2000: Jane Fonda tacitly agrees to let Patricia Bosworth write a biography of her. But she is not willing to speak directly with Ms Bosworth because she is at work on her own book, the memoir My Life So Far.
2003: Ms Fonda changes her mind. She agrees in an e-mail (“Subject: Gulp”) to cooperate fully with Ms. Bosworth’s book. She has an agenda. She will show Ms Bosworth her FBI files only if Ms Bosworth sifts through them and extracts the good parts so that “My Life So Far” can use them.
2005: My Life So Far is published. It makes a strong impression. At 67, Ms Fonda has lived many different public lives and tried hard to explain them.
2005 onward: Ms Bosworth keeps working. But her job has got more difficult because, as Ms Fonda points out to her in an e-mail, “mine came first.”
2011: Prime Time, another book by Ms Fonda, arrives at the beginning of August. Ms. Bosworth’s Jane Fonda: the Private Life of a Public Woman arrives in August too, but not until the end of the month. Which book includes the line “You could have put what was left of me into a thimble?” And which has this: “If cared for properly, good sex toys can last for many years?”
Prime Time is a how-to book about being happy and self-aware at 73. Jane Fonda is about a much younger woman who had very little idea of who she was or how she treated others. And because My Life So Far demonstrated that its author still had a lot to learn about herself, there is enough room in the Fonda sphere for Ms Bosworth’s version. This is not a nosy celebrity biography full of gossip and poison. It sees what Ms Fonda cannot see about herself.
A remarkable line-up of Ms Fonda’s friends, lovers and colleagues were willing to talk openly about her to Ms Bosworth. Consider the interviewees who are no longer here to talk about Ms Fonda: Sydney Pollack, Hume Cronyn, Arthur Penn, Peter Boyle, Sidney Lumet, Roy Scheider, David Halberstam, Herb Gardner.
According to anyone with an opinion about the Fondas, the single most formative event in the family’s history was the 1950 suicide of Jane’s mother, Frances. She slit her throat after calling out to Jane, who ignored her, and who carries the lifelong guilt of not having tried to help. Many biographies and memoirs touch upon this incident and there would seem to be little that Ms Bosworth can add.
But Ms Bosworth wonders about Henry Fonda’s decision to appear on Broadway in Mister Roberts on that same night. She thinks his ability to perform reveals much about his emotional life, or lack thereof. She spoke to Ruth Mitchell, the show’s stage manager, who describes Henry Fonda’s tough, chilly nature.“Once he said to me, ‘Ruthie, I can be a real son of a bitch,’ ”she told Ms Bosworth in 2001. “And you know something? He was.”
One of Ms Bosworth’s main sources is Andreas Voutsinas, who lived with her in the early 1960s and offers keen if nasty memories of Ms Fonda’s ingénue phase. Mr Voutsinas volunteers much about Ms Fonda’s insecurities: “It’s ridiculous when you think about it, because she actually had long, slender, gorgeous legs, and her ankles weren’t that fat.”
Such sniping remarks aren’t prevalent in Ms Bosworth’s book, but they make good stories. A guy who danced with Ms. Fonda at a Long Island country club in the 1950s recalls that she carried a hidden hatpin in her hand to jab her dance partners in the neck. (“Pretty hostile gesture!”) And David Halberstam describes being enraged when he heard Ms Fonda mouth off about the history of Vietnam after her extremely controversial trip to Hanoi in 1972.
Ms Bosworth works most of her assessments of Ms Fonda into the book’s overview, but the Hanoi episode forces her to weigh in. She does it weakly, making the irrelevant point that Ms Fonda’s comments via North Vietnamese radio may not have been widely heard.
The chirpy Prime Time does not dwell on Ms Fonda’s past politics, either. It is ageing that she wants to address. She cites research and interviews with upbeat, lively, sexually active older people to extract some all-purpose lessons about endurance. The beautiful, dewy photo of Ms Fonda on the book’s front cover is a miracle of photography, fitness and plastic surgery, probably all three.
This older, mellower Ms Fonda provides a sharp contrast with the no-nonsense Jane who talked so openly about her wild and varied experiences with Ms Bosworth. But Prime Time demonstrates the same taste for expedience that Jane Fonda only describes. Here Ms Fonda arrives at generalities that happen to suit her specific personality. Most of Prime Time is more basic than that. And sometimes it is excessively basic, as when Jane Fonda offers up Proust for Beginners. “A single stimulus may bring forth buried memories,” she writes. “In his masterpiece ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ Marcel Proust illustrated this beautifully: the protagonist eats a small cake he enjoys as a child and memories come flooding back.”
Today the story of Ms Fonda’s seemingly endless array of startling, abrupt, culture-savvy reinventions has become that kind of small cake too.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
JANE FONDA: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A PUBLIC WOMAN
Patricia Bosworth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
596 pages; $30
PRIME TIME
Jane Fonda
Random House;
416 pages; $27
