Why Jane Fonda went back on her word to leave Hollywood: “I now needed to work”
Until she was 16 years old, Jane Fonda showed no particular desire to follow her father, Henry, into the family business. After starring in a charity performance of The Country Girl with him in 1954, though, she was well and truly bitten by the acting bug. However, it would take until ’58, after a few years flitting between Vassar College and Paris studying art, for Fonda to finally pursue what many considered her birthright.
The young aspiring actor enrolled at Lee Strasberg’s famed Actors Studio in New York, where she received her first encouragement from someone outside her family. “It was a turning point in my life,” she revealed in 1989. “I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!”
Suddenly, after years of not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, the 21-year-old Fonda only had dreams of acting, and she soon nabbed her first starring role in a feature film. She was cast as the female lead in 1960’s Tall Story opposite Anthony Perkins, who later that same year would be forever immortalised as the very un-romantic lead Norman Bates in Psycho. However, in Tall Story, he played a college basketball superstar, and Fonda was the cheerleader who only had eyes for him.
Unfortunately for Fonda, though, Tall Story was far from the incredible experience she’d imagined. Director Joshua Logan had cast her because he felt she had star quality, but she couldn’t get the fact that he was her godfather out of her head. She wondered if he had only cast her to please her famous father, and matters weren’t helped when he supposedly told her, “You should have your jaw broken so your cheeks aren’t so puffy.” Fonda had always been insecure about her looks, and that comment was a hammer blow to her fragile sense of self.
“I was unable to rediscover the excitement I had experienced acting in Strasberg’s classes,” Fonda admitted in her memoir My Life So Far. “All the things I feared most in myself — that I was boring, untalented, and plain — came to the fore during the filming of Tall Story.” In fact, Fonda’s experience on Tall Story was so awful that she noted, “When it was done, I returned to New York, vowing I would never go back to moviemaking.”
Naturally, Fonda didn’t make one movie and then disappear into the ether, never to be seen again. Instead, she became one of the biggest female stars in Hollywood history and an activist icon. Before that happened, though, she had to overcome this unexpected hurdle of despising her very first film experience. Complicating matters was the fact that she had signed a five-picture deal with Logan worth $100,000, yet she had no intention of working with him again. So, needing the money to buy her contract out, Fonda accepted her second film role: Kitty Twist in 1962’s Walk on the Wild Side.
To Fonda’s relief, playing Twist in Edward Dmytryk’s adaptation of Nelson Algren’s Depression-era tale was a revelation. The movie tells the story of a lovesick Texan man who travels to New Orleans to find his ex-girlfriend, who now plies her trade in a brothel, and Twist is one of the other prostitutes in the supposed den of iniquity. Fonda believed she couldn’t have found a role more polar opposite to her dull, cookie-cutter cheerleader in Tall Story if she tried. “I wanted to play the brash, train-hopping, petty thief who had just escaped from reform school and ends up a high-class prostitute in a New Orleans brothel,” Fonda gushed.
While playing Twist in Walk on the Wild Side – “a real character,” as she put it – Fonda had a tremendous amount of fun, and suddenly acting didn’t seem so horrifying anymore. She starred in two other pictures that year alone, and Tall Story soon became but a blip on her journey to the top.
