"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?"
"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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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.
