How fear turned Jane Fonda into a sex addict
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The man of Jane Fonda’s dreams was finally hers. At a short ceremony in a Las Vegas hotel, serenaded by a bevy of female violinists in skin-tight, sequined dresses, the French film director Roger Vadim agreed to forsake all others and cherish her for ever.
Even then, however, she knew his words were hollow. Soon after they’d begun their intensely sexual affair, he’d spelled out his philosophy to the naive young American star.
‘Jealousy is bourgeois,’ said Vadim, who at 37 was ten years older and embarking on his third marriage.
‘If I have sex with someone else, it’s not betrayal, because I love you.’
Jane Fonda raised no objection when her-then husband Roger Vadim brought home a call girl from the most elegant brothel in Paris - instead welcoming her into the marital bed
Uncertain of her identity and racked with insecurity, Jane said nothing. If she objected, she feared she might lose him — and the thought of life without her gentle and charismatic lover filled her with terror.
Even so, she seemed jittery on her wedding day in 1965.
In truth, says Jane, she was ‘feeling like a zombie and wondering: “I don’t know why I’m doing this”’.
Later, she locked herself in a lavatory which had a phone and rang a former lover.
‘I’m married,’ she sobbed. ‘Now what do I do?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he snapped and hung up on her.
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ShareFor Jane — whom I’ve known since the Sixties when we studied together at the Actors Studio in New York — it was not an auspicious start. And although Jane loved Vadim dearly, he would soon propel her into the kind of wanton lifestyle that was unusual even in the free-wheeling Sixties.
Besides being rampantly promiscuous, he was an inveterate gambler whose pockets were always empty. So Jane found herself not only playing an archetypal sex kitten, but also having to pay off his creditors — which took her five years — and his debts to the tax authorities, which took even longer.
Back in France, where the couple had bought a farmhouse, she concentrated on lavish refurbishments and told no one that she was paying for everything. Nor did she confront Vadim with her suspicion that he was secretly sleeping with other women.
Jane complained that she never got any pleasure from the threesomes the couple had, but others believe she was turned on by Vadim's sensual decadence
Only when they had been together three years did he confess he’d never been faithful to her. But these nameless women weren’t important, he insisted, and he vowed that he’d never embarrass her in public by taking a mistress.
On top of that, he had a shocking suggestion. Jane should try having adventures of her own to enjoy ‘sex for its own sake’; then he’d be able to tell her about his conquests, and they could share their experiences.
Initially, Jane was horrified.
Suddenly, her beloved husband — with whom she was trying to conceive a baby — was asking her to be his sexual accomplice. But she felt she had no choice.
For all his faults, he gave her much-needed emotional security. So, again, she said nothing.
‘He validated me. I couldn’t conceive of leaving him,’ she recalls.
She raised no objection when he brought home a call girl from the most elegant brothel in Paris — instead welcoming her into the marital bed.
‘I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am,’ she says.
By 24, Jane had a history of promiscuity - she'd been to bed with so many men she'd lost count
The couple continued having threesomes throughout most of their marriage. To close friends, Jane complained that she never got any pleasure from these experiences, but others believe she was turned on by Vadim’s sensual decadence.
It was sexual attraction, of course, that had brought this unlikely pair together in the first place. While in Paris to make a movie, Jane had met Vadim at a dinner.
Aware he was the great seducer who’d married Brigitte Bardot when she was 18 and moulded her into a star, she was understandably wary of him. But as the evening wore on, she felt the full force of his high-voltage charm.
‘Oh, God, is he handsome,’ she found herself thinking, ‘even though his teeth are too big and his face is too long. His green slanting eyes are filled with so much mystery and promise.’
They didn’t see each other again until New Year’s Eve at a costume ball in a pavilion in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. Jane came as Charlie Chaplin, and Vadim as an officer in the Red Army.
All evening, she seemed to be running away from him. Then, at around 5am, as music drifted in plaintively from the garden, he caught up with her.
‘You’ve forgotten the New Year’s Eve kiss,’ he murmured, taking her in his arms and kissing her deeply. Jane gasped and ran off.
A few days later, Vadim dropped by at the studio where she was filming.
One look was all it took: within two hours they were back at her hotel, embracing passionately.
‘But something happened and I couldn’t make love to her,’ he recalled.
Later: ‘One evening, in the middle of the night, the curse was broken. We stayed in bed two nights and a day. I had to make up for lost time.’
Jane realised she was falling in love — and the thought terrified her. A few weeks later, she ran off to Geneva without any explanation. When she returned, she confessed she’d gone there to be with an old lover in order to test if she really loved Vadim.
‘And what do you feel?’ Vadim asked.
‘I love you,’ she answered.
While Jane might have been scared of emotional intimacy with Vadim, she certainly didn’t shy away from physical liaisons. Occasionally during the marriage, it was Jane who solicited women. She explained to one friend that she felt compelled to supply the women for her husband in order to have some sort of control.
As Jane became more brazen in her marriage to Vadim, the threesomes sometimes extended into foursomes
Sandy Whitelaw, a friend working at United Artists in Paris, says the open marriage was the source of much gossip and titillation in showbusiness circles.
Who was in their bed and who wasn’t, everyone wanted to know. The answer was: la crème de la crème from the worlds of politics and the arts, and friends over from Hollywood were equally eager to participate.
‘But you had to be invited,’ says a London producer who was, but refuses to give his name.
Soon, Jane was insisting to friends that Vadim had shown her a gloriously different way to live, without any secrets. And as she became more brazen, the threesomes sometimes extended into foursomes.
Even her beloved former stepmother Susan Blanchard — who’d been more of a mother to her than her real one — was invited into the bedroom with her new husband, actor Michael Wager.
‘We just laughed and said no,’ he says.
Also asked were Jane’s childhood friend Brooke Hayward and her actor husband, Dennis Hopper.
They said yes — ‘for the hell of it,’ admits Brooke, adding: ‘It was not exactly my idea of heaven.’
Less forgivable was Jane and Vadim’s growing carelessness towards Nathalie, his nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
One morning, the little girl walked in on them and found a strange woman beside her father in bed while Jane was in the bathroom.
‘I was disgusted,’ says Nathalie. ‘I turned around and left. After I grew up, I told Vadim he’d been full of s*** to behave that way.’
Although Jane never spoke to her stepdaughter about the incident, she was concerned enough to make plans to send her to a Swiss boarding school. This came to nothing, however, when Vadim objected to being separated from his daughter.
In 1965, the year of their wedding, the family moved to Malibu in California while Jane made the movie The Chase, with Marlon Brando. Their beach house quickly filled up with friends from Paris and Hollywood.
Frequently, Jane would sunbathe nude on one of the decks, not at all self-conscious when friends such as Brando and Hopper wandered by.
Once, a female guest was so overwhelmed by the sensual atmosphere she knelt down and kissed Jane full on the mouth.
Not surprisingly, there were continuing rumours that she was gay or bisexual.
Asked about this, Jane said: ‘Look, can’t we leave something to the imagination? Frankly, I’ve probably done everything.’
Vadim married Brigitte Bardot when she was 18 and moulded her into a star
One friend recalls that Jane often confided that she’d enjoyed sleeping with girls since she was at boarding school. Even when sex wasn’t involved, she always forged intense female friendships.
At primary school, her best friend was a tomboy called Sue Sally Jones, who played professional polo — then not open to women — for 20 years, disguised as a man. Jane has carried a photo of Sue Sally with her throughout her life.
Another intimate friend was the petite and intense Canadian actress Madeleine Sherwood. When the two women starred in a Broadway play — with Madeleine playing Jane’s mother — they were often seen holding hands backstage.
Once, during a performance, Madeleine kissed her full on the mouth.
The director objected, saying: ‘A mother doesn’t kiss a daughter on the mouth.’
Madeleine recalls: ‘It was a gentle, loving kiss. We didn’t slobber.’
Rumours about Jane’s sexuality surfaced again in 1970, during an anti-war road trip across the States with her French friend, Elisabeth Vailland. They shared a curious bond: like Jane, Elisabeth had also procured women for her late husband and indulged in threesomes.
When Elisabeth asked if she enjoyed being with other women, Jane said she thought she did — ‘because I liked having an up-close view of the varied ways women express passion’.
There was something about performing rituals of domination and submission that made her feel more real, she added.
‘But I’d always have to drink enough to be in an altered state. I always felt scared and competitive — not the best frame of mind to be in when you’re having sex.’
Vadim preferred young girls, she continued — sometimes as many as three at a time. Whether Jane had solo extra-marital affairs with women herself or not, she certainly had them with men. Afterwards, she’d describe them in detail to Vadim.
‘We were always honest to each other,’ he said. ‘It didn’t dawn on me that as soon as Jane acknowledged her own sexual freedom, she’d distance herself from me and finally escape.’
Jane hated herself in Barbarella, finding it exploitative, and became critical of what she saw as Vadim's frivolous nature
Jane’s sexual behaviour had never been particularly restrained, even before she met Vadim. By 24, she had a history of promiscuity: she’d even told her French teacher, Monique Caron, that she’d been to bed with so many men that she’d lost count.
What she’d never done, however, was to make herself vulnerable to another human being. She was a stunning young woman, with an exceptional body, already a movie star. The real Jane, however, was something of a lost soul.
One day, she told Vadim about her mother Frances Fonda, a beautiful and insecure socialite who’d had numerous plastic surgery procedures.
Cold and with wild mood swings, her mental health, already precarious, had deteriorated after her husband, Henry Fonda, told her he was in love with the actress Susan Blanchard, and Frances ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
In April 1950, she’d been allowed home for a few hours, accompanied by two nurses. Jane and her brother Peter were upstairs when she called for them. Peter, then nine, went to her, but 11-year-old Jane had stayed put, angry at her mother for abandoning her. She never saw Frances again.
A week later, her mother cut her own throat with a miniature razor. The children were never told how she died, but Jane found out by accident soon afterwards when she read an account in a magazine.
For years, she had a nightmare in which Frances lay on a chaise longue, covered with blood. And Jane suffered for decades from bulimia — which she hid from all her husbands — and worried she’d inherited her mother’s mental instability.
‘Before my mother’s death I was feisty, I was ambitious, I was brave,’ she says. ‘Suddenly I was nothing to myself. You could have put what was left of me into a thimble.’
The turning point in Jane's marriage to Vadim was her role in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a bleak film about marathon dancers in the Depression
After she’d told her story to Vadim, he was unable to comfort her. He realised her mother’s violent death was ‘like a wound on the brain’.
Jane has confessed she was damaged by the trauma — ‘If I wasn’t acting, I’d probably be institutionalised.’
Her relationship with her film star father exacerbated her problems.
Incapable of showing his emotions, he never felt able to praise his needy daughter or offer her support.
‘I never had a real, long conversation with my dad in my entire life,’ she says.
It was little wonder, perhaps, that Jane clung so fiercely to Vadim.
‘What I found as irresistible about him as the sex was his attachment to his little daughter,’ she says. ‘(I thought) he must be a good man to love his daughter that way.’
In their first months together, Jane was happier than she’d ever been.
‘I thought my heart would burst,’ she said. ‘He reawakened me sexually.’
She was immersed in a world light years away from her repressed East Coast background. His former wife Bardot, luscious in her bikini, drifted in and out of their home.
Still glamorous: Jane at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011
Vadim’s second wife, the model and actress Annette Stroyberg, lived across the hall from him in an apartment he’d shared with the actress Catherine Deneuve.
Once, when Vadim fell and broke his shoulder on the set of 1964 film La Ronde, which he was shooting with Jane, Stroyberg — who’d stopped by to say hello — ran to his side.
Jane, too, rushed out to comfort him.
Deneuve was rehearsing nearby and, by coincidence, just as the ambulance arrived, Bardot drove into the movie studio’s court.
Within seconds, all four of the most important women in Vadim’s life had climbed in beside him and were pealing with girlish laughter.
No one could dispute that Vadim truly loved women — and inspired genuine love back. Jane became less frenetic and more relaxed. She even carried around her own supply of marijuana in a silver snuff box.
For his sake, she turned down starring roles in Bonnie And Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby and Doctor Zhivago. She made the futuristic sex fantasy Barbarella with Vadim, which turned her into a global sex symbol.
But despite the birth of their daughter Vanessa, the marriage began to lose steam. She hated herself in Barbarella, finding it exploitative, and became critical of what she saw as Vadim’s frivolous nature.
While he often got drunk, she swam every day, jogged and dieted strenuously.
The turning-point was her role in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a bleak film about marathon dancers in the Depression, for which she won an Academy Award nomination.
Most nights, she didn’t return to their rented home, preferring to stay in Mae West’s old dressing room on the Warners lot. Vadim’s approach to life now exasperated her.
In the evenings, he’d join eccentric actor (and future Dallas star) Larry Hagman, who led wacky processions on the Malibu beach, with everyone stoned and in costume. Jane wanted to stay in and talk about the U.S. bombing of Cambodia.
Suddenly, she was tired of playing the passive wife and mistress, and wanted her life to have more significance.
During an interview with a German reporter about They Shoot Horses, Jane’s attention seemed to wander and the reporter pounced.
‘What are you thinking of right this minute?’ he demanded.
‘I’m thinking of getting a divorce,’ she answered.
Adapted from Jane Fonda by Patricia Bosworth, to be published by The Robson Press on October 1 at £18.99.
© 2011 Patricia Bosworth. To order a copy for £16.99 (incl p&p) call 0843 382 0000.
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