A note on Jane Fonda...

A nice little piece on Jane from a columnist for the Independent in the UK.

The theme of Fonda's promotional interviews, and presumably the autobiography itself, has been simple and consistent: nothing is ever Jane's fault.

Family life was unhappy because poor old Henry Fonda was so uptight that he made her feel bad about herself. Although she was good-looking, her boyfriends had somehow made her feel inadequate. Even when she was an international star and married to Roger Vadim, his behavior played havoc with her self-esteem.

Trying to be perfect, as usual, Jane not only allowed her husband to introduce French hookers into the marriage bed but also ended up going out herself to procure them for a jolly little threesome chez Vadim. "It really hurt me," is the way she remembers it now. "It reinforced my feeling that I wasn't good enough."

It is about this time, that even her most devoted fan -- me, for example -- is likely to experience a sharp twinge of irritation. Is she not responsible for anything? There are various ways of reminiscing about bad behavior in one's youth, ranging from the sheepish to the boastful, but there is something particularly pathetic about a woman deciding to include raunchy stuff in her memoirs but describing it in dreary, self-pitying terms of victimhood. Now, as then, she seems to want to have it both ways.

This is Barbarella feminism. Like the dippy innocent that she played in that outer-space version of "Candide," Fonda has got up to all sorts of things but, even when she is having fun in real-life versions of the orgasmatron machine, she is never quite responsible for it.