Over the last 30 years she has tried on a dozen identities, from sex kitten, to Oscar winner, to political radical, to exercise fanatic. And now, at 51, Jane Fonda describes herself as "an idea person who happens to act."
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As she would be the first to admit, Jane Fonda does not have the most dynamic, complex or pivotal role in Old Gringo. In this epic romance adapted from Carlos Fuentes's novel, she plays a New England spinster who journeys to Mexico in 1913 and comes under the spell of two strong men--a fiery general in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army (Jimmy Smits) and a world-weary American writer (Gregory Peck). Harriet Winslow recalls Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Stingo in Sophie's Choice--the observer who records the exploits of far more fascinating tragic characters. But like those other narrators, Fonda's character is the figure who survives, the one who lives on to tell the tale. It is far from the most interesting part Fonda has ever played, but it's an apt one. Offscreen as well, Jane Fonda is the quintessential survivor. Over the last 30 years she has tried on a dozen identities, from sex kitten to political activist to fitness guru. She has been mocked, vilified, revered and neglected. Yet she has somehow landed on her feet after every setback.
A chameleon who seems infinitely adaptable to changes in the political and cultural climate, Fonda has also been propelled by a ferocious tenacity. When she started acting, critics dismissed her as a featherweight talent riding her famous father's coattails. Determined to prove that she owed her career to something more substantial than her pedigree, Jane took off for France, where she hoped that she could develop a cachet she lacked at home. Instead she forged a professional and personal alliance with director Roger Vadim, who directed her image as a voluptuous but vacuous screen siren. Still, the Vadim connection (which was formalized in marriage in 1965) did help to make Fonda an international star, and she demonstrated her amazing growth as an actress when she starred in a pair of powerful dramas, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute.
By the time Klute (which won her the first of two Academy Awards) opened in 1971, Fonda had embarked on a whole new odyssey. She divorced Vadim and plunged into an affair with Donald Sutherland, her Klute co-star. Sutherland also became her comrade on the barricades during the antiwar movement. Suddenly the actress who had been best known, just a few years earlier, for her striptease in Barbarella was one of the country's most visible radicals, seizing every forum to harangue her audience on behalf of the Black Panthers or the Viet Cong. Fonda's career took a nosedive as her political enemies multiplied. At the 1972 Republican convention in Miami, the Young Americans for Freedom circulated a petition demanding that she be tried for treason. The following year, after she denounced returning POWs as "hypocrites and liars," Connecticut Republican Congressman Robert Steele declared on the floor of the House of Representatives, "I would like to nominate Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda for a new award: the rottenest, most miserable performance by any one individual American in the history of our country."
A few years later "Hanoi Jane" underwent still another metamorphosis. She decided to play a more conciliatory role, at the encouragement of her second husband, former SDS leader Tom Hayden, who was by then seeking his own power base in the mainstream. Fonda came back to Hollywood in a giddy comedy, Fun With Dick and Jane, which was designed to prove that she could still be sexy and funny and boffo at the box office. Then her career went into high gear with a string of gripping dramas--Julia, Coming Home, and The China Syndrome. Although some of her public statements continued to spark controversy, Fonda was once again an unmistakable superstar. The success of her Workout salons, exercise videos and handbooks established the onetime radical as a capitalist-come-lately and did a great deal to turn her into a beloved American heroine, an inspiration to millions of women.
Now Fonda has arrived at still another turning point. Her 16-year marriage to Hayden is over, and her ten-year partnership with Bruce Gilbert (who produced all of her movies from Coming Home to The Morning After) has also ended. She's 51 years old, and although her Workout-primed body would be the envy of women half her age, there's no denying that she's well into middle age. Fonda speaks frequently of craving challenge, and the greatest one she faces may be simply holding on to stardom in a culture that worships youth and is constantly on the lookout for new faces to supplant yesterday's idols.
Fonda is well aware of the problems that aging actresses have traditionally faced in Hollywood. Male actors like Clint Eastwood have continued to win juicy starring roles well into their fifties and sixties, but that has been far less common for women. "What happens very often," Fonda observes, curled up on a sofa in her spacious, secluded Santa Monica production office, "is that Women will have a really nice career up to a certain point, and then between the ages of 45 and 65, there's a sort of semi-retirement. Then they come back as character actresses and win their third Oscar. I don't want to do that. I would like to be able to keep going as an actress through that period. It's undeniable that there are fewer roles for women as you get older. But I intend to put a dent in that. I like challenges, and I'm looking forward to breaking some ground in this area if I can."
She has by no means surrendered to Hollywood's gender and age biases, but a new approach to her career suggests that Fonda's taking account of some hard realities. "I'm beginning to work on projects that I would produce for other people," she says. "And that's feeling very comfortable for me. Recently I bought A Bright Shining Lie, the book by Neil Sheehan that just won the Pulitzer Prize. There's no role for me in that. But it's a 20-year dream come true to do a history of the Vietnam war."
Her enthusiasm for this project is unabashed, and it demonstrates that she has not turned her back on the strong leftist principles that made her so controversial during the '70s. Although Fonda seemed to be recanting when she appeared on a Barbara Walters TV special and publicly apologized to Vietnam veterans for the anti-American rhetoric she spouted in Hanoi in 1972, she clearly has no intention of disavowing her belief that the U.S. government's policy in Vietnam was tragically misguided. A Bright Shining Lie may represent Fonda's most ambitious attempt to vindicate the antiwar movement that she championed two decades ago.
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.
After completing Old Gringo, Fonda made a romantic drama with Robert De Niro called Stanley and Iris, in which she is the one who takes charge of the education of a man; she plays a factory worker who teaches an illiterate co-worker how to read. Fonda is guarded in her comments on De Niro, laughing that she found him "very intense" but leaving it somewhat ambiguous as to whether she found his intensity a pleasure or a pain. By contrast, she speaks effusively about her Old Gringo co-star, Jimmy Smits. "I think he's an incredible presence on the screen," Fonda gushes. "We did a talent search in all of Latin America and Spain and the United States, and he was the only one. He was our first and last choice. He's extremely charismatic and sexy, but he has depth as well. I felt totally dominated by him."
One of the most problematic projects will be an American remake of Pedro Almodovar's arthouse hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Fonda admits she is taking a risk by remaking a foreign film that was so beloved by the critics, but she believes she can pull it off. "The challenge," she observes, "is how to keep that wonderful style and whimsy and warmhearted generosity that Almodovar had in his film and at the same time make it more accessible to an American audience. As great as the reviews were, very few people saw it, just because it was a Spanish movie. I would like more people to see it because of what it says about women. All of the women in the movie are being treated badly by men, but they have such joy and generosity and humor. My character is on the verge of totally falling apart, absolutely obsessing about this guy who's left her, and at the same time she is capable of taking care of her friends, watering the plants, feeding the animals, looking great--God forbid she shouldn't look good--and ready to seduce the policeman and her ex-lover's son. I love taking these women who are going through such hell and making such a positive movie. It's like a hymn to women's resiliency."
But isn't the movie somewhat regressive in focusing so intensely on women's obsession with men? "Well, we're all obsessed with men," Fonda chuckles in reply. "But that doesn't mean that we're not the greatest sex in the world. We're the strong ones, we're the ones that hold it all together. The movie shows us with all of our obsessions and vulnerabilities, but it also shows how fascinating we are."
Fonda also expects to spend at least a couple of years working behind the cameras on A Bright Shining Lie. Clearly she is still exploring just where her future in movies lies.
"Given how long it takes me to develop a project," she muses, "I know what will happen eventually is that I'll start a project that's supposed to be for me and that will end up being for a younger actress. It will be an interesting challenge for me to sit back on the sidelines as a producer while another actress plays a role that was originally destined for me. I think I'll be very good in that situation, because I love actors and I'm real supportive."
If her acting career does taper off, she claims she would survive quite handily. "There are a lot of things that interest me a whole lot that have nothing to do with acting," she says. "Producing, politics, health, hiking, fishing."
Nevertheless, Fonda is clearly wrestling with a host of personal and professional changes as she enters her sixth decade. She was reportedly devastated by the breakup of her marriage to Hayden, who was rumored to have been carrying on with a much younger woman. Aging has never been easy for American women, and it may be doubly difficult in Hollywood. Jane Fonda's mother committed suicide in 1950, and Fonda once said of the suicide, "Some of it had to do with the fact that she was middle-aged, and she'd never been taught to have anything but youth and beauty."
"I'm not suffering over my age," Fonda says. "I wish I was younger, but I'm not. Aging is definitely something that you have to think about as an actress, but it doesn't scare me. As long as life is rich and people like me, as long as guys like me, I'll survive. Right now I'm having a great time."
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Stephen Farber is co-author of Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego and the Twilight Zone Case.