Potty-mouthed Seventies superstar Jane Fonda had long been a world-class iconoclast and taboo-buster before dropping the C-Bomb during an appearance on The Today Show. Decades before using the c-word as casually as if she were mentioning new toiletries at a suburban koffeeklatsch, Lady Jane frolicked bare-bottomed on the Silver Screen, ostensibly as an “Up yours!” gesture to her straight-laced father, screen icon Henry Fonda, whom she blamed for the suicide of her mother, the manikin Frances Seymour Brokaw. For La Fonda, being a cinema slut was not only a rite of passage, but a causus beli, to boot. Before she donned a North Vietnamese helmet and posed provocatively on an ack-ack gun in Hanoi, Jane was a warrior in the trenches of the sexual revolution. Jane Fonda was a rebel with a cause, and she managed to take on Hollywood in its entirety and told it to kiss her foot, if not other nether regions.
Unfortunately for her and her legions of fans, her development as an actress was stymied by her dedication to the sexual persona that she embraced from the very beginning of her career. In her 2005 autobiography My Life So Far, Jane Fonda says that she has been defined by the men in her life, and as her sexual persona was the response to that molding of men, she was never able to free herself from them — or it — and develop a career as a mature actress, a time of life when a woman of her generation would be expected to achieve independent, self-definition. Jane Fonda essentially quit acting while still possessing her sex pot persona. unable to navigate away from the posession of her identity by men.
She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda on December 21, 1937, the very same day Walt Disney’s classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in the Big Apple. (Like Snow White, she would go into a long sleep, career-wise, from 1990 to 2005.) As a young actress, before she had even achieved minimal success as a thespian, Lady Jane was the object of reams of publicity. In the early 1960s, she was touted as “America’s Answer to Bridget Bardot,” the French sex pot who achieved international superstar status under the hand of her director-husband Roger Vadim. La Fonda herself would move to France and marry Vadim, who would cast her in her ultimate sex kitten role, that of Barbarella, an intergalactic sex kitten.
It is now hard to think of Jane Fonda as a multiple-Academy Award winning actress in the sense of the Oscar being a measure of acting prowess rather than just a gong awarded tribally by the Lotus-eaters of La-La Land because — though she was fine one — her persona was larger than her art, which she abandoned while still in the prime of her career. If any actress was going to be able to navigate into mature roles and remain a star, surely, Jane Fonda would be it.
During the late 1970s she was taken seriously as a first-rate actress, which now seems more projection and promise than reality. Looking backward, it seems that once La Fonda could no longer deliver the goods as a sex pot, the raison d’etre of her career except for the decade of 1969-1979 (between her appearance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, for which she received her first Oscar nomination, and her second Best Actress Oscar win for Going Home) evaporated. She retired rather than play older women or segue into character roles. Was it fear, a fear of abandonment of the audience? That they could not or would not accept Jane as anything other than the sex pot she had been touted as for her entire career?
The sexual warrior of the 1970s, who denounced men for forcing her to dye her hair blonde and doff her duds for the enjoyment of voyeurs seated in cinemas, had a boob-job in the 1980s and lightened her hair — again — seemingly not under the compulsion of sexist baddies, this time, but to curry favor with the very patriarchy she still denounces. But the woman entered her 50s as the Ronald Reagan Presidency went into eclipse, and despite the best plastic surgery money can buy, there is a time when age must be surrendered to. Katharine Hepburn, a natural, radiant beauty whose beauty flourished throughout her long life, had two of her finest roles in the 1950s playing old maids in Summertime and The Rainmaker. The Great Kate followed up these roles with her turn as a woman well-past her prime in Suddenly, Last Summer, opposite 1950s uber-sexbomb Elizabeth Taylor. (This is an order of magnitude, like conventional munitions versus nuclear weapons: Liz Taylor was a sexbomb; Jane Fonda was a sex pot.)
If it had been Jane Fonda faced with the offer of Suddenly, Last Summer, Jane likely would have wanted to play the sex kitten, not the old bag, despite the latter being the better role.
But Fonda never played old lady roles. It was Maggie Smith who played Violet Venable in the 1993 boob-tube rendition of Suddenly, Last Summer. Unlike her friend and fellow rhetorical bomb-hurler, Vanessa Redgrave, Fonda never made the transition into aged woman roles. This is because Jane Fonda, for all her protests, is a Certified Sex Pot, not an Actress. We, Lady Jane’s fans, thought of her as an Actress, but a Sex Pot she was and she knew it, more than we did.
Lady Jane Fonda is also a Victim, as her autobiography shows. It’s all the fault of the men in her life. So, she can have her cake (Sexpotdom) and eat it too (boo hoo hoo! Men have turned me into a sex pot). In the words of Gertrude, yet another role she has not and never will play, being a sex pot and not an actress, “Methinks the Lady doth protest too much.” (Julie Christie played Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, and recently copped her fourth Oscar nomination playing a woman in her mid-60s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in Candian writer-director Sarah Polley’s Away From Her. Why isn’t Jane Fonda in such fare? She would have been a terrific Gertrude, for instance, a role in which Christie was miscast. And think of Fonda’s very fine performance as Lillian Hellman in Julia: She could handle a role such as Fiona in Away From Her. However, she has resurrected her career to appear in dreck such as Monster-in-Law and Georgia Rules. Why? It cannot be for the want of a paycheck, can it?)
Jane Fonda won Best Actress Oscars in 1972 and 1979, playing two sex mavens in what could be seen as the on-screen education of Jane Fonda, actress and star. In those days, the sheer act of having sex was considered some kind of manifesto, on and off-screen, an act of “liberation” from the old Puritan hang-ups that led America astray and caused it to expiate its psycho-sexual sins by dropping flaming jellied gasoline on the living flesh of Vietnamese peasants. First as a whore and then as an Army frau, La Fonda went through a very public process of sexual healing on the Big Screen, dropping trou in both roles and — like the sex kitten Jane of the 1960s — thrilling voyeurs who had put their fannies in movie theater seats to get a gander at the goods.
Playing the whore Bree Daniels is probably as close to autobiography as Jane Fonda is going to get. That movie acting is a form of prostitution is something that Jane Fonda and her ilk have driven home with their propensity of baring their asses, if not their souls, for over four decades now. Bree (and what kind of name is that? is it supposed to evoke “Free” or is it a variation of the “Bra” that women’s libbers like Fonda were alleged to have shucked and burned in the name of liberation from the patriarchy?) — Bree is an actress, though not a successful one. In this, her failure, she is closer to Jane Fonda than may be supposed.
The movie Klute (another strange name for a strange time — the title refers to the surname of a private detective who meets Bree while investigating a murder and who, of course, falls in love with her) was shot in 1970, the year that Jane Fonda redeemed herself with her first — and very well-deserved — Oscar nod for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Before that, the highlight of her life other than a nice light comic turn in Barefoot in the Park, was as the ultimate sex pot of the 1960s, Barbarella. With no pretensions at all to art, Jane Fonda — the scion of Hollywood royalty — gave as shameless a performance ever caught on film to that time, outside of the stag loops shown at bus drivers’ smokers. The climax of the film was Jane being slapped into an “Orgasmatron” to be executed, but the intergalactic minx turns the tables on her tormentors by blowing out the engine of capital punishment, as if it were a cheap $2 vibrator picked up in Times Square.
Marilyn Monroe, whom was embraced as the apotheosis of the “Merry Whore,” spent her life trying to escape such degrading roles. Jane Fonda openly embraced them. Instead of the Merry Whore olf the 1950s, La Fonda was the Angst-Ridden Whore of the 1970s. And, unlike Marilyn, she won an Oscar for it (her variation as “The Symbol”).
However, this could be correctly seen as a bid for respect, as Hollywood likes nothing better than redemption, on-screen or in reel, that is, real life. After such monumental degradation, Jane had set the stage for her triumphant overcoming of self-imposed bimbodom. With a very real if somewhat limited talent, good looks and the best rear-end in the business circa 1970, Jane Fonda was poised to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes.
Playing a whore.
It worked, and she beat her own father Henry to the Oscar.
Seven years later, she reprised her triumph at the Academy Awarxs, bringing home the gold for Coming Home, a now barely-remembered potboiler that was that era’s The Best Year’s Of Our Lives, a dreary social drama lacking the exquisite craft of William Wyler’s 1946 masterpiece. The climax of that film was La Fonda’s depressed hausfrau, married to a Marines Corps captain (a real pig played by ’60s uber-psycho Bruce Dern (in an Oscar-nominated turn) in what can only be described as “loaded” casting), being brought to orgasm orally by Vietnam Vet Against-the-War cum Paraplegic stud Jon Voight in a scene that would embarrass an actress of less fortitude than Jane Fonda. In this one, Lady Jane again bares all (with the aid of a body double, sadly refusing to bare her world-class bum).
In a bit of Marcusean politics that would warm the cockles of the heart of any 1960′s activist, the “Big O” is presented as a universal panacea to genocidal war, if not the “Mother’s Little Helper” blues. In seven years of evolving Fonda cine-art, we have gone from whoredom in its purest sense, Bree the Hooker, to where, in the words of Dr. David Reuben, the former Air Force shrink who wrote Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (one of Woody Allen’s early funny ones), Any Woman Can. Achieve the Big O (in the case of Jane Fonda, this included the Oscar) and sexual healing. (That this was all part of the meretriciousness of Seventies-style sexual politics is little commented upon. Three years before Coming Home, Warren Beatty foisted his own brand of sexual politics onto the American box office. His pathetic Don Juan in Shampoois supposed to be some symbol of what — liberation? — as distinct to Richard Nixon and the sell-outs and fixers represented by Jack Warden’s character Lester, who in retrospect, is more honest — and engaging — than the immature Beatty character. Beatty’s former love Julie Christie, who played Warden’s mistress in the film, reportedly resented having played what essentially was a whore in the film, feeling the film equated women to prostitutes. Her character peforms fellatio, off-camera, on Beatty’s hair-dresser, a scene that helped the film rake in tens of millions of mid-’70s stagflation dollars.)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Baby Boom Generation must rank as one of the great failures of all time. Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty, both of whom were born in 1937, are not members of the Baby Boom (ironically, their generation, the Silent Generation, is the sole generation never to have produced a single U.S. president), but they flourished with the Baby Boom and mirror it. Beatty offered the part of Bonnie in his seminal Bonnie & Clyde to Fonda after he was turned down by his first choice, Natalie Wood. Fonda wisely turned it down too, which set up Faye Dunaway’s groundbreaking performance as the neurotic Bonnie Parker in the film, a Baby Boom generation classic for its freewheeling amorality. The film, which made murder sexy, was a watershed, and it helped set up more transgressive films to come.
Both Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda were sex pots, defined by sex. (Politics was another huge part of their public personae, but sex — and physical beauty — was the largest part.) Warren Beatty, like Jane Fonda, retired rather than go into older man/character roles. Like Dorian Grey, both Beatty and Fonda seek to preserve their younger screen selves, unsullied by portrayals of older people such as defined the career of Spencer Tracy, as well known and celebrated for his characters that he played during his 50s and 60s as those during his 30s, when he won back to back Oscars forCaptains Courageousand Boys Town.
Jane Fonda achieved her apotheosis as a Hollywood sex goddess on-screen in her two Oscar-winning roles of the 1970s and was absorbed into the mainstream of the Hollywood community she — in her best Baby Boom fashion — revolted against in the 1960s. Unfortunately for Jane Fonda, she seems to be the living evocation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there is no second act in America.
Sources:
The Blacklisted Journalist, “America’s Answer to Bardot: The Young Jane Fonda”
1st Cav Medic (Airmobile), “Jane Fonda A.K.A. Hanoi Jane”
