When she was young, Fonda says, “being a woman meant being a victim, being the loser, being the one that’ll be destroyed.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller

August. The dog days of 2007. The whole world seemed to be wilting. Jane Fonda—the actress, philanthropist, feminist, political activist, model, Christian, blogger, fitness advocate, licensing magnate, and memoirist—impeccable and straight-backed in a light-colored chiffon dress, was attending an outdoor wedding reception in Brooklyn. The groom was Fonda’s son, the actor Troy Garity, who had married the actress Simone Bent earlier that day. Before the reception began, Fonda marched over to one of the bar tables, followed by a coterie of younger men. “I’m the mother of the groom and I need a drink!” she announced to the startled bartender. She took a sip of her vodka-and-orange-juice and looked around at the crowd, which included her eldest child, the documentary filmmaker Vanessa Vadim, and her youngest, Mary Luana Williams, a park ranger, the child of Black Panthers, whom Fonda had unofficially adopted in the seventies. Then she raised her glass and said, ruefully regarding the proceedings, “More than my old man did for me.”

As the evening progressed, the parents of both the bride and the groom made speeches. Speaking off the cuff, Garity’s father, the political activist and politician Tom Hayden, who was Fonda’s second husband (neither parent wanted Troy to bear the weight of a famous last name), said that he was especially happy about his son’s union with Bent, who is black, because, among other things, it was “another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.” Hayden turned the floor over to his ex-wife this way: “Now Jane wants to say a few words. The new mother-in-law. We know how Jane always becomes the part she’s playing. Hopefully, that won’t be the case in our son’s marriage!” There was a silence. Fonda had just played Viola Fields, the domineering title character in Robert Luketic’s movie “Monster-in-Law.” Pulling a sheaf of papers from her purse, Fonda looked concerned, tense. She had written this script herself. She began by apologizing: “Unlike Tom, who can speak extemporaneously, I have to write everything down.” For Troy, she continued, Hayden had been “the parent.” “I was usually off making a movie somewhere. Tom was the one who had dinner with Troy every single night.” Then, referring to her notes, she talked about how Native Americans had once lived where we were now and how her ancestors had sailed from Holland to New York. When the speeches were over, Hayden hugged his son and his new in-laws and rejoined the party, while Fonda, the image of maternal responsibility, went to each of the hundred or so seated guests, shaking their hands and thanking them individually for coming.

Another role, a different stage. Spring, 2009. This time Fonda was appearing not as a version of herself but as Dr. Katherine Brandt, a musicologist suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, who was gripped by one last question: why did Beethoven, toward the end of his life, devote so much time to composing thirty-three variations on an insignificant waltz written by Diabelli, a composer of no great distinction?

Fonda was starring in “33 Variations,” by Moisés Kaufman, her first Broadway performance since 1963. Standing motionless in a white spotlight that emphasized her dark hair and gardenia-white skin, she conveyed her character’s drama largely through her voice. Her urgent, seductive, imploring tone was recognizable from her innumerable speeches and interviews and forty-odd film performances, which, over the course of half a century or so, set the template for countless actors, writers, and directors interested in depicting the ever-evolving life of the modern American woman. As she performed in Kaufman’s play, Fonda didn’t so much smash the stage’s fourth wall as ignore it. What she communicated, above and beyond the words of the script, was her desire to inhabit her character’s lonely imagination.

“She makes no distinction between the world in which she lives and the work she does on the stage,” Kaufman said of Fonda. “The things she learns in one realm help her in the other.” Although Kaufman had considered other performers, by the time he met Fonda, in New York, in October, 2008, he told me, he knew that he wanted her for the part. “There are actresses who do emotional wonders, and there are actresses who can do very intelligent roles but are very dry,” he said. Fonda, he explained, could do both.

Before their meeting, Kaufman watched a video clip in which Barbara Walters talked about how Fonda got annoyed when people weren’t punctual. He arrived an hour early for their seven-o’clock appointment at the Algonquin Hotel. “At six-forty-five the elevator opens, and it’s her,” Kaufman said. “And she shakes my hand and says, ‘I knew you were going to be on time. Reading your play, I know you’re that kind of person. You’ve done your research.’ ” Kaufman went on, “She ordered a Martini. And then we kept talking. Later, she says, ‘You know, two Martinis ago, you said . . .’ And I said, ‘Jane, you have to do this play. Any woman who measures time by the number of Martinis consumed is somebody I must work with.’ ”

Once “33 Variations” closed, after eighty-five performances (Fonda was nominated for a Best Actress Tony), the actress travelled to Los Angeles for knee-replacement surgery. While recuperating, she stayed at the house of a friend, the producer Paula Weinstein. Fonda (who has since moved to L.A.) was then based in Atlanta—in a loft whose entranceway was designed to resemble a vulva. (When Bill Maher talked to Fonda about this on his television program in 2005, he asked her if there was a back way into her home. She invited him over to find out.) Weinstein’s house, on the other hand, was a fairly traditional New England-inspired affair, just off Sunset Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, amid split-level houses, dusty palm trees, and lonely, nondescript streets. Fonda’s assistant ushered me into the house, and, as two small dogs ran barking toward me, I heard a familiar voice: “I need you!” Fonda’s command silenced even the dogs, but when I entered the living room she hunched her shoulders and giggled: an actress in need of a director. Her costume for the day was a long-sleeved peach-colored top and a prairie skirt, and she was sitting, with her legs extended, in front of a computer screen. What she “needed,” she explained, was for me to help her figure out how to e-mail a document on her new computer. After the problem had been solved, Fonda stood, with the aid of a cane, to show me how her recovery was progressing. “Isn’t it amazing?” she said, walking back and forth. “I’m a little sore today, though. I wore high heels last night.” When I asked why she’d worn heels so soon after her operation, she said, chastened, “Vanity.”

Fonda sat down. To test my tape recorder, I said, into the microphone, “This is Hilton Als, observing Jane Fonda.”

Fonda grabbed the mike, delighted to transform the moment into a performance, and said, “And this is Jane Fonda, who loves being observed.”

I asked her something I had wanted to ask since her son’s wedding: Why had she said that Hayden was “the parent”? Hadn’t her role as provider for the family made her just as important? She shook her head and pounded her fist on her chest. “I remember once reading ‘Huckleberry Finn’ to Troy, after I’d been away shooting a film,” she said. “And Troy looked up at me and asked, ‘What’s the point of having a mother?’ ”

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In her best work, Fonda has portrayed women who suffer a kind of spiritual orphanhood, emotionally abandoned by families that were never quite families. “I felt alone, surrounded by lights” is how she describes her early days of acting, but it could as easily apply to her childhood. Even her birth name sounds like that of a solitary princess in some dark fairy tale. Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda was the firstborn child of Frances Ford Seymour, a society beauty, and Henry Fonda, the Nebraska-born actor who, as the film historian David Thomson says, “played some of the most important heroic figures in American film.” Fonda père was famously critical, perpetually dissatisfied, and notoriously uneasy when it came to dealing with emotion on or off the stage. “He hated people to cry,” Jane said. “I was told when he was rehearsing ‘Two for the Seesaw,’ with Anne Bancroft, and she had a scene where she would get very emotional, he was so angry that she was actually crying and being emotional he stormed offstage and came back with a mirror and said, ‘Look at yourself—it’s disgusting.’ That kind of vulnerability terrified him.”