My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Vanessa was now seven years old. I told Vadim I didn’t think it was good for her to keep breaking up her school year between California and Paris. At least partially because of this, when he and Catherine Schneider divorced, Vadim moved to his old haunt on Malibu Beach and remained in California for a good part of the next five years, later moving into a house in Ocean Park a few minutes from us.

  Three years had elapsed since we had begun work on Coming Home, but the script still wasn’t quite ready when Julia wrapped. By now, at the instigation of Jerry Hellman and to our great good fortune, Hal Ashby had come on board as our director. Hal, an offbeat, aging hippie of a man, with glasses, long wispy gray hair, and a full beard, had directed some of my favorite films: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, and Shampoo. He appeared to be very laid-back but in reality was wired and tough as a bull. When Waldo Salt had the heart attack, Hal brought in his longtime friend, editor and screenwriter Robert Jones, to complete the script. Working overtime and selflessly, Jones crafted a script from Waldo’s first draft and many notes, but the script remained a work in progress during the entire shooting. Haskell Wexler, who had filmed Introduction to the Enemy with Tom and me in North Vietnam and Bound for Glory with Hal, was our cinematographer. Jon Voight had been offered the role of my husband, the rigid marine officer, but he worked tirelessly to convince us all that he was the man to play Luke, the paraplegic role inspired by Ron Kovic. Jon participated actively in much of the research with the vets, and finally his passion and commitment persuaded us to go with him. Bruce Dern, my old pal from They Shoot Horses days, would end up being wonderful as my husband.

  Multitasking during a lunch break on Fun with Dick and Jane—fund-raising for Tom’s U.S. Senate campaign.

  (Michael Dobo/www.dobophoto.com)

  Me and Troy in our campaign T-shirts.

  (Star Black)

  Campaigning with Tom.

  (Anne Marie Staas)

  While Jones was working on the script, out of the blue I got a script from my friend Max Palevsky and his producing partner, Peter Bart, called Fun with Dick and Jane. It was serendipity—a social satire about an overconsuming, middle-class, keep-up-with-the-Joneses couple (Dick was played by George Segal) and how they deal with his sudden layoff from an executive position at an aerospace company. Despite all the trappings of the American dream (mainly for the neighbors’ benefit), they own nothing and have saved nothing. All they have are mortgages and credit card debts. As soon as word of his firing gets out, all the creditors show up to repossess everything. Faced with the hard realities of people on food stamps and welfare, they turn to crime. I couldn’t believe my luck—a quick shoot that didn’t require me to leave home, in a comedy with something to say, in which I could show I was still funny and could still look good. The film would be released before Julia and be my “she’s back” film, proving to the studio heads that I was still a bankable star.

  Fun with Dick and Jane was an easy film from an acting point of view, which was fortunate because I spent every second I wasn’t on camera raising money for Tom’s Senate race. I organized an auction that brought together Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball, Red Buttons, Danny Kaye, and my dad in support of Tom. I got Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Arlo Guthrie, Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur, the Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, Chicago, Boz Scaggs, Taj Mahal, James Taylor, and many others to do benefits; I got Dad to do paintings I could auction off (I bought them all myself). I was a whirlwind of activity on Tom’s behalf, and when Fun with Dick and Jane was finished, I traveled the state, building support and putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign war chest. In the end he didn’t win, but he got 36.8 percent of the vote—1.2 million Californians had cast their votes for a New Left radical, cofounder of SDS, and co-conspirator of Chicago. This was unprecedented in recent political history.

  But we lost. I think I took it harder than Tom did. I felt it as my failure—not an unusual response, I have discovered, for women whose sense of self is tied to their husbands’ public life. Does this surprise you? Me, with my financial independence and career? But there you have it. A woman can be powerful professionally, socially, and financially, but it is what goes on behind the closed doors of her most intimate relationship and within her own heart that tells the story. And like Vadim, Tom defined me to myself: If brilliant, articulate Tom was with me, then I couldn’t be all bad.

  Tom kept his promise to César Chávez and morphed his Senate campaign structure into a statewide grassroots organization called the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which focused on economic issues. The average American family was earning less then than a decade earlier; inflation, largely the result of the Vietnam War, was robbing them of their savings; and unemployment was rising sharply as more corporations automated or took jobs overseas to cheap labor markets. We also took on the nation’s reliance on foreign oil and the use of nuclear energy (we pushed the use of alternative energy sources like solar and wind); we supported small farmers against agribusiness; and we fought for the rights of workers, including office workers. Many of CED’s concerns found their way into the movies I would subsequently make.

  As soon as Dick and Jane wrapped, we began shooting Coming Home, even though many of the key scenes still weren’t locked in. In fact, we had no ending everyone was happy with, and Hal and I disagreed about the nature of the critical love scene between Luke and my character, Sally Hyde. There were always vets in wheelchairs all around us as we filmed, and a few had their girlfriends with them. Some were quadriplegic, which means the injury is high up on the spine and paralysis is from the neck down; some were paraplegic, which means the wound is lower on the spine and paralysis is from the waist down (for a man, the lower down the wound, the less the penis is affected). I remember one quadriplegic in particular, whose really cute girlfriend would sort of flip him over, fold him up, and sit on him playfully. There was a vibe about them that was utterly trusting and deeply sexual. Since I needed to find out as much as I could about what sex was like for a couple in their situation, I talked to them quite a bit. I learned that the girl had been brutalized by a previous boyfriend who had once thrown her from a moving train. This in itself was illuminating: It made sense that a victim of abuse would be attracted to a man who couldn’t hurt her physically. When it came to sex they said they never knew when he would have an erection; it was not connected to anything she did or said. “It can happen anytime—when we’re driving past a gas station or looking at a daisy. But when it happens it can last for hours . . . one time for four hours,” she said with a sexy, knowing look to him. I had to go off by myself and think about that for a while till my palms stopped sweating.

  Anyway, until the dramatic “four hour” revelation, genital penetration was not something I had considered possible between my character and Jon’s, and this to me was a powerful aspect of the story—a dramatic way to redefine manhood beyond the traditional, goal-oriented reliance on the phallus to a new shared intimacy and pleasure my character had never experienced with her husband. But Hal didn’t see it that way. He too knew the “four-hour story,” and penetration was definitely where he was headed with the scene.

  There were a number of things Hal and I didn’t agree on (like my character’s husband’s suicide at the end), but I tried to make my points as clearly as I could and then let go and leave it up to him. I had neither the confidence nor desire to fight with Hal, whom I respected enormously as a director. The one exception was the Battle of Penetration. Both of us knew that the scene had to be really hot—not as arbitrary sex but as the centerpiece of their relationship, emblematic of her transformation and—for me, anyway—of a masculinity sans erection. Jon agreed with me, by the way, and there were endless, very funny on-set discussions about it between us: “Where can he feel something?” I would ask Jon. And, “Are his nipples sensitive?” That sort of thing. As the time approached to film the pivotal scene, we all agreed that Hal should not be limited in what he shot, th
at it should include total nudity, at least the semblance of oral sex, and anything else he might need to create a groundbreaking love scene. I knew I could not do that myself. I may have been thought of as a wild sex symbol for a period of time, but it was more the art of suggestion than anything overt. So I suggested a body double be hired to do all the long shots. We decided Hal would shoot those first, so we’d know what shots we’d need to match when we came in for the close-ups. I stayed away while they spent all day filming with the double, and when I saw the footage the next day it was evident from the way the actress was moving on top of Jon that Hal had won the first round of the Penetration Battle.

  “Hal,” I said, “she can’t be riding him that way; he can’t get an erection. I thought we had agreed!” Hal, however, was not about to throw out the footage and concede to me. So I thought, Ah-ha, when the time comes for me to match my close-ups to the body double’s, I’ll just make sure I don’t move like that, and he won’t be able to intercut the footage.

  With Jon Voight in a scene from Coming Home.

  (Steve Schapiro)

  Accepting my second Academy Award (Best Actress in Coming Home) in sign language.

  (© Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences/Long Photography)

  Finally the day came for shooting the love scene. Large sheets were hung around the area of the bed and the set was closed to everyone except the camera operator, Haskell, and Hal. Jon and I spent most of the day in bed, naked under the sheets, being filmed from various angles. It’s a strange experience doing this kind of scene: There is a sexy, electric charge in the air, and everyone overcompensates by becoming very businesslike. You appear to be doing the most intimate things together, naked, skin against skin, pretending ecstasy, while signaling to your body, Hush now, this is just a job. Then the director says, “Cut,” and you stop and move away in bed because you want to show that it was only acting—but not moving too far or too fast, so as not to hurt the other actor’s feelings, all the while working on getting your breathing back to normal. I remember feeling grateful for Jon’s trust and happy that we could giggle together between takes, that we both had a commitment to our friendship above and beyond the scene. He was as much Tom’s friend as mine, after all.

  Hal had saved the key shot for last, the one with me/Sally sitting on top of Jon/Luke with the camera framing me from my shoulders up. For me, Sally was experiencing oral sex, and I was moving and reacting accordingly when Jon suddenly whispered, “Jane, Hal’s yelling at us!”

  From far away behind the hanging sheets, I heard Hal’s voice, “Ride him! Dammit! Ride him!” I froze, refused to move. I was not going to give up my concept of what was happening. The cameras kept rolling, Hal kept shouting, “Move your body, goddammit!” but I wouldn’t. Finally he gave up and stormed off the set. I felt bad. I’d never seen Hal mad; he was usually so mellow.

  Hal ended up using both shots, even though the long shot of the body double didn’t match what I did in the close-up. In the end, I think audiences read into the scene whatever they wanted. God knows everyone had a strong reaction to it, though compared with today’s love scenes it seems pretty tame. Of course, in my opinion what made it especially hot was the sexual tension that had built up between the characters in the preceding scenes. Just as in life, the buildup of desire beforehand, especially when it is withheld, is what makes the act itself explosive.

  To be truthful, Jon and I didn’t know up until we saw the final version of the film if it all really worked. Hal and Jerry showed a very rough cut for an invited audience of about fifty people in a United Artists projection room. These events are always fraught with anxiety, which was compounded by the personal, emotional investment I had made in the film. When the lights came back on, Tom got up and walked right past me without saying a word. As he went out the door, he turned and said to Bruce, Jon, and me, “Nice try.” The coldness of his response was devastating for all of us. It took me weeks to recover.

  Tom was not used to seeing rough cuts, and it was true that the film was too long and had problems; but it also had powerful moments, even at that early stage. Yet Tom chose to dismiss all our work outright. I came to believe that the explicit love scene shook him more than I had anticipated, though he claims it was the film’s “watered-down politics.” This was the first time I had shot a love scene since Tom and I had married. I knew it was just pretend, and I hadn’t anticipated that my husband would get upset. Maybe I was too used to Vadim, who was famous for liking to put his wives in explicit scenes. Maybe it was an eruption of the unexpressed anger we both felt toward each other.

  In the end, there were many aspects that made the completed film work. One was Hal’s style of directing: He had started off in the business as a film editor. Unlike other directors with whom I had worked, he would do thirty or forty takes of each scene, not saying very much to the actors about what they should do differently each time—and he’d print all of them. Then, in the solitude of the editing room, his brilliance would shine like that of a sculptor with clay. He would take a glance here, a sigh from me there, a slight turn of Jon’s head, and would edit them together in a way we hadn’t expected—or in some cases hadn’t intended.

  Then there was the way Haskell shot the movie, using long lenses and natural light, which gave the scenes a sense of beauty and voyeurism, as though the audience were looking through a keyhole at something intensely private and real. The improvisational nature of our acting added to this feeling of cinema verité. Then there was the music, which was all Hal. He wallpapered the film with the essential music of the sixties, and all of us who had lived through it were transported back to the rage, the existential angst, the desperate idealism of that time.

  There was also the heartful attention and care with which Jerry Hellman attended to every detail of the project. By the time the film was completed, all the senior executives at UA had left to form Orion Pictures and Jerry had the unenviable task of, in his words, “delivering it to a skeptical group of new executives who had had little or no involvement in the project, and hence, no particular emotional commitment to it.” But he kept the film safe from the vagaries of Hollywood. All of our tenacity paid off when, in April 1979—six years after its inception in my bedridden head—Coming Home received Academy Awards for Best Screenplay for Nancy, Waldo, and Robert; Best Actor for Jon; Best Actress for me, and nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. Tom, Vanessa, and Troy were with me at the ceremony; I wore a dress that a supporter of Tom’s designed for me, and I accepted my Oscar in sign language, to acknowledge GLAD, an advocacy organization for the deaf and hearing impaired that supported Tom. I had learned from them that the ceremony wasn’t made accessible to the deaf in the United States. It was one of the happiest nights of my life. Besides, Ron Kovic told me later that the film had improved his sex life immeasurably.

  In 1980 a Veterans Administration poll asked Vietnam veterans which feature films portrayed them most favorably. The highest ratings went to John Wayne’s Green Berets—and Coming Home.

  One day during the filming of Coming Home actor/producer Michael Douglas sent Bruce and me a script called The China Syndrome, about a near meltdown at a California nuclear power plant that company executives try to cover up. Everything about the script rang with authenticity, owing to the fact that it was written by Michael Gray, who had studied to become a nuclear engineer, was extremely knowledgeable about all that had gone wrong with nuclear technology in various plants over the years, and had consulted closely with three former nuclear engineers who’d resigned from General Electric over safety concerns. Gray had fashioned a taut, low-budget thriller about a nuclear engineer and a radical crew of documentary filmmakers. The only drawback was that there was no woman’s role. Jack Lemmon, a passionately vocal opponent of nuclear energy, had agreed to star in the film, with Michael producing as well as starring. The third star, Richard Dreyfuss, had dropped out.

 
; Bruce Gilbert and I had been developing a film about the nuclear industry inspired by what happened to Karen Silkwood, a worker in a Texas County, Oklahoma, nuclear power plant who was killed under mysterious circumstances when she was on her way to deliver evidence of defective welds in the plant’s core. We had considered having me play a television reporter who gets involved in a nuclear story. The research we had done showed us that local news was undergoing a disturbing change: In an effort to boost ratings, news consultants had recommended to station heads that they develop a new format where a racially balanced team of slickly attractive men and women would deliver “news lite,” lacing their stories with “happy talk.”

  We were developing our story for Columbia Pictures and, it turned out that Michael Douglas had brought The China Syndrome to the same studio. A studio executive, Roz Heller, suggested we combine our efforts, and that was when Michael came to us to see if the Dreyfuss role could be rewritten for me—with Bruce as executive producer this time.

  We wanted Jim Bridges, best known at the time for The Paper Chase (and later for Urban Cowboy), to rework the script and direct. He excelled at character-driven stories, and he did not see our nuclear thriller as something that suited his particular talents. While Michael was working on the film Coma and I was in Colorado filming Comes a Horseman, Bruce kept coming back to Bridges in an effort to get him excited about the idea of creating a parallel story to the nuclear accident: the morphing of TV news into infotainment, with a female TV reporter who is trapped between pressure from her bureau chief (who wants to bury the nuclear story) and her growing commitment to getting it told. The reporter, Kimberly Wells, is ambitious and doesn’t want to rock the boat, yet she resents being assigned fluff stuff and being told how to look. I told Jim the story of my early experiences in Hollywood, when Jack Warner wanted me to wear falsies and Josh Logan suggested I have my jaw broken and reset so that my cheeks would sink in. These were personal issues to me. Again, as with Coming Home, we were able to bring an added gender dimension to a story that hadn’t started out that way. After turning us down four times, Jim finally saw his way into the story and its potential character dynamics—not just between Kimberly and her bureau chief, but between Kimberly and her more radical cameraman, played by Michael Douglas.