She hadn’t kept her little adventure a secret, but it became clear to Vadim that she had no intention of sharing it with him. “I was no longer her accomplice,” he wrote, and he felt “a great chill.”

On August 9, the very pregnant Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and the writer and actor Wojciech Frykowski were brutally slaughtered by Charles Manson’s tribe of homicidal maniacs inside the Polanski house. Jane was devastated by Tate’s violent death (she’d been stabbed 16 times). To Jane, the murders symbolized the worst aspects of this turbulent decade—sex, drugs, hippies, evil gurus, Hollywood excess. She suddenly wanted to get away from it.

The rest of the summer was bittersweet. In September, Vadim took Jane and Vanessa to St. Tropez. The weather was glorious, he remembered, but Jane was disturbed. Tightly wound as always, and knowing that something was very wrong, she was “trying to be a mother but not really knowing how,” she wrote in her autobiography.

In October she decided to go to India. She told Vadim that she needed to go by herself “in order to understand myself and what was going on inside me,” but she was really fleeing her husband and their baby. The reality of teeming New Delhi was depressing. She’d expected poverty but not so much disease and death.

Then she met some Peace Corps volunteers digging wells. She toyed with the idea of joining them, but could she bring Vanessa?, she wondered crazily. She began to suffer such ambivalence about being away from Vadim and her little daughter that when she finally returned to Los Angeles she remained in her hotel room and went over what she felt was wrong about her marriage. But she was putting up a smoke screen for herself, as she often did; what was really upsetting her were the harsh facts that she no longer wanted to live with Vadim and she didn’t know how to be a mother. “After six years,” she wrote, “I had begun to see a faint outline of me without him.”

For months she’d been telling friends that she dreamed of being part of all that was going on in the roiling political climate that was America. But how? At that point, if she could emulate anyone, it would be Brando, a pivotal figure in Hollywood’s changing attitude toward activism. He personalized his causes, refusing an Oscar in order to protest the treatment of Native Americans, giving the Black Panthers plane tickets so that they could attend Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. Brando advised Jane to use her fame to attract attention to any cause she believed in. “Fame is a useful political tool,” he said.

So she told Vadim that, instead of going back to France after Horses opened, she wanted to remain in the U.S. to see what she could do about publicizing the Native American cause. Vadim didn’t answer. As he listened to her talk, he wrote in his memoir, he realized that “Jane had a deep need to justify her right to exist.” In another book, he wrote, “It was not a home, a husband or a child that she wanted, but a cause she could throw herself into. . . . She just didn’t know what the cause would be. I knew our marriage was over. It was just a matter of time as to when we would separate.”

In mid-December 1969, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? opened to qualify for the Oscars. Pauline Kael concluded, “Fonda goes all the way with it, as screen actresses rarely do once they become stars. . . . [She] gives herself totally to the embodiment of this isolated, morbid girl . . . who can’t let go and trust anybody. . . . Jane Fonda makes one understand the self-destructive courage of a certain kind of loner, and because she has the true star’s gift of drawing one to her emotionally even when the character she plays is repellent . . . Jane Fonda stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties.” She was right.