On Golden Fonda

Jane Fonda has made more than her share of controversial scenes, in the movies and in the headlines, but none has quite matched a certain sylvan sequence in On Golden Pond. She stands on the edge of a dock in Squam Lake, N.H., her body firm and svelte, her skin as burnished as an Indian totem, her bikini two bright tattoos. A shiver or two later, she has backflipped off the dock and sliced into the cold water. As sentimental drama, the moment is effective; as cinema, it is unremarkable; as a display of new-fashioned star quality, it is radiant. But, oh, the ruckus it raised, as the movie reeled surprisingly toward blockbuster status last winter and spring. No audience could watch Jane without murmuring in tones of awe, "Look at

that tan!" "Look at that tone!" Fonda's critics took a different view. "She has a body like wood," one man said. "You don't want to stroke her, you want to sand her down." Dale Pollock, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, complained, "That scene is supposed to be the climax of the film. Instead, it's a commercial for Jane Fonda's Workout Book." If so, the commercial did its job. Work-out (Simon & Schuster, $18.95), published the month On Golden Pond was released, has had 31 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list (No. 1 for 21 weeks). The book has become the focus for a baby conglomerate that mints money by marketing Fonda's exercise ideology. A 90-min. video cassette showing Fonda and the workout instructors performing the regimen retails for $59.95; a two-record album of mellow-rock exercises has made the Top 40; her Workout studios are now in Beverly Hills, Encino and San Francisco and will be opening up in other large cities. At the Beverly Hills center, housewives and secretaries mingle with Hollywood actresses, such as Kate Jackson, Ali MacGraw and Jill Clayburgh, spending $6 per hr. to perform hamstring stretches, buttocks lifts and donkey kicks.

Occasionally, Fonda supervises the workouts--in those intervals when she is not acting in a movie or producing one, touring the talk shows, raising her two daughters, or promoting the campaign of her husband Tom Hayden for a California state assembly seat this fall. At 44, she is at the top of both her profession and her form. Fonda is an ace saleswoman for her program because for a quarter of a century now she has reflected changing fashions in dress and image, politics and physique. In the '40s she was a movie star's brat, going chubby and haywire, while her father Henry played love scenes and went to war. In the late '50s Jane was a Vogue cover girl, fresh out of Vassar and mummified in heavy makeup. The early '60s saw her as Hollywood's all-American ingenue in Tall Story and Sunday in New York. A few years later, her then husband Roger Vadim retooled her into a European sex symbol as Barbarella. By the early '70s she was a scrawny, scraggly Hanoi Jane, the ardent activist who visited the Viet Cong, turned up at Black Panther rallies, and cheered on the Indians who occupied Alcatraz, earning contumely for herself and an Oscar for her performance in Klute.

What a difference a decade makes. Jane's clenched fist, once the angry sign language for radical power, now helps form a taut bicep. She has become a role model for mid-life American women, as well as a gutsy advocate of causes like equal pay. She charms listeners from Malibu to Donahue with her no-nonsense do-gooding. She may be the country's most visible "liberal"--and the most electable, though for now she is content to sponsor Hayden's political career by ringing doorbells, and with some substantial contributions to his campaign. On Golden Pond, which her film company produced, not only took in more than $100 million at the box office but served as a public celebration of the bond uniting her and her father just before his death. She seems glowingly happy as a wife, a mother and a cottage industry.

In her introduction to the Workout Book exercises, Fonda performs some of her most strenuous handsprings, explaining her past. There were the youthful bouts of anorexia nervosa and jags of amphetamine popping at Vassar. Prescriptions were apparently easy to get from incurious doctors.

Later came attempts to meet Hollywood's or Paris' standards of sex appeal. "In an effort to conform to the sought-after female image," she writes, "I abused my health, starved my body and ingested heaven-knows-what chemical drugs. I took diuretics for almost 20 years, almost half my lifetime, something that appalls me today." In this sense, Workout is two books: an essay on the celebrity as society's most glamorous victim and a guide to salvation through sweat. Fonda's new eminence suggests another moral that this lioness of the left might find ironic.

She is living proof that two systems can be made to pay off: workouts and capitalism.

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