My Life So Far (46 page)

Those letters formed a popular acronym among GIs (Fuck the Army), but for us (publicly, at least) it meant Free the Army. Howard wanted us to try to bring the show to U.S. military bases both stateside and in the Pacific. I found the concept irresistible. Here was a way to support the GI movement—which I increasingly felt was the cutting edge of the peace movement—and to do so using my professional skills. Acting and activism—together at last!

At the time, Donald and I were planning
Steelyard Blues,
to be directed by Alan Myerson, who also agreed to direct the FTA show. Howard Hesseman, Garry Goodrow, and Peter Boyle (all of whom were going to co-star in
Steelyard Blues
) joined the FTA cast as well. FTA was political vaudeville with an antiwar, pro-soldier theme. It was written mainly by Jules Feiffer, Carl Gottlieb, Herb Gardner, Fred Gardner (no relation), and Barbara Garson. The show was intended not only to support the soldiers’ antiwar sentiments but to call attention to the way soldiers were dehumanized in the military. Some may say that dehumanization is the only way the military can work, but if stripping young people of their rights and their feelings of empathy, and filling them with racist, sexist attitudes is the only way we can succeed in making them into good soldiers, then we have a problem.

Some high-ranking military officers share this view as well. I heard U.S. Army (ret.) general Claudia Kennedy say, for instance, that the military should be prepared to deal with “soft” issues like ethics and integrity, not just technology and weapons systems.

As Ken Cloke once said to me, “Defensive wars against oppressive regimes do not require dehumanization.” The problem was that in Vietnam dehumanization was necessary, because rather than being a defensive war, it was a war of outside aggression (ours) against the popular will of the Vietnamese.

D
ick Gregory and Barbara Dane joined Peter Boyle, Donald, and me for our first FTA performance on March 14, 1971, at the Haymarket Square coffeehouse near Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

JANE FONDA’S ANTIWAR SHOW SCORES HIT NEAR ARMY BASE,
read next day’s headlines in the
Los Angeles Times.
The article went on to say, “The soldiers roared time and again their desire for an end to the war.”

We performed three times to packed houses in Fayetteville, even though the police used long-range infrared cameras to take pictures of all the soldiers as they entered and even announced there had been a bomb scare, which we ignored, to the delight of the soldiers.

We had assumed we’d be performing for the soldiers and sailors, but suddenly that spring, the air force erupted with antiwar sentiment—not surprising when you realize that Vietnamization was turning it into an air war.

The air force’s desertion rate doubled; Travis Air Force Base in California, the primary embarkation point for flights to Vietnam, was in a state of siege for four days in May. The bachelor officers’ quarters was burned, one man was killed, dozens injured, and 135 were arrested.

In June, Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas saw a revolt. In August, Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois saw a violent uprising, and that spring airmen and airwomen, with civilian support, turned an old theater into the first air force coffeehouse, the Covered Wagon. When we performed there, a local reporter asked me if we were urging servicemen to revolt. “No,” I said, “they’re ahead of us on that.”

From the beginning, the intention had been to try to bring the FTA show to South Vietnam as an alternative to Bob Hope’s pro-war, testosterone-driven tour. I wrote to President Nixon asking for permission to go to South Vietnam for Christmas. I wasn’t holding my breath for a Dear-Jane-Sure- come-on-over- we’d-love- the-troops-to- see-you-Love- Dick letter, but I wanted to be able to say that I’d at least tried. The backup plan was to perform for GIs stationed in the Pacific en route to or from Vietnam. We also decided to make a documentary film of the tour, and a company called American International agreed to distribute it. By summer we had a new, more diverse cast. Besides Donald and me, there was singer Holly Near, poet Pamela Donegan, actor Michael Alaimo, singer Len Chandler, singer Rita Martinson, and comedian Paul Mooney. Francine Parker, a Hollywood producer, took over the directorial reins.

When I watch the film we made, I am impressed by the extent to which we achieved a real ensemble. Everyone had his or her own solo bit; no one stood out more than the others. Donald, of course, was a mainstay. He played President Nixon to my Pat:

We spent the fall touring the country performing for some fifteen thousand GIs near major U.S. military bases, and in November, after performing at Philharmonic Hall in New York, off we flew to Hawaii, where GIs were flooding in from Vietnam for R&R.

All told, we did twenty-one performances during the overseas tour, for an estimated sixty-four thousand soldiers, sailors, marines, and men and women in the air force. It was made extremely difficult for the servicemen to attend. They were photographed and risked getting harassed; the military authorities would put out misinformation about the time and place of the show in an effort to prevent the soldiers from getting there in time (we’d always wait for them). Also, those sixty-four thousand spread the word to countless others. Ken Cloke told me that when he’d gone to the Philippines and Japan to visit GI coffeehouses right after FTA had been there, bootlegged audiotapes of the show were “selling like hotcakes” among soldiers and were even circulated in Vietnam. He also told me that attendance at the coffeehouses increased dramatically following our tour.

One very important thing happened while the tour was in Japan. We filmed an interview with several men at Iwakuni Marine Base who told us that despite the agreement between Japan and the United States following World War II that stipulated nuclear weapons were never again to be brought onto the island, they themselves were moving nuclear weapons around the bases,
all in secret, all illegal.
They asked us to demand that a search be conducted to uncover the truth. We got nowhere.

On July 14, 1972, the FTA film opened in Washington, D.C., distributed by American International.

S
ome GIs were upset that I didn’t live up to their fantasies. One soldier told Holly Near that they’d torn down my
Barbarella
poster in anger. I wasn’t secure enough to let their disappointment roll off my back. So much of who I’d been had to do with what men wanted me to be; their admiring gaze was the “acknowledgment of my personhood.” What would happen now? Would I ever be able to work again? Would anyone ever want to see me onscreen again? Yet another part of me knew I couldn’t go back.

I
n years to come, as I approached fifty, I would again revert to that woman who needed to fulfill her man’s fantasies. I was afraid that I’d never have the one, truly intimate relationship that I so wanted, and I thought it was only in that fantasy role that a man could love me.

Why does it have to take so long to heal?

I
wish I could do the tour over again, as the person I am now. I would have gone onstage and said, “Hey, I know it must disappoint you to see me like this, not as sexy Barbarella, but as a regular person in jeans and no makeup. I could do the Barbarella bit, but then I’d be in the Bob Hope show. And hey, I understand about sexy fantasies, but let me tell you something: When it’s you having to live other people’s fantasies, it can be dehumanizing. ‘Sexy’ is great as long as it doesn’t require you to deny who you are—well, that’s what happened to me. I lost who I was. Now I’m trying to get real and I hope you understand—and I love you.”

The FTA show. From left to right: Rita Martinson, me, Donald Sutherland, Michael Alaimo, Len Chandler.

Receiving my Academy Award for
Klute.

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Perhaps I could have found ways to equate how the “Barbarella syndrome” affected
me
with how the military was dehumanizing
them.
It could have taken maybe four minutes at most; I could have said it with humor; and I
know
most of the guys would have gotten it and been there for me.

When I hear people today saying that anti–Vietnam War activists were antisoldier, I wish I could rerelease that film. It wasn’t a great piece of art—it didn’t
need
to be. Just the fact that we showed up in support of the soldiers was important. What we did was raw, unprecedented, outrageous, and, in today’s environment, totally unthinkable. We succeeded because the soldiers were ready and ripe with passionate antiwar, antimilitary feelings.

A
s soon as the FTA tour was over, I flew, on Christmas Day 1971, directly from Tokyo to Paris, where I was to begin filming
Tout Va Bien
with Yves Montand—a movie I didn’t want to make. I was homeless, structureless, loveless, and bulimic. Not a good combination. My gray drizzle of a life felt as though it was dissolving on some crucial level. There was the endlessly escalating war. Vanessa was having terrible, screaming nightmares every night; I was racked with guilt and didn’t know what to do. Whenever I had a day off, I would play with her in the swank apartment Vadim was renting on the rue Trocadero or take her to the Jardins des Tuileries, where there was a wondrous variety of children’s rides.

The director of
Tout Va Bien
was Jean-Luc Godard, the French avant-garde filmmaker who had become internationally known in the sixties with his movie
Breathless,
starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Godard had offered me the role the previous summer without showing me a script, and I had accepted unquestioningly. After all, Godard was seen as a political filmmaker, and there weren’t too many of those around. But when I received the script, I found it incomprehensible. It read like one long polemic. Godard, I learned, was a Maoist. I berated myself for having accepted the role with so little knowledge of its content, and through my agent I got word to Godard that I was backing out. I didn’t want to be used by him to get financing for something with politics that seemed obscure and sectarian.