Excerpt: 'My Life So Far'

April 5, 2005 — -- Jane Fonda, actress, activist, feminist, workout guru and role model, has written an extraordinary memoir, "My Life So Far," which hits bookstores today. Fonda divides her life so far into three acts.

Act one covers her often painful childhood, her early films and her turbulent marriage to filmmaker Roger Vadim. In act two, she begins to discover her activism and discusses her marriages to Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. And in act three, she begins to confront her demons and tries to live her life in a more conscious way.

You can read an excerpt from "My Life So Far" below.

Stay near me -- do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!-- William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

I sat cross-legged on the floor of the tiny home I'd created out ofcardboard boxes. The walls were so high that all I could see if I lookedup was the white-painted tongue-and-groove ceiling of the glassed-inporch so common in Connecticut in the 1940s. The porch ran the entirelength of the house and smelled of mildew. Light from the windowsbounced off the ceiling down to where I sat, so I didn't need a lamp as Iworked on the saddle. I was eleven years old.

It was an English saddle, my half sister Pan's, from the time beforeshe'd gotten married, sold her horse, and moved to New York City -- fromthe time when we still believed things would work out all right.I held the saddle on my lap, rubbing saddle soap into the beautiful,rich leather, over and over ... Make it better. I know I can make it better.The smell of saddle soap was comforting. So was the smallness of myhome. This was a place where I could be sure of things. No one was allowedin here but me -- not my brother, Peter, not anyone. Everythingwas always arranged just so -- the saddle, the soap, the soft rags foldedcarefully, and my book of John Masefield poems. Neatness was important...something to count on.

Mother was home for a while and if I leaned forward ever soslightly, I could look out my "door" down the length of the porch, towhere she sat at an oilcloth-covered table on which stood a Mason jar.A butterfly would be beating its wings frantically against the glass wallsof the jar, and I could see my mother pick up a cotton ball with tweezers,dip it into a bottle of ether, unscrew the top of the jar, and carefullydrop in the ether-soaked ball. After a minute, I could see the butterfly'swings begin to slow their mad fluttering, until gradually they wouldstop moving altogether. Peace. A whiff of ether drifted down to where Isat, making me think of the dentist. I knew just what the butterfly felt,because whenever I went to have my braces tightened, the nurse wouldput a mask over my nose and tell me to breathe deeply. In no time theedges of my body would begin to disappear. Sound would come to mefrom far away and I would feel a wonderful, cosmic abandon as I fellbackward down a dark hole, like Alice to Wonderland. Oh, I wished thatI could make that sensation last forever. I didn't feel sorry at all for thebutterfly.

After a while, mother would unscrew the lid; gently remove the butterflywith the long tweezers; carefully, lovingly, pierce its body with apin; and mount it on a white board on the wall above the table. Therewere at least a dozen of them up there, different kinds of swallowtails, asouthern dogface, a red admiral, a clouded sulphur, and a monarch. Inever could decide which one was my favorite.

Once she took me with her to a meadow full of wildflowers and tallgrasses where she went to catch her butterflies. There was still an abundanceof wild places -- swamps, unexplored forests, and meadows -- inGreenwich, Connecticut, in the 1940s. I watched as she moved throughthe grass -- her blond, sun-blushed hair blowing in the wind -- swoopingdown with her green net, then flipping the net quickly to close off thebutterfly's escape route. I would help her get it safely into a jar andquickly screw the top on.

It puzzled me a little why Mother had decided to take up butterflycollecting. I don't remember her ever doing this when we lived in California.I was the one fascinated with butterflies. I was always paintingpictures of them. When I was ten, right before we'd moved from California,I gave my father a drawing for his birthday. "Butterflies by JaneFonda" was written up in the right-hand corner, and then two rows ofthem with their names written underneath in my tight, straight-upand-down-careful-not-to-reveal-anything handwriting. My letter said:

May 19, 1948.
Dear Dad,
I did not trace these drawings of butterflies. I hope you had ahappy birthday. I heard you on the Bing Crosby program. Every twodays I will send you another picture of butterflies.Love, Jane.

By the time Mother took up the butterfly hobby, I had turned eleven,Peter was nine, and we were living in our second rented house in Connecticut.It was a rambling two-story wood house perched atop a steephill overlooking a tollgate on the Merritt Parkway. I could look out mybedroom window and count the cars. Prior to the move east, we'd grownup in California's Santa Monica Mountains and, instead of a tollgate, welooked out onto the vast, shimmering Pacific Ocean. Maybe that is whymy childhood fantasies of conquering all the enemies of the world wereso expansive. Had I grown up overlooking the tollgate, I might have seenmyself as an accountant.

This new house was on a large piece of property bordered to thewest by an immense hardwood forest that, in the winter, became a leaflessgray fortress. Then in the spring, dogwood would bloom, hopefuland white through the layered forest gray, and redbud would add slashesof magenta. By May, an array of greens would transform the woodsonce again. For someone who had spent the first ten years of her life seasonlessin California, this ever-changing palette seemed miraculous.

The house had an uncomfortable Charles Addams-y quality aboutit, always too dark and chilly, and it had far more rooms than there werepeople living there, which added a sense of impermanence and awkwardnessto its hilltop perch. There was Grandma Seymour (Mother'smother), Peter, me, and a Japanese-American maid named Katie. Petersays Katie's familiar presence with us after three years was comforting tohim. I, on the other hand, barely remember her. But then Peter got moreattached to people than I did. I was the Lone Ranger.

Mother wasn't with us much anymore, though I didn't know why. Itwas during one of the periods when she was back from wherever it wasshe went that the butterfly collection was started. Maybe someone hadsuggested that she get herself a hobby. Peter and I had stopped payingmuch attention to her being away, or at least I had. It had simply becomea fact of our lives: Mother would be there, and then she wouldn't. Whenshe wasn't there, and even when she was, Grandma Seymour would bein charge of us. Grandma was a strong woman, a constant presence inour early lives. But though I loved her, I don't remember ever runningjoyfully into her arms the way my own grandchildren do with me. I don'tremember her ever imparting grandmotherly wisdom or even being funto be with. She was a more formal, stalwart presence. But she was alwaysthere to meet our external needs.

Around the house there'd be an occasional murmured mention of ahospital or of an illness, and right after we'd moved to Greenwich,Mother had been in Johns Hopkins Hospital for a long time, for an operationon a dropped kidney. Grandma took Peter and me to visit her thereonce, and I remember Mother telling me they'd almost cut her in half.But she'd been "ill" and in hospitals so much that it had lost any realmeaning. Hospitals were supposed to make you well so you could comehome and stay.