My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Before there could be any more discussion, Ted had penciled me in for one or two weekends every month for the next four months, the follow-up coming just three weeks hence at his place in Big Sur. Yep. In addition to all the other properties, Ted apparently owned a place that jutted into the Pacific right above Pfeiffer Beach.

  “Ted, this is kind of fast, don’t you think? I mean, don’t we need time to get to know each other before we lock in all these dates?” I didn’t know him. I didn’t understand that he needed to know way in advance who he was going to be with so he wouldn’t be caught alone, God forbid, even for one night. Over his shoulder I could see up to September. Most of the days were already penciled in.

  By the time we got to the Bozeman airport, I was a noodle, limp from overstimulation. If the super-stupendous performance (I swear, it felt as if a 3-D stereophonic Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show had rolled over me) I had been privy to over the last thirty-some hours had been designed to knock my socks off, it had succeeded. My socks, my nerves, and my tongue were knocked. Over and out. On top of it all, he dropped me off at the airport two hours early, because he had to go to the private airport next door, where his jet was waiting to take him to Atlanta, where he was going to a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Gone with the Wind (he owned it)—with a girlfriend who’d rented a Scarlett O’Hara gown just for the occasion. He was, of course (could I have doubted it?), going as Rhett Butler. He didn’t want to be late. Okay, so we left it there. It felt bad. So much performing and then this. Off to the next one. I thought, Well, I had a lot of fun with this guy. He’s totally amazing, and I definitely have a crush, but I must have bored him to death. I didn’t say anything interesting.

  When I got home, I talked with my therapist and did a lot of deep breathing. Something about Ted felt . . . dangerous, and I didn’t want my heart broken again. I ended by writing him a letter thanking him for the weekend, telling him that he was a national treasure that deserved to be nurtured and preserved and that I’d had a lot of fun—but that I didn’t feel good about the way he’d left me at the airport and I really wasn’t sure all those dates we’d made were appropriate. The chemistry between Ted and me had been powerful, and I was fascinated by his put-everything-on-the-table forthrightness, but I think I was afraid of how vulnerable I’d be if I actually allowed myself to fall in love with him. Instead I fell into lust with a tall, dark, handsome Italian seventeen years younger than me, who made me feel like a girl again.

  I called Ted to tell him I had fallen in love with someone and that I wouldn’t be coming to Big Sur.

  “Oh no!” I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “I knew I should never have left you for this long. I was afraid this would happen. Dammit! Oh, come on . . . just for one weekend. You can’t end it like this. We just started. You gotta give me another chance.”

  “No, I can’t, Ted. I’m sorry, but I am in love with someone else.”

  “Well, I’m coming out there. You’re going to have to tell me to my face. I’ll be there in three days. Make a reservation at that same place where we had dinner that first time.”

  Three days later, when the waiter asked Ted for his dinner order, he replied, “I’ll just eat crow and some humble pie for dessert.” I marveled at his humor and resiliency, given that he kept insisting this was an utter tragedy for him. But then he began reciting other tragedies, like the time when he was in his early twenties and had come home from school for a vacation to learn that his girlfriend Nancy, the love of his life, had fallen in love with someone else. He’d sat on a high-up hotel window ledge and contemplated suicide until he remembered his father’s words: “Women are like buses. If you miss one, another’ll always come along.” That did it. He vowed never to let himself be that vulnerable again. (Shades of Vadim . . . and Dad . . . and Tom. Hmm.)

  I sat back and tried to decipher what was going on in the head of this unusual man. Was he convincing himself that I was, after all, just another bus? Was he really upset? I didn’t quite get it yet—that with Ted what you see is what you get, no hidden agenda. All I had to do was listen carefully. It was all right there, like it or not. Full (though involuntary) disclosure.

  I recall telling him that I was looking for intimacy with a man and that I thought I would find it with my Italian boyfriend. “This is what has eluded me so far. Before I die I want to know intimacy, and intimacy may be the one thing I don’t think you’re good at.”

  Three months later I went to visit my brother and his wife, Becky, and take a week of classes at the Orvis Fly Fishing School in Bozeman. I had booked the classes in early May, a month before I ever met Ted. In fact, I told Johnny Carson on his show in early spring that every important man in my life had been a fisherman—deep-sea, bass, everything but fly-fishing. I told Johnny that I intended to learn fly-fishing so I’d be ready for the next one.

  Somehow Ted found out that the classes were taking place in the old railroad station–turned-hotel a mere twenty minutes from his ranch (The Flying D, the big one that had been in escrow in June) and he showed up one afternoon, nervous and talkative, to suggest I take the final “exam” on his Cherry Creek and stay for dinner.

  When I arrived the day of my exam, Ted hovered about, insisting on driving me to the creek himself with the fishing instructor following in his truck. Once more I was impressed at his sense of humor: “I know you’re looking for intimacy, so I’ve started taking intimacy pills.” And later: “Enough of this stuff with younger men. What about older men’s rights?” And in a quiet moment he turned to me and said, “It would be a shame if we were eighty by the time we finally get together.”

  Dinner that night was strained. The Scarlett O’Hara girlfriend was there with him, and Ted made no effort to disguise his interest in me. I can’t imagine how three’s-a-crowdish she must have felt. My brother, always there for me when I need support, was with me. As we drove away I could hear Ted calling to me, “I’ll take Italian lessons,” “I’ll get myself stretched to six feet five” (the height of my Italian boyfriend). Total charm. But I am basically a serial monogamist, so that was that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TED

  All I know is I get what I want.

  Maybe because I want things more than others do.

  —TED TURNER

  . . . Let’s see

  what I am in here

  when I squeeze past

  the easy cage of bone.

  Let’s see

  what I am out here,

  making, crafting,

  plotting

  at my new geography.

  —IMTIAZ DHARKER,

  from “Honour Killing”

  THE ITALIAN STALLION IS GONE.” That’s all the postcard said. Unbeknownst to me, my sister-in-law, Becky, a loyal Ted supporter and CNN junkie who was rooting for our coupling, had decided to alert him the moment I was single again. So when Ted’s call came early one morning, I was surprised.

  “Hey, I hear you’ve broken up with the Italian. Wanna come up to Big Sur for that weekend we never had?”

  “You’re really something, Ted,” I said, again impressed at his persistence.

  This time he picked me up at Santa Monica Airport in his jet and we flew to Big Sur together. I was excited to see him and struck by his handsomeness and candor. Once airborne, he asked me if I was a member of the mile-high club.

  “What’s the mile-high club?” I asked.

  “You know, when you’ve made love in a plane—a mile up in the sky?”

  “No, I haven’t done that,” I replied, feeling quite square.

  “Wanna do it right now?” he asked with boyish exuberance, and before I could inquire about the logistics, a fully-made-up double bed materialized where just minutes before there had been a row of seats.

  “Oh boy! Playtime,” he said gleefully.

  Thus began my initiation into the mile-high club.

  Driving from Monterey airport in a small Jeep identical to the one he had in
Montana, he talked about how he had an okay thing going with a woman in Atlanta and needed to know if I would commit to being his girlfriend, because if not, he didn’t want to blow what he already had.

  “But, Ted, I can’t do that till we know each other. How can we know if this will work? Why don’t we just go with the flow . . . see how things work out?” It wasn’t the definitive answer he was looking for, but “go with the flow” became his mantra for two years.

  Ted’s Big Sur house is tiny and mostly glass. It sits atop a narrow mountain ridge that juts out into the azure blue Pacific, Pfeiffer Beach on one side and on the other a heart-stopping, southern view down the rugged coast. I was familiar with this view, having often stayed in the Big Sur Hot Springs Lodge in the early 1960s, before it became the famous Esalen Institute, a center of the “human potential” movement. Vanessa had even lived and worked there for a time.

  Big Sur is an intense place, all about edges. When edges of things meet, energy is ratcheted up. There is a mysterious altering of molecules in the air, and those who live at the edges are caught up in it. Mary Catherine Bateson writes that it’s at the edges where disciplines meet that thinking becomes most creative: “Where lines are blurred, it is easier to imagine that the world might be different.” Maybe that’s why some people prefer edges. In Big Sur’s offshore waters, the warm Pacific currents converge with the cold arctic waters and this, coupled with Big Sur’s savage topography, creates wild clashings of extremes. Of course Ted would love Big Sur—he’s a man made to live on edges. Brave, brash, edgy.

  Surrounding the house is a terraced garden, wild and tangled, the kind I like, and a wooden hot tub built on a ledge with the view of the coastline.

  “Pretty great, huh?” he said as he walked me around the garden. “Ted Turner actually owning all this . . . the most beautiful spot in Big Sur.”

  I was discovering that Ted is, in the words of novelist Pearl Cleage, a man who enjoys “creating a perfect moment but can’t let you enjoy it for reminding you how perfect it really is.” I could barely contain the desire to say, “Well, actually, Ted, there’s a place up Limekiln Creek that’s more beautiful,” but I bit my tongue. Standing out on this knee of seacoast, looking down onto Pfeiffer Beach, I told Ted about my long-standing feelings for Big Sur, but while he said, “Oh, that’s great,” I could tell he wasn’t really interested. I remember feeling a shiver when it dawned on me that being with Ted would mean being divorced from my own history.

  During dinner I again noticed that my words lay like droplets on an oil slick, never penetrating his surface. This vague indifference to what was not himself left me feeling unseen. The next morning I told him, “I don’t think this will work, Ted. I’m sorry. You want to push me into some sort of commitment. But something doesn’t feel right and I don’t want you to blow that other relationship. I think I’d better go home.”

  Over the following months I dated other men. I fell asleep on a date with a real estate developer from Laguna Beach. A Beverly Hills doctor took me out several times, but when he told me that he’d gone to South Africa with Frank Sinatra and become convinced that Zulu tribal leader Mangosuthu Buthelasi was the true nonviolent peacemaker there, not Nelson Mandela, I stopped seeing him. Ted called fairly regularly, and there was a constant niggling inside my gut telling me I’d blown my best chance at having the relationship I was searching for, that the problems I’d sensed were really my own, not Ted’s.

  Ted was funny, quick, complicated, smart. Unlike the doctor, he understood the significance of Mandela. We had a common interest in the environment and peace and a commitment to make things better. The chemistry between us crackled. And he was a terrific lover. What’s not to fall for? I couldn’t say for sure . . . just that something didn’t feel right. Yet I was miserable, feeling that cowardice (fear of intimacy, fear of being hurt) had made me blow what might well have been the love of my life.

  The Fondas being inducted into the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. Here I am with Peter, his children Bridget and Justin Fonda, Shirlee, and Troy.

  (Alan Berliner © Berliner Studio/BE Images)

  Then my friend the singer Bonnie Raitt called to tell me she was opening for the Grateful Dead’s annual New Year’s Eve concert in Oakland and invited me. I remember the famous concert promoter Bill Graham making his traditional slow descent from the stadium rafters dressed as a chicken; the Dead Heads tripping in their straight-from-the-sixties tie-dyed shirts and beads; my feeling old and out of it. And I remember how happy Bonnie seemed, more at peace and centered than I had ever seen her. We had known each other and shared intimacies for a number of years and it was no secret that relationships and commitments had been challenges for her. Now here she was with actor Michael O’Keefe and enjoying the heck out of it. Somehow her happiness gave me courage. I thought, Gosh, if she can do it, maybe I can, too, and the very next morning, January 1, 1990, I called Ted and asked if we could try again. Again I was amazed that he was not only willing, but fairly ecstatic. He was always so sweet that I had to ask myself if my trepidations weren’t my own demons trying to undermine me.

  That was when we began “going steady,” as we described it, which I thought was rather charming for two fifty-somethings. Vanessa was in college, but Troy was still in high school. Being away from home for too long made me anxious, so when Ted had to be in Atlanta, I stayed in Santa Monica, even though he was honest about spending those nights with the other woman (or two). I didn’t like it. It confused me, but I wasn’t ready to lay down ultimatums. I wanted, as I told Ted, to go with the flow, see how things went.

  At those times we would talk on the phone for hours. Often he would say, “I need ‘fonda-ling. . . .’ ” He found it hard to believe that he was the only one who had ever made this pun on my name. He would tell me he felt himself shrinking when he wasn’t with me, and at first I took it as a compliment. Later I realized that it wasn’t so much his need to be with me as it was his fear of being alone. Sad to say, Ted doesn’t hold his well-being within himself (something we had in common for a while). It has to come from the outside: from a woman, from applause, from achievements and good deeds. It took several years before I began to understand the profound ramifications this would have on me and our relationship. But I had fallen head over heels in love with him—still am in many ways—and I wanted to hang in and try to make it better for this lovable, fascinating man-child, who was just enough not like my father that I wanted to crawl inside his skin and know him.

  Despite the oddities, being courted by Ted was heady business. Here was a man who shared my commitment to making things better but wasn’t so perpetually preoccupied with that that he couldn’t shift gears and give equal and talented attention to what can be communicated only through the body. Above the neck and below the neck, together at last! One-stop shopping. You want the sex, romance, laughs, shared values, intellectual stimulation, companionship, eroticism, friendship. You want it all, and he seemed to have it all. Besides, everyone close to me liked him: Debbie, my assistant, Lois, Paula, Troy, Nathalie, Lulu, Vanessa—well, actually things weren’t so cut-and-dried with Vanessa. From her vantage point here I was giving myself over to another man again, and she was angry.

  The first time Ted invited me to Atlanta, he met me at the airport in his modest Ford Taurus and we drove straight to the CNN Center. Oh my! Walking into the huge glass-domed atrium, looking up at the building rising fourteen floors all around me, CNN and TURNER everywhere, every nation’s flag flying, even that of the United Nations, testifying to Ted’s commitment to a global network. My boyfriend made this all happen! I was surprised to discover that this building was also his residence when he was in Atlanta (which was as infrequently as he could get away with). For years after leaving his second wife he had lived in his office and slept on a Murphy bed, until his mistress had complained. Recently, he’d punched through the ceiling of some storage rooms on the fourteenth-floor and built a tiny (seven-hundred-square-foot) penthouse that you r
eached by going up a narrow wrought-iron take-your-life-in-your-hands spiral staircase. For the ten years Ted and I were together, that penthouse was my home base, making me the only woman in the world who had to walk through a sports-marketing department to get to her front door.

  The way he introduced me to everyone in Atlanta made me realize that despite his unquestionable importance in the world, Ted was like a kid, so proud to have me on his arm. This was new for me. So much was new: I had never before been with a businessman, not to mention a very wealthy one, and this one also had the heart of a rebel and social values that didn’t put money first. Ted understands money, but he’s not about money. He’s also a playful renegade, an outsider, impolite, impolitic, with grand dreams of changing the world for the better. He put me on a pedestal, clearly needed me, and wasn’t afraid to show it. In many ways he was simply irresistible.

  I began to get to know Ted’s business associates, many of whom had been with him since the very beginning. They told me that since we started dating they had never seen Ted so happy and how much easier he was to work with. The many people who loved him deeply had been growing concerned about his state of mind, partly because of his father’s history and partly because of his uncertainties in the relationship department. So they gratefully embraced me as “the woman who had come to the rescue.” As one of his sailing buddies said, “Well, it appears Le Capitan is finally in good hands.” Of the people around him, only one, his executive assistant, Dee Woods, had something worrisome to tell me (though she loved him dearly): “Jane,” she said, “he’s a male chauvinist pig and he always will be.” She laughed when she said it, and I chose to think she was being funny—sort of. I stored it away.