My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  As the time of the birth approached, I told Ted I wanted to be with Vanessa for the ten days surrounding her due date. Although by now he had gotten over his anger, he wasn’t happy about my going. But there was no question that this was where I had to be, and Ted even surprised us by showing up as Vanessa went into labor.

  It was a home birth at Ted’s farm outside Atlanta, with a midwife in attendance. Theoretically we parents know when our children are grown-ups, yet a part of us is still awed when circumstances force us to see that they’ve grown beyond us. I was impressed by Vanessa’s decision to have a home birth, how she had gone about finding a midwife (home births are not legally sanctioned in Georgia) and prepared herself for all eventualities. I read books she gave me on home birthing, and together we watched videos of actual home births. I realized sadly how I, like many women, had relinquished to doctors my ownership of this ultimate metamorphic experience. This had been true when I gave birth to Vanessa, but now I was watching her do it right—not in the sense that everyone must have a home birth, but “right” in being intentional, fully in charge, informed. In case it might be needed, we preregistered at a hospital and practiced driving there. She carefully prepared a birth plan (instructions the mother gives to the doctors and nurses about what she wants and doesn’t want to happen to her and her newborn). For instance, Vanessa was adamant about having natural childbirth, and she specified that the baby not be taken from her or given any bottles.

  I stayed with Vanessa and Malcolm for four days after he was born. I was so proud of the brave way she handled the birth and grateful that I could be there to help her with him. I would sit in a rocking chair for hours at a time while she slept, holding Malcolm against my chest, singing the lullabies I had sung to Vanessa thirty years earlier. A May breeze would gently lift the slipcovers on the porch furniture, and as I gazed out over the freshly blooming dogwood, the wild azaleas, and the lake where two swans held court, I felt that life could never get any better. No one had prepared me for the feelings that arose when I held this little boy, Vanessa’s child. I was utterly broken open in ways I had never been before. Malcolm had enabled me to discover the combination to the safe where the soft part of my heart had been shut away for so long. Depths of feeling washed over me, cleansing me, carrying me too far down the new path of intimacy for me to ever want to turn back. Perhaps Ted knew it would be this way and that’s why he had gotten so upset at the news I would be a grandmother.

  With the birth of Malcolm, the Phoenix that had been on hold for ten years had risen: I also was being born anew. I knew now that I had to muster the courage to ask for what I needed in my relationship with Ted. At the time, these things seemed huge and difficult to me, but looking back, I see that I was asking for reasonable, bread-and-butter, emotional things. I knew that if I didn’t speak up, I would end my life married, yes, but filled with longings and regrets—just what I’d vowed I would not do. Deception is a lousy foundation for intimacy, and sustainability in a relationship is as critical as it is in the environment.

  Then one day when Ted’s business brought us to Los Angeles, I went to see my therapist. She said, “Jane, the choice is yours. You like challenges, so I am throwing the gauntlet at your feet. Take the challenge. Be brave in your relationship, whatever the outcome will be. Ask him to join you.”

  I was acutely aware that there was more time behind me than in front of me and that I had to shake myself awake. Maybe Ted would also like to jolt himself onto a new path but didn’t know how. Maybe I’m supposed to do this . . . for both of us. I love him enough to try.

  It was June. We were up early at his ranch in Montana. The sun had barely risen above the Spanish Peaks, yet a sultry air shimmered across the sleeping fields, signaling the hot day ahead. It had taken me two years to muster the courage for this crucial moment.

  We gathered our fishing gear, and as we were driving over the bumpy dirt road to his favorite part of Cherry Creek, I said, “Ted, I am scared. I feel myself going numb. I need us to try to do some things differently in our marriage, because otherwise I’m not sure I can show up for you the way you want me to.” And I spelled out what I hoped would happen. I don’t remember what he said, only that a rush of discordant, confused emotions suddenly sucked up all the air in the car. He was angry, that much I knew.

  When we got to the creek he said, “Let’s go fishing and we’ll discuss this later.”

  As usual we went to separate stretches of water and for several hours I attempted to fish, but my heart was pounding with dread. Oh my God, I thought. What if he actually refuses to try? For almost nine years I’ve made a core part of myself invisible in order to be “good enough,” and now I’ve put it out there. What if . . . No, it’s too awful to countenance. For a moment I imagined our marriage going under, like my grasshopper fly disappearing under a riffle.

  From the moment we got back in the car, I knew things were not going to be as I had hoped. He had not calmed down; anger was boiling. He was fragmented into little pieces, and I could get no traction anywhere to slow him down and explain my feelings in any depth. I should not have been surprised. As is typical of people who don’t speak up, I had overwhelmed him by dumping everything on him all at once—he, who can’t handle change. When we got back to the ranch, all he could do was bang the walls with his fists and his head. I was stunned by his reaction, but I watched him with detachment. I did what I had to do, and for once I am not going to “fix it” by backtracking. That morning I stepped outside the framework that had held me in thrall most of my life and I could not go back. There was detachment but also a sense of free fall, similar to the limbo an actor feels when he or she is morphing into a new character. Only this was my life, and I had no road map.

  Over the ensuing months I tried to find ways of making Ted understand my point of view. But it was as though something had snapped, as if he had been hijacked by his emotions and was incapable of hearing me. I was dumbfounded, because I knew he loved me and that our life together was more important to him than the few things I had asked him to try—try! I hadn’t even demanded a “never again.” Yet our life seemed to be crumbling before my eyes. Was it possible that his male identity was so inextricably bound up with things as they were that he would risk losing me to avoid change?

  There was another factor that, understandably, compounded his fragmentation and convinced him I had lost my mind: He learned that I had become a Christian. Remember Ted’s abhorrence of decisions made without his consultation? Well, this was about as major a one as can be imagined.

  Several months earlier my friend Nancy McGuirk had taken me to my “next step.” I hadn’t told Ted beforehand, because by then I didn’t feel we were on the same team. Alongside the frantic life we shared, I was living a parallel inner life, where I took care of my own needs. I was used to doing this.

  I also knew if I had discussed with him my need for spirituality, he would have either asked me to choose between him and it or bullied me out of it. It was too new. I was too raw. Besides, it was not for nothing that he’d been captain of the debating team at Brown University. If I had discussed it with him beforehand, there was no way I could have held up under what I knew would be his blistering attack on Christianity, most of which I actually agreed with. Don’t you know that Christianity, just like Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, says women are inferior? What do you think the Garden of Eden myth means, anyway? Woman was an afterthought, made from Adam’s rib to serve him, and then was blamed for man’s fall from grace. And what about the witch burnings, the Crusades, and the Inquisition? He had it all at his fingertips. He knew the Bible far better than I did; he’d read it twice, cover to cover, had been “saved” seven times (including once by the Reverend Billy Graham). He had even considered joining the ministry as a young man, in the years before his younger sister died a terrible, prolonged death from lupus and he had turned from God.

  In hindsight I realize that not telling him was a wildly unfair thing for me to do. But I fel
t lost and empty. I needed to be filled. An inner life had been emerging for some time, and I needed to name it. I named it “Christian,” because that is my culture. I began to pray every day, out loud, on my knees, and it was like being hooked up to the power of the Mystery that had been leading me for the last decade. It wasn’t so much a learning about the existence of God, because learning implies use of intellect. It was more an experiencing of His presence, a psychic lucidity, that was allowing me access to something beyond consciousness.

  It wasn’t long, however, before I found myself bumping up against certain literal, patriarchal aspects of Christian orthodoxy that I found difficult to embrace. I will address this in the next chapter. But I discovered that alienation from dogma doesn’t have to mean a loss of faith.

  Ted’s level of rage and stress in the six months following my speaking up almost incapacitated him. Marilyn Van Derbur gave me an insight when she wrote in Miss America by Day that her early trauma “had literally hard-wired my brain so that my stress level on a scale of one to ten was fifty. If someone humiliated me, I had no way to accommodate the additional stress, so I would go into a kind of craziness.” There had been too much stress, abuse, and instability in Ted’s early life. Anyone who knows him knows that he reacts to stress almost like someone suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. I had blindsided him with my need to renegotiate our marriage and with my becoming a Christian—and this double whammy acted as a trigger to rage over which he had no control.

  Ted insisted that it wasn’t normal to change after sixty. I told him I thought it was dangerous not to. While I had become stronger, Ted had not, and my speaking up for myself was a blow from which he could not allow himself to recover. Maybe he was too invested in his projection of me as someone who expressed her needs only if they didn’t threaten his and who would never place another love—for self, for children, grandchildren, friends, or Jesus—above, or even on a par with, her love for him.

  I had started out hopefully. I knew that other very successful alpha males can, after a certain age, when testosterone levels drop, make the shift, slow down, open their hearts, and reduce the need to perform. I felt that he loved me enough to at least try. In fact, he did say at one point that he would try to do what I had asked in the marriage. For many months I was ecstatic. I no longer wanted to leave myself behind; I wanted sexuality to come out of relationship—eye-to-eye, soul-to-soul pleasure, where everything wasn’t all planned out to a fare-thee-well. He was happy with sexuality that came out of performance. The very thing I had feared the most—that I would gain my voice and lose my man—was actually happening. It wasn’t how I thought the story would end. You see what you need to see in another person, and when your needs change you try to see different things. The problem comes when what you need and what you see isn’t seen or needed by your partner. It doesn’t mean your partner is bad; it just means that she or he wants something else in life. My happiness was short-lived, for I could see Ted withering before my eyes. Clearly he wasn’t going to be able (or willing) to make the journey with me. We agreed to separate.

  Sitting down to lunch at a UN Foundation meeting in Capetown, South Africa. Left to right: Tim Wirth, the foundation president; board member Graca Machel; her husband, Nelson Mandela; Carolyn Young, whose husband, Ambassador Andy Young, is a board member. I had just come from a tour of Robbin Island prison, where Mandela had been jailed for twenty-five years.

  It was only after we separated that I discovered that while Ted was telling me he would try to do things differently he had turned to his old adage: “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.” He had spent our last year together looking for my replacement. That was why he seemed to be graying before my eyes: It was killing him to be dishonest with me. The day we parted, three days after the millennium, he flew to Atlanta to drop me off. As I drove from the airport to Vanessa’s home in a rental car, my replacement was waiting in the hangar to board his plane. My seat was still warm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MOVING ON

  It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a lifestage, a relationship, is over—and let it go.

  It involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out.

  —ELLEN GOODMAN

  AT AGE SIXTY-TWO I found myself alone, living in my daughter’s guest room. I was acutely aware of how different I felt this time from the way I’d felt after my breakup with Tom eleven years earlier. I didn’t feel alone, because I wasn’t. I was with myself, for the first time, and proud that I hadn’t capitulated out of fear. So what if it had taken so long? What matters is that I got there.

  For two weeks I was alone in the house with my golden retriever, Roxy. Vanessa had gone to Paris with eight-month-old Malcolm to be with Vadim, who had been battling cancer for three years. Her pain and concern were palpable, and I was glad my new circumstances made me available should she need me.

  Neither Roxy nor I was accustomed to stillness. The absence of Ted’s booming voice and constant activity left a deafening silence. I had wanted stillness. Here it was. My friends wondered if I would experience “luxurium tremens” (as singer James Taylor calls the sudden loss of luxury). I didn’t. In fact, I found the smallness of my surroundings humorous: I had gone from twenty-three kingdom-size properties and a private plane that could sleep six to a small guest room with no closet in a modest house in a charming but not quite gentrified section of Atlanta.

  I experienced mourning rather than anger—mourning not so much for the relationship as it was as for the loss of what I had hoped it might become. The anger rose somewhat later, when in agonizing drips and drops, I began to find out about Ted’s quests for my replacement during the year I was rejoicing in what I thought was his concession to monogamy. For about a month I would write him letters venting my rage and hurt; fortunately I never mailed them. (Time and understanding take the edge off anger. Best not leave everlasting proof of your temporary insanity.)

  Vanessa and Malcolm returned to Atlanta for a while, and in the quiet of her home we talked about fathers and husbands, marriage and divorce. But when it became clear that Vadim hadn’t much longer to live, she hurried back to him while I remained in Atlanta with Malcolm. I felt bonded to this little boy in a way I never had with anyone before. He was showing me how to love. I would lie in bed with his sleeping body draped across me (his position of choice), his nose in my right ear, his toes in my left, and feel utterly complete. Later, Malcolm would take my face in his hands and say, “I yuv you, Gamma.”

  It was a painful time for Vanessa. Not only was the father she adored dying, but she was separated from her son. She had been breast-feeding, and by the time I brought him back to her in Paris, that precious window had closed. I stayed in France for a while, wanting to see Vadim one last time and to help Vanessa with Malcolm. She spent her days at her father’s bedside, alternating shifts with Vadim’s sister, Hélène, and greeting friends, family members, and former wives and companions as they came and went. It felt synchronous that my separation from Ted had made it possible for me to be totally available when I was needed, and to reconnect with my family from my first marriage.

  I remembered something Katharine Hepburn said to me during the filming of On Golden Pond: “Make no mistake, Jane, women choose their men and not the other way around.” If this is true (and I’d like to think it is), then in spite of everything, I feel that I chose well. I learned and grew with Vadim, Tom, and Ted (sometimes because of them, sometimes in spite of them), and I feel grateful for that. I also have to say that in hindsight, each divorce, painful though it may have been at the time, marked a step forward, an opportunity for self-redefinition rather than a failure—almost like repotting a plant when the roots don’t fit anymore. Of course, I wish I’d found just one husband, also capable of redefinition, to make the whole journey with, but self-redefinition is harder for most men, especially since in a patriarchy they are not supposed to need it
. Given my parents’ difficulties with relationships, and my personal evolution, choosing right for the long haul just hasn’t been in the cards. I comfort myself in knowing that should I choose again, the haul will be shorter.

  Often during periods of transition in my life people or books have appeared, like miracles, to teach me what I need to learn. During my final months with Ted, as I struggled to make sense out of the impending separation from a man I loved, I began reading In a Different Voice, by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan. In the very first pages, Gilligan wrote that women “often sensed that it was dangerous to say or even to know what they wanted or thought—upsetting to others and therefore carrying with it the threat of abandonment. . . .” Exactly what I had been facing. Gilligan went on to describe the damage that this does to women: “The justification of these psychological processes [of silencing the self] in the name of love or relationships is equivalent to the justifications of violence and violation in the name of morality.”

  If I’d been a cartoon character, the balloons over my head would have read: “Oh my God!”; “Now I understand”; “So that’s why!” I saw that the issues I had been wrestling with in my marriage were not just my struggles; they were other women’s struggles, and they were important enough for a psychologist like Gilligan (and the many others I subsequently read) to study. I had had revelations before with books—The Village of Ben Suc and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for example—but this time the book was speaking to my own life experiences. I was like a nearsighted person suddenly given corrective lenses (or having the old lenses, distorted by patriarchy, suddenly removed). The whole world looked different to me now—so many elements in my life and my mother’s life began to make sense. I don’t know if another woman would have the same visceral response to Gilligan’s book, but the time was right for me. I was ready. Earlier I could not have taken in the full implications of what she wrote. I would have been more worried about rocking Ted’s boat than captaining my own.