Sunday, May 04, 2008
News, In this Issue...
“Do you mind if I take my sweater off?”
Jane Fonda shares the world’s best contraceptive (and drops the P-word along the way)
Jane Fonda ca. 1960
Getty Images/AFP
“Three Generations of Fonda on Film”
Monday, May 12
Woodruff Arts Center
Cocktails at 6:00 PM; Auction and films, 8 p.m.
Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Bridget Fonda and Troy Garity discuss their film careers, interviewed by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne
$750 per person, $1,500 per couple
Raffle tickets to win a 2007 Maserati are $200 each
For more information, call 404-475-6046 or visit www.gcapp.org.
By Stephanie Ramage
It’s a Monday morning in late April and Jane Fonda, who is in New Mexico, answers the phone with a simple “Hello?”
When I tell her that I have just watched “Klute,” she groans, “Oh, god, not that one…”
“Klute,” the 1971 film in which she starred with a shockingly hot Donald Sutherland, might be best known as the vehicle for cinema’s longest, most-repeated and sexiest bout of dirty talk. Sutherland, as investigator John Klute, is wiretapping Fonda as Bree Daniels, a prostitute and would-be actress.
“Do you mind if I take my sweater off?” she asks an unseen john in that unmistakable Fonda voice—crisp, cool and confident—and then adds, “Inhibitions are always nice because they are so nice to overcome. I think the only way that any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out and, you know, f**k it.”
But Klute isn’t just a sexy detective flick. It’s the story of Bree’s battle with herself. Because she is afraid of men, she needs to manipulate them, and being able to control them gives her the illusion of controlling herself. Though sessions with a therapist help Bree define her problem, it’s viewing herself through Klute’s moral and compassionate eyes that allows her to see the business of selling herself as a trap designed to give her temporary control of others while denying her real authority over her own life.
The movie won Fonda her first of two Academy Awards for Best Actress. It also firmly established her as the go-to girl for roles that require the portrayal of women struggling for independence while maintaining their femininity. Was there something, even in 1971, that urged her to help others find what her characters, feeding on her spirit like so many celluloid succubi, were able to find in film after film—self-determination?
I ask Fonda when audiences might first have glimpsed the future founder of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP), and she says she has to think about that. In the past several weeks, she and her staff have been rifling through her films, as well as films starring her son, Troy Garity, her niece, Bridget Fonda; her brother, Peter Fonda; and her father, Henry Fonda, to put together G-CAPP’s 13th annual fundraising event, “Three Generations of Fonda on Film,” slated for May 12 at the Woodruff Arts Center, but she hasn’t really looked for bits of her individual identity amid the footage.
There is a long silence. She puts down the phone to let in her dog, who has been scratching at the door, and then, eventually, she says decisively, “Probably in the very first one, ‘Tall Story,’ with Anthony Perkins.”
From being a knockout to preventing being knocked up
In 1960’s ‘Tall Story,’ Fonda, then 23 years old, is the quintessential American girl, who wants only to get married. Her character, June Ryder, chooses her college because of its basketball team; she wants to marry a tall man.
“She defined herself by the man she was with,” says Fonda, who explains that such a lack of identity, a lack of control over one’s own life—common to June Ryder, Bree Daniels and, later, Sally Bender in 1978’s “Coming Home,” for which Fonda won her second Academy Award—is a tremendous factor in teen pregnancy. Though she points out that she has never played a poor character—and poor young people are the demographic most served by G-CAPP—the idea of having options, having a choice about the kind of life one leads, is one that has defined both Fonda and G-CAPP.
“This is not just a ‘charity’ issue, it is something that I feel in the marrow of my bones. Although I did not grow up poor, I had no one I could talk to about these things,” she says. What she does not say, but what is detailed in her autobiography, “My Life So Far,” is that her mother committed suicide when Fonda was 12.
“That is something that we see in many cases of teen pregnancy,” she says. “Because I had no one to talk to, I learned that in order to be popular, I had to please. I was a girl who did not really have agency over her life, and while G-CAPP works with young girls who do not have agency over their lives, it’s really true for boys and girls, across all these stereotypes: They do not have agency over their lives.”
Most teen pregnancies occur among the poorest segments of the population, compounding a set of problems that have dogged Georgia for decades. According to G-CAPP’s literature, fewer than four out of 10 teen mothers ever complete high school, and their babies inherit a wealth of obstacles: The poverty rate for children born to teen mothers who have never married and have not graduated from high school is 78 percent. Georgia produces 62 new teen pregnancies each day. That adds up to more than a staggering 22,500 teen pregnancies each year, making Georgia the 8th most teen-pregnancy-prone state in the nation. Teen pregnancies turn on a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty.
“That’s why we say that hope is the best contraceptive,” says Fonda. “If you are someone, a boy or a girl, who sees no future, why not have a baby? For middle class kids who see a future for themselves, they don’t want to compromise that, but if you see no future, then why not? What we know from G-CAPP is that it has more to do with what’s going on between the ears than with what’s going on between the legs.”
And obviously, the young women who become pregnant don’t get that way by themselves. The unsupervised hours after school can allow for a lot of exploration, and that is when G-CAPP’s after-school teen pregnancy prevention program for both boys and girls tackles age-appropriate Family Life Sexuality Education, beginning in 6th grade. The program is offered at Iconium Baptist Church on Moreland Avenue, where G-CAPP rents space. It attracts students from Price Middle School, MLK Middle School, Coan Middle School and Atlanta Charter Middle School. Boys are such a big part of G-CAPP’s focus that “Taking Time for Teens, Engaging Young Men and Fathers” will be the theme of its annual conference next September.
Fonda explains that there is a mentality among economically disadvantaged boys that dictates a very narrow view of how they can become men. Their options, she says, are limited.
“So they think that if only they can impregnate a lot of girls then they can prove their manhood,” she says. “There’s a sense that if you don’t knock up a girl before you’re 20, you’re really a p**sy.”
Oops, there’s that word. She’s using the language used by peers to describe boys who don’t knock up girls, but it’s almost as bad as the C-word that got Fonda into trouble with NBC a few months ago when she let it drop on NBC’s “Today” show.
Fonda was explaining that playwright Eve Ensler had asked her to do a monologue called ‘C**t” for her play “The Vagina Monologues.”
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t a fan of the play,” she told host Meredith Viera. “I hadn’t seen the play—I live in Georgia, okay? And I was asked to do a monologue called ‘C**t.’”
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I went to see “The Vagina Monologues” in 2001, here in Atlanta, where it has been performed several times.)
The word problem
Fonda’s life has been littered with well-intentioned words that have gotten her into trouble. Consider, for example, her contretemps with Gov. Zell Miller in 1998.
At that time, she’d told a United Nations group that parts of Georgia resembled a Third World country, where “children are starving to death” and “people live in tar-paper shacks with no indoor plumbing." For natives of rural Georgia like me, her remarks didn’t seem terribly off-the-mark; after all she hadn’t said that all of the state was like that. But she apologized anyway. The problem word, she says, was “starving.”
“It was Zell Miller who freaked out,” she says. “He’s got a short fuse and he got really, really angry and spouted off in public because he is from north Georgia. I apologized because I had used the word ‘starving’ and if you’re going to be literal, the word is ‘malnourished.’”
Apologies are as much a part of Fonda’s public persona as her passionate opinions. She famously protested against the Vietnam War, going so far as to be photographed perched atop a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, for which she earned the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” Though she never apologized for opposing the war, she did later apologize to all those whom she had hurt through her anti-war activism.
In a 1988 interview on ABC’s “20/20” with Barbara Walters, in response to criticism from a group of New England Vietnam veterans, she said, “I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I’m very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. ... I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done.”
Sorrow and forgiveness, she says, have shaped who she is and the mission of G-CAPP.
“All of us have wounds that we need to heal, and you can’t really heal unless you know how to forgive,” she says now. “Forgiveness has to come first. That’s a fundamental precept not only of Christianity, but of every major religion. There are people who have said and done terrible things to me, but I have to forgive them if I am going to heal. I have asked people to forgive me because my intention was never to hurt people.”
Fonda could be forgiven for taking a glum view of life in rural Georgia in 1994. It was then that she met a pregnant teen in the state for the first time. While visiting Phoebe Putney Hospital in Albany, she was introduced to a 14 year-old African-American girl in labor.
“They told me ‘She lives in a tar-paper shack where there is no indoor plumbing.’ That is when it really hit me, as I looked at her, I could not judge her. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I could take this girl and introduce her to other girls I know,’” says Fonda. “If you want to break the cycle of poverty, you don’t judge them, you take them in your arms, something that I think many of them have never had.”
Fonda says she has been surprised to sometimes encounter people who feel that pregnant teenage girls deserve what they get.
“People will ask, ‘Why are you doing this for these girls?’ It’s interesting that no one ever asks ‘Why are you doing these programs for boys?’” she says. “The attitude seems to be that the girls have been ‘bad.’ But, they don’t need more punishment.”
If it’s incongruous that one the world’s iconic sex kittens is now a crusader to prevent teen pregnancy—and, by the way, to prevent abortions by preventing the pregnancies that occasion them—it helps to remember that during much of the time that America was writhing its way through the sexual revolution, Fonda was not here. She was in France, married to the famous director Roger Vadim. There, she was stunned at the number of juenes filles meres—“child mothers,” young women who had children without being married.
“But, they were not 13, 14, and 15. That’s an important distinction—they were 19, 20, and 21. They were approaching adulthood,” she explains. “In the U.S. in those days, my impression of it was that they tended not to be single, that girls who got pregnant got married or got abortions. It’s very easy to understand: If you don’t want to have a baby when you’re too young, you’re going to do everything you can to prevent it. If you see no future for yourself in a poor environment, where is the motivation to use birth control? You’re going to be careful if you have a future to plan for.” SP