My Life So Far (66 page)

Less than a year into the business, a man named Stuart Karl came into my life. Stuart was the father of how-to home videos, having made the very first of the home improvement types. His wife, Debbie, read the Workout book and told her husband he should get me to do it as a video. When I got the call I remember thinking, Home video? What’s that? Like most people back then, I didn’t own a VCR. I’m an actor, I thought. It would look foolish for me to be exercising on camera. I gave Karl a firm no. But he kept coming back until finally I relented, thinking,
It won’t take long and it will bring some additional income into CED.
I certainly never saw it as a big moneymaker. No one I knew had ever bought a videotape.

I remember writing out the shooting script for the first Workout video in pencil on the floor. Despite protestations from Sid Galanty, a friend who became the producer and director of the first wave of my videos, I decided that to reduce the cost of the production we wouldn’t use hair or makeup people or teleprompters. I’d just wing it. I never imagined how hard it would be. First of all, because everything on the video would be reversed for the viewer, every time I wanted them to move right I’d have to say left, and all this while executing the moves correctly and trying not to seem breathless—on a concrete studio floor never designed for aerobics.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter
how
we did the video. We had no competition (
that
would soon change), and we could have all been painted purple and covered with sequins. All that mattered was that people could follow what we were doing. The crucial thing about creating a successful business, I have subsequently realized, is timing—giving people something they really want that they can’t yet get anywhere else. But at the time I was not aware of how serendipitous our timing was, or that there was a budding video industry poised to explode.

That first video, the original
Jane Fonda’s Workout
(1982), remains to this day the biggest-selling home video of all time (seventeen million copies). In addition, it helped create the home video industry. Up until then people weren’t buying videos, because they didn’t own the necessary hardware—a VCR player, which was expensive—and there weren’t any videos that people felt they had to have for repeat use that would justify the cost of the hardware. But once the Workout videos arrived, people were suddenly buying VCRs like crazy. This is why I am the first person in the “Talent” category to have been inducted into the Video Hall of Fame, an honor usually reserved for inventors and marketers of hardware. I am extremely proud of this and appear to be boasting (well, maybe I
am
boasting), but remember, all this success happened in spite of me.
Who knew?
Well, Debbie Karl knew. And her husband, Stuart, was smart enough to listen to his smart wife.

Letters began coming in by the basketful from women who were “doing Jane,” as they called it, all over the world. They were touching, handwritten letters I have kept to this day, usually starting with how they had never written to a celebrity before and were sure I wouldn’t actually read their letter myself. Some were about my Workout book, some about the videotapes or the audiotape version. These women poured their hearts out, about weight they had lost, self-esteem they had gained, how they were finally able to stand up to their boss or recover from a mastectomy, asthma, respiratory failure, diabetes. One woman described how, brushing her teeth one morning, she was stunned to see arm muscles in the mirror for the first time. A Peace Corps volunteer wrote me about how she “did Jane” using the audiotape every day in her mud hut in Guatemala. Another told how a group of nine women in Lesotho in southern Africa would get together three times a week to “do Jane” and had discovered that the social aspect of these sessions was as rewarding as the exercising. Here’s a quote from a thirty-eight-year-old woman who had lost eighty pounds using my book and video:

Something new was starting to happen to me as well: When your voice and image are coming into someone’s living room (or mud hut) every day, via video or on a record, you become part of people’s lives in a personal way, different from movie stars on the big screen, and this was affecting how people reacted to me.
They felt they knew me.
Often I would come into a store to buy something, and when someone heard my voice, even if their backs were turned, they knew who I was—and would want to tell me stories about which tape they used, whom they “did Jane” with, how it had affected them. Once a woman got down on the floor of a drugstore to ask if she was doing her pelvic tilts correctly. Husbands would say, “I wake up to your voice every morning ’cause my wife does you in the living room.”

I didn’t know whether to say thank you or to apologize.

I’d been used to celebrity, but this was a new world, and I began to think, Hey, wait a minute. What about me as an actor? What about the causes I am fighting for? What’s with the pelvic tilts already? The Workout phenomenon, it seemed, had superseded everything else about me, and while I loved knowing I was making a positive difference in women’s lives, it made me uneasy. I didn’t want pelvic tilts to define me. Still, I was becoming fascinated with the business itself—and not only the money it was bringing in.

I found that making the business a success was a creative process. I wanted to see it make a difference—not just for wealthy women in Beverly Hills but, through the videos, for senior citizens, kids, and employed women who had little disposable income and even less time. I did focus groups to better understand what women wanted. I would be riveted listening to the thoughts of these secretaries, small-business owners, wives, students, women in real estate—Middle-American women—as they expressed their wants and needs in the area of exercise. They spoke of their difficulty finding time to go to a gym and affording baby-sitters, and they all expressed gratitude to the Workout for creating our home videos.

Julie Lafond, director of the Jane Fonda Workout, is on the right. Jeanne Ernst, a lead instructor, is between us.

(Lynn Houston Photography)

I sometimes taught classes myself, especially at the beginning, so that I could learn what worked. During filming on
9 to 5
in Los Angeles, I taught a 5:00
A.M.
class three times a week before going to work. Dolly Parton thought I was mad as a hatter coming in all sweaty and red as I did.

I soon opened a second studio in Encino, a small city in the San Fernando Valley, and then a third in San Francisco. Business consultants were advising me to franchise the Workout, and that was when I knew I had to engage an executive search firm to help me find an experienced businesswoman to run it.

I interviewed fifteen women. I never considered hiring a man, because so much of my business was made up of women and because I felt I would be more comfortable with a woman partner. I chose the woman I did for three reasons: First, she was from the Midwest; because of Dad, I see midwesterners as hardworking, frugal, and honest. Second, she told me she cried when she heard “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Third, she had married her high school sweetheart. The last two told me she was bedrock and loyal. I was not mistaken. (Actually there was a fourth reason: Her name was Julie Lafond and Lafonda made a great name for our partnership.)

The first vital piece of advice Julie gave me was to close down the two newest studios and not franchise. “You don’t want to be in bricks and mortar,” she said. “It’s the tapes and books that will be your main source of money (and fewer headaches), and the Beverly Hills Workout will be the laboratory where you try out new classes and keep your finger on the pulse of the people we serve—what works for them and what doesn’t.”

Two years after Julie arrived, I decided to separate the Workout from CED. I wanted to grow the business but could not because all the income was being paid out in dividends to the organization. By that time (the mid-1980s), the Workout had brought $17 million into CED, and I felt we had more than fulfilled our original mission of providing it with a solid financial base. As long as I owned the Workout business, I could grow it while continuing to donate money to CED as needed.

By now Tom had been elected to the California State Assembly and others were running CED day to day. But from the get-go Tom had hated the Workout, seeing it as an exercise in vanity. He told me once that he felt the problems in our marriage began with the Workout. Maybe. My time was certainly taken up more and more with the business, but whenever he made disparaging remarks about it, I would just think, Okay, I’m vain, call it what you will, but it sure makes a lot of women feel better. Besides, where else would you have gotten $17 million?

In the end Julie and I produced five books, twelve audio programs, and twenty-three videotapes—everything from the basic Workout to yoga and step aerobics; some short, easy ones for older people; and two for kids called
Funhouse Fitness.
By now competition had become fierce, which forced us to spend more money on our productions and marketing. But we got it down to a science and could shoot a video in five days (though we would spend from six months to a year developing each one). I was adamant that there be a variety of people performing on the videos with me, so that home viewers would feel represented: We had racial diversity and men as well as women, some young, some older, some slim, and some not so slim.

I had fun coming up with innovative ideas. For instance, instead of the traditional disco workout beat, we used Scottish jigs, Latin, country, and bluegrass, and we would choreograph accordingly. I would usually do the choreography myself. That way I could be sure it was something that I—a good decade or more older than the other dancers—was able to do. In one video I came up with the idea of having teacher Jeanne Ernst and myself perform part of the routine in front of a screen, on which a film appropriate to the music was projected. I used these tapes myself and knew how important it was to keep them interesting. On another tape I had thought it would be funny to have a guy seem to crash the class, just sort of come in late and insert himself into the back row and then act very crazy. To this day people refer to “that tape with the crazy guy.” In one of the aerobics videos we did,
Lean Routine Workout,
I wanted an urban feel, so our set was the roof of a city tenement building at night.

Right after making that video, I met Ted Turner, and I never had time after that to do a full ensemble aerobics video (which took months of creating, weeks of rehearsing, and a week of shooting). But the business did continue under Julie Lafond’s guidance for a number of years, during which I put out Workout videos with me alone (much easier to do). Together Julie and I also created a second Workout book and a cookbook,
Cooking for Healthy Living.
Julie helped me develop a self-generating treadmill we sold that didn’t need to be plugged in (appealing to my desire for energy efficiency), plus a host of other Workout paraphernalia that was also very lucrative.

Julie and some of the Workout teachers became close friends—Jeanne Ernst and Laurel Sparks in particular. We would go on marathon bike rides and hikes together. Troy and Vanessa came with us on one wild and woolly three-day bike trip through Napa Valley. That was when I saw how naturally strong and fit both my children are . . . without even trying!

I came to depend a lot on my friendships with many of the teachers at the Workout. In retrospect I see they were like a safety valve, allowing a suppressed part of me to surface. I remember a journalist friend of mine coming to the set one day while we were taping the
Lean Routine
video. He hung around for a while and later said to me, “I can’t believe how different you were around those women. I’ve never seen this laughing, joking side of you before.”

It isn’t easy for me to accept the fact that many young people, if they know me at all, know me as “the woman in the exercise video their mother used.” Yet I am proud that the Workout got so many women feeling better about themselves and their bodies.*
 
¹²

Working out can mean different things depending on where a person is at a given time in her life. Working out can be narrowly about armoring ourselves in muscle or about striving for toxic, elusive perfection. But it can also, for a more conscious person, be about breathing energy and life into the core of the body, building chi, communicating on a deep level with your cells. For me it started off in the former categories and later developed into the latter as I began moving more frequently out of the gym and into nature, climbing mountains, biking, doing meditation and yoga. That’s when I began adding working
in
to my working
out.