My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Cat Ballou was a relatively low-budget undertaking. It seemed we’d never do two takes unless the camera broke down. The producers had us working overtime day after day, until one morning Lee Marvin took me aside.

  “Jane,” he said, “we are the stars of this movie. If we let the producers walk all over us, if we don’t stand up for ourselves, you know who suffers most? The crew. The guys who don’t have the power we do to say, ‘Shit, no, we’re workin’ too hard.’ You have to get some backbone, girl. Learn to say no when they ask you to keep working.”

  I will always remember Lee for that important lesson. At least I was learning to say no in my professional life.

  I have to admit, it wasn’t until I saw the final cut of Cat Ballou that I realized we had a hit on our hands. I hadn’t been around when they filmed Lee’s horse, leaning cross-legged up against the barn in what’s become a classic image, or the scenes when Lee tries to shoot the side of the barn. I didn’t realize how director Elliot Silverstein would use the two troubadours, Nat “King” Cole and Stubby Kaye, like a Greek chorus. It would be my first genuine hit, though its success had very little to do with me. By the way, Nat “King” Cole was every bit as kind and wonderful as I had remembered him from my parents’ parties after the war.

  During the filming of Cat Ballou and the movie I did right afterward for Columbia, The Chase, Vadim, Nathalie, and I lived in a rented house in Malibu Colony, right on the beach. Like my father, Vadim loved to fish and would often do so from the shore, pulling in perch and sometimes halibut, which we’d have for dinner. Today, of course, you wouldn’t dare eat fish from Santa Monica Bay even if you did manage to catch one, which is unlikely. The house we rented had belonged to Merle Oberon and was bright and cozy. We paid $200 a month for it, and I remember how astounded I was when the rent went up to $500. What could they be thinking! Today a house like that rents for closer to $10,000 a month or more. Back then, average folk who’d been there for decades could still afford to live among the millionaires. The powerful who did have homes there (usually second homes) were considered avant garde bohemians.

  There were always friends hanging out with us: Marlon Brando; Brooke Hayward and her new husband, Dennis Hopper; my brother and his wife, Susan; Yvette Mimieux, who was dating a young French director; Mia Farrow, who was dating Frank Sinatra; Julie Newmar; Viva, who would star in many Andy Warhol movies; Sally Kellerman; and Jack Nicholson. Every Sunday Larry Hagman would don a gorilla suit and march down the beach followed by a swarm of friends carrying banners.

  It was an atmosphere the French would call désinvolte, friends casually hanging out, with good food and interesting conversation, what I had always been attracted to but was too shy to have initiated. Now I was learning to create that same ambiance, running a home and making things comfortable for people. We were always entertaining, and any French person who came to Los Angeles made a stopover at our home. Dad said in an interview around this time, “She’s outgoing, not at all like me. . . . Look at the kind of home she’s created, look at the life they lead out there in Malibu. People coming, people going, all day long, open house all the time, and Jane handling it all so beautifully, making people feel comfortable. . . .”

  I was proud of that.

  Dad was dating the woman who would be his last wife, a lovely, enthusiastic, pert woman named Shirlee Adams, only slightly older than me. They had taken a house just down the beach from us. Nathalie attended a nearby school, her English had become fluent as had my French, and we were quite a happy family. For Dad, the fact that Vadim was a fisherman created an affinity; besides, he was not immune to Vadim’s charm.

  Sam Spiegel, one of Hollywood’s great producers, offered me a role in Lillian Hellman’s The Chase, based on a novel by Horton Foote. The Chase was to be directed by Arthur Penn and to co-star Marlon Brando, Angie Dickinson, E. G. Marshall, Robert Duvall, and a relative newcomer, Robert Redford, who would play my husband. What a package, right? What I was to learn, however, was that even the best packaging and assembly of talent can’t guarantee success. While the film did fairly well in Europe, it was a flop in the States. My performance certainly didn’t help. It was a little like “Barbarella comes to small-town Texas.” Maybe out of revenge for all those bad-hair years I’d endured, I was now playing second fiddle to a mane of hair that, as a friend recently said, should have had its own billing.

  Two things happened that summer of 1965 that were especially important to me. Strangely enough, both involved parties.

  I had a lot of time off during the filming of The Chase and decided I would throw a Fourth of July party on the beach. I had never given a big Hollywood party before, but as usual I took it on full bore. I asked my brother, who unlike me was into the new music scene, what band I should hire. The Byrds, he said without hesitation. The Byrds included David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, and there was an underground cult of Byrd Heads who followed them from gig to gig. They were just about to hit big with their version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Peter’s instinct was right on target; they were perfect. We put up an enormous tent with a dance floor right on the beach. I invited Hollywood’s old guard, and Peter, wanting to make sure there’d be good dancing, got the word out to assorted Byrd Heads. Think “Big Sur Meets Jules Stein,” “Dreadlocks Meets Crew Cut.” Dad set up a spit, where he spent the evening roasting and basting an entire pig, glowing in the attention his unusual culinary skills brought him. I saw it as a big improvement for the shy man.

  It was called “the Party of the Decade” and was talked about for a long time to come: the first coming together of old Hollywood and the new counterculture. I remember watching a barefoot flower child standing in the buffet line as she pulled out a breast and began nursing her baby—with George Cukor standing right behind her. This was clearly a first for Cukor, who didn’t know whether to stare or pretend it wasn’t happening. Next to him was Danny Kaye, pretending to be a baby who wanted to nurse. Darryl Zanuck, always one to appreciate beautiful women, looked apoplectic. Sam Spiegel, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Tuesday Weld, novelist/diplomat Romain Gary and his wife, Jean Seberg, Peggy Lipton, Lauren Bacall, William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Sidney Poitier, Jules and Doris Stein, Ray Stark, Sharon Tate, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, Terry Southern, and all those Byrd Heads were floating out on the dance floor as the band played on. When dawn broke and the tents were coming down, Vadim took me in his arms and said, “You pulled it off, Fonda. Good for you.”

  Cat Ballou.

  (Photofest)

  The Chase.

  (Photofest)

  With Jason Robards in Any Wednesday.

  (Photofest)

  It was good for me.

  That same summer I was invited to a fund-raiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), hosted by Marlon Brando and Arthur Penn at Arthur’s house. It was the first fund-raiser I had ever been to, and there was an astonishing array of heft in attendance. Two young people from SNCC spoke to us about the organization’s efforts to register black voters in Mississippi. The national Voting Rights Act had just passed, but violent resistance from southern segregationists made getting blacks safely to the polls a dangerous undertaking. They painted a vivid picture of secret meetings at night, attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootings. They spoke of the reasons for SNCC’s commitment to nonviolent protest; the courage of the southern blacks who worked with them. Many had been killed, black and white alike.

  It wasn’t just what the SNCC organizers said so much as how they were that struck me. There was the calm centeredness of people living beyond themselves. I didn’t feel guilt-tripped, but I did feel like an outsider—as Ralph Waldo Emerson must have felt when he went to visit Henry David Thoreau, who was in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery.

  “Henry,” said Emerson, “what are you doing in there?”

  “Ralph, what are you doing out there?” Thoreau replied.

  What was I doi
ng out here?

  A seed was sown. We were asked for money. No one had ever asked me to support a cause before. I gave what I could, but I also became a volunteer for the local SNCC group—writing letters, asking others for money. I was indefatigable. I didn’t know how to do it very effectively and I was extremely naïve, but I learned an important lesson that evening: Never underestimate what might be lying dormant beneath the surface of a back-combed blonde wearing false eyelashes. All she might need is to be asked.

  That summer I went to my second fund-raiser. All I remember is that Vanessa Redgrave was there, and during the question-and-answer period she raised her hand and, unlike all the others, stood up to speak, turning to look at everyone, owning her space. I will never forget my feelings of awe: Here was a woman who controlled her destiny!

  Right after The Chase I made Any Wednesday, the first of the three films I would make with Jason Robards. Vadim was preparing our next picture in Paris, so I was alone most of the time. My brother would come over at night after work, and that’s when I realized that while I had been adjusting to domesticity in France, he had been creating a niche for himself and was about to become the new generation’s rebel star. It was a funny contrast: I’d have just come from work on the very conventional Any Wednesday, and he’d been shooting The Wild Angels, a low-budget Roger Corman film. I remember listening in shock while he described a scene where his biker gang had ridden right into a church and had an orgy in the pews. I was definitely an outsider looking in through Peter’s eyes, at the new American counterculture. Usually these evenings would end with him pulling out his guitar, and we’d sing Everly Brothers songs in harmony.

  Three years later, in 1969, my father, Vadim, and I sat in a private projection room and watched Peter’s film Easy Rider, which hadn’t been released yet. My father really didn’t know what to make of it but was awed that his son had co-written and produced it. I loved parts of it, like Jack Nicholson getting turned on to pot around the campfire and the motorcycle odyssey across America. I thought it unbelievably audacious that they carried kilos of cocaine in their bikes and tripped on acid in a cemetery. But I secretly thought it would be too rough and far-out for most audiences. It was Vadim who understood that here was a no-holds-barred cinematic breakthrough that would resonate immediately and become a classic.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

  I could be “anything anybody wanted me to be”—except that I still wasn’t even one of the people doing the defining of who this latest-model Galatea would become.

  —ROBIN MORGAN,

  Saturday’s Child

  I WAS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN with a U.S. passport but had become a resident of France—except I had no residence. Vadim and I were not married, but we had been together almost three years and were still moving with Nathalie from one rented apartment to another, using furniture left behind by former wives. It was a nomadic lifestyle that suited Vadim, but I felt Nathalie needed more stability, and I needed to nest. I decided that Vadim and I needed a place that was truly ours. I found a very small piece of land thirty-seven miles west of Paris near Houdan. Once there, you meandered down a series of one-lane country roads, through villages hidden behind mossy stone walls, past farmyards and gently undulating fields of oats and barley, interspersed with forests of beech and oak, into and through the hamlet of Saint-Ouen-Marchefroy. Just beyond lay a flat, nondescript piece of land with an old stone farmhouse in great disrepair. I don’t know why this was where I landed. Maybe it was the idea of living near a hamlet that appealed to me; maybe it was those stone walls and the proximity of the woods. Having been smitten with stone walls in Greenwich in my youth, I have remained susceptible all my life.

  Vadim and me looking around the fixer-upper farm we bought outside of Paris, 1966.

  Nathalie leading her pony, Gamin, with Christian and me riding and Vadim following. That’s the stone wall I built behind us.

  (© David Hurn/Magnum Photos)

  The hamlet of Saint-Ouen-Marchefroy was a ten-minute walk from the house, and I liked to stroll in at midday when folks were taking a break from their work, to get a sense of who my neighbors were. They had no idea that I was a movie star, and though I never asked, they probably wouldn’t have known who Vadim was, either. I became friends with one woman who lived in the farm closest to ours. She liked to give me fruit tarts she’d bake. When I’d visit her, she was always at her sink or stove, and because her hands were wet or greasy, she’d bend her hand back and give me her wrist to shake, a gesture I encountered more than once in that hamlet, the shake of a farmer’s wife. (I never got to use it in a movie, alas.) I enjoyed sharing such moments with my neighbors. I would sit in her kitchen, drinking her strong coffee and thinking how lucky I was; my friends back home would not likely get to do this.

  Reluctantly I went to Hollywood for several months to make Any Wednesday. While there, I decided Vadim and I should get married—at least I think it was my idea. Like buying the farm, I felt marriage would make our commitment deeper, bring normalcy into our relationship, and be better for Nathalie. I think I also wanted to prove I could make it work and pull off something at which Dad had failed.

  We arranged for a secret wedding in Las Vegas. Vadim flew up first to get the license. Then, after filming on a Friday, I flew up with my brother and his then wife, Susan; Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper; friend and journalist Oriana Fallaci (who was sworn not to write about it); Vadim’s mother, Propi; and his best friend, Christian Marquand, with his wife, Tina Aumont. As the plane circled over Los Angeles, we looked down to see Watts in flames, an omen, though I didn’t see it as such at the time.

  The ceremony took place in our suite at the Dunes Hotel. The minister was disappointed that we’d forgotten to buy rings, claiming that reference to rings was the best part of his speech. So Christian lent Vadim his ring and Tina lent me hers; it was much too large for my skinny finger. I had to hold my finger upright throughout the ceremony, which created the impression that I was giving the whole proceeding the finger. The fact is, however, that I cried when we were pronounced man and wife. We had been together for three years, but I hadn’t realized how much formalizing our relationship would mean to me.

  After the ceremony, some in our small group began enthusiastically renewing their relationship to Chivas Regal, and by the time we got to dinner, things were starting to feel sad. We ate in a cocktail lounge, where a long buffet table with a massive glass swan sculpture separated us from a stage on which a striptease version of the French Revolution was being performed. We watched as a topless woman was “beheaded” on a guillotine to the strains of Ravel’s Bolero. I told Vadim I thought we should adjourn to our room. But Vadim disappeared into the casino and I ended up sharing a bed with his mother. I really was ignorant of the realities of compulsive gambling, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I was hurt and angry, and as we flew back to Los Angeles the next afternoon, I remember thinking, What have I done? But, like I say, I’d learned to compartmentalize—bury the hurt and move on.

  The following year we filmed La Curée (The Game Is Over), our second film together, and again it was a happy experience for us both. Sharing a common goal, joining in a structured workday, gave sense to our union that often seemed to be lacking outside of work. During the filming of La Curée, I received a letter from the Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis asking me to play the title role in Barbarella, based on a French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest. Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren had both been offered the role and turned it down, and this was my inclination as well. But Vadim was adamant that science fiction films would be the wave of the future, that this could be a terrific sci-fi comedy, that I should do it, and that he should direct.

  Vadim had long been an aficionado of science fiction, and the added whimsy and sexiness of the story clearly played to his strengths. His passion for the idea convinced me to go along. As soon as La Curée wrapped, he began working on the script for Barbarella with satirist Terr
y Southern. Meanwhile, I returned to the United States to do the film Hurry Sundown with Otto Preminger, Michael Caine, Burgess Meredith, Beah Richards, Faye Dunaway, Robert Hooks, Diahann Carroll, Rex Ingram, Madeleine Sherwood, and John Phillip Law. It was shot in and around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and while it was ultimately not very good, for me the experience was profound.

  The entire cast, black and white alike, was housed in a motel in Baton Rouge, a small city about seventy-six miles from New Orleans. The motel had never been integrated before, and the first night we arrived, a cross was burned on the motel lawn. All the rooms opened onto a swimming pool, and the day Robert Hooks dove into that pool for the first time, locals peered from around corners as though they expected the pool to turn black. I was sure the reverberations were heard all the way to New Orleans. Diahann Carroll told me how concerned she was because as a black woman from New York, she’d forgotten how to behave “down here in Klan country.” She worried that without thinking she’d do something that would be normal for her up north but dangerous down here.

  One day we were filming in the small county seat of St. Francisville, in front of the courthouse, when I looked down to see a cute little black boy of about eight shyly watching the filming. I squatted down to talk to him and then, as I was being called back into the scene, I leaned over and gave him a kiss. Snap!—someone took a picture of the kiss, and it appeared on the front page of the local paper the next day.