Jane Fonda

We'll talk about her adolescence, her dad, her activism, the time we got arrested together. We got a lot here. For this conversation, we're on the rooftop patio of Team Coco's office in LA. So from time to time, you'll hear some helicopters and some leaf blowers. It was Woody's idea to record outside.

By the by. Without further ado, here's the legend herself, Jane Fonda.

But what the good part is about podcasts is we won't sit down in a party and have this uninterrupted hour of conversation. Intentional.

People I've had affairs with. No. It's like.

One version is you're going down a river in a canoe and you don't have an oar. And so you're taking wherever the current takes you. And that was my life up until about 60.. Right. And then I decided, okay, 60..

I've got maybe 20, 30 more years. I'd better start figuring out. And then I got an oar. And then I became intentional. And in becoming intentional, I realized how important that was.

Especially when you're older.

And then the third act can make sense of it all. So you go out, okay.

And that's why I decided to live intentionally. You can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been. So you have to really figure it out.

Because, you know, you were the biggest movie star many years on the planet. You know, I fell in love with you watching Cat Baloo. I did.

He rode behind me on the horseback and he said, oh. Anyway, that made me very happy.

I feel I haven't launched yet.

I had met you, but I didn't get to hang out with you.

I met you and I noticed your foot was slammed to the floor on the gas pedal. Metal to the metal. Yes, you were 80, just turning 80, and I had just turned 70.. You were such an inspiration. What are you doing, Ted?

Why are you planning for end of life? Keep going as fast as you can.

They call it existential, because if we don't deal with it, our existence will be thrown into question.

I don't have much longer on the earth, and I just don't want to be somebody who was arranging China while the earth burned. And, Ted, you have been trying to save the oceans for how long?

But everything the ocean, we can talk about that, but everything that we've done to make fisheries abundant and manage fisheries in a correct way, because if you do, you can feed a billion people a day, sustainably, forever. But everything we're doing can be undone by climate change and perhaps will. Yes, it's an existential threat. I mean, it's no longer around the corner. It's genuinely here.

You have grandchildren. You have children. How do you keep the hope and the joy going? at the same time, you tackle something that feels very end of the world-ish?

Hope is like a muscle.

But if I take action and I know that I'm doing everything I can do about something, then I feel hope. Greta Thunberg, she said, don't go looking for hope. Look for action and hope will come. And I know that's true from my own personal experience. That's why it's very selfish.

I take action so I can stay hopeful.

It's worth fighting for. I mean, we are this generation, the 2020s. This is the last generation that can determine whether there's a livable future. I mean, it's an awesome responsibility.

And we have to step up to it.

that would make a big difference. I mean, we've gone after Amazon, so packaging and plastic. You can work with corporations to prove to them that they're doing the wrong thing, but also people will appreciate it and they'll make more money. Sometimes I think going after corporations can move things faster than Congress.

. You know, there's like 30% of Americans have said that they would engage in civil disobedience if asked by someone they trust. But nobody's asked them. So Fire Drill Fridays aim is... The great unasked.

We're going to ask them to move from concern to action. That's outside the walls of government. And then Jane found a climate pack inside. If you can't change the people, change the people. Get rid of the oil sycophants and elect climate champions up and down the ballot.

And that's what we've been doing.

My career took off once I went to jail with Jane.

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Because my business manager, who has to deal with these bills, is very happy. Uh-huh. Up to half the cost. That's pretty good. He's watching the pennies.

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So that's pretty cool. That's a good stress test. being in a canyon. Yeah. Like literally a canyon?

Literally. You're at the bottom of this huge... Uh-huh. Not huge, but, you know, big enough to... Are you trying to get me to tell you where I live?

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You know, you did make a difference to me in my activism by going to Fire Drill Friday. You asked. I came. You sure did.

It's against the law and we'll arrest you. But it won't be the hardcore arrest. And we made, you know, let me start back. I arrived in Washington and the night before.

who was it? Anyway, forgive me.

Then, the next day, you show up and I'm a little nervous, but there's.

. I'm sitting in a room of everybody being told what to expect with this experience of being arrested. and there were nuns and there were, you know, there were people in their 80s. There were people... It was astounding, and some of them had been here before.

And then off we go, and then it's kind of a typical rally where people get up and make speeches and then you go here we go and you start marching to the place where you're going to get arrested. and lo and behold, you know, they stop you. and then, to be honest, it's really not always you've been arrested, arrested. This was kind of the champagne of arrests. For example, the officer came up and they'd have to ask you you have to leave, and this is the last time you'll be asked are you going to leave?

and you'd go? no, and they'd say, okay, and I said, but excuse me, my shoulders are really problematic. can you cuff me in the front? Yes, Mr. Danson, we can.

So it was like when I say I was arrested. meh, not really. but then they put you in a, you know, in the back.

oh, just a little taste enough, so that it made me think if I'm doing this, if I come here to do this, and this even though it's a minor luxurious.

arrest. it made me stop and think. wait a minute, because I have been in my head going. I've given it the office I have. you know, I've been doing ocean advocacy for 35 40 years and doing great work so someone else can do climate change, and it was like oh it's like I've been hiding behind my environmental work to not go out and do more, and you taught me that I remember coming out after we were set free from our prison term, coming out on the street and hugging you and crying, because I was so grateful for that experience you gave me.

there's a metal flat metal thing that you sleep on and you use anything. you have a sweater, a coat, anything to soften it a little bit. in the meantime down the hall, nothing but screams.

psychotic breaks are happening and guys are screaming and screaming and banging the doors, and you realize they should be in another kind of place, like a mental health place. they shouldn't be in jail. I was the only white person there and and then in the morning I ended up being put someplace else with a lot of other prisoners, black women, and it was, you know, it was really really interesting. they could have cared less who I was. they had far more important things to think about and.

none of them had seen any of my movies, Jennifer Lopez. they had seen monster in law.

yeah, no, it was awful if we were bombing carpet whatever, if our soldiers were there. that has to be right. I really believe that. I thought well, we're always on the side of the angels, and it was American soldiers who opened my eyes, who had been in Vietnam. that made me realize it, and if you're a real believer and you're shown to have been fooled, lied to the other side, you become a warrior, you know.

I met the soldiers in. I lived in Paris, I was married to a Frenchman and I lived there and the French had already fought in Vietnam, and they knew very well that we weren't gonna win and what was going on. but I didn't really believe them. I thought it was sour grapes when others would tell me this is really bad, what's going on? I thought you guys didn't win.

for me it was.

the.

It was at the time of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was on trial, and the Pentagon Papers had been released, and Tom had written a digest of the Pentagon Papers, which was really important to see how many Democratic and Republican administrations had lied about the war and kept the troops there because they didn't, as Johnson was afraid he'd. look, this is a quote, look like an unmanly man. if he withdrew from Vietnam. He was worried that Kennedy would accuse him of being an unmanly man, you know, there's patriarchy at work.

And I started to date Tom, who was extremely knowledgeable in all things movement and anti-war. He was receiving messages from French and Swedish diplomats that we were bombing the dikes in North Vietnam. The whole North Vietnamese Red River Delta is like Holland, it's below sea level. And the sea is kept out with earthen dikes built by hand because they're peasants. They don't have heavy equipment, they don't have tractors and things.

And if those dikes are destroyed and the monsoon season was coming, then they would be flooded. And this had been proposed previously, under Johnson, I think, and he had said, no, we can't do that. Hitler did that during the Second World War in Holland. We can't ever be accused of destroying the dikes, but Nixon was doing it.

And they said, you have to do something. And I thought to myself, about 300 Americans, including Ramsey Clark, our Secretary of State, all kinds of journalists, all kinds of American soldiers had already been to Hanoi, it was no big deal.

And so, you know, I arrived in Hanoi on crutches. I had a cast put on my foot in Hanoi, I mean, in Moscow. And I arrived in Vietnam with a cast on crutches while the bombs were dropping. It was really something else. And that's how I got to Vietnam.

I might say that two months after my trip, the bombing stopped of the dikes. I went again the following year with Tom and my nine-month-old son. The North Vietnamese toilet trained my son.

No, but let me just.

. I'll tell you two, just two brief stories, and then I'll tell you how I ended up on the gun. And kind of, they partly explained the gun.

Okay, so it was 1972.

. We were bombing the North still. And I was taken all through the North to see cities that had been razed and towns that had been razed. And we were driving back and they could hear that there were bombers coming and they signaled. The drivers pulled over to the side and the translator told me to get out and get all along the sides of the roads all over North Vietnam, where these potholes meant for one person to get in.

They had lids made of straw that were about a half a foot thick to keep shrapnel away. And you go and jump in and pull the lid on, and that's what they do when there's a bombing raid. And so I started to run to one of these things and somebody grabbed my arm. It was a young Vietnamese student because she had a rubber strap over her shoulder wrapped around books. And she grabbed me and she pulled me in front of a house, which I assume was her house, I don't know, and got into one of these holes with me.

The holes are meant for one person. So there was me and this young Vietnamese girl smashed up against... Her face was smashed up against mine. I could feel her breath on my cheek. And I thought, this is, this can't be, this is, I mean, like, this is a dream.

What is happening? And then the ground started shaking from the bombing and I can feel her there and the shaking, and then it stops for a while and they're yelling that we can come up. now. She moves the lid off and we get out and I start to cry and I go to her and I keep saying, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry. And she calls the translator over and she says to me something like, don't be sorry.

We know why we're fighting. Those men don't know why they're bombing us. It's your tragedy or something like that. I was like, what? And it couldn't have been planned.

It couldn't have been planned. They wouldn't have known that. right there, there was going to be a bomb, you know what I mean? And this young girl says it's our tragedy because we don't even know why we're there fighting. I mean, it was just, it was, it was surreal.

And then, the second to the last day, I was there for two weeks and the second to the last day, I'm asked to go out back from the hotel where I'm staying, where a stage has been erected, and a troupe of Vietnamese actors are going to perform Arthur Miller's play All My Sons.

And so I was seated next to the director and my translator. It's all in Vietnamese. And for people listening who might not know anything about the play All My Sons, it takes place during the Second World War. The lead man, the father, he owns a factory that makes parts for American bombers. And he knows that the factory is making faulty parts and he doesn't say anything because he doesn't want to lose his government contract.

But one of his sons knows that he's lying and accused him of being greedy. And his other son is a pilot in a bomber and ends up crashing and dying, possibly because there were faulty parts in his plane. At any rate, it's about good and evil in America. And after the play is over, I asked the director, okay, you're under bombs, you're at war, why are you performing an English play, an American play, All My Sons? He said, through the translator, this is a troupe of actors who travel from village to village after a bombing has taken place and performed this play.

The play shows that there are bad Americans and there are good Americans. One day this war will end and our countries have to be friends. We don't want our people to hate you. It was just jaw-dropping, that kind of sophistication and long view. It explained why, unlike other countries, that the United States has bombed, when you go there and they say, you know, Yankees, bad, go, here, it was Johnson, that bomb, Johnson, that's Nixon bomb, you know, they singled out the people responsible for what was happening to their country, but they never wanted their people to hate Americans.

And so many friends of mine who have gone to Vietnam since the war are astounded at how friendly they are. And I know in my heart partly why that's true. It was a deliberate thing on the part, strategy, on the part of the communist government, for them not to hate us, in spite of the millions of them that we killed. I mean, unbelievable. And so the next day I had, when they first invited me, I said, I don't want to go to any military sites.

That was Tom, my second husband, who had a lot more, he'd been over there. He brought POWs back subsequent to my going, and he said, don't visit military sites. But the next morning, and by now I'm like a wet noodle, I mean, I'm just, I'm going home to a country that considers these people the enemy. And while some of them are clearly not good people, the enemy? So they asked me to come out to a gun site at the center of Hanoi, and I did.

And I got there and there were a lot of people, and there were a whole bunch of young soldiers sang a song to me. And the song started with the Declaration of Independence, ours and theirs, of Ho Chi Minh. And it talked about, we want the skies over the square of Hanoi to be free of bombers. I don't know, it talked about Ho Chi Minh. Then they asked me to sing a song, and I'm ashamed of this.

I sang Old MacDonald.

I didn't know what to sing. I was kind of, I was out of my mind.

I was set up. But I mean, I was an adult, it was my responsibility, it was awful. It wasn't like, there were no planes and the gun wasn't active or anything, but it was a terrible mistake. Terrible. But just that trip changed my life for the good.

No problem.

That all happened with,

well, really, with Reagan. It was, they created a real,

you don't want to be like Jane Fonda. Look what happened to her. They wanted to...

It wasn't much of a deal, a big deal in the 70s, in terms of it, you know, the big thing that it became later. He raised it to an art form.

And yeah, and exactly what did happen, let's see, Nixon resigned and then they went to jail and I'm here.

You go 100 percent and you step up, and you, you know, your activism is just inspirational.

they thought, just because I was a movie actor and Henry Fonda's daughter and privileged, that I was soft, they're going to get me. And the more they tried, the more I was like, fuck you, you're not going to make me stop. You know, but, you know what I mean? I'm sure that's happened to you, you know, I once went to an eight day silent Buddhist meditation retreat, a formal Buddhist meditation retreat. And they told me afterwards, nobody expected me to last.

And I knew that I was not going to, no matter what, I was going to stay and do my thing.

you know, what was your childhood like? And when did you have an awareness? Oh, my father is, you know.

And my father was not a social person. And I mean, I knew that he would come home a lot looking different, but I never, I didn't really understand because I went to a private school where everybody's parents were famous. So I didn't really understand it. I was a tomboy.

One thing I knew was that my father, who was almost always in a bad mood, but when he did movies like The Oxbow Incident or 12 Angry Men or The Rock, he would be happy. That was made just before I was born. But that's an example, Grapes of Wrath. When he made movies about his values, he was happy. And although he never spoke to me about values or anything, as a child, I knew the characters that he responded to and respected.

Also, I spent all my time outdoors. This is what Ted Turner and I had in common. We found solace in nature, which is what leads later to becoming like an environmentalist, I guess. But it wasn't until the war ended and Dad went into Broadway with Mr. Roberts, and we knew it was going to be a huge hit, and so we sold our house and moved to Greenwich.

And that's where I suddenly realized, oh, we're different. Okay, this was in the 50s. There were children not allowed to play with me, to come to my house, because I was part of a theatrical family, and that was considered, you know, iffy.

And it took him a long time to say it. And what he was talking about was having killed a child. This young boy. And he was shaking.

He needed me to know that. And I told that to my father and he didn't believe it. He said if they had done things like this, they wouldn't talk about it. And so I said, I'm going to, he said, if you can prove to me that what you're saying is true, I will lead marches on the White House. And so I brought him a Green Beret, Donald Duncan, who spent hours with him talking about what we were doing.

And but it was a generational thing, you know, he was of a generation that he was not an activist. He would tour for Johnson because Johnson said he was going to end the war, but he wouldn't lead a march. And that was just a generational thing, you know, but he tried to understand. But anyway, let me tell you something that is happening in California now, but it's actually a national issue. There are 2.7 million people in California that live dangerously close to oil wells.

I mean, sometimes the oil wells are right outside bedroom windows or all around a playground. And the 2.7 million people are sick. I know a young girl, Naleli Cobo in Downey, she lived across the street from an oil well. And at nine, she would have to sleep sitting up so as not to drown in the blood of her nosebleeds. And then she had to have a complete hysterectomy because of cancer of her reproductive systems.

And everyone in her community got sick. When the oil well was closed down, they got well. People are getting really sick. And for decades, we've been fighting to create what are called setbacks, health and safety zones that say no oil wells can be inside this buffer zone. And finally, Governor Newsom passed it.

He signed the bill, Senate Bill 1137, and it passed. Great celebration. The next week, the oil companies in California began to gather signatures to overturn it, lying to people, saying, if the governor's bill passes, people are going to start getting sick in these communities. Gas prices are going to go up, blah, blah, blah. All lies.

But they got their signatures. It's going to be on the ballot next year, 2024, to overturn the setbacks. They're going to spend, we're told, $200 million to succeed, because it's a big deal.

. And if they swam, it was in the pool. And then one day, Greta Garbo shows up with a woman accompanying her.

And she pays attention to me. She came over and she said, would you like to go swimming? And she meant in the ocean. And I'd been in the ocean enough to know it was fucking freezing. But she was Swedish.

So she didn't care. So I said, yeah. And she disappeared in the house with her friend. And they came out in terrycloth robes, those white rubber bathing caps. Remember those?

I do. Yeah. Only she looked great in them. You used to wear them?

I was so happy. She was an athlete. And she dove right in without a second thought and swam really fast. And I slowly got in and I went out. And by the time I got out, she was coming back.

And she was, the two of us kind of peddled water and looked at each other. And she said, do you want to be an actress? And I said, no. And she said, well, you should. You're pretty.

You're pretty enough. I thought I was going to, I swallowed water. I was so happy. And then I forgot that there was that other woman there. And then we walked back up.

I was like a shish, your cat. And nobody knew the difference. But I had that secret.

And he said to me at the last Halloween party that he came to, and he would pose with me for people. he'd $25.. You could take a Polaroid picture with Michael Jackson and me. It was pretty great. He said, I'm going to, I'm going to call in the chips at some point while I was making on Golden Pond.

And he called in the chips. He had just made the whiz. He wanted to be a movie star. He wanted to watch Hepburn and Fonda work. And he asked if he could come up.

New Hampshire. I couldn't find a place that I thought would be safe for him to stay. There was no other black person in New Hampshire. So my husband and children had gone home for school. And so I was living in this very modest little shack on the edge of the lake, Squam Lake.

So I had him stay with me. It was the first time he'd ever traveled without bodyguards. And he stayed with me for 10 days. And that's when we went skinny dipping on one wonderful full moon night. But here's what's great.

He, when I first, I had to ask permission of Hepburn if I could have him come on the set. You know, and I explained he's this young black and she was such a snob. She was not happy at all. But then she found out who he was. So it became fine.

And so every time he would be on the set, you know, I would bring him on the set. And in between takes, she would pull over a chair next to her for him. And he would bring out his tape recorder and she would tell him stories. And every story would contain a lesson, a lesson for a rising mega star. For example, she had seen Loretta Taylor when she first performed in Glass Menagerie, which, according to all living people who ever saw her, it was transcendent, pure magic.

And she described it to Michael. Then she described seeing it again a decade later, with Loretta Taylor playing the same part. And the magic was gone. And it's because she wasn't hungry anymore. You have to stay hungry.

And I thought, what a great lesson for Michael to hear stories like that for 10 days. I mean, I wish I knew what happened to that tape recorder, because the price was, but she was fabulous with him. And he was, it was an interesting experience.

And so for years I did ballet and then I broke my foot doing China syndrome. And I had to, I was about to go into a movie called California suite, where I had to wear a bikini and I couldn't do ballet anymore. And so I, I took a class with a woman called Lenny Kasdan, and it was what became the workout.

And, and it was, what I saw was that you could control the shape of your body by doing this kind of workout. And that's how it, and then it was the seventies and there was a recession and Tom Hayden, my second husband, and I were starting a statewide organization called the campaign for economic democracy. Very expensive to run a statewide organization in a state this big. And it was hard to raise money because there was a recession. And I read about this horrible guy named Lyndon LaRouche.

He had a computer company that paid for people to stand in the airport, holding signs saying, you know, things like feed Jane Fonda to the whales and Jane Fonda leaks more than three mile Island. And anyway, stuff like that, going and sending goons into gay bars to beat up gays, that kind of thing. Well, he made his money off a comp on his computer company. And I read that article and I said to Tom, we have to start a business. Long story short, it became the Jane Fonda workout that was owned by the campaign for economic democracy.

And I raised tens of millions of dollars through the workout to support the statewide organization. That's how that happened.

That's the, that's the word slow. It's true in sex and it's true in working out when you're older, slow down. She, she specializes in women over 50, no, in people over 50, most of them are women. And I do the same kinds of things, but slower, with less weights. And I just, you know, I'm, I'm, I've, everything is replaced in me.

I've got both hips, a shoulder, a thumb, my back, my knees, they're all fake. And it's, so it's hard for me to do things. So I'm like pushing five pounds over my head. I used to do 15 and I'm thinking, what a fucking wuss I am. But I don't speed up, because that's when you get hurt if you're older, but if you keep moving, you're going to be okay.

You just have to keep moving. You have to keep limber. You have to keep muscle strength. Um, cause. otherwise just simple things like trying to back up and look over your shoulder becomes impossible or picking up your grandkids.

You don't have grandkids yet.

Criminal and, and, and all of it together, just leading toward the inevitable. And I really, I wish to God I could convince her to, you know, you know, it's like once.

I don't know about you guys, but I have to work hard to not go down a rabbit hole. That's why activism is important. And it's why working out is important.

Uh-huh. He was paranoid. He was 30 years older than his wife and his wife was very beautiful and he was paranoid. And so he would lock everything up and board up the windows. That's how they lived.

And the only person allowed in was the piano tuner. And he was the one that abused my mother when she was seven. Same age, that I was abused. It's interesting how things repeat. And the shadow of early child abuse, it's generational.

It casts a shadow over the daughter, the granddaughter. I've studied it. Even before I knew that my mother had been abused, I had studied it so that when I discovered that, I knew all about what that meant in terms of her mental health and her suicide and everything.

And I find resilience one of the most interesting things in the world. Because you can have two siblings born of the same parents within a year of each other, and one will be resilient and one won't. And what does that mean? The one that's resilient, it means that when ill adventure and mishaps come her way,

she instinctively has this radar beam, infrared beam, scanning the horizon for any warm body that might love her or teach her or take her in. It's just a kind of a thing that resilient people, they know when support is there and someone who's not resilient can be surrounded by love and they can't metabolize it. They can't take it in. And a knockdown, they can't get up. My brother was lacking in resilience and I'm not.

I don't know why. I've had therapists tell me that they can tell when someone walks in the door.

if they're resilient. Many people think that you're born with it. I think so.

And then you can build on it. But I'm resilient, so I didn't succumb.

Going to your home, being in the presence of the two of you, is like getting in a warm bath. It's just wonderful. And everybody that knows you agrees with that. They all feel the same way. You're just heaven.

Thanks so much to our amazing guest, Jane Fonda. That's it for this week's show. And special thanks to Woody for joining. If you like this episode, tell a friend or, better yet, subscribe to this show, wherever you get your podcasts. I won't twist your arm, but you could also leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

We'll have more for you next time, where everybody knows your name. See you soon. Play us out, John Osborne.

You've been listening to where everybody knows your name, with Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson. Sometimes. The show is produced by me, Nick Liao. Executive producers are Adam Sachs, Colin Anderson, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervising producer.

Our senior producer is Matt Apodaca. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel, with support from Eduardo Perez. Research by Alyssa Grawl. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Our theme music is by Woody Harrelson, Antony Genn, Mary Steenburgen, and John Osborne.

Special thanks to Willie Navarrete. We'll have more for you next time, where everybody knows your name.

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