JANE F-ING FONDA
December 1, 2022
Amanda Doyle:
Content warning that in today’s very special episode, we reference the existence of past sexual abuse and ongoing eating disorder recovery. Please take care of yourself.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Where we would normally read our guest bio, we’re doing something different today because today, we have the unbelievable honor of hosting, Jane Effing Fonda, a singular human who has pushed six decades of our history forward fearlessly. It is our honor to share a glimpse right now into Miss Fonda’s seismic and sustained impact. Sissy, go.
Amanda Doyle:
Miss Fonda was a pivotal voice on behalf of service members and activists to expose Nixon’s deadly lies in Vietnam. As the nation turned its back on Vietnam vets who gave everything, her film, Coming Home, forced America to see vet’s experiences with compassion and ease their reentry into civilian life. She fought beside Black Panthers, including for the release of Angela Davis, setting a standard to support them with love, money, and risk for which she was rewarded with years of illegal FBI surveillance into the most intimate aspects of her life.
Amanda Doyle:
She was a vocal ally for the LGBTQ+ community when it was rare to be, including during the White Night riots, after the assassination of Harvey Milk. She stood in solidarity with indigenous Americans for 50 years, amplifying their work from Bernie Whitebear’s occupation to the 1970 Alcatraz Coalition to Standing Rock. She started Jane Fonda’s Workout for the express purpose of funding the campaign for economic democracy, funneling $17 million to that pivotal organization. Through her founding work for 26 years with GCAP, the only Georgia organization that has doggedly focused on teen pregnancy prevention in her state. She has overseen her state’s teen pregnancy rate drop by 72%.
Amanda Doyle:
This year, she launched the Jane Fonda Climate Pack and continues her work with Fire Drill Fridays, hell bent on ousting politicians who are on the tab of the fossil fuel industry. Miss Fonda has also won two Oscars and seven Golden Globes for films extolling empathy and progress like Klute, in which she personalized the plight and power of sex workers. And 9 to 5, which was based on our conversations with real office workers, amplifying their organizing efforts and bringing their stories of sexual harassment and unequal pay to the mainstream. Her womanist evolution marked our nation’s revolution. She is a woman who owns her brilliant light as clearly as she owns her shadows. Thank you, Miss Fonda, for a lifetime of hard things well lived.
Glennon Doyle:
Damn.
Jane Fonda:
Oh, that’s so beautiful. Thank you. Going to make me cry. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
Jane Fonda:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Abby and I were lucky enough to be at your 85th birthday very recently. It was so beautiful. It was also a fundraiser to support GCAP. We were so unbelievably moved to be there.
Jane Fonda:
I was sure happy you were there. And your words, I didn’t think you were going to get up on stage and pay a tribute like that. They were so beautiful. Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my gosh, it was such an honor. I’m going to record the toast that I did for you for our pod squad. So don’t worry, pod squad, you’ll hear it. But first, we want to get into some beautiful, hard things with you, Jane. We’re going to start with this question, a really hard one. So, your mom died by suicide when you were 12. And you say that at that moment when you found out that your mom had died, you left your body and you didn’t come back for 50 years. I relate to this so deeply. Can you talk to us about what you mean by when you talk about disembodiment?
Jane Fonda:
My mother was sexually abused as an eight-year-old. I was sexually abused as a seven-year-old and I didn’t know that for a long time. I had to go through a lot to kind of get back there. And I think sexual trauma and abuse causes women, it happens to men too, but mostly women to become disassociated from their bodies. It’s very easy to slip away from a relationship to your body, especially for women because so much importance is put on our body. We’re so judged by how we look. So I think the disembodiment, the leaving my body happened much earlier than my mother’s suicide when I was 12. I know that I went through a whole lot of my early life wanting to be perfect because I thought nobody’s going to love me unless I’m perfect. And so, all the interesting, complicated parts of myself moved out and took up residence alongside.
Jane Fonda:
It was kind of like a double image. And every now and then there would be somebody, Simone Signoret was one of the theater critic. Kenneth Tynan was another one. There were certain people along the way who seemed to see the Jane Fonda that was over here and get interested in that. And it was like, who is Simone talking to? It’s not me, I’m not smart. But was she saw that other part. So it was like this good girl that’s who presented herself, it’s who took men into the bedroom. But all the interesting stuff was next door. And I had to work really, really, really hard to bring myself back into myself. Like a double image that’s finally-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jane Fonda:
… that’s coming together and it’s a work in progress, it doesn’t… It’s not like everything just goes away, but you learn to manage it. Yeah. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
When I did your speech, I actually started crying on stage and I’ve never done that in 15 years of doing this job, because I always stay completely disembodied. I don’t ever mesh the two together, but I’ve been doing a lot of work lately trying to get embodied again. I’ve had eating disorders my whole life and I started crying on stage with you and that was the first time. And when I got off stage, somebody said to me, this, Jane, “You seemed very embodied up there.” And I was like, “Ah, putting the two together.” How do you… Because eating disorders does that too. You used to struggle with bulimia, all of the eating disorders just like I have. Was that a coping mechanism for disembodiment? How do you see that now?
Jane Fonda:
I think eating disorders happen in the presence of inauthenticity. If you’re pretending to be someone you aren’t, if you’re in a relationship that isn’t 100% authentic, we’re going to tend to fill that empty space with something. And for us, it was food. It can be drugs, it can be shopping, it can be workaholism, it can be all kinds of things. But you fill up that hole created by inauthenticity. And it took me a long, long time to understand that because of my early abuse and my mother’s mental health challenges, I never was able to really have a relationship be fully authentic. And I’ve had three of them and they’ve all been fascinating, wonderful men, but it just didn’t ever really… It was never democratic.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. You said that you were so courageous for the ideals of our democracy in our country, but you never once had a democratic marriage.
Jane Fonda:
Oh my god, if that’s what you’re scared of, showing up fully for another person, that’s going to be terrifying. I mean, I’ve been under bombs, I’ve been shot at, but if earlier in my life, if a guy said to me, “Come on Fonda, show up. Come on. Who are you? Show me who you really are.” I just wonder how many appropriate relationships came my way and I fled in terror because they were going to demand that I show up. And most of my relationships were with men who couldn’t show up themselves and I blamed them, but it was really both of us, it was me.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think it was that perfection though? Because you also said with the eating disorder stuff that I loved this because I relate to everything that you ever say, but you said most people blame eating disorders on moms. But for me, it was stuff my dad said. But did you learn that from your dad that a girl was supposed to be so perfect in this way and so that’s…
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, he was married five times and he would say to his wives, tell her to wear a bigger bathing suit, or tell her not to wear a bikini, or tell her to wear a longer dress or tell her she’s too fat. I would hear those things or the stepmothers would tell me those things. So I just thought, well, I want my father to love me, so I’ll get really, really, really skinny. And of course, that doesn’t just stop with your father, it goes on into your… Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
When you said, I put my complicated self over here, my interesting and complicated self and it made me think of with those marriages, it’s almost like those people were allowed to be complicated and interesting, but you were not in those marriages, allowed to be your entire self. And it’s fascinating to me because I’m thinking about when your daughter said you’re about to make the film of your life and your daughter said to you, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon, let it walk across the screen?” Was she talking about the melding into the people that you were married to?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah. I mean, I look at pictures of me through the various marriages and boyfriends and I look like a different person in each one. The way I dressed, the way I did… I’m really good at, “Oh, you want me to be that kind of a woman? Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll do that.” I can become pretty much whatever a guy wants me to be. And I did that for a long time. And then at a certain point, you then try to, oh my God, I really love him. I want this to work, which means that I have to now become who I am. And a couple of times, it’s like he didn’t want that. No.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, no. You know how that goes.
Amanda Doyle:
And that’s so brave because you could have just not found your wholeness, right? You could have stayed-
Jane Fonda:
I have a big fear. My big fear is getting to the end of my life and I’m pretty close at 85 and having a lot of regrets. My dad died with a lot of regrets. Oh my god, I don’t want that. We never know how we’re going to die, but it’s important to vision how you want to be. I want to be in a bed either I hope in my home and have people around me that that love me. I have to earn that, deserve that. And I want to feel that I’ve done my very best. And so that’s what I try to do. I’m aware of my failings and I try to get better, make it better, get better. So I hang out with girlfriends who are better. They give me strength and put stretch in my spine and inspire me. And my girlfriends are just all so wonderful. And they all do hard things all the time.
Amanda Doyle:
I know, they do. One thing that you said that just rocked me was when you were trying to make these decisions and you could see yourself, but you knew you couldn’t be who you needed to be in the relationship you’re in. And you said that you didn’t leave your husband for another man, you left them for the idea. The idea that you can reside in your own skin with all of your needs and ambitions, and then you don’t have to exile yourself anymore.
Jane Fonda:
Exactly, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
How could you recognize that self in you if it had been so separate for so long? How did you feel it and know it?
Jane Fonda:
Well, I really started coming together when I was married to Ted Turner. And we knew about a year in advance that the marriage was going to end. And I had a lot of time to prepare. And one of the things that I did was in preparing for my third act for my 60th, I made that little movie about myself. I researched myself and one of the things that I discovered in doing that was that I’m brave and that I’ve always been brave. Oh, who knew? I didn’t realize that.
Amanda Doyle:
I know.
Jane Fonda:
I didn’t know, so that was good. And then from there, there were two more years with Ted. I started to feel this is good what I’m doing. He said, “You’re going to come back to me. You’ll come back to me” And I said, “What makes you think so?” And he said, “Because I’m so interesting.” And he is most interesting person I know, but I remember, oh it was hard. We split up January 2nd of the year, 2000. He has a little private plane and he dropped me at the airport in Atlanta where I lived with him. And I had a rented car waiting for me. And I turned around and I saw the next woman getting on his plane. My seat was still warm. Painful, huh?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s so painful.
Jane Fonda:
And my daughter, Vanessa, who had a one-year-old child, she was in Paris with her father, my first husband, who was dying of cancer. And I asked if I could stay in her house. And I remember I left so many properties, vast vistas, such a magnificent, huge life to move into my daughter’s house in a little room with no closet. I had my golden retriever with me. And there was such silence. And I remember standing in the middle of the room and I could feel myself moving back into myself. And I said, “This is God. I know that this is God.”
Jane Fonda:
Now, here’s something really interesting. I was writing a book about aging and this notion of why I felt like it was God when I could feel myself becoming re-embodied. And so, I started reading books about the Bible and it turns out in most books, Jesus is quoted as saying to his disciples, “You have to be perfect like our father in heaven is perfect,” which I just felt that can’t be what he said. And then I read a book that said no, in Aramaic, which is a language that Jesus spoke, what he said was, “You have to be whole like our Lord in heaven is whole.” So Jesus knew that the goal of humanity is to become fully integrated, fully whole.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, I mean, it was like, wow, it’s happening to me, I can feel it. And even though my heart was broken because I loved Ted so much, I knew that I’d made the right decision. And I remember Oprah decided it was her second issue of the O Magazine and she wanted to interview me for it. And she came to my daughter’s house and she said, “Good God. I mean, didn’t he get you a penthouse? I mean, what are you doing?” And I said, “No, I’m being reborn and it’s appropriate that I get reborn in the home of my firstborn.” It was the most beautiful time in my life, I was 62.
Glennon Doyle:
Reborn at 62. When you told that story about the origin being whole and not perfect, I was thinking about my whole journey, my final frontier, all of it is this embodying again because I was gone too. I’m still gone-ish, but landing. And I always think about the most repeated phrases in the Bible, are do not be afraid and remember. And I always think of, remember as the opposite of dismember, like remember can mean to recall an old idea, but remember is also to come back together, right?
Jane Fonda:
And the members of your body, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Like body, mind, spirit in one and just live in this body that for so many of us, wasn’t safe and refusing to believe that. And living inside of it is I think what the whole thing’s about.
Jane Fonda:
It’s what the whole thing is about. That’s right. If we did that, if we lived authentically as embodied men and women, there would be no climate crisis. There would be no racism, there would be no patriarchy. It’s all part of a poison-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Jane Fonda:
… that’s been in our species for thousands of years. But I’m hopeful, I believe that we can change it.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm, yes, you do believe it and you’re working toward it.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s wild to me that when you were 60 and decided that in order to understand myself and not have regrets, I need to know who I am, which means I need to know my history. I need to find out who I am and know my parents’ history and know who they were.
Jane Fonda:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
And so, that part of remembering, like not being afraid to look at your life and pull the pieces together.
Jane Fonda:
Right, exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And same with our universe. We are dismembered from our history and where we are as a country in a world because we are not remembering. We are not looking at our history and where we are.
Jane Fonda:
We’ve forgotten that we’re all part of the same dust molecules from the stars. We’re part of the animals and the rocks and the trees. And that’s the reality. It’s hard for people to grasp that.
Amanda Doyle:
Speaking of hard to grasp, you spent decades working on myriad campaigns for so many people. And there were always the people who were hellbent on trying to take you out, the detractors. And they had a very large voice, there was administrations behind them. It was big. How in the world, even notwithstanding all of that, you would apologize when you needed to, but you would always fall forward after every one. You would keep showing up, you would keep doing your work. How did you find the strength to do that? And then what would you say to folks now, who are so terrified to take a step because they know they’re going to make a mistake and that all the people will come rushing to take them out?
Jane Fonda:
I think one very important thing is if you want to be an activist, don’t do it alone, be part of a movement. I’ve always been part of a movement. So there’s always been support around me and love at the worst of the controversy. There were always people with me who knew what was in my heart and knew why I was doing what I do, knew the mistakes that I’d made, but we were in it together. For survival, that’s really, really important. The other thing is people expected me to be scared away. Oh, God, look at white privileged, Henry Fonda’s daughter, “We’ll give her a little hard time and she’ll disappear.”
Jane Fonda:
Fuck you, man. You’re not going to scare me, I’m going to show you. I just refused to play into that preconception that they had. I was going to show them that I’m tough, and I am. I’m really… I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m missing a gene because things don’t upset me as much as they upset other people, but also, I always knew what was in my heart. I could make mistakes, but I knew why I did, and so I could keep going and I wasn’t going to let them get me down.
Glennon Doyle:
Jane, how and why?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, I know.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s all of these people, all of these colleagues of yours throughout time, you’re the one who got into these fights, stay in these fights. What is it about you, where did we-
Jane Fonda:
There’s others. There’s been lots of others too. I’ll tell you partly, because I’ve thought a lot about it. See, growing up, right? What was my dad doing? He was making Grapes of Wrath. He was making Young Abe Lincoln, he was making The Wrong Man. He was making 12 Angry Men. And I always knew those are the roles that he loves. Those roles represent the values that he respects and admire. I want some of that. And so, I wasn’t really conscious then, but I think it was like fertilizer that was being sprinkled on my soul so that when the Vietnam War surfaced and I began to realize what it really was, that fertilizer allowed the sprouts to start growing, the sprouts of activism.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you have a time when you remember deciding to not live to please your dad? Was there like a fork in the road where you were like, “Uh”?
Jane Fonda:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know if any of us have stopped.
Amanda Doyle:
I haven’t, so let me know, does it happen around 84? I’m still crossing my fingers.
Jane Fonda:
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I always wanted to please him, I think. I didn’t always know how to talk to him, and I miss him so much and I would so love to talk to him now. But I just think we grow up and we can get over it. Yeah, we grow up, and you see the parent’s frailty. It’s so important to try to see your parents as human beings. When I was preparing to turn 60, which to me, was the beginning of my third act, I decided, and it speaks to what you said, Amanda, that in order to know where I wanted to go in my third act, I had to know where I’d been. And so really, I did very intense research for a year about my life, and there was a lot… there was stacks of FBI files in case I forgot what I was doing on that day, and my father made a lot of home movies, and there were a lot of interview. I mean, there was a lot of material.
Jane Fonda:
I thought in order to do this research, I have to find out really, who were my parents? Who really were they? And they were dead, so it was hard. But I did a lot of research and that’s when I found out, because my mother killed herself in an institution, I got ahold of the medical records and that’s when I found out that she had been sexually abused as a girl, and explained… Interestingly, when I started GCAP, I was noticing that all these girls, 15 and younger, all of them had been sexually abused. These girls who were pregnant or parenting, if they were young, they’d all been sexually abused. And I began to study that. So when I read the medical records of my mother, I was like a lay expert. I knew a lot about what happens to a young girl or boy when he or she is sexually abused. And so, I knew exactly why my mother had been the way she was, and I was able to forgive her.
Amanda Doyle:
And you knew that it had nothing to do with you.
Jane Fonda:
Had nothing to do with me. That’s the value of finding out who your parents are, because you’ll probably find out it didn’t have anything to do with me, it was because that happened to them. Oh, and then you can have compassion and forgiveness. There’s a generational trauma. Even if a child, a daughter, for example, hasn’t been, the shadow of her mother’s abuse can affect her life. And it’s one reason why it’s really important to talk to our parents, especially our mothers, to find out if something like that happened to them.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jane Fonda:
You have to talk to them separately.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, separately from each other?
Jane Fonda:
Oh, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. That’s a really good point.
Jane Fonda:
Well, we’re so different. We do hard things like admit.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jane Fonda:
Men don’t do that.
Glennon Doyle:
Jane, why is that?
Jane Fonda:
Well, because that’s the way they’re raised, to detach from their heart. I don’t know if you heard, but at that night at the GCAP-
Glennon Doyle:
I did.
Jane Fonda:
… I said we’ll start programming for boys. The difference between women friendships and men friendships, men friendships are two guys sitting side-by-side, looking forward saying, “Oh my God, look at that car. Oh my goodness, look at him kick that football.” It’s out there. They’re sharing, nothing wrong with it necessarily, but they’re sharing things outside of themselves. What do women do? “Oh my God, I’m feeling so bad. I need some help from you.” We ask for help. We look, we sit opposite each other and we look into each other’s eyes. We show up emotionally for each other and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. It’s such a great gift and men don’t have it, and I feel so sorry for them because they don’t. So it’s important to have empathy for men. I have a lot of empathy for men.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, we’re all disembodied. They’re dismembered from heart, from internal.
Jane Fonda:
And we’re cut off from our voice.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jane Fonda:
Which is different.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you know what the-
Jane Fonda:
The voice, it doesn’t go away, it just goes underground. And then we have to learn, as we grow up, to bring it back up again.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, this freaked me out, in one of your books, you talked about how after you became more embodied, your voice changed and dropped.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Jane, for the last five episodes, since I read that, I’ve been trying to talk low because people make fun of my voice that it’s so high, and I think that’s what it is.
Jane Fonda:
It is. It is.
Abby Wambach:
Was it on purpose? Did you lower your voice on purpose?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. How does this happen?
Jane Fonda:
No, no, no. It occurred to me when I read Carol Gilligan, the feminist psychologist, her book called In a Different Voice, when she talks about how girls, especially girls who are disembodied, especially girls who’ve been sexually traumatized, the voice goes up into the head because it doesn’t reveal anything. You’re not going to know what I’m feeling, it’s way up here. As you begin to connect to your core self, the voice drops. And what I discovered, it started to happen with me when I made Klute, because Klute was a film where for the first time, I think I really, I went to my core, I touched my core self, and became a feminist, and my voice dropped.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, that is so badass, Jane. When you talk about being real, you talk about looking at yourself crying in the mirror and saying, “Oh, that’s how I look crying. I should use this on stage.” And you would always say, “I’m searching for what is real in there. Is there somebody real in there?” Who is that? When you get to your embodied self, when you get to your realest self, who is real Jane Fonda?
Jane Fonda:
I guess I’m a brave, strong, persistent, curious woman who wants to make things better, is who I am.
Abby Wambach:
For sure.
Glennon Doyle:
Make it better. Where are you happiest now? What are the moments that you’re the happiest?
Jane Fonda:
Well, I’m always happy when I’m high on a mountain. Nature, to me, is my soul, my religion. So hiking, being in the mountains, being in a forest is my happy place. I like being in bed.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Nature or bed.
Jane Fonda:
I have a great bed. I love my bed. I’m happy most of the time. Isn’t that weird?
Amanda Doyle:
It’s wonderful.
Jane Fonda:
I know. I didn’t used to be that way. I come from a long line of major depressives, but I’ve learned to be content.
Glennon Doyle:
Are there any tricks for that?
Jane Fonda:
No, it takes a lot of work. No, there’s no shortcuts or tricks. It’s that investigating your life. It’s called doing a life review, it’s meditation, it’s therapy if you can afford it, and it’s a good therapist, it’s girlfriends. I mean, it can be all kinds of things, but it all comes from a desire to be intentional about how you live. See, there’s one way to live. You’re in a canoe in a river and you have no oar, and so you’re just taken where the current takes you, or agency, you have an oar. I am going to go over to this. You control, to the extent that any of us control anything, which we don’t really, but you have agency over what you do with your life. And that can only happen if you’re really intentional about who you want to be and where you want to go.
Glennon Doyle:
This is interesting because… So when you talk about the chameleon and you just became whoever for your husbands, so sister and I were talking about this after reading one of your books. And sister said this thing that I thought was so interesting. She said, “The narrative seems to be that you matched yourself to each husband,” and you did that. But what if, instead of viewing you as passively assuming your husband’s identity, what if you actively selected the men that were perfectly and strategically aligned with your personal and political objectives?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, that’s what I did.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re a mastermind.
Jane Fonda:
I wanted to know what it meant to be a woman, and so I married Roger Vadim, who before me, had been married to Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, and made the movie with Brigitte called God Created Woman. I didn’t know that it was going to be a female impersonator, but that’s what that was about. And then Tom Hayden, he’s going to show me how to be an activist, and he did. That was a good choice. And then Ted, it was about the outdoors, about nature, and being taken care of. I’d always supported everybody. It was nice to be taken care of.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah. It felt good.
Glennon Doyle:
Absolutely.
Jane Fonda:
It scared me at first, but I remember the first time that Ted and I went to a hotel and the porter came with the luggage and I went to my wallet to tip him, and Ted got there first and I got scared. And that’s where I realized, oh my God, my being the one that had the financial strength in the marriage gave me power, and I don’t have that now.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Jane Fonda:
And I got scared. I got used to it pretty quick. I got-
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Metabolize that fear pretty quickly.
Jane Fonda:
Pretty quickly.
Abby Wambach:
In terms of your marriages, do you think at this point in your life, you got what you needed out of them and you’re like, “I don’t need any more marriage.” Is that ever something that you ever considered since divorcing Ted?
Jane Fonda:
Oh yeah. It’s over. I don’t need anymore marriage. I mean, I had some major boyfriends and no, I’m alone now. And so happy, I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship now. Oh, I have girlfriends.
Glennon Doyle:
Your girlfriends. What does that look like? Do you hang out on the weekends? What do you do with your girlfriends? Didn’t Fire Drill Fridays start with you hanging out with some girlfriends?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us that story?
Jane Fonda:
I was really depressed because I knew I wasn’t doing enough about the climate. And my friend, Naomi Klein, had just written a new book about the climate crisis. And I had the gals and Rosanna Arquette and Catherine Keener and I drove up to Big Sir for the Labor Day weekend and I read Naomi Klein’s book and I knew exactly what I had to do. I said to Catherine and to Rosanna, “I’m going to move to DC.” I wanted to go for a year. I called Annie Leonard, who’s the director of Greenpeace. And I said, “I want to come to DC. I’m going to live in a tent for a year opposite the White House and I’m going to raise a ruckus. I’m a little worried about where to poop.” Because I have camped at 24,000 feet. I mean I have camped in the wilderness a lot and you know what to do with your poop, but in a city… And she said, “Well, I don’t think you have to worry about it because it’s illegal now. You cannot do that.”
Glennon Doyle:
Thank God.
Jane Fonda:
And so, that’s when we shifted to Fire Drill Fridays. And we’re going to be back in DC live on December 2nd, Freedom Plaza with a brass band from New Orleans.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, stop.
Jane Fonda:
And we’re going to talk about the climate and what we have to do in the coming two years.
Glennon Doyle:
And what did your friends say when you said, “I know what I have to do.” Because they were probably thinking post something on social media and you said, “No, move to DC.”
Jane Fonda:
No, no. We’d look at maps together and well maybe you could be there and we’ll come with you and all of that. And then I went and I made an appointment with Ted Sarandos who runs Netflix and I said, “Ted, I want to move to DC for a year and I need you to let me out of my contract with Grace and Frankie.”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh.
Jane Fonda:
And he said, “That’s so great, Jane, but I can’t do that.” I signed the contract. So I went for four-and-a-half months and then COVID hit, so.
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Amanda Doyle:
And this is the first one live. I know you’ve been doing them online the whole time.
Jane Fonda:
Online, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Tomorrow is the first one. We’ll put it in the show notes and they can just show up and march with you?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, or watch virtually. It’s going to be virtual carrying on Twitter and Facebook and everything.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so beautiful to think about you as a kid. You are always in the woods. Nature really always has been.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Would you say the place you feel most embodied?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And now, you’re working to save the earth. Talk to us about climate change. Can you just give us your heart about it?
Jane Fonda:
Oh gosh. Well, I grew up in California in the ’40s and there was never any smog, you could swim safely in the ocean. It was so beautiful. I’ve swam with sea turtles in the world, I’ve swam over the most beautiful coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reefs, I’ve hiked in the most beautiful forests. I’ve hiked. I’ve done all these things. They’re not going to be there for my grandkids. The coral reefs are dying, the forests are dying, the ocean is dying. Now, the ocean is where we get oxygen, little things called plankton. Phytoplankton in the ocean is what provides us with oxygen. And it’s dying because of acidification, because of burning fossil fuels and heating up. We had 700 whales washed up on the beach, dead. And many of them had 80 pounds of plastic in their stomachs.
Jane Fonda:
And the forests that give us the rest of the oxygen, they’re going. I mean, it’s the things that are being destroyed by us, breaks my heart. And I’ve read the science and there’s going to be pandemics coming, there’s going to be extreme weather events coming. There’s going to be hundreds of millions of refugees that need to find a place where they can live safely. What are we going to do? We have to cut our fossil fuel burning in half in seven years. I mean, it’s not easy to do it. And we’re going in the wrong direction, so that’s what I want to feel when I’m on my deathbed. I want to say, I did everything I possibly could so that this incredible planet of which we are an integral part, is saved for the young people that are coming up. I remember two-and-a-half years ago, it was like 112 here in Los Angeles. And because of the fires, the sky was brown, orange.
Jane Fonda:
And then I read that birds were falling dead out of the sky. I mean, birds falling dead out of the sky. I grew up with nightingales and meadow larks and songbirds, and they’re gone. And they’re gone. And the insects are gone. You notice when you drive, there’s not a lot of crush insects anymore on the windshield. There is in Italy because they don’t spray the way we do. We’re destroying life on the planet. And I think that there’s a way to stop it and to save it. And so, that’s what I’m devoting my life to. I do believe what I said earlier, that all these things are connected. So it’s a very profound change that we have to go through.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, we need to remember our bodies. We need to come back to our bodies and we need to remember, we need to stop being dismembered as a one human family. That we come back together as kin, as one human family. And we need to be also reunited with our environment.
Jane Fonda:
You don’t have to like, “I’m going to be someone who now concentrates on reintegrating my body.” You can do that while you’re being an activist. One doesn’t preclude the other. You don’t have to only be that thing.
Glennon Doyle:
And we do make a mistake when we say, oh, I have to get my shit together. I have to be personally-
Jane Fonda:
We don’t have time.
Glennon Doyle:
… before I show up for the world. We don’t have time for that.
Jane Fonda:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Jane Fonda:
We don’t have time.
Glennon Doyle:
And that’s more-
Jane Fonda:
You have to do that while you’re doing the other.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, and that’s more of what you were saying before, like I have to be perfect before I can whatever. And we’ve never been that and we’re never going to be that. We just have to show up as ourselves.
Jane Fonda:
That’s right. We’re human beings, we’re flawed. And it’s a toxic desire to want to be, won’t be nothing but disappointed.
Amanda Doyle:
I also love what you’re doing with the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, because it goes to the table where it’s like Hamilton room where it happens, right?
Jane Fonda:
The room where it happens.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re getting in the room and instead of saying, “Oh, I wish these rascals wouldn’t take this money.” You’re saying, “Well, two can play at that game, “and we’re coming after folks who are getting elected based on fossil fuel money. Can you talk to us about what you’re doing there?
Jane Fonda:
There’s two prongs, one is Fire Drill Fridays, whose goal is to take people who are concerned about the climate and turn them into activists. That’s grassroots. And we need millions and millions and millions of them. But we kept seeing the important legislation isn’t passing. Because all these damn elected officials are getting money from the fossil fuel industry. So I should start a PAC that brings fossil fuels into the electoral arena, that targets the people who are taking that money. Call them out on it and then try to get elected the people who say, “No, I’m working for the people. I’m not working for big oil or big corporations.” They’re mostly women, mostly women of color, mostly young. And they’re all over this country. And we’re not a PAC that’s rich enough to deal with the presidential or senate level. So it’s all down ballot. Oh my God, but down ballot is where everything’s happening. It’s amazing. I have met the most amazing, brave people who have run for office and most of them won all over the country and they’re the future.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like we always think about activism as you know that Desmond Tutu quote that you can only pull people out of the river for so long till you have to go upstream to look who’s pushing them in? Fire Drill Friday is like we’re getting people out of the river. This is like grassroots right now. And then the PAC is the looking up river and confronting the people who are causing everybody to fall in the river in the first place.
Jane Fonda:
I like that. I like that. I’ll use that. I’m going to steal that from you.
Glennon Doyle:
Please do.
Abby Wambach:
Do it.
Glennon Doyle:
Well it’s Desmond Tutu, but via Glennon Doyle.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Pod squad, listen to what Jane said. She did not say, “I have to fix the climate.” She said, “On my deathbed, I want to know that I did everything I could.” It’s different. So we don’t not start just because it feels too overwhelming, because it is not our job to do everything. It is just our job to do our thing.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, and everybody can do something. And the most important thing is join an organization so you’re not alone, so you’re with other people.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And everybody listening who’s a parent, who has kids, I mean, we’re all raising kids who are looking at the climate change like, “What the hell are all of you all doing?”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
So important for our kids to see us showing up, not ignoring what they’re going to face in their generation.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so freaking inspiring, Jane. Thank you. We’re going to put all the information in the show notes, so everybody can show up.
Jane Fonda:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re going into a new year here. Do you have any ideas or habits or anything that you’re leaving behind in 2022? Are you thinking in that way at all yet?
Jane Fonda:
Well, I have to get better at not being afraid of conflict, which probably sounds weird coming from me.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it does.
Jane Fonda:
But I don’t like conflict, so I stay away from it, which means that I don’t often talk things out the way I should. So I want to try to get more used to talking things out so they don’t fester.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. In one of your books, I’m remembering this line where you said, I’m afraid of intimacy. Intimacy is what’s in here. It’s easier to be out there. Because this might be familiar to me, are you good at conflict out there? Like big conflict, public conflict and less good at inter relational conflict?
Jane Fonda:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Behind the closed doors, let there be no conflict. That’s why I’m a chameleon or I used to be to avoid conflict.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so Jane Fonda.
Jane Fonda:
Oh, he wants me to be a bimbo, I can be a bimbo.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, it’s so damn good. Okay. So is that your hard thing. I’m in my final frontier, which now that you probably think that’s hilarious because I’m probably going to have six more final frontiers in the next decades.
Abby Wambach:
10, 100.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, but I’m doing the work right now of my life, which is this body shit and this is my final frontier that I’m in right now. Would you say your public frontier right now is the planet?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, and I want to go out feeling that my grandkids will be okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I do know.
Jane Fonda:
I’m not going to be around to see them reach middle life, but I want them to be okay. So I’ll do whatever I can to help that happen.
Glennon Doyle:
We appreciate that on behalf of all the grandkids.
Abby Wambach:
And if you could impart any kind of wisdom on those grandchildren of yours, what would be-
Jane Fonda:
Oh my gosh.
Abby Wambach:
What would you want them to know?
Jane Fonda:
You can be anything you want to be. Figure out what your dream is, what your passion is, what would make you happy. Forget about rich, what will satisfy you, and then go for it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And what you’ve done it seems is constantly forever go towards the thing that breaks your heart.
Jane Fonda:
I have?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I think.
Jane Fonda:
Really?
Glennon Doyle:
Every decade. I mean, Vietnam, racism, misogyny, the teenagers in Georgia with the GCAP, you said that we do, we teach what we want to know. And your passion became pushing off teen pregnancy so that girls can have a chance. Aren’t these all things that kind of tore at your heart and so you rush towards them?
Jane Fonda:
Yeah, I guess that’s true. Yeah. I mean, when something feels really wrong to me, I sort of feel like this is narcissism probably that I’m going to make that go away and I think it’s my responsibility to end that war. It’s my responsibility to turn around the climate crisis. I feel like all the responsibility is on me and so I can’t stop. I just have to keep going and working as hard as I can.
Abby Wambach:
If only more-
Jane Fonda:
I sleep nine hours a night.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Good for you.
Abby Wambach:
If only more had that mindset, we could actually get some shit done. So that, to me, is not narcissism. That is just mothering.
Glennon Doyle:
Leadership.
Abby Wambach:
That is leadership.
It’s mothering. It’s mothering.
Jane Fonda:
Mothering, that’s a good… Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s mothering the world.
Jane Fonda:
Thank you Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
Jane Fonda, for fuck’s sake, we love you.
Abby Wambach:
God.
Jane Fonda:
Thank you. I love you too.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God, thank you for this.
Jane Fonda:
You both moved me so much when you came to Georgia and we talked together and really it meant a lot to me.
Abby Wambach:
Same to us.
Jane Fonda:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re in your corner forever.
Jane Fonda:
And so many people love your show.
Glennon Doyle:
They do.
Jane Fonda:
Unexpected. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, they really do.
Abby Wambach:
We also agree that it’s unexpected. We love doing it and it’s because we get to have such amazing people like you on who have… You have lived it feels like 1,000 lives, but you have taught us so many freaking lessons, Jane Fonda. Thank you for being on with us.
Jane Fonda:
I appreciate your having me. I really appreciate it. I hope we can stay friends.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, please. Yes, yes. And we’ll be ready for Fire Drill Friday, tomorrow. All right, pod squad, we love you. Okay. Pod squad, before we go, we want to give the toast again that Abby and I gave to Jane Fonda at her 85th birthday party for you. Take it away, love bug.
Abby Wambach:
Okay, so I just have to set the scene a little.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, set the stage.
Abby Wambach:
So there we were, we were on stage. Jane was to our left. There was lots of people in the crowd.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
And-
Glennon Doyle:
It was a beautiful tent.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a gorgeous.
Glennon Doyle:
In Georgia.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a gorgeous tent. And this is what we said.
Amanda Doyle:
Where did you poo?
Oh, there was a tent in the yard of a house.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Connected-
Abby Wambach:
There was toilets inside.
Glennon Doyle:
… by a tunnel.
Abby Wambach:
Do you want me to do this or?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, go.
Abby Wambach:
Okay, great. Hello everybody, I’m Abby Wambach, and this is my wife, Glennon Doyle. See, Jane is my wife’s hero, so I’m going to start this toast while she does the breathing exercises she’s been practicing with her therapist in anticipation of this exact moment. Glennon breathes. Glennon and I have three teenagers, so we are very, very tired. This morning at the airport, in a long line for coffee, I looked at tonight’s itinerary and saw that this party ends at 10:00 PM. I said hopefully to my wife, “Jane’s turning 85, right? Certainly she won’t want to stay up till 10:00 PM, right?” And time stopped as my wife glared at me with the fire of 1,000 burning suns. And this is what she said.
Glennon Doyle:
I said, “Let me make something perfectly clear. Jane Fonda has spent her life making 50 films, winning Oscars and Emmy’s and Golden Globes, healing trauma, breaking generational patterns, reducing the rate of teenage pregnancy, working tirelessly for the liberation of women, indigenous people, and all marginalized people. Oh, ending wars, and also saving our planet from apocalypse. So I’m pretty sure she can stay up till 10:00 PM. Furthermore, if Jane Fonda asks us to stay up till February, we will stay up till February, Wambach.” And then a lady behind us in line tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and she looked me in the eye and she said, “I love Jane Fonda.” And I looked right back at her and I said, “I do too.”
Glennon Doyle:
And she squeezed my arm and chills ran down my spine, because I realized that two women saying, “I love Jane Fonda,” to each other means something much more than I love Jane Fonda. It’s like a secret code that means I love justice, I love truth, I love fiery women who risk it all for both. It means I want to be like that. I want to wake up in the morning and rush straight toward the most dangerous, complicated battles of our times to save us all. To say, “I love Jane Fonda,” is to say, “I stand on the side of goodness and courage and the people and the earth and revolution.”
Glennon Doyle:
Happy birthday to the woman who lives her life in such a way that her name has become a clarion call, an ethos in itself, a battle cry. Let us offer a birthday toast with that battle cry. I love Jane Fonda. And we love you too, pod squad. See you next time. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it, it’s fine.