Her Life Since Then: Different Views of It (Published 2011) (2024)

2000: Jane Fonda tacitly agrees to let Patricia Bosworth write a biography of her. But she is not willing to speak directly with Ms. Bosworth because she is at work on her own book, the memoir “My Life So Far.”

2003: Ms. Fonda changes her mind. She agrees in an e-mail (“Subject: Gulp”) to cooperate fully with Ms. Bosworth’s book. She has an agenda. She will show Ms. Bosworth her F.B.I. files only if Ms. Bosworth sifts through them and extracts the good parts so that “My Life So Far” can use them.

2005: “My Life So Far” is published. It makes a strong impression. At 67, Ms. Fonda has lived many different public lives and tried hard to explain them. Her daughter Vanessa has notoriously suggested a video version: “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?”

“Prime Time” is a how-to book about being happy and self-aware at 73. “Jane Fonda” is about a much younger woman who had very little idea of who she was or how she treated others. And because “My Life So Far” demonstrated that its author still had a lot to learn about herself, there is enough room in the Fonda sphere for Ms. Bosworth’s version. This is not a nosy celebrity biography full of gossip and poison. It is a book that gets unusually close to its subject. It sees what Ms. Fonda cannot see about herself.

Ms. Bosworth and Ms. Fonda have known each other since the 1960s. They both studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio then, and Ms. Bosworth was a stage actress for a while. But she made her bones as a biographer with an immersive 1978 biography of Montgomery Clift. She brings that acuity to bear on Ms. Fonda’s story.

A remarkable lineup of Ms. Fonda’s friends, lovers and colleagues were willing to talk openly about her to Ms. Bosworth. As some measure of this book’s scope, consider the interviewees who are no longer here to talk about Ms. Fonda: Sydney Pollack, Hume Cronyn, Arthur Penn, Peter Boyle, Sidney Lumet, Roy Scheider, David Halberstam, Herb Gardner. Some of the keenest observations come from distinguished but less famous members of the film and theatrical world, like the publicist John Springer, who saw Ms. Fonda at very close range indeed.

According to anyone with an opinion about the Fondas, the single most formative event in the family’s history was the 1950 suicide of Jane’s mother, Frances. She slit her throat after calling out to Jane, who ignored her, and who carries the lifelong guilt of not having tried to help. Many biographies and memoirs touch upon this incident (among them Peter Fonda’s “Don’t Tell Dad,” Brooke Hayward’s “Haywire” and Henry Fonda’s “Fonda: My Life,” and of course Ms. Fonda’s own “My Life So Far”). There would seem to be little that Ms. Bosworth can add.

But Ms. Bosworth wonders about Henry Fonda’s decision to appear on Broadway in “Mister Roberts” on that same night. She thinks his ability to perform reveals much about his emotional life, or lack thereof, and she asks Eli Wallach, who was in the cast, to describe what the performance was like. She also spoke to Ruth Mitchell, the show’s stage manager, who describes Henry Fonda’s tough, chilly nature.

“Once he said to me, ‘Ruthie, I can be a real son of a bitch,’”she told Ms. Bosworth in 2001. “And you know something? He was.”

Another widely held opinion about Ms. Fonda is that she has spent the rest of her life drawn to men who remind her of her inaccessible father. She has presented herself as a strong, independent woman while bending herself to the wills of her three husbands (Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner), as well as many other friends and lovers.

One of Ms. Bosworth’s main sources is Andreas Voutsinas, who lived with her in the early 1960s and offers keen if nasty memories of Ms. Fonda’s ingénue phase. Mr. Voutsinas volunteers much about Ms. Fonda’s insecurities: “It’s ridiculous when you think about it, because she actually had long, slender, gorgeous legs, and her ankles weren’t that fat.”

Such sniping remarks aren’t prevalent in Ms. Bosworth’s book, but they make good stories. A guy who danced with Ms. Fonda at a Long Island country club in the 1950s recalls that she carried a hidden hatpin in her hand to jab her dance partners in the neck. (“Pretty hostile gesture!”) People who did business with her later in life also recall feeling stung. Afdera Franchetti, one of the three of Henry Fonda’s five wives who are interviewed here, is a nonstop fountain of malice. (“Hayden was sullen, glum and Dio mio! so unattractive.”) And Halberstam describes being enraged when he heard Ms. Fonda mouth off about the history of Vietnam after her extremely controversial trip to Hanoi in 1972.

As for Ms. Bosworth, she works most of her assessments of Ms. Fonda into the book’s overview, but the Hanoi episode forces her to weigh in. She does it weakly, making the irrelevant point that Ms. Fonda’s comments via North Vietnamese radio may not have been widely heard.

The chirpy “Prime Time” does not dwell on Ms. Fonda’s past politics, either. “Today, as the separate skeins of my life weave themselves into its final fabric,” she writes, it is aging that she wants to address. She cites research and interviews with upbeat, lively, sexually active older people to extract some all-purpose lessons about endurance. The beautiful, dewy photo of Ms. Fonda on the book’s front cover is a miracle of photography, fitness and plastic surgery, probably all three.

This older, mellower Ms. Fonda provides a sharp contrast with the no-nonsense Jane who talked so openly about her wild and varied experiences with Ms. Bosworth. But “Prime Time” demonstrates the same taste for expedience that “Jane Fonda” only describes. Here Ms. Fonda arrives at generalities that happen to suit her specific personality. “Interestingly, I discovered research that indicates that whether our childhoods were happy or miserable is not all that important in later life,” this survivor of a parental suicide interestingly points out.

Most of “Prime Time” is more basic than that. And sometimes it is excessively basic, as when Jane Fonda offers up Proust for Beginners. “A single stimulus may bring forth buried memories,” she writes. “In his masterpiece ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ Marcel Proust illustrated this beautifully: the protagonist eats a small cake he enjoys as a child and memories come flooding back.”

Today the story of Ms. Fonda’s seemingly endless array of startling, abrupt, culture-savvy reinventions has become that kind of small cake too.