Actresses: The Blonde Black Panther

• Share

By the mysterious code of the mysteriously well-connected, the shabby, fly-infested Hotel Tahiti in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera is the place one goes to if one is too rich to bother with the Taj Mahal. Last week, amid the wandering beer barons and compliant courtesans, a newcomer dashed in and out in a bright succession of tight slacks and V-necked blouses, occasionally pausing to effulge a visitor with her smile, occasionally cutting out of the creepy joint in her baby-blue Ferrari.

Jane Fonda didn't need the Hotel Tahiti to convince anyone else that she'd made it big, but maybe it helped persuade her. At 28, after a headlong decade of public vocalizing about the difficulty of being a famous actor's unfamous offspring, Henry Fonda's daughter has established herself on her own as one of the world's most sought-after film actresses. No fewer than three completed movies starring her will be released in the next six months: La Curee, directed by her husband, Roger Vadim; Any Wednesday, the screen version of the Broadway comedy; and Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown, with Michael Caine. If she can't quite take

her pick of roles from here on out, she can count on a reasonable selection.

A Certain Angle. Fonda's eminence is either inevitable or unlikely, depending on the eyesight, mood and metabolism of the observer.

From the beginning, there has been the question of The Name, and she has never made up her mind whether it was a help or a horror. "When you're Miss Jane Smith," she says, "and win a beauty contest in Ohio and you go to Hollywood and you're disastrous, it couldn't matter less, because you have nowhere to fall from. I felt that, being Jane Fonda, people would be judging me from a certain angle. I'd have to be great or not at all. I know now that I was desperately, desperately, desperately in love with acting, but it was like a woman in love with a man she's afraid of—she'll build such defenses. So instead of acting I painted, I studied languages, I studied music, I worked for the Paris Review."

She was 21 before she dropped the diversionary maneuvers and enrolled at Lee Strasberg's celebrated Actors Studio. "It was because of Lee that I became an actress," she says flatly.

Not everyone agrees that Strasberg deserves sole credit for making her an actress, partly because not everyone agrees that she is an actress. In the

Oscar-winning Cat Ballou, she was outclassed by everything onscreen, including Lee Marvin's horse. In any case, there were others who helped along the way. An old family friend, Joshua Logan, directed her in starring roles in both her first film (Tall Story) and first play (There Was a Little Girl), and Daddy, "nonverbal" as she thinks he is, could not have been a total liability.