When Jane Fonda went skinny dipping with Michael Jackson: “It was a beautiful moonlit night”
An iconic star like Jane Fonda is never short of a story to tell from her long, illustrious Hollywood career. After all, it has spanned six decades—and counting—and encompassed everything from Oscar winners to blockbuster comedies, from Broadway plays to her iconic exercise videotapes.
Along the way, she’s probably encountered every famous celebrity worth their salt from the last 60 years, including pop music idols like Michael Jackson. In fact, she once admitted she saw Jackson naked one night when the pair went skinny dipping – much to Katharine Hepburn’s chagrin.
In 1981, Fonda starred in On Golden Pond, the cinematic swansong of her father, Henry Fonda, who died less than a year after the film’s release. The drama, directed by Mark Rydell, co-starred Katharine Hepburn and Fonda, who played the daughter of her father’s character. It was an enormous hit critically and commercially, becoming the second-highest grosser of 1981 and winning three Oscars.
Unfortunately for Fonda, she and Hepburn, who was 74 at the time, didn’t exactly get along. “She was very prickly,” Fonda told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I mean, she was a snob. She was very moody; she was very judgmental.” For some reason, one thing Hepburn particularly disliked was the idea of Fonda receiving visitors to the set – and Fonda revealed she had to ask her if she could invite one of her famous pals to come see her.
“When I first asked her permission, she was not happy,” Fonda admitted. “But then the crew said, ‘You don’t understand: it’s Michael Jackson.”
Eventually, Hepburn relented, and Jackson came to stay with Fonda in her cottage by the lake on the film’s New Hampshire set. For ten days, the pair hung out in the beautiful surroundings, and even Hepburn began to soften to the young music star. Fonda revealed that he had recently starred in The Wiz and was determined to become a movie star, so he often sat under the learning tree with Hepburn.
“He had a tape recorder with him,” explained Fonda, “And every day, I would bring him to the set, and in between scenes, she would…pull over a chair for him and tell him stories. And every story embedded a lesson.“
While Jackson stayed with Fonda, she revealed, “He slept on a mattress that he pulled out on the floor of the living room. I slept in the loft upstairs.” She found him to be an interesting character and revealed that they were still pretty close six years later when he made Thriller in 1987.
With a smile, though, in 2023, she told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live that Jackson could also be mischievous and spontaneous, such as when he suggested they go skinny dipping one beautiful moonlit night. Fonda revealed that her abiding memory of the evening is that Jackson was very thin, but she had a lot of fun, and it left her with a great story to tell.
“I skinny-dipped with him, how about that?” the Barbarella star grinned. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
