Growing Fonda of Jane

The rebel has mellowed

Henry Fonda's little girl who went to Vassar grew up to be not only a gifted actress but the Pasionaria of the antiwar movement. In the early '70s Jane marched in protests and starred at rallies, and during a trip to North Viet Nam, spoke against the U.S. war effort over Radio Hanoi. "I'm not a do-gooder," she proclaimed in those days. "I'm a revolutionary--a revolutionary woman!"

Her protests inflamed supporters of the war. Groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars boycotted her films. She received death threats, and Maryland legislators half-seriously debated whether she should be punished with summary execution or merely with the removal of her tongue. To many her very name was an epithet.

Now the fires have cooled on both sides. But Fonda is still passionately political. Together with her husband Tom Hayden, a comrade-against-arms and an unsuccessful senatorial candidate in last year's election, she is promoting what they call "economic democracy," a vague term that seems to mean economic decentralization. On a 120-acre ranch just north of Santa Barbara, she and Hayden have set up a center for the 30 California chapters of their movement. When they are not busy with politics or movies, the Haydens live simply in a $40,000 house in Santa Monica with their son Troy, 4, and Vanessa Vadim, 10, her daughter by French Director Roger Vadim.

Ironically, the Hollywood Establishment that reviled her has now made her one of its spokeswomen. She presented the American Film Institute's lifetime achievement award to Bette Davis earlier this year, and was one of the hosts of the Academy Awards.

Her newest film, Julia, an autobiographical account of Playwright Lillian Hellman's life in the '30s, offers Fonda and Co-Star Vanessa Redgrave two roles that are far more powerful than most recently available to women. Fonda plays Hellman, and Redgrave plays Hellman's friend Julia, a committed antifascist. The movie opens Oct. 3, and TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief William Rademaekers talked to Fonda about it and about her life today.

On Julia and the possibility of richer roles for women: I was first offered the role of Julia, but I didn't want to play her because I was too on the nose. I'm not interested in playing committed, way-out liberated women. I think most people aren't like that, and that the value of movies is to have characters that people can identify with and relate to.

I wanted the challenge of playing this other woman, Lillian Hellman, who was so different from me. I didn't spend very much time with her--just a day and a half--but I read everything she wrote. What was particularly helpful to me were her plays. Somehow the spirit of the woman, the subconscious, was more in the plays.

I had never had the opportunity of playing a woman who thinks and who is mainly, at least at that stage of her life, motivated by ideas. It was wonderful. It's hard if you're an actress to have to portray women who on some level are either neurotic or lacking in something--desperately needing the love of a man, or just plain superficial. Whenever a man-woman relationship comes along, there's always some game playing, and this was a film where there was no game playing. Lillian was relentlessly what she was, you know, as was Julia.

I think that the old stereotypes have been rendered obsolete by women's new consciousness. But in order for an industry that is profit-oriented and financially precarious to begin churning out serious new women's films, new bankable stereotypes will have to be discovered. So far those types of films have been freaks--films like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Klute--the exception rather than the rule. If films such as Julia are box office successes, the studios may rethink their position.

On how she became an activist: It would have happened to me sooner if I had lived in this country, but I was in France all during the '60s, living in the world of Roger Vadim, with my blond hair and falsies. Although some people would find it hard to believe, I was always defending the U.S. during those days. I couldn't stand it if some Frenchman would come up and say, "What do you think about destroying a Vietnamese village in order to save it?" I would say, "It's not true"--exactly what my father said to me later. It took 1968, the events in the U.S. and the student uprising in Paris to begin to stir up my thoughts. I began to read about the war, and I became angry because I felt betrayed. I felt I wanted to be with the people who were doing something about the war--my marriage was also falling apart--and so I came back here. I got on the phone to Sam Brown, who is now head of the Peace Corps but who was head of the Viet Nam moratoriums, and I said: "My name is Jane Fonda. What can I do?"

On growing up in Hollywood: I was never very comfortable in the Hollywood milieu. Part of it has to do with my father. It's true he was a movie star and that we lived in Brentwood. And we had a swimming pool and a tennis court. But there was always an element of a Midwestern farmer about him, something about ethics and integrity. There is something about my dad that conflicts with the world that Brooke Hayward is talking about in her book Haywire. I never liked privilege. It always seemed to be absolutely preposterous, all this stuff that goes along with fame. But I think that if I had been very beautiful--and maybe if I had been very self-confident--I would have fitted in just fine with the world of Brooke Hayward.

On the women's movement: The movement to me is not as the media tend to portray it. It's not a bra-burning, down-with-men kind of movement. Even more important, I don't think it's "We want a piece of the pie." Putting a woman in the White House or replacing the president of Exxon with a woman isn't going to change anything. Sometimes one has the impression that the women's movement is saying, "Move over. We want in," and that when women get power, the problems will be over. I don't think that's true. I think if you just kept the current structure and put women in it, the problems would still exist. Upper-middle-class and intellectual women would be in positions of power, but the mass of women would be in just the same situation as they're in now. I think you need a whole restructuring of who has power and what it is being used for. In order to achieve that women have to work with men.

On turning 40: I was terrified when I turned 30. I was pregnant and had the mumps, and Faye Dunaway was just coming out in Bonnie and Clyde. I thought: "Oh my God, I'll never work again. I'm old." But strangely enough, as I turn 40, my gray hairs and wrinkles don't bother me very much. I think it's because I'm happy. That always helps. And it's because I'm discovering that if you work at it and if you're lucky, you really can get wiser. I wouldn't want to go back.

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