My Life So Far (43 page)

In retrospect I see the parallels between myself and Bree, a woman who felt safer hooking than facing true intimacy.

I
hadn’t gotten used to being hated yet. Not that everyone had loved me up until then. What was to love—or hate, for that matter? I had occasionally been a bit outrageous in public statements, but generally I had come across as a slightly edgy, nonthreatening, fairly popular celebrity. So when the hate started, it took me by surprise, especially on the film set.

I’d always gone out of my way to be on time, know my lines, never behave like a diva. (I’d pulled that once in
Walk on the Wild Side,
when I was scared to go into a particular scene and kept having my makeup redone—as though different eyebrows and more rouge would somehow make things right. When I finally did show up on the set, I could feel people’s anger and I froze. I learned then that if the on-set vibes toward me were negative, it was harder to do good work.) I needed the crew to respect me, to be rooting for me in the tough scenes. So when I came onto the set of
Klute
one morning early on and saw a huge American flag hanging over the doorway to Bree’s apartment, I was taken aback. I didn’t say anything to anyone, even Alan Pakula, because I didn’t want people to know it had gotten to me, this sign that I was thought unpatriotic. Instead I remember sitting in my dressing room getting my makeup done, wanting to cry. But in the hour it took me to get ready, the other, more resilient part of me banished those feelings behind a high wall that (for many years to come) would shield me from feeling the pain of being a lightning rod for certain people’s hostilities.

I knew that activism was right for me, that the killing in Vietnam needed to be stopped, and that using my celebrity to help people who were being bullied, deprived of safety and opportunity, was what I needed to do. So when I came out of that dressing room ready for the day’s work, my attitude was very “Fuck you, guys, whoever you are.” Since “Fuck you” was my character’s general attitude about life, it worked for me on that film. Besides, I knew that the people who worked closest to me—Alan, Donald, Gordon Willis, and Michael Chapman, the camera operator—liked me. This was when disparity in people’s feelings about me became a constant in my life. There was visceral hatred and there was something else I wasn’t used to: admiration. I wasn’t used to people throwing me high fives and peace signs. Fan letters were routine, but not letters filled with thanks for my having taken a stand, and when I went on TV talk shows, the audience response was different—as if people were rooting for me. That felt very good indeed.

Unbeknownst to me, during this time I had become the target of the government counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO, a secret creation of J. Edgar Hoover, whose purpose was to disrupt and discredit members of the antiwar and militant black movements. This was done through infiltration, sabotage, intimidation, murder (directly assassinating or hiring rival groups to assassinate leaders), by framing activists for crimes the FBI committed, and through fake black propaganda—feeding journalists information through phony letters and inflammatory leaflets that slandered and discredited the targeted person. After extensive investigation of COINTELPRO, Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Government Intelligence Activities pronounced it “a sophisticated vigilante program aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.” Seems the government felt it necessary to destroy democracy in order to save it. And look where it got us—Watergate and the first presidential resignation in U.S. history.

Richard Wallace Held was head of the Los Angeles section of COINTELPRO, and he specialized in black propaganda. In his 2002 book
The Last Editor
Jim Bellows says that in spring of 1970, while he was editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
Richard Held, with permission from J. Edgar Hoover, had planted a story with the
Los Angeles Times’
gossip columnist Joyce Haber saying that an actress who had recently appeared in a big musical film was now pregnant by a Black Panther. (Jean Seberg, a Panther Party supporter, had just starred in the musical
Paint Your Wagon
and was definitely pregnant, but by her husband, French novelist Romain Gary.)

In August an article appeared in
Newsweek
specifically naming Jean as the actress in question. In her seventh month of pregnancy, Jean attempted suicide and suffered a miscarriage as a consequence. She held an open-casket funeral in Paris so that her friends and family could see that her dead baby girl, whom she’d named Nina, was in fact white. Every year on the anniversary of Nina’s death, Jean attempted suicide, until on September 8, 1979, she was found dead in her car in Paris. Also in September, the FBI admitted publicly to what it had done. Jean’s husband shot himself several months later. Nice work, guys, and on taxpayers’ money, too.

In June, soon after the first Seberg article had appeared, the same Richard Wallace Held received a memo from Hoover authorizing him to send a fictitious letter about me to Army Archerd, a columnist at
Daily Variety.
“It can be expected,” emphasized Hoover’s instructions to Held, “that Fonda’s involvement with the BPP [Black Panther Party] cause could detract from her status with the general public if reported in a Hollywood ‘gossip’ column. . . . Ensure that mailing cannot be traced to the Bureau [FBI].” Held’s subsequent letter read:

Army Archerd knew me, and to his credit, declined to print the letter. There would be more of the same to come.

One article, aiming to portray me as a rich hypocrite (though I can no longer remember where it was printed) said that I had been invited to speak at the University of Mexico but had insisted on having a limousine and on bringing my secretary and hairdresser. (Poor Elisabeth, there she was again.) Another reported that I had crashed a Nixon fund-raiser in New York, climbed onto a table, torn my blouse off, and shouted obscenities.

Starting in May 1970, the FBI, CIA, and counterintelligence branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency began monitoring me and eventually built up a file of some 20,000 pages. I would learn in 1975 that the National Security Agency had made transcripts of my 1970 phone calls and distributed them to Nixon, Kissinger, and other top government officials. One FBI informant reported at the time, “What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment.” God help us!

It was through information given to my lawyers by columnist Jack Anderson that I learned the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the City National Bank of Los Angeles had turned over my bank records to the FBI—without any subpoena. It turns out I was part of Group 1, which meant the documents about me could not automatically be declassified, and many were deemed top-secret. My “case” went by the code name “the Gamma Series,” and I am variously referred to as a “subversive” and “anarchist”—although nothing in my files shows any proof as to why I was considered so dangerous.

Apart from government shenanigans, those were difficult times to be a newcomer to the movement scene. There was infighting on the Left, much debate about what the correct position was on this and that. For the radical left wing, the issue wasn’t so much ending the Vietnam War as it was smashing U.S. imperialism. Sexism was rampant in the antiwar movement, and many women activists began to develop more feminist priorities. Then there were the yippies—and I wasn’t sure
what
they were doing, although I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Central Park Zoo with Abbie Hoffman.

I was confused. Was it just limp, liberal politics to ask: “But what about all the American soldiers and Vietnamese dying . . . for a lie?” I had begun to feel there was no way I could possibly learn enough fast enough to understand why these ruptures were happening and what the radicals were all talking about.

This was a lonely time for me personally. Had I known at the start the hatred, scorn, and lies that would be unleashed at me, I would have gone ahead anyway; I was too immersed in this new world to turn back. What was lacking, I later realized, was a loving environment of fellow activists and friends with whom I could work. I didn’t want to be the Lone Ranger anymore.

Then, in an amazing bit of synchronicity, I came upon an article in
Ramparts
written by the man who would within two years provide that loving environment for me: Tom Hayden. The article was titled “All for Vietnam,” and it brought things into focus for me. Hayden wrote, “Most peace activists and radicals believe that Vietnam is a flaw—a terrible flaw—in the working of the American Empire. We should follow the war “not as a ‘tragedy,’ ” he wrote, “but as a struggle in which humanity is making a stand so heroic that it should shatter the hardest cynicism.”

That article confirmed and reenergized my commitment to ending the war, and I sensed that working with antiwar soldiers was the best way I could do that. The movement of active-duty soldiers and returned Vietnam veterans was potent, because these men and women were from America’s heartland. They had enlisted as patriots; they returned as patriots. They had
been
there, and this made them more believable to Middle Americans than other groups in the antiwar movement. It was GI resisters, after all, who had brought
me
into the antiwar movement. I became even more committed to making these new heroes, the new warriors, the focus of my efforts.

CHAPTER SIX

REDEMPTION

—A
RTHUR
E
GENDORF,
American Orthopsychiatric Association,
at a meeting in Washington, D.C., April 1971

—A
LICE
M
ILLER,
The Truth Will Set You Free

I
T WAS TO BE
a war-crimes hearing, what has become known, famously, as the Winter Soldier investigation. The name Winter Soldier invoked Tom Paine’s reference to the revolutionary soldiers who, through the terrible winter of 1777–1778, volunteered to remain at Valley Forge. Vietnam veterans would testify about atrocities they had committed or had witnessed while in Vietnam, as a way to let the American public know the kind of war it was. Like all information about the GIs and Vietnam veterans who opposed the war (VVAW), with a Ramboesque sleight of hand it has been disappeared, and history has been conveniently rewritten. I want to help reverse this abracadabra.

The motivation for the Winter Soldier investigation was the My Lai massacre. When the story about My Lai had broken in
The New York Times
in November 1969, it had staggered the public. What had enraged a lot of Vietnam veterans, however, was the way the government was scapegoating Lieutenant William Calley and the men he commanded, calling My Lai an “isolated incident of aberrant behavior.” To the membership of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)—some 25,000 to 30,000 members in 1970–71—the My Lai massacre was remarkable only in the number of victims involved and the fact that it became public.

The vets knew that atrocities were occurring as an inevitable part of our Vietnam policies and that if justice was to be served, the
architects
of those policies—from the president on down—needed to be held accountable, as had been the case at the Nuremberg trials following World War II.

Before the Winter Soldier investigation—the hearings were scheduled for early the following year, 1971—the VVAW, led by Al Hubbard, had organized an eighty-six-mile march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where it would end in a Labor Day rally. Donald Sutherland and I spoke at that rally.