Aesthetic Realism Consultant Nancy Huntting

[W]here love does not mean the knowing and love for other things too, Aesthetic Realism definitely says it's a fake. A love for a person is a love for persons, a love for humanity, a love for reality. And if it isn't that, the thing is a phony.

Jane Fonda's first husband, French director Roger Vadim, starred her in his 1967 x-rated film Barbarella, in which she played a comic-book figure, a heroine of the future. Afterwards she became “depressed….[and] worr[ied] about the seeming purposelessness of my career." Later she said the film was sexual exploitation. I think it represents why she was both for her body and so against it that she says most of her life she felt “disembodied.” Women can have a big effect on men through our body, but have a purpose we’re ashamed of in doing so: do we want a man to be stronger or weaker?

Her role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” was a turning point in her life. The film shows how people were forced to get money to live during the Depression through weeks-long dance marathons, unbearably grueling. Fonda received an Oscar nomination for her role as the cynical young Gloria, a would-be actress, destitute and hopeless. She felt a new relation to many other people. “I realized,” she said, “it was an allegory about American life. Suddenly... every word...every scene... had reverberations that made you want to get up in the morning.”

[W]e are paid to become all the people inside us and to bring into us all the people we may have met along the way…. Being able to see from this “other” point of view gives actors compassion.

Yes, and the reason is you have to successfully be against your own narrow self to become “somebody else."

Tom Hayden, Chicago 7 activist and California Legislator, remembering when he first met Jane Fonda in 1972, said, “My impression...was that she was serious and searching.” They founded the Indochina Peace Campaign, which became IPC Films, producing "Introduction to the Enemy" about the struggle of the Vietnamese to rebuild their country, and later "Coming Home" and "The China Syndrome." She worked in his political campaigns and they started the Campaign for Economic Democracy which fought "to curb the political power of large corporations." She’s said in interviews that the first years of marriage to Hayden were the best she ever had with a man, because they were working together for the same cause. And, I add, that cause was for a kinder world.

Women and men have to see the strength of their hope to be against the world—the false victory of contempt in it—before the hurtful competition between us will end.

Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden started out being for good things in each other. At the same time there was unseen competition. Fonda writes that Hayden’s “brilliance as speaker intimidated” her, and remembers feeling “here was a man who was stronger than I, a man who didn't need me in any of the traditional ways.” During the 16 years of their marriage, along with her acting in and producing of films, she was enormously successful selling her workout videos, begun to finance the IPC. Meanwhile, there was an increasing distance between her and Hayden. In a class in which Mr. Siegel spoke to two young actresses he said:

If you were a famed actress, would you want a man to be closer or further away? Take Miss Cramer—she wants to be a power in her own right. She also wants to show how desolate she can be without a man. If a person is a distinguished actress, she has to be a power in her own right.

It can be asked: with all their desire to have fairness come to people politically and economically, did Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden have good will for each other? Neither knew to criticise the ordinary ways couples feel superior to each other, and, perhaps, talk together disparagingly of others.

She writes she was devastated when Hayden wanted to end their marriage. Then right away, Ted Turner, founder of CNN, owner of the Atlanta Braves and vast properties in the South and West, began to pursue her. She was against him at first, but this man with enormous wealth and power showing he needed her, even getting on his knees to her, won out. “[I]t was hard to refuse,” she writes, “this wounded child-man.” In one interview she said that he gave her confidence, because every morning he woke up saying he loved her. But from the outset she presents him as liking to talk, but not listening to her. If someone who seems for us, doesn’t listen to us, what are they actually for? After nine years the marriage ended. I want very much for her to study the knowledge we’re presenting here tonight.

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