My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  On the second page of Gilligan’s book I read:

  Women’s choices not to speak or rather to dissociate themselves from what they themselves are saying can be deliberate or unwitting, consciously chosen or enacted through the body by narrowing the passages that connect the voice with the breath and sound, by keeping the voice high in the head so that it does not carry the depths of human feelings. . . .

  When I read this it hit me so forcefully that I cried out, remembering my early years as a young movie star—Sunday in New York, Any Wednesday, Tall Story—when my voice was high and thin. Alone in Vanessa’s home, I watched videos of my films chronologically and was able to track my growth as a woman by noting when my voice began to drop. It started with Klute, which was when I began to define myself as a feminist; it was also when I won my first Oscar. My acting had improved as my voice deepened, because I was beginning to inhabit myself.

  Change can come from the inside out or the outside in. I got a call late one night in early 2000, when Vanessa was still in Paris. It was Paula Weinstein in California. Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, producers of the Academy Awards show that year, wanted me to be a presenter.

  “I can’t, Paula,” I said. “I’m not in the business anymore.”

  “Do it anyway,” said my dearest friend, who can’t seem to remember that she’s not my agent anymore. “It’ll be good for you.”

  She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Finally I said, “Oh, okay, I’ll do it. I have a dress that I bought four years ago that’s really pretty that I can wear.”

  “Jane,” Paula shrieked, “no way. Vera Wang is going to design you a dress, and you’re going to get your hair cut by Sally Hirschberger, and that’s that! I don’t want any arguments.”

  Isn’t it great to have persistent friends?

  Psychologist Marion Woodman has said: “Changing your hair is a reflection of a shift in thinking.” Well, thanks to Paula, I had new hair to go with my new thinking.

  Within months of my singlehood, another germinal event took place: My close friend Pat Mitchell asked me to perform one of the pieces in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. I had gotten to know Pat during the years she was president of CNN Productions and Time Inc. (Pat had just been named president and CEO of PBS.)

  I had not acted in eleven years and had little desire to do so again, but I asked Pat to send me the script. I read one page of the monologue they wanted me to perform (it was titled “Cunt”) and called Pat.

  “No, Pat,” I said. “I have enough problems. Hanoi Jane saying ‘cunt’ in Atlanta? I don’t think so.” But as is her way, Pat wouldn’t let up—not necessarily pressuring me to perform, just asking me to meet Eve Ensler. She told me that Eve was in New York performing the monologues and insisted that I go and see it for myself. “Trust me, Jane. You have to do this.”

  As a presenter at the Oscars in 2000 with my new haircut and Vera Wang dress.

  (Catuffe/SIPA Press)

  So I did.

  I had no idea what to expect, but as I sat there listening to Eve enact the monologues she’d written based on interviews she’d done with women about their vaginas, I felt something happening to me. I don’t remember ever laughing so hard or crying so hard in the theater, but it must have been during the laughter part, when I wasn’t paying attention, that my feminist consciousness slipped out of my head and took up residence in my body—where it has lived ever since.

  Up until then I had been a feminist in the sense that I supported women, brought gender issues into my movie roles, helped women make their bodies strong, read all the books: I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart—in my body—but I didn’t; not really. I couldn’t. It was too scary, like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. It meant doing life differently.

  Fans of Robert Heinlein’s science fiction masterpiece Stranger in a Strange Land know what the word grok means: to understand something so thoroughly on every level—spiritually, intellectually, bodily, psychically—that you become one with what you have observed or grasped; you merge with it. My experience upon seeing The Vagina Monologues (as with reading In a Different Voice) can only be described as “grokking” feminism.

  Eve Ensler has remained a beloved presence in my life ever since that night. Beaten and subjected to incest for years by her father, she is a force of nature, a person who with lots of work has risen, burnished and purified, from the fires of violence and pain, and her vision of ending violence against women is contagious. She has turned her play into a global campaign, and as of this writing her organization, V-Day: Until the Violence Stops, has raised over $26 million in support of local efforts to stop violence against women around the world, more than the total amount that the United States government has spent on this pandemic. I serve on her organization’s V-Council and have traveled to many countries with Eve to help build this global movement.

  Vaginal epiphanies and Oscar presentation notwithstanding, life was ratcheting down to soulspeed, just as I had wanted. My daughter’s home had become a womb in which I was pregnant with myself, entering what Dr. Susan Blumenthal described to me as “the infancy of my second adulthood.” It felt right, like when you hit a tennis ball on the “sweet spot” of the racket. It took place in small, incremental, cumulative steps that I might not have noticed, except that I was paying attention—becoming intentional. I also know that, manless (and not afraid of that) and surrounded by vibrant, brave, emotionally available women friends, I was able to remove the blinders and see things, which necessitated my rethinking fundamentals I couldn’t see before—like how differently most women “do” life. We listen with our hearts; we try to mirror the other’s humanity.

  With Eve Ensler, having just performed the final monologue in The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden. I had been so scared beforehand that I prayed I’d be sideswiped by a taxi—not killed, just hospitalized—so that I wouldn’t have to go through with my first acting in fifteen years. It went well—the whole event was memorable— and gave me courage.

  (Mark Abrahams/German Vogue)

  Left to right: Actress Tantoo Cardinal, Karen Artichoker, me, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, and Eve Ensler at a V-Day event in Rapid City, South Dakota, to raise funds for a women’s shelter on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I’ve come full circle.

  It’s not that I was entirely conscious of what was happening to me. It was like a slow letting go at the very center of myself. My relationships with people began to shift. I wasn’t reactive anymore (amazing, if reactive is what you’ve been most of your life). I was detached, yet my heart had opened. The space between me and other people seemed filled with a new, vibrating energy that grew exponentially more intense when I felt connected to other women. In the “old days,” I would go to a party and wonder, Will they like me? Will I be pretty enough? Interesting enough? Now I was coming into a party thinking, Do I really want to be here? Is there anyone I want to connect with?

  After a month or two Vanessa made it clear that I needed to start thinking about moving out. I no longer had a home of my own, having sold it in order to make my home (homes) with Ted. When it dawned on me that we were splitting up, I had to think about where I was going to live. It took me about three seconds to realize I wanted to stay in Atlanta. This decision had been so sudden and certain, it took me by surprise. (It certainly took many of my New York and California friends by surprise.) There comes a time in life when you have to put down roots. Why not Atlanta? I was sixty-two; Vanessa, Malcolm, and Lulu were all living there now; I had made many good friends in Georgia; I was committed to the important work my organization, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, was doing with our school-based programs for girls and boys and with young mothers and fathers, and I longed to be more hands-on. Enough moving around! Besides, I like the Chekhovian nature of the South: a slowness, a love of talk for its own sake, the friendliness and humor; the jokes, like heirlooms, passed back and forth and savored as though for the
first time; an acceptance of people’s idiosyncrasies. And where else can you hear expressions like “frog strangler” (for a heavy rain) and “lower than a pregnant duck” (when you’re depressed)?

  As a fund-raiser for G-CAPP, I lived a lifelong dream and, with ten fit friends, made the five-day trek to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. I was single now and could do these things.

  But there is something else that contributes to my love of the South. Most of my life I had lived in sophisticated, relatively privileged coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York. I had grown weary of criticism about people in those places being elitists, out of touch with the American mainstream. Just as it had taken my going to France to begin to understand America, so it had taken my move to Georgia to show me that the criticisms were at least partly true. With this had come a realization that appealed to the activist in me: If you can effect change in the South, you can effect change anywhere. There’s a sense of reality—things aren’t as prettified and above the fray as in Hollywood. History is closer to the surface, possibly because our Civil War bloodied the soils and souls of this southern land in ways that can never be entirely wiped away or understood by northerners or West Coast folk.

  So out I set on a new life as a solo, short-haired southerner, not entirely certain where my less traveled road would lead me, but sure that my choice was right.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LEAVING MY FATHER’S HOUSE

  Oh this is the animal that never was.

  They hadn’t seen one; but just the same, they loved

  its graceful movements, and the way it stood

  looking at them calmly, with clear eyes.

  It had not been. But for them, it appeared

  in all its purity. They left space enough.

  And in the space hollowed out by their love

  it stood up all at once and didn’t need

  existence. They nourished it, not with grain,

  but with the mere possibility of being.

  And finally this gave it so much power

  that from its forehead a horn grew. One horn.

  It drew near to a virgin, white, gleaming—

  and was, inside the mirror and in her.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  from The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 4

  ALL MY LIFE I had been a father’s daughter, trapped in a Greek drama, like Athena, who sprang fully formed from the head of her father, Zeus—disciplined, driven. Starting in childhood, I learned that love was earned through perfection. In adolescence, my feelings of imperfection centered on my physical being, and I abandoned my poor, loyal body and took up residence in my head. Whether you are male or female, that split between body/heart and mind is the fatal one when it comes to being a fully realized person. Your soul becomes homeless. In the house of the Fathers, there is no room for soul.

  I am referring here to “father” not in the biological sense but metaphorically, to the house of the Fathers, the patriarchs—to a way of existing by seeing myself through the eyes of men and accommodating them on the deepest, invisible level (while seeming to do the contrary) and, in so doing, delivering a part of myself to a world that bifurcates head and heart, renders empathy (for oneself or for others) impossible, and makes both men and women, boys and girls, less human than they inherently are.

  Don’t get me wrong—I love men. One reason I didn’t become a feminist sooner is that I erroneously thought it required male bashing. In fact, the more I have come to understand the nature of the Fathers’ house, the more I love men, because I see how patriarchy’s toxic cloistering has dehumanized them as well.

  For me, the journey from the house of the Fathers has been a long time coming. I didn’t know, when I started writing this book almost five years ago, that I would arrive at this place, nor did I know exactly what “place” I hoped to get to.

  There have been (and will continue to be) many course corrections on this path to enable my whole embodied spirit, the unicorn in Rilke’s poem, to manifest itself. For me, as Rilke describes, the journey had to start with “the space hollowed out by . . . love”—self-love—despite the absence of perfection. That love allowed me to accept myself and imagine going beyond where I’d been as a disembodied, male-identified woman, to arrive at a belief so strong in “the mere possibility of being” that the unicorn—my embodied spirit—“stood up all at once and didn’t need existence.” Because the transformative experiences we go through over our lives are so elusive, their essence can sometimes best be captured through metaphor.

  Two very nonpoetic impediments at the start of this third part of my journey were my breasts. It’s hard to squeeze through the door of the Fathers’ house with breast implants. Soon after my separation from Ted, I began to feel an urgent need to have those implants removed, because I now saw these false appendages as sad, misguided reminders of a woman who didn’t own her womanhood.

  A series of male doctors assured me that the procedure could not be reversed successfully, but finally a friend of mine, a woman my age who had had it done, referred me to her female surgeon. This doctor told me that it is not uncommon for women of a certain age—when they have developed an authentic self and no longer need to define themselves by what shows on the outside—to want the implants removed.

  When he first saw me postremoval, Troy said, “Mom! You’re back in proportion again!” Yes, in more ways than one.

  Psychologist Marion Woodman says the body is our “chalice for Spirit” and if there is no Spirit, we may try to fill its emptiness with addictions. In my forties I had stopped bingeing and purging, but I wasn’t really healed; I was the way a dry drunk is in relationship to alcohol. Now I feel I have found spiritual food to fill what was always spiritual hunger, so I am no longer a dry drunk in relation to my eating disorder. Along the way I have also stopped drinking alcohol. Since this is my last act, I sure as hell want to try to do it on the natch—replacing spirits with Spirit.

  Perhaps you are wondering how I can talk about leaving the patriarchal, hierarchal structures of the Fathers’ house only to turn around and slip into the patriarchal, hierarchal structure of Christianity. This is exactly the conundrum I have been facing.

  Always one to give my all to whatever I undertake, when I began this part of my journey—the soul’s journey—I committed myself to what was presented to me. But as I diligently slogged through my weekly Bible classes, I felt the reverence slipping away, and I began to get scared. How to get back what had begun as an intense personal experience? I met some inspiring, extraordinary Christians who clearly lived their faith. Yet others came at me, fingers pointing: “How could you have spoken at that pro-choice rally?” They demanded to know my position on this or that issue. When I commented to one Christian columnist about the difficulty I was having with the belief that all non-Christians would go to hell, he replied, “Uh-oh, you sound like a Universalist!” Hey, that sounded about right. Given all the bloodshed and persecution that has gone on through the ages in the name of religion, shouldn’t we start practicing tolerance? Claiming that Jesus was the only way to salvation felt like Christian imperialism. Maybe this isn’t the spiritual home I seek.

  For me, religion is not so much about a belief in dogmas and traditions. It must be a spiritual experience, and I find it impossible to have that experience when I cannot reconcile myself to the Judeo-Christian assumption that man was God’s principal creation, with woman (Eve, fashioned from Adam’s rib) a mere derivative afterthought. Nor can I accept woman as the cause of man’s downfall, an assumption that has permitted men through the ages to regard women with suspicion and misogyny. (The best bumper sticker I ever saw read, EVE GOT A BUM RAP.) Women were anything but an afterthought for the Jesus I believe in. His acceptance of and friendship with women was truly revolutionary at a time when the male-dominated status quo had severed religion’s connection to the prepatriarchal ancient goddess and to nature. There was a reason why women were among Jesus’ most ardent followers: They respon
ded to his revolutionary message of compassion, love, and equality.

  The outlawed Christian communities that spread into the desert to worship in secret after Jesus died included more women than men, by a margin of two to one. Women were among the early Roman Christians who met clandestinely in their homes, preached, converted men, and performed the Eucharist.

  I am moved and inspired by those early Christians—like those in the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Gospel of Mark, and the Book of John—who saw themselves as seekers more than believers; who felt that experiencing the divine was more important than mere belief in the divine. According to them, Jesus preached that each individual has the potential to embody God (embodiment again). Perhaps this is one reason these teachings were outlawed and excised from Christian dogma back in the fourth century: They meant there was no need for priests or bishops—or hierarchy. By erasing these early interpretations of the founding myths of Judeo-Christian civilization, the fathers of patriarchy (in this case bishops) caused a potentially fatal split between mind and body, Spirit and matter. This split is the essential cornerstone of patriarchy—of the Fathers’ house. I have lived this split alongside my (biological) father and my three husbands. This split is more evident in men (which is what gives it toxic heft, since men currently run things), but it exists to varying degrees in women as well—as my story shows. If our civilization hadn’t been built on devaluing, fearing, and denigrating women, men wouldn’t split head from heart and distance themselves from their emotions, which are supposed to be the domain of women.