My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

In 1978, while filming The China Syndrome, I again fractured my foot, so ballet became impossible for me, at least for the foreseeable future. For more than twenty years ballet, with its strict classical structure and music, had been my haven, my way of staying in shape and keeping at least a tenuous connection to my body. What to do? I had to get into shape for my next movie, California Suite, in which I had to appear in a bikini. Understanding my urgency, my stepmother Shirlee suggested that when the foot was sufficiently healed (where was that Vietnamese chrysanthemum poultice when I really needed it?), I should check out a class at the Gilda Marx studio in Century City, California. The instructor was marvelous, Shirlee said. Her name was Leni Cazden.

  Leni was in her early thirties, about five feet five, with short copper-colored hair, green eyes, narrow hips, and an enigmatic combination of aloofness and availability. Her class was a revelation. I entered so-called adult life at a time when challenging physical exercise was not offered to women. We weren’t supposed to sweat or have muscles. Now, along with forty other women, I found myself moving nonstop for an hour and a half in entirely new ways.

  Leni’s class wasn’t what would soon become known as aerobics. For something to be aerobic it needs to get your large muscle groups—your thigh, hip, or upper body muscles—working steadily so as to increase your heart rate for at least twenty minutes. This is the form of exercise that burns fat calories and strengthens the heart. But Leni, I would discover later, was a smoker and aerobic activity wasn’t for her. Instead her routine was more about strengthening and toning through the use of an interesting combination of repetitive movements that included, to my great pleasure, a surprising amount of ballet, which Leni had learned during her early days as a competitive ice-skater.

  Lyndon LaRouche fielded these folks in major airports around the country back in the late seventies. It was hard to walk by with Vanessa and Troy and maintain my composure.

  (Anne Marie Staas)

  On Malibu beach between scenes in California Suite with director Herbert Ross.

  (Photofest)

  Another thing that made the class special was Leni’s choice of music. This was the beginning of the disco craze, and most other types of classes relied on this high-volume, repetitive beat to drive the class forward. Not Leni. The music she brought in was Al Green, Kenny Loggins, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergass, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye.

  Up until then I had known next to nothing about current popular music. If I listened to the radio, it was to NPR for the news. Now these new sounds entered my life. I began to move to a different rhythm, becoming one of those people you see through their car windows singing and grooving to music only they can hear. I never did go back to ballet.

  I had ceased bingeing and purging the year before (more about that later) but was still a recovering food addict and way too compulsive when it came to exercise. I hated to miss even a day, and when there were no scheduled classes, I would hire Leni to teach me privately.

  One day an idea hit me: Leni and I could go into the exercise business together! It was perfect. Here was one thing that I understood in my gut: how exercise could affect a woman’s body and mind. I knew it myself from ballet and now was learning another way from Leni. Helping women get fit was a business I could understand and respect. If it was successful, it could help finance CED!

  Leni liked the idea. We searched for names for the business and decided on Jane and Leni’s Workout.

  During this time, I began to teach the routine myself in St. George, Utah, where I was on location with The Electric Horseman, my third film with Bob Redford. At night after work women of all ages and a few men from the film crew came from miles around to take the class, which I held in the basement of a small spa. The experience of teaching such a diverse group opened my eyes to a much broader array of the benefits of exercise than I had ever expected. One woman said she’d stopped needing sleeping pills. People told me they felt less stressed. Most profound, though, were the testimonials that showed how women were starting to feel differently about themselves—empowered. Clearly we were on to something that mattered more than just how a person looked, and no one was really talking about that beyond the vanity stuff.

  Leni and I began to interview teachers to hire for a studio. We found a space in Beverly Hills, on Robertson Boulevard, and I hired an architect to begin renovation plans. I wanted to offer ballet, jazz, and stretch classes and felt we needed some easier and shorter classes in addition to Leni’s marathon routine. Then the time came to set up the actual business structure and draw up contracts. What happened then is painful to write about.

  My primary goal in going into this business was to raise money for CED. My lawyer at the time persuaded me that the best way to do the contract from a tax perspective was to have CED own the business. What would Leni’s role be, then? Leni was no more a businesswoman than I was, and it was clear that neither of us could actually run the Workout. I would have to hire someone to do that job. Yet if we were going into the business together, she couldn’t be just one of the teachers; it was her routine that would be the foundation for the business. But if she was a partner in the usual sense, how could we square that with CED owning the business? No one, least of all me, ever imagined that the Workout could become as successful as it did. So round and round we went, me with the lawyer. What to do about Leni?

  Looking back, I see so clearly that the answer to “What to do about Leni?” was to talk to her, find out what she wanted and what it would take to make us both feel that our needs were addressed. Instead I let the lawyer frame the debate, putting Leni into the position of adversary who (we were sure) would fight against CED owning the business. (I was to take no money at all for myself out of the business.) Then one day Leni told me that she had met and was going to marry a wealthy man, and they were planning a round-the-world trip for two years on a sailboat they had built. But I doubt that she would have done this had she felt able to sit down with me and work out a fair deal for herself.

  The Workout went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, beyond anything any of us had ever imagined. For those of you who came to one of the Workout studios and did the advanced Workout class, that was a somewhat easier version of Leni’s original routine. The one-and-a-half-hour video called Workout Challenge was a replica of the class I took with Leni. It is important that I tell this story—and that Leni finally get the credit due her for her original routine.

  Many years elapsed. Leni found herself training my then-husband, Ted Turner, at a gym in West Los Angeles. That’s how she and I reconnected and became friends. And that’s when I learned that because of a growing-up as traumatic as any I have ever heard about, Leni had been robbed of the ability to speak up on her own behalf. The word no was not part of her vocabulary, and she had felt powerless earlier to negotiate with me and the lawyer. Had we been able to sit face-to-face as women—Leni owning her voice and me not ceding mine to the lawyer—things could have been worked out. At least I’ve tried over the intervening years to make it up to Leni.

  We weren’t at all prepared for the huge success. The Workout was very small, with only three studios and bathroom facilities suited to the modest mom-and-pop-type business I had envisioned. But from the minute we opened our doors in 1979 it was like an avalanche, without our once having to pay for advertising. Talk show hosts Merv Griffin and Barbara Walters asked to come and film classes. People flocked from all over the country. It became a “must visit” site for tourists from other countries.

  I hired a woman activist from CED, the only person I knew with an MBA, to run the studio. We learned as we went, and it was never easy. We often had upward of two thousand clients a day—seventy thousand a year—working out in three small classrooms. In summer the air-conditioning wasn’t up to the task, the bathrooms weren’t large enough, clients would get into fights if someone took their accustomed place in front of the mirror, and teachers bridled at having to start and end on time and follow a set routine. Yet the clients kep
t coming, filling just about every class. There were beginning, middle, and advanced Workout classes, and stretch classes.

  My friend and birthing coach Femmy DeLyser became director of the Pregnancy, Birth, and Recovery Workout classes, which were immensely popular. I’d regretted having to give up all exercise both times I’d been pregnant and felt committed to providing a safe, effective way for women to stay fit while waiting for their deliveries. It was Femmy’s inspired idea to also have classes for the moms recovering from childbirth. The babies would come with them and were often incorporated into the exercises—lying on their mothers’ bellies during abdominal work, for instance—and the classes would end with lessons in baby massage. These classes proved wonderful on many levels, not least of which was their social value: The women enjoyed comparing notes about their birthing experiences while they nursed and discussing how others were dealing with new-mother issues. Later Femmy and I did a pregnancy, birth, and recovery book and video, using pregnant women from the class, including actress Jane Seymour. Women who had just given birth demonstrated recovery exercises and baby massage. It was the first of its kind.

  The Workout.

  (Kelvin Jones)

  I traveled the country raising money for Tom’s campaigns by teaching huge workout classes like these.

  Two years later (1981), I wrote my first Jane Fonda’s Workout Book. It was number one on The New York Times Bestseller List for a record twenty-four months (that was before they put such books in their separate How-To books section) and was translated into over fifty languages. It was while writing the book that I realized I needed to study physiology to more deeply understand what was happening during exercise. For instance, I had learned from personal experience that an exercise was more effective if I worked hard enough to cause a burning sensation in the muscle, but I didn’t know why. I knew what aerobic meant—sort of—but not really. So I began to research sports physiology and talk to doctors, like Dr. James Garrick at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, with whom I did a sports medicine video. I did the same with nutrition—discovering, for instance, why complex carbohydrates give more lasting energy than simple carbs, why having a healthy breakfast and a light dinner was advisable, and why some fat is healthier than others. My bedtime reading changed from books like The Wealth of Nations to Gray’s Anatomy. I studied the process of aging and menopause and co-wrote a book with another CED activist, Mignon McCarthy, called Women Coming of Age, which also became a best-seller.

  Less than a year into the business, a man named Stuart Karl came into my life. Stuart was the father of how-to home videos, having made the very first of the home improvement types. His wife, Debbie, read the Workout book and told her husband he should get me to do it as a video. When I got the call I remember thinking, Home video? What’s that? Like most people back then, I didn’t own a VCR. I’m an actor, I thought. It would look foolish for me to be exercising on camera. I gave Karl a firm no. But he kept coming back until finally I relented, thinking, It won’t take long and it will bring some additional income into CED. I certainly never saw it as a big moneymaker. No one I knew had ever bought a videotape.

  I remember writing out the shooting script for the first Workout video in pencil on the floor. Despite protestations from Sid Galanty, a friend who became the producer and director of the first wave of my videos, I decided that to reduce the cost of the production we wouldn’t use hair or makeup people or teleprompters. I’d just wing it. I never imagined how hard it would be. First of all, because everything on the video would be reversed for the viewer, every time I wanted them to move right I’d have to say left, and all this while executing the moves correctly and trying not to seem breathless—on a concrete studio floor never designed for aerobics.

  As it turned out, it didn’t really matter how we did the video. We had no competition (that would soon change), and we could have all been painted purple and covered with sequins. All that mattered was that people could follow what we were doing. The crucial thing about creating a successful business, I have subsequently realized, is timing—giving people something they really want that they can’t yet get anywhere else. But at the time I was not aware of how serendipitous our timing was, or that there was a budding video industry poised to explode.

  That first video, the original Jane Fonda’s Workout (1982), remains to this day the biggest-selling home video of all time (seventeen million copies). In addition, it helped create the home video industry. Up until then people weren’t buying videos, because they didn’t own the necessary hardware—a VCR player, which was expensive—and there weren’t any videos that people felt they had to have for repeat use that would justify the cost of the hardware. But once the Workout videos arrived, people were suddenly buying VCRs like crazy. This is why I am the first person in the “Talent” category to have been inducted into the Video Hall of Fame, an honor usually reserved for inventors and marketers of hardware. I am extremely proud of this and appear to be boasting (well, maybe I am boasting), but remember, all this success happened in spite of me. Who knew? Well, Debbie Karl knew. And her husband, Stuart, was smart enough to listen to his smart wife.

  Letters began coming in by the basketful from women who were “doing Jane,” as they called it, all over the world. They were touching, handwritten letters I have kept to this day, usually starting with how they had never written to a celebrity before and were sure I wouldn’t actually read their letter myself. Some were about my Workout book, some about the videotapes or the audiotape version. These women poured their hearts out, about weight they had lost, self-esteem they had gained, how they were finally able to stand up to their boss or recover from a mastectomy, asthma, respiratory failure, diabetes. One woman described how, brushing her teeth one morning, she was stunned to see arm muscles in the mirror for the first time. A Peace Corps volunteer wrote me about how she “did Jane” using the audiotape every day in her mud hut in Guatemala. Another told how a group of nine women in Lesotho in southern Africa would get together three times a week to “do Jane” and had discovered that the social aspect of these sessions was as rewarding as the exercising. Here’s a quote from a thirty-eight-year-old woman who had lost eighty pounds using my book and video:

  I couldn’t begin to put in a letter how my life has changed. It’s incredible. I’m a person I’ve never been before. I’ve started a cleaning business, set my own hours, asked for a raise, and got it. This may not sound like much to someone as strong as you, but I used to be so ashamed of myself I never even wanted to go outside. Now I like myself, I’m strong, I’m confident, I feel so wonderful I can’t describe it!

  Something new was starting to happen to me as well: When your voice and image are coming into someone’s living room (or mud hut) every day, via video or on a record, you become part of people’s lives in a personal way, different from movie stars on the big screen, and this was affecting how people reacted to me. They felt they knew me. Often I would come into a store to buy something, and when someone heard my voice, even if their backs were turned, they knew who I was—and would want to tell me stories about which tape they used, whom they “did Jane” with, how it had affected them. Once a woman got down on the floor of a drugstore to ask if she was doing her pelvic tilts correctly. Husbands would say, “I wake up to your voice every morning ’cause my wife does you in the living room.”

  I didn’t know whether to say thank you or to apologize.

  I’d been used to celebrity, but this was a new world, and I began to think, Hey, wait a minute. What about me as an actor? What about the causes I am fighting for? What’s with the pelvic tilts already? The Workout phenomenon, it seemed, had superseded everything else about me, and while I loved knowing I was making a positive difference in women’s lives, it made me uneasy. I didn’t want pelvic tilts to define me. Still, I was becoming fascinated with the business itself—and not only the money it was bringing in.

  I found that making the business a success was a creative process
. I wanted to see it make a difference—not just for wealthy women in Beverly Hills but, through the videos, for senior citizens, kids, and employed women who had little disposable income and even less time. I did focus groups to better understand what women wanted. I would be riveted listening to the thoughts of these secretaries, small-business owners, wives, students, women in real estate—Middle-American women—as they expressed their wants and needs in the area of exercise. They spoke of their difficulty finding time to go to a gym and affording baby-sitters, and they all expressed gratitude to the Workout for creating our home videos.

  Julie Lafond, director of the Jane Fonda Workout, is on the right. Jeanne Ernst, a lead instructor, is between us.

  (Lynn Houston Photography)

  I sometimes taught classes myself, especially at the beginning, so that I could learn what worked. During filming on 9 to 5 in Los Angeles, I taught a 5:00 A.M. class three times a week before going to work. Dolly Parton thought I was mad as a hatter coming in all sweaty and red as I did.

  I soon opened a second studio in Encino, a small city in the San Fernando Valley, and then a third in San Francisco. Business consultants were advising me to franchise the Workout, and that was when I knew I had to engage an executive search firm to help me find an experienced businesswoman to run it.

  I interviewed fifteen women. I never considered hiring a man, because so much of my business was made up of women and because I felt I would be more comfortable with a woman partner. I chose the woman I did for three reasons: First, she was from the Midwest; because of Dad, I see midwesterners as hardworking, frugal, and honest. Second, she told me she cried when she heard “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Third, she had married her high school sweetheart. The last two told me she was bedrock and loyal. I was not mistaken. (Actually there was a fourth reason: Her name was Julie Lafond and Lafonda made a great name for our partnership.)