Autobiography: Astonishingly, Jane Fonda was alone when she went to Hanoi in 1972 to protest against Nixon's bombing of irrigation dykes. Already a Hollywood celebrity, she did not have an adviser or a press agent. On her last day she inadvisedly sat, laughing, on an anti-aircraft gun. Only afterwards did she realise how this would be used against her.
She was Henry Fonda's privileged daughter thumbing her nose at "the country that gave me privilege". Worse, she was the sex bomb of Barbarella who had embodied men's fantasies and was now the enemy. It was "the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine," she writes. The confession is typical of this extraordinarily candid biography, tapped out on a computer by a woman who often found herself alone, making misjudgements along the way. Jane Fonda had several incarnations, as anti-war protester, Oscar-winning actor, mini-skirted bimbo, committed feminist and aerobics guru.
Born Lady Jayne Seymore Fonda in 1937, she says she was driven by a desire to please the men in her life, starting with her famous and cold-hearted father, Henry Fonda. Watching his callous treatment of her socialite mother, Frances Seymour, she concluded that it was better to "side with the man if you want to be a survivor." Her mother didn't survive: she slashed her throat while Henry had an affair with a "tomato". Jane was 12 and was told it had been a heart attack. She learned the truth from a magazine six months later.
Soon afterwards, her father married his "tomato" Susan Blanchard (whom Jane came to love), but had to cut short his honeymoon when Jane's brother, Peter, shot himself (not fatally). The trauma helped bring on the bulimia from which Jane Fonda suffered for 20 years. The next man she tried to please was the hedonistic Roger Vadim, with whom she went to live in Paris. One night he brought home a red-haired call girl to share their bed. This was the Swinging Sixties. It never occurred to her to object, and she threw herself into the threesome "with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am". Sometimes there were more than three, and sometimes Jane herself did the soliciting. Looking back, she feels she betrayed herself through a lack of self-worth.
The second act of her life began when she rejected the "permissive, indolent" existence with Vadim and threw herself into the protests against the Vietnam War, motivated by desire "to be a better person". A GI draft-resister gave her an anti-war book, The Village of Ben Suc by Jonathan Schell, which fuelled her outrage. She was also profoundly influenced by the autobiography of Malcolm X, the drug dealer turned black militant turned Muslim, which convinced her of the possibility of profound human transformation. As an activist, Jane Fonda became strident and humourless.
Looking at taped interviews now, she wants to shout: "Will someone please tell her to shut up!" But again there was no-one to tell her what to do. She concedes now that there was some truth to what was said about her, that she was a puppet, and needed a man to come along and pull her strings. The new man who supplanted Vadim was Tom Hayden, an anti-war campaigner whose "Irish juiciness" brought "welcomed moisture to what I felt was my arid Protestant nature." They named their son Troy O'Donovan Garity, the O'Donovan bit after the Irish hero O'Donovan Rossa and Garity from Hayden's mother.
Throughout all this she she pursued her movie career, winning an Oscar for a call girl in Klute and, with incredible timing, starring in The China Syndrome about a nuclear mishap just days before Three Mile Island happened. But she and Hayden drifted apart - long absences on film locations didn't help - and on her 51st birthday he told her he was in love with someone else. Through all this, Fonda struggled for the affection of her father and tried to find it, to no avail, in On Golden Pond in which she and Katherine Hepburn played alongside the 80-year-old Henry Fonda. Hepburn found him "cold, cold, cold". To which Jane added simply: "Yup. "
Ted Turner came into Jane's life with a booming phone call out of the blue and they got married on her 54th birthday. They moved to Atlanta where Turner's CNN was located. A month later she caught him having a "nooner" with another woman in a hotel room. She hit him with the car phone, thinking at the time what a good movie scene it would make. He apologised for his "tic" and they stayed together seven years before breaking up. She turned to religion to replace the void she felt. Once again a book, In a Different Voice by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, had a profound influence, with its reflections on the damage done to women who fear abandonment by a man if they speak up.
Her divorce from Ted Turner was not the end of another phase but the emergence of her complete feminist self, she concluded. She stayed in Atlanta to continue working on a foundation she heads that promotes equality for women as the basis of strong relationships. She has not acted since 1990, apart from her role in a new movie, Monster-in-Law, which she took to make money for her foundation.
After a life of emotional betrayals, activism and Oscars, Jane Fonda is still defined by Vietnam. She makes no apology for opposing the war. But to many vets she will always be "Hanoi Jane". One spat in her face at a book signing. "If I was used, I allowed it to happen," Fonda writes. "It was my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it."
Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times
My Life So Far. By Jane Fonda. Ebury Press, 624pp. £18.99