My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  We didn’t have a dishwasher or a washing machine, so twice a week I would take our clothes to the nearby laundromat. One day, when I’d stepped next door for coffee, someone stole all my clothes, including the silk pajamas I’d worn in North Vietnam.

  I set to work brightening up the place with a pregnant woman’s nesting intensity, and in spite of the downside I actually loved being there. This was community living of a kind I had never experienced. Because the streets were so short and the houses so close (and all had porches), all the neighbors knew one another and would exchange sugar, coffee, and gossip. There were kids for Vanessa to play with, and the beach with swings and slides was a block away. Because I could always hear the sound of breaking surf and smell the salt air, living in our home on Wadsworth Avenue felt like a return to the summers of my childhood. We would stay there for close to ten years.

  When celebrity friends would visit, they’d usually ask if the lack of privacy and security bothered me. There were several reasons I liked being so accessible: The first had to do with the issue of “coming down from the mountaintop.” Then, when my children came of school age, both went to public schools, and we didn’t want their friends who came over to play to find that we lived differently from them.

  Furthermore, my relationship to my profession had changed. I was beginning to feel I could be in control of the content of my films, and this made me care more and want to go deeper as an actress. How can an artist plumb reality if he or she lives in the clouds? Of course, the fact of my being a movie star created an inevitable separation; most people have a hard time overcoming their intimidation around celebrities. But you’d be amazed how much this separation can be minimized, and I really worked at it. It wasn’t that difficult. I’ve always had a high tolerance for what other celebrities might call inconvenience or discomfort.

  Also, for me, the security and privacy issue that so concerned some of my more famous friends was not about being accessible to fans. It was the government that was the problem. The first year we were in the house (during the Nixon administration), our home was broken into, drawers turned upside down, all our files and papers strewn about, and our phone tapped, and one day an FBI undercover agent posing as a reporter came to interview me in order to confirm that I had been three months pregnant at the time of our marriage. How do I know this? Because I later read it in my FBI files.

  In retrospect I wouldn’t have given up the Wadsworth experience for anything, but I no longer believe that it is necessary to prove your political purity by living in a manner that makes your teeth clench. If you can afford to hire someone to help run a comfortable, attractive home, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as you pay a decent wage with benefits and as long as materialism doesn’t become your focus in life.

  During my pregnancy, I spent a lot of time doing research for the film that Bruce and Nancy were developing. I traveled to San Diego to interview wives of Vietnam veterans. One told me, “I talk to my husband now, but it’s as if there’s no one there. He’s empty. It’s like I can hear my voice echoing inside him.” A character was beginning to emerge for me to play: My husband goes to war while I remain at home and go through my own changes because of a relationship with a paralyzed vet I meet in the hospital.

  I learned a lot from a Vietnam vet named Shad Meshad, who had been a psych officer in Vietnam. He was a friend of Ron Kovic’s, equally charismatic and fearless, and had an intuitive way with troubled vets, who were flooding to the warm climes of Southern California. When I met him he had become an important member of the staff of the largest psychiatric facility for vets in the country, at the Wadsworth VA Hospital in Brentwood, California, one zip code up from Santa Monica. Back then doctors didn’t have a diagnosis for the symptoms Vietnam vets were presenting. It would be several more years before posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would be recognized by the medical establishment as a complex of symptoms and a specific diagnosis—and only then thanks to the tireless and empathic work of Drs. Robert Lifton, Leonard Neff, Chaim Shatan, and Sarah Haley and Vietnam veterans themselves. But guys identified with Shad. He had established rap (discussion) groups in Venice, Santa Monica, Watts, and the barrio and helped put Bruce and Nancy in contact with many of them.

  Ron Kovic invited me to come to a meeting of the Patients’ Rights Committee at the Long Beach Veterans Hospital, where he was currently a patient. He wanted me to hear from other guys about the poor conditions there. It was midday when several hundred people, the majority on gurneys or in wheelchairs, gathered on the lawn behind the paraplegic ward. Ron and another ex-marine, Bill Unger, had had a leaflet distributed announcing that I would be there. In protest there was a counterdemonstration of World War II and Korean War vets, waving flags and singing patriotic songs to try to drown us out.

  I don’t remember what I said to the vets that day, but I do recall being totally shocked at what they said to me. The guys from the paraplegic ward told me how their urine bags weren’t emptied and were always overflowing onto the floor; how patients were left lying in their own excrement and would develop festering bedsores; how call buttons weren’t answered and when patients protested they’d be put in the psych ward, given Thorazine, or even lobotomized. Ron had been rolling his gurney around the different wards with a hidden tape recorder, gathering evidence, and journalist Richard Boyle verified these stories while researching an article for the Los Angeles Free Press. I immediately arranged for Nancy Dowd and Bruce Gilbert to come down and see for themselves, and everything we heard and saw found its way into the film Coming Home.

  As it turned out, the final push to end the war coincided with the birth of Troy. It was 1973. Friends of ours, Jon Voight and his wife, Marcheline, had just had a baby boy, James, and they recommended we take birthing classes with the woman who had coached them, Femmy DeLyser, who lived just south of us in Ocean Park.

  Tom holding Troy.

  On our front porch with Troy.

  (John Rose)

  My water broke one morning while I was standing on the porch with Carol. This time I was ready, and this time the birthing was different. For one thing, I was an empowered participant; Femmy had seen to that. No doctor was going to give me drugs unless I wanted them; no nurse was going to make me feel she knew more than I did about how it should go. I was awake, Femmy was there with me along with Tom and Carol, and though I begged for pain relief just before I was being wheeled into the delivery room, Troy was born before it took effect, so for all intents and purposes it was a natural birth.

  Tom lifted the baby out of me, and I saw immediately in the overhead mirror that it was a boy. They laid Troy O’Donovan Garity on my chest, and I noted with groggy astonishment that he didn’t cry. Tom was crying. I was crying. But not Troy. I’d never heard of a newborn not crying, and I saw this as a sign that his journey through life would be blessed.

  During the first few weeks I was very resistant to letting Tom hold or change Troy. I think this was because I was defending my domain as the one who knew what she was doing. This was one area where I, who had already had a child, knew more than Tom—and I wasn’t about to let this go. When I finally did let go, however, I was terribly moved by how tender Tom was with his son and how touched by fatherhood. He would lie naked in bed with Troy on his stomach for hours, just cooing to him. In his autobiography Tom wrote, “Then and there . . . I made a pledge: I would build my life around this little boy until he became a man.” I don’t believe anything in Tom’s life softened his heart the way Troy did. Although Tom and I would divorce sixteen years later, he kept this pledge to his son and has always been a present and involved father.

  Almost until the day I delivered, I had continued making speeches against the war on campuses all over California. With my protruding belly, usually draped in a bright purple knit poncho, I looked like the defiant prow of a ship. Within days after Troy’s birth I returned to meetings and speeches, bringing him with me everywhere. I handled the experience so differently from the wa
y I had with Vanessa. A lot of this change was because of Tom: He would not have tolerated leaving Troy, he was against nannies, and neither of us was about to stop what we were doing—so by necessity I had a different relationship with my son than I had had with Vanessa. I was, perhaps for the first time, really showing up for someone.

  Troy would nurse and our eyes would lock as he gazed at me across my breast for many minutes at a time. I realized that I was imprinting him with love and that my touch and this prolonged gaze between us were important. I know that for many mothers these things come naturally, but they hadn’t for me—partly because of my own early childhood. As I have learned more about parenting over the years, I see that sometimes when you haven’t healed your own wounds, as I hadn’t, it is painful as a parent to open your heart to a child and you avoid it. My way of avoiding it was to stay busy. I was at the beginning of the process of healing when Troy was born, and the bittersweet part was my awareness and sadness that I was giving Troy something I had not given enough of to Vanessa. She was nearly five years old when Troy was born, and during the first years afterward, she moved back and forth between our home in Ocean Park and her dad’s place in Paris.

  The escalating scandal surrounding Watergate (many of Nixon’s staffers had been forced to resign) was weakening the administration, which offered us a strategic opportunity to mobilize the antiwar forces IPC had built the previous year. When Troy was three months old, we embarked on a three-month tour. The goal was to put pressure on Congress to cut funding of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. Troy would sleep in dresser drawers that I padded with blankets and set on the floor by our beds. When I’d make a speech, someone would hold him in the wings until I was through, and occasionally I’d be in the middle of a speech when my milk would let down, and I’d have to hand the microphone to Tom and step into the wings to nurse.

  Following the tour, I made my second trip to North Vietnam, this time with Troy and Tom. The purpose was to make a documentary film, Introduction to the Enemy, aimed at showing a human side of Vietnam, a view of the people’s lives and stories very few Americans would otherwise ever see or hear. We wanted it to be not about death and destruction but about rebirth and reconstruction. Haskell Wexler, the brilliant American cinematographer whose credits included Medium Cool and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, filmed it for us.

  It was very different this time. Not only had the bombing of the North stopped, but having Tom there to buffer and support allowed me to relax. It had been what I had learned about hope, on my first trip to Hanoi, that had motivated me to have another child. Now here was Troy, actually in Hanoi, a little bundle of manifested hope.

  We went directly from North Vietnam, that spring of 1974, to six weeks of around-the-clock lobbying in Washington, D.C., to persuade Congress to stop funding the Thieu government. We found that the lobbying effort we had helped mount during the tour was generating thousands of letters and phone calls to congressional offices. One congressman was so inundated with mail that he pleaded, “Please call your people off. I’m voting with you, okay?”

  In 1973 I had filed a lawsuit against the Nixon administration to compel the various government agencies to admit they had been carrying on a campaign of harassment and intimidation in an attempt to silence and impugn me. I wanted them to acknowledge that this was improper and to cease and desist. One afternoon that spring of 1974, I went with my friend and attorney, Leonard Weinglass, to take the deposition of former White House special counsel Charles Colson. Before, we met off the record with David Shapiro, Colson’s law partner and chief legal adviser for Watergate matters. Tom was with us.

  Shapiro told us it was Attorney General John Mitchell who ordered the Watergate break-in and also admitted that “my client [Colson] is not cleaner than driven snow. He heads the list of the biggest sons of bitches in town and they say everything points in his direction . . . but he has committed no crimes.” His was merely “peanuts and popcorn politics,” said Shapiro of Colson, who was in charge of compiling the White House enemies list and of destroying Nixon’s opponents (who included not simply activists but antiwar Democrats, heads of major corporations, newspaper editors, labor leaders, and presidential candidates).

  After thirty minutes Colson came in with a stenographer and the formal deposition began. I recall staring at an enormous cross that hung around Colson’s neck and rested atop his potbelly. That’s right, I thought, he has a cross to bear. It was an odd experience sitting in that posh office in the presence of this well-groomed, well-heeled, cross-bearing man who had been so involved in subverting American democracy. Colson admitted there were memos on me in the White House files but said they came from John Dean. He denied any official ties with the government other than his publicly known job and said he knew nothing about the enemies list. Nonetheless Mr. Colson was indicted on March 1, 1974, on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of justice.* 10

  My lawsuit against the Nixon administration was settled in 1979. The FBI admitted that I had been under surveillance from 1970 to 1973; that they had used counterintelligence techniques, in violation of my constitutional rights, to “neutralize” me and “impair my personal and professional standing”; that they had seized without subpoena my bank records during that time and had made pretext calls and visits to my home and office to determine where I was.

  In addition, the CIA admitted to opening my mail. I am told this was the first time the Agency had ever acknowledged conducting a mail-opening campaign in the United States against an American citizen. The suit also revealed that the State Department, IRS, Treasury Department, and White House all kept files on me. By then new guidelines and laws had been put in place by Congress and the new attorney general that prohibited all of these activities without judicial process.

  In 2001 the Bush administration got Congress to pass the Patriot Act, which has rolled back the post-Watergate protections of our constitutional rights, expanding the government’s authority to conduct wiretaps and allowing a noncitizen suspected of associating with terrorists to be detained without a warrant and without the right to consult an attorney. Even more Big Brotherish, the Patriot Act gives the FBI broad power to require libraries and bookstores to identify individuals who read or purchase books the government deems suspect; and the law provides that such individuals may not be notified that they and their reading habits are being investigated.

  In the spring of 1974 Nixon’s supplemental aid bill for Thieu was roundly defeated. In August impeachment proceedings began in Congress. That week Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office. In addition to the Watergate crimes, the Senate Armed Services Committee had developed evidence suggesting Nixon had violated the law by permitting secret ground operations in Laos and Cambodia. But in the end it was for the narrower issues of illegal cover-ups in response to antiwar dissent, not because of the war itself, that Nixon was finally forced to resign. In the wake of the Watergate scandals, when asked what I thought of it all, I replied, “I’m still here. The last government’s in jail.”

  Gerald Ford became president, pardoned Nixon one month later, and by attempting to reinstate funding for Thieu proved that the United States was still unwilling to give up its corrupt South Vietnamese ally and leave Indochina to the Indochinese. But in the spring of 1975, after more than ten years of war, the North Vietnamese and their supporters in the South entered Saigon. The war was over.

  It was hard to believe. There was joy that it was over, but there was sadness, too, as we watched the scenes unfold on television: helicopters lifting out embassy personnel, Vietnamese allies of the United States clinging to the skids. It didn’t need to end this way. All along the Vietnamese had offered olive branches, believing that we who had fought our own war of national independence would understand them. So many wasted, lost lives on both sides. So much land and forest destroyed for no reason.

  I have not returned to Vietnam since the war ended thirty years ago
, and not all that I have heard about the situation there makes me happy. In North Vietnam the “hard-liners” won out over more moderate leaders, and they were heavy-handed and disconnected from the people in the southern cities when they set about trying to bring order out of chaos. Thousands of former Saigon administrators and military officials were put into reeducation camps with no rights of appeal. Economic reforms were rigidly instituted without sensitivity to what people wanted and needed in the South. The Hanoi government went about imposing a centralized economy and social order ill suited to local conditions, with almost the same sense of entitlement that had allowed the United States to try to reorganize South Vietnamese society according to our westernized concept: an urban consumer culture. Still, none of this justifies what the United States did—and none of it seems to be keeping American tourists from spending their holidays there or U.S. corporations from investing there.

  The Vietnamese were expecting the United States to honor its agreement to provide reconstruction aid. Instead the economic embargo of the North was extended throughout the country, all Vietnamese assets in the United States were frozen, and the United States blocked Vietnam’s entry into the United Nations. The country was in desperate need of aid. Without it terrible hardships were imposed on South Vietnam, where years of war had taken the hardest toll, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were crowded into cities. The North Vietnamese hard-liners had to deal alone and ineptly with severe problems. On top of this there was a massive exodus from Vietnam. Mostly the ethnic Chinese (Hoa) fled the country in makeshift boats; tens of thousands died at sea. U.S. officials claimed that the “boat people” were victims of massive political persecution, and the crisis became the new “See? I told you so” justification of the war.* 11