My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  It was into Lee’s private classes that I had been accepted—a step down from the Studio but nonetheless a step into the inner circle of the man who was considered one of the great teachers in this country. It had all come about because Marilyn Monroe was filming Some Like It Hot in Hollywood and Lee’s wife, Paula Strasberg, was her acting coach. That’s what had brought the Strasberg family to Los Angeles, living a few houses down from us on the beach. And that’s the coincidence that changed my life.

  I remember going with Susan Strasberg to visit her mother on the set of Some Like It Hot. I had been on many of my father’s movie sets, but this was my first time visiting a set as a young adult, and I was paying close attention. As the heavy padded double doors that led onto sound stages thudded closed behind us and I stepped inside, I felt myself in a foreign land, a dark and secret world, what my son (who is an actor) calls “a civilization within a civilization.” A movie set is not an easy place to be if you are not part of the filming. Inevitably you feel like an interloper, left out of the secret that has brought everyone else to this dark, cavernous place with padded walls and a ceiling so high you have to tilt your head all the way back to try to see it. In the center there is a circle of light where all the energy is being sucked, where the secret lies. Thick electric cables snake across the black floor and up into huge boxes on poles, the klieg lights, which, like sentinels with their backs turned, are silhouetted in a glow. Everyone but you has a task connected to that light. People talk in hushed voices that hang, muffled, in front of their faces. They’re polite, but you feel an invisible cord drawing them away from you to that place. A siren shrieks. You jump and turn to see a red light swirling above the double doors, like the light on a police car. “Silence!” someone shouts. Then all you hear are murmurs. Then another shout: “Camera rolling!” Then: “Action!” and all sound and energy are sucked into the vacuum of light.

  There was an overabundance of tension as well as excitement on the set that day, partly because of the extraordinary assemblage of star power (Marilyn, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and the director, Billy Wilder), but also because Marilyn was having problems with her lines and they had been shooting the same scene many times over. It was a scene early in the movie when she’s in the train’s sleeping car with Tony and Jack, who are in drag.

  Susan Strasberg silently pointed out her mother to me. Paula was sitting in a canvas chair behind the camera, all her attention focused on what was going on inside the circle of light. She was a wide woman. Everything about her was wide—her eyes; her face, with high cheekbones; her body, draped in layers of black, covered by an earth-toned shawl and ethnic jewelry. Hers was a lap and bosom you’d want to be taken into. Thick glasses made her eyes large as an owl’s, and her pale red hair was pulled back in a braided chignon. She had clearly been a beauty once, like her daughter, Susan.

  An eternity of held breath elapsed before a voice yelled, “Cut!” Suddenly people sprang into action, moving out of the darkness, doing their precise, union-prescribed tasks inside that circle of light. Then into the darkness stepped Marilyn Monroe, bringing the light with her, shimmering, in her hair and on her skin. She walked with Paula toward where Susan and I were standing while someone draped a pink chenille bathrobe over her shoulders to cover her revealing nightgown. Her body seemed to precede her, and it was hard to keep my eyes from camping out there. But when I looked up at her face, I saw a scared, wide-eyed child. I was dizzy. It was hard to believe she was right there in front of me, all golden iridescence, saying hello in that breathy, little-girl voice. There was a vulnerability that radiated from her and allowed me to love her right there and feel glad that she had someone wide and soft, like Paula, to mama her. She was very sweet to Susan and me, but I could tell she wanted Paula’s undivided attention, to give her what she needed so that she could go back and do the scene one more time. I wondered how it could be that she seemed so frightened when she was probably the most famous woman in the world. We lingered a few moments, said hello to Billy Wilder, whom I’d known since childhood, and to Jack Lemmon, whom I’d met at this very studio when he filmed scenes for Mister Roberts with my father. Then we left, stepping out of the darkness and into the blinding sunlight, into that other civilization that was real life. But for the first time a part of me felt drawn to the light within the darkness behind those heavy padded double doors.

  That episode took place just weeks before my meeting with Lee, and long before the time I myself would be inside the circle of light and would have to find my own ways of dealing with the fears that celebrity cannot assuage.

  Modeling to pay the rent and for acting classes.

  (October 1959 Ladies’ Home Journal, courtesy of Meredith Corporation, photo by Roger Prigent)

  A few weeks later my father brought me to the Warner Bros. Studio back lot to meet with Jimmy Stewart about the possibility of my playing his daughter in the film The FBI Story. Director Mervyn LeRoy had come up with the idea, and I suppose my father saw it as a harmless, all-in-the-family sort of lark, Jimmy being his best friend. For just these reasons, I didn’t cotton to it in the least: It smacked too much of a “Daddy’s little girl” setup, and I communicated my lack of enthusiasm strongly enough to sweet Jimmy that things never got further than that first meeting. But in light of my subsequent relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wouldn’t it have been ironic if my first role had been in The FBI Story?

  So Lee Strasberg had accepted me into his private classes in New York, and my problem of what to do in the fall was taken care of. Where exactly to live and how to pay for it all were the remaining issues. As luck would have it, Susan Stein, youngest daughter of MCA’s Jules and Doris Stein and sister of Jean (Stein) Vanden Heuvel, had graduated from Vassar and was looking for an apartment and roommate in New York.

  Susan Stein suggested that I meet with Eileen Ford, head of the famous Ford Modeling Agency. Maybe I could get work as a fashion model to pay my share of the rent, as well as the acting classes. Within two months of my return to the city I had started Lee’s class, taken my first modeling assignments, found a duplex on East Seventy-sixth Street for Susan and me, and moved out of my father’s house (to the great relief of Afdera). I was on my way, a leaf in the river’s current—not in control of my destiny, perhaps, but at least on the move.

  The modeling work I was doing to pay for the acting classes was difficult for me. I didn’t like the incessant focus on my looks, and I never felt I was very photogenic (those round cheeks), but I had no trouble finding a doctor to prescribe Dexedrine, which kept me hyper, and diuretics, which made me urinate incessantly, thus draining my body of fluids. On my five-foot-eight-inch frame, my weight dropped from the low 120s to under 110. My face, which in those years (1959, 1960), was prominently featured in many major magazines—Life, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Look, Vogue, and Ladies’ Home Journal—looked drawn, my eyes empty. But the modeling work kept coming. I would hang around the magazine stands when one of my covers had come out, an anonymous bystander, to see how people reacted to my photo. Eileen Ford, whose agency I worked for, once said of me, “She was something. She was terribly insecure about her looks and the impact she had on people. She was astonished to learn that people would be interested in using her and paying her well.”

  Acting classes were held in a nondescript building in midtown, on Broadway. We’d take a cramped, musty elevator up to the sixth floor to a small theater with a proscenium stage and seats for about forty people. Do you remember the feeling of entering a new school when you were a kid, looking around and picking up clues as to where you fit in and where you were different? Well, it was clear to me from the outset that I was different: I felt uncomfortably upper-class, an elite dilettante, as though I carried a sign that read, “I’m not really sure I want to be here, I’m just trying it out.” Everyone else had a scruffier, bohemian look about them that said, “I am an intense, serious New York actor. Deal with it!” My clothes were verging on preppy and my voic
e, with its Ivy League accent, seemed to come out of my ear. The other students knew I was Henry Fonda’s daughter and, whether it was real or imagined, I felt resentment.

  There were a few famous faces in the class from time to time—France Nuyen, for instance, who was starring on Broadway in The World of Suzie Wong; Salome Jens; Carroll Baker, who was considered a major discovery after her sexy performance in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll.

  Then there was Marilyn Monroe, Lee’s most famous student, who sat quietly and earnestly in the back of the room in a trench coat, a scarf on her head, and no makeup. Twice a week for one month I sat right behind her, trying to understand what was going on, praying Lee wouldn’t call on me. I had definitely not committed myself to a career in acting and wasn’t at all sure I’d even stay in the class. Marilyn, I was told, had never been able to do a scene there. Each time she’d try, fear would make her sick to her stomach. I remember following her out into the street after class one day. I stood behind her as she hailed a cab, and I watched her ride away unrecognized. I had seen her in newsreels, in the spotlight, being stormed by fans and paparazzi, and had wondered how a person could handle the extreme swing from being the center of fanatical attention to being all alone on a New York sidewalk, unrecognized and scared.

  A few years later her press agent (who represented me as well) told me that once Marilyn had been so scared to come down from her hotel room to a press conference that she couldn’t stop throwing up. He said she vacillated between thinking she was not just a star but a “celestial body” and the fear that “this is the day they’ll find out I’m a fraud.” I wish I’d gone to her and held her hand.

  The first of the two weekly classes was devoted to what was called a “sense-memory” exercise. One or two students would be called on to re-create the sensations of a particular activity, its smells, feelings, sounds—actually experiencing them. Unlike pantomime, which requires you to mimic an activity exactly but without props, sense-memory involves taking minutes to really feel the heat and weight of a cup of coffee in your hand, for instance, then many more minutes to feel the heat as the cup approaches your lips. It’s the difference between reenacting and reexperiencing. The purpose is to expand your sensory awareness and concentration. Following the exercise, Lee would do a critique of your work, and then the class could make comments as well.

  Next would be the “song” exercise, where the student would stand center stage and belt out a song all on one note, each word drawn out as long as possible. Something about the note being extended on that long breath caused emotions to surface and play across the voice as though it were a harp string. The voice might begin to quaver or crack, faces and bodies would tremble, and Lee would, in his calm, nasal voice, encourage the student to keep going and to relax different parts of the face or body. This exercise was to teach actors how to use focused relaxation to enable them to go on with a scene even when powerful emotions threatened to overcome them.

  After that part of the exercise, students would continue the song while flinging themselves about the stage like limp bean bags: jumping, leaping, and swinging their arms.

  It was fascinating, but at the time I didn’t understand the point of it. I knew that my father felt nothing but disdain for acting classes in general and Strasberg’s Method in particular. He didn’t believe acting could be taught, and to him the Method was self-indulgent rubbish that allowed untalented actors to feel they were interesting and deep. As I sat there in class, I wondered if maybe he was right. It was all so easy to ridicule.

  The second (and last) class of the week was scene day, when students would perform a two-person scene they had chosen, after which Lee would make his comments. I watched actors and actresses I thought were extremely talented, like Lane Bradbury, Ellie Wood, Lou Antonio, and others whose names I don’t remember. Many had had small parts off Broadway or on live television shows. Some waited tables; others modeled, like me. I was struck by Lee’s ability to home in on whatever it was they needed to work on. Sometimes he was easy on the actors, especially the prettier women. Sometimes he was harsh and impatient. Clearly he’d had some of the students in his classes for years, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and was frustrated when they weren’t able to move forward with the work. For me, the most frightening aspect of the class was the thought of being critiqued by Lee in front of the other students. Even worse, he sometimes asked students to comment on the work of their fellow students.

  I decided that before I quit the class I should at least try to do a sense-memory, and I chose drinking a glass of fresh orange juice as my exercise. I was still living in my father’s house at that point. Early every evening when I’d get home from a photo shoot, I’d squeeze oranges and sit in the library with a glass, focusing as hard as I could on every aspect of the sensory experience.

  One day Dad came home, found me working on this, and said, “What the hell are you doing, Jane?”

  “Practicing a sense-memory exercise for class,” I answered, wincing at what I knew was coming.

  He looked at me with pure derision, shook his head, and walked off muttering, “Jesus Christ.”

  But I persevered. “Persevere” happens to be our family motto.

  A whole month and a half after entering his class, I finally told Lee that I was ready to do my first exercise. The following week he called on me. Sitting on a chair center stage, I was as nervous as I’d ever been in my life. It seemed to me there were many more people than usual in the class that day, and I figured they were there to see me fail. But I launched in, placing my fingers around the imaginary glass of chilled orange juice. I closed my eyes and before long felt myself alone in a world of sensation; the nerves in my fingertips felt the cold. I opened my eyes and lifted the glass slowly, testing its weight until I could feel it in my hand, and as I brought the glass to my mouth, the taste buds on my tongue woke up in anticipation of the sweet, acidy wetness. For the first time I was experiencing something unique to actors: I knew I was on a stage before an audience, pretending—yet at the same time I was all alone and totally in the moment.

  What happened next was the most important moment in my life up until then.

  Lee was quiet, looking at me. Then in a low voice he said, “I see a lot of people go through here, Jane, but you have real talent.”

  The top of my head came off, birds flew out, and the room was bathed in light. Lee Strasberg told me I was talented. He isn’t my father or an employee of my father’s. He sees actors all day long every day. He didn’t have to say this. I know he’s not one to “make nice.”

  In that moment my life did a flip-flop, though I didn’t understand at the time why it had such a powerful effect on me. When I walked outside after the class, the city felt different, as if I now owned a piece of it. I went to bed that night with my heart racing, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew why I was alive, what I wanted to do. There is nothing more exquisite in life than being able to earn your living doing what you love (that, and being capable of love). All I’d needed was for someone who was a professional—and who didn’t have to—to tell me I was good.

  Characteristically, I went at it full-throttle. Instead of the usual two classes a week that everyone took, I took four. Instead of one scene every few months, I’d do double. I don’t think I fully understood the Method, nor do I think I really knew how to apply it in my professional work when that time came. What the classes did for me, however, was provide the confidence I so sorely needed. I knew there’d be those who’d say I’d gotten my breaks because I was Henry Fonda’s daughter. At those times I needed to be able to say to myself, I’m studying hard to develop a modicum of technique. I’m not a dilettante. I don’t take this for granted.

  Before Dad ever got to Broadway or starred in a film, he’d played in hundreds of summer stock productions and road shows. They had served as his classes, where he could develop his craft. In the late fifties, when I came along, the business was far more competitive; there were many more actors
looking for work, and because I was Henry Fonda’s daughter, there was more attention paid to me and fewer opportunities to fumble and make mistakes incognito. For my niece, Bridget Fonda, and now for my son, Troy Garity, the field is even more competitive and challenging. Perhaps you can’t teach acting talent, but you can learn the tools to bring that talent out in the face of what are often challenging circumstances. Dad was wrong to have thought the classes were a mistake—not for me they weren’t. Years later, Troy studied acting at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and he says it saved him just as Lee Strasberg saved me.

  As a girl who had grown up denying my feelings, with a father who thought emotions “disgusting,” I was unaccustomed to people fully expressing themselves even to the point of looking ridiculous. So the work in Lee’s classes was revelatory, a balm to my soul. Sally Field captured what acting did for girls like us who grew up in the fifties when she said, “I guess it was a way for me to release all the feelings that I had in some acceptable terms, so that I wasn’t responsible for them.” Through acting I could probe new parts of myself—sorrow, anger, joy—and feel safe exposing them. I felt I was appreciated for the fullness of my self rather than for some “good girl’s” proper façade. I had never been so happy.