An Awakening
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.
"Women have to not be afraid of their own strength and to inhabit themselves," the 67-year-old actress and author says.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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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.
Breaking the Cycle
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?"
