Jane Fonda: My life so far

Jane Fonda in the movie 'Barbarella' which was directed by her husband Roger Vadim in 1968.

My first memories of Jane Fonda were hormonal rather than aesthetic, recorded in the dark of the Majestic Theatre in Wellington where I saw Barbarella all those years ago. She inflamed my imagination as a sort of life-size, blow-up Barbie doll, an image that lingered whenever I thought of her - not often in recent years.

She was better than that as an actress, sometimes even superb, but in her autobiography, My Life So Far, she stars in a modern journey - from early and persistent victimhood, through relentless self-diagnosis and blame-apportionment and a particularly virulent form of do-goodism, on to God.

Only in America? Probably only the God bit in the third act. The first two acts are now common throughout the Western world.

But the book has been enough to erase my warm memory of Barbarella. I admired her "Hanoi Jane" exploits during the Vietnam War, but not as much as she did. For some time before that she had been leaping on every passing bandwagon and has continued to do so ever since.

I am awed by the energy that enabled her to campaign endlessly on behalf of every person or group she perceived as not getting a fair go, to get married several times and have affairs, to provide for a tribe of dependants and to continue making movies. But again I am less awed by her energy than she is.

What a paradox all this is: how could a woman with as quick an intelligence and as extraordinary a sense of dramatic character write such cliché-ridden, shallow prose, and have so little sense of herself, so little moral grounding.

The most hilarious example of how morally confused she is comes when her indignation overflows at a large billboard in South Vietnam advertising an American plastic surgeon making Vietnamese eyes rounder and breasts bigger. Thousands were having this done, her lover and next husband (for 16 years), Tom Hayden, told her.

She was speechless the United States was trying to overthrow an ancient culture and replace it not with democracy but "with a Western, consumer-driven Playboy culture making Vietnamese women so ashamed of their slight frames they were willing to mutilate themselves to become Westernised". A few years later she had a breast implant.

She's not sure whether she was sexually molested by one of her nanny's boyfriends. "But something bad must have happened around that time, because that was when I began behaving differently and having recurring fantasies in which I either watched or participated in sexually disturbing, even violent, acts".

When her French husband, Roger Vadim, brings home other women for threesomes, she joins in enthusiastically - perhaps, she rationalises, because I'm an actor - and then spends years wondering if it is possible for a woman to accept and enjoy such a thing. 

One of her many epiphanies was to realise her relationships and her self-image have been marred because she needed men to validate her existence as a woman. This came late enough to suggest she is a slow learner, emotionally at least. Fonda was raised in the restless 1950s and the tremulous 1960s when young people proclaimed they wanted to find themselves and looked in the oddest places - pill bottles, joints, communal beds and elsewhere. If some did find themselves, Fonda didn't, even though she made the fashionable journey to India. She had a privileged upbringing in many ways but a scary childhood within a disintegrating marriage between her actor father, Henry, and New York socialite mother. Her mother committed suicide by cutting her throat as Jane was coming towards her teens.

But traumatic though that must have been, she focuses on other much lesser events to account for her difficulty with intimacy and other personal failings. For example, that she was never photographed in her mother's arms after her birth only became unbearable when her younger brother, Peter, was. A reason was her mother suffered from depression after Jane's birth and was away from the family for a while.

Her grandmother later told her "tears streamed down your cheeks but you didn't cry out loud" when she saw the film her father took of her new-born brother in her mother's arms. Says Jane: "I believe it was right then that I sent some soft part of myself down into a vault somewhere for safekeeping".

During college she became addicted to Dexedrine and suffered bulimia and anorexia. The bulimia stayed with her until her forties.

Late in the book the reader begins to sense that Fonda is not the wilting flower she sometimes pretends to be. She overcomes so many problems, confronts so many frightening situations, you think, she is as tough as Donald Rumsfeld, as ruthless as Al Capone, and as resilient as Tony Blair. In fact, she lived the sort of confrontational life Al Capone might have taken up if only he had been pretty.

Looking back, she apportions blame for all her perceived problems. Her father becomes the maestro of her victimhood because of his taciturnity and locked-up emotions which shut her out of his affections after she was a little girl. But she forgives him, and forgives him, and forgives him again. Indeed, she forgiveth too much.

In her fifties, after Tom Hayden left her, Ted Turner sought her out and she may have thought she had found God. After all, he rewrote the Ten Commandments. But Ted Turner-type titans do exactly what they want. Within a month, she discovers he is having it off with someone else at lunch time.

Towards the end God does come along. You think, with enormous relief, she won't any longer have to continue with her endless campaign, her insatiable craving, to save the world. She can leave it to Him.

Well, no. As she approaches 70, hers remains a life devoted unremittingly to causes.

Her latest? "I write about my vagina and my vagina-related fears because of the work I have chosen (and sometimes feel I was 'called') to do in my third act. I work with young people on issues surrounding gender, sexuality, early pregnancy and parenting."

Amen.

* Elbury Publishing, Random House