Composing a Further Life

“second act” and the years since she turned sixty as her “third act.” In the story of her life, the third act has been a time of spiritual deepening.
    Jane Fonda in her sixties is lithe and brisk. Her beauty seems a matter more of vitality than of sensuality, and she is clear-eyed and decisive. We spoke for only a few minutes that day, but the following spring, she came to stay with me in New Hampshire, where we sat together with two tape recorders running and took turns exchanging questions. The scene reminded me of the saying that, during the years of poverty and famine, Irish villagers survived by the women taking in each other’s laundry. But I have learned that writers, including me, often interview other writers, finding them quick to understand the kind of material we want.
    A wise friend had warned me in the meantime not to hand over all my best ideas and anecdotes, and had indeed suggested a way to plan for these sessions so that I would be following a script of what I wanted or did not want to share. As I prepared myself for our project, however, it became clear to me that it is more important to me to get my thinking into the cultural mainstream than to have my name on it. Like many women, I have had the experience of saying something in a meeting that is apparently ignored and then having some male colleague repeat the idea as his own half an hour later and get confirmation. I confess that, from time to time, when I want to get something done or an idea heard, I have explained it to some senior male before the meeting, saved myself the trouble of trying to be heard, and watched happily as the suggestion was accepted. You work with what you find. Jane and I will reach different people and put things together in different ways.
    At some level, I do not believe that ideas are property. I believe they are bread to be cast on the waters. I write in the hope of having a significant impact on the culture and on the way we think, not only about aging but about making wise decisions in an endangered and dangerous world. I want to get these concerns into as many minds as possible, so that we will be working together toward solutions. I believe that my basic concept of composing a life has had a useful impact on many people, and it doesn’t bother me when it floats back as “constructing a life” or “designing a life.”
    The best way to affect people’s behavior is for them to take ownership of an idea or set of ideas, and in order to bring about cultural change, it is important that ideas seem to converge from multiple sources. Then, too, I try to avoid interviews where one person is getting something from the other without giving, so the concept of an explicit reciprocity was interesting, and I happily moved out of the role of neutral interviewer, exchanging experiences and aspirations.
    Jane Fonda was a significant figure to me during my youth, often in the news as an actor and antiwar activist. Two memories popped into my mind when I met her. One was that at one time she had considered playing my mother, Margaret Mead, in a movie, and I had said that not only was she much taller than my mother but it would be hard for a tall person to play a short person who thinks she is taller than she is—too many layers. I did not discover until I met her that Jane herself is not particularly tall (she is five foot seven, an inch taller than I am, not five foot ten as I had imagined). That was my own projection. But she still has some five inches on my mother.
    Fame is a paradoxical commodity. The other memory concerned Marlon Brando, the only other movie star I had met (I did meet Richard Gere at Davos in a small group discussing AIDS prevention in Africa, but only in passing). Brando had apparently confided in his psychoanalyst, an acquaintance of my mother’s, that he had daydreamed of going to the South Pacific, especially Samoa, and wanted to meet her (his daydream may have led to his role in
Mutiny on the Bounty
and the purchase of a small Polynesian island years later). I was thirteen or so, and my mother assumed that I had a crush on Brando—I didn’t, but some of my friends did—so she said she would be willing to meet him if I could come along. Off we went to an apartment he had in New York at the time, where there was a not quite party going on, a record player and a dozen people talking and drinking in a desultory way, getting up in pairs from time to time to dance.
    It was a cold, drizzly