My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  One afternoon when Dad and Afdera were entertaining, Greta Garbo came over with a female companion. After a perfunctory drink with the guests, she and her friend went into the house and came out wearing terry-cloth robes and white rubber swimming caps, the serious kind worn by professional swimmers. Garbo asked if I wanted to go swimming in the sea with her. You could have fanned me with a brick. Greta Garbo! By the way, she was the only guest all summer who expressed interest in leaving the social scene and walking down the steep steps carved into the cliffs to swim in the sea. I had done it myself only a few times—it was a long way down and the water was cold. But down we went—Garbo, her companion, and me. When we got to where the waves broke over the rocks, Garbo threw off her robe to reveal her naked athletic body, stepped out to the farthest rock, and did a perfect dive into the water—none of the dipping toes in first, then knees, the “let’s get used to it gradually” approach I preferred. I reminded myself that she was Scandinavian, after all, held my breath, and threw myself in after her (wearing a bathing suit, of course). She swam vigorously for quite a ways without stopping, then turned and swam back, meeting up with me as I was trying to catch up. We bobbed about, treading water and looking at each other. Garbo’s face was luminous and utterly pure, not a trace of makeup.

  Then, in that throaty Ninotchka voice, she asked me, “Are you going to be an actress?”

  I was stunned that she had asked me about myself.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t have talent.”

  “Well,” said Garbo, “I bet you do, and you’re pretty enough to be one.” Oh my God!

  “Thank you,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of salty water while my thoughts careened about: She’s just being polite. But wait a minute—someone who leaves the party to go swimming nude doesn’t say things just to be polite. But how could Garbo think I’m pretty?

  We crawled out onto the rocks to dry in the sun, and I noticed that her body was healthy and athletic but not pinup beautiful. This made me feel good: Maybe you could be adored even if you didn’t have a perfect figure. I remember climbing up the steps to the house behind Garbo and trying to hide the Cheshire Cat grin I could feel spreading across my face.

  The village of Villefranche is just to the west of Monaco, the small independent kingdom then ruled by Prince Rainier and his wife, Grace Kelly. On the curve of the Monte Carlo harbor was the resort and casino where the rich and famous gambled. Every Saturday night in the summer there would be a gala ball where the jet set would dine, drink champagne, and dance under the stars. At the evening’s close there would be an astonishing display of fireworks. Afdera arranged blind dates for me with the sons of rich counts or industrialists; I think she was hoping I would marry one—probably to get me out of the New York house but also because it would add to her cachet. I was never tempted to get serious with any of the men I met at the time—the upper-crust idle rich—any more than with the Ivy Leaguers I had met in school. I needed someone who could take me into other worlds—not of wealth but of passion and intensity. I needed a rebel, an adventurer, an outsider.

  Goey and a friend of his from Yale, José de Vicuna, came to visit for a week. José, a sophisticated Spaniard, knew his way around the area and had friends to stay with, but Goey stayed in one of the many guest rooms in our villa. We would manage to meet in my room while the adults were taking afternoon siestas. I developed a fondness for lovemaking in the afternoon, lying languidly under a gently whirring ceiling fan. The roll-down canvas awnings outside the large Mediterranean windows cast long shadows on the bedroom’s cool tiled floor, and the noise of the fan became synonymous with pleasure.

  One afternoon Goey, José, and I drove along the coast to the small sepia-colored old fishing town of Saint Tropez. We got there just as the sun was setting, and I was awestruck by its beauty and charm. Tourists had just discovered it thanks to the recently released film . . . And God Created Woman, directed by a young first-time director, Roger Vadim, and starring his then wife, Brigitte Bardot.

  It was sometime that summer that I realized the love affair with Goey was beginning to dim. I was getting bored. He seemed stuck, and I realized that his classic drama in iambic pentameter was emblematic—he could never get past the first act. I felt this like a cold whisper in my body but avoided talking to him about it, because I didn’t want to hurt him. I am ashamed that while I no longer felt the same, I pretended nothing had changed. In doing so, I set him up for real pain when the time to turn him down finally came, and I set myself up for what was to become a familiar sense of self-betrayal. The following year, when Goey proposed and I declined, it became impossible for us to continue seeing each other as friends, and my first real love affair came to a whimpering end after a year and a half.

  When the summer of 1957 came to an end, Dad and Afdera went with me to Paris, where they had arranged for me to be a pensionnaire in an apartment on the tree-lined avenue d’Iéna, on the Right Bank. The daughter of one of Afdera’s friends had stayed there while at finishing school. Afdera wanted me to attend finishing school as well, where young ladies from wealthy families learned manners. But I balked and enrolled instead in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an art school on the more bohemian Left Bank, where I intended to study painting and drawing.

  Susan, my ex-stepmother, had been living in Paris for almost a year, and having her there was a comfort. But Susan had her own life now and probably assumed that at nineteen I was as mature as she had been at that age. Part of me carried the aura of maturity, but inside I was still immature and in serious need of imposed structure and boundaries. Yet I was unable to impose them on my own. I felt porous, like a colander—things just poured into me and seeped out: No there there. I had gotten in over my head and was lonely and scared. Here I was, living in a foreign city where I knew no one but Susan, spoke only halting, academic French, and didn’t know my way around.

  The apartment where I was staying belonged to a gray-haired woman who had once been of the haute bourgeoisie (the fine furnishings, silver, and porcelains testified to that), but there was a penurious quality about her. She wore only black and was exceedingly dour, as was her adult daughter who lived there with her. They never turned on the lights or opened the draperies, and all the living room furniture was perpetually covered in plastic sheets. Had it not been for the faint sour odor of boiling turnips, which seemed embedded in the drapes and carpet, the place could have been mistaken for a morgue.

  I’m ashamed to say I attended only three classes during the two and a half months I was in Paris. Saying that I wanted to take art classes turned out to have been simply a way of getting myself out of college. Mostly I sat in sidewalk cafés and read books and newspapers.

  I was smitten by Paris: Hector Guimard’s art nouveau entrances to the Métro, fanciful and enchanting as Maxfield Parrish’s paintings; the weeping willows and plane trees bordering the Seine; the bateaux-mouches carrying tourists up and down the river under the ornate, low-spanning iron bridges; the doe-colored stone buildings along the Seine with sloping, slate-tiled mansard roofs, separated into blocks by narrow cobblestone streets. I liked the sense of history evident everywhere. It reminded me how young my own country was.

  One night I was at Maxim’s for dinner and dancing with a group of people that included the French actress Marie-José Nat and actor Christian Marquand. A tall, dark man with exotic eyes and an erotic aura joined our group. With him was a beautiful woman who looked to be nine months pregnant. The way the energy in Maxim’s shifted when he made his entrance reminded me of entering public places with my father. This was my first encounter with Roger Vadim.

  He had become an overnight celebrity with the release of . . . And God Created Woman, which, because of his youth (he was not even thirty) and its irreverent, iconoclastic style, came to be seen as the film that launched the nouvelle vague (new wave) of French cinema. But above all, it was the presence of the phenomenal Bardot that had audiences, especially in the United States, flocking to see i
t.

  I had not realized that Vadim and Brigitte were no longer together. Apparently she had fallen in love with her leading man in the film, and Vadim had promptly hooked up with this blond Danish woman, Annette Stroyberg, who would soon bear his firstborn and would, like Bardot, become a star in one of his movies. They weren’t married at the time, which somewhat shocked me. I wasn’t used to this French “custom” of having babies first and then, perhaps, getting married. Vadim’s presence at the table felt predatory, and I was uncomfortable, feeling square, white-bread American. I know from what he later told me that this was just how he saw me. I could never have imagined that one day these people would be a central part of my life.

  From time to time Susan would invite me out to dinner with her friends, and occasionally we’d go dancing afterward at l’Éléphant Blanc, a nightclub that was the rage. Several times she was escorted by a man she considered the best dancer she knew, and it was a joy to watch them dip and glide around the dance floor like Astaire and Rogers. I’ve always had a weakness for people who are beautiful dancers. He was an Italian count in his thirties, a playboy whose family had lost much of its money, making it necessary for him to go to work at an American brokerage firm in Paris. He seemed to know everyone in the Parisian party world and loved to have a good time. So when he asked me out, I accepted. I think because he was a friend of Susan’s, I imbued him with qualities he did not possess. Besides, I was lonely and he made me feel I was part of the scene. I wasn’t especially attracted to him, but when he asked me to spend the weekend at his country estate, I didn’t know how to say no. Phrases like “I am having fun with you, but I have no intention of having an affair with you so I will have to say no to your invitation” never occurred to me. I just went along, whatever he wanted.

  What he wanted, besides having an affair, was to take nude photos of me. I find it hard to explain to myself that I didn’t think I could say no even though I didn’t want to do what he asked. This is painful to write about, but I do so because I want readers—especially women—to know that even an essentially smart and good girl, if she lacks self-esteem and believes a woman is supposed to “go along,” will allow herself to get into some inexplicable situations. I wish I could say this was the last one for me. I had a brief affair with him, every moment of which I hated. Mostly I hated myself for my betrayal of my body, and I felt terrible confusion about why I was letting this happen. The nude pictures he took weren’t porn photos by any means; in fact, they were rather arty and demure. I think the kick he got was from the fact that he’d managed to get Henry Fonda’s nineteen-year-old daughter to pose nude for him. He wasted no time making sure the story of his wretched conquest made the rounds. Afdera, with her pointy, gossip-ferreting nose, snitched to Dad, and when I went home to New York for Christmas, he had her inform me that I would not be returning to Paris. I was mortified, horrified, and also relieved. I didn’t want to go back. I felt my life was spinning out of control.

  For the following six months I lived at my father’s house in New York. He was doing Two for the Seesaw on Broadway and not happy about it. He never mentioned the photos to me, thank God. I think he was too embarrassed, and surely he thought I’d turned into a “bad” girl. But it wasn’t that.

  I was at a loss as to what to do with my life. I was deeply depressed, sleeping again for twelve or thirteen hours a day, and even then I’d fall asleep on dates, in theaters—a sort of adult-onset narcolepsy. I think part of it was an existential mourning for the lack of meaning in my life, a yearning for the emergence of an authentic self I wasn’t sure existed.

  Then came the summer, and Dad moved us all to a house on Santa Monica beach, about a mile or so from Ocean House, where Peter and I had spent summers with Susan. It was made clear to me via Afdera that come fall I had to find my own apartment and begin to support myself. I was twenty and it was a reasonable request, but I had no idea what I would do and I was in a panic.

  Several years ago José (Goey’s Spanish friend, who had become my lover) sent me the letters I wrote him that summer (in French) from Malibu, which reveal something of my state of mind:

  Darling,

  I’m terribly depressed, don’t really see any point in going on; after all, why try to fight when life invariably puts its foot in the door and separates us from the people we love and makes us miserable in so many ways. It’s times like these I get so discouraged for no particular reason and I know I will never be very happy or make a success out of life. I don’t know what I can do. I’m empty, like a vegetable. Afdera (my father’s fourth wife) always uses the same words as my father does: I am a great “disappointment,” “lazy,” “frivolous,” “weak,” etc. I don’t think I’m as terrible as that, but maybe she’s right. I have everything and do nothing. There’s a piano and I can’t play. There are books in Italian and I cannot read. I cannot draw. I have not “one ounce” of interest, and I’ll be like that all my life, I know it!

  And later in the letter:

  Afdera has all but told me she has no intention of staying married to my father, says there’s “no future”: and thinks he would go well with Lauren Bacall. I agree and think she should leave immediately so Miss Bacall could move in.

  Many young people feel just as I did, hopeless and empty, not knowing what to do with their lives. All of us want to feel we have a purpose that gives our lives meaning. In the absence of that, we blame ourselves and feel like refuse that might just as well be discarded. My alienation took the form of sleeping all the time, bulimia, and deep conventionality. Drugs, acting out, drinking, and driving too fast are escapes other young people turn to in order to feel they actually exist, in the absence of a sense of self.

  But long about midsummer, just when all seemed hopeless, a coincidence set me on a path to meaning. You have to be ready for coincidences—as Bill Moyers says, “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  TURNING POINT

  Our greatest gift, the closest thing to divinity, is our ability for creation. When you’re creating, you start living for something outside yourself and colors vivify and sounds deepen and you feel alive and that is the intoxicating factor in performing.

  —TROY GARITY,

  my actor son

  A SUMMER STORM was building to the west as I walked the short distance down Santa Monica beach to his rented house, shoes in hand, jaw set, leaning stalwart into the wind, and telling myself I didn’t really care if he accepted me or not. I didn’t want to be an actress anyway. All the same, my heart was pounding in my throat when I arrived at his back door, brushed the sand from my feet, and slipped on my high-heeled shoes, chosen carefully to match my dress and flatter my legs.

  Taking a deep breath, I knocked at the back door and waited, listening to my pounding heart. Finally the door was opened by a short, bespectacled man with an exceedingly high forehead rimmed with silver hair. In a clipped, nasal voice, without looking at me or introducing himself, as though he had other pressing things awaiting him, he asked me to come in and showed me to a seat in the living room. His accent was unfamiliar, that of a Jewish man of a certain age from New York’s Lower East Side, though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. It dawned on me that this was Lee Strasberg, the man I’d come to be interviewed by. He seemed more like a rabbi or a dentist than a famed acting teacher. He was dour, I thought he was angry. I wasn’t used to people who didn’t bother with social niceties, though in time I would come to appreciate this about him: no frills. You could trust him. If he said it, he meant it.

  He sat down, looked at me, and said, “Well.” The silence that followed was broken only by an odd clicking sound he was making by forcing a quick breath from his throat out his nose. (He would use this tic to great effect in his scene with Al Pacino in Godfather II. I was paralyzed as he stared at me, his cold eyes made eerily larger by the thickness of his glasses. Then I felt something deep inside him relax and grow gentle. Perhaps he saw how scared I was. H
e told me months later that I had seemed shut down, trying so hard to be a proper, conventional young woman. I asked why, then, he had accepted me into his classes, and he said, “It was your eyes. I saw something else in your eyes.”

  I had gotten to know his daughter, Susan, earlier in the summer. She and her brother, Johnny, who was around Peter’s age, and a directorial protégé of Lee’s named Marty Fried would come over and hang out at the beach house Dad had rented. Susan Strasberg, with her tiny, perfect face and skin that shone like a magnolia blossom, had created a sensation in the Broadway play The Diary of Anne Frank, and earlier that year she had starred opposite my father in Sidney Lumet’s film Stage Struck. She seemed to me to be wildly confident and mature.

  Day after day for more than a month as I played chess with Susan and Marty, I resisted their efforts to get me to join her father’s private acting classes. “Why not give it a try?” they’d say over and over. I insisted repeatedly that I didn’t want to be an actress, but the problem of what to do in the fall was looming. So in time I reluctantly gave in. I became an actress by default!

  Lee Strasberg was associated with the acting style called the Method. It was not really a set of rules but a quintessentially American adaptation of an amalgam of techniques developed by the Moscow Art Theater’s director Konstantin Stanislavsky—with ample contributions from Lee himself, who prior to becoming a teacher had been a stage actor and director. In 1949, two years after Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis had founded the Actors Studio, Lee was asked to join and soon after became the Studio’s artistic director and sole teacher of actors. His students included most of the great actors and actresses of the time: James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, Al Pacino, Julie Harris, Rip Torn, Ben Gazzara, Sally Field. They brought a new, edgy realism to their work, more internal and personal than the standard theatrical fare audiences were accustomed to. They didn’t show; they were.