Sexes: On Golden Fonda

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What a difference a decade makes. Jane's clenched fist, once the angry sign language for radical power, now helps form a taut bicep. She has become a role model for mid-life American women, as well as a gutsy advocate of causes like equal pay. She charms listeners from Malibu to Donahue with her no-nonsense do-gooding. She may be the country's most visible "liberal"—and the most electable, though for now she is content to sponsor Hayden's political career by ringing doorbells, and with some substantial contributions to his campaign. On Golden Pond, which her film company produced, not only took in more than $100 million at the box office but served as a public celebration of the bond uniting her and her father just before his death. She seems glowingly happy as a wife, a mother and a cottage industry.

In her introduction to the Workout Book exercises, Fonda performs some of her most strenuous handsprings, explaining her past. There were the youthful bouts of anorexia nervosa and jags of amphetamine popping at Vassar. Prescriptions were apparently easy to get from incurious doctors.

Later came attempts to meet Hollywood's or Paris' standards of sex appeal. "In an effort to conform to the sought-after female image," she writes, "I abused my health, starved my body and ingested heaven-knows-what chemical drugs. I took diuretics for almost 20 years, almost half my lifetime, something that appalls me today." In this sense, Workout is two books: an essay on the celebrity as society's most glamorous victim and a guide to salvation through sweat. Fonda's new eminence suggests another moral that this lioness of the left might find ironic.

She is living proof that two systems can be made to pay off: workouts and capitalism.