My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  No sooner was that over than he dropped dramatically on one knee and recited, “ ‘At the feet of Hannibal / Then like a ripe plum Rome once lay / Oft he put the time of conquest / To a later, better day.’ . . . I wrote that myself, in high school. Pretty strong, huh? I was a classics major at Brown. Thucydides? Have you read him? I know his History of the Peloponnesian War and everything about Alexander the Great. He was my hero until I switched from war to peace. Martin Luther King and Gandhi are my heroes now. . . . Whaddaya think, huh?”

  “Pretty cute,” I replied.

  I may have descended the basement stairs alone that night, but I had a dizzying head full of Turner to take to bed with me—he’d made sure of that. Like one of those male birds in a nature documentary that puffs and struts and fans his plumage in a wild mating dance, Ted had, it seemed, decided to conquer me. His efforts were endearing.

  The sun was barely up the next morning when he yelled down for me to get dressed so we could have breakfast and go for an early drive. “Do you mind making breakfast?”

  “No, of course not,” I answered, grateful to have something to do while acting as audience.

  In the daylight I could see that we were situated at the bottom of a long, narrow valley surrounded by rocky cliffs. Sixteenmile Creek, the creator of the valley, meandered close by, looking far more riverlike than the word creek implied. I asked him how he had discovered this place, and over breakfast he recounted how the previous summer he had been a guest of a longtime friend at a ranch in Wyoming.

  “I love fishing,” he explained, “but it’s been mostly bass. I’d never fly-fished before and I really liked it, and when I saw the views . . .” Of course. This man from the piney flatlands of the South had encountered vistas to match his expansive vision. Before even leaving Wyoming, he had called his friend’s real estate broker and the very next day he flew to Montana and purchased this “starter ranch,” as I would later refer to it.

  “At first I couldn’t think of a good name for the place,” Ted went on, “but I thought it was the best ranch bar none, so that’s what I call it, the Bar None Ranch.” The place has more than quadrupled in size since then, but at three thousand acres it was the largest piece of private property I’d ever visited as a guest. When singer Michael Jackson told me he had bought a two-thousand-acre spread near my ranch in California, I thought it was sinful—one person owning that much land. What to make, then, of this acquisitive man who already owned one of the barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina near Hilton Head, an old rice plantation in the same state, a quail-hunting plantation in north Florida, and a one-hundred-acre farm outside Atlanta?

  After breakfast we took off in the Jeep, bouncing over miles of old logging roads that switchbacked from one pine-covered mountain to the next through breathtaking terrain. Elk and mule deer were everywhere, just as he’d promised. Even a black bear and a bald eagle managed to make an appearance, as if called up by Ted. At one point he leaned out the car window and pointed to a bird flying in silhouette high overhead. “See that?” he asked. “That’s a ferruginous hawk.” Another time it was a red-tailed hawk. I’d never known anyone who could recognize birds on the wing in silhouette. I was duly impressed.

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “By how their wings move. I know a lot about birds. I’m sort of an ornithologist. You know that songbirds are becoming extinct? You know there used to be so many passenger pigeons that the sky would be darkened when they flew over? There are none left. We wiped them all out. And squirrels used to be able to travel through treetops from the East Coast to the Mississippi River without ever touching ground. Can’t do that now. The trees are gone.” I was mesmerized, thinking how much I could learn from this man.

  “I gotta stop for a second and tighten my skates.” And with that he left the motor running, jumped out, and peed off the side of the road, his back barely turned.

  In fact, nature called Mr. Turner every ten minutes or so. After several of these stops I had to laugh. “When you kept going to the bathroom during our dinner date,” I confessed to him, “I had assumed you were arranging a late date with a starlet, but I see it was just paranoia on my part.”

  “Yep. When I’m nervous I have to pee a lot.”

  “Am I making you nervous?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, I’m smitten with you.” Then, realizing where we were, he abruptly stopped the Jeep. “Come on, I want to show you something,” he said excitedly as he hopped out and motioned for me to follow him. We climbed a small rise alongside the road and he pointed proudly to a shallow cave that ran vertically from the ground up the side of the cliff. I peered closer into its vaginalike opening and saw it was a shiny, purplish vein of rock crystal.

  “Pretty cute, huh? My very own crystal mine.” He broke off a small crystal and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “a memento.” Then suddenly he kissed me and I . . . well, I had a mini meltdown. Warm lips on my lips. Whew! Hadn’t realized how much fervor was bottled up. We got back in the car and continued silently on our way. My heart was pounding.

  It turned out that Ted didn’t know the back roads of his ranch all that well, which wasn’t surprising given how many there were. We got seriously lost. In a place like that, getting lost is an I-wonder-if-someone-will-find-our-bodies-months-from-now kind of experience. But the most memorable part of the drive was the conversation . . . well, “monologue” is a more appropriate word, with Ted all the while chewing and spitting Red Man tobacco juice into a small Styrofoam cup as he urged me to sit closer to him. “Come on, move over here. I want to feel you against me. Put your hand on my knee.”

  “Where did you grow up, Ted?” I asked.

  “I lived in Cincinnati to begin with . . . a Yankee. I loved being outside collecting bugs and butterflies. I’m told my first word was pretty. I loved to draw, especially pictures of birds, animals, and boats, and I wrote poetry. My dad had a billboard business. He was a real conservative. He thought Roosevelt was a Commie.”

  “Roosevelt was my dad’s hero. The only time I ever saw Dad cry was when Roosevelt died.”

  “Yeah . . . well . . . But still, you and I have a lot in common. My father killed himself when I was in my twenties—shot himself. Your mother committed suicide, too. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So see? That’s probably why we’re both overachievers.” He told me that his father had suffered from depression and emphysema, had taken barbiturates, and had secretly sold his failing billboard company right before he took his life. “He was the one I wanted to prove myself to, and he wasn’t there to see me make it,” Ted said sadly. “He was something. Women loved him and he loved them. Couldn’t get enough. He thought it was a sign of true manhood to play around. He thought mongo . . . magno . . .”

  “Monogamy?” I offered.

  “Yeah, that’s it. He thought that was for sissies.” Ted went on to describe how when he’d come home from boarding school at age twelve, he was put to work on a labor crew erecting roadside billboards for his father’s business. He earned $50 a week and had to pay $25 of that for room and board in his own house. His father told him that if he found a better deal, he could go somewhere else to live. Apparently Ed Turner was a dapper, theatrical, charismatic, heavy-drinking, womanizing manic-depressive who believed that sparing the rod would spoil the child. Judy Nye, who was married to Ted for two years when they were both in their early twenties, once said of Ed Turner, “He believed that insecurity bred greatness.” Ted’s aunt Lucy told me that even when Ted was an infant his father would pass by his crib and snap his fingers against his son’s cheek. “Think about that,” Lucy said, wanting me to understand why Ted was the way he was.

  That day, as we drove through his ranch, Ted talked with utter dispassion about the beatings he had taken from his father, all the while assuring me that his father loved him and was his best friend. He spoke of the belts and straightened wire hangers used for the beatings; of refusing to cry; of his mother
pounding on the bedroom door, pleading for her husband to stop; of the time his father lay down on Ted’s bed and made his son beat him with a razor strap.

  But of all the stories he told me that day, the one that seemed to hold the deepest pain happened to him at age five—the critical age developmentally for a boy—when his father placed him in a boarding school and went off to the navy with his mother and younger sister.

  “There wasn’t even any grass in the playground,” Ted said wistfully, “only pebbles. I was all alone. The only place I could go for comfort was the floor proctor. She was young and pretty, and she would hold me on her lap and rock me at night. Otherwise I would have died. I guess that’s why I can’t be alone. I have a real fear of abandonment. But I’m working on it. J.J. [the not-so-former mistress] has given me books on how to learn to be okay with solitude. She said she felt inundated by me. . . .”

  “Ted,” I exclaimed to him as we drove together that first day. “This was child abuse! It’s so sad.”

  He seemed stunned that I had started crying. “No, you don’t understand. My father really loved me. It was for my own good. It made me strong,” he protested. “Come on, why don’t we make love? Huh? How long’s it been?”

  “Six months,” I replied, wondering if that entitled me to claim secondary virginity.

  “Wait too long, it’ll grow over,” he said with just enough good humor to render it benign.

  I drew a deep breath . . . I needed time before surfacing. Was I being arbitrary? Prudish? What’s to be gained by refusing? Why not celebrate my return to pleasure by accepting Ted Turner’s once-in-a-lifetime offer, a quick dip in the waters of bliss? After all, it was hard to refuse this wounded child-man so in need of care and nurturing.

  “Okay,” I said, finally breaking the surface.

  “Hot dog!” He put foot to gas and back to the cabin we sped.

  I would love to write a lyrical passage or two about what it was like. I described it later to friends as Versailles with all the spectacular lit-up fountains. Ted is a wonderful, thorough lover, and I was captivated (as well as relieved that everything still worked). After a nap—he’s the napper; I just lay there, too much all-of-a-sudden feeling, too much to think about—he said he wanted to show me another ranch he was thinking of buying a few hours south of where we were. “It’s a hundred twenty-five thousand acres. We can spend tonight there. It’s closer to the airport. Whaddaya say?”

  “Fine. Sure. Whatever.” Why would anyone want another, bigger ranch when they had this one? I wondered as we drove out the long, bumpy road.

  An hour later we entered the western edge of the new property that began at Madison River and stretched twenty-five miles to the east, where it ended at the Gallatin River. Two hundred square miles of utter beauty.

  “Whaddya think? Should I buy this place? It’s still in escrow.”

  “No,” I replied. “Why would you want two big ranches? Wouldn’t the Bar None be enough?”

  He pondered this briefly, and I realized his had been a rhetorical question; he’d already made up his mind. “The fishing here is easier,” he replied. “This is like elementary school, then I graduate to the Bar None . . . high school. Besides, I want to bring it back to the way it was before the white man came here. Bison are the grazing animals that were here originally till we wiped them out in our attempt to deprive the Indians of their source of food and clothing.” Fine. Great. Weird. Tom was also fascinated by bison . . . and how about Ted’s interest in Indians!

  Somewhere along in there, Ted pulled out a small calling card entitled “Ten Voluntary Initiatives.”

  “The problem with the Ten Commandments,” he explained, “is that nowadays people don’t like to be commanded, so I’ve rewritten them as voluntary initiatives.”

  “You rewrote the Ten Commandments?!” I asked, astonished.

  “Yep. Moses had no way of knowing about the environmental crisis mankind is facing, the dangers of nuclear war, and overpopulation, so I’ve brought the Commandments up-to-date. Take a look. Pretty strong, huh?”

  I glanced down the list: I promise to care for planet Earth and all living things thereon . . . to treat all persons everywhere with dignity, respect, and friendliness . . . to have no more than one or two children . . . to contribute to those less fortunate, to help them become self-sufficient . . . I reject the use of force, in particular military force, and I support United Nations arbitration of international disputes. . . . Pretty good list, I thought.

  “What do you do with these cards?” I asked, the organizer part of me wondering if he really believed he could change anything with a list.

  “I give them out to people. I read them when I make speeches. I made a lot of speeches last year to all kinds of groups. Sometimes it’s for business, but I really like to speak on college campuses. Right now I’m trying to beat Bob Hope’s record in doctoral degrees.”

  The Turner loquacity was unending. My innate shyness with people I didn’t know well usually made me uncomfortable, feeling I wouldn’t know how to fill in the silences. With Ted, this was no problem, for there were no silences. I wondered that his brain didn’t just empty out.

  “I think you’re perfect for me,” he said suddenly. “We care about the same issues, we’re both overachievers, we’re both in the entertainment business, and you need someone who is as successful as you—and I’m more successful than you, which is good. Those last two movies you did were real dogs—let’s face it.” I was dizzy with overstimulation and taken aback at his lack of self-censorship. “In fact,” he went on, “there’s only one negative as far as I’m concerned . . . your age.” Wow! And here I was under the impression I was looking pretty good. Doesn’t this guy keep anything to himself?

  “So, describe your former life to me,” he asked suddenly. I began, feeling ever so pedestrian and boring next to him, by telling him about my family, my children, about the times I spent away on movie locations.

  “I wouldn’t have put up with it,” he interrupted. “I would have gone crazy if you had been in a love scene with another man and I’d have to watch it on the screen. I wouldn’t have allowed you to go away for three months at a time. It must have been absolute hell for Tom.” Long silence, then: “If this is going to work, you’ll have to give up your career.” This guy is crazy! Doesn’t he know anything about process?

  “Hey, you know that song ‘Ballerina’? It’s about a dancer who lost her one true love because she wouldn’t give up her career?” And before I could respond, he began singing it:

  Once you said his love must wait its turn

  You wanted fame instead.

  I guess that’s your concern,

  We live and learn.

  And love is gone, ballerina, gone

  So on with your career, you can’t afford a backward glance.

  Dance on and on and on. . . .

  Ballerina, dance, dance.

  “That’s not what you want, is it?” And then he abruptly went on, “I just realized . . . you’re not going to give up your career . . . not until you have an Oscar.”

  “Ted,” I said, “I’ve got two of them. One for Klute and one for Coming Home.”

  “Oh . . . really?”

  So there! It felt really good.

  We arrived at the almost-previous owner’s house as the sun was going down in a poinsettia-red blaze with orange trim in a navy blue sky. Ted swirled around me like a dervish as I prepared dinner, singing romantic songs, reciting more of his boyhood poetry (always from bended knee, always in iambic pentameter, like my first boyfriend, Goey), telling me how hard it was—with all his many properties, the clothes he had to keep straight in all the different locations, all the traveling—to do without a wife to help him out. “Get a maid,” I replied, laughing at this rapscallion, whose words tumbled uncensored and unexamined from his mouth.

  That night we shared a bed, and I told him more than I should have about my previous experiences in the sex department, even my childhood
fantasies, subjects that for me had been traumatic but for him . . . well, they convinced him that I was what he was looking for. Anyone who’d had those fantasies and done those things, well. . . .

  The “bed” is different things to different people. To some it’s a proving ground; to others a battleground; for still others a playground. For me, bed has been so fraught with theatrics over the years that I’ve found I need to know someone prebed for bed to be more than genital pleasure. For me, sex needed to be total anonymity or soulful connection.

  I was in a deep sleep when I heard a voice: “Gore Vidal is writing something for Turner Films.” It took me a moment to surface and realize it wasn’t a dream, that it was morning and that he’d actually started the day with such an out-of-the-blue boast.

  “Do you always start your day in sprint mode?” I asked groggily.

  “I really like Gore Vidal,” he said.

  “Me too,” I answered. “One time an owl fell in his soup at my house in Rome.”

  “What?” That got his attention.

  “Never mind.” It was too early and I was too sleepy to explain.

  After breakfast Ted pulled a calendar out of his briefcase—or rather, it was a huge sheet of folded paper that when opened showed the entire year, month by month: so linear, so different from my own circular view of a year, that I found it hard to follow.

  “Let’s block out the times when we can get together this summer, okay? You got a calendar?”

  “Not really, but it’s okay.” I quickly ran my mind down the left curve of my year—July, August, September . . . nothing. “I really don’t have much planned.”