My Life So Far (75 page)

I don’t think we can fully live until we have come to terms with our mortality. My friend Fred Branfman calls it “life-affirming death awareness.” There’s something far worse than death, I think, and that is to not really
live.

I learned from watching Dad die that it is not death I fear as much as it is dying with unresolved regrets about things not done. This realization is determining how I am living my third act. If I want Vanessa to have sweet dreams, I have to work on that now, and I am. If I want to leave my family stronger for my having lived, that is also something I have to work on—now.

It is possible that the words I quoted at the start of this chapter, spoken by my father in
The Grapes of Wrath,
are what determined early on my feelings about an afterlife. Flesh and bone are temporal, but I believe that our souls, the twenty-one grams of weight we are said to lose the moment we die, become part of the “one big soul that belongs to everybody.” Our energy is born into the future, in the bodies of our children and loved ones. I have felt it. My father has come to me in dreams, stepping out from behind a bush, radiantly happy, to tell me not to worry about him. I see him in Vanessa’s talent at composting and growing things. I have watched Troy onstage turn and say a line with a certain inflection, and I realize it is my father—yet Dad died when Troy was a little boy. I see it in the commitment my children and I have to justice. In these ways my father lives on.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MAKING MOVIES

—A
NNE
T
RUITT,
Daybook, the Journal of an Artist

Grandma, what a great job you have!

You get paid for using your imagination.

—J
OHN
R. S
EYDEL,
my eleven-year-old stepgrandson

P
LAYING DRUNK
had always frightened me. If there was even a short scene in a movie where I had to be tipsy, I dreaded it. That’s why I decided to do
The Morning After,
a murder mystery about a heavy drinker who blacks out and finds a dead body in her bed. For that role I had to be perpetually drunk. Well, I thought, at this stage in my life why not try to do the things I fear the most? Mustn’t get soggy. Besides, we got Sidney Lumet to direct and the superb Jeff Bridges to co-star. Bruce produced
The Morning After,
and the associate producer was Lois Bonfiglio, who would soon become my new partner.

A
s I write this I realize that I’ve done a good deal of thinking about acting in the fifteen-year hiatus I have taken, and I’d like to try to give you a sense of what it’s like, at least for me.

In most films there is a scene when the main character is going through a critical transition or defining event. Whether or not the story works often depends on the success of that scene. Sometimes the director will want to shoot it in one long take, with the camera following you as you move from place to place, hitting your marks, all the while making the emotional transitions. This delicate balance between technical and emotional demands is the hallmark of movie acting.

I would usually wake up the morning of the critical scene feeling queasy, with a knot in my belly. I’d arrive at the studio for makeup and hair, and at some point I’d be asked to stop what I was doing and come to the set for rehearsal.
Should I give it my all?
There is the risk that if I do, I won’t have anything left when the real time comes (as was the case in my big scene in
On Golden Pond
). On the other hand, the purpose of rehearsal is to discover what my moves will be so that the lights can be set and the camera will know where to follow me; and if I don’t dip fairly deep into the emotional waters during rehearsal, how will I know where I’m apt to go? So I rehearse and pray that I’ve given just enough, but not too much.

Rehearsal now over, I go back to my trailer to finish hair and makeup and then wait while the crew lights the set and practices camera moves with my stand-in. It can be a thirty-minute wait or an hour or, if it’s a complicated setup, three hours. What to do? Do I read a book or get into a conversation that might risk taking me too far away from where my emotions are meant to be? Do I just sit here and think about the scene and risk getting too much into my head? The challenge is knowing myself well enough to calibrate correctly the balance between physical relaxation and emotional alertness that will most benefit me during the one- to three-hour wait. But it’s hard not to feel like a balloon from which air is slowly leaking.

Then the moment comes. The knock on the door: “We’re ready, Miss Fonda.” Truthfully some small part of me (which I would try to ignore) has hoped that the sound stage would catch fire or the director would have a breakdown so that this moment could be postponed—for a year, maybe. But, no, there’s the knock. No going back now. So I step out of my trailer and begin the endless walk to where everyone is waiting, all one hundred people who work on a film on any given day. As I run the gauntlet, the issue of my salary comes to mind.
Why didn’t I agree to do the damn thing for free? I know there are people on the set who are just waiting to see if I’m worth all that dough, like that guy over there on the ladder reading the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue.
I remember being told that shooting on an average Hollywood film costs in the neighborhood of $100,000 a day.
If this goes badly, maybe I can offer to deduct it from my salary; otherwise I may never get hired again. Please let me stay relaxed, help me stay in my truth, tell my muse to be with me now.
I arrive on the set that just a short while ago during rehearsal was a place of forgiving shadows. Now it’s a pitiless glare of light under which my possible disintegration will be exposed for all to see.
Breathe deeply, Jane. Get out of your head and into your body . . . quiet the demon voice that is trying to tell you that today is the day you’ll be exposed as an overpaid fraud.

At the Cannes Film Festival for
Old Gringo
with Gregory Peck.

With Kris Kristofferson in
Rollover.

(Photofest)

This is the part of film acting that I was only too happy to leave behind, the part that became more agonizing as time went on. Yet you have to go through those terrifying times if you are ever to have the magic ones, the times when it all works—and to be truthful, those I have missed. There were perhaps only eight or nine of them out of forty-five films, but they were the times when I stepped into my light and my muse
was
with me, all my channels were open, the creative flow coursed through my body, and I
became.
Whether the scene was sad or funny, tragic or triumphant, never mattered. When it worked it was like being enveloped in love and light, as I danced the intricate dance between technique and emotion, fully inside the scene while simultaneously a separate part of me observed and enjoyed the unfolding.

Ah, but just because it has happened once doesn’t mean it will again! Each time is starting new, raw; it’s a crapshoot—you just never know. Which is why this profession is so great for the heart—and so hard on the nerves.

I always assumed that the more you did something the easier it would get, but in the case of my career I found the opposite to be true. Every year the work seemed to get harder and my fear more paralyzing. Once, on the set of
Old Gringo,
I watched Gregory Peck late in his career doing a long, very difficult scene over and over again all day long. I saw that he too was scared. I went up to him afterward and hugged him and told him how beautiful and transparent he had been.

“But, Greg,” I asked, “why do we do this to ourselves? Especially you. You’ve had a long and incredible career. You could easily retire. Why are you still willing to be scared?”

Greg sat for a moment, rubbing his chin. Then he said, “Well, Jane, maybe it’s like my friend Walter Matthau says. His biggest thrill in life is to be gambling and losing a bit more than he can afford and then have one chance to win it all back. That’s what you live for—that moment. The crapshoot. If it’s easy, what’s the point?”

L
ooking back, I sometimes think I enjoyed the story meetings more than the acting. With acting you’re on your own; with script meetings you’re part of a group. I never liked being number one.
Co–
number one worked for me; but when the burden of creativity rested exclusively on my shoulders, I would freeze—and echoes of the doors of creativity clanging shut were almost audible. What I like best is working with a group of people who share a vision and are able to set aside their egos—people you trust, who respect one another. I hated it when I thought that just because I was the star people were kowtowing, telling me my ideas were good even if they weren’t. With Bruce, and later with Lois Bonfiglio and most of the writers and directors we worked with, I felt free to express an idea, knowing that if it wasn’t good, they would let me know and we’d move on. I remember exhilarating script meetings when one person would have an idea, and that in turn would stimulate another idea from someone else, and
that
might lead to a sudden breakthrough in a scene, with everyone having placed a building block in the process but with no one having an overweening ego stake in any of it; it was the final product that mattered. I would have missed this sort of creative collaboration, except that I have found it in my life as an activist.

Actually it’s not unusual for actors to suffer from self-doubt. Our profession feeds insecurity. Success and fame can come so fast and in this business can go just as fast. It takes stability and maturity to handle it. It’s not like most other professions, where you go to college and then medical school, for instance, then years of internship—and at the end you’re a doctor and no one can take those years away from you. There is no license or diploma that certifies that you are a for-real actor with the talent to bring a character to life. If you make it as an actor, suddenly there you are—and you don’t exactly know why; why you and not her?

I tried never to get too used to the perks because I knew they might not last. But it was hard because the perks are addictive. There’s the comfort of knowing that when you wake up you will roll into a waiting car and be driven to a predetermined place. Then you go into a trailer or a dressing room where someone puts on your makeup, someone else does your hair, and yet a third person lays out the clothes you are to wear that day. You don’t have to make any choices. Your
identity
is all taken care of, what you’re supposed to think, feel, and say that day are determined by the pages you are given, and your only responsibility is to bring them to life (that’s the hard part—the part you’re paid for). At the day’s end you take it all off, get driven back home, and are usually forgiven for being so tired that you collapse into bed—only to do it all again the next day.