My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  As we exited the church, we were surprised by three Russian violinists, in full costume, who began playing soulful Slavic music as they took their places behind the coffin. Brigitte had arranged this on her own as a surprise. I loved her for wanting to acknowledge Vadim’s Russianness on this day, in this way. We broke off sprigs of mimosa along the route to the cemetery and laid them on his coffin as we walked past to say our good-byes.

  Vadim and I had spent many happy times together in Saint Tropez, and whenever we’d pull his fancy Chris-Craft into the harbor after a day of island picnicking or water-skiing, we’d look up to see this historic old cemetery, the one Vanessa referred to as the “dead people’s village,” perched on the edge of the cliff. Once, at about age five, Vanessa was walking with her dad on the road that ran just above the cemetery. She stopped and looked at the tall, lichen-covered grave markers and began asking questions about death and survival of the soul. Vadim wrote in his autobiography Memoirs of the Devil:

  She thought on the whole that there was probably some kind of existence after death, but was afraid there might not be any sensible place where we could arrange to meet each other. Her face clouded over, and a few silent tears ran down her cheeks. Then, all of a sudden, her expression brightened.

  “We shall just have to die at the same time,” she said.

  It is a very difficult promise to keep, but I gave my word I would live till I was very, very old so that I would wait for her.

  The two of them always had a profound relationship. He died with Vanessa lying beside him, her head on his chest. He lived long enough to see her grown into a remarkable woman and to know her little son, whom he referred to as Buddha.

  When the funeral was over we drove to Catherine Schneider’s home and drank together and talked and laughed, thinking how very Vadimesque it all was, all of us women together as friends, reminiscing about why we’d loved him. What we did not discuss that day were the reasons all of us had left him. In rereading Vadim’s book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda, I came upon something Catherine Deneuve said in an interview that may have been closer to the truth: “I wonder if it’s not he who left [us]. You know, you can leave someone by doing everything to make them leave you.”

  His full name was Roger Vadim Plemiannikov, and for years my passport listed me as “Jane Fonda Plemiannikov.” Plemiannikov means “nephew,” and the family is said to be descended from the nephews of the great Mongol conquerer Genghis Khan. That explains the exotic eyes that my daughter and grandson have inherited. In France, families must give their children an officially approved first name; hence “Roger” was tacked on, but everyone who knew him called him Vadim.

  His formative years were spent during the Nazi occupation, and that must have had a profound impact on his character. In Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda, he wrote of the political hypocrisy he witnessed, the priests collaborating with the enemy, as well as acts of heroism:

  At sixteen, I had established a rule for myself: I was going to take the best from life. Its pleasures. The sea, nature, sports, Ferraris, friends and pals, art, nights of intoxication, the beauty of women, insolence and nose-thumbing at society. I kept my ideas on politics (I’m a liberal who is allergic to the words “fanaticism” and “intolerance”), but refused commitment in any form. I believed in man the individual, but had lost my faith in mankind at large.

  As a young man he would work off and on as an assistant to film director Marc Allégret, writing scripts but essentially eschewing steady work. In Memoirs of the Devil, he wrote: “We rejected all occupations which would have deprived us of our liberty. . . .”

  Liberty for him then meant being free for lovemaking, hanging out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where his acquaintances included André Gide, Jean Genet, Salvador Dalí, Edith Piaf, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Henry Miller. For a while he shared a mistress with Hemingway and would read aloud to French novelist Colette in her apartment on the rue de Beaujolais.

  Vadim was always loyal and generous to his friends. If he had any money, he’d share it without hesitation, even if he was pinched himself. If he had a woman who was up for it, he’d share her as well.

  After he and Brigitte, his first wife, had broken up and she was having an affair with Jean-Louis Trintignant, her co-star from . . . And God Created Woman, Vadim stood outside the apartment they had shared, and was overcome by a jealousy so powerful it was almost suicidal. When he recovered, he vowed never to allow “this unknown demon [jealousy] to take possession of my body and soul again. I became immune to the virus forever.” However, he also writes revealingly, “What you think you have buried lives on in you, feeding on you silently. Gnawing away. It is just that you do not realize it.” I think of the pain my father felt as he stood beneath Margaret Sullavan’s window while she made love to Jed Harris, and I think Vadim was right: You can appear to quash feelings of rage and jealousy, but those unacknowledged emotions can continue to play havoc with your heart, all the more so because they are unacknowledged.

  Vadim abhorred jealousy, considering it petty, bourgeois, unworthy of him or of anyone he was with. As our marriage floundered, I often wished that he would fight harder to save it; demonstrate more concern—even including jealousy. Instead he would become almost passive, as if knowing that the ending had been fated long before—a stance I read as not caring. In Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda, Bardot is quoted as saying of their marriage (in an interview): “If only Vadim had been jealous, things might have worked out.” People need to be wanted, and want to be needed.

  I could write one version of my marriage to Vadim in which he would come across as a cruel, misogynistic, irresponsible wastrel. I could also write him as the most charming, lyrical, poetic, tender of men. Both versions would be true.

  It was a month after Kennedy’s assassination, December 21, my birthday, that Vadim reappeared on my horizon. He’d been invited to a party given for me by my French agent, Olga Horstig. We found ourselves sitting together most of the evening, talking. He wasn’t at all as I had I remembered. He seemed funny and sweet in an offbeat, old-shoe kind of way. I’ve found that when you have a diabolical image of someone and he or she turns out to be a regular mortal, you then tend to elevate that person to an unrealistic place of perfection. Dangerous, that. A clear-eyed, balanced perspective is always the safest. As the evening wore on, he sang ribald French marching songs from the French-Algerian war and mispronounced English with irresistible charm. For example:

  “Oh, Jane, you can’t tell me alcoholeeesm is harry-di-tarry” (hereditary). “This chair is getting a leetle un-con-fort-eeble” (uncomfortable). “I see no ob-stee-cles” (obstacles . . . as in no obstacles to taking me home).

  Okay, so you don’t see that as especially charming? Ah, but you weren’t looking into green, slanted eyes above high Slavic cheekbones, eyes that seemed filled with mystery and promise. My God, he was handsome. Not in some perfect way—his teeth were too big, face too long—but the way the whole came together was startlingly attractive. Besides, except for being tall, dark, and very slender, he didn’t seem at all like my father.

  The next encounter would be the deciding one. He had a meeting with his talented production designer Jean André at Studios Eclair, where we were filming with Delon. Word reached me that he was in the canteen, and as soon as we had a break, I ran straight from the scene to see him—scantily dressed in a teddy covered only by a trench coat, which managed to fly open as I entered the canteen, breathless, flushed, and clearly excited. That’s what he needed, to see my excitement at seeing him. I was a fairly naïve, inexperienced twenty-six-year-old. He was ten years older, and a lot of water had flowed under his bridge.

  When filming had wrapped for the day, he took me back to my hotel room and we began to make out passionately on the couch, but when we finally made it to the bed he was no longer aroused. I remember thinking it was my fault and feeling humiliated, but I didn’t let on because I didn’t want him to feel bad. Here was Vadim, renowned lover, unable to make it with
me. Now I knew for sure there was something really wrong with me.

  The situation went on for three weeks, with me feeling terrible, wanting to die, but I never let him know how I felt, because I didn’t want to make matters worse. It never occurred to me to break it off. That would have been conceding defeat. Make it better! I know I can make it better! The fact that he was impotent for that first period of our relationship, rather than turning me away, actually reassured me: He wasn’t a superman, he was vulnerable, human.

  When finally the curse was broken, we stayed in bed for two nights and a day and were together from then until I had to return to the States to promote Sunday in New York. Everything else in life seemed to come to a standstill. I ceased eating except for the crusts of his bread and the rinds of his Camembert. Every afternoon when I wasn’t working, we would make love. Then I’d kiss him good-bye, and he would excuse himself to be with his three-year-old daughter, Nathalie, then living with her mother, Annette Stroyberg.

  His lovemaking was imaginative, erotic, and tender. Though I couldn’t understand all that he said (or maybe because I couldn’t understand), his murmurings sounded to me like messages from some new planet. But what I found as irresistible about him as the sex was his attachment to his little daughter. He must be a good man to love his daughter that way.

  There’s no doubt that part of my attraction to him and his life was because it was so different from the repressed style in which I had been raised. Then there was a certain remote dignity about his person that belied his reputation. But what a reputation he had! In the first years of our relationship, walking down the Champs-Élysées, people would react to him as to a major movie star. I was also intrigued by his worldliness: He’d been through war, had risked his life, knew so many interesting people, and was so different from any man I’d known. He would wake up in the morning singing!

  It was normal, I suppose, to pay no heed to the fact that we spent an inordinate amount of time in a club he belonged to, where we would drink and he’d go off to a side room to bet on a miniature electric car race, or that we were always driven by a chauffeur. Not even later, when he explained that he’d had his driver’s license revoked for a year for having an accident while driving under the influence, did I think: Wait a minute. Nor did I make the connection later, when he told me that at the time of the accident he’d been driving Catherine Deneuve, who was pregnant with his child and almost miscarried. I paid no heed to the many red flags thrown up over those first months—the drinking, the gambling. Nor did I ask myself later, before committing myself to him “in sickness and in health,” whether our respective weaknesses and strengths would complement one another; whether his vices together with my black-belt co-dependency (put up with everything—make it better) would bring us both grief; whether my emotional underdevelopment could surmount his “charming” addictions. Had I known enough to ask myself those questions, chances are I would have known enough to answer them—or known where to go to find the answers. But I didn’t.

  It certainly never occurred to me that this was not a man who could teach me intimacy, because I didn’t know it was something I needed to learn. You can’t look for something you don’t know exists. Intimacy has a feel to it, and if you’ve never experienced it, you don’t know that you miss it. In fact, if it’s never been in your life and then it does come along, there’s a chance it will make you feel extremely uncomfortable and that you’ll run away from it.

  Frankly, if I had it all to do over, knowing then what I know now, I would have plunged in just the same. I probably would have tried to get him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and whatever is offered for compulsive gambling. Being French, he would have refused (only in America do people self-identify as being “in recovery”), and I would have hung in anyway, maybe leaving a year or so sooner. Maybe not. I don’t regret any of it. Well, at least not most of it.

  I wanted to stay in Paris with Vadim, so—my earlier telegram from California be damned—I agreed to be in his film La Ronde. We moved out of my hotel and into a small, romantic walk-up apartment just around the corner, on the rue Seguier, while he was busy preparing the film. I knew that in addition to three-year-old Nathalie, his daughter with his ex-wife, he had a baby son with twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve, but I assumed that having babies out of wedlock indicated a laissez-faire relationship, a lack of emotional commitment on both their parts.

  So three months after coming to France, for the first time I found myself living full-out with a man—shopping, keeping house, cooking our meals: all in French (in which I was becoming quite fluent). Fortunately I’m a nester. Unfortunately I couldn’t cook, and I also had food issues, which continued without Vadim knowing it.

  I began to spend all my time reading cookbooks (food obsessions are not uncommon for people with eating disorders), everything from the old standby The Joy of Cooking to The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which included a notorious recipe for hash brownies. Never one to do things halfway, I would always attempt the most complicated recipes: Senegalese chicken soup, baked Alaska. This was pre-supermarket France, when shopping for food pretty much still meant going to one store for vegetables, another for fish, others for breads, diary products, and so on.

  For one of our first home-cooked dinners, I decided I’d make minute steaks. I remembered watching Susan cook them when she was married to Dad. Seemed easy enough. About five minutes into the meal, Vadim stopped midbite, looked up bemusedly from his plate, and asked, “Where did you buy this meat?”

  “At the butcher,” I replied.

  “Was there a horse’s head over the door?”

  “Actually, come to think of it . . .” Oh, my God, in a flash I realized what I’d done. It was horsemeat! I’d gone and cooked my favorite animal!

  Then there was the time he announced he’d invited Bardot over for dinner. Yikes! I’d never met her. It was hard enough trying to banish from my mind the knowledge that he’d actually been married to her, held that body in his arms. Now I was going to have to be in the same room, at the same table, with her! I roamed the markets till I came upon something that seemed perfect for the occasion: boudin noir, blood sausage, big, fat, black, blood sausage. I’d never seen one before, much less cooked one, but it looked appropriately . . . Well, maybe she’d choke on it. Actually we got along fine. She was funny and down-to-earth and seemed to have no hidden agenda. She even complimented me on the meal—it turns out she couldn’t cook, either.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT

  The magician’s assistant is easy to spot the way her arm curves like a swan’s neck as she points To a favorite piece of furniture for our inspection and approval,

  The way her smile charms us into believing, Disarming whatever might otherwise cut her in half. Where does a magician find his assistant,

  Such a beautiful woman (though we hardly notice her!) who will smile at his side and give nothing away? We assume she knows, of course, and imagine

  that behind her perfect teeth, her mind is haunted by the knowledge of another, secret kingdom where a dove crouches next to the heart-hammering hare in a dark warren, waiting

  To be abracadabred back to the dovecote, to lapin reality. In that country of lifted wallets, colorfully endless handkerchiefs and torn one-hundred-dollar bills that heal themselves,

  women, cut in half, seem to dwell mindlessly under a spell, play games with a marked deck or recline in utter weightlessness, suspended only by our wish to believe in them.

  —CHARLES DARLING,

  “On Being Introduced at a Neighborhood Party

  to a Magician’s Assistant”

  THE FILMING OF La Ronde (retitled Circle of Love in the United States) with Vadim was a happy time for us both. I loved the joining of our creative forces, and I discovered tremendous sexual excitement in having him place me in the positions he wanted, calling the shots—and in my exceeding his expectations. I have always liked being directed, not having to make the big dec
isions but having parameters set for me and then infusing life into the director’s vision.

  For an American I had a good accent, which meant people thought I was Swedish! In some ways speaking French acted as a mask for me, allowing me to be freer than I was in English. It slowed me down, softened me, and made my voice deeper and more nuanced.

  Vadim’s ex-wife, Annette, was in Morocco at this time, and three-year-old Nathalie had come to live with us. Remembering how important Susan had been in my life, I wanted to be as responsible as I could toward the little girl whom I had just started to know.

  Our apartment on the rue Seguier was too small for Vadim, me, Nathalie, and her nanny. Lacking the money to rent a larger apartment, Vadim prevailed on his old friend Commander Paul-Louis Weiller, who had turned one of his many houses, the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, into a haven for friends and artists (and beautiful young women, for whom the old man had a penchant). Weiller gave us an apartment there. The hotel, a magnificent historic monument built in the sixteenth century, is on the rue Vieille-du-Temple, in Le Marais, one of the oldest sections of Paris. I was fortunate to have lived there at that time, before it became chic and recherché.