Book Excerpt: My Life So Far

(9 of 11)

I realize that it is not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a Vietnamese antiaircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda's privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided me these privileges. More than that, I am a woman, which makes my sitting there even more of a betrayal. A gender betrayal. And I am a woman who is seen as Barbarella, a character existing on some subliminal level as an embodiment of men's fantasies; Barbarella has become their enemy. I have spent the last two years working with GIs and Vietnam veterans and have spoken before hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters, telling them that our men in uniform aren't the enemy. I went to support them at their bases and overseas, and will, in years ahead, make Coming Home so that Americans can understand how the wounded were treated in VA hospitals. Now by mistake I appear in a photograph to be their enemy. I carry this heavy in my heart. I always will.

•FALLING FOR TED

Distraught over the breakup of her marriage to political activist Tom Hayden, Fonda found that the courtship of the man who would become her third husband was unexpected and unpredictable.

The day after my divorce was announced in the papers, the phone rang. Someone yelled, "Jane, there's a Ted Turner on the phone for you." Ted Turner? I'd met him once with Tom at a screening of a documentary about child abuse that his Turner Broadcasting System was going to run. He's probably calling to offer me a job, I thought as I picked up the phone. Suddenly a voice boomed through the phone so loudly that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.

"Is it true?"

"Is what true?" I thought it was an odd way to start a phone conversation with a virtual stranger.

"Are you and Hayden really getting a divorce?"

"Yes." I was still in the throes of depression and unable to speak above a whisper.

"Well then, would you like to go out with me?"

I was dumbstruck. Dating was the furthest thing from my mind. "To tell you the truth, I can't even think about dating right now. I can hardly even speak. I think I'm having an emotional breakdown. Why don't you call me back in three months?"

"Hey, I know just how you feel." I could tell he was trying to modulate his voice to approximate compassion and that this was hard for him. "I just broke up with my mistress," he went on. "I wrecked my whole family and my marriage two years ago to go and live with her, so now I'm having a hard time myself."

It occurred to me that this was just about the most inappropriate thing a man could say to a woman who had just been dumped by her husband of 16 years for his mistress. Didn't it occur to him that it would be his wife I'd identify with, not him? This is one strange guy, I thought.

But what I said to him was, "Call back in three months, when I'm feeling better. Okay?" He said he would do that, and we hung up. Whatever would come of it, the call in and of itself made me feel better.