Word: fonda
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There are plenty of people who long ago dismissed Fonda as a professional changeling and controversialist. For them, My Life So Far (Random House; 624 pages) offers juicy celebrity gossip and passages about her adventurous sex life (plus a convenient index). But Fonda doesn't acknowledge skeptics, and she didn't write her memoir--which reveals, among other things, that she suffered from bulimia for 30 years, how she never felt the closeness she yearned for with her father Henry and that she only recently found personal happiness, in part through a conversion to Christianity--simply to tell...
...Fonda has often been out in front of social change, but in this case she admits she's catching up with what many people already know, and her passion could reasonably be mistaken for penitence. The rap on Fonda has always been that she twists herself into the ideal of whatever man she's with--avant-garde boy toy for first husband and Barbarella director Roger Vadim, liberal activist for second husband and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) co-founder Tom Hayden, traditional corporate wife for the third, Dixie-loving media mogul Ted Turner. But it wasn't until...
...time of that discovery, Fonda and Turner were in a six-year marriage that worked largely because she had given up acting, moved to Atlanta and adopted as her hobbies hunting, fishing and ranch hopping (Turner is the largest private landowner in the U.S.). "When I met Ted," she says, "I'd had just about everything in life except real intimacy. I knew that he was the one I wanted to have it with, so I committed to doing whatever it took for things to work." She stuck with Turner for two more years before confronting him with what...
...Fonda insists that what the public saw--in this case, the most widely reported middle-aged divorce since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's--was not the confused end of yet another phase but the assertive debut of her complete feminist self, a project that had been quietly flourishing while the marriage deteriorated. When Fonda decided to stay in Atlanta after the breakup, it was widely presumed she did so to stay close to Turner. In fact, she says, she moved into her loft so she could be nearer to the downtown offices of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy...
Another reason Fonda has stayed in the South is that it was the first place she met what she calls, "smart, hip Christians." Raised an atheist, she never gave much thought to religion until she had a breakdown following the end of her second marriage, in 1990. "One day I was all by myself, and I said out loud, 'If God wants me to suffer like this, there must be a reason.' I almost did a double take. God?" In the mid-'90s, Fonda started feeling "an opening to the presence of the Almighty." She did not tell Turner...