celebrity

'I spent a night with Jane Fonda and she's a very different 'icon' to what we've been told.'

I went to see Jane Fonda to feel something. That's what she's always done, made you feel something. For some, awe. For some, anger. Others, admiration. Occasionally, envy. Possibly the urge to buy a leotard and do leg lifts on a shag rug. Jane Fonda is one of those women who has lived many lives and all of them publicly: protestor, movie star, workout prophet, ex-wife (a few times), mother and icon (reluctantly).

Listen to our interview with Jane Fonda on YouBeauty here. Post continues below.

So yes, I expected to be galvanised. I expected poise. I expected fire.

What I didn't expect was that, 87 years into being Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda would admit she's still trying to become Jane Fonda.

She walked onto the stage at the ICC Sydney for Wanderlust True North with journalist Liz Hayes in front of 5,000 of us, looking exactly how you want Jane Fonda to look: like an ad for being 87 and very rich and very experienced and very good at choosing the right shade of purple.

The crowd sat taller. The lighting softened. We collectively prepared to be told how to be braver, bolder, better.

Instead, she tells us she only recently started therapy again.

Why? To learn how to love her children more.

And now I'm crying into my plastic cup of rosé.

There's something uncanny about hearing a woman who's been arrested for her convictions, who, frankly, made being political sexy, say: "I wasn't such a great person early on in my life. I was unhappy. I didn't have any meaning."

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It's the kind of line that drops like a bomb and then keeps echoing. Wait, Jane Fonda wasn't a great person? Jane Fonda, whose face could stop traffic and whose biceps once could, too? Jane Fonda, who seems like she's never second-guessed anything, not an outfit, not a husband, not a movement?

It turns out she's not the authority on certainty. She's the authority on trying.

Hayes asks about Grace and Frankie, and Fonda mentions, almost too casually, that she hated the first season. Hated it. She hated a show that received five Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Because her character's husband leaves her in the opening scene, and it awakened something in her she thought she'd buried deep enough to forget.

Abandonment. Her old friend. Fonda's childhood was filled with it. Her mother died when she was 12. It was suicide and no one told her the truth. Her famous father, Henry Fonda, who she describes as a man of few emotions, then refused to speak of her mother. She tells a story of filling a chair her mother loved with presents the Christmas after she died to be met by her father's wrath.

"I had to go to therapy," she said. "And talk to Grace until I could fall in love with her."

And I think, of course you did, Jane. Of course you therapised your fictional self into self-acceptance. And I also think: what a perfectly strange and stunningly useful thing to do.

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Watch: Jane Fonda talks friendship, sexuality, and Richard Pryor in this unforgettable interview. Post continues below.


Video via ABC.

In between the hard-earned wisdom and the carefully curated vulnerability, she drops the kind of anecdotes only Jane Fonda can: that she went skinny-dipping with Michael Jackson ("I wanted to check out his body"). That she did the same with Greta Garbo ("I was 16 and in the South of France"). She learned the truth about her mother's suicide from a gossip magazine, passed to her by a friend at school. And that she was so hated at times a man once approached her and told her he wanted to slit her throat.

Each story is told in that practiced, polished tone of someone who has had to answer many, many questions over a very long time. But every now and then something slips through, a pause, a flinch, a softness, and you realise: Oh, this still hurts.

Jane Fonda, it turns out, is very into neuroplasticity. ("You can change how you react to things," she said. "You can change the neural wiring in your brain, actually.") She meditates. She sleeps nine hours a night. She walks. She talks about integrating the left and right hemispheres of her brain with the seriousness of someone explaining foreign policy.

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Jane Fonda also spoke with You Beauty's podcast host, Leigh Campbell. Image: Supplied.

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There is nothing passive about the way Jane Fonda lives. She is effortful. She is trying. Still. At 87.

She calls perimenopause "a fertile void," which is both deeply poetic and slightly confusing and, somehow, exactly right. "It's empty, seemingly," she said. "But it's full of seeds that will sprout."

By the time the hour wraps, I'm struck not by her decades of reinvention but by her insistence that the work is ongoing. That the answer to how to be Jane Fonda is not something even Jane Fonda has cracked yet. That her third act, the part where we're supposed to have it all figured out, is, for her, the part where everything is finally starting to make sense.

She is not finished.

She tells us she feels younger now than she did at 20.

And weirdly, I believe her. Not because she looks it (though, my God, she does), but because she talks like someone who is not done. She's not winding down. She's winding in, toward herself, toward the people she loves, toward whatever version of Grace still lives inside her.

I expected to meet a firecracker. I met someone so much more interesting. I met a woman who refuses to treat herself like a finished product. Who still gets curious. Who still wants to grow.

And I left wanting to do the same.

Feature: Getty.

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