Written by William B. Guidry
Reprinted with permission from American Opinion, June 1979
William B. Guidry is a critic, essayist, lecturer, and father of five. He is a Contributing Editor for The Review Of The News, the national weekly Conservative newsmagazine, and is currently working on a political novel.
REQUESTING a simple comment from Jane Fonda is like asking a pusher for an aspirin. In either case, you are likely to come away with more than a headache. Indeed, Jane Fonda’s reputation as a royal pain is so well earned that many Americans who were tuned to this year’s telecast of the Academy Awards withered when she was announced as Best Actress for her performance in Coming Home. Aware of the anti-war theme of the movie, produced by Jane’s own I.P.C. Films (I.P.C. stands for Indochina Peace Campaign), few doubted that Hanoi’s darling would use her acceptance speech to sound off with militant enthusiasm.
As Jane sprang from her seat and rushed to the stage to claim her Oscar, your correspondent leaned forward in his easy chair and reached for the custard pie he had acquired for just such a possibility. Pie at the ready, we took aim at the television set fully expecting Miss Fonda to condescend to tradition by acknowledging the “little people” who made it all possible. The Vietcong. Doubtless she would then raise the Oscar in her clenched fist and cut loose with a tirade of condemnations against capitalism, ending with the proposal that Communist Vietnam be admitted as our fifty-first state.
“I’m so happy!,” Jane Fonda beamed. “I wanted to win very much! Because I’m so proud of Coming Home, and I want many people to see the movie.”
She referred indirectly to the propaganda message in the film, but it was hardly strong enough to merit a pie in the face. Besides, we were distracted from what she was saying by the exaggerated gestures she was making with her hands. Jane explained, “I’m signing part of what I’m saying tonight; because, while we were making the movie, we all became more aware of the problems of the handicapped. Over fourteen million people are deaf. They are the invisible handicapped and can’t share this evening. So this is my way of acknowledging them.”
This patronizing display drew thunderous applause from the audience. It was not enough that Jane Fonda had wrenched the Oscar from the hands of more deserving candidates; the pious hypocrite had resorted to exploitation of the deaf to wring sympathy in a new role as patron saint of the physically handicapped.
We took aim. She wasn’t through talking, and something worse was bound to follow.
As it turned out, however, Jane Fonda’s little charade for the deaf was the dramatic high point of her delivery. Oh, there was a brief reference to the “cramped offices of the Indochina Peace Campaign” where “a lot of us whose lives have been bound up with the war sat on the floor” and gave birth to the film. But she then said her thanks to husband Tom and children Troy and Vanessa, and to her co-stars and production staff, and left the stage to take her seat.
We felt cheated. Not once had Jane Fonda called for the destruction of an unworthy America, shouted her solidarity with sisters of the revolution, or accused the police of napalming the grape pickers. Naturally we threw our pie on general principle, but our heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps Jane Fonda had mellowed!
Certainly the leading magazines and newspapers are heralding a new Jane Fonda who is said no longer to be the youthful revolutionary but a middle-aged actress, mother, housewife, and “concerned citizen.” An article entitled “The Mellowing Of Jane,” in the Boston Globe for April 30, 1979, reflects her new attitude about earlier behavior. “I alienated lots of people . . . ,” she said. “That makes me wince.”
There are no doubt some former P.O.W.s who would like to see Jane wince as much as they did when she visited their Communist torturers in North Vietnam.
“Her style has changed since 1971,” proclaimed McCall’s for January 1978. “She has breakfast with congressmen rather than standing outside the gates of Army camps denouncing them.” Jane’s husband, former S.D.S. insurgent Tom Hayden, has been welcomed at the White House and in the California governor’s office, and even ran for U.S. Senator in 1976. On the night of the Academy Awards ceremony Tom was wearing a tuxedo and seemed to fit in very well among the film capital’s aristocracy. That must prove something. Why he even applauded when John Wayne stepped out to present the award for Best Picture!
But the fact is that neither Tom nor Jane has changed in the slightest. What is different is our level of tolerance . . . and the American condition. Jane says it herself in that same issue of McCall’s, which reports “her anger spurts out at the people who have sanitized her, made her respectable during the last year or two. ‘I hate the isn’t-it-wonderful-she’s – come-back-to-her-senses-and-joined-the-fold. I’m more profoundly committed to what I believe in now than in the days when I was considered a traitor. Today I’m polite because it’s possible. You couldn’t be polite six years ago. It wasn’t until Watergate began to be exposed that we could work through the system. And we did immediately. We came off the streets and into the halls of Congress to lobby.”
Just what was it to which Jane and Tom were committed? History is always forgiving when historians are forgetful. It is conceivable that some Americans who lived through the anti-war hysteria of the Sixties and Seventies have forgotten or never fully understood the roles played by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in the movement which brought them together as husband and wife. It is time for a refresher course.
Jane Seymour Fonda was born on December 21, 1937, the daughter of actor Henry Fonda and his second wife, Frances Seymour Brokaw, who committed suicide in 1950 by cutting her own throat. Miss Fonda’s early upbringing steered Jane in the “Liberal” direction. “My father was always progressive,” she says. “He . . . would get worked up about McCarthy and what that meant to the country. Yet, that kind of liberalism within the family never did provide me with any alternatives. I grew up feeling, ‘What is the use?’ “
As Jane began her struggle for independence and “consciousness,” the father-daughter relationship grew progressively more strained, causing Henry Fonda eventually to refer to Jane as “my alleged daughter.”
“After Henry took his fourth wife. ..,” reports Newsweek for November 16, 1970, “Jane . . . became the Anything Goes Girl. At Vassar she displayed both academic apathy and social promiscuity. ” Newsweek quotes cane’s lifelong friend Brooke Hayward Hopper, former wife of actor-director Dennis Hopper and daughter of Henry’s longtime agent. “Jane had a reputation for being easy,” recalls Brooke, who was also a Vassar girl. “It was almost a joke.” Her father apparently was not amused, continues Newsweek, “especially after receiving reports that Jane – then on a fling in Paris – was hanging out in Left Bank dives and swinging with jet-set playboys. Henry ordered her home to New York, and thus began Jane’s . . . most important role, that of Fulfilled Woman. After a friend suggested she try acting, she plunged almost obsessively into Actors Studio classes, dancing and voice lessons, physical training and deep psychoanalysis – all aimed at perfecting her performances.”
Her early screen credits bear sad testimony to the fact that the benefits of her strenuous effort were not immediately apparent. Perhaps that was due in part to her equally strenuous extracurricular activities. “Jane also reversed her field in her choice of men,” reports Newsweek. “After a depressing period in which she primarily dated homosexuals and starred in a run of cinematic disasters . . . she fled back to Paris and met Roger Vadim, the French film director and Svengali of sex goddesses.”
Vadim, whose real name is Plemiannanikov, married the young film star and set to work creating an image of Jane as a sex queen, something he had done earlier for his first wife, Brigitte Bardot. Jane had been prepared for this hustle by performances in such films as Tall Story, Walk On The Wild Side, The Chapman Report, Any Wednesday, and Hurry Sundown, in which she portrayed spoiled ingenues, restless wives, kept women, and underpaid prostitutes. Though the liberated Ms. Fonda claims now to be ashamed of her youthful stereotype as a sex object too dumb to burn her bra without scarring her chest, Jane had pursued these roles with enthusiasm. “Acting gave her the kind of applause she never got as a human being,” said friend Brooke. “I’ve never seen ambition as naked as Jane’s.”
Even Brooke never realized how naked Jane’s ambition could get until Barbarella, Vadim’s sexual space fantasy derived from the French comic strip, which presented the young starlet in various stages of dress and undress. And this intergalactic peep show turned the political tide for the heretofore uncommitted Jane. Up to then, says Fonda, “I had no political consciousness. I started talking to more and more women and reading some of the first books [on Women’s Lib] that were coming out. I began to understand that I myself had been conditioned a lot by images of women…. It was a time of really tumultuous currents in world history (1968). So on a personal level you feel that your life is going by and you have to change at a time when history is changing.”
As Jane’s political mood changed, so did her acceptability as an actress. She got her first important break in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a morosely dramatic film about marathon dancers during the Depression. “For Fonda,” according to Newsweek of October 10, 1977, “this serious film was like an oasis in the desert. Vadim remembers that ‘she often slept at the studios to keep her make-up on overnight. She was living her part with almost morbid intensity.’ “
Jane’s marriage to Roger Vadim, who was described by Newsweek as ” charming, faintly sinister and intelligently decadent,” was disintegrating rapidly. Vadim, to whom Jane later referred as that “crazy Russian,” complained of her new political consciousness: “It is very difficult being married to Joan of Arc.” Finally, Jane’s pent-up hostilities broke loose. “It would have happened to me sooner.” she said, “if I had lived in this country, but I was in France all during the ’60s, living in the world of Roger Vadim, with my blond hair and falsies …. It took 1968, the events in the U.S. and the student uprising in Paris to begin to stir up my thoughts. I began to read about the war, and I became angry because I felt betrayed. I felt I wanted to be with the people who were doing something about the war -my marriage was falling apart – and so I came back here. I got on the phone to Sam Brown, who is now head of the Peace Corps but who was head of the Viet Nam moratoriums, and I said: ‘My name is Jane Fonda. What can I do?’ “
That’s how easy the transition was from padded blond bombshell to liberated fanatic. “When I left the West Coast,” says Jane, “I was a liberal. When I landed in New York I was a revolutionary.”
The actress militant jumped into her new role with a vengeance. No sooner had she raised her colors than Jane was arrested with eighty-four Indians in an attempt to take over the Army’s Ft. Lawton near Seattle. She also backed the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island and spoke at a fundraising rally for the Committee United for Political Prisoners. Ever the camp follower, Jane has been expelled by Military Police for distributing Leftist literature at Ft. Hood, Tesas; Ft. Meade, Maryland; and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
Soon she switched from renegade Indians to shilling for the Black Panthers. Jane arranged bail for a Panther in New York charged with possession of three-sawed-off shotguns and invited notorious Black Panther leader Huey Newton to use her Manhattan penthouse. Indeed, the bloody Black Panther demonstrations in New Haven were a result of a mass rally called by Newton during a press conference at Jane’s place. Newton, at the time, had recently been released on bail of fifty thousand dollars in connection with the killing of an Oakland police officer. Not one to allow felonious conduct to interfere in her appraisal of a man’s leadership capabilities, Jane proudly announced during a speech at Michigan State University on November 22, 1969, that “Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton is the only man I’ve ever met that I would trust as the leader of this country.” Perhaps she had yet to meet Charles Manson.
In that same speech, delivered as part of a tour to raise funds for the defense of G.I. war resisters in trouble with the Army, Jane Fonda called the Communist Vietcong, who were as she spoke engaged in torturing and killing American Servicemen, “the conscience of the world.” She spoke of these butchers as “driven by the same spirit that drove Washington and Jefferson.” While men, women, and children were being brutalized throughout Indochina in the name of Communism, Jane Fonda rejoiced of the Gulag: “I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist.”
The pretty little movie star who was selected as the U.S. Army’s “Miss Recruiter” in 1962, and whose photograph was used in connection with the Army’s recruitment of volunteers, quickly became the war’s Tokyo Rose. She went so far as to join an outfit called the Winter Soldiers Committee to investigate U.S. “war crimes” and to accuse American soldiers of mass murder of Vietnamese civilians. Then came her F.T.A. (F*** The Army) road shows, touring Army towns with actors Donald Sutherland and Peter Boyle in company with comedian Dick Gregory. They relied primarily on obscene anti-military jokes, waved their clenched fists in the air, and propagandized for the Vietcong. These programs were advertised as “alternatives to the Bob Hope Show.”
The House Internal Security Committee formally reported that Jane Fonda was a participant in the January 8-10, 1971, National Coalition Conference at Chicago, Illinois. Here Jane was directly engaged in an effort with radical, revolutionary, Communist, and socialist groups that included the Black Panther Party, the Angela Davis Defense Fund, and the Communist Party, U.S.A.
Disclosure of this by the House Committee came as no surprise to those who had read the U.P.I. release of March 7, 1971, which reported: “Actress Jane Fonda visited jailed black Communist Angela Davis Sunday and then announced an anti-war offensive in May to shut down the nation’s capital and the San Francisco Bay area. ‘What we need is civil disobedience,’ she told a news conference at the University of San Francisco. ‘What we need is laying our lives, our bodies, on the line in massive protests,’ she said. The actress said the main focus of the protest will be in Washington, D.C., . . . and ‘we will shut it down if our demands are not met.’
“The demands included a date for withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia, a $6500 guaranteed annual income for families of four on welfare, and the freeing of all political prisoners. She said the ‘peace offensive’ would include massive research and lobbying efforts as well as workshops in the capital.
“Miss Fonda was here for a rally in support of the defendants in an alleged conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. She visited Miss Davis earlier Sunday and talked with her about ‘everyone joining forces to stop repression in this country and abroad.’ “
Jane’s desire to use violence in her quest for “peace” was illustrated later that same year in San Francisco. Responding to a question about possible violence arising from a “peace mobilization,” she said: “Property may ***dam well be destroyed, but maybe some things are more important.”
Through the years, Jane Fonda has lent her name and support to every Leftist cause imaginable, from the Women’s Liberation movement to radical prison reform. Adopting the whimsical slogan, “Have picket sign, will travel,” she has toured the country to march for the poor and skip for homosexual rights. But the height of publicity came in the summer of 1972 when Jane journeyed to the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi to lend her personal influence to the efforts of a Communist enemy working to break the spirit of American soldiers and P.O.W.s through a series of Tokyo Rose broadcasts over Radio Hanoi.
Miss Fonda appealed over the enemy radio network to U.S. fighting men, calling on them to “consider what you are doing,” telling them “the men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the past, in Germany and Japan, men who were guilty of these kinds of crimes were tried and executed.” Meanwhile, Hanoi Jane visited the heroes of a Communist aircraft battery which had been engaged in shooting down American planes and expressed her “solidarity” with the gunners. She even allowed herself to be photographed while poised on a Communist anti-aircraft gun. Finally, this champion of the oppressed visited with captured U.S. soldiers in an attempt to help their Communist jailers extract statements of sympathy with the peace movement. Jane resumed from her two-week stay in North Vietnam to proclaim “They [the P. O. W.s] all told me, ‘Call [our friends and families] and tell them to work in the peace movement. Tell them to work for McGovern. Tell them that we’ve got to get Nixon out of office.’ “
What effect did Jane’s visit have on the P.O.W.s, who she insisted were being treated humanely by their captors? The Trenton Times for April 17, 1979, published the account of Captain John McCain of the U.S. Navy who spent nearly six years as a P.O.W. “One day,” reports the Times, “his captors told him he would be taken to meet someone identified only as ‘an American actress who is for peace.’ He refused to see the actress, in part, he says, because he did not expect her to be the sort of person who would go home and tell the truth.
“He also refused because of the experience of a P.O.W. who had agreed to meet with some other Americans in the ‘peace’ movement. The ‘peace’ people commanded the P.O.W. to confess to war crimes. When he refused, repeatedly and adamantly, he heard a ‘peace’ person suggest to his captors that ‘this young man needs to be straightened out in his thinking.’ He was hung by his wrists until an arm pulled from its shoulder socket.
“For refusing to see the actress, McCain was confined for four summer months in an unventilated cubicle five feet long and two feet wide, and he was beaten and starved. Other prisoners suffering similar abuse also were made to suffer Jane Fonda’s voice: The North Vietnamese piped into the cells recordings in which she urged prisoners to actively oppose U.S. policy, and told the world how well the prisoners were being treated.”
Jane returned home to find the American people were outraged and Conservatives in the House calling for her prosecution for treason. Republican Congressman Robert J. Huber of Michigan put it this way: “Examined from the evidentiary focus of a grand jury, the testimony of my colleagues establishes sufficient factual allegations to support indictments against Jane Fonda on the ground of conspiracy and under the Sedition Act (18 U.S.C. 2387).” Lieutenant Colonel James Thompson, who suffered nearly nine years of nightmarish torture in a bamboo prison, said it straight out: “She and the others like her were traitors and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be hung for it.”
How did Jane’s acting career fare throughout these treasonous rampages? The Hollywood Women’s Press Club did give her its “Sour Apple” award for presenting the worst image of Hollywood to the world. and Jane assumed the martyr’s role, picturing herself as an outcast. “They don’t give Academy Awards to people like me …. I’m a renegade actress, a slob who doesn’t fit into the Hollywood mold.” But the Left rewards its own. As soon as Jane picked up the picket sign she was nominated for Best Actress for her 1969 performance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? And she was honored with her first Oscar for her 1971 portrayal of a prostitute in Klute. That little statue assured Hanoi Jane of stardom and wealth to finance her militant enterprises. Pretty fair treatment compared to what Julius and Ethel Rosenberg got.
It was in the spring of 1972 that Jane Fonda met Tom Hayden. According to one interviewer, her eyes still light up when she talks about him. “I met this guy,” Jane says, “this brilliant person I had respected from afar. I’d read his books. It turned out he was very into films, and we’d talk about films in a way I’d never thought about. He had more respect for films than I did. So I thought, through some strange quirk in my life I’ve become a movie star. Now I’ve become a political activist. Why not try to blend the two?” Perhaps they will turn their love story into a Hollywood musical featuring the Hanoi Symphony Orchestra.
As an activist, Jane Fonda is a fledgling compared to Thomas Emmett Hayden. While Jane was wearing a cheerleader costume in her 1960 motion-picture debut, Hayden was engaged in the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta and Tennessee, a gang that was heavily infiltrated with Communists and eventually gave birth to the Black Panthers. Tom was a graduate of the University of Michigan where he had become a campus militant. A founder of the Marxist Students for a Democratic Society, he drafted the Port Huron Statement of June 1962 which created the S.D.S., described by the late F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover as working “constantly in furtherance of the aims and objectives of the Communist Party throughout the Nation.”
While a graduate student at Michigan, Hayden led marches under the banners of Black Power, Ban-the-Bomb, end-the-war, resist-the-draft, reform-the-university, and other radicalizing favorites. In 1965 he was honored by the radical Communist National Guardian, and in 1966 he participated in the National Guardian’s forum on politics and policy. Before Jane could even locate Hanoi on a map, Tom Hayden was there accompanied by Staughton Lynd and Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, whose congressional candidacy Hayden sponsored in 1966. Indeed. Tom Hayden has traveled freely in the Communist world from Cuba to Czecho-Slovakia and always has such nice things to say about the Comrades upon his return.
Tom Hayden is quite a little revolutionary. He applied his idea of participatory democracy” in Newark by exploiting racial grievances which erupted in five days of rioting in July 1967, during which twenty-one people were killed. The year 1968 was a high point for Hayden’s career as a professional agitator. In April and May he led the riots at Columbia University; in July, he became national coordinator for the Presidential candidacy of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver; and, during June through August, he was in Chicago to coordinate the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
The show in Chicago resulted in Hayden and a handful of his cohorts being indicted by a federal grand jury. The conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven began on September 24, 1969. Five months later the jury found Hayden guilty of violating the anti-riot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act by crossing state lines with the intent to incite riot. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and fined five thousand dollars. but a tame “Liberal” judge can always be found when the issue is important enough and Tom’s conviction was reversed on appeal.
Instead of going to jail, Tom Hayden, like so many radicals before him, fell into the arms of Jane Fonda. In January of 1973, Tom and Jane were married. But, just as the honeymoon was beginning, the happy couple was swept up in yet another controversy as returning P.O.W.s bore tragic witness to the lies this radical pair had told about prisoners being treated fairly and reasonably in North Vietnam. Hayden responded by calling the P.O.W.s who told of brutality at the hands of the Communists “liars, hypocrites, and pawns of President Nixon.” The scarred and crippled veterans responded with vehement indignation.
“Liars, hypocrites, and pawns, are we?” wrote C.W.O. Roy E. Zeigler II, who had just spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison. “You sorry individual …. Men died at the hands of their captors and you have the audacity to say we were the best treated prisoners in any war in history. . . . I hope the ghosts of the men who died in prison camps come and haunt you.” Captain James Ray of Conroe, Texas, responded: “I would personally challenge that young lady [Miss Fonda] to look at the scars still visible on my arms from the tortures and tell me to my face that I’m a liar and a hypocrite.”
Republican Congressman from Connecticut Robert H. Steele nominated the Oscar winner for an award for “the rottenest, most miserable performance by any one individual American in the history of our country …. Where does she get her colossal gall? I wonder if she would dare to make her charges to the faces of those men who were beaten with rifle butts in the jungle or to the captured airman who was tied down with wire while ants swarmed over his body until he thought he would be eaten alive?”
We can take some pleasure in knowing that the Haydens do not find paradise every time they visit a Communist country. Critic Rex Reed, writing in the October 1975 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, described the unpleasant ordeal that plagued American film stars on location in Russia for the making of The Blue Bird. The primitive working conditions and unsanitary facilities afflicted everyone on the set. Elizabeth Taylor developed amoebic dysentery from filthy ice cubes and was unable to get satisfactory medical treatment from the Soviet physicians who came to attend her dressed like butchers.
‘In addition to Elizabeth Taylor’s amoebic dysentery,” says Reed, “the rest of the cast has had various stomach disorders from the terrible food. Jane Fonda loved it when she first arrived; she spent three weeks saluting and calling everyone ‘comrade.’ Then when the [production] delays dragged into six weeks, she couldn’t wait to leave. There were no fresh vegetables, her child broke out in a rash, and her husband, Tom Hayden, was arrested for getting locked out of the hotel and standing in the middle of the street yelling his wife’s name until he was taken away for interrogation by the secret police.” This is the kind of experience for which Jane Fonda believes we should pray on our knees.
The road to respectability was not immediately easy for Tom and Jane Hayden, but they got considerable help from friends and the media. Soon Tom was feeling sufficiently comfortable within the “Liberal” Establishment in California that the successful 1974 gubernatorial campaign of twilight child Jerry Brown convinced him he should challenge John Tunney, the state’s junior Senator, for the Democratic nomination in 1976. Jane, of course, went all out for her favorite revolutionary, sinking over four hundred thousand dollars into the campaign and eagerly “scraping the bottom of the barrel for votes. In the summer of 1975, she sought to deliver the vote of the red-light district by appearing at a “Hookers’ Convention,” organized by a so-called “union” of prostitutes called C.O.Y.O.T.E. (“Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics”), and called for “decriminalization” of prostitution in the United States. She qualified her appeal by saying she approved the ban on prostitution by the Reds in Saigon, however, contending that in “an ideal society” the world’s oldest profession isn’t necessary. The prostitute is, according to Jane, “an inevitable product of a society that places ultimate importance on money, possessions and competition.” And we bet you thought it had to do with sex.
In spite of Jane’s solicitations at the lamp post, Tom lost by half a million votes. But he did come away with a list of eighteen thousand campaign contributors and a gang of supporters who helped him set up the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a lobby working for such Leftist goals as federally guaranteed employment, control of corporations, public ownership of utilities, a restructuring of the tax system to destroy the middle class, and rent control.
Jane has been a little slower in adapting to the pose of respectability, but she’s doing the best she can. Liberated though she is, Jane plays the role of sacrificing housewife and mother of two small children, Vanessa Vadim and Troy Hayden, whenever accommodating writers for McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal arrive for interviews. She always appears wearing what has been described as “deliberate rundown chic,” throws in a load of wash, cooks a meal, or washes the dishes while the interview proceeds. If she has groceries to bring in from the car she points proudly at the items which she picked out and purchased all by herself. In “Jane Fonda: Trying To Be Everywoman,” reporter Barbara Harrison wrote in Ladies’ Home Journal of April 1978 that the actress is now “Mellow Jane, happy in her shack – which is a block away from the unpolluted ocean, and has a wraparound porch, rooms painted in bright kindergarten primary colors, and eclectic -organic decor . . . . ” But even Miss Harrison was put off by Jane’s relationship with Troy, her son who had been given a dollhouse for his bedroom. “The next morning,” writes Harrison, “when she introduced me to her four-year-old son Troy, she said: ‘Hi, hotlips. This is my friend Barbara. She’s afraid of airplanes, isn’t that silly?’
” ‘I told you not to call me hotlips, dummy,’ Troy said-and rammed his head into her flat stomach. I was beginning to feel most uncharitable.”
Later, when Jane received a telephone call from a friend in the Campaign for Economic Democracy announcing that a mutual acquaintance was having a baby, Miss Harrison was jarred by Jane’s “spontaneous” utterance. ” ‘Terrific,’ Fonda yelled back: ‘Another child for the Revolution.’
“Dear me,” thought Harrison, “I marched, too, and no one has ever accused me of leaning to the Right, but I have seldom heard a less humane, more knee-jerk ideological response to the birth of a child. And what, precisely, did she mean by the ‘Revolution’?”
Yes, Jane does have her lapses in restraint, like the time Jacoba Atlas of Parents’ Magazine arrived to do “an intimate interview with the gifted actress, activist, wife and loving mother” for the December 1977 issue. “I want to say loud and clear,” Jane Fonda insisted, “I’m not mellow. If anything, I’m even more committed than I was.”
Poor Tom was doing his best to get her to cool it in anticipation of box-office receipts. “It’s very important that Jane be restored to legitimacy now,” Hayden is quoted as saying in the October 10, 1977, issue of Newsweek. “I’m very impressed by how rapidly Jane’s image has started to reverse itself. It’s not just her doing, it’s a sign that the country has been changing.”
Incredibly, Hanoi Jane even attended a White House reception on November 17, 1977, where she chatted with Amy Carter. Hayden was there in February 1978 and was “warmly received” by President Carter who reportedly announced that he was “proud to meet” the S.D.S. revolutionary and praised him for “all the contributions that he had made” to the country. A strange greeting indeed from a U.S. President in view of Tom Hayden’s famous attacks on the previous Democrat occupant of the Oval Office. During a meeting in Communist Czecho-Slovakia in 1967, Hayden had publicly threatened that President Lyndon Johnson had “better leave some men at home. Because, like Spartacus, whose fellow slaves in Rome protected his hiding-place by each claiming to be Spartacus himself, I am the Vietcong. We are everywhere! We are all the Vietcong!”
The White House welcome was angrily denounced by Congressman Robert K. Dornan (R.-California) on the floor of the House on May 12, 1978. “Mr. Hayden’s desire to change his image is understandable,” Dornan remarked. “But his attempt at self-made change of label has not succeeded in changing his substance – or his long-term goals. Hayden now heads the California Campaign for Economic Democracy, a group lobbying for what they term ‘basic institutional reform’ but which translates into massive economic re-distribution and anti-capitalism, that is Marxist-socialism.
“That Mr. Hayden would like to change his image is, as I said, no surprise-most of us would want to change our image if it resembled his. What is surprising is the way the liberal establishment – once the target of his ire – have rushed to embrace him in complete disregard of his past and still held views.”
Dornan pointed out that California Governor Jerry Brown had already gotten into the act by appointing Hayden as the state’s representative on the board of the Western S.U.N., a regional organization intended to promote solar energy. “It is almost as if Hayden were some radical prize to go to the highest bidder,” said the disgusted Congressman.
Tom has certainly gotten into the spirit of things as a promoter of solar energy, having recently announced: “The anti-nuclear struggle should be to America during the ’80s what the anti-war movement was in the ’60s.”
Our neighbors to the south would be well-advised to adjust their sombreros against the solar heat likely to be generated by the radical Mr. Hayden, who has now been appointed by Governor Brown to the Southwest Border Regional Commission where, with representatives from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, he is supposed to promote “economic development along the Mexican border.”
Meanwhile, Jane’s style is so mellow, she’s about to decay. Naturally that doesn’t prevent her from injecting her films with large doses of Communist propaganda-perfectly acceptable to the Hollywood elite as long as it is done respectably. The “Liberal” Establishment joined in applause as Jane paid obsequious tribute to the antediluvian radical Lillian Hellman and her pack of Communist friends in Julia. It cheered as she rode over the wicked cattle and oil barons in Comes A Horseman. It richly rewarded her for Coming Home, Jane’s own battle hymn to Ho chi Minh. And her latest release, The China Syndrome, has proved so accurate in foretelling a certain nuclear accident that she must be suspected either of being clairvoyant or complicity in sabotage.
She still picks up a picket sign when the housecleaning is done and was photographed last winter demonstrating in behalf of the union boycott of a J.P. Stevens mill in Cleveland. But, like it or not, Jane is being sanitized. Gore Vidal, according to the Washington Post, recently announced that Mrs. Hayden would “make a d*** good president.”
Who knows? Maybe by the time she’s eighty or ninety, if the image-makers have their way, Jane Fonda will be completely respectable.
Which reminds us of a line in the 1974 production Chinatown, a brilliant film about the corrosive effects of unchecked evil. Portraying an elderly, wealthy, and extremely ruthless businessman with an unsavory past, actor John Huston was described by another character in the film as respectable. “Of course I’m respectable,” replied Huston, “I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get to be respected if they live long enough.”
If that’s true, there may yet be hope for Jane Fonda. But little hope for America.