In 1948, when Jane Fonda was 10 years old, she wrote a letter to her father, Henry Fonda, who was temporarily living in New York, performing on Broadway. The letter—accompanied by a drawing of butterflies—begins, “Dear Dad, I did not trace these drawings of butterflies.” Fonda, born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda (she is distantly related to Henry VIII’s third wife), briefly mentions this anecdote in her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, never returning to it, but letting its implication toll. “I was saying to him, ‘I have artistic ability,’ ” she tells me over Zoom one morning in February. “I could do it from my head.” Even from a young age, Fonda was spelling it out—laying claim to her inventiveness, her imagination, as if born with an urgency to make plain her point of view. She did not trace those butterflies, and she needed her dad to know.
There’s very little that can be said about Fonda that she hasn’t already said about herself. Honesty is her … sound. Her quota for candor is without limit. Her running total of contradictions is remarkable; she has reinvented the whole concept of celebrity one decade at a time. At 83, she has lived a life wired with an antennae-like curiosity and a stamina for staying switched on. Fonda likens herself to an artesian well. “Once you hit the water source,” she tells me, “the water keeps coming. My energy doesn’t come from anybody else. It comes from…
