My Life So Far (87 page)

Friends come to Atlanta to support the work of G-CAPP. Here are Dolly, Lily, and me.

(Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)

The following year Bob Redford and Peter came to help.

(© 2004 Ashley Walsh)

In 2000, Oprah was our knock-’em-dead keynote speaker at G-CAPP’s annual conference.

(Mark Randelle King/Millennium Entertainment, Inc.)

The following year, 1995, I founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP) with the help and generous ongoing support of the Turner family and its foundation. Laura Turner Seydel in particular has been tremendous in helping fund-raise for G-CAPP. All the Turners have embraced this effort. While the organization’s strategies have evolved, what I learned at the Cairo conference remains at its heart: a holistic approach that addresses “above-the-waist” issues—
hope
—as much as or more than the traditional “below-the-waist” ones.

The Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention has been active in Georgia for ten years, and each year we have probed deeper into the lives of adolescents to discover what factors impel them to have babies when they are not yet
themselves.
We have learned that small things—like being rocked, held, and gazed at—can enable a child to remain resilient even in the face of unspeakable abuse and neglect. I learned from Lulu and Leni that a child who has received this kind of nurture will, as an adolescent, be less likely to become a parent too soon. That’s why G-CAPP works with pregnant young women and mothers to assure they will know how to do this. I know from my own mothering experience that these skills don’t always come naturally but that they can be learned.

Child sexual abuse, we have learned, is very much connected to adolescent pregnancy and parenthood. That is one reason G-CAPP and the Jane Fonda Center at the Emory University School of Medicine, which opened in 2001, work with emergency room doctors and nurses, pediatricians, juvenile court justices, and mental health experts to enable more frontline workers to identify and learn how to get appropriate treatment for sexual abuse. Studies have estimated that one out of four American females has been sexually abused. Four in ten women who have sex before age fifteen report that their first sexual experience was coerced. Sexual abuse survivors often begin voluntary sexual relationships earlier and are more likely to become pregnant before the age of eighteen. One study found that one-half to two-thirds of pregnant teens reported sexual abuse histories.

Sexual abuse is more than physical: It is a form of brainwashing. The message emblazoned on the mind of an abuse victim is that her only worth
is
her sex, that her body doesn’t belong to her, that saying no means nothing. She is stricken with what Oprah Winfrey, herself a victim of abuse, calls the “disease to please.” Sexual abuse eradicates the very skills that are needed for girls to protect themselves from pregnancy, STDs, and HIV/AIDS. Knowing my mother’s history with abuse, I found that this knowledge helped me immeasurably to understand and forgive her—and to want to help others heal. And, naturally, I also feel great passion for the work I do now because these issues have been at the center of my own life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

YEARNINGS

—R
UMI

I
YEARNED FOR
the “source of deliciousness,” in Rumi’s words, which for me means emotional intimacy and soul connection. We got there on occasion, Ted and I (I remember each time vividly, when he would look deeply into my eyes and I felt we were truly connecting), and sometimes when that happened I swear he’d get scared. It was as though emotional intimacy (as opposed to needy longings) had to be kept in check. Still, there were the lovemaking times when we would lock eyes and melt into one. There were the times when something would set us to laughing so hard we’d sink to the floor, like the night when our guffaws collapsed us at the foot of the
Gone with the Wind
staircase at his Avalon plantation and we had to crawl up to bed on hands and knees.

We had been going steady for almost two years when in 1991 we got married at Avalon on my fifty-fourth, winter solstice, birthday. Troy gave me away, and Vanessa was maid of honor.

A week later Ted was
Time
magazine’s Person of the Year.

A month later I discovered he was sleeping with someone else.

Life had taught me that men, at least those I tended to go for, operate by the
Fornicato, ergo sum
(I f——, therefore I exist) principle, but since there’d been plenty of Versailles moments of lovemaking with Ted and me, I’d rarely be away from him for more than a few hours, and since I knew he loved me, why?

The discovery was pure fluke. I was sitting in our car in the motor lobby of the CNN Center waiting to go to the airport with him. I saw a woman step up to valet parking. I’d seen her from behind, walking into the hotel two hours earlier. This time I saw her face and realized I knew her, but when I called out her name, she foolishly hid behind a pillar. I knew. In my gut, I knew. I called Ted’s office on the car phone, and when his assistant, Dee Woods, answered I put it to her straight: “He pulled a nooner today, didn’t he.” (This was Ted’s term for lunchtime dalliances.) She stammered and denied it (probably thinking, Hey, Fonda, didn’t I warn you?). She told me Ted was on his way down to meet me.

I remember sitting there, my heart pounding, my mind imploding. Ted was ashen when he got into the car, behind the wheel. That’s when I began hitting him about the head and shoulders with the car phone. Simultaneously, part of me was thinking that I’d never seen anyone do this in a movie and what a good scene it would make. (Is it only actors who think this way?) Then I poured my water bottle over his head and, crying and shaking, said, “I sure hope it was a great f——, because you just blew it with me. I’m outta here.” Hitting someone is not my style. But it also occurred to me that I’d never cared enough before to express this kind of balls-out rage. “Why did you do it? Haven’t things been great with us?”

He stopped at a red light and put his face into his hands. “Yes. Yes. I love you madly and our sex is great. I don’t know. I guess it’s . . . it’s like a tic”—that’s actually the word he used—“something I’ve gotten used to doing. I’ve always needed a backup in case something happens between us.”
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

“Well, you’ve succeeded in making sure something would happen and now you’ll be stuck with your backup. I hope you’re happy.”

That evening I flew to Los Angeles, booked myself into the always calming Hotel Bel-Air, and holed up there for two weeks, telling no one where I was except Leni, the woman who had taught me the Workout and who had become my friend. Leni was Ted’s gym trainer when we were in California. She knew him, and given her street smarts I intuited that she would be the one to best midwife me through the anguish, which was just what she did. She would come to my room every day, sit by the bed, give me hard Coffee Nips candies (“They’re comforting”), and hold my hand while I cried and kvetched.

Ted suspected that Leni would know where I was and kept calling her, asking her to convince me to take him back. For two weeks I was determined that it was over. Then one day Leni came to my hotel room and said, “Think about it, Jane. If you don’t give him a second chance, someday you may see him happy, with another woman on his arm, and you’ll always wonder if that woman could have been you. He really wants you back. He says he’ll do anything.”

I called my former therapist (who was retired by then) and she recommended the people who had trained her, Beverly Kitaen Morse and Jack Rosenberg, who work with couples. I immediately made an appointment with them for a few days hence and asked Leni to arrange for Ted to come to Los Angeles and meet me in her apartment.

He flew from Atlanta the next day and came crawling into her living room on bended knee (which wasn’t saying much, since this was his supplicant gesture of choice whenever he had apologies to make, often combined with kissing of shoe and/or head in hands).

“Oh, get up, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “You look foolish and I know that doesn’t mean anything anyway. Half your business associates have seen you in that position at one time or another.” I then told him I would give him another chance on three conditions: that he would never betray me again, would never see the woman again, and would go into counseling with me. He agreed to all of it, and the next day we spent six consecutive, life-altering hours with Jack and Beverly and continued to see them off and on for eight years whenever we were in Los Angeles.
Make it better.

For seven of those years (there’s that seven again) Ted kept his promise and never betrayed my trust, never went behind my back to exercise his “tic” (except for our last nine months together, when he sensed the marriage was doomed and was looking for a substitute). In fact, the day came when he said to someone who had heaped praise on him for something he’d done, “Stop, you’re being too monogamous.”