What's the article really about? About how really amazing
Patricia Bosworth is, really just as mysterious and alluring and deep and
beautiful, as Jane Fonda, with whom she is ever so close. Because,
after all, she and Jane share a deep, dark, secret, one that is so profound
that all of your friends would want to know, if only they could be trusted
to not spoil it.
What was on Henry Fonda's mind the night he performed in
"Mr. Roberts" after his wife slit her own throat? Jane thought he just
didn't know how to deal with grief. But
it's all a puzzle
to Jane. Why didn't she feel grief? Why didn't she cry?
Rather than acknowledge that much of what passes for grief nowadays is more
like grief theatre anyways, she thinks there must have been something wrong
with her, that she was trying too hard to please daddy.
Let's all wonder
about it.
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.
NY Times, Janet Maslin, 2011-08-18
2011-09-25
Just browsing. The murder rate for women vs. men is about 10 to 90%,
of murders committed generally, or 15 to 85%, or some other ratio, depending
on where you read. Let's say 10% or better.
The interesting number (1995, FBI Uniform Crime Report): as a
percentage of murders of spouses, the ratio is more like 499 to 976.
Do women kill? Yes they do. Spouses, most often. A
feminist might look at that number and see women pushed to desperate
measures by abusive husbands. Someone else might say that a few of the
women that were murdered by their husbands might also have been abusive.
But everyone knows, of course, that men are evil.
THAT said, in the 10 years I took to write her biography, I
observed many Janes. I saw the Jane with the agenda; the girlish, self-effacing
Jane when she’s with men; the armchair shrink Jane who spouts advice about sex
and love and exercise as if by rote whenever she’s on TV; the ruthless,
hard-as-nails Jane in business and self-promotion; the generous Jane with
friends in need; the loving grandmother-matriarch Jane; the celebrity Jane who
in May walked down the red carpet at Cannes in a glittery white gown and left
all the young starlets in her dust. Patricia Bosworth, in the NY Times,
September 25, 2011.
What is this? I mind it. All the young starlets "in her
dust"? You mean, she can be smart and shrewd and giving and all that
and, oh, just for the fun of it, let's march down that red carpet at the age
of 70 and prove that I am still more desirable than, say, Greta Gerwig, or
Anne Hathaway, or Jessica Alba. Poof! It's not dust,
Patricia, it's dried up embalming fluid.
Is that what it takes to get access to Fonda, and to her friends and
professional colleagues? To make sure that she understands that your
biography will include lines like "and left all the young starlets in her
dust"? After the Viet Nam War and Roger Vadim and Tom Hayden and Klute
and Ted Turner-- that's ultimately what always really mattered, isn't it?
To leave "all the young starlets in her dust"?