Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman [Kindle Edition]

Patricia Bosworth (Author)

Book Description

“An irresistible biography of the accomplished, controversial actress whose roles on screen and off helped define a generation. Whether you love Jane Fonda or abhor her, Jane Fonda is a detailed and generous exploration not only of the contradictory world Fonda grew up in but of the many people who shaped her.” —Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle

Patricia Bosworth has gone beyond the image of an American superwoman to reveal a Jane Fonda more powerful and vulnerable than ever expected. Fonda emerged from a heartbreaking Hollywood family drama to become a ’60s onscreen ingénue and then an Oscar-winning actress. At the top of her game she risked all, rising up against the Vietnam War and shocking the world with a trip to Hanoi. While becoming one of Hollywood’s most committed feminists, she financed her husband Tom Hayden’s political career in the ’80s with exercise videos that began a fitness craze and brought in millions of dollars. Just as interesting is Fonda’s next turn, as a Stepford Wife of the Gulfstream set, marrying Ted Turner and seemingly walking away from her ideals and her career. Fonda’s multilevel story is a blend of the deep insecurity, magnetism, bravery, and determination that has fueled her inspiring and occasionally infuriating public life.

“The definitive portrait of a woman conflicted, torn between ferocious ambition, family, and feminist causes.” —Gail Sheehy, author of Passages

“The Private Life does Jane Fonda the service of making us remember why she was relevant in the first place: the movies. Bosworth’s thorough account of this wild, uniquely twentieth-century Hollywood life makes Jane Fonda the actress even more intriguing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Distinguished celebrity biographer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Bosworth recounds the life story of an American icon in all its heady--and at times, unabashedly scandalous--glory. With consummate skill and insight, the author follows Fonda... Bosworth's coverage of Fonda...is as epic as the life that she chronicles. Reading to savor."
-Kirkus, starred

"[Bosworth's] remarkable reconstruction of long-ago events has a fly-on-the-wall viewpoint, written with such intimacy that it sometimes generates the strange sensation of being present with Fonda and her friends... Bosworth has succeeded in capturing Fonda's step-by-step transformation from wide-eyed, apolitical ingenue to the poised personality of recent decades."
-Publishers Weekly, starred

"Watching Jane Fonda wrestle with her many passions has been one of the most fascinating stories of the past fifty years. Brilliant, beautiful, achingly vulnerable, self-wounding and yet with a Joan of Arc sense of self-determination whenever she steps into the spotlight. Fonda is one of the greatest film stars to ever appear on the screen. Her life deserves to be re-evaluated as it is in Patricia Bosworth's Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman."
—Alec Baldwin

"Patricia Bosworth has written an irresistible biography of the accomplished controversial actress whose roles on screen and off helped define a generation. Whether you love Jane Fonda or abhor her, the Private Life of　a Public Woman is a detailed and generous exploration not only of the contradictory world Fonda grew up in but of the many people who shaped her."
—Jeannette Walls

"Bosworth’s expedition into every corner of Fonda’s life makes for far more than a spellbinding biography. It sweeps the reader into a cultural history of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, when this female icon helped define the causes of the era. The access gained by Bosworth is impressive—lovers, stepmothers, and ex-husbands share their secrets, adding to what will certainly become the definitive portrait of a woman conflicted, torn between ferocious　ambition, family, and feminist causes. Bosworth’s rendering of Fonda’s interior chaos becomes a revealing probe into the female psyche."
—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages

"Patricia Bosworth’s brilliant detective work has unearthed so much about Jane Fonda that I didn’t know—so much feeling, so much courage, so much hurt. Reading this book, it occurred to me that Fonda, despite her brilliant acting, despite her activism, despite her life led in the headlines, was really the archetypal woman of her generation: a woman torn between love and work, family and accomplishment. Bosworth’s book is far from another Hollywood biography; it is a human portrait and, at the same time, a major American life. Reading this book, living Jane’s life along with her, is an adventure and a pleasure."
—William Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood

"Jane Fonda was born with beauty and talent, which brought　her fame and wealth. Now she's blessed with a biographer who knows　Hollywood and understands　the human condition. Nothing about Fonda's life (her obsession with her looks, her lovers—male and female—her husbands, her money, and her elusive father) escapes the keen eye of Patricia Bosworth, who tells the life story of　a cinema icon, one of the most intriguing women of our era.　You will be enthralled from start to finish."
—Kitty Kelley, author of Oprah:　A Biography

"Gracefully written and deeply researched, Patricia Bosworth's Jane Fonda is not only a first-class biography but a thoughtful,sympathetic, yet objective, study of a central figure in the preoccupying drama of American celebrity life as it has been played out over the past half century."
—Richard Schickel, author of Conversations with Scorsese

"As an heiress to Hollywood royalty, survivor of childhood trauma, sexpot, movie star, fitness guru, activist, trophy wife, and serial self-reinventor, Jane Fonda has embodied every theme in modern American mythology. And I can't think of anyone better equipped to tell her story than Patricia Bosworth. Her superb reporting, combined with an equally sure understanding of what the details add up to, has produced a clear-sighted but sympathetic and compelling portrait of a woman who really is an emblem of our age."
—Amanda Vaill, author of Everybody Was so Young

About the Author

PATRICIA BOSWORTH, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has known Jane Fonda since they were students at the Actors Studio and has been writing about her since 1968.  Bosworth has also written acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Diane Arbus, and Marlon Brando.  She lives in New York.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 5071 KB
• Print Length: 645 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0547152574
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Reprint edition (August 30, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005G5PPLS
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #186,868 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An addictive, authoritative biography of a woman who wanted -- no, needed -- to be the world's biggest star August 30, 2011

By Jesse Kornbluth TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Google "Jane Fonda +hate site" and you get 10 million results.

Sarah Palin, in contrast, gets 109 million. Obama: 101 million. George Bush: 106 million. Donald Trump: 37 million.

But it's not just raw numbers that matter here. It's context. Palin, Obama, Bush and Trump are contemporary figures. Jane Fonda is a 73-year-old actress who had her last box office hit thirty years ago. So why is she hated?

Mostly, it's for something that happened forty years ago --- at the height of the Vietnam War, she visited North Vietnam. There she not only sat on an anti-aircraft gun and made a "public service" announcement to American bomber pilots, she visited a POW camp. There she met some captured soldiers. They slipped her messages to bring to their families --- and she promptly turned them over to the North Vietnamese, who tortured (and, in one case, killed) those prisoners.

Wait! That never happened!!! But that untruth is a measure of the controversy that has swirled around Jane Fonda for most of her adult life. Actress, sex symbol, feminist, activist --- in every sphere, she presses buttons.

Some of these buttons reflect the sickness of our society. A sex symbol who likes sex and who plays a sci-fi goddess and a prostitute --- that gets our blood pumping. A public figure who skips the USO tour to organize coffee houses for dissidents in the military --- imagine what they've said about her at the VFW. A bra-burner who shows women how to feel strong --- that didn't fly with the crowd that likes their women barefoot-and-pregnant.

But there are also internal buttons --- the buttons pushed in her by her parents, her producers, her lovers.... These are the fascinating buttons, because only by learning about them can we hope to understand why the best single word to define Jane Fonda is "driven." And these, blessedly, are the buttons that fascinate Patricia Bosworth in her massive (600 page) biography.

Patricia Bosworth is a biographer's biographer. She wrote the best book on Diane Arbus. Her Montgomery Clift biography is beyond compelling. It's not just her sensitivity and insight that make her so good. It's her life history (she was a Broadway actress for a decade) and her work ethic (the Fonda book took a decade). It doesn't hurt that she knows Fonda well and that, as a result, Fonda did not discourage friends and family from seeing her.

In this book, Bosworth delivers the ultimate goods --- the family story. It's well known that Henry Fonda was emotionally remote and that her mother committed suicide. Bosworth turns those observations into a narrative. She shows us, time and again, how Fonda mistreated his wife; as a little girl, Jane once watched her mother crawl naked across the room pleading with him to talk to her. (He didn't.)

Fonda has said, "All my life I've been my father's daughter." But her mother was also key. As a girl, Jane would come into her mother's dressing room while Frances Fonda was checking for the slightest weight gain. She told Jane: "Lady, if I gain any extra weight I'm gonna cut it off with a knife." Any wonder that Jane Fonda was obsessed with her body and became bulimic?

Pleasing a man. Showing no flaws. Expressing herself with her body. This is the triangle that will rule her life.

Bosworth can analyze brilliantly, but her real genius is as a reporter --- she takes you, again and again, into the room. Her account of her romance with Roger Vadim feels very much like the whole story. It was downhill from there. Bosworth's account of Fonda's relationship with activist Tom Hayden is simply shocking --- in this book, he lived off her, cheated on her, dominated her. Why did she stay with him so long? By then, you understand --- just as you understand why she stayed with Ted Turner, who cheated on her within a month of their marriage.

"An actress is more than a woman, an actor is less than a man," Oscar Wilde said. Maybe. But in Fonda's case, definitely. This is a woman who needed to be the biggest star in the world, and made it. And when that faded, she re-invented herself. Now she's doing it again, speaking out about the vitality that's still possible in the AARP years. Clearly, she'll never be satisfied.

You can look at a life like that and see desperation. Or you can see how a badly damaged child forges a successful identity --- or, at least, a workable persona. Patricia Bosworth sees it both ways. You will close this book with admiration for the writer, compassion for the actress ... and great relief that your life is so much less twisted. Read more ›

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Person and Story September 4, 2011

By R. Spell VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

This is an exceptional book about a controversial figure of a certain period in America. I doubt seriously if the book will be of much interest to the younger generation as they have no frame of reference for Jane Fonda as she did not continue her exceptional career as an actress or as an activist and therefore she has not been as high profile for a number of years. In fact, most younger people may only remember her as Ted Turner's wife sitting in the Braves box doing the Tomahawk. That's really sad because as this exceptional but very detailed book details, she is a fascinating creature who lived an incredibly full life including controversy that will follow her for the rest of her life for her episode in North Vietnam.

All this is detailed in this book. Probably the most insightful part of this book is her frame of reference of dysfunctional family life punctuated by her mother's suicide but other slights earlier are detailed in the book specifically by her father and his family relationships. Personally, I found the most interesting part to be her Svengali relationship with her husband Roger Vadim and how he molded her into the person she became until she broke his spell and became the activist Jane. Her "life education" of young adulthood modeling and acting in Europe is fascinating and worth the read alone.

Hanoi Jane is also covered in detail as well as her interesting relationship with Tom Hayden. Tom doesn't come off so well which is quite interesting that this man could be married to one of the most beautiful, intelligent women and probably never really appreciate it. One look at the magnificent cover here shows this appeal. This book has great depth in this controversial period as it does with other portions of her life.... Will this change any minds of the many people who hate Jane Fonda? Absolutely not. But, it does give a fair account of how these events came about. Clearly, this was a bad war in which we should not have participated. Still it doesn't feel right to me to openly oppose America and cavort with the enemy IN THEIR COUNTRY. I had no real opinion of her on this issue and took no real offense to her visit but I respect the right of others who will not forget.

After the war period her career really takes off. This is not meant to discount "Barefoot in the Park" and "They Shoot Horses Don't They?" made with the great Sydney Pollack. But movies like Oscar winning "Klute" and the controversial but moving "Coming Home", the first major film to deal with Vietnam and the emotional trauma show her fantastic ability. Later, she moved into more mainstream, moneymaking movies but not socially satisfying like "9 to 5" But special attention is applied to "On Golden Pond" due to the family connections and approaching depth of her father. Clearly a fascinating piece of art that seemed to parallel their relationship.

For most of this book we have an extreme left-leaning privileged actress who lives her life in a fascinating manner. But in her 50s she's hit by a tornado from the south, Ted Turner, a man that clearly would not be considered a feminists first choice. But this is where the book is even more appealing as this avowed Democrat who admits to not being around religious people unless they were Jewish, suddenly is thrust into a life in the deep South around conservative, Christian people. Maybe the greatest statement I can make of Jane is that unlike a lot of people, many of who will read this book and dislike it, she learned from these new friends and altered her life completely becoming an advocate concerning teenage pregnancy and a devoutly religious person. Life is to be learned from and this later chapter of her life shows that she was willing to grow and continue to learn.

This is a magnificent book of growing up in the last half of the 20th century and being one of the legends, good and bad, of this period. Life is to be lived and she accomplished a lot and lived by her standards only whether you agree with them or not. Be ready for a long read but chock full of information about a fascinating person and period of American and cinema history. Read more ›

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of detail - with much insight into Fonda's life,too September 11, 2011

By K. Corn TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I had already read Fonda's autobiography My Life So Far before picking up Bosworth's book. Interestingly, Fonda had reservations about talking to Bosworth because Jane was writing My Life So Far at the time and was conflicted about another book being written about her. But Bosworth prevailed enough to create far more than a light book, full of fluff and praise. It goes well beyond that.

The result? An intimate and very personal look at both the high and low points of Fonda's life and career,including plenty of insightful info about Henry Fonda's often strained relationship with his daughter. Bosworth reveals that Henry's difficulties with women weren't limited to Jane. His marriages suffered because of his distant nature and inability to handle strong emotions (offscreen) .

Jane Fonda had early childhood traumas ( including one that involved her mother) that marked her for life. For those who do not already know about Fonda's mother, I won't add a spoiler. Add that trauma to father's less than nurturing nature and Jane was left with an insecurity that lasted for much of her life. She yearned for her father's approval and this yearning extended to her relationships with men whose praise she also sought.

From Fonda's childhood on, Bosworth creates a psychological study of Fonda.

But even though the book was very well- written I could not give it more than 4 stars. While I learned much about Fonda, I did feel the biography could have been tighter. Will it appeal to more than diehard fans of Fonda? I can't help wondering about that and did find it slow going at times....

Like it or not, there is no doubt that Bosworth did her research - and it shows - resulting in am ambitious work. Read more ›

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