Jane Fonda is a legend in her own right. The Queen
of Hollywood had been gracing our screens for decades, and her grace, charm, and talent remain
unmatched. Jane has made a name for herself not only as an actress but a passionate political
activist, travelling the country spreading the anti-war message. But the real war was with Jane’s
love life; with three failed marriages behind her, it seemed as though she was never able to
find a man to truly love her for who she was. Jane Fonda already had a lot to live
up to from the day that she was born. Her father was actor Henry Fonda, a
Broadway star who became famous for his Oscar-nominated performance
in the 1940s Grapes of Wrath. Her mother was a socialite and her father’s
second wife, Frances Ford Seymour Brokaw. Henry and Frances had a troubled marriage
from the start. As a result of his career, Henry often left his wife alone to take
care of Jane and her three other children. Not only was he away for work, but he was
also notoriously unfaithful to Frances, having had numerous affairs
throughout their marriage. Speaking about her mother, Jane
explained that she often saw how the strain of her parents took its
toll on her mother’s mental health. She admitted that her mother suffered from “What
would today be called bipolar." Jane added that her mother was "frequently institutionalized,"
which was hard on Jane and her siblings. "When a parent isn't around, the child assumes
it's her fault... assumes she isn't lovable.” After years of mental health struggles,
Frances could no longer bear with the pain and tragically took her own life,
leaving Jane, who was just 12 years old, to take responsibility for her younger siblings.
Her father had told his children that Frances had a heart attack, so it wasn't until years later
that they discovered the truth in a magazine. In an exclusive interview,
Jane confessed that as a child, she blamed herself for her mother’s death.
She thought that if she had done more to help, perhaps her mother wouldn’t have felt so
overwhelmed and chosen to end her life. It wasn’t until she was older that she was
able to understand her mother’s decision and came to terms with the fact that there
was nothing she could have done to help her. "Then you can forgive, and you can
understand," she told the Guardian. Just mere months after their mother's
death, Henry remarried Susan Blanchard, who was only nine years older than Jane.
The actress’s father was also absent for most of her childhood, and when he was
around, he was always cold and distant. In her autobiography My Life So Far, Jane wrote
that Henry constantly told her that she needed to lose weight. When she was only 13 years old,
it took her a week to work up the courage to tell him that she'd hurt her back swimming, and
when she did, he made Blanchard take care of her. Even though Henry wasn’t the ideal father
figure, Jane still worshiped him and was desperate for his approval. In fact, it was
her father who inspired her to be an activist. She had always admired the righteous, moral
characters he played in his films and thought that maybe if she was more like that, he
would finally pay some attention to her. "I knew he loved these characters and I wanted him
to love me," She added that although he initially thought she was "a foolish, frivolous person,"
she believes that ultimately he was proud of her. After dropping out of college, in 1958 Jane
moved to New York to take acting lessons at the Actors Studio. She was determined to follow
in her father’s footsteps and become an actress, and she was going to do everything she could to
make it happen. She featured in numerous Broadway plays and several unsuccessful movies, but things
didn’t seem to be working for her in New York. Finally, in 1963, an opportunity to film a movie
in France came knocking on her door, and Jane quickly jumped at the chance. The movie was a
huge success, and it rocketed Jane into stardom. That very same year, on her birthday, her
agent introduced her to French-Russian filmmaker Roger Vadim The two quickly hit it
off, and Jane was immediately taken by Rodger. He was the total opposite of what she
knew men to be like; he was passionate, emotional and brought excitement into her life. The couple wed two years later, but their
marriage was quite unconventional for its time. Vadim decided they should have an open
relationship and often brought his dates home. Fonda felt like she had no choice in the matter
and agreed with the arrangement. However, she later admitted that she didn’t enjoy any of it but
was determined to try and make her marriage work. Unfortunately, another problem arose in their
marriage as Vadim continued to ask Jane for money, which she reluctantly gave him. When she later
learned he was using it for gambling, racking up countless debts, Fonda had no choice but to pay
them off using an inheritance from her mother. However, when Fonda took an interest
in political activism in the US, Vadim didn’t agree with anything
that she wanted to stand up for. Finally, Jane had had enough and filed for
divorce. Their split was finalized in 1973, although the former couple stayed friends and made
an effort to co-parent their daughter, Vanessa. In 1971, Fonda met Tom Hayden onstage
at an anti-war rally. They spoke about their shared passion for fighting
for what they thought was right, and after getting to know one
another, Jane was smitten. The couple fell deeply in love, and this time the
actress thought she had finally met ‘the one. She and her last husband had bumped heads politically,
so after having found Hayden, she couldn’t have asked for anyone better. The pair married in 1973
just as her divorce from Vadim was finalized. Hayden started running for political office
and founded the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED) to fund his campaigns and other liberal
candidates. Fonda took on the role of breadwinner, starring in movies, writing books, and launching
her famous “Jane Fonda's Workout,” which made her a famous home workout guru. In 1982, the New
York Times reported that the workout videos were making a whopping $30,000 a month, and
it was all going towards Hayden’s campaign. Despite this, Hayden was often critical
of Fonda's activism. And then, as Fonda put it to the New Yorker, "he fell in love with
somebody, and it really devastated me." However, the breakup with Hayden in 1988 also freed
her to become an activist in her own right. She said of her relationship with Hayden, "I needed someone far wiser and
more knowledgeable than I was about movement-building and politics... I learned so
much from him that I am forever grateful for." When it came to motherhood, Jane admitted that
she felt completely unprepared when her children were young. She had two biological children,
Vanessa Vadim with Roger and Troy Garity with Tom. She also has an adopted daughter, Mary Williams,
who came to live with Fonda when she was 16. Mary's parents were Black Panthers — a movement
Fonda was involved with — but after her father was imprisoned, her mother was devastated by the
arrest of her husband and became an alcoholic. While working at a summer camp
that Jane and her ex-husband ran, the actress got to know Mary and her story
and offered her a safe place to stay. However, Jane confessed that rather than focus on
being a good mother, she was driven to continue with her activism. She told the New Yorker that
Hayden was the one that took care of her other two children. Once, when Jane was putting
him to bed after being away for a long time, "Troy looked up at me and asked,
'What's the point of having a mother?'" Despite not being "a very good parent"
during her children's early years, Fonda says that she's trying to make up for
it now. "It's never too late," she shared. Her divorce from Hayden was finalized in
1990, and it wasn’t much later that Jane got a call from a stranger who happened
to be a famous billionaire. The stranger was none other than Ted Turner, founder of CNN.
According to the New Yorker, Turner asked Fonda out after reading about her divorce, but
she told him to ask again in a few months. Exactly one month after his first call, Ted called
Jane again and asked her out. Just one year later, they married. This was Fonda’s third marriage, and unfortunately for her, the
third time was not the charm. Just one month into their marriage, the
actress found out that her new husband was having an affair. Their vows were still
fresh in the air, and yet Jane was betrayed yet again by the man that she loved. Determined to
make their marriage work, Fonda stayed with Ted. However, as time went by, Jane
started to feel like she was losing herself. She was making herself
smaller, fading into the background, all because she was trying so hard to see past
the cracks in her marriage. She gave up acting, took a step back from her activism, and became the
perfect image of the glamorous, silent housewife. Thankfully, Jane knew she was born to do bigger
and better things. She knew she wanted to make a difference in the world, and playing the part
of ‘housewife’ wasn’t going to cut it. In 2001, Fonda left Turner, later telling the New
Yorker, "it was really hard to leave... and yet I knew that, if I stayed, I was never going
to become who I'm meant to be as a whole person." Just like her splits from her previous husbands, Jane remained on good terms with Ted and never let
the past prevent them from being amicable friends. In 2017, Jane broke up with
her boyfriend of eight years, music producer Richard Perry. After their split,
the actress decided that she was done with dating, sharing, "I'm single, which makes me very happy." Fonda admitted being a strong feminist made having
healthy relationships with men more complicated, explaining, “For me to really confront sexism
would have required doing something about my relationships with men, and I
couldn't. That was too scary," Being single in her 60s, before meeting
Perry, gave her the chance to "heal the wounds patriarchy had dealt me... to become
a whole, full-voiced woman." She added, "For me, the personal meant
becoming a single woman, no longer silencing my voice, slowly
becoming the subject of my own life." Jane Fonda has proved to the world that
no one is ever going to stop her from fighting for what she believes in. From
the rubbles that her losses left behind, Jane was able to blossom into a stronger
woman taking the world by storm!
