By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 5, 2005; Page C01

NEW YORK, April 4

She is limping. "Hanoi Jane" is in pain, though that moniker may not be fair anymore. She's 67, after all. Those days of rage, of the seemingly nonstop 1960s and '70s Jane Fonda talkfest on every cause at hand, are long past. Even she, in retrospect, is annoyed by it. Watching some old tapes years later, she writes in her new book, she wanted to shout, "Will somebody please tell her to shut up?"

She hoists that bad left hip and size 4 frame onto a red leather stool Monday morning to pose for photos. She is a portrait of the aged star struggling with a fading body even as she is healed of heart after decades of private battle -- with self-loathing and bulimia; with sexual, shall we say, abundance; with husbands and lovers whose identities she absorbed as her own; with her various personae as a woman both burned in effigy and adored.

As she sits, you forget that limp and instead focus on the head-high posture, the piercing, earnest gaze of a woman who has confronted her demons and has emerged a wiser diva fully in control, especially of her besieged image.

She poses. The photographer frames her.

"Oh, God! Side lighting is not so good for me," she warns.

Adjustments are made. She cocks her head. As if that flat stomach could be flatter still, she smooths the front of her tightly cinched brown slacks.

"Where are you cropping?" she asks in that commanding, clipped voice. She wants to know how she'll look. This shoot, this interview, are part of her reemergence.

"For 15 years, I've been able to go unnoticed in airports," she says. That's how long it's been since her last movie. But now, with the new autobiography, "My Life So Far," coming out Tuesday and the new movie, "Monster-in-Law," with Jennifer Lopez, out next month, Jane Fonda has something to sell.

Off the red stool and heading back to the sofa, she clutches that hip. Replacement surgery comes in June, and not a minute too soon. In the hallway at the Drake Hotel, she stumbles into the elevator. Sometimes the hip just gives way.

"Honey, I'm falling apart," she'd said a few minutes earlier, laughing with a ghoulish play on one of her old movie titles. "They shoot horses, don't they?"

How to reconcile her many faces? Jane Fonda watchers long have wondered just who she was, why she was and how she had so many incarnations -- actress, activist, mismatched spouse, workout queen, born-again Christian, feminist.

Her own daughter, Vanessa Vadim, cuttingly called her a "chameleon," Fonda writes.

That's what we all saw, the changes. And yet we didn't see anything, really -- certainly not the intimate life and deep secrets that she now reveals in this extraordinarily frank book that she wrote herself, running more than 600 pages.

Yes, she addresses the "Hanoi Jane" years and apologizes for posing in 1972 in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gunner's nest, which gave the impression that she supported the shooting down of U.S. planes.

"It was a mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it," she writes in a lengthy rendering of that incendiary trip to Hanoi. "I carry this heavy in my heart, and always will."

And yes, as has been the advance buzz for some days now, she reveals that her first husband, Roger Vadim, who directed her in "Barbarella," introduced her to group sex. She even helped in soliciting prostitutes as participants during their wild years in Paris. Deep down, she says, she didn't want to do it. She wanted to keep Vadim happy -- she was 25 at the time. "So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced I enjoyed it," she writes.

She was ashamed. But a few years later, she writes, those prostitutes, and what she learned of their lives, helped inform her 1971 portrayal of Bree Daniel, the call girl in "Klute," which won her a Best Actress Oscar.

The book isn't quite a tell-all, though it tells much. It's a Hollywood book spanning a 39-film movie career. In it are supporting roles by Katharine Hepburn and Simone Signoret, plus cameos from Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, even an unforgettable scene on the French Riviera, where she ends up swimming with a nude Greta Garbo. (Fonda wore a bathing suit.)

The book tells a sprawling, tangled, at times even messy story. It ranges from the stoicism of Henry Fonda to the train wreck that was Vadim to the high-handed spousal criticism of Tom Hayden to the egomaniacal charm of Ted Turner. There's a lot there -- the kids, the family histories, the inner musings, the '60s, the war, the activism, the movies, the "Jane Fonda's Workout" business. Plus tons of pictures. No wonder it runs so long. Oh, and let's not forget the FBI, CIA, Treasury Department -- those federal agencies that monitored her. It's an epic, really.

"It's going to be a huge book with men and women," she says, "and while people may buy it because they think, because of this trash that's come out early that it's going to be salacious and all that, this is the kind of book it is. People are going to buy the book, read it and give it to their mothers, or give it to their wives, or the mothers will give it to their daughters.

"But I think I have a lot to say to men, too. When you're a feminist, you're always worried that what you're going to say is going to be anti-man. But my book, I think it doesn't and I think that comes across, and that men feel included, which is great. . . . Women have to not be afraid of their own strength and to inhabit themselves, and men have to not be afraid to own their hearts."

Fonda says the book links the seemingly disconnected dots of her life.

"The through-line is what happens to a young girl when she feels that she can't be loved unless she's perfect," she says. ". . . And how that toxic quest for perfection will cause her to move out of herself, to become disembodied, and then to fill the emptiness and numb the anxiety that is caused by the disembodiment with any number of things. For me it was a food addiction, and the disease to please."

She is an awkward, desperate girl, nails bitten to the bloody quick, and she knows, just knows, that she has failed to earn her parents' love. It's all her fault. She isn't perfect. Her father, Henry Fonda, is gone a lot and, when home, gives little of himself to any of them -- not to Frances Ford Brokaw Seymour, his wife, nor to the children, Jane and Peter. The young Jane is angry at her mother, thinks she's not trying hard enough to be pleasing, to earn her husband's love. And angry at her too because her mother did not hold her as a baby or a growing child, not like she held Peter.

Jane's mother, who had been in and out of sanitariums, returns home one day in 1950 with a uniformed nurse. Jane refuses to go downstairs to greet her.

And she never sees her mother again. A month later, Seymour slits her own throat.

Those were the couple of years spent "in a zone of somnambulance," she writes. Other girls blossomed; Jane, instead, withered. "She had slipped away so quietly that I never even said, 'Good-bye, see you again in 50 years.' "

Into that lost space came food -- and its expulsion. Bulimia. Thinness. Making herself perfect.

Even as she got her first break, in "Tall Story" (1960), after Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio declared that she did indeed have talent, she was so in the throes of her disease that she was binging and purging "sometimes eight times a day," she writes.

Later, in Paris, where she hooked up with Vadim, her life -- when not working on camera in any of the four films she made under his direction -- was reduced to parties and sex and crumbs: "I ceased eating except for the crusts of his bread and the rinds of his camembert."

"Barbarella" made her a pinup for the Vietnam generation, and yet Fonda was clueless while in Paris of the unrest back home.

"There were the struggles of blacks in the United States that I'd only just started to learn about," she writes. "There was a growing anti-Vietnam War movement. But I hadn't followed the war news closely and when Vadim's French friends criticized the U.S. involvement there my reaction was usually defensive. I simply couldn't believe that America could be involved in a wrong cause, and I hated having foreigners criticize us."

Her naivete began to change with Tom Hayden. He was an activist, and she was an actress who became one, under his tutelage. There were antiwar and social causes. They started a youth camp together, where she met Lulu, an African American girl from a troubled family, who over time became like a daughter, joining Vanessa (her daughter with Vadim), her stepdaughter, Nathalie Vadim, and her son, Troy Garity (with Hayden).

Hayden and Fonda launched an outfit called the Campaign for Economic Democracy and explored various ways to fund it.

That is how "Workout" starring Jane Fonda came about -- to underwrite their many causes. The money indeed poured in. And Fonda found an unexpected benefit: She began to accept her body.

Her bulimia subsided. But there was trouble with Hayden, whom she portrays as having difficulty with her huge celebrity -- especially after she starred in "Coming Home," the 1978 feature film about U.S. soldiers and Vietnam that would win her a second Best Actress Oscar. The film is memorable in part for the touching and explicit sex scene between Fonda and actor Jon Voight, who scored a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a paralyzed vet.

Hayden had hoped the film would tell more about Vietnam than it did. Upon viewing the early cuts of "Coming Home," he coldly got up, walked toward the door and said "nice try" before exiting the room, Fonda writes.

A day after the Fonda-Hayden divorce hit the papers in 1989, a phone call came. It was Ted Turner. It went like this:

"Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"Are you and Hayden really getting a divorce?"

"Yes."

"Well then, would you like to go out with me?"

That was the come-on line, to be followed -- when she finally dated him several months later -- by such memorably inappropriate declarations as: "I have friends who are communists" and "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?"

The dissonance was extreme -- even his secretary warned her, she writes, that Turner was "a male chauvinist pig and he always will be."

But he swept over her life with a vibrancy and a consuming love that she says she needed at the time. She describes him in the book as one of the most fascinating people she has ever met. They wed at a refurbished plantation Turner owned. In photos, Fonda is wearing a southern-belle-type dress.

She moved to Atlanta. Stopped acting. They traveled constantly. They bought ranches. They both loved the outdoors. Attended Braves games (since he owned the baseball team). She felt he truly loved her, and he never hesitated to express it.

But Turner would stumble over a particular word. He'd say "mongo" or "magno" when trying to utter "monogamy." It was a concept he did not practice, as Fonda writes.

She again found herself living in the context of a man's life, absorbing the cuts, the hurts, even learning to hold her tongue politically.

She thought the "disease to please" had ended with the Vadim years.

"But this burying, this betraying of myself was such an ingrained part of my modus operandi that in each new relationship I repeated the pattern," she writes.

And as had been her pattern, her outward life did not match the struggle of her private one. She launched a program, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, to help young women.

But something new was happening. Surrounded by people she respected and cared for who also were practicing Christians, she began to explore her spirituality. She had had periods of feeling guided, of things in her life happening for a reason. And once she began exploring how Christianity helped to explain such things, she felt religion's pull. She was born again. (Though over time, as she understood fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, she felt it was not quite right for her, as a feminist. She now prefers to call herself simply a Christian.)

That was one step toward affirming herself. Another came when she told Turner she would be spending time away from him to be with Vanessa while she gave birth and brought her new grandson home.

Turner was outraged that she had made a plan on her own without consulting him. Unable to fully express his anger, "all he could do was bang the walls with his fists and his head," she writes.

And when she finally told him she'd been born again, it "convinced him I had lost my mind."

But actually, she writes, she had found her mind, in the sense of standing up for herself and not backtracking, not caving in to please a man.

She has, since the 2000 breakup with Turner, surrounded herself with the young women she counsels in Atlanta and the universe of women friends who've helped her along the way, including Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues."

They all know well of the secret struggles of women, and Fonda explains the emotional rut of her life this way:

"The lessons we're supposed to learn gyrate around us over and over," she says in her suite at the Drake. "It takes time before the lessons finally get internalized."

Asked if there is a new man in her life, she laughs a simple no.