Prime Time (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Bill smiled at his wife. “I have never, ever thought of separation or divorce. It has never been a part of me.” He added that one hard time “was during the feminist period where Kathy felt she had been with her parents and then with me and she had never been her own person.”

  “I went from one dependency to another,” Kathy explained. “At first, when Bill was in seminary, I worked—we both worked. That was survival. But after the first child, I did not work for a number of years. Or, rather, I should say I didn’t get paid for a number of years.”

  “Ah yes,” I interjected. “Unpaid labor? You mean you became a homemaker?”

  “You got it! But in the seventies, when Bill began his postdoctoral work and his career at the University of Pennsylvania, I went back to work as an administrative assistant and a middle school music teacher. Yet my responsibilities at home didn’t lessen. We were not in a financial position to hire housekeeping or landscaping help, and I was the one who negotiated help from our children. I made a decent salary to help pay for one of our kids to go to college. But it got swept up into other expenses of our household.

  “Probably,” Kathy continued, “our biggest clash of value has been over how to spend money. Because I’ve always grown up with the belief that ‘where your money is, that’s where your heart is.’ And my heart was in a different place than Bill’s heart. But as a woman of my generation, I fell into the ‘dependent’ role of the wife, wanting to please my spouse, not believing that my voice, if in opposition to Bill’s, particularly around issues of large financial expenditures, was equal to his, and I would give in to his desires around those matters and then harbor resentment. Not smart!”

  Bill then told me that they had considered separating for a year, to give Kathy a sense of independence, as a way of strengthening both her and their marriage. When that was too complicated because of the children, their therapist suggested that they work on separateness in their own home, by having separate financial accounts.

  Bill recalled, “And so for a year—and this was so painful for me—you bought your own Christmas presents for the children and I bought my Christmas presents for the children. Before that everything had always been from Mom and Dad—even though she bought the presents,” he told me. “And for a year she decided not to go to church anymore. I would go on Sundays and people would say, ‘Where’s Kathy?’ ”

  Kathy frowned. “I don’t remember that it was for a whole year.”

  Achieving Individuation

  “When did this begin,” I asked Kathy, “this feeling that you needed to stand on your own two feet?”

  “In the early seventies, when we lived in Pennsylvania, I resonated with the words that Gloria Steinem was saying. I just said, ‘That’s true! She speaks for me.’ ”

  “Do you remember what it was she said that so resonated with you?” I asked.

  “It had to do with roles. When you are feeling imprisoned by what is expected of women, when you don’t feel the expectations suit you.”

  “Because you didn’t feel you could be a full person within those expectations?”

  “Yes. You feel like, ‘Is this what I should be doing?’ That kind of stuff.”

  Privately, I asked Kathy if Bill had been threatened by all this change.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think the whole feminist movement has had an impact on all the men as well as women, and I think at that time, in his head, Bill was a feminist, but in actions it was life as usual.”

  “I was that way myself for a few years,” I admitted. “A theoretical feminist but not an embodied one.”

  Bill and Kathy Stayton.

  TIM SCOTT, SPENCER STUDIOS

  “It’s hard to unlearn those things,” Kathy mused. “I didn’t really get into feminism a lot. I was kind of on the periphery but watching to see what was out there. I have more courage in my head maybe than in my body at times.”

  “Perhaps, but you did go out and begin to create your own space, right?”

  “Well, actually, I always have used my leadership skills throughout my life, even while being a full-time homemaker. But I did move into new territory—in terms of my own ‘space’—in the early seventies.”

  Finding Identity in Community

  “It was around that time that I started doing community things that Bill didn’t do and we just had different lives,” Kathy recalled. “One of those things was the symphony orchestra. I played the violin, and when I was part of the orchestra no one asked, ‘What does your husband do?’ You really are your own person. You just learn your part and are a part of the group. And rehearsals were every week, so Bill had to take the kids. I wasn’t going to give it up. And that really did help even before I was aware that that’s what it was doing for me.

  “Also, in the early nineties,” she said, “the board of our denomination, the American Baptist Churches of the USA, issued a new policy, a one-sentence resolution that caught us all by surprise: ‘The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.’ Period. Our church was up in arms about this and we began our activism and, within a year, we had a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) allied group within the church. That was where I became very involved. It was not hard to do because, with Bill being in the field of sexuality, we already knew people who were transgender, transsexual, gay, lesbian, cross-dressers, the whole spectrum of human expressions in sex and gender.” Kathy talked about the process they had to go through before their congregation finally agreed to become a member of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists.

  Kathy explained that the work she and so many others have done for decades now on LGBT issues has blossomed. “I have a network of people I know all through Philadelphia, and they are very meaningful to me,” she said. “Some are clergy, some are lay; they are all out, in their churches and, I presume, in their jobs, but who knows? They became really my second church because what was important about our church was not necessarily the theology or anything; it was the community of people who will support us even though they may not be active in our group. They will support us, and then they talk about it. In fact, some people said they went back to their retirement communities and they would talk about these issues at their dinner table and it kind of grew.”

  Having found her own voice, her own way to make a difference, Kathy now works within her new church community in Atlanta, on the board of directors for the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists and the Marriage Equality team, which is a group that advocates for marriage equality for same-sex marriage in Atlanta. “We will start up in Atlanta—we’ll see if we can ever get the state of Georgia,” she told me with a smile.

  But Kathy didn’t end the discussion there. She wanted me to understand another part of why their marriage has survived for so long, in addition to her finding her own space. “We have always been a part of a community of people who are supportive,” she said, “and that has happened in the churches we have been in, with people who have lived a long time and seemed to be happy in their old age and they were still active—and so, you know, we had role models.”

  “So, there was a community rooting for you and dependent on the two of you to stay together as a couple?”

  “Well, I don’t know if they depended on us, but it was my expectation that we would stay together, I think. I would have let myself down.”

  I have thought a lot about these words of Kathy’s, this thing about what’s expected out of marriage, what we expect from ourselves. It saddens me that we just don’t have these same expectations anymore. Quite the contrary. The expectation these days is that one won’t stay together, and so when the going gets rough, many tend to move on. And yet … maybe that is becoming inevitable in the face of our newly gained longevity and our desire for 360-degree relationships, intimate and passionate all the way. Margaret Mead felt that every woman needed three husbands: one for the youthful sexy stage, one for bringing security to the family-building stage, and one for Third Act
companionship.

  Right now, looking back at the beginnings and endings of my own relational scenarios, I feel that if our loves must be segmented into more doable phases, what becomes critical is to take the time and make the effort to learn the lessons each phase offers so that at least we deepen and grow in our ability to be a loving, intimate partner. Who was it who said, “If you keep doing the same things the same way, you keep getting the same results”?

  Intentionality

  “I think one of the things that has really been important for us,” Bill remarked, “and we had to become intentional about this, was spending time for just us. I’ve learned a lot working with people, and one of the things that happens all too often is that when people get married you spend all your time on maintenance: the kids, fixing up the home, doing the work around the house. Whereas when people start getting together, you’re nurturing the relationship. Then they get married and all that nurturance tends to turn over into maintenance, and when I work with couples it’s putting play back into their relationship. Just going to do something with the kids is not nurturance of the relationship. It might be nurturance of the family, but it is also maintenance.”

  “So, when does this start to happen between couples?” I asked.

  “Kathy and I became intentional when our kids were becoming teenagers. We set time aside just to be together because kids take up all your time at home. So, we became really intentional. Like we set ten o’clock at night, something like that—the kids couldn’t break in on us. It was time when we could talk about planning a party, or we could—”

  “Have sex?” I queried.

  With Jewelle Bickford on a hike at Rancho La Puerta in 2008.

  “Oh yeah. We’ve always had a good sex life.”

  “I think that is the glue,” I interjected. “Isn’t it the thing that helps in the forgiveness, in smoothing over the rough passages?”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Bill replied.

  The story of Kathy and Bill’s successful marriage underscores for me the importance of having healthy boundaries, a life outside the relationship, and a willingness to work at it at all stages along the way—that and good sex!

  Another long-term relationship that exemplifies these things is the forty-six-year marriage of Nat and Jewelle Bickford. Nat’s the chap you met in Chapter 10 who wrote his life story and purged his ghosts. He was sixty-six when I interviewed him and Jewelle was sixty-four. I first met her at a Women in the Global South seminar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Somewhat cowed by the fact that her background is in assets securitization and that she was, at the time of our meeting, the highest-ranking woman at Rothschild bank, I didn’t anticipate getting to know her and her family and still can’t quite believe that I have a friend who has been a banker. One thing I hadn’t known about Jewelle until the interview was that when her daughters were young she was a stay-at-home wife and mother, doing all the cooking and housework. Only when the girls turned sixteen and nineteen did she, at age thirty-eight, go back to college—Sarah Lawrence.

  Just-married Nat and Jewelle Bickford.

  Jewelle and Nat with their daughters, Laura and Emily.

  “Nat was the one who said, ‘You are too smart not to be college-educated,’ ” Jewelle told me with evident appreciation in her voice. “At that time it was really hard for him to pay for the two kids in private school and my college education, but he felt it was absolutely essential.” My admiration for the two of them grew immensely at the idea that her amazing career didn’t start till midlife and that he wasn’t at all threatened by her morphing from mom to career woman.

  The longevity of their marriage is proof that people with loveless childhoods can beat the odds and have a happy marriage. Nat and Jewelle focused on spending time together, on sensuality, and on compromise. Jewelle thinks one reason why they married so young was that it provided a way out of their parents’ homes. I find their compatibility surprising because they are so utterly different: It’s Ferdinand the Bull married to the Little Engine That Could in high gear. Jewelle put it this way: “Nat’s the rudder and I’m the engine.” He said, “We are the reverse sides of a coin. She’s got a tremendous amount of energy, I have a medium amount. She is, let’s see, self-directed, proactive, spontaneous, intuitive. These are not words I use to describe myself. I am more reflective, less spontaneous. I just need time to think about things.”

  Although they are temperamentally polar opposites, several things are clear about Nat and Jewelle right off the bat. For one, their marriage has been a priority for them. “We always made time for each other,” Nat said, “even when we had the kids. We couldn’t go away a lot, so we took advantage of the fact that we had two sets of grandparents, both of which were willing to take the kids. So we had some rest from the grind on weekends. And we’ve always liked talking to each other.”

  It’s also apparent that there is a lot of physical chemistry between them; it’s been that way, according to Nat, from the start. He recalled, “I had a date for a football weekend at Harvard and my date was bringing a chaperone, so I arranged a date for the chaperone and, to bribe him, I got him tickets to the game. Well, Jewelle was the chaperone, and when I laid eyes on her I told my friend, ‘Forget the tickets, you won’t see her. I am going to take her home for seventy-two hours and you won’t see her again.’ ”

  I asked Jewelle how they kept the sensuality going all these years. “People don’t have good long-term sexual relationships who don’t have good psychological relationships,” she said. “Consistently good lovemaking to the same person doesn’t come from exciting techniques but from mental stimulation and excitement.” She described to me the beauty of getting sexually turned on by and making love with someone whom you’ve shared so much life with. “You can’t imagine, Jane, how fantastically special it is. There’s a different kind of richness to it that’s way deeper than when you’re young and it’s new.” I can only catch a whiff of what that must feel like, and this is a big regret for me. For me, it will never be “the long haul.”

  I asked Nat if they’ve had major differences over the years, and what’s changed now that they are in their Third Acts. “One of our major differences was the children,” he said. “I am much more laissez-faire than she is. She is a believer in setting boundaries far beyond me, and that produced a lot of friction from time to time.”

  “It was terrible, just terrible” was Jewelle’s description of it. “He thought girls didn’t get into trouble. Isn’t that amazing? And he wanted to be their friend and not their disciplinarian, so we fought a lot over it.” What this meant, though, is that unlike couples who suffer when the children leave home, Nat and Jewelle found that the empty nest meant that a source of tension was removed. Though they love their daughters immensely, that’s when, they say, they started really enjoying themselves, sharing a common interest in all the cultural riches New York has to offer.

  In 2004 Nat retired from his law practice while Jewelle continued working. I asked her if this caused problems, the way it has for some couples. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “In the first place, he totally took over my kitchen. I like to cook, and it was just a mess. There were stacks of books and papers, and he had an office and never went to it.”

  Although he was retired, Nat’s law firm had given him an office and a secretary for his use—hoping, perhaps, that he would stay involved with clients on some level.

  “I know it was annoying to Jewelle,” Nat told me. “Why didn’t I use it? Why did I have to hang out in the kitchen? There were times when I felt sort of sheepish about not going to the office. I felt this tremendous internal barrier—I just didn’t want to go back there. I knew I would get involved in something. When I left that firm for the last day, I was just happy to go.”

  These seemingly small issues have brought storms to many a calm sea. One retired husband I read about thought he was doing his wife a big favor when he reorganized all her kitchen cupboards while she was away on business. Needless to
say, she pitched a fit. What Jewelle did was get them to see a couples counselor and, according to Jewelle, this woman helped both of them. Nat was able to see that invading Jewelle’s space and avoiding making a decision about where to do his work and put his stuff was a passive-aggressive act. “After that,” said Jewelle, “a lightbulb went off, he came home and, in two days, totally filed everything, and I had my kitchen back.”

  The therapist helped Jewelle see ways that she, too, can avoid problems. “As you know,” Jewelle said, “Nat and I are very different, and now that he’s home more, certain things bother me. I’ve been wanting him to not depend so much on me for social life and for intimacy. I think he should have lunch with more of his friends, but the therapist said, ‘That is not your business, Jewelle. Lay off. Quite frankly, you have to pick the things that matter most to you.’ So, I started thinking about the things that really did not matter to me and I have been laying off.”

  “Has this relieved the tension?” I asked.

  “Yes, it has,” Jewelle replied with relief.

  Like most women I have talked to, menopause was freeing for Jewelle. “In some weird way I got much more self-confidence,” she told me. “I don’t know whether it was hormonal or just age. But my fifties were the beginning of when I started feeling good about myself.”

  When I told her that the writer Suzanne Braun Levine calls that decade the “Fuck-You Fifties,” Jewelle said, “Absolutely! I stopped caring so much how they view me.”

  “ ‘They’ as in the men you work with at the bank?”

  “Yes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get along with them at work. You have to get along in whatever environment you are in. But you can choose which environments you want to be in. That was a real eye-opener for me.”

  Nat and Jewell’s marriage is a demonstration of how individuation and andogenization—gender balancing—can deepen a couple’s bonds. Generativity and passionate involvement have also had a role to play. Jewelle retired from banking in 2009. She is now working with GenSpring, a firm that focuses on wealth management, but is, nonetheless, able to spend more time with her family and grandchildren and to work with the international nonprofit organization Women for Women International, which links women in the developed world to individual women in the Global South and helps them become economically self-sufficient, primarily through microenterprise.14