CultureWatch: Jane Fonda and Red Grooms

In This Issue:

Books:  In Jane Fonda; The Private Life of a Public Woman, Bosworth explores the ambivalences of Jane Fonda as artist, romantic, businesswoman, femme fatale, and partly finished intellectual.

And Consider This:  Red Grooms’ Marlborough Gallery show,  New York: 1976-2011, is a madcap collection of paintings, sculptures and walk-through “sculpto-pictoramas” depicting the high-life, low-life and in-between-life of the metropolis.

Books

Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman
by Patricia Bosworth
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, © 2011; hardcover, 563 pp

Reviewed by Joan L. Cannon

Writing a biography is a singularly challenging task; writing a biography of a celebrity is almost impossible to accomplish without falling into various pits that open in the path of one pursuing the truth. In addition to research for facts and dates and verifiable data of all kinds, the biographer has to find a way to bring the subject to the page as a person — that is to say, as a character who will engage the reader. The picture has to be true, ought to be objective, must be engaging, cannot be servile, must dance through the legal niceties, and so on. Patricia Bosworth has done an extraordinary job.

The individual who emerges from this exhaustive study remains controversial, enigmatic, admirable and infuriating, strong and neurotic, talented and driven, empathetic yet self-involved. Those who despise Jane Fonda will probably not have their minds changed because Bosworth does nothing to hide the events and quotes that have made those people dislike Jane so much; she does point out both sides of several controversial events. Those with open minds will be pushed back and forth between admiration, incredulity, dislike, and frequent sympathy for a person who has spent an already long life as her own (sadly determined) worst enemy.

Much of this book has the artistry and suspense of fiction. A biographer who stood back and offered ‘just the facts, Ma’am’ would likely not hold readers’ attention long enough to get to the end. The sheer volume would be suffocating. Bosworth manages her material with intuition and skill.

She maintains not just a respectful presence, but injects an outsider’s sympathetic attempts at interpretation without intruding too much on the story she’s telling. Occasionally she allows herself to show her own reactions. This skillful straddle on either side of  the facts and their effects on those closest to them was impressive. What led up to what happened is presented, as are the consequences.

The history of Jane’s professional acting career is but part of what made her famous, as is the Hanoi episode, her marriage to Tom Hayden, and her place as the leader of feminist fitness and rejection of age stereotypes. You’ll see the ambivalences of an artist, romantic, businesswoman, femme fatale, and partly finished intellectual. You may come away with an opinion different from the one you held before reading this book, or equally likely, with your original opinion reinforced.

Most of us have a hard time imagining the number of Jane’s liaisons and marriages that, even for Hollywood, are noteworthy. Bosworth makes it possible to understand how some of them came about without making Jane seem to be simply amoral. That question remains open by the end of the book. Bosworth didn’t pull her punches, though, when in the last few pages she quotes Jane’s comment about a breakup after two years of living with a much younger man, which is, “I got bored.”