My Life So Far (76 page)

For three months you are absolved of all responsibility except to bring your character alive. But then suddenly the shooting ends and it’s
Who am I? Oh God, I have to start making decisions.
It’s like morphing backward, like a film running in reverse. We step outside the circle of light and move from whoever we have temporarily become into the shadowy persona of who we were
before—
the “real”
us,
the one who has dogs that crap on the floor, kids that let her know her time-out is over and that she’d better show up for them and make up for lost time, and has a husband who doesn’t say it but leaks resentment at her exciting absences. It’s hard; at least it was for me. I was always an emotional noodle after a film, feeling as if I needed a halfway house where I could exhale all the accumulated
stuff
from three months of living in a protective bubble. But there is no such place if you have a family. You
have
to try to reconnect with husband and kids and pick up life where you left off: straightening up, doing laundry, driving kids to school, sitting in the bleachers watching Little League games with other moms, buying the groceries—the mechanical stuff. After a while the normalcy of the daily routine itself would get me back on track. Routine is what I cling to when the abyss beckons. But the pendulum swing from fantasy to everyday reality is dizzying, and it takes a healthy, grounded spirit to do it well.

I
n 1980 Tom launched a fierce, expensive two-year campaign for the California State Assembly. My last film before I took a hiatus to work on the campaign and grow the Workout business was
Rollover,
another project that Bruce and I undertook together. Inspired by the book
The Crash of ’79,
the story told of secret financial manipulations between an American banker and the Saudis, ending with the collapse of the U.S. economy. The late seventies, when we began to develop the script, was a time when the price of Arab oil was so high, the OPEC alliance so powerful, and our dependence on Saudi oil so great that economic blackmail—moving oil overnight from a dollar-denominated commodity to a gold-denominated commodity—was a possibility. We wanted to call attention to the perils of U.S. dependency on Arab oil, and it dovetailed with our organizational work to shift America’s sources of energy to alternatives like solar and wind. With
9 to 5
we had cloaked the tough issues that office workers faced in comedy’s softening mantle; with
Coming Home
we used a love story;
The China Syndrome
was a thriller; and
Rollover
was a combination murder mystery/love story. It was my third film with director Alan Pakula. My co-star was the chiseled, gravel-voiced actor/singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson. I have to chuckle at the thought that Kris and I played important figures in the world of high finance. I can barely read a profit-and-loss statement, and Kris . . . well, let’s just say that a man who hitchhiked across the country in the 1960s with Janis Joplin and wrote “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” is not by nature someone who wants to cozy up to mezzanine financing or interest rate swaps. An interesting, complicated man, Kris—a onetime Rhodes Scholar who worked on an oil rig off the coast of Texas, who cares deeply about injustice, and who captured angst the way few other songwriters ever have. It was fun working with someone who, like me, had a life beyond movies.

This was when Nathalie Vadim came back into my life. She was working as a script supervisor in Paris, but I sensed that she needed a change of scenery so I arranged for her to work on
Rollover
as the third assistant director. By then Nathalie was twenty-one years old, lean and lanky, with an appealing, gaminlike beauty; she took to her new job with a professionalism and presence that impressed everyone. The assistant director liked her so much that he hired her for many of his subsequent films and she quickly moved up to second assistant and for the next ten years had a solid career in Hollywood.

In 1982 Tom won his election for the California State Assembly with a healthy nine-point margin. He served his district with integrity for seventeen years—working on behalf of working women and mothers, for child care, workplace safety, and affordable housing; against pollution; to improve the public education system. He spearheaded the Proposition 65 campaign to keep toxins out of California’s drinking water, and I assembled busloads of celebrity warriors who helped with the tough but ultimately successful battle. Prop 65 continues today as a substantial safeguard for Californians.

W
ith the campaign over, I returned to acting in a role that is one of my favorites: Gertie Nevels, in
The Dollmaker,
the one Dolly Parton helped me prepare for. If you think of emotions as muscles, then approaching a new role is like entering a new sport: You bring to it the muscles you use habitually.
Anger? Oh yeah, I know what that muscle feels like—
but not everyone expresses anger the same way. The truth is, all during the eleven years Bruce and I fought to bring
The Dollmaker
to life there was a small, scared part of me that hoped it wouldn’t happen, because I doubted I had the right muscles to inhabit her. What would Gertie’s anger look like? If you are lucky enough to have a good director, he or she gets you to shift to a new set of “anger” muscles, often ones you didn’t know you had. It feels awkward at first; you get sore, but then you fall into it as if it’s what you’ve always done.

For me
The Dollmaker
is an archetypal fable that tells of Gertie, her husband, and their five children as they live a hard but value-rich life on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, where her husband works in the coal mine. In contrast with the fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone fear-based Christianity of her mother (played by Geraldine Page), Gertie sees Christ as a joyous, forgiving, laughing figure. She wants to carve his laughing face into a block of cherrywood. The family is uprooted when the mines close and is forced to move to the squalid, consumer-driven, buy-on-credit world of wartime Detroit, where men like her husband hope to find jobs in the factories. In the tacky workers’ housing, in the shadow of a steel mill, Gertie finds consolation carving her Jesus on the block of cherrywood.

We developed
The Dollmaker
for television, and I was fascinated by the differences between film and television. For one thing television is a writer’s medium, whereas film is a director’s medium. With film you sit in a darkened theater with nothing else going on, looking up at the huge screen, moved as much by evocative images and camera angles as by the words. Often in films the essence of the story is conveyed visually. Television, on the other hand, is a cozy medium. You’re at home in your living room or in bed, looking at a little box, far less aware of the visual impact than you are the dialogue. This is why, often in television, the writers are also the producers—and have more power than they do in movies. And since with television you don’t have to wait for just the right cloud formation or the perfect lighting effect to fill a huge screen, a TV movie can be shot in a matter of weeks, whereas a feature film usually takes three months. This came as a shock to me when we began shooting
The Dollmaker.
Scenes I had imagined and labored over for years—like the opening, where Gertie, riding a mule and carrying her ill infant son, stops a car and performs a tracheotomy on him in the glare of the car’s headlights on the side of the road—would take a week to complete in a film. We shot it in a day!

The star-studded Clean Water Caravan in support of Proposition 65, with Dweezil Zappa, Linda Gray, Bobby Walden, Victoria Principal, Ed Begley, Jr., Joanna Kerns, Patricia Duff, LeVar Burton, Charlie Haid, Tyne Daly, Georg Stanford Brown, Troy, Moon Zappa, Bonnie Bedelia, Shari Belafonte, Linda Evans, Daphne Zuniga, among others.

(© 1986 Michael Jacobs/MJP)

As Gertie Nevels in
The Dollmaker.

(© Steve Schapiro)

This didn’t keep
The Dollmaker
from being one of the most joyous acting experiences of my career. Our director—the nurturing, supportive, sensitive Dan Petrie—hovered like an angel over it all.

Petrie once told a film class of his that after my last shot he turned to me and said, “Well, Miss Fonda, it’s a wrap,” and I broke down and sobbed for a long time while he held me.

“I tried to analyze later why those tears,” Dan told the class. “Why racking sobs? It was because of the death of the character, of somebody that she had invested so much time in and lavished so much love on.” Yes, I had tapped into the Gertie part of me and it was hard to let go. I loved her so.

I think most of us have many personas inside us at the outset, but over time we lean to the one that is dominant and the others atrophy for lack of use. The difference with actors is that we are paid to
become
all the people inside us and to bring
into
us all the people we may have met along the way. Thus we remain instinctively aware of, unsettled by, curious about, empathetic toward, and eager to display all those potential beings we carry. Of all these, the empathy part is the most important and is, I believe, why actors—the good ones—tend to be open, progressive creatures: We are asked to get inside the skin of “other,” to feel with “other,” to understand “other.” Being able to see from this “other” point of view gives actors compassion. Is that why artists have little tolerance for dictators, even those disguised as patriots? Because dictators abhor the variables in human nature, the very things artists cherish.

The Dollmaker
aired on ABC on Mother’s Day 1984, and I learned something else about television that day: I knew exactly what time my film would show, and as the time approached I found myself wanting to go up to everyone I saw on the street and say, “What are you doing? You should be going home to watch this movie.” Lots of people did see it, and for many it is their favorite of my films. I won an Emmy for it.

B
y the mid-eighties Tom was in the state legislature and I was in emotional limbo, plowing through life by sheer force of will (of which I have an abundance), but willpower can be anathema to creativity. Creativity requires a looseness, a letting go, an openness that allows the psyche to plumb the moist depths where the stuff of dreams and myths percolate. On the other hand, the I-will-get- that-done- I-will-remain- married-I-will-be- perfect-I- will-not-express- my-needs mode of living means existing in a contracted body with shallow breath and nothing to nourish the spirit—“No wild and unheard-of melodies / No tunes that rise from the blood / no blood calling from the deep places,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it.

Without “blood calling from the deep places,” my work that followed
The Dollmaker—Agnes of God, The Morning After, Old Gringo,
and finally
Stanley and Iris—
became harder and harder, although there were moments in all of them that I cherish.

I just didn’t want to be doing it anymore. It was too agonizing. I was experiencing creative disintegration, and I didn’t understand that my inability to be honest about the disintegration of my long marriage, the shutting down of my body,
and
my feeling totally responsible for it all was slowly draining me of life. I remember sitting in my hotel room in Toronto, where I was making
Stanley and Iris,
and thinking, What will I do with my life? What is there for me? I saw only a joyless road ahead, and I couldn’t admit that it was because there was no future in the marriage. It was inconceivable to me that my couplehood with Tom wasn’t going to be forever. Leaving would be a sign of defeat, and defeat was not an option. Besides, without Tom what would I be?