Genevieve Naylor/Staley Wise-Gallery
The Fondas, with Henry Fonda in the foreground, photographed in Greenwich, Conn., in 1948. From left, Peter, Frances, Jane and Frances de Villers Brokaw, a half sister of Jane Fonda's.
JANE FONDA:
The Private Life of a Public Woman
By Patricia Bosworth
Illustrated. 596 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.
PRIME TIMEBy Jane FondaIllustrated. 416 pages. Random House. $27.
Covers -Patricia Wall/The New York Times
2000: Jane Fonda tacitly agrees to let Patricia Bosworth write a biography of her. But she is not willing to speak directly with Ms. Bosworth because she is at work on her own book, the memoir “My Life So Far.”
2003: Ms. Fonda changes her mind. She agrees in an e-mail (“Subject: Gulp”) to cooperate fully with Ms. Bosworth’s book. She has an agenda. She will show Ms. Bosworth her F.B.I. files only if Ms. Bosworth sifts through them and extracts the good parts so that “My Life So Far” can use them.
2003: Ms. Fonda changes her mind. She agrees in an e-mail (“Subject: Gulp”) to cooperate fully with Ms. Bosworth’s book. She has an agenda. She will show Ms. Bosworth her F.B.I. files only if Ms. Bosworth sifts through them and extracts the good parts so that “My Life So Far” can use them.
2005: “My Life So Far” is published. It makes a strong impression. At 67, Ms. Fonda has lived many different public lives and tried hard to explain them. Her daughter Vanessa has notoriously suggested a video version: “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?”
2005 onward: Ms. Bosworth keeps working. But her job has gotten more difficult because, as Ms. Fonda points out to her in an e-mail, “mine came first.” 2011: “Prime Time,” another book by Ms. Fonda, arrives at the beginning of August. Ms. Bosworth’s “Jane Fonda: the Private Life of a PublicWoman” arrives in August too, but not until the end of the month. Which book includes the line “You could have put what was left of me into a thimble?” And which has this: “If cared for properly, good sex toys can last for many years?”
“Prime Time” is a how-to book about being happy and self-aware at 73. “Jane Fonda” is about a much younger woman who had very little idea of who she was or how she treated others. And because “My Life So Far” demonstrated that its author still had a lot to learn about herself, there is enough room in the Fonda sphere for Ms. Bosworth’s version. This is not a nosy celebrity biography full of gossip and poison. It is a book that gets unusually close to its subject. It sees what Ms. Fonda cannot see about herself.
Ms. Bosworth and Ms. Fonda have known each other since the 1960s. They both studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio then, and Ms. Bosworth was a stage actress for a while. But she made her bones as a biographer with an immersive 1978 biography of Montgomery Clift. She brings that acuity to bear on Ms. Fonda’s story.
Full piece at The New York Times.
2005 onward: Ms. Bosworth keeps working. But her job has gotten more difficult because, as Ms. Fonda points out to her in an e-mail, “mine came first.” 2011: “Prime Time,” another book by Ms. Fonda, arrives at the beginning of August. Ms. Bosworth’s “Jane Fonda: the Private Life of a PublicWoman” arrives in August too, but not until the end of the month. Which book includes the line “You could have put what was left of me into a thimble?” And which has this: “If cared for properly, good sex toys can last for many years?”
“Prime Time” is a how-to book about being happy and self-aware at 73. “Jane Fonda” is about a much younger woman who had very little idea of who she was or how she treated others. And because “My Life So Far” demonstrated that its author still had a lot to learn about herself, there is enough room in the Fonda sphere for Ms. Bosworth’s version. This is not a nosy celebrity biography full of gossip and poison. It is a book that gets unusually close to its subject. It sees what Ms. Fonda cannot see about herself.
Ms. Bosworth and Ms. Fonda have known each other since the 1960s. They both studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio then, and Ms. Bosworth was a stage actress for a while. But she made her bones as a biographer with an immersive 1978 biography of Montgomery Clift. She brings that acuity to bear on Ms. Fonda’s story.
Full piece at The New York Times.
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