by Jane Fonda
One of the things I learned during that time was how courtesies matter. I had often not written to people I knew when they had lost a loved one, because I didn’t really know what to say. Now I was seeing that just getting a letter, whether articulate or not, matters; it lets you know that the person is mourning with you, countenancing your pain. There were two letters especially important to me; one was from Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband, who wrote movingly of his admiration for my father; the other was from Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, who spoke of the complexities of dealing with the loss of a father who was also a national hero.
I spent a lot of time in Dad’s garden during those days of mourning, sitting under one of his fruit trees sorting out my feelings. While I still had a long way to go, in hindsight I see that this was a first step in my learning to be still, to be and not to do. I was grateful for having had On Golden Pond with him and that I’d managed to tell him I loved him before it was too late. I could feel myself making peace with the fact that though he hadn’t given me all I had needed from him, he’d given me plenty. I somehow sensed that now that he was gone, some part of me would be able to come into its own, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it would be. I was sad that at his request there would be no memorial service, that he would be cremated but never buried. I like graves, always have. They give a tangible presence to the spiritual realm. I knew that there would be times when having a gravestone to sit by and touch would make it easier to remember and communicate with him. But it wasn’t my decision to make. This was when I decided I wanted to be buried with a gravestone, where my kids and grandkids could come and lay down their heads.
I don’t think we can fully live until we have come to terms with our mortality. My friend Fred Branfman calls it “life-affirming death awareness.” There’s something far worse than death, I think, and that is to not really live.
I learned from watching Dad die that it is not death I fear as much as it is dying with unresolved regrets about things not done. This realization is determining how I am living my third act. If I want Vanessa to have sweet dreams, I have to work on that now, and I am. If I want to leave my family stronger for my having lived, that is also something I have to work on—now.
It is possible that the words I quoted at the start of this chapter, spoken by my father in The Grapes of Wrath, are what determined early on my feelings about an afterlife. Flesh and bone are temporal, but I believe that our souls, the twenty-one grams of weight we are said to lose the moment we die, become part of the “one big soul that belongs to everybody.” Our energy is born into the future, in the bodies of our children and loved ones. I have felt it. My father has come to me in dreams, stepping out from behind a bush, radiantly happy, to tell me not to worry about him. I see him in Vanessa’s talent at composting and growing things. I have watched Troy onstage turn and say a line with a certain inflection, and I realize it is my father—yet Dad died when Troy was a little boy. I see it in the commitment my children and I have to justice. In these ways my father lives on.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MAKING MOVIES
A lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.
—ANNE TRUITT,
Daybook, the Journal of an Artist
Grandma, what a great job you have!
You get paid for using your imagination.
—JOHN R. SEYDEL,
my eleven-year-old stepgrandson
PLAYING DRUNK had always frightened me. If there was even a short scene in a movie where I had to be tipsy, I dreaded it. That’s why I decided to do The Morning After, a murder mystery about a heavy drinker who blacks out and finds a dead body in her bed. For that role I had to be perpetually drunk. Well, I thought, at this stage in my life why not try to do the things I fear the most? Mustn’t get soggy. Besides, we got Sidney Lumet to direct and the superb Jeff Bridges to co-star. Bruce produced The Morning After, and the associate producer was Lois Bonfiglio, who would soon become my new partner.
As I write this I realize that I’ve done a good deal of thinking about acting in the fifteen-year hiatus I have taken, and I’d like to try to give you a sense of what it’s like, at least for me.
In most films there is a scene when the main character is going through a critical transition or defining event. Whether or not the story works often depends on the success of that scene. Sometimes the director will want to shoot it in one long take, with the camera following you as you move from place to place, hitting your marks, all the while making the emotional transitions. This delicate balance between technical and emotional demands is the hallmark of movie acting.
I would usually wake up the morning of the critical scene feeling queasy, with a knot in my belly. I’d arrive at the studio for makeup and hair, and at some point I’d be asked to stop what I was doing and come to the set for rehearsal. Should I give it my all? There is the risk that if I do, I won’t have anything left when the real time comes (as was the case in my big scene in On Golden Pond). On the other hand, the purpose of rehearsal is to discover what my moves will be so that the lights can be set and the camera will know where to follow me; and if I don’t dip fairly deep into the emotional waters during rehearsal, how will I know where I’m apt to go? So I rehearse and pray that I’ve given just enough, but not too much.
Rehearsal now over, I go back to my trailer to finish hair and makeup and then wait while the crew lights the set and practices camera moves with my stand-in. It can be a thirty-minute wait or an hour or, if it’s a complicated setup, three hours. What to do? Do I read a book or get into a conversation that might risk taking me too far away from where my emotions are meant to be? Do I just sit here and think about the scene and risk getting too much into my head? The challenge is knowing myself well enough to calibrate correctly the balance between physical relaxation and emotional alertness that will most benefit me during the one- to three-hour wait. But it’s hard not to feel like a balloon from which air is slowly leaking.
Then the moment comes. The knock on the door: “We’re ready, Miss Fonda.” Truthfully some small part of me (which I would try to ignore) has hoped that the sound stage would catch fire or the director would have a breakdown so that this moment could be postponed—for a year, maybe. But, no, there’s the knock. No going back now. So I step out of my trailer and begin the endless walk to where everyone is waiting, all one hundred people who work on a film on any given day. As I run the gauntlet, the issue of my salary comes to mind. Why didn’t I agree to do the damn thing for free? I know there are people on the set who are just waiting to see if I’m worth all that dough, like that guy over there on the ladder reading the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I remember being told that shooting on an average Hollywood film costs in the neighborhood of $100,000 a day. If this goes badly, maybe I can offer to deduct it from my salary; otherwise I may never get hired again. Please let me stay relaxed, help me stay in my truth, tell my muse to be with me now. I arrive on the set that just a short while ago during rehearsal was a place of forgiving shadows. Now it’s a pitiless glare of light under which my possible disintegration will be exposed for all to see. Breathe deeply, Jane. Get out of your head and into your body . . . quiet the demon voice that is trying to tell you that today is the day you’ll be exposed as an overpaid fraud.
At the Cannes Film Festival for Old Gringo with Gregory Peck.
With Kris Kristofferson in Rollover.
(Photofest)
This is the part of film acting that I was only too happy to leave behind, the part that became more agonizing as time went on. Yet you have to go through those terrifying times if you are ever to have the magic ones, the times when it all works—and to be truthful, those I have missed. There were perhaps only eight or nine of them out of forty-five films, but they were the times when
I stepped into my light and my muse was with me, all my channels were open, the creative flow coursed through my body, and I became. Whether the scene was sad or funny, tragic or triumphant, never mattered. When it worked it was like being enveloped in love and light, as I danced the intricate dance between technique and emotion, fully inside the scene while simultaneously a separate part of me observed and enjoyed the unfolding.
Ah, but just because it has happened once doesn’t mean it will again! Each time is starting new, raw; it’s a crapshoot—you just never know. Which is why this profession is so great for the heart—and so hard on the nerves.
I always assumed that the more you did something the easier it would get, but in the case of my career I found the opposite to be true. Every year the work seemed to get harder and my fear more paralyzing. Once, on the set of Old Gringo, I watched Gregory Peck late in his career doing a long, very difficult scene over and over again all day long. I saw that he too was scared. I went up to him afterward and hugged him and told him how beautiful and transparent he had been.
“But, Greg,” I asked, “why do we do this to ourselves? Especially you. You’ve had a long and incredible career. You could easily retire. Why are you still willing to be scared?”
Greg sat for a moment, rubbing his chin. Then he said, “Well, Jane, maybe it’s like my friend Walter Matthau says. His biggest thrill in life is to be gambling and losing a bit more than he can afford and then have one chance to win it all back. That’s what you live for—that moment. The crapshoot. If it’s easy, what’s the point?”
Looking back, I sometimes think I enjoyed the story meetings more than the acting. With acting you’re on your own; with script meetings you’re part of a group. I never liked being number one. Co–number one worked for me; but when the burden of creativity rested exclusively on my shoulders, I would freeze—and echoes of the doors of creativity clanging shut were almost audible. What I like best is working with a group of people who share a vision and are able to set aside their egos—people you trust, who respect one another. I hated it when I thought that just because I was the star people were kowtowing, telling me my ideas were good even if they weren’t. With Bruce, and later with Lois Bonfiglio and most of the writers and directors we worked with, I felt free to express an idea, knowing that if it wasn’t good, they would let me know and we’d move on. I remember exhilarating script meetings when one person would have an idea, and that in turn would stimulate another idea from someone else, and that might lead to a sudden breakthrough in a scene, with everyone having placed a building block in the process but with no one having an overweening ego stake in any of it; it was the final product that mattered. I would have missed this sort of creative collaboration, except that I have found it in my life as an activist.
Actually it’s not unusual for actors to suffer from self-doubt. Our profession feeds insecurity. Success and fame can come so fast and in this business can go just as fast. It takes stability and maturity to handle it. It’s not like most other professions, where you go to college and then medical school, for instance, then years of internship—and at the end you’re a doctor and no one can take those years away from you. There is no license or diploma that certifies that you are a for-real actor with the talent to bring a character to life. If you make it as an actor, suddenly there you are—and you don’t exactly know why; why you and not her?
I tried never to get too used to the perks because I knew they might not last. But it was hard because the perks are addictive. There’s the comfort of knowing that when you wake up you will roll into a waiting car and be driven to a predetermined place. Then you go into a trailer or a dressing room where someone puts on your makeup, someone else does your hair, and yet a third person lays out the clothes you are to wear that day. You don’t have to make any choices. Your identity is all taken care of, what you’re supposed to think, feel, and say that day are determined by the pages you are given, and your only responsibility is to bring them to life (that’s the hard part—the part you’re paid for). At the day’s end you take it all off, get driven back home, and are usually forgiven for being so tired that you collapse into bed—only to do it all again the next day.
For three months you are absolved of all responsibility except to bring your character alive. But then suddenly the shooting ends and it’s Who am I? Oh God, I have to start making decisions. It’s like morphing backward, like a film running in reverse. We step outside the circle of light and move from whoever we have temporarily become into the shadowy persona of who we were before—the “real” us, the one who has dogs that crap on the floor, kids that let her know her time-out is over and that she’d better show up for them and make up for lost time, and has a husband who doesn’t say it but leaks resentment at her exciting absences. It’s hard; at least it was for me. I was always an emotional noodle after a film, feeling as if I needed a halfway house where I could exhale all the accumulated stuff from three months of living in a protective bubble. But there is no such place if you have a family. You have to try to reconnect with husband and kids and pick up life where you left off: straightening up, doing laundry, driving kids to school, sitting in the bleachers watching Little League games with other moms, buying the groceries—the mechanical stuff. After a while the normalcy of the daily routine itself would get me back on track. Routine is what I cling to when the abyss beckons. But the pendulum swing from fantasy to everyday reality is dizzying, and it takes a healthy, grounded spirit to do it well.
In 1980 Tom launched a fierce, expensive two-year campaign for the California State Assembly. My last film before I took a hiatus to work on the campaign and grow the Workout business was Rollover, another project that Bruce and I undertook together. Inspired by the book The Crash of ’79, the story told of secret financial manipulations between an American banker and the Saudis, ending with the collapse of the U.S. economy. The late seventies, when we began to develop the script, was a time when the price of Arab oil was so high, the OPEC alliance so powerful, and our dependence on Saudi oil so great that economic blackmail—moving oil overnight from a dollar-denominated commodity to a gold-denominated commodity—was a possibility. We wanted to call attention to the perils of U.S. dependency on Arab oil, and it dovetailed with our organizational work to shift America’s sources of energy to alternatives like solar and wind. With 9 to 5 we had cloaked the tough issues that office workers faced in comedy’s softening mantle; with Coming Home we used a love story; The China Syndrome was a thriller; and Rollover was a combination murder mystery/love story. It was my third film with director Alan Pakula. My co-star was the chiseled, gravel-voiced actor/singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson. I have to chuckle at the thought that Kris and I played important figures in the world of high finance. I can barely read a profit-and-loss statement, and Kris . . . well, let’s just say that a man who hitchhiked across the country in the 1960s with Janis Joplin and wrote “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” is not by nature someone who wants to cozy up to mezzanine financing or interest rate swaps. An interesting, complicated man, Kris—a onetime Rhodes Scholar who worked on an oil rig off the coast of Texas, who cares deeply about injustice, and who captured angst the way few other songwriters ever have. It was fun working with someone who, like me, had a life beyond movies.
This was when Nathalie Vadim came back into my life. She was working as a script supervisor in Paris, but I sensed that she needed a change of scenery so I arranged for her to work on Rollover as the third assistant director. By then Nathalie was twenty-one years old, lean and lanky, with an appealing, gaminlike beauty; she took to her new job with a professionalism and presence that impressed everyone. The assistant director liked her so much that he hired her for many of his subsequent films and she quickly moved up to second assistant and for the next ten years had a solid career in Hollywood.
In 1982 Tom won his election for the California State Assembly with a healthy nine-point margin. He served his district with integrity for s
eventeen years—working on behalf of working women and mothers, for child care, workplace safety, and affordable housing; against pollution; to improve the public education system. He spearheaded the Proposition 65 campaign to keep toxins out of California’s drinking water, and I assembled busloads of celebrity warriors who helped with the tough but ultimately successful battle. Prop 65 continues today as a substantial safeguard for Californians.
With the campaign over, I returned to acting in a role that is one of my favorites: Gertie Nevels, in The Dollmaker, the one Dolly Parton helped me prepare for. If you think of emotions as muscles, then approaching a new role is like entering a new sport: You bring to it the muscles you use habitually. Anger? Oh yeah, I know what that muscle feels like—but not everyone expresses anger the same way. The truth is, all during the eleven years Bruce and I fought to bring The Dollmaker to life there was a small, scared part of me that hoped it wouldn’t happen, because I doubted I had the right muscles to inhabit her. What would Gertie’s anger look like? If you are lucky enough to have a good director, he or she gets you to shift to a new set of “anger” muscles, often ones you didn’t know you had. It feels awkward at first; you get sore, but then you fall into it as if it’s what you’ve always done.
For me The Dollmaker is an archetypal fable that tells of Gertie, her husband, and their five children as they live a hard but value-rich life on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, where her husband works in the coal mine. In contrast with the fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone fear-based Christianity of her mother (played by Geraldine Page), Gertie sees Christ as a joyous, forgiving, laughing figure. She wants to carve his laughing face into a block of cherrywood. The family is uprooted when the mines close and is forced to move to the squalid, consumer-driven, buy-on-credit world of wartime Detroit, where men like her husband hope to find jobs in the factories. In the tacky workers’ housing, in the shadow of a steel mill, Gertie finds consolation carving her Jesus on the block of cherrywood.