.jpg)
JANE FONDA is the most intimidating person I’ve ever met. It was nearly 20 years ago, a week before George W. Bush’s inauguration, when I arrived at the door of her hotel suite in Santa Monica to interview her for Vogue. I remember an outstretched arm—Hi, I’m Jane Fonda—a rigid handshake, and a once-over. No phony smile or how nice to seeeee you. As we sat down, I asked how much time I had. “Let’s start with an hour,” she said, curtly. No amount of friendly chit-chat—how about this rain?—changed the dynamic. Indeed, I had to fight the urge to flee. Only once I started asking direct, pointed questions (and stopped wasting her time) did things turn around and she talked animatedly, sometimes wildly gesticulating, for well over an hour. A woman Fonda once worked closely with in Atlanta had described her effect to me as a wave coming at you. “Well, I don’t think I’ve crushed too many people,” she said, when I told her, looking a little hurt. “You can get out of the way and get scared, or you can get it and go with it.”
I think I was caught off guard by that chilly reception because I thought I had already passed some kind of test. In the spring and summer of ’96, I fell into a social circle that included Vanessa Vadim, Fonda’s daughter with the director Roger Vadim, and Rory Kennedy, the documentary filmmaker and daughter of Robert Kennedy. It was a friend of a friend-of-a-friend situation, and I took an instant liking to Vanessa. Like her mother, she seemed both brash and bashful at once, hiding her eyes behind the bangs of a Klute shag (ironically enough). She lived in New York City but went everywhere with her dog, Osa, an Australian shepherd. As smitten as I was with both of them, I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking Vanessa questions about her mother, whom I was fascinated by but who also reminded me of my mother—an impatient, active worrier who suffers no fools.
And so: Just a month after the 2001 profile I wrote of Fonda for Vogue was finished (though not yet published), I was invited to join Vanessa’s family and a wide circle of friends to attend V-Day, a live benefit performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden. It couldn’t have been starrier, with Glenn Close, Queen Latifah, and Gloria Steinem among the dozens of actors and rock stars on the stage. Oprah performed in a burka. Fonda closed the show—the first time she’d done acting of any kind since she married Ted Turner a decade earlier. Beforehand, everyone had gathered in Fonda’s enormous hotel suite at the Hilton across from Rockefeller Center to sip white wine. Fonda was then under the spell of Carol Gilligan, the feminist Harvard professor and writer best known for her seminal 1982 work on gender and psychology, In a Different Voice. And she had recently left Turner because she felt stifled by all his manly me-first energy and was sick of shuttling between all of his many houses (13 at the time). She was staying put in Atlanta—to be close to Vanessa (who’d moved there to be close to her mother, who had moved there to be with Turner)—in a tidy little Craftsman bungalow in a groovy neighborhood. Vanessa had recently given birth to Malcolm, Jane’s first grandchild, and was raising him on her own. Jane was in the midst of renovating four lofts, in the same neighborhood as Vanessa’s, into one enormous space and had hired an artist to paint the foyer to look like a womb. “It’s the birth canal,” she’d told me in Santa Monica. “And it’s going to be pink. And suddenly you come through that and…20-foot high ceilings! You are born again into this huge open airy space.” She let out a great gusty laugh. “And I have nine Andy Warhols that will cover one wall.” Of…? I asked. “Me!” she said, in a hilarious display of self-parodic glee.
At one point during the pre-V-Day gathering at the Hilton, Fonda suddenly stood up, and in a grand actress-y gesture, as if she had just entered stage right, swept across the room toward Rory Kennedy and then stopped, hitting her mark. “Oh RORY,” she said. “Have I told you I’ve endowed a chair at Harvard?” Dramatic pause. “It’s no Kennedy School, but it’s something.” (I have been quoting that last bit of dialogue ever since.) There was an after-party, too—at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown. It was packed, with electricity in the air, everyone having a great time. At one point, I moved to the edge of the room and lit a cigarette, something you could still get away in those days despite laws that forbade it. Suddenly, I could see Jane drifting through the crowd toward me, Vanessa trailing her. As she arrived, her arm went up and out with two fingers extended. She took the cigarette out of my hand and I thought she was going to admonish me and put it out, but instead she put it to her lips, took a deep, long drag and then cocked her head back and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. Vanessa was appalled. “Moooooom!”
This past December I checked back in with Fonda after all these years. I headed to Washington, D.C., to participate in one of her now-infamous Fire Drill Fridays, the weekly rallies she’d been staging, mostly on the lawn of the Capitol, since October to bring attention to the climate crisis. Inspired by Greta Thunberg—and teenagers around the world who’ve been walking out of class on Fridays—Fonda has ended the rallies in civil disobedience with dozens, sometimes hundreds of people—some of them famous, often including Fonda herself—getting arrested. The Friday I was there was a week before Fonda’s 82nd birthday, and it was pouring rain. The participants gathered at St. Mark’s church, a few blocks from the Capitol. Fonda was milling about in her red coat—“the last new piece of clothing I will ever buy”—with a black-and-white houndstooth cap perched jauntily on her head, looking worried, as usual.
Sally Field was there. Unlike Fonda, she was the very soul of approachability, a warm, head-cocked smile for everyone. Despite the fact that she is perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning performance in the 1979 worker’s rights protest film Norma Rae, Field had never done anything remotely like this before. “The time is now,” she would say to the crowd at the rally later, just before she was handcuffed and hauled away. When I asked her why she decided to participate, she said, “Because this is just so amazingly Jane. I am proud to do it, proud to be here for Jane and for my country.” And then she told me how they met, back in the early ’80s, when they both had development deals with production offices at the old 20th Century Fox lot. Jane had sent her a “fan letter” and insisted that they have lunch. “And I wrote back to her and said, ‘I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to receive this letter, and I can’t have lunch with you...because I wouldn’t be able to speak! If you will wait a while, maybe I will grow up some.’ ” Were you intimidated? “Even from afar, she seemed like a quandary to me. And intimidating beyond belief! Because she was willing to stand up for what was right. She was willing...you know...in female terms…to not be liked.” Even today, after decades of lunches, Field was still a little scared of her. “She’s so raw. And I don’t think you’re ever prepared for how much it is, how present she will be with you when you’re sitting there.”
The next afternoon I found myself once again in a hotel suite with Fonda, feeling ill at ease because she was brusque as always, dispensing with all niceties. (“What is the purpose of this?” were not her first words but damn nearly.) She’d been living in Washington since September, and her suite had taken on the feeling of a command module. She rolled back and forth on a desk chair between the computer, where she had been writing her speeches, and the couch where I was sitting. She wore yoga pants and a skintight black-and-white striped shirt, with a cowboy hat. She was, it must be said, as lithe and fit as ever, her big bright blue eyes still lit with mischief. We talked about the Vogue profile from two decades ago (which she did not remember), and it became plainly, if not painfully, obvious that she did, in fact, not remember me—not even a little bit. But then I brought up the V-Day night and suddenly it all came rushing back. “Such a great party,” she said with a big smile. You took a drag of my cigarette that night, and it upset Vanessa, I said. “I remember it well.” She paused. “I’m the only ex-smoker I know who can take an occasional puff and never go back. No desire.” Why was that party so great, I ask. “Well, I hadn’t acted in...10 years? And I was scared to death. Just petrified. And this is literal. I prayed that I’d be sideswiped by a bus or a truck in New York—not to do any permanent damage but enough to put me in the hospital so I wouldn’t have to get up there and do that monologue. I was that scared. And once I did it and it worked? Let’s party! I got so drunk. And I danced all night. Just had a complete blast.” When I reminded her about her announcement that she had just endowed a chair at Harvard she said, “Yeah, and then Larry Summers became the president and he didn’t want anything to do with gender studies.” She stared at me for a second. “So I took the money back.”
Jane had just turned 63 when I met her in Santa Monica. What does 82 know that 63 didn’t? “Oh, I’m way better now,” she said. “I had just left the marriage to Ted that I had really hoped would last. So I was unhappy about that and I...you know, I was just at the very beginning of writing my memoir. So I hadn’t figured a lot of things out. The five years I put into writing my book and working on myself definitely paid off. I strongly recommend it. And I realize that I’m exactly where I want to be. I’m a single woman because I don’t have time to not be...single.” She gave the question some more thought. “Let’s see: I know a lot more about climate change; I know more about episodic television; I know more about the history of slavery and racism because I’ve been studying it. But the most important thing is, between 63 and 82 I became an integrated person. I’m at peace with myself. I know that wouldn’t be true if I wasn’t doing this activism. I have a real hard time when people say, ‘What do you think you are more? An activist or an actor?’ It’s of a piece. So one of the things that I knew I wanted to do was to live so that when I got to the end, I wouldn’t have a lot of regrets. And regrets are always things not done. And I’m also realizing...I don’t think there’s going to be a fourth act. But there may be a substantial coda!”
One of the most touching moments in the 2018 HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts comes at the end, when Fonda is talking about having made peace with her mother’s troubled life—and suicide—and the effect it’s had on her. “I hope Vanessa can forgive me,” she said. I had heard through friends that she and Vanessa, whom I’d not seen in years, had been through a difficult time, but things had recently improved. She told me that Vanessa got married, had another child, and moved to a farm in Vermont. “Malcolm is 20!” she said. “And my granddaughter is 17. Both of them got arrested with me.” She looked a bit wistful. “Vanessa is a strong woman. She’s got...what? Twenty-six acres or something like that. And she’s doing the right thing for that land—regenerative agriculture. They all came down to D.C. Vanessa came twice. She was there when I got out of jail, which moved me very much.”
Fonda finally went home to her beloved dog in Los Angeles after the last Fire Drill Friday in early January so she could begin shooting the seventh and final season of Netflix’s Grace and Frankie with Lily Tomlin. The impact of her four months of civil disobedience—a noble and admirably sustained piece of performance art–meets–protest that captured hearts and generated countless #headlines—is hard to quantify, but one measure of Fonda’s success is that when she went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and said that if viewers wanted to know how to set up Fire Drill Fridays in their own communities, “just text 'JANE' to 877877, and we’ll help you,” more than 4,000 people did exactly that. “What Jane is doing,” said Ira Arlook, who has known Fonda since the early ’70s, when her protest days began in earnest during the height of the Vietnam War (and who serves as a spokesperson for Fire Drill Fridays), “is making a huge difference in terms of bringing people beyond worrying about climate change and into action. There are tens of millions of people who right now believe that it’s a crisis. But almost none of them have been asked to do anything.” Jane, in other words, is giving the people something to do.
She will continue her Fire Drills (though just once a month) in California through July—they’re now managed by Greenpeace—and there is both a documentary and a book on all of this rabble-rousing, due later this year. “I need three weeks once I get home to get ready to start filming again,” she said, perched in her command post with her cowboy hat on. “But when we finish at the end of July, I’m going to travel the country and build up Fire Drill Fridays.” She rolled back over to the coffee table between us and put her foot up. “These next two years are critical. I can’t imagine being able to work.” I was reminded of the day before, standing in the rain listening to Jane Fonda thunder from her pulpit, surrounded by acolytes, the Capitol dome rising through the gloom behind her, as news began to ripple through the crowd, huddled under umbrellas, that the House had just passed two articles of impeachment. I wondered aloud if she was thinking at all about the election, defeating Trump. “No,” she said, flatly. “I’m totally absorbed with climate.” A worried look crossed her face. “The Senate task force on climate change asked to meet with me,” she said. “And so I asked the senators, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ And Ed Markey said to me, ‘You’re building an army. That’s what we need. Make it big.’ ”