The Arresting Jane Fonda

by Katherine Smyrk / The Big Issue Australia / courtesy of INSP.ngo

Jane Fonda has been in jail twice. First in 1970, when she was 32, after being arrested on suspicion of drug possession. The alleged drugs turned out to be vitamins, and the whole arrest turned out to have a lot more to do with her very vocal stance against the Vietnam War.

The second time was in November last year, just before her 82nd birthday. After protesting against the US government’s inaction on climate change outside the White House, Fonda was handcuffed and escorted to prison, where she spent the night.

She’s pretty blasé about the whole thing – “One night, big deal!” – pointing out that as a rich, famous, white lady she was never really at risk.

“The plastic handcuffs hurt more than the metal ones and I discovered that it’s not easy for an 82-year-old to get in and out of a police paddy wagon without the use of her hands,” was all she said about it in a droll summary on her blog, which is a delightful catalog of her recent activist endeavors.

You might know Fonda best from her glittering film career, appearing in more than 40 films and winning two Academy Awards for her films Klute in 1972, and Coming Home in 1979. Accustomed to the spotlight as the daughter of revered actor Henry Fonda, she rose to prominence in the 1968 erotic cult sci-fi Barbarella, directed by her first husband, Roger Vadim.

You might know Fonda best from those '80s workout videos that brought the world of boisterous exercise in high-cut leotards into people’s living rooms. Her Jane Fonda’s Workout series went on to sell more than 17 million copies around the world.

You might even know Fonda best for her starring turn in Grace and Frankie, a current Netflix series about two women in their 70s (long-time collaborator Lily Tomlin is her co-star) who are forced into an uneasy friendship when their husbands leave the women for each other. The show has been a surprise smash-hit and is set to become the longest-running Netflix original series.

Scrolling through the pages on janefonda. com, or reading any of her many interviews, it is evident that it’s activism to which Fonda is most devoted.

“I became an actress because I didn’t know what else to do!” she admitted to Harvard Business Review. “I was fired as a secretary, and I had to earn a living. That was the way I thought about it. It was a job.”

The activism came into her life in her early 30s: “There was a lot going on in the world and I was pregnant, which makes a woman like a sponge, very open to what’s going on around her. It was around that time that I began to realize that I wanted to change my life and participate in trying to end the war.”

She formed the Free the Army Tour with actor Donald Sutherland in 1970, speaking out against the Vietnam War around the US – it was during this tour that she had her first stint behind bars. In 1972 she travelled to North Vietnam to learn more about the local people and to publicly urge troops not to bomb citizen targets. But she was photographed laughing and sitting on top of an anti-aircraft gun, creating a storm of controversy back home and earning herself the nickname Hanoi Jane. She has since apologized numerous times for causing offense to American troops, but amid the controversy continued to campaign furiously against the war.

She held fundraisers for the Black Panthers around this time, and was a vocal supporter of Native Americans during the occupation of Alcatraz. Her film choices often had a foundation in activism too: Coming Home was about the Vietnam War; 1979’s China Syndrome was about nuclear disaster; 9 to 5 (with Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin) was about sexual harassment and working women reclaiming their power in 1980.

Even those renowned workout videos had a political core – the money she made from Jane Fonda’s Workout went to the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a leftist political organisation founded by her then husband, Tom Hayden.

In 2005, along with Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, she founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that aims to ensure women are better represented in the media, and advocates and campaigns for various women’s rights issues.

Jane Fonda attends the debut of "Grace & Frankie"

Netflix

And then, at the end of 2019, Fonda bought a bright red wool coat, publicly vowed that it was the last new piece of clothing she was ever going to buy, and launched Fire Drill Fridays. A series of weekly protests – part sit-in, part rally, part large-scale education event – Fonda named the event after the much-touted warning from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg that “our house is on fire.” Fonda even temporarily moved to Washington, D.C. to enable her to take part, and went out every Friday for four months, always wearing that bright red coat.

And while these events are the work of many, including Greenpeace, Fonda has used her decades of influence in the world of Hollywood to pull her famous friends into the fray. The call sheet of arrests from the protests includes Joaquin Phoenix, Catherine Keener, Rosanna Arquette, Ted Danson and Martin Sheen.

As she told The New York Times: “Why be a celebrity if you can’t leverage it for something that is this important?”

Fonda was arrested five times during Fire Drill Fridays. On one of those occasions she received word that she had won a BAFTA – the Stanley Kubrick Award for Excellence in Film from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts – and recorded a video acceptance from the scene of the crime, shouting “BAFTA, thank you! I’m very honored” with her wrists tied in front of her, a police officer leading her away.

Lily Tomlin and Fonda on the set of "Grace & Frankie"

Netflix

“One of the reasons I’ve moved to Washington, D.C. for four months was to get out of my comfort zone and put my body on the line, as Greta Thunberg calls us to do,” Fonda explained to Who What Wear in January. “I want to help wake people up. I want to try to role model with my own body.”

While the campaigning continues, she recently had to leave Washington to film the final season of Grace and Frankie, which she was unable to delay. But this show too seems to perfectly tap into her passion for changing the world for the better. While it is a resolutely light-hearted series that includes scenes like Frankie (Tomlin) trying to teach Grace (Fonda) how to make personal lubricant out of yams, it also shows the complexities and desires and stories of women at an age we usually don’t see on our screens.

“I have long wanted to give a cultural face to old age,” Fonda told Vogue. “I thought this was a show that could potentially give a lot of hope to people, especially to older people, especially to women. And I think that’s actually happened.”

It’s a show about reinvention, and women coming into their own at a later part of their lives. And that’s something Fonda knows all too well.

“I was in my 60s before I realized that I could just be who I was, and that was okay,” she said in a moving 2013 interview on the podcast Death, Sex & Money.

A Classic promotional image for Jane Fonda's Workout series.

courtesy

Fonda has spoken very publicly about her personal battles, particularly as a young person. At the age of 12 her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, killed herself – a fact Fonda learned from a movie magazine.

Fonda also struggled a lot with her identity and body image as a teenager. “Nothing seemed normal, I didn’t get my period until I was 17, I was at boarding school,” she wrote in Being a Teen. “I would buy [tampons] every month and pretend. I pretended a lot of things because I wanted to fit in. But I didn’t fit in. First of all, my father was famous and second of all, I actually did think that I was maybe supposed to be a boy.”

She was in her 50s when she went to therapy for the first time. And after divorcing her third husband, CNN founder Ted Turner, at the age of 64, Fonda says that she finally felt free.

“There was this voice that said, I’m okay. For the first time in my life I do not need a man to be whole. And that’s what life is supposed to be about,” she told Death, Sex & Money. “I have a lot more time behind me than I have ahead of me,” she added. “And living with the awareness of that helps me make decisions in life. It helps me not squander time.”

And for Fonda, the most important thing for her to spend her time on is climate change.

“Why spend your time on what’s not important? There’s no question that of all the things that I have ever focused on there’s nothing more existential than climate change,” she told radio station WBUR FM. “And it’s a terrible thing that it’s not all anyone talks about now. I know that until I decided to move to Washington and engage in these actions, I was getting quite depressed because I knew I wasn’t doing anything.”

Since then, she has not only inspired many to get involved in the cause, she has been revitalized by action.

“I’m learning so much,” she wrote on her blog. “And I’m energized to a level I haven’t felt maybe ever.”

She may have been campaigning for a better world for 50 years, but Fonda is resolutely showing the world that giving a shit is something that doesn’t have to stop when you hit 82. If anything, it’s only more important.

As she herself wrote: “I never would have expected my life to get so much fuller and, in some ways, more meaningful as I moved into my [ninth] decade.”

Jane Fonda

courtesy