My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  I felt sickened. Part of my identity had been that I was a citizen of a country that, in spite of its internal paradoxes, represented moral integrity, justice, and a desire for peace. My father had fought in the Pacific, and when he returned wearing a Bronze Star, I had been filled with pride. I sometimes cried when I sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I had been “Miss Army Recruiter” in 1959. I was a believer. Reading Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc, I felt betrayed as an American, and the depth of my sense of betrayal was in direct proportion to my previous depth of certainty about the ultimate rightness of any U.S. mission. I began telling everyone I knew about the book, and I was shaken by the we’ve-known-this-for-years, what-are-you-so-bothered-about? reaction I received from most people (including Vadim). I found it difficult to understand how they had known this and not done more to end it. But they were French. They’d ended their war in Vietnam. Ending it this time was our job, as Americans.

  As I began to read more—including reports from the International War Crimes Tribunal—I began to wonder: Why had I not paid more attention and taken action sooner? It wasn’t that I was lazy or lacked curiosity. I think it had to do with giving up comfort—and I don’t mean material comfort. I mean the comfort that ignorance provides. Once you connect with the painful truth of something, you then own the pain and must take responsibility for it through action. Of course, there are people who see and then choose to turn away, but then one becomes an accomplice. In Galileo, Bertolt Brecht wrote, “He who doesn’t know is an ignoramus. He who knows and keeps quiet is a scoundrel.” I’m a lot of things, but a scoundrel isn’t one of them.

  I wanted to act on what I was learning and feeling but didn’t know what to do. I knew (without acknowledging to myself what I knew) that if I became involved, it would mean leaving Vadim; but I couldn’t conceive of leaving him. Who would I be without him? I decided to go see Simone Signoret.

  When I arrived at the bucolic country estate she and Yves Montand shared outside Paris, she was at the door to greet me. I could see in her face that she had been waiting for this to happen. Somehow, through all the silliness of my lifestyle, she had maintained a firm belief that what she loved about my father from his movie roles was waiting inside me to manifest itself through action. Sometimes I would catch her looking at me in such a deep way that I’d be tempted to look over my shoulder to see whom it was she was relating to—surely not me. It was her patience with me, the fact that she had never pushed or proselytized but had been content to put learning opportunities in my path, that told me I could trust her.

  Bringing a bottle of fine cabernet and a platter of cheeses, she took me out to the back porch, where we ensconced ourselves in an arbor.

  “I’m glad you read Schell’s book. It’s important,” she said. She’d read it the previous year, when it had appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker. I asked if she had been surprised by it.

  “Yes and no,” she answered. “We’ve known here for some time about your ‘strategic hamlets’ and the bombardements de saturation [saturation bombing], but never in such detail. It was the details that got to me. But remember, we were there before you, we French, and the attitudes that Schell describes the Americans having toward the Vietnamese—the total disregard, as though they aren’t human beings—these were the same attitudes les colonialistes Français had. The difference is that we didn’t need to try to hide it. Don’t forget, back then most people still believed it was all right to have colonies, whereas in your country people need to believe you’ve been invited in to protect a democracy.” And she cocked her head at me and gave me a look that said “Who do they think they’re kidding!”

  “Explain it to me, Simone,” I asked, ashamed to admit how much I didn’t know.

  “First of all, Jane, you need to know that at the end of World War Two, when France had to go to war to keep Vietnam as her colony, it was your country that paid most of our military expenses. C’était monstrueux, n’est-ce pas? The U.S. was supposed to be about independence, not colonialism.”

  “I didn’t know this,” I said quietly.

  “Yes. The French couldn’t have won alone, and colonialism is a terrible thing, Jane.” She described how the French had manipulated the economy of Vietnam to benefit themselves, how they gave schooling only to the privileged but left most Vietnamese illiterate, how they had cultivated a bureaucracy of colonial wannabes from the Vietnamese upper classes and gave privileges to Vietnamese who agreed to convert to Catholicism.

  “These are the kind of Vietnamese who support your so-called president Thieu right now,” she said, “the same ones who supported us because they got power and privilege by identifying with the colonialists. Besides, they know there’s a lot of money to be made off you Americans. Listen, Jane, these parasites are the people who allow you to believe that there are Vietnamese who want you there and who support Thieu. You had them during your own revolution. How did you call them?”

  “Tories,” I answered, beginning to understand things in a new way.

  “Okay. You had Tories who supported the British. Did that make it a civil war?”

  “No, it was a revolution.”

  “That’s right. How can it be a civil war if one side is entirely paid for, trained by, and supported by a foreign nation?” She was getting worked up now. I liked Simone when she was worked up. “And you know who the Vietnamese revolutionaries thought of as the George Washington of their country? Ho Chi Minh. Americans are so blinded with anti-Communism that you don’t even realize that most Vietnamese, including people who aren’t Communists, still respect Ho as the founder of their country. He declared independence in 1945, for crying out loud! And when they had to fight France to keep their independence, Ho was certain he could count on the United States for help. You stood for national independence, that’s what your wonderful father fought for in World War Two. Do you know that Ho petitioned and begged President Truman to help them get their independence from France, but each time he tried, they ignored him? Think about it: If your country had paid attention back then, none of this would have happened. There didn’t need to be a war.” She stopped to sip her wine and let this sink in. I took notes.

  “This president of yours, how stupid! He’s ‘not going to be the first president of the United States to lose a war,’” she said in a mock macho voice. “But you can’t win it any more than we did! Why can’t they get it through their heads?”

  I told her about Vadim’s reaction in 1964 when he heard about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. “Well, he was right. There’s no way. All your presidents have thought they were fighting to stop the Soviets and China when they were really up against homegrown revolutionaries with a cause they’re willing to die for. They’ve been fighting outsiders who’ve tried to take it away from them for centuries, and they always win sooner or later. Your GIs and those soldiers in Thieu’s army, they don’t want to fight because they have no cause to believe in.” She leaned forward and looked hard at me.

  “Dad voted for Johnson. He was sure he would end the war.”

  “Your dad and I have had many fights about this. I love him dearly, but he’s too gullible when it comes to your liberal establishment.”

  “I had no idea it was all such a lie. I feel so angry and betrayed.”

  “As well you should, my darling girl. Your country has been betrayed by its leaders. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know what to do, Simone. I want to go back to America, but . . .”

  I had to stop because I didn’t want to cry. She was silent for a while, waiting to see if I would go on. Then: “It’s hard to do much when you’re here in France, I understand.”

  “But I can’t ask Vadim to move to the U.S. We’ve just spent all this money on our farm, I’m having this baby . . .”

  “You’re in a difficult situation.” Then she paused for a moment. “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a little too much certainty, as women do when they�
�re not sure but don’t know it.

  The sun had gone down and a chill was setting in when we carried our wine and the remains of the cheese into her kitchen. “Do you want to stay for dinner? I’m alone tonight.”

  “Vadim’s meeting me in Paris. I’m sorry, and I’ve taken so much of your time already.” She put her arms around me. “I’m so glad we talked.” Then, with her hands on my shoulders and holding me away from her, she looked into my eyes. “Jane, you will know what to do when the right time comes. Right now, you go and get ready for that baby.”

  I could see her standing in the doorway waving to me as I drove off. At dinner I didn’t tell Vadim why I’d gone to see Simone, and he never asked.

  In April Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and any hope that a nonviolent solution could be found to segregation and urban poverty went down in tears. Violence and uprisings were spreading around the world—from New York and Mexico to Prague and West Germany. In May, France’s traditional month of demonstrations, students began a rebellion in Paris’s Latin Quarter to protest unpopular reforms in higher education. They were met by police violence, and like a match to tinder, rebellion spread rapidly and unexpectedly throughout Paris and then into the provinces, launching what became known as Les Événements de Mai, the Events of May. Ten thousand students battled police for fourteen hours on May 6, turning Paris into a city under siege. People poured into the streets, barricades were erected, the CRS (the French counterpart of the National Guard) responded with shocking brutality.

  Just prior to the start of the revolt, Vadim had been elected president of the film technicians union, and he was required to go to Paris for union meetings. I insisted on coming with him, not wanting to be left barefoot and pregnant out on the farm while history was being made. What I saw was astonishing. Streets were being torn up, cars overturned and burned, trees cut down for barricades. People were bleeding from the blows of the police, from tear gas and fires. Friends of ours were thrown in jail, and articles appeared daily about the brutality of the CRS. Vadim’s union meetings were filled to overflowing, fractious, and passionate.

  Then, a countrywide general strike brought France to a virtual standstill. People, including me, began stockpiling canned food in anticipation that the strike would continue. The French stock market was set ablaze by rioters. To appease the strikers and avert a potential civil war, de Gaulle called for a general election and raised the minimum wage by 33.3 percent. Along with the fear of being killed or hurt, there was a feeling of excitement and possibility in the air: Maybe this unlikely coalition between students and workers could actually topple the Gaullist government and achieve the reforms they sought; maybe change was possible; maybe people didn’t have to be powerless. The stirrings were contagious. It seemed to be a worldwide phenomenon.

  By now even loyalist American businessmen were publicly expressing concern about the deficit spending of the war and what it was doing to Johnson’s vision of eradicating poverty. Bobby Kennedy had already taken the position publicly that the Vietcong should be included at the negotiating table. Now his presidential campaign was said to be bringing a brave, fresh sense of possibility to blacks, blue-collar workers, and youth, and to those committed to ending the war. Everything depended on his winning the critical California primary. Vadim and I were listening to the returns on the radio and the results slowly coming in showed that he was winning. But in the morning came the horrific news that he, too, had been shot. It felt like the Apocalypse was upon us.

  I was six months pregnant by now, and Vadim wanted to get me out of the city, so with another couple we rented a house by the sea in Saint Tropez. The fact that the husband was an opium addict (and had a young girlfriend there as well as his wife) added to the alienation I was feeling. It probably wouldn’t have affected me as much a year or two earlier. I would have shrugged it off as part of the dark side of life with Vadim. But now it caused me to retreat into my own world, encapsulated in the cocoon of my pregnancy. I spent most of my time floating on an inflatable raft in the pristine Mediterranean waters, my big belly curving toward the sun, reading (incongruously) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It rocked me to my core. Malcolm’s story opened a window onto a reality I had ignored. But the greatest revelation the book brought me was the possibility of profound human transformation. I was spellbound by his journey from the doped-up, numbers-running, woman-beating, street-hustling, pimping Malcolm Little to a proud, clean, literate, Muslim Malcolm X who taught that all white people were the Devil incarnate—to his final, spiritual transformation in Mecca. There he met white people from all over the world who received him as a brother, and he realized that “white,” as he had been using the word, didn’t mean skin color as much as it meant attitudes and actions some whites held toward non-whites—but that not all whites were racist. At the time of his murder, he was anything but the hatemonger portrayed in the American press. Somehow, through the horrors that had been his life, he had become a spiritual leader. How had this been possible?

  That summer in Saint Tropez I began to search my soul to see which kind of white person I was. While theoretically I didn’t think I was racist, I hadn’t had enough contact with black people to know with certainty. That would change. Malcolm had allowed me for the first time to have a glimpse into what racism feels like to a black man. What I was not ready to acknowledge was how the black women in his life were viewed as mostly irrelevant, voiceless, subservient. It’s hardest to see what’s wrong about what seems normal.

  Those two books that I’d read within months of each other, The Village of Ben Suc and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, made me feel more uncertain than ever about lasting in Vadim’s world. If someone like Malcolm could transform himself, so could I. I didn’t want to die without making a difference. But still I could not see myself alone, without Vadim—not only because I was going to have a baby, but because I didn’t feel I could survive on my own.

  In July I was sent a script of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It was based on a book of the same name by Horace McCoy. I was unfamiliar with the book, but Vadim had always loved it. The novel was a favorite among French leftists, who viewed it as the first true American existential novel. The script wasn’t very good, but Vadim was adamant that I do it, saying it could be a very important movie. I accepted. It was to begin shooting three months after my September due date.

  We returned to Paris at the end of August and were invited to the American embassy to watch the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominate Hubert Humphrey for president. When it was announced that Humphrey (who had not come out in opposition to the war) had won the nomination, Ambassador Sargent Shriver said, “They just put Richard Nixon in the White House.” Cutting away from the vote proceedings, the television cameras took us into the streets of Chicago, where thousands of essentially peaceful protesters were being beaten bloody and teargassed by Mayor Richard Daley’s police; 668 people were arrested.

  Little did I know that one of the leaders of the protests, Tom Hayden, would one day be my husband.

  I was due to give birth in a month. Wanting to have a natural delivery, I had attended a number of Lamaze classes in Paris but was unconvinced that the rapid panting would succeed in alleviating the pain of contractions, so I quit. In those days you couldn’t determine the child’s sex beforehand, but I hoped it would be a girl. I’d come up with a perfect girl name: Vanessa. Vanessa Vadim. I liked the alliteration. I also thought of the name because of my fascination with Vanessa Redgrave— not just because she’s a transcendent actor, but because she is strong and sure of herself and was the only actress I knew who was a political activist, though I didn’t know the particulars of her politics. I remember reading a magazine article about her that said she went to bed studying Keynesian economic theory!

  A room was reserved for me at a fashionable private clinic on the outskirts of Paris, where Catherine Deneuve had given birth to her son, Christian. I woke up at our farm at 5:00 on a morning c
lose to my due date and thought I was dying. The pain was beyond anything I had imagined, and I assumed something was wrong: Where was the slow buildup, the water breaking, the slight contractions to signal it was time to go to the hospital? Vadim raced to the clinic with me writhing in agony and scared to death. We ran out of gas about a half mile before reaching the clinic, and Vadim had to carry me the rest of the way. By 6:00 A.M. I was on an operating table starting to efface, with a gas mask over my face. It felt like a rape. As I went under, I remember thinking that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Forceps were shoved up me, a man’s voice came from far away, telling me to push, and then I was out. I was unconscious for my child’s birth.

  It was almost 8:00 A.M. when I came to, alone in the recovery room, groggy, hurting, wondering what had happened. I turned my head and saw a baby all wrapped up, lying in a bassinet alongside my bed. Was it my baby? Was it a boy or girl? I felt woozy and dozed back to sleep. Then the doctor came in and told me it was a girl. Vanessa. He was wearing riding jodhpurs (he’d been prepared to go fox-hunting when called to the hospital), and he showed me his finger, claiming I had bitten it hard during delivery. Good!

  “Is the baby normal?”

  “Yes,” he assured me.

  “Why did you give me gas?”

  “Because you were in such pain,” he answered defensively.

  “But . . .” I wanted to tell him that he should have asked me first, and how much I had wanted to have a natural birth. It turns out that the hateful doctor in jodhpurs had really torn me up with the forceps, though later I was told by the nurses that forceps hadn’t been necessary.

  Holding Vanessa in the French clinic.

  (Gamma)

  Our arrival back at the farm with Vanessa . . . a week old.

  I asked to have the baby given to me, and for a long time I lay there looking at her. I felt exhausted, depressed, and angry. I was moved to a fancy room and nurses brought the baby to me when she was to be fed and then took her away somewhere. I asked if she could stay with me, and they told me no. Assuming the nurses knew better than I did, I never argued.