Jane Fonda: On Golden Fonda

Fonda has been producing her own films since she made one of the first Vietnam movies, Coming Home, in 1978. But she may become a more active producer now that she has split up with Bruce Gilbert. By all accounts Gilbert had a very strong influence in determining both the kinds of projects their company produced and the final shape of the scripts. With her new partner, Lois Bonfiglio, Fonda seems more inclined to assume an equal share of the decision-making. Whereas she once described herself as an actress first and foremost, Fonda now calls herself "an idea person who happens to act."

Old Gringo, Fonda contends, is consistent with her other productions in that she has always been more interested in the subject matter than in the size of her own role. "I don't necessarily do a film because it's the role of my life," Fonda contends. "I do it because it's a movie that I want to be part of, that I want to help see the light of day. On Golden Pond wasn't my movie. In 9 to 5 I didn't have the best part. For Coming Home I won an Oscar, but I never conceived of it as a vehicle for me. When I agreed to do China Syndrome, there wasn't even a woman in it. Richard Dreyfuss was supposed to play my part."

Most of these movies addressed issues that concerned Fonda, and it was once again the social commentary of Fuentes's novel that drew her to the material. "I first met Fuentes," Fonda recalls, "when be was writing Old Gringo and I had just come back from my first trip to Mexico. I was filled with this sense of shared history between our two countries. It's the only place in the world where the wealthiest country shares a border with one of the poorer countries. And I wanted to make a movie about how we handle those differences. Also, there's a great tradition that this movie belongs to. In Gone With the Wind and Dr. Zhivago, very personal romantic dramas are set against a background of great social upheaval. I think it is in the cauldron of social turmoil that heightened personal change can take place."

Although Fonda agrees that the two male characters in Old Gringo are definitely richer than hers, she was intrigued by the exotic qualities of her role. The actress who achieved notoriety as Barbarella had never played a virginal Victorian spinster, and she was tantalized by the prospect of veering so far from her usual image. In preparation, Fonda immersed herself in diaries written by women during the last 100 years. She says, "I read scores of diaries of working class women and domestic women and upper-class wives. There were very few outlets for women, very few things that were fulfilling for them. The diaries were a very common way that women expressed their innermost selves, their fears, their hopes, their hatreds, their sorrows. Another thing that women could do if they wanted to bust out was to travel. It was usually to do good, to help the natives. It was never to go off and have an affair. But they were really breaking out of the strictures about what a woman was supposed to be. What I learned from my research, and it made me appreciate Carlos's book, was the psychological and historical validity of the character."

Surprisingly, she also gained a lot of insight simply by wearing the period costumes designed by Enrico Sabbatini. "Once you put the costumes on," Fonda says, "you really begin to understand. When you're wearing those corsets, you can't express grand emotions because you can't get enough breath into you. It was like the binding of the Chinese women's feet. It literally brought you down to this diminished level. After the first couple of days of wearing the corset and hyperventilating, I said to Enrico Sabbatini, 'Who was it who got women out of corsets, because whoever it was should be crowned a feminist hero.' He told me it was Coco Chanel. What a great thing to have done, what a liberation."

Some feminists may criticize Fonda for playing a character in Old Gringo who is in the shadow of two men, but she defends the role. "Because I identify myself as a feminist doesn't mean I always have to play strong, feisty, feminist leaders," she asserts. "Most people make little incremental changes in their lives. What interests me are those very average people who go from A to F the way most of us do. Sometimes you go from A to Z, at a particular time in history. But that's not an everyday occurrence. Harriet was a woman who came to Mexico with all these North American preconceptions and stereotypes, which were just blasted in front of her eyes. It's a passive role, but it's wondrous to play someone where the veils are being pulled from her eyes. I believe so much in that, because I've experienced it in my own life. Most of the films I've done have been about changing, and that's why even though my part is more passive than the men's roles, it was exciting for me to do."

An unsympathetic observer might insinuate that Fuentes's story of a woman dominated and educated by men is one that Jane Fonda has acted out in her own life. One of her harshest critics, Charles Krauthammer, wrote a devastating review of Jane Fonda's Workout Book in the New Republic: "Having ingested the values first of Roger Vadim and now of Tom Hayden, she delivers with mind-numbing seriousness the startling message that one should never take one's values from others and, in particular, that women should never accept sexual stereotypes that make them appendages to men. A curious message for a book that peddles Tom Hayden's ideas wrapped in fane Fonda's body." But still another Jane Fonda may be stirring in 1989. Perhaps her new position as a single woman with a female business partner will give her a different perspective in the years ahead.

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