by Jane Fonda
The rue Vieille-du-Temple, old, narrow, and cobblestoned, was lined by buildings so ancient that they leaned in toward each other like friends longing to touch. We lived in the attic—vaulted rooms where walls and ceilings were covered with maps of the world painted by sixteenth-century artists. Our bedroom window was directly opposite a school for cantors, and as we were at the top of the two leaning buildings, it was as though the singers were right in bed with us. On the first floor, Roland Petit, director of the Ballets de Paris, and his wife, prima ballerina Renée Jeanmaire, made their abode. There was an apartment reserved for Charlie Chaplin, though I don’t remember ever seeing him there. This exotic atelier is where we made our home for several years and created a family.
Vadim directing me in La Ronde.
Vadim wrote extensively about how, later, I spoke of having been “turned into a domestic slave” by him, as though this were a betrayal of womankind. I will admit to having made some pretty extremist rhetorical statements during that period, but I doubt it was the domesticity I was objecting to. I have, in fact, always liked creating a home. My physical surroundings are very important to me. I can’t think straight if my surroundings are disorderly or dirty, and during times when we couldn’t afford to have someone help out, I did the housework myself rather than live with the mess. During the years with Vadim it never crossed my mind to ask him to help with household chores. I saw it as women’s work, even though it meant doing double duty, since I often left home for the studios before dawn and returned after dark, while he stayed home and wrote—or went fishing.
This acquiescence was, in part, due to the way we were all conditioned, and partly because I felt that being the perfect, unselfish housewife would make it impossible for him to leave me—just as my mother had thought about Dad. Interesting how we interpret the radical notion of bringing democracy into the home as selfishness! It wasn’t that Vadim was mean or wanted to make my life hard. It’s just that he didn’t notice. He could live with dirty dishes stacked high in the sink for weeks. Now that I think of it, maybe that was what I railed about—his not noticing.
But there were other, more complicated problems that are much harder to write about. Vadim had created a view of life for himself, a view shared by all his friends, which held that any show of thrift, jealousy, or desire for organization and structure was a sign that you were bourgeois. God forbid! “Bourgeois” became the dreaded epithet, as horrifying as betrayal or dishonesty. There were even times when it was suggested that the French Communist Party had bourgeois tendencies.
I had inherited $150,000 from my mother. At the time, it was a nice sum, something I could fall back on if I stewarded it carefully. Vadim could not comprehend why I hesitated to give him large portions of it so that he could hire a friend to come with us to some vacation spot and work with him on a script. At first I was horrified and said so. But over time I began to feel that I was being petty and stingy. So I gave in. Only years later did I realize that Vadim was a compulsive gambler, that the locations for his films or vacations were often chosen for their proximity to a racetrack or casino. I had no idea that gambling was an addictive disease, as difficult to overcome as alcoholism, anorexia, and bulimia. Much of my mother’s inheritance was simply gambled away.
Along with thriftiness, jealousy was a major no-no. Why did women make so much fuss about the physical act of intercourse? Just because a husband or wife (though it always seemed to be the husband) had sex with someone else, that didn’t represent betrayal—“It’s you I love.” Vadim would go on and on with his friends about how the sexual revolution of the sixties showed that people were finally beginning to see what they had always known: that middle-class morality needed to be discarded for sexual freedom and open marriage. (We weren’t married . . . too bourgeois!) Maybe he’d smelled it on my skin when we’d first met—that I was malleable and insecure in my sexuality. In any event, I was vulnerable to him and felt that in order to keep him and be a good wife, I had to prove that I was, in fact, the queen of “nonbourgeoisness,” the Oscar winner of wildness, generosity, and forgiveness.
As time went on, Vadim would fail to come home in the evenings. I’d have dinner ready and he wouldn’t show. Often he wouldn’t even call. I would usually eat all the food I’d prepared for us, go out and buy pastries and French glacé (not nearly as satisfying as our ice cream), devour all of it, throw it all up, and collapse into bed exhausted and angry. Sometimes he’d come home around midnight and fall into bed drunk. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up till morning. I swallowed my anger (along with the ice cream), never really confronting him about this behavior. I didn’t want to seem bourgeois. I didn’t think I deserved better.
Then one night he brought home a beautiful red-haired woman and took her into our bed with me. She was a high-class call girl employed by the well-known Madame Claude. It never occurred to me to object. I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am. If this was what he wanted, this was what I would give him—in spades. As feminist poet Robin Morgan wrote in Saturday’s Child on the subject of threesomes, “If I was facing the avant-garde version of keeping up with the Joneses, by god I’d show ’em.”
Sometimes there were three of us, sometimes more. Sometimes it was even I who did the soliciting. So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced I enjoyed it.
I’ll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed (questions I never asked myself!) and, in the case of the call girls, what had brought her to make those choices. I was shocked by the cruelty and abuse many had suffered, saw how abuse had made them feel that sex was the only commodity they had to offer. But many were smart and could have succeeded in other careers. The hours spent with those women informed my later Oscar-winning performance of the call girl Bree Daniel in Klute. Many of those women have since died from drug overdose or suicide. A few went on to marry high-level corporate leaders; some married into nobility. One, who remains a friend, recently told me that Vadim was jealous of her friendship with me, that he had said to her once, “You think Jane’s smart, but she’s not, she’s dumb.” Vadim often felt a need to denigrate my intelligence, as if it would take up his space. I would think that a man would want people to know he was married to a smart woman—unless he was insecure about his own intelligence. Or unless he didn’t really love her.
As with my eating disorders, I believed I was the only one who betrayed myself by allowing other women into my bed when I didn’t really want to, especially when there was no mitigating financial need. (I know many women who have no money and no job skills who do lots of things they don’t want to do in order to keep their support, especially if they have children.) Then in 2001 I read Saturday’s Child, the autobiography of Robin Morgan, cornerstone of the contemporary feminist movement, inventor of the feminist symbol, and editor of Sisterhood Is Powerful and its two sequels, Sisterhood Is Global and Sisterhood Is Forever. In her autobiography she writes of her own self-betrayal within marriage. She describes how she
bought into every sexual myth the guys could fling at me—about Bloomsbury, sexual liberation, not being a puritan; about keep-on-doing- what-you-don’t- like-because-the- more-you-do- it-the-more-you’ll- like-it; about D. H. Lawrence’s ideal quartet (two women, two men, all possible sexual permutations). I never questioned whose needs and self-interest these models served. . . .
I partly dissociated my consciousness in order to survive them, an attempt to compartmentalize and contain the experience of violation.
Until then I had not planned on writing about my own experiences. I thought: There are enough people who dislike me, I don’t need to give them even more ammunit
ion. But when I read Robin’s book, it gave me courage to see that a woman like her had had these experiences and written about them, bravely and without salaciousness. I saw that if the telling of my life’s journey was to matter to other women and to girls, I would, like Robin, have to be honest about how far I’ve come and the meaning of where I’ve been.
I got Robin’s e-mail address from Gloria Steinem, a friend, and wrote to her, telling her how important her honesty had been to me. I asked, “How is it that otherwise strong, independent women can do these things?” She answered: “You’d be surprised how many ‘otherwise strong, independent women’ have done these things.”
In my public life, I am a strong, can-do woman. How is it, then, that behind closed doors, in my most intimate relations, I could voluntarily betray myself? The answer is this: If a woman has become disembodied from a lack of self-worth—I’m not good enough—or from abuse, she will neglect her own voice of desire and hear only the man’s. This requires, as Robin Morgan says, compartmentalizing—disconnecting head and heart, body and soul. Overlay her silence with a man’s sense of entitlement and inability (or unwillingness) to read his partner’s subtle body signals, and you have the makings of a very angry woman, who will stuff her anger for the same reasons she silences her sexual voice.
Vadim was the first man I had ever loved, and in spite of the complexities (and in some part because of them), the love was real enough that for a long time my anger was only a background whisper. I loved that he was like a kaleidoscope and I could see the world through all his different prisms. He helped me rediscover my sexuality (and that of other women in the process), gave me an if-he-loves-me-I-must-be-okay kind of confidence, and helped move me out from under my father’s shadow. I had a persona now. I was with a “real man,” I ran his house, was a good stepmother to his daughter and to his son, Christian, when Catherine Deneuve agreed to let him visit us. Vadim’s friends seemed to like me. What wasn’t to like? I never complained, rarely scolded, worked hard, brought in the money, brought them their whiskeys at night, and made them their breakfast in the morning when they were hungover, and they knew I participated with Vadim in his sexual libertinism. I remember one of the group remarking, as I was leaving with a tray of glasses to be refilled, “Jane is something else, not like most women, more like one of us.” I fairly purred with pleasure, as I had at age ten when someone had asked if I was a boy or a girl.
Unlike the magician’s assistant in the poem at the start of this chapter, my functioning self did not know what was real, that there was another way to be, a “secret kingdom” of the embodied self that I could be Abracadabred to, authentic and whole. I had long since abandoned that self. I so needed to not know, in order to remain in the relationship. I transformed myself with Vadim’s magic wand into the perfect sixties wife. I didn’t need his money, so it wasn’t an economic issue. It was the fear of losing the relationship, since it was the relationship that validated me. If someone had asked me to describe who I was then, I would have had a difficult time of it. But as film critic Philip Lopate once wrote: “Where identity is not fixed, performance becomes a floating anchor.” And could I perform! Making the unreal seem real, the sad seem happy, hoping that somewhere along the way it would all work out, that I would discover who I was. Meantime I had an anchor.
I would often talk to Vadim about my insecurities, but he didn’t really understand, though he tried in his own way to give me confidence. The problem was, he knew how to validate only my façade, and the façade worked so well that there seemed no pressing need to go deeper. “Deeper” might have meant my becoming more assertive, more opinionated, more who I was, and as Vadim said publicly (later, after I’d left him and become more . . . me), he liked his women “softer.” At that time, if it was soft he wanted, I’d give him squooshy.
I made a list one day of what I considered my main faults: selfishness, stinginess, and being too judgmental were the top three. Then and there I decided that if I pretended to be generous and forgiving for a long enough time, maybe I would become those things. I remembered reading Aristotle in philosophy class at Vassar: “We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” I had always felt that you become what you do—which is one reason I fretted so when I was asked to play silly young women like my characters in Tall Story and Any Wednesday. If you behave one-dimensionally day after day, you start to become one-dimensional, and after a while the ability to reach deeper becomes atrophied.
You could say that Vadim majored in vacations. His love of certain natural environments and talent for enjoying them was unbounded, and I was a beneficiary. He loved the sea and its shores. We would go not just to glamorous Saint Tropez, but to the rugged coast of Brittany on the Atlantic in the northern region of France and to the Bay of Arcachon on the southern Atlantic coast. We would pile into an outboard motorboat with Nathalie, Christian, and grande Nathalie (daughter of Vadim’s sister, Helene) and go for picnics on some of the sand dunes that would emerge at low tide. Grande Nathalie was almost ten years older than petite Nathalie and often accompanied us on our vacations.
Beached in Arcachon, France, with Nathalie (in the boat with me) and Christian watching.
Vadim and me in Baja California on one of our many deep-sea-fishing trips.
Petite Nathalie was growing into a beautiful combination of her Danish mother and Franco-Slavic father, the same exotic eyes and dark hair, with legs that went on forever. She was a challenging child. Her stubbornness and moodiness were evident; she kept her deeper self tucked away, and I never really knew what she felt—except for her love for her father. She and I were always battling over issues like brushing her teeth and doing her lessons, and I suspected she thought I was a nag. (Forty years later, she remains a member of my family.)
Often Vadim and I would go to Saint Tropez in the winter, my favorite time there. We’d stay in a small, not fancy hotel/restaurant called Tahiti Hôtel, right on Pampelonne Beach, the one that became famous for its nude sunbathers in summertime (which is one reason I preferred winter). I loved the Mediterranean storms—the mistrals—that would bend the palm trees and send waves high onto the beach. Vadim and I would sit by a cozy fire, playing chess and watching nature rage.
Next to the sea, Vadim loved mountains best. He was an excellent skier and we often spent Christmas in Megève or Chamonix, two ski resorts in the French Alps. But just as I preferred Saint Tropez in the winter, I loved most when we would go to Chamonix in the summer. We’d always drive from Paris to the mountains with Nathalie, singing French songs and playing road games. We would rent a chalet in the little town of Argentière, adjacent to Chamonix, in the valley of the Mont Blanc.
It would be sunny, the air pure and brisk, the wildflowers just emerging. The sparkling, majestic Alps rose sharply on both sides of the valley, with Mont Blanc to the south lording it over them all. From time to time, an awesome rumble would echo down the valley as melting snow avalanched from the peaks. Once, at night, I saw the northern lights dancing in the sky, and sometimes, when the sun was at just the right angle, I could spy the faint blue of the glaciers. I took long walks along the creeks, watched the Lenten roses as they blushed open, and thought how I had never been happier in my life, so happy my heart felt like bursting. I learned that spring that I am molecularly suited to high altitudes. Fourteen thousand feet is as high as I’ve ever hiked, but up there where the air is thin and crisp and the tundra spongy, I feel transcendent.
On one of these alpine vacations, Vadim left me to go to Rome to fetch his baby son, Christian. I didn’t know until I read Vadim’s book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda that he had had a passionate night with Catherine and that he thought “everything would work out with [her], that [his] relationship with [me] was only a dream, and that Christian would grow up living with a mother and father who loved each other.” Reading that so many years later didn’t hurt me, but I wondered how I could have been so naïve as to th
ink his commitment to me was real.
I had no experience with the care and handling of infants, but I threw myself into it with enthusiasm when Vadim brought the baby to our chalet that spring. He was truly a hands-on father, comfortable with bottles and diapers. I remember Christian, Nathalie, and me taking our baths together in a tub much too small to accommodate us all. I didn’t feel totally sure of myself as a stepmother, but I liked being with the children and having a family. Susan was never far from my heart at those times.
There are certain things you are not supposed to do if you are just becoming a star and want to survive in Hollywood. You don’t go and live in an attic with a French director and refuse to come back unless you absolutely have to. But I never followed career rules. For better or worse, I didn’t think of myself as a movie star with a real career. I was never fully vested in my celebrity. I felt I’d gotten into it by default, and I wouldn’t die if I got out of it by default. I liked the work, the structure it gave my life, the challenges of different roles, and the pleasure I would sometimes derive from bringing a character to life. I also liked being financially independent. But the choices I made in relation to work were always connected to my relationships or, later, my politics.
In late spring I was offered the title role in Cat Ballou with Lee Marvin. It meant returning to Hollywood, but Vadim encouraged me to take it, saying he would come visit whenever he could. For reasons I don’t recall, I was under a contract to Columbia Pictures, where Cat Ballou was to be made, and this was a way to fulfill part of it. The script was unusual, and I wasn’t sure whether it was any good or not. I’m not sure Lee Marvin knew either. I remember him whispering to me one day during rehearsal that the only reason he and I were in the movie was that “we’re under contract and they can get us cheap.”