I wanted to be schooled by Jane Fonda.
There was a decent chance that we would get into a Megyn Kelly-type dust-up, where I waded into some topic she didn’t want to discuss. But I was ready to take the risk.
I wanted Ms. Fonda, a glam Forrest Gump who has popped up on the front lines of culture, fitness, politics and Hollywood for more than half a century, to give me the lowdown on everything:
From Black Panthers to the Green New Deal, from a legendary sex life to no sex life, from plastic surgery to plastic prison handcuffs, from “Barbarella” to Quentin Tarantino, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, from Marilyn Monroe to TikTok, from bad vibes over Hanoi Jane to good vibrators.
And there she was on Zoom, looking fetching with her new gray pixie cut, speaking from her chic townhouse in Los Angeles.
“I went gray at just the right moment,” she said. “I didn’t know Covid was coming along. I got tired of the chemicals and the time and the money to keep myself this particular color of blond, you know — enough already! And so I talked to the producers of ‘Grace and Frankie’ and I said, ‘I want to go gray, but that would mean that Grace is going to have to go gray,’ and they were all for it.”
At 82, she still has the same intensity that made her a two-time Oscar winner, an antiwar activist and an intergalactic sexpot. And a repeater.
“Do you know what a repeater is?” she said, her Pacific blue eyes trained on me. “Repeaters are the antennae that you see on top of mountains.”
She continued: “They don’t originate the signals, but the bottom-of-the-valley signals get picked up and then the repeaters take them from the valley and spread them to a much wider audience. That’s what celebrities are.”
Ms. Fonda considered herself an environmentalist before this year “but I hadn’t really put my body on the line for it,” she said. She had “fished the high seas with every important man in my life, starting with my father.”
She knew about sea turtles strangling and polar bears starving. She used windmills and solar, bought an electric BMW, recycled, cut back on red meat and plastic. (But she still sneaks in the occasional order of spareribs.) She had co-produced and starred in “The China Syndrome” in 1979, about the dangers of nuclear power.
But then, last Labor Day weekend, driving up to Big Sur to hike with her pals Rosanna Arquette and Catherine Keener, she began keening about doing more.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The New York Times