Over the years Jane Fonda has made it easy to hate her. Far from the radical feminist of her public persona, a new biography paints a picture of a troubled little rich kid seeking approval of the men in her life:
One day, at the height of her fame in the mid-Seventies, Jane Fonda turned up on the doorstep of her ex-husband, Roger Vadim. She was lugging a bulging sack.
Vadim’s glamorous new girlfriend let her in, thrilled to meet the movie icon at last. But her excitement soon turned to disbelief. The star of Julia, Klute and The China Syndrome had come to do her laundry.
Why? Because her second husband, Tom Hayden, a Left-wing activist with a bulbous nose and acne-scarred cheeks, had forbidden her to have either a washing machine or dishwasher. Far too bourgeois
So there is truth to the “stinky hippie” caricature. She continued with her quest to gain Lefty street cred by smoking pot with AIM members:
Fired with zeal, she flew to San Francisco to support the takeover of Alcatraz, a former federal prison that the American Native Indians wanted to turn into a cultural centre.
Squatting in a corner of the prison yard, she smoked pot with some Sioux Indian leaders, who were frankly bewildered at having a movie star in their midst.
Later, she joined another Indian protest that involved scaling the fences of a fort. The soldiers stopped to ogle the star — braless under her T-shirt — before firing tear gas into the demonstrators.
The Indians told her to take a hike so then it was on to chill with the Black Panthers:
For them, she opened her chequebook, paying a $2,000 phone bill, lending them her credit card and posting bail for Panthers who’d been arrested. The Panthers promptly charged a car to her Visa card — then lost both the car and the card. One of them skipped town after she’d stumped up $50,000 bail money. When she heard the Panthers were calling her a ‘white honky bitch’ behind her back and spreading false rumours that she was sleeping with their leader, she called it a day.
I tell ya she gets no respect! After this she started moving into her “Hanoi Jane” phase, and longed for unrequited love:
She supposedly confided during a feminist consciousness-raising session, ‘My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.’
Don’t worry, Janie. He was probably a closet homosexual.
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