Bosworth - Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman

A S SOON AS Jane returned from Vadims funeral in Paris, she plunged into her new life as a free and independent woman. For the next ten years, while I wrote about her transformationsfrom movie star to political actress to exercise gurushe was recycling these various selves. She has survived as many people; they are a genuine part of her and she can inhabit them at will. She markets them brilliantly, in order to remain relevant and visible to the public.

Its not possible to describe the wild variety and scope of everything she tried to do in the last decade. As usual, she never stopped. (Except when she had hip and knee replacement surgery in 2005. Friends insisted that she rest and she did, for a while, at her ranch.)

Some highlights: May 2001, at a tribute at the Lincoln Center Film Society to honor her stellar career, the theater was packed, and the audience applauded as Jane told them, Im on a quest. Who knows whats ahead? She went on to appear at the Rome Film Festival, where she was also honored. In Rome Jane saw her half sister, Pan, for the first time in twenty-five years; they talked about their mother for hours and what she had meant to both of them.

In April 2005, Janes autobiography, My Life So Far, was published with the usual publicity blitz (Jane dedicated the book to her mother). Two segments on 60 Minutes were to be aired on the publication date, accompanied by book serialization in both Time and People magazines, because my autobiography is a news event, she told somebody. She was upset when the Pope died on the publication date, which meant that the 60 Minutes segments had to be put off. She went on Larry Kings show and talked about that.

On the heels of her book, which was a bestseller, she starred in Monster-in-Law, her first movie in fifteen years, opposite Jennifer Lopez. Jane told me she adored playing the part of a celebrated TV interviewer la Barbara Walters who goes nuts after her youth-obsessed network bosses unceremoniously fire her. Janes portrayal of Viola is a self-obsessed, mocking caricature of the same conflicted persona she reveals in her autobiography. New York Times critic Steven Holden wrote, Fonda informed this disagreeable character with a zany, good-natured verve even when she was behaving atrociously. The movie was a box-office success.

At the time, I was deep into my own book interviewing directors like Sydney Pollack and flying to Greece to speak to Andreas Voutsinas. Jane and I met periodically. Mostly, I e-mailed her, telling her I was working hard. One time she e-mailed back: I was wondering. The book must be even harder to do cause mine came first. Glad you havent given up. Then she switched subjects: I am very happy and falling in love. Who knows where it will lead.

Earlier that year, she had complained on the Larry King show that she was tired of being celibate: Ted says, if you wait too long, itll grow over. Not long after that, at a book signing in Grand Central Terminal, she noticed a handsome, rugged man who bore a faint resemblance to Henry Fonda waiting in line for her autograph. She told him he looked like a movie star. He slipped her his card. She lost it. The following week when she was a guest on the David Letterman show, she declared, Will the man who gave me his card please call my office.

They were together for two years. But it ended finally: I got bored, Jane said. And she was busy touring all over the world with Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues. She had also started researching her new book, Prime Time: Creating a Great Third Act, about aging in our culture, and she was interviewing men and women around the country, couples in their seventies and eighties who were still vital, still doing things that mattered to them. Being active keeps you young.

In 2007, Janes beloved dog Roxie died and she replaced her with a ball of white fluff: a tiny dog named Tulea. She took Tulea everywhere with her. She said, I cant have a big dog anymore because I no longer have a husband with a private plane.

Speaking of husbands with private planes, Jane continued to travel with Ted Turner to his various ranchesher favorite is in Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentinaand occasionally mediated conflicts among his three mistresses when they called her for advice.

She never stopped promoting her celebrity for a cause at charity auctions and movie premieres, usually for her main foundation, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP). She was often accompanied by her brother, Peter, her daughter, Vanessa, her son, Troy, and her adopted daughter, Lulu.

A friend told me Jane decided to sell her celebrity ten years ago when she was at an AIDS benefit chaired by Elton John. All sorts of stuff was being auctioned off: a trip to Bermuda, a Jeep. Suddenly Jane says, Im going to auction myself off. I tried to stop her. But she runs up to the stage, grabs the mike, and calls out, Who wants to go out to dinner with Jane Fonda for $5,000? A guy shouts, I do! I was worried he might be a freak or a weirdo, but he turned out to be a very nice man who owned a business in Atlanta. Jane and he have since become friends.

At another benefit for G-CAPP in Atlanta, writer Claudia Glenn Dowling reported that Jane appeared in Tweety Bird slippers and flirted with Ted Turner who was in the audience, teasing him with lascivious looks and encouraging him to bid $12,000 for a ski weekend with Jane at her ranch. The pajama party with Jane outsold everything else and she didnt stop. She picked up a fishing rod and announced that people could also buy a weekend with Jane at Ted Turners Soque River house. She adds, The fish are huge, its Teds place, and Ill make breakfast. The auction was a great success. When it was over, Fonda looked for Turner in the crowd, but hed left. Ted? she called out. Hes got a short attention span, she told the audience.

Once I asked her, How do you cope with strangers who are paying to be with you for a weekend? She answered briskly, I handle it. We have dinner together and then I say good night and I go off to my room and they go off to theirs. It works out and I make money for my foundations.

In the ten years I was writing this book I saw Jane fall apart only once. She had been traveling nonstop for a variety of causes, ending up at an international womens conference at a Hilton hotel in New York, where she gave one of the keynote speeches. Afterward, I went up to her suite to say hello and found her pacing back and forth. When she saw me, she whirled away. I could tell she wished I werent there. Are you okay? I asked. With that, she yanked off the dark glasses she was wearing. One eye was hideously bloodshot. I am breaking apart, she cried in an angry panic. At that moment, Eve Ensler came into the room and tried to make her eat something but she refused. I have to have my picture taken tomorrow for my book cover. What am I going to do? Eve and I assured her she was going to be all right, but she had to relax and take it easy. I stayed with her for a few more minutes and then slipped away. I realized then how much this driven, complicated woman keeps inside herself and at what cost. Months later, when I saw her book cover, she looked absolutely beautiful and serene.

She began practicing yoga and went off to Zen retreats outside of Santa Fe; she learned to meditate and it calmed and centered her.

We had dinner together and I told her Id never seen her so mellow or laid back. Try not talking. Try existing in silence, she said. She had been doing just that for eight days and she found it to be very healing.

On March 10, 2009, Jane made her Broadway comeback in Moises Kaufmans 33 Variations. She told me she chose the play because its about life and death and the creative process. I am learning so much as I inhabit the character Katherine Brandt, this musicologist whos dying but determined to find out why Beethoven was so obsessed with composing thirty-three variations on a mediocre little waltz.