Composing a Further Life

evening. There had been four or five teenage girls waiting outside the building when we arrived, and it had felt very strange being ushered in past them as they stood there, wet and bedraggled, drooping with fatigue. So as the evening progressed, when Brando politely asked me to dance, I asked him instead to come to the front door with me and give the girls autographs. Astonished but compliant, he came downstairs with me, but they had given up and gone, and he then quizzed me for half an hour about why on earth I would care about them, with that extraordinary combination of curiosity and naïveté that actors sometimes show about the motivations of others, but without empathy for his disappointed fans.
    When we met, Jane’s antiwar history interested me more than her movies, for I had been involved in the antinuclear movement as a student, before the focus shifted to Vietnam. I knew she had been involved in feminist causes as well, which meant that she was yet another woman who had discovered feminism in the seventies and was now writing about aging. To me that made her an especially important person to talk to, for I had been wondering where all the passion and ideological commitment of the sixties had migrated and whether I was correct in believing that the activism of youth would reappear in combination with the wisdom and judgment of age. Jane remains engaged, passionate, seeking.
    Gradually I learned that, although it fell into different chapters, Jane’s activism was lifelong, growing out of a sustained conviction that her efforts could “make it better,” whatever
it
was at a given time. At the point when we met, I had seen only two of her movies; she had read one of my books,
Composing a Life
. Our lives were lived on different tracks, yet it was no accident that we met in a Buddhist monastery and that much of our conversation revolved around spirituality. A year later, over three days of working together in New Hampshire, Jane and I built the foundations of a genuine friendship that was followed up again in Santa Fe and then in New York, where she was back on Broadway in 2009.
    Jane Fonda was born in New York City, two years before me, in December 1937. She was drawn into acting as the result of appearing with her movie star father, Henry Fonda, in a community theater production. Her first film role was at the age of twenty-one and a whole series of roles followed, winning her two Oscars and five Oscar nominations, as well as a seven-year marriage to the French director Roger Vadim. By the 1970s, she had become involved in the antiwar movement and married Tom Hayden. She married her third husband, Ted Turner, in 1991, and shifted her activism to women’s issues, including teenage pregnancy in Georgia, where she and Turner lived. She went back to Hollywood after their divorce in 2001 to make
Monster-in-Law
.
    All of this is easy enough to find on Google, but what Jane said to me was “I have been an ‘award-winning actor’ all of my adult life, but I’m realizing it’s not who I am. I had defined myself by externals, praise, applause, awards, all those kinds of things. And I realized when I was entering my third act—I was still married to Ted for the first two years of my third act, from sixty to sixty-two—that I had to redefine my locus of well-being if I wasn’t going to be miserable.”
    In our New Hampshire conversations, Jane expanded on this period of rethinking her identity, no easy task after such a public life. As she spoke of the extent to which she had been determined by the men she was with, it seemed to me that each of her marriages evoked different but intrinsic potentials, each expressed in a revised identity but each reflecting only a part of her. She seems to have been trying to find someone who sees her as she is—the verb she uses for this is
countenance
, with an idiosyncratic emphasis that goes beyond the dictionary meaning of accepting and tolerating, to genuinely recognizing and acknowledging the other, knowing and being known, no longer “through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). I found myself connecting the importance she gives to “countenancing” another to the issue of eye contact in interactions.
    “The reason I know that an ‘award-winning actor’ is not who I am is because, if that was who I am, I would have been miserable when I had left my career to be with Ted,” Jane explained. “I was also defined by how I looked, but moving