My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  The first vital piece of advice Julie gave me was to close down the two newest studios and not franchise. “You don’t want to be in bricks and mortar,” she said. “It’s the tapes and books that will be your main source of money (and fewer headaches), and the Beverly Hills Workout will be the laboratory where you try out new classes and keep your finger on the pulse of the people we serve—what works for them and what doesn’t.”

  Two years after Julie arrived, I decided to separate the Workout from CED. I wanted to grow the business but could not because all the income was being paid out in dividends to the organization. By that time (the mid-1980s), the Workout had brought $17 million into CED, and I felt we had more than fulfilled our original mission of providing it with a solid financial base. As long as I owned the Workout business, I could grow it while continuing to donate money to CED as needed.

  By now Tom had been elected to the California State Assembly and others were running CED day to day. But from the get-go Tom had hated the Workout, seeing it as an exercise in vanity. He told me once that he felt the problems in our marriage began with the Workout. Maybe. My time was certainly taken up more and more with the business, but whenever he made disparaging remarks about it, I would just think, Okay, I’m vain, call it what you will, but it sure makes a lot of women feel better. Besides, where else would you have gotten $17 million?

  In the end Julie and I produced five books, twelve audio programs, and twenty-three videotapes—everything from the basic Workout to yoga and step aerobics; some short, easy ones for older people; and two for kids called Funhouse Fitness. By now competition had become fierce, which forced us to spend more money on our productions and marketing. But we got it down to a science and could shoot a video in five days (though we would spend from six months to a year developing each one). I was adamant that there be a variety of people performing on the videos with me, so that home viewers would feel represented: We had racial diversity and men as well as women, some young, some older, some slim, and some not so slim.

  I had fun coming up with innovative ideas. For instance, instead of the traditional disco workout beat, we used Scottish jigs, Latin, country, and bluegrass, and we would choreograph accordingly. I would usually do the choreography myself. That way I could be sure it was something that I—a good decade or more older than the other dancers—was able to do. In one video I came up with the idea of having teacher Jeanne Ernst and myself perform part of the routine in front of a screen, on which a film appropriate to the music was projected. I used these tapes myself and knew how important it was to keep them interesting. On another tape I had thought it would be funny to have a guy seem to crash the class, just sort of come in late and insert himself into the back row and then act very crazy. To this day people refer to “that tape with the crazy guy.” In one of the aerobics videos we did, Lean Routine Workout, I wanted an urban feel, so our set was the roof of a city tenement building at night.

  Right after making that video, I met Ted Turner, and I never had time after that to do a full ensemble aerobics video (which took months of creating, weeks of rehearsing, and a week of shooting). But the business did continue under Julie Lafond’s guidance for a number of years, during which I put out Workout videos with me alone (much easier to do). Together Julie and I also created a second Workout book and a cookbook, Cooking for Healthy Living. Julie helped me develop a self-generating treadmill we sold that didn’t need to be plugged in (appealing to my desire for energy efficiency), plus a host of other Workout paraphernalia that was also very lucrative.

  Julie and some of the Workout teachers became close friends—Jeanne Ernst and Laurel Sparks in particular. We would go on marathon bike rides and hikes together. Troy and Vanessa came with us on one wild and woolly three-day bike trip through Napa Valley. That was when I saw how naturally strong and fit both my children are . . . without even trying!

  I came to depend a lot on my friendships with many of the teachers at the Workout. In retrospect I see they were like a safety valve, allowing a suppressed part of me to surface. I remember a journalist friend of mine coming to the set one day while we were taping the Lean Routine video. He hung around for a while and later said to me, “I can’t believe how different you were around those women. I’ve never seen this laughing, joking side of you before.”

  It isn’t easy for me to accept the fact that many young people, if they know me at all, know me as “the woman in the exercise video their mother used.” Yet I am proud that the Workout got so many women feeling better about themselves and their bodies.* 12

  Working out can mean different things depending on where a person is at a given time in her life. Working out can be narrowly about armoring ourselves in muscle or about striving for toxic, elusive perfection. But it can also, for a more conscious person, be about breathing energy and life into the core of the body, building chi, communicating on a deep level with your cells. For me it started off in the former categories and later developed into the latter as I began moving more frequently out of the gym and into nature, climbing mountains, biking, doing meditation and yoga. That’s when I began adding working in to my working out.

  I know now that, for me, the moving to the music, the endorphins, the sweating, led me into the long, slow process of accepting my own body. (It would also help me remain intact during the dark times that lay ahead.)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GHOST

  A body without a spirit is a corpse, and a spirit without a body is a ghost.

  —ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

  WHEN I MET TOM, my attention had been focused almost entirely away from my film career, and there was no reason to assume I would ever be a major star again. While I had been active in the antiwar movement for two years before meeting him, Tom’s unique, decade-long experience as an organizer made it natural for me to follow his lead. This created a power balance between us that offset the inordinate celebrity that accrues to movie stars. So when Fun with Dick and Jane came out, followed closely by Julia, then Coming Home and a second Oscar, it created tensions.

  Soon after Coming Home opened with all the attendant fanfare, magazine covers, and press junkets, Tom asked Bruce and Paula to come up to Laurel Springs, where the four of us were to have what we thought was a criticism/self-criticism encounter—where we would discuss our shortcomings, hear one another out, clear the air. Neither Paula, Bruce, nor I was entirely sure what the air needed to be cleared of, but these sorts of meetings were not unusual among movement people back then, so we all assumed it would be constructive.

  Soon after the meeting began, Tom turned on me, accusing me of hogging the limelight and not giving Bruce the attention and credit he was due for Coming Home. But it soon became clear to all three of us that Bruce was only an excuse for Tom to express his own barely suppressed rage over what he viewed as the injustice of a movie star receiving so much attention when the “real” people—who risk their lives every day and work hard to change the balance of power in the world—never get public credit. They, Tom said, are the unsung heroes, and it’s not fair. Which is largely true, I suppose. On the one hand, films can put out powerful images and messages that have a deep impact on people; on the other hand, they are only images, not actions in themselves. There’s something fundamentally superficial surrounding the profession—not the art of it but the celebrity, the self-promotion, the rarefied atmosphere. I’d had it all my life, first through my father, then on my own, so I hardly noticed it. But to Tom it was deeply disturbing.

  Ultimately the discussion played right to my Achilles’ heel, making me feel that what I did wasn’t worth a damn, that I and it were superficial and peripheral to what was really important. Paula and Bruce still have vivid memories of the experience, and as Bruce said later, “The level of his anger at you surprised me. It was personalized, intense, and designed to hurt.” But instead of dealing with things personally and saying, “What’s happening with the renewal of your career is hard for me to handle” or “I am not
happy in this marriage,” Tom couched everything in political terms: “Is this behavior correct or incorrect?” I recently came upon an interview done with the two of us in 1973, the year of our marriage, which is another illustration of this: Writer Leroy Aarons asked what had brought us together, and Tom’s answer was, “The degree to which Jane had changed and the mutual strategic outlook was exactly right.” Gone were the days, it seemed, when a man would say, “Because I fell in love with her,” or, “Because I love her and her commitment to things I also believe in.”

  When I read the article at the time it came out, the coldness of Tom’s reply didn’t register, possibly because I too had learned to set aside or hide personal emotions in favor of a more “politically correct” stance. We were becoming mirror images of each other.

  When I fell in love with Tom, I thought he was someone whose sense of himself was so secure that my celebrity would pose no threat; someone who could be gentle, with whom I could begin to unwind and open up. I was wrong. I don’t think it was purposeful on his part, but Tom’s emotional coldness reflected my father’s, and Tom also played on my insecurities, making me feel stupid and superficial when I was with him.

  In spite of my theoretical identification with feminism, I was passive with Tom, still assuming that whatever was wrong was my fault. If he didn’t like one of my women friends (and generally he didn’t), I assumed he saw flaws I couldn’t see. I rarely disagreed with him about where the family should go for vacations, what we should do, or (as you now know) where and how we should live. I simply didn’t think that my ideas or feelings were as credible or important as his. Anger had started to roil up in my body during lovemaking, blotting out intimacy. It’s hard to enjoy lovemaking when you’re mad. It confused and scared me, because I didn’t know I was angry, or why. Such is the power of denial when you need to keep a marriage, a family, together. I read somewhere, probably Cosmopolitan, that women are supposed to ask for what they want. Ask! I’d rather die.

  What if he won’t or can’t give me what I want? Then he’ll feel bad and I’ll feel worse, and I don’t want to make him feel bad because then he won’t like me even more, and what if he is opposed on some moral or political grounds to giving me what I want? Then I’ll just be left with my anger. It’s easier on everyone if I just don’t say what I want. No one will notice, and anyway I’ve learned to do without. Does everyone else ask? Am I the only one whose communication lines have been permanently severed?

  So I postponed the pain I feared would come if I truly communicated, figuring it would go away. Years went by and I’d think, Well, that’s in the past, why raise it now? But pain and anger stay there and accumulate; together they fester and create distance. Someone once said that under the bell jar of compliance, the only thing that blooms is rage.

  I wanted the marriage to work and so chose not to see what I later learned was evident to all our friends: that Tom constantly put me down. In her autobiography, the late Katharine Graham writes how after her husband, Phil Graham, had left her, women friends told her how shocked they had been at the nasty way he often treated her. This took her by surprise. “I always viewed it as a joke,” she wrote, “and thus didn’t see the comments and behavior as put-downs.” It was oddly comforting to learn that even a woman as bright and successful as Kay Graham—publisher of The Washington Post—could choose not to see what her friends saw. Eleanor Roosevelt, another strong woman with her own experiences in such things, once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” That’s right. By choosing denial, I had permitted inferiority. It would take another passage through another marriage, to Ted Turner, for me to fully emerge, popping up like a periscope to look around and say, “Hey, wait a minute! This is who I am! I need you to deal with it.”

  I don’t know when it started, the change from the cozy comradeship Tom and I had shared early in our relationship to something that resembled a business arrangement—except one in which I was still expected to remain sexual and desirous, although I didn’t want to be. Widening the chasm was Tom’s addiction to alcohol. Because neither of us would ’fess up and deal with it, our disconnectedness grew. But at the time I was still so into my own addiction to food that I didn’t even see his. Or maybe it was one more thing I didn’t want to see. He’s Irish after all . . . it’s a cultural thing, right?

  In the swirl of interesting activity that was our life, it wasn’t hard for me to sweep things under the rug with the false certainty that just around the corner everything would change. A part of me thought that perhaps this was what marriage was meant to be like. I’d had no training in intimacy—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I knew that a big part of the problem was the eating disorder that had been with me since age fifteen, hovering darkly over my life, and especially over my relationships—a secret that no one knew. I haven’t continually brought it into this narrative, but it was always there, as you know. Anyone reading this who has an addiction knows that you carry the secret demon within you and it colors everything you do, at certain times more than others. That’s the thing about addictions: They occasionally take phony leaves of absence, which trick you into believing you have it all under control, only to return and whack you across the back of your knees. And down you go. No one sees this, of course. It’s the soft inner you that’s been brought down, not the perfect, efficient, in-charge, outer container that seems to manage life so well.

  By the time I hit my forties, though, I was living on sheer willpower. The effort it took to keep the outer me together left the inner me exhausted for longer and longer stretches of time. Sometimes it took a whole week to recover from a binge and purge. Author/poet Robin Morgan once told me about a translucent third eyelid, called the nictitating membrane, beneath the lower lids of the eyes of some animals like cats and owls. The eyelid isn’t closed, but it isn’t open either; it’s just gray. That was me in the periods following a binge and purge. A nictitating membrane would settle over my being. My husband and children were so accustomed to this veil that they thought it was me, and they would have been shocked if it had suddenly disappeared. It’s impossible to connect in a real way with your intimates when you are living with an addiction.

  I realized I had to make a choice between life and a living death. I had to move toward the light or succumb to the darkness. I had an unusually full, interesting, demanding life that was important to me: my family, my films, my political work. I was going a mile a minute, developing films, winning awards, raising money. People were depending on me. Plus, I wanted to make a difference, and that’s hard when you’re under a nictitating membrane. It wasn’t worth it, blowing my life.

  One morning I woke up and knew that I would have to quit—cold turkey. I couldn’t keep going. It was like going into a battle that lasted for several years. I gave up the excitement, the fast-beating heart, the momentary pleasure—and the insufferable guilt, depression, and sense of worthlessness that followed. Still, it was not until about five years or more after I quit that I could sit down for a meal and not feel my heart pounding, not wish I could just banish food from the house the way you can banish alcohol or drugs. But I couldn’t. I had a family to feed.

  I was like a dry drunk who’d stopped drinking but had left unexplored the reasons for her addiction. The dark, empty place at my core was still there. It never occurred to me to consider working the twelve-step program for addictions. That might have led me to open myself so that a higher power, a holy Spirit, or whatever one wants to call it could enter me and soften the hard, empty place. But I didn’t see myself as the spirit type, not then. I was living entirely in my head, certain that if I was smart enough—and as “pure” as I felt Tom to be—we would be together forever.

  I still needed a man to validate me. Sometimes that came from the waist down, sometimes it came from the neck up. I believed that Vadim had seen me from the neck down, as a physical object who appealed to him and whom he enjoyed displaying. I didn’t want that ever ag
ain. I wanted Tom to see me from the neck up, to respect me. I didn’t realize how dangerous this body/mind split can be to relationships.

  My food addiction had represented a misguided search for perfection and nurture, to fill the emptiness and to “get into” my body. I quit the bingeing and purging but the need remained, a need to connect with my body and break out of the rigid container of false control I had built around myself.

  I replaced food with sex. I had an affair.

  It was wonderful, and traumatic. I lived with the constant sense that I would be struck down for my transgression, and at the same time I felt joyously liberated. Being with someone for the sole purpose of pleasure, for whom I was not “wife” (hence under no obligation to be “good”), brought me back to a part of myself that had gone dead. Though my marriage actually improved during this time, after a while I could no longer tolerate the duality of my existence, so I had to put an end to the affair. It was excruciatingly difficult to give up that part of myself. I had been miserable in the lie and I was miserable without it. But I knew I had to end it. Above all I did not want to destroy our family. I never spoke of this to Tom, nor did I know that he himself was seeking solace elsewhere. We simply continued in our unusual, seemingly successful partnership.

  I often think of alternative how-it-could-have-gone scenarios about events in my past that didn’t go right. In the case of my marriage to Tom, I should have taken his face in my hands, looked into his eyes, and said, “I want us to work this out. If you do, too, then let’s each admit our addiction and try to heal, and get help with ‘us.’ I think the issues go deep and I am frightened to do it alone. I am very angry and I don’t know why. We need a referee. Let’s look for a caring professional who can help us work this through.” Instead I would say, “I think we should see a therapist,” and he would say, “No,” and I’d fall silent. Like the magician’s assistant, with body cut in two, I took up permanent residence in my head and ventured out only when in the company of women friends or while exercising, dancing, or getting massaged.