I remember this photograph like it was yesterday. I had just left university and was working in a bookstore.
I was looking for women to look up to. Women with keen self-awareness. Women who didn’t know how to iron or care about waxy build-up on their kitchen floors.
Jane Fonda was everything I admired in a woman. She was talented, beautiful, driven, rich, politically outspoken and sexy.
Sexy as in “sexual” and that was the quality that most fascinated me about her way back then. She openly lived in sin with French filmmaker Roger Vadim and later married him and starred in that little soft porn romp of his “Barbarella”.
She left Paris and came back home to Hollywood.
Tossing aside her sexy and shallow patina, Fonda became the poster girl for the evils of war marching in protests for PEACE sans bra and donning the best “shag cut” of the seventies while giving Oscar worthy performances.
If that wasn’t liberated enough “Hanoi Jane” married “Chicago Eight” bad boy Tom Hayden and she pissed off Richard Nixon so much he added her name to “THE LIST.”
And then the seventies gave way to the eighties.
La Fonda was all blonde now and perky and turned herself into a multi-millionaire aerobicizing machine.
She was even making banal little movies with Daddy “Hank” and gushing about what a wonderful man he was while picking up his Oscar for their joint little cinematic venture: “On Golden Pond.”
Soon The Commie found Capitalism and Ted Turner. We watched her munching on hot dogs and cheering the “Atlanta Braves” on to victory.
All those years, I thought Jane Fonda was her own woman and a role model, and in some aspects she was but Fonda was more like all of us back then. We were unsure of ourselves, we threw up in toilets trying to maintain impossible weight standards and when we disappointed ourselves, we didn’t teach ourselves to find our way to a brand new solo life, instead we would place the blame on our husbands and quickly replace that husband with a new lover.
We were never separate entities from the men we loved, we merely mirrored them. We were in constant awe of the personal power they possessed. A kingdom at their fingertips.
I wanted their brains, their charisma, their wit, their talent, in short I was a lot like Jane Fonda……I MERELY morphed into my men…..and lived my life vicariously through them.
And what about all that awe I had for those men?
Well, I would mistake that awe for love over and over and over again.
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