My Life So Far (82 page)

Ted was funny, quick, complicated, smart. Unlike the doctor, he understood the significance of Mandela. We had a common interest in the environment and peace and a commitment to
make things better.
The chemistry between us crackled. And he was a terrific lover.
What’s not to fall for?
I couldn’t say for sure . . . just that something didn’t feel right. Yet I was miserable, feeling that cowardice (fear of intimacy, fear of being hurt) had made me blow what might well have been the love of my life.

The Fondas being inducted into the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. Here I am with Peter, his children Bridget and Justin Fonda, Shirlee, and Troy.

(Alan Berliner © Berliner Studio/BE Images)

Then my friend the singer Bonnie Raitt called to tell me she was opening for the Grateful Dead’s annual New Year’s Eve concert in Oakland and invited me. I remember the famous concert promoter Bill Graham making his traditional slow descent from the stadium rafters dressed as a chicken; the Dead Heads tripping in their straight-from-the-sixties tie-dyed shirts and beads; my feeling old and out of it. And I remember how happy Bonnie seemed, more at peace and centered than I had ever seen her. We had known each other and shared intimacies for a number of years and it was no secret that relationships and commitments had been challenges for her. Now here she was with actor Michael O’Keefe and enjoying the heck out of it. Somehow her happiness gave me courage. I thought, Gosh, if she can do it, maybe I can, too, and the very next morning, January 1, 1990, I called Ted and asked if we could try again. Again I was amazed that he was not only willing, but fairly ecstatic. He was always so sweet that I had to ask myself if my trepidations weren’t my own demons trying to undermine me.

That was when we began “going steady,” as we described it, which I thought was rather charming for two fifty-somethings. Vanessa was in college, but Troy was still in high school. Being away from home for too long made me anxious, so when Ted had to be in Atlanta, I stayed in Santa Monica, even though he was honest about spending those nights with the other woman (or two). I didn’t like it. It confused me, but I wasn’t ready to lay down ultimatums. I wanted, as I told Ted, to go with the flow, see how things went.

At those times we would talk on the phone for hours. Often he would say, “I need ‘fonda-ling. . . .’ ” He found it hard to believe that he was the only one who had ever made this pun on my name. He would tell me he felt himself shrinking when he wasn’t with me, and at first I took it as a compliment. Later I realized that it wasn’t so much his need to be with me as it was his fear of being alone. Sad to say, Ted doesn’t hold his well-being within himself (something we had in common for a while). It has to come from the outside: from a woman, from applause, from achievements and good deeds. It took several years before I began to understand the profound ramifications this would have on me and our relationship. But I had fallen head over heels in love with him—still am in many ways—and I wanted to hang in and try to make it better for this lovable, fascinating man-child, who was just enough
not
like my father that I wanted to crawl inside his skin and know him.

Despite the oddities, being courted by Ted was heady business. Here was a man who shared my commitment to making things better but wasn’t so perpetually preoccupied with that that he couldn’t shift gears and give equal and talented attention to what can be communicated only through the body.
Above the neck and below the neck, together at last!
One-stop shopping. You want the sex, romance, laughs, shared values, intellectual stimulation, companionship, eroticism, friendship. You want it all, and he seemed to have it all. Besides, everyone close to me liked him: Debbie, my assistant, Lois, Paula, Troy, Nathalie, Lulu, Vanessa—well, actually things weren’t so cut-and-dried with Vanessa. From her vantage point here I was giving myself over to another man again, and she was angry.

The first time Ted invited me to Atlanta, he met me at the airport in his modest Ford Taurus and we drove straight to the CNN Center. Oh my! Walking into the huge glass-domed atrium, looking up at the building rising fourteen floors all around me, CNN and
TURNER
everywhere, every nation’s flag flying, even that of the United Nations, testifying to Ted’s commitment to a global network.
My boyfriend made this all happen!
I was surprised to discover that this building was also his residence when he was in Atlanta (which was as infrequently as he could get away with). For years after leaving his second wife he had lived in his office and slept on a Murphy bed, until his mistress had complained. Recently, he’d punched through the ceiling of some storage rooms on the fourteenth-floor and built a tiny (seven-hundred-square-foot) penthouse that you reached by going up a narrow wrought-iron take-your-life-in-your-hands spiral staircase. For the ten years Ted and I were together, that penthouse was my home base, making me the only woman in the world who had to walk through a sports-marketing department to get to her front door.

The way he introduced me to everyone in Atlanta made me realize that despite his unquestionable importance in the world, Ted was like a kid, so proud to have me on his arm. This was new for me. So much was new: I had never before been with a businessman, not to mention a very wealthy one, and this one also had the heart of a rebel and social values that didn’t put money first. Ted understands money, but he’s not
about
money. He’s also a playful renegade, an outsider, impolite, impolitic, with grand dreams of changing the world for the better. He put me on a pedestal, clearly needed me, and wasn’t afraid to show it. In many ways he was simply irresistible.

I began to get to know Ted’s business associates, many of whom had been with him since the very beginning. They told me that since we started dating they had never seen Ted so happy and how much easier he was to work with. The many people who loved him deeply had been growing concerned about his state of mind, partly because of his father’s history and partly because of his uncertainties in the relationship department. So they gratefully embraced me as “the woman who had come to the rescue.” As one of his sailing buddies said, “Well, it appears Le Capitan is finally in good hands.” Of the people around him, only one, his executive assistant, Dee Woods, had something worrisome to tell me (though she loved him dearly): “Jane,” she said, “he’s a male chauvinist pig and he always will be.” She laughed when she said it, and I chose to think she was being funny—sort of. I stored it away.

Ted’s adoration for me made me feel good about myself.
Good about myself.
I have to stay with that one for a moment. He told me, so generously and frequently, that he loved me, that he thought I was smart and beautiful, the love of his life, that it began to chip away at my low self-esteem:
Ted Turner thinks I’m great and smart and beautiful, and he’s no dummy.
What’s touching is that while I was feeling this, Ted was feeling:
Wow, if Jane Fonda loves me, I can’t be all bad.
Much as some people might find it hard to believe, we were two people with fragile egos who could make each other feel stronger.

Yet for more than a year there were times when I would feel myself falling into a dark hole. I was learning to listen to my body more, to pay attention to my feelings, and something just didn’t feel right. I was certain that he loved me, but then he would say or do something that made me feel his antennae were still up, that my position in his life was permanent, perhaps, but not solo.

We talked about it a lot. He would say, “We’re looking at the same canvas and you are seeing one thing and I am seeing another,” and he would assure me that my paranoia was unfounded. He began to tell me that the problem was that I was scared of intimacy.
True.
Why else had I twice before chosen men who were not capable of intimacy? I was, I would remind myself, the daughter of my parents: They were two people who lacked emotional attunement.

Perhaps you think that by
intimacy
I mean sex, so allow me to clarify. Sex can be intimate but isn’t necessarily so; sometimes it’s just the pleasurable stimulation of genitalia. By
intimacy
I mean an attunement between two people who, despite each other’s evident flaws, open their hearts fully to each other. This openness makes them vulnerable, so trust is key. So is
self-
love: It’s impossible to be truly intimate with someone if you don’t like yourself.

On at least four occasions I told Ted that I didn’t feel he was really there for me and that I would have to leave. Each time, he would become so palpably miserable that it would convince me to stay. “Jane,” he said to me one night, “I need to know I can depend on you. You can’t keep threatening to leave me, or this won’t work.”

And suddenly
. . . whack
! The thought slams into me how easily I could blow it because of fears about things that might only be my imaginings. Why am I not allowing myself to be happy? It’s so much easier to hold on to those old ghosts, the hurts and grievances, to knead and nurse them. It’s comforting because they are what’s familiar, not these new feelings of happiness. Mustn’t trust them . . . they’re too fickle.

But, Jane old girl, this isn’t some rehearsal where you’ll get notes afterward and a chance to do it better. No, this is but a few years away from the beginning of the last act of your life. Every day counts; every chance to make peace with the old ghosts must be seized. They’re not your friends—they’re your jail keepers who have outlived their usefulness. They won’t keep you warm on a cold night in Montana. Humor and love and the understanding of your new partner will keep them at bay. He’ll do that for you and you’ll do that for him.

One day Ted asked me, “What do you want out of this relationship?” I liked the question and knew that I needed to take my time and really think before I answered. Ted is a negotiator, and whatever my answer was, I would be held to it as to a contract.

“Give me twenty-four hours to think about it,” I said.

And then I pondered: What
do
I want? Trust. Happiness. Love. To be seen, countenanced. I had begun to notice how when those things are not present, when I feel scared or am doing something I don’t want to be doing, my breathing gets shallow and my muscles tense and I don’t feel good.

“What I want out of this relationship,” I told him the next evening, “is to feel good.”

“Great! Me too. I want to feel good. Oh boy, party time.”

“No, Ted,” I interrupted, laughing at his take, which I should have expected. “I don’t mean feeling good that way. I mean feeling good the way people do when they feel safe: seen, heard, fully loved.”

“Oh yeah . . . okay. That’s fine. I get it. Me too.”

Only then, a good year into the relationship, did I tell him that I needed him to be monogamous. He agreed.

F
or all intents and purposes, I had decided to stop acting and producing by the time I met Ted, but once I committed to the relationship, it became a done deal. Ted made that abundantly clear. I was convinced that my career (and the long absences from home that it required) had been a big problem in my marriage to Tom, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again; but the feelings that this new reality brought up in me were tough to handle. I had worked from the time I was twenty-two. It was in many ways who I was, though I never quite realized this until I decided to stop working. It wasn’t about money. I had enough money to pay my own bills, buy my own clothes, and support my children, all of which I continued to do while I was with Ted. Financial independence was of fundamental importance to me. This fact, I believe, was what created a semblance of a balance of power between us. The anxiety that arose with my retirement was more about giving up what had been my personal, creative outlet and about being subsumed into Ted’s orbit.

While Vanessa, never one to steer away from confrontation, expressed outright anger about my subsumation, Troy simply said one morning while he was visiting Ted and me, “I don’t want a mom who doesn’t work,” which, I think, translated into his not wanting me to be merely “wife of.” Both of them sensed that some part of me wouldn’t be able to flourish. Lulu took to Ted immediately. He was the father figure she’d never had. Nathalie seemed to sense that Ted made me happier than she’d ever seen me, and that was enough for her. But I don’t want to minimize the impact that my decision to take up a full-time relationship with Ted had on Vanessa and Troy. They saw me leave behind their home base, as well as my identity as an actress, producer, businesswoman, and political activist, to enter the constantly moving, glitzy life of the corporate media world and on the arm of a former Goldwater Republican. But it wasn’t as though they were waiting for me to come home. Troy would soon head to the University of Colorado in Boulder; Vanessa was in her last year at Brown University and had taken a year off to help build a village school in Nicaragua and work with her father in Zaire. Nathalie had a flourishing career as an assistant film director; Lulu was a graduate student at Boston University.