My Life So Far
Those old enough to remember 1975 with any sort of clarity may still identify Fonda with her tireless work as a cheerleader for the early women’s movement, but the image of Fonda that’s etched on the boomer cortex tends to be either the space vixen Barbarella or her alter ego, cannon-straddling Hanoi Jane. And us youngsters are stuck with a vision of her in a striped leotard, smiling, her frosted brown cloud of hair so perfect as she bounced, kicked, and crunched. They’re all hard personae to reconcile with “vigilant feminist.”
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Beginning with her childhood, she outlines the origins of the dynamic that would typify her next 60 years–living in the long dark shadow of a powerful man. Her mother committed suicide when she was 12, leaving her to be raised by her cold and distant father and a series of stepmothers only a few years older than she. Early on in her acting and modeling career she details being taken hostage by Betty Friedan’s archetypal “problem that has no name,” as well as a problem with a clinical tag: bulimia, which she battled for nearly 30 years. She recounts her attempts to become the perfect dutiful “60s wife” to her first husband, French director Roger Vadim, subverting her own desire and discomfort and directing all her energies into keeping a clean home, supporting Vadim’s gambling addiction, and participating in three-ways with call girls he would bring home–so as to avoid reprimand from her husband and his cronies for being “bourgeois.” She sought solace in morning-after coffee with the other women, talking at length with them about their histories and what led them into prostitution (this research went on to inform her portrayal of Bree Daniels in Klute, for which she won her first Oscar).
“I wanted to be a repeater,” she writes, “like one of those tall radio transmitters at the tops of mountains that pick up signals too faint in the valleys and transmit them to a broader audience.”
Her story reaches its denouement deep in the third act, when Fonda is 60 and has a spiritual awakening. Having put her acting, producing, and workout careers to bed years earlier in favor of being Mrs. Ted Turner, she finds a new calling, one close to her heart: instilling in teenage girls a healthy sense of self and their own sexuality. With a $10 million endowment from Turner, she founds the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, an advocacy group aimed at addressing the socioeconomic and psychological roots of teen pregnancy, and throws herself into the cause. But in trying to help women save their lives, she also saves her own. Newly empowered and hopeful, she soon realizes Turner is a controlling asshole and that she’s spent her entire life shrinking to the needs of the men in her life.
