by Jane Fonda
There was another element Lee brought to his classes and to the Actors Studio (for which I auditioned and to which I was accepted the following year), and that was the sense of theater as great art. The Actors Studio had grown out of the Group Theatre to carry on the tradition of actors working together to achieve a high level of truth and reality. Those of us privileged to study with Lee could feel this sense of history and commitment to an ideal, and it was inspiring.
Lee was a voracious reader, and the walls of his spacious but unassuming apartment on Central Park West were ceiling-to-floor books. That apartment became a haven for many of us, a place to sit in the kitchen, drink tea in Russian glass cups, and discuss theater. I was unaccustomed to sitting in kitchens engaged in endless discussion, being asked for and giving opinions. Another stray that seemed to find her place in that culture-laden apartment was Marilyn.
The need for Lee’s method of teaching actors seemed very clear to me, and the clearer it became, the more I understood why my father put it down. Musicians use instruments to express themselves through sound. Painters, with time and solitude on their side, use paints and brushes to express themselves on canvas. For actors, their canvas, their instrument, is their very being, and for theater actors in particular, instead of in solitude, they are creating before an audience. It’s not easy to ensure that your very being is on call, ready, willing, and able to perform to its utmost. The only thing analogous (which I would become conscious of later, during all those years of watching Atlanta Braves baseball games with Ted Turner) is the athlete up at bat, say, with the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth. The world is watching and either he comes through or he doesn’t; it’s all him up there. There is another critical element the athlete and the actor share: the essential need to be relaxed.
Lee once said, “Tension is the occupational disease of the actor.” I have watched carefully the not-quite-great baseball players when they strike out and walk back to the dugout, shaking their heads, swearing, and sometimes pounding their bats on the ground. The great players, on the other hand (I’m thinking particularly of Chipper Jones and Greg Maddux), take that walk as cool as a cucumber, as though nothing had gone wrong. They have found a technique to maintain physical and mental calm. You can’t do most things well without being relaxed, not in sports, not in lovemaking, not in acting. Where it differs for actors is that relaxation is needed, not to swing a bat well or run swiftly, but so that the body’s energetic flow is unimpeded and inspiration can rise and express itself through the actor’s spirit: in eyes, voice, and movement . . . the body as instrument. But it’s not as though you can get up in front of an audience and say to yourself, Relax, dammit! You can pretend to be relaxed, but pretending isn’t going to address self-doubts and hangups, often unconscious, that block the creative process and keep you from doing what you want to do in a scene.
Some actors become famous right away and go from role to role, often being asked to play the same qualities that made them famous, over and over, until they are imitating themselves. In fact, stardom can be the death knell of an actor’s best talent. Lee would sometimes say that actors develop their careers in public, but their art develops in private. It is a terrible feeling to be famous but have lost the fire in the belly and not know where it went or why. Something’s wrong, but you don’t know how to fix it. That’s where class comes in. It is in the private sanctuary of a class, not on the job, that an actor can try things, take chances, fall on his or her face, learn how to make his or her instrument perform wholly and fully in all the ways needed, when needed. To achieve this goal, we must become conscious of what makes us respond the way we do in real life, in certain relationships and situations. We must confront inhibitions, fears, all of our emotional processes and what triggers them, all the things that can cause us problems without our knowing what is happening. The techniques Lee used were aimed at enabling the actor to become aware of and remove these internal barriers. He had no rigid set of rules that applied to all actors. On the contrary, he made comments and suggestions based on each actor’s individual issues—and one of mine was the need always to be perfect. That made me tense, wanting constantly to prove my talent by being very emotional (something that has always come easily for me). So Lee would have me do scenes where I’d play rather dull, slow-speaking, slow-moving characters. Doing nothing was what I needed to learn.
The other big challenge for an actor is how to find inspiration. You know how some days every nerve in your body is alive and vibrating, while other days you’re dull and sluggish? That’s not great in civilian life, but if an actor has a critical scene to play (often, in filming, at impossible hours like 6:00 A.M. or midnight) and is “dead” inside, what to do? That’s where technique is critical. By working with a variety of exercises, from the sense-memory kind to private moments, and by trying different scenes that you may never be asked to do professionally but that work on the psychic places you tend to block, you can develop an arsenal of tools to use when the need arises.
Of course my father would have hated the Method: It was all about being able to plumb your depths and expose yourself spontaneously on a personal level, especially in class, so as to become conscious of how your instrument functions. He lumped it together with all the other things he disdained: religion, therapy, anything that expressed need, the antithesis of the rugged individual. “Crutches, all crutches!” he would say.
Decades later we were filming a scene in On Golden Pond when, standing in the water next to his boat, I tell him I want to be his friend. We had rehearsed many times, and I had stifled the urge to touch his arm, wanting to save it for when it would matter most: his close-up. Dad very rarely had tears on camera, and I wanted him to have tears in this scene, which meant so much to me on a personal level. When the moment came and the camera was rolling for that close-up, I reached out and placed my hand on his arm as I said, “I want to be your friend.”
What I saw amazed me: For a millisecond he was caught off guard. He seemed angry, even: This isn’t what we rehearsed. Then the emotions hit him, tears came to his eyes, then anger again as he tensed up and looked away. All this, though barely visible to the camera, was palpably clear to me, and my heart went out to him. I loved him so much just then. It amazes me what a great actor he was in spite of his fear of spontaneity and real emotions. I remembered reading something that Leora Dana, who starred with him in the play Point of No Return, once said:
His acting was fantastic. His precision was so perfect it made me want to be perfect. His relaxation was tremendous. I liked that. . . . And then, one day, I touched him at a time when I wasn’t supposed to be touching him. I just put my hand on his arm, and instead of that relaxed human being I felt steel. His arm was made up of bands of steel.
Of course he would hate the Method! But I’d found a home.* 2
CHAPTER TEN
DOUBLE EXPOSURE
When you’re a nobody, the only way to be anybody is to be somebody else.
—ANONYMOUS PATIENT,
Your Inner Child of the Past
IN THE SPRING OF 1959, Josh Logan, after making a screen test with me, decided to put me under contract for $10,000 a year and launch my career with a movie version of a Broadway play called Tall Story, co-starring Anthony Perkins. It was to be shot at the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank. What fascinated me most on the lot was the wardrobe department—two floors of a building, room after room of costumes from different periods, each tagged with the name of the movie and the star who had worn it. There were the muslin-covered body dummies of all the Warner Bros. stars: stout, thin, buxom, they had been created to the exact measurements of the stars’ bodies, ready for the seamstresses to pin their patterns to the forms. The dummies were headless, so if a particular shape intrigued you because of its dramatic curves (Marilyn’s) or its petite size (Natalie Wood’s), you’d have to ask one of the fifteen or so seamstresses whose it was. In the wardrobe department more than anywhere else, I felt awed in the presence of Ho
llywood history and realized I was about to step into that history myself. My measurements had been taken before I’d left New York and my dummy was right there next to the others, looking disappointingly straight up and down—with none of the eye-catching ins and outs that distinguished so many others.
With Tony Perkins in Tall Story.
(Photofest)
Josh Logan directing Tony Perkins and me in Tall Story.
Then came the day for makeup tests. The Warner Bros. makeup department was run by the highly regarded Gordon Bau. Down the hall I could see Angie Dickinson getting hers done; Sandra Dee was next door. I lay back and presented my face to Mr. Bau, confident that he would make me look like a movie star. When he’d finished I sat up and . . . Oh, my God! Who is that in the mirror! Is that how he thinks I should look? I was horrified, dumbstruck. Who was I to tell him I didn’t want to be that person in the mirror? But this wasn’t me. My lips had a new shape and my eyebrows were dark and enormous, like eagle’s wings.
I hated the way I looked but didn’t dare say so. Then I was sent to get body makeup, done by a different person (union requirements) in a different room, with (oh my God!) mirrors all around. You could see everything. This was turning into a nightmare. A woman asked me to stand on a small platform while she wet a sponge with Sea Breeze and then put pancake body makeup over all the parts of my body that were going to be exposed. Since I was playing a cheerleader, that meant just about everything. To this day the smell of Sea Breeze brings back waves of anxiety. I began to think that this business of making movies wasn’t for people like me, who hated our bodies and faces.
The next day, when I saw the results of the costume and makeup tests, I wanted to disappear, so much did I hate how I looked onscreen—my face so round and my makeup so unreal. And I definitely didn’t have good hair. To top it off as one of the worst days of my life, word came down from Jack Warner, who had also seen the tests in his private projection room, that I must wear falsies. At the same time that he notified me of Mr. Warner’s demand, Josh suggested that after the filming I might consider having my jaw broken and reset and my back teeth pulled to create a more chiseled look, the sunken cheekbones that were the hallmarks of Suzy Parker, the supermodel of the time.
“Of course,” said Josh, touching my chin and turning me to profile, “you’ll never be a dramatic actress with that nose, too cute for drama.”
From that moment on, my experience on the film Tall Story became a Kafkaesque nightmare. My bulimia soared out of control and I began sleepwalking again as I had as a child, but in a different context. I would dream I was in bed, waiting for a love scene to be shot, and gradually I would realize that I’d made a terrible mistake. I was in the wrong bed, in the wrong room, and everyone was waiting for me to start the scene somewhere else, though I didn’t know where.
It was summertime and hot, so I often slept nude. On one occasion I woke up on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building: cold, naked, searching in vain for where (and who) I was supposed to be.
I was unable to rediscover the excitement I had experienced acting in Strasberg’s classes. I didn’t know how to use what I had learned there to make my cheerleader character more than one-dimensional. And the camera felt like my enemy. Standing before it, I felt as though I were falling off a cliff with no net under me. There was so much focus on externals, and there seemed no shortage of people who let me know that my externals could use some improvement—with one exception.
During a day off, I found a plastic surgeon who did reconstructive surgery, and I made an appointment to see him. In his office, I showed him my breasts and told him I needed to have them enlarged. To my amazement (and his credit), he got mad at me.
“You’re out of your mind to consider doing such a thing,” he said. “Go home and forget about it.”
But his validation wasn’t enough to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. All the things I feared most in myself—that I was boring, untalented, and plain—came to the fore during the filming of Tall Story. When it was done I returned to New York, vowing I would never go back to moviemaking.
I was twenty-two, on my way to celebrity, earning my own living, and independent.
So why, when it was time for me to write about this period for my book, did I develop writer’s block that lasted six months? Oh, I had lots of excuses: There was all that thistle to spray at my ranch in New Mexico. There were rocks to move and trees to cut down to make horse trails, and then my kids were visiting. . . . You know, life. But after six months I had to face the fact that I was having difficulty confronting those years following the turning point with Strasberg. Why did the ensuing years feel so sad, so false, after things had started off so well? Not that there weren’t happy times, but pain engraves a deeper memory.
Does it seem strange that Strasberg’s classes allowed me to discover a place of truth, an authenticity, for the first time since childhood? The moment when I did my first exercise for him I felt he “saw” me. He was, after all, a master at sensing what was real and at naming it. All my life I had been encouraged not to probe my depths, not to identify and name my emotions. But Lee encouraged me to dig deep and to come out—and I did, all raw and vulnerable, reborn. Then, wham! My career began, and everything that had started to happen with Lee was pushed aside and it all became about hair and big cheeks and small breasts, and I couldn’t handle it, coming as it did on the heels of an emerging selfhood. I went into a three-year tailspin of private self-destruction, depression, and passivity. I don’t mean this by way of self-pity. There are a lot worse things in life than having your body critiqued, and stardom is a whole lot better than a kick in the ass. But my Tall Story experience pushed all my insecurity buttons. I seemed to be doing fine. Friends who were with me during that period may be shocked to read what I was really feeling. But then I always seem to be fine. I know how to get by.
For one thing, when I returned to New York from Hollywood I was bingeing and purging sometimes eight times a day. It was out of control, and as a consequence I was always tired, angry, and depressed. I briefly sought help from a Freudian psychiatrist, who sat behind me as I lay on a couch, where I was convinced that he was either sleeping or masturbating. I soon realized that talking to the ceiling about my dreams wasn’t what I needed. I needed immediate, look-me-in-the-eyes help—first to stop my bingeing and purging, then to help me understand why I was doing it. But I didn’t know where to go.
During this period I also developed a fear of men, and my sensuality took a long hiatus. I sought safety in the company of gay or bisexual men. This is also when ballet came into my life. With its rigidly prescribed moves and required slimness, ballet is the dance style of preference for women with eating disorders. Like anorexia and bulimia, ballet is about control. This was a time when women were not supposed to sweat; it was considered unseemly. The health clubs for women that existed featured saunas, vibrating belts that made your fanny wiggle, and other forms of passive exercise. Dumbbells and machines were strictly the domain of men. Consequently ballet was my first experience with hard, sweat-producing exercise that could actually change the shape of my body, and from 1959 until I began the Jane Fonda Workout in 1978, through all those early films, including Barbarella and Klute, wherever I was working, whether in France, Italy, the United States, or the USSR—ballet was my sole form of exercise.
Within a month of my return to New York after Tall Story, I began rehearsals with Josh for a play he’d purchased called There Was a Little Girl, written by Daniel Taradash. It dealt with rape. My father begged me not to do it, fearing that critics would find it too risqué. I saw it as a way to stretch myself beyond what I’d been asked to do in Tall Story, and although the script was flawed, it had an interesting, quasi-feminist-before-its-time premise: A young virgin is celebrating her eighteenth birthday with her boyfriend and hoping he will make love to her. He makes it clear he is not ready, they get into a fight, and she runs out into the parking lot, where a man rapes her, aided by a ga
ng of his friends. She returns home in a state of shock and confusion to discover that, while they don’t say so overtly, her parents and sister (played wickedly by a fifteen-year-old, Joey Heatherton) assume it must have been her fault—the old you-must-have-wanted-it, blame-the-victim response. Knowing that she had wanted to have sex that night; believing that she may in fact have brought it on herself; and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the girl goes in search of her rapist, hoping to find out directly from him where the truth lies.
Barely a year had passed since I’d begun to study acting, and a portion of that year had been spent on Tall Story. This was my first time in professional theater. It was a highly charged, emotional role, and I was onstage the entire time, making lightning-fast costume changes in the dark on a revolving stage while trying to get into various stages of emotional meltdown. During rehearsals in New York, it became clear to everyone that the play had major flaws, and every morning Dan Taradash would bring in new script changes. I’ve always liked challenges, but this went a little beyond what I was prepared for.
On New Year’s Day 1960, one week before we were to begin out-of-town tryouts in Boston, we received news that Brooke Hayward’s mother, Margaret Sullavan, had been found dead in a hotel room in New Haven, an apparent suicide. The news hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. Her death also hit Josh very hard, since their friendship went back to the earliest days of the University Players.
Two nights before our out-of-town opening at the Colonial Theater in Boston, Josh fired my leading man and replaced him with Dean Jones, who barely had time to learn his lines. Two nights later, at the top of the second act, Louis Jean Heydt, who played my father, died of a massive heart attack right before his entrance. Two nights after that, Josh himself, who unbeknownst to me had long suffered from severe manic depression, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for more than ten days, leaving us in the hands of the writer, who had never directed in his life.