My Life So Far (38 page)

My first visit to a GI coffeehouse was near Fort Ord, a massive infantry training base in Monterey, California. I hadn’t known what to expect or what was expected of me. I wondered if my recent Oscar nomination as Best Actress in
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
would turn my visit into a circus, with GIs wanting my autograph and nothing more. As it turned out, the atmosphere was friendly but somber—no requests for autographs or pictures. They had more important things on their minds. We all sat on the floor, and some of the guys began to tell me about life in the military and their feelings about the war. Those who had seen combat in Vietnam were the quietest. I mostly listened. When I was getting ready to leave, a young man, twenty years old at the most and looking more like fifteen, came up to me wanting to say something but having trouble. I waited, leaning slightly in to him.

“Ahhh . . . I . . . kk . . . ahhh.” I had to put my ear up against his mouth to hear him. He was shivering and there was sweat on his forehead.

“I . . . I . . . ah . . . I killed . . . ah . . .”

“It’s okay, you can tell me,” I said, putting my hand on his arm.

“I . . . k-killed a young . . . b . . . ,” he whispered, and began to cry silently. Up to that moment I had thought only about what we were doing to the Vietnamese. Now, from his suffering, I glimpsed that the war had become an American tragedy as well.
What are we doing to our young men?

P
oor Dad. He watched all of my comings and goings with increasing agitation. I wished I could discuss with him all the things I was learning and the questions I had, but the several times I did he’d explode in generalities about why I shouldn’t have anything to do with these people. Maybe I should have asked him to talk to me in the character of Clarence Darrow or Tom Joad.

One day, for instance, we got into a heated argument about Angela Davis, the young black professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was a member of the American Communist Party. I said I didn’t think she should have been fired from her teaching job at UCLA because she was a Communist, and he vehemently disagreed. Then he pointed his finger at me and said, “If I ever find out you’re a Communist, Jane, I’ll be the first person to turn you in.”

“But Dad, I am
not
a Communist!” I shouted as I ran from him into my room and into my bed, the non-Communist Lone Ranger, pulling the sheets up over my head, desperate to blot out what his words implied.
He would turn me in? His own child?
I knew he had vivid memories of the days of HUAC and how Joseph McCarthy had ruined the lives and careers of people he knew. I knew he was afraid for me. But what about Tom Joad and Clarence Darrow and Abe Lincoln? I couldn’t reconcile the father I thought I knew with the more conservative person I now saw him to be.

I can only imagine the confusion and anguish the changes I was going through must have caused my father, and now I am filled with love for his gruff attempts to remain connected to me, however tenuously. In time I could forgive him for not possessing the more radical courage I wanted him to have. Choosing what characters to play can reveal an
aspiration
on the part of an actor, not necessarily the actor’s reality.

The march with Native Americans at Fort Lawton near Tacoma, Washington. Janet McCloud is next to me. I was about to be arrested for the first time.

(Richard Heyza/
Seattle Times
)

Me in the midst of a welfare-rights march in Las Vegas in 1970.

(Bill Ray/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

AN ASIDE

T
he activism upon which I embarked in 1970 changed me forever in terms of how I saw the world and my place in it. These changes remain to this day at the core of my being, though the way I express them has grown—fortunately, because in those first years back home there was hardly a mistake I
didn’t
make when it came to public utterances.

I had heard and read things that threw into question everything I believed about my country. But what to do? I didn’t know, but I felt I couldn’t slow down while people’s rights were being violated, while people were being killed, while the war continued. Everything (including my career) had to be put on hold till this was stopped.

Instead of reflection, what I did was talk—all the time, everywhere, on and on and on in a frantic voice tinged with the Ivy League. Press conferences became an almost biweekly occurrence. When I look back over that period I realize that I was not ready for so much antagonistic public exposure. I was angry enough going in because of all that I was learning, and when, increasingly, I felt reporters were coming after me and questioning my motives, I became even more defensive. In interviews I was humorless, talking too fast, in a voice that came from some elitist, out-in-space place, anger seething just beneath the surface. This was when I began to use radical jargon that rang shrill and false.
You try to prove what you’re not sure of.
I made it easy for the media and others to choose a dubious if not downright hostile lens through which to view me. There I was, up on my soapbox, pronouncing myself a “revolutionary woman,” while
Barbarella
had just played in a theater around the corner.

In hindsight I should have listened more, talked less, taken it slower. I wish I had taken Vanessa with me on my cross-country travels. It would have been better for her, for me, for us. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. It makes me wince to think about it now.

Watching some taped interviews years later with my son, Troy (to whom I turn when I need support), I wanted to shout, “Will someone please tell her to shut up?” Troy, always a wise and generous soul, said, “Mom, listen, Taoist sages, when they were learning something new, would isolate themselves for a long time, until they had attained enlightenment and could teach. But you”—he shook his head and laughed—“you were out there in public before you had really made those issues your own. Your voice wasn’t even your own. You weren’t a complete person yet. You weren’t
you.
”

The following is an explanation, and an explanation isn’t an excuse. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why I did what I did the
way
I did.

Partly it’s the way I am. My instincts are good, but I am not by nature someone who goes slow. I get the picture quickly, and if something comes into my life and touches me and makes sense to me, I plunge in
jusqu’au bout,
right to the end. My life has been a series of gigantic leaps of faith, based almost always on intuition and emotion, not on calculation or ego—or ideology. As British playwright David Hare has said of himself, “I’m where I want to be before I can be bothered to go through the dreary business of getting there.”

Then, too, it was the nature of the times. I returned to an America at war with itself in a manner and on a level I had not suspected. There was a visceral sense that everything was ready to blow up, that there could actually be a revolution. Having been in Paris the year before, I knew that it was not inconceivable that students, blacks, workers, and others who felt disenfranchised could bring down their government. What that would mean I hadn’t a clue. That such a thing would (as ultimately it had in France) cause a backlash that might very well end in an even more oppressive state didn’t occur to me. Certainly no one I knew was articulating any clear, more democratic alternative to what we had in the United States.

I wanted to be taken seriously, and I mistakenly thought that the more militant I appeared, the more seriously I’d be taken. I realized only later that my value was in being just who I was—a newcomer on a fast track seeing a lot of things that were rocking the foundations of my belief system; trying to put it all together; and most important, being a movie star whom servicemen and -women were eager to meet and talk to and from whom I was hearing truth I thought other Americans needed to hear.

What I wanted to be was better—and to
make it better.
I didn’t think enough about how I was being perceived. I was too immersed in what I was learning, in trying to understand, and in day-to-day dramas. I would have gotten into a lot less trouble if I had been more self-conscious, more aware of my image, more concerned about how what I said or did might be interpreted or might affect my career. For better or worse, I still don’t. It wasn’t until
On Golden Pond,
when I got to know Katharine Hepburn, someone quintessentially conscious of her image, that I was forced to think about the extent to which I have
ignored
mine.

I wanted to be a repeater, like one of those tall radio transmitters at the tops of mountains that pick up signals too faint in the valleys and transmit them to a broader audience. In retrospect, and having survived to write about it, I don’t regret having plunged in. Had I been more cautious, I might have become just another concerned observer. A character in E. M. Forster’s
Howards End
says that the truth can be found only by exploring the extremes, and “though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”

A persistent assumption about me is that I am a puppet, ready for a new man to pull my strings. There was some truth to this. Until age sixty I never had enough self-confidence to feel validated unless I was with a man, and the men I was with embodied something I felt would make me better than I thought I was. While each relationship did bring me new depth, I invariably ended up feeling: “Something’s missing. This doesn’t feel right anymore.” I would then spend time on my own (though never more than a few years) and begin to identify what it was that was missing—and invariably an extraordinary man would come into my life who seemed to be the One who could help me get there. A puppet has no life without its puppeteer. A Svengali takes his Trilby and molds her into something
he
wants or needs, regardless of
her
potential. In my case, when I got into a committed relationship, I was always partway to where I was headed and my partner would help guide me further along on the journey. For me, this realization has been very important. It has shown me that I have always been, at the very least, the
co-
captain of my ship.

This aside is an attempt to address some of the controversial things said about me
personally.
I’ll have more to say later on the subject of the
political
controversy that has surrounded me. If you haven’t already, fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

CHAPTER FOUR

SNAPSHOTS FROM THE ROAD