NON-FICTION – FEATURE STORY PROFILE: Jane Fonda: Opening Up and Speaking Out

JANE FONDA: OPENING UP AND SPEAKING OUT

by David Lefkowitz

(This article was first published in Long Island Woman magazine, March 2020.)

Does Jane Fonda contradict herself? Very well, she contradicts herself. After all, this is an actress who began her career with a Tony-winning turn on Broadway but then gained stardom playing hookers and babes in such films as Walk on the Wild Side, Circle of Love, and Barbarella. This is also a woman who championed exercise as the best way to stave off aging but later succumbed to Hollywood’s plastic-surgery siren call. A woman who bought into her famous dad’s patriotic values and yet committed diplomatic acts that bordered on treason. A woman who became a feminist symbol but was frequently and willingly caught in the spell of powerful men. Oh, and a woman who renounced the trappings of L.A. and materialism only to marry billionaire mogul Ted Turner. 

She is also a woman who has made a career—in the notoriously amnesic entertainment industry—last six full decades and counting. If you didn’t know Jane Fonda as the vivacious newlywed smooching Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, you knew her as the scarified prostitute in Klute. You cried when she interacted with papa Henry in On Golden Pond and laughed watching her gain office empowerment in 9 to 5. And if you missed her arc on The Newsroom, surely you’ve seen her camaraderie with Lily Tomlin on Grace and Frankie, now airing its sixth season (and shooting its seventh) on Netflix.

Shapeshifting plus longevity equals an endlessly fascinating personality, one that Fonda herself delved into in her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far and that HBO recounted in its recent documentary, Jane Fonda: A Life in Five Acts. Having reached the age of 82, the actress is readier than ever to offer frank assessments of her life choices, career cul-de-sacs, and political stances. She even tours occasionally, doing live Q&A/life-overview concerts (though a December 2019 stint at Westbury’s NYCB Theater was canceled without explanation). Fonda has taken hits, sometimes deservedly, for thoughtless public gestures, but her five arrests for protesting climate change attest to a decades-long yearning to make her celebrity voice count for something.

To be sure, she knows well the double standard often placed on women who speak their minds versus men who do the same. As she notes in her book, when husband Turner opined, the press would call him passionate. When she’d do it, she was branded as “strident and shrill”—as evidenced by a Life Magazine article about her that was titled “Non-Stop Activist: Nag, Nag Nag.” Of course, to modern eyes, that sounds more like a badge of honor than a knock.

“I’m an open-upper,” she told Long Island Woman in our late autumn conversation. “I’ve done a lot of the public speaking by now, and it tends to be a lot of fun—often revelatory. I think it’s fair to say the audiences always leave having had a very good time and maybe having learned a few things. I try to be helpful; I think being honest is being helpful. I mean, why talk about yourself if you’re not gonna open up and be real? All of us women have had the same struggle, the same challenges—and many men, as well. So you have to tell the truth.”

Even those who see hypocrisy in Fonda’s actions—be it promoting peace by riding a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun or having work done despite being the icon of video exercise—will likely be disarmed by her frankness and confessional style. She has long apologized for the horrid optics of the Hanoi Jane photo, and in 2018 she told Vanity Fair that, like it or not, plastic surgery gave her “a decade more to survive in the business” of Hollywood. To this, she added, “I have a fake hip and a fake knee and a fake thumb. Just call me the Bionic Woman!” 

Asked by Long Island Woman what she has learned about herself by doing the documentary and speaking tours, Fonda deadpans, “Nothing. When I wrote my memoirs, that was where I really uncovered things about myself that I hadn’t realized. I had turned 60 and was looking at my last act, so I spent time studying the past.”

In directing her film about Fonda, Susan Lacy chose to partition the actress’s life into five acts—four of them marked by her being under the sway of a powerful man, be it father Henry Fonda or ex-husbands Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden, and mogul Ted Turner. But now that she’s in her most independent era, Fonda chafes at the movie’s structure. “Personally, I divide my life into three acts: The first 30 years, the second 30 years, and the last 30 years. I couldn’t know how to live my last 30 years if I hadn’t known what I had done in the first 30 years. So I spent five years researching my life, my parents, my grandparents. And that process taught me a great deal. So when it came time to do the documentary or the speaking, no, I’m not learning during that time. I’m teaching.”

As the movie makes clear, for all her manning of political and feminist barricades, Fonda often defined herself in terms of powerful men: pleasing an unreachable dad, fitting into Vadim’s hedonistic lifestyle, pouring her time and money into Hayden’s campaigning, and being swept off her feet by Turner’s bonhomie. Yet whether by Lacy’s conception or Fonda’s own, the last segment is about the actress alone. “Because of the work I did to write my book,” Fonda says, “I certainly understand myself better at this age. I have had two other important relationships [since her divorce from Turner], but I realize that’s no longer for me. I have a whole lot more time to devote to other things now that I’m not in a relationship and know that I never will be in a relationship again with a man.

I have lots of relationships but they’re not romantic, they’re friendships.”

No question, Fonda is entitled to have complicated feelings about the male-female dynamic. Her mother, a victim of sexual abuse, committed suicide when Fonda was 12, and the actress herself experienced both childhood sexual trauma and rape as an adult. For her, the “Woke” era is long overdue, and she offers a snarky laugh when I suggest that the era has become so sensitive to harassment, men must be super-careful in their interactions with women. “Super-careful?,” she chortles, “No, men just have to behave like decent human beings. If that means being super-careful, that’s very interesting because it says a lot about men. Hopefully, the `Time’s Up’/`Me Too’ movement will help men regain their humanity and realize that they’re not entitled to treat women however they want. More women are speaking up—which helps other people to realize how pervasive sexism—including violent sexual assault—is, and that’s all to the good.

We are human beings together on this planet, and we have to respect each other. The movements are a good, important step forward in the journey to that goal.”

It is this idea of looking backward and inward, of figuring out how you arrived where you are and how best to get wherever you might be going, that seems to be most crucial to Fonda’s psyche these days. As she told NPR, “You don’t become wise by having a lot of experience; you become wise by reflecting deeply on the experiences that you’ve had.”

Put another way, having newly embraced Christianity and her own efficacy as a woman, Fonda ends her 2005 autobiography by owning and appreciating, “Every earned line on my skin and scar on my heart . . . I can affirm every imperfection as my share of our mutual, flawed, fragile humanity.”

Those who have seen the HBO documentary know that the actress is not above giving herself the occasional pep talk, addressing herself by her last name and dispensing no-nonsense self-recommendations. It is what she does when I ask what she would tell her 20-year-old self if given the opportunity to go back and advise young Jane. “It’s gonna be a tough road, Fonda!” comes the reply. “Keep your head up and your eyes open, and know that if you are intentional about getting better and braver and stronger, then you can. So don’t give up.”

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BYLINE:

David Lefkowitz hosts the Dave’s Gone By show Saturday mornings live on Facebook (facebook.com/radiodavelefkowitz). He is co-author of musical comedy Shalom Dammit!

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NOTES & BACKSTORY:

This one was a grind, not because Fonda was in any way difficult, but I had only 10 minutes with her on the telephone, of which the first minute was introduction and two other minutes were fairly specific about her upcoming gig at Westbury—which was canceled a week later. In other words, my job was to spin 1500 words out of seven minutes. Eat your heart out, Cameron Crowe.

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NON-FICTION – FEATURE STORY PROFILE: Christine Lahti – Riding the Waves

Riding the Waves: Christine Lahti on the Feminist Path

(c) 2018 David Lefkowitz

(Note: This article was first published in Long Island Woman, July 2018)

With fourth-wave feminism inspiring marches, activism, and hashtags against violence and harassment, women are once again feeling pressured to decide where they “fit” in terms of society’s demands on them. If you are a proud housewife and mother, are you a throwback? If you are militantly unisex in dress and style, are you denying your natural muliebrity? If you use your body and sexual power as a facet of your career, are you falling into the traps of male-constructed desires and stereotypes?

Though these socio-political questions are constantly debated on a macro level, every woman, of course, has her own beliefs, boundaries, and experiences that shape her response to society’s shifting mores. Going back to look at your choices along the way can be painful but also edifying and satisfying. To quote the Talking Heads, “You may ask yourself: how did I get here?”

Someone who rose to that challenge—and lived to write about it—is award-winning actress Christine Lahti. Since landing the plum role of Al Pacino’s girlfriend in 1979’s And Justice for All, the actress has worked steadily—never quiet reaching a mega-hit status but giving memorable performances in such respected films as Swing Shift and Housekeeping, and holding the spotlight as a rival surgeon on Chicago Hope and a sobriety-challenged ADA on Law & Order: SVU. Along the way came stints on Broadway, an endearingly embarrassing moment at the Golden Globes, an Oscar for directing a short film, marriage, motherhood, and a lot of anecdotes about what it meant to be an aspiring actress in the pre-#MeToo era of casting couches and offhanded cruelty disguised as career advice.

The result is her newly published memoir, true stories from an unreliable witness: A Feminist Coming of Age, which is as much about Lahti finding herself as an empowered woman as it is about her mostly charmed life as an actress. Memories range from her mother breaking through a suffocating Stepford Wife-Meets-June-Cleaver persona to become a professional artist, to Lahti being hired as a dinner date for a rich gentleman (and being too naïve to realize that dinner meant, well, more than dinner), to auditioning for a casting director who said she didn’t possess the looks or talent to succeed it unless she slept with the men who could give her jobs.

“He didn’t assault me or try to rape me,” Lahti recalls in our late-winter conversation, “but he devastated me by trying to convince me that my work was only in my sexuality, that I would never make it unless I `slept my way to the top’—which was how he put it. Part of me believed he might be right. An internalized misogyny made me think, `Oh my God. All my training, my intelligence, my education, my heart—everything about me was dismissed in that room when he said, `the only way your dreams will ever come true is if you become a prostitute.’

“That was the day I became a feminist in my bones,” she adds, “although the scars of this kind of treatment are lifelong. So you just have to be mindful and work on the distrust you develop about male aggression. You hopefully move on and treat everybody as individuals and not assume that you’ll be harassed or mistreated.”

For all her residual anger and disbelief, Lahti doesn’t call out the bad guys in her book by name. She didn’t even report the casting director back then because “I felt wouldn’t be believed and it wouldn’t do anything. And as I said, I thought, `Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m just new at this and naïve.’”

Lahti has traveled a long way since then, and she says that by reexamining her life “through the sexism of show business, and now navigating through the ageism of show business, it’s all through the lens of being a feminist, which I define simply as a person who believes men and women should have equal rights. I saw my mom being treated like a second-class citizen, and I saw the mothers of all my friends being treated that way. So I was determined not to be like that.”

As such, Lahti has generally been careful to take roles that feature complex, vulnerable, but multi-faceted women, be it Wendy Wasserstein’s consciousness-building Heidi on Broadway, or playing a former Sixties radical still on the run in Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty. In fact, her rare career regrets included doing, in her pre-fame days, a Joy dishwashing liquid commercial (not exactly ground zero for women’s lib), and a 1995 horror movie called Hideaway: “Over the years, I tried to be really selective about what films I did, but sometimes it just depends on how long it’s been since I’ve worked or how much I need to pay the rent. So I hadn’t worked in a long time, and the director was able to convince me somehow that Hideaway was a feminist thriller, a psychological thriller. And it’s so not! It’s a horror movie! And not a movie I put on my resume.”

Missteps aside, unlike other actresses forced to decide between being a role model or fashion model, Lahti doesn’t feel the need to justify her nude scenes . . . because she hasn’t done any. “Saying `no’ was a typical, second-wave feminist reaction, I guess,” she explains. “If I was in a movie, and if I was nude, or partially nude, I thought I would not be taken seriously as an actress. At the time, we felt the only power we were given was in our sexuality. So that by denying it, at least externally to the world (by dressing down, not wearing a lot of makeup, not dressing in a sexual way), we would force men to take us more seriously.

“What’s different now is that younger women tend to be pro-sex feminists. They get to be as sexual as they want—which doesn’t mean they want to fuck you. If men objectify them, that’s the men’s problem. These women are empowered and love their sexuality, they celebrate it. So if I were 25 now, would I make different choices? Maybe. But no matter what, it’s always about doing good work and choosing projects that portray women in a three-dimensional way.”

To demonstrate, Lahti proudly lists such credits as the Bill Forsyth film, Housekeeping (“a little gem of a movie”), her off-Broadway turn last fall in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, and a short-lived series on the WB Network, Jack and Bobbie. “That show had a small but devoted, passionate fan base. It was on the wrong network, so it lasted only one season, but it was really smart, and I loved the character. She was a very flawed professor and mom who smoked dope and was insecure about her boys’ rebellion. The show was from the teenagers’ point of view but also explored how a parent hurts when a teenager rebels or is disrespectful.”

Lahti’s own three children with husband Thomas Schlamme are doing just fine. “One’s an abstract painter,” she notes, “one’s a composer-musician, and one’s a singer-songwriter-actress. They’re all finding their paths. My advice to them? Just work your ass off. If you love it and work really, really hard, the sky’s the limit. I was told that by my parents—even though I was `just a girl.’ That was a great gift that they gave me, so I wanted to impart that to our children.”

And yes, feminism is also a component of that parenting paradigm. Lahti recalls, “When she was 11 years old, I took my daughter to a march in Washington for reproductive freedom. Millions were there, and she got a big taste of activism. So that was the day she became a feminist in her own way, for a younger generation.

“My sons are also feminists,” she notes. “My husband and I want to model for them that parents can be equal partners with mutual respect. Also, my sons must respect women and not treat them as sex objects or objectify them. My sons truly are respectful men—and they just couldn’t be any other way because they grew up with this in their faces every day. They also learned from their father and me how it is so limiting when you narrow gender definitions. For men, if you’re living by a classic, patriarchal model, you don’t get to be nurturing or cry or be celebrated in the home the way women are. As Gloria Steinem said, `Women will never have power outside the home until men have power in the home.’ I think that’s what feminism gives to men and women: it broadens all our human potential and doesn’t limit us to some patriarchal gender definitions.”

Lahti adds that although she began writing true stories two years before the so-called Weinstein effect, she dreamed about this movement her whole life and is thrilled to be living through “such a heartening reckoning in our culture. Women are finally being heard and believed, and there are actual repercussions for their poor treatment. Yes, it’s definitely complicated, and there needs to be lots of nuanced conversation, but it’s unbelievably thrilling.”

Married life, too, has proved to be “fantastic” for Lahti. Asked the secret to her 35 years of bliss, the actress replies, “Don’t see each other that much. Really. Tommy and I both have careers we love, so we spend a lot of time away or on location. It’s so great because we both bring back tales of our adventures and share what we learned. That’s helped us a lot: having a partnership of mutual respect, and both of us loving what we do.”

In her book, Lahti also points to honesty as the best way to keep a marriage solid. One time, she and a handsome co-star found themselves getting particularly playful off camera. Though a full-on affair was averted, Lahti nevertheless confessed the flirtation to her husband, which led to constructive discussions about how they’d been taking each other a bit too for granted.

Readers paging through true stories for juicy name-dropping about Lahti’s days as a single woman will likely be disappointed, however. She spends less than a paragraph on her three-year “on and off” relationship with And Justice for All co-star Al Pacino. Asked to elaborate, the actress admits, “I fell madly in love with him—or at least at the time, I thought I was in love with him, and it was intense for me, but it just didn’t work out. I guess we weren’t meant for each other. But he’s an incredible actor and a great, great guy. I wouldn’t say we’re close friends, but we’re still friendly, and it was all good.”

Even better are Lahti’s self-deprecating stories about nearly missing her Golden Globe moment because she was in the bathroom, and her worst night playing Maggie in a 1985 Long Wharf Theater staging of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s a laugh-out-loud tale worth reading in full, but the short version is that Maggie’s ineffectual husband Brick, fed up with her relentless need, hurls his crutch at her. On this night, however, Brick’s throw proved errant, and Lahti noticed the crutch being held by a woman in the front row. A tug of war ensued, with the actress trying to stay in character as the older lady resolutely clutched the prop. Needless to say, the audience began seeing the humor in the situation—especially when they noticed what Lahti didn’t: that the prop crutch had landed elsewhere on the stage, and Lahti was trying to pry a real crutch from an old woman with a broken leg.

“No, I did not laugh,” Lahti recalls of the incident. “I was such a serious, Uta Hagen student and still in character. I just gave a little shrug that said, `Well, I don’t need your crutch anyway.’ Meanwhile, Brick was not looking the entire time and had no idea what was going on. After the curtain came down, Peter Weller came up to me and said, `God, the audience was going crazy! What did I do that was so funny?’”

In her youth, Lahti did laugh at, and admire, actresses like Marlo Thomas (in That Girl) and Mary Tyler Moore, for being funny and vulnerable yet independent. “I had never seen a woman be able to have her own apartment and, apart from a few boyfriends, not have a particular man in her life,” Lahti says of the Mary Richards character. “She had a career, and she was fine with that. That was really informative and influential for me. I even ended up working with Mary Tyler Moore in a movie called Just Between Friends, and I got to tell her that!”

Now 68, Lahti is at the point where she can serve as the role model for younger generations, which she’s doing by telling her stories and continuing to seek worthy roles. “I got into my fifties and was hit by a tsunami of ageism,” she admits. “I’m still battling that, and it’s been the primary motivation for writing the book. I wasn’t gonna shut up—no way! I needed to stay creative, and my daughter, who’s a kick-ass feminist, said, `Go write yourself a one-woman show or a screenplay. You have so many stories, mom. Why aren’t you writing them down?’ So I took it to heart and started writing about three years ago. I developed the stories as monologues at first and did a workshop at [NYC’s] Cornelia Street Café.

“My only regret is that I didn’t start this in my thirties. Back then, when people used to say, `Don’t you have a production company?’, I would say, `Oh, no, I’m just an actress. I’m not entrepreneurial like that.’ Now, however, I’m feeling so empowered and not listening to all the ageist crap about women. I just want to produce and direct and write. I feel so liberated from that dependency of being `just an actress’—which is part of my journey as a feminist. I don’t have to listen to those casting directors or anybody who diminishes me. All of you can just shut up and let me go about my business, do the work that I love, and help other women by telling stories about women that aren’t being told.”

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A LITTLE MORE LAHTI

How do you stay in shape?

I love exercise and the endorphins I get from it. I just bought a Peloton bike, and I’ve been going to spin classes forever. Before SoulCycle, I was spinning.

Are your eating habits healthy, as well?

Sometimes I’m really bad, but most of the time I try to stick to low-sugar, low-carbs, and lots of vegetables. Still, I love ice cream and burgers and fries. So I don’t deny myself anything. Being tall may help. It distributes the weight over more surface!

Favorite Meal?

Thanksgiving. I like all those carbs and the care. I don’t cook much, but I love the cooking of that.

Favorite Dessert?

Hot fudge sundae with walnuts.

What books have you been reading?

I’m in love with Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts, Bluets), who is a wonderful feminist writer. Also, Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays, The Faraway Nearby.

What music have you been listening to?

Cardi B. I like to work out to her. Because I’ve got a 24-year-old daughter, I know some of these younger performers. But I still love and listen to Joni Mitchell constantly.

Favorite Vacation Spot?

Torch Lake in Northern Michigan. My parents had a cottage there, and I think it’s still my favorite spot. Recently, we’ve been renting a house in Sag Harbor for a week in the summer, and that’s pretty remarkable.

Favorite Movies?

Recently, I liked Three Billboards and Lady Bird. All-time: Gone with the Wind was lifechanging. I don’t know why, and not sure I’d still feel the same about it, but back then… Also, Sidney Lumet’s version of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Both films left me gutted; something changed in me after seeing them.

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BYLINE:

David Lefkowitz is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado. He also co-publishes Performing Arts Insider (TotalTheater.com) and hosts Dave’s Gone By (davesgoneby.com) live on Facebook on Saturday mornings (facebook.com/radiodavelefkowitz).

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