BACK IN THE SADDLE

By MARGARET CARLSON

Where's Jane Fonda? I occasionally wonder as I consider taping over my Prime Time Workout cassette to record ER. She's been basking happily the past six years in the shadow of her mogul husband Ted Turner (vice chairman of Time Warner), watching the buffalo roam and writing a cookbook (perhaps the only one with a section on eating disorders). Now, however, she has left the deer stand (she hunts with Ted) and returned to the klieg lights. What lured her was a pressing need--to reduce teen pregnancy--and an enemy, conservative Republicans who attached strings to $250 million for sex education; to get the money, schools must preach "abstinence only" to young people. Say the word condom, and you don't get a cent.

So Fonda got Durex, the world's largest condom producer (slogan: "Only the Feeling Gets Through"), to join the Turner Foundation-supported Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention for some counterprogramming. Starting this month, Fonda chatted up Lisa McRee on Good Morning America, taped a segment with Susan Molinari on CBS and sang a duet with Rosie O'Donnell. Sure, abstinence is the best policy, Fonda says, but not if it means losing the second-best policy: "About 90% of what we do is above the waist--give kids hope and an adult who cares about them, tell them not to have sex until they're mature. But you can't ignore below-the-waist aspects: contraception, sex education, AIDS and STD prevention."

Her below-the-waist philosophy got a huge lift from a just completed study comparing 7,000 New York City kids who got condoms with 6,000 in Chicago who didn't; among the New Yorkers there was an increase not in the amount of sex but only in the safety of it. Come November, she will field a team to make 27 Georgia clinics "teen friendly." "You need to have young staff, be open evenings and not confront girls with a pelvic before they're comfortable," she says. "When we reduce teen pregnancy by 25%, the rest of the country will want to follow."

It's hard to think of a better use of celebrity than saving teenagers from ruining their lives, even if the celebrity comes with more baggage than could ever fit in an overhead bin. While the rest of us have shed our antiwar activism along with our bell bottoms, images of Fonda in her shag cut in Hanoi, along with stills of her as the sex kitten Barbarella, are the staples of every profile. But because we didn't let her grow up, she may have greater appeal to vulnerable teenagers than the icy perfection of a Nancy Reagan urging, "Just say no!"

Always more interested in making a difference than in making a movie, the Oscar-winning actress briefly returned to Hollywood to narrate a film on depression (her mother committed suicide when Fonda was 12) to be shown at a fund-raising lunch this week at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. At the lunch, other celebrities such as Mike Wallace and Liza Minnelli hope to start doing for depression what Elizabeth Taylor did for AIDS.

As she picks up a large piece of chocolate cake, Fonda says that exercise, once an obsession, has become "a sidebar." "I'll be 60 in December," she pronounces with the honesty only someone who looks 40 could bring to the subject. Being happily married has freed her to discover a satisfying life beyond the gym and the silver screen, she says. Cutting teen pregnancy is a big part of it. Newt & Co., watch out.