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Sometimes there were three of us, sometimes more. Sometimes it was even I who did the soliciting. So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced that I enjoyed it.
I'll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed (questions I never asked myself!) and, in the case of the call girls, what had brought her to make those choices. I was shocked by the cruelty and abuse many had suffered, saw how abuse had made them feel that sex was the only commodity they had to offer. But many were smart and could have succeeded in other careers. The hours spent with those women informed my later Oscar-winning performance of the call girl Bree Daniel in Klute. Many of those women have since died from drug overdose or suicide. A few went on to marry high-level corporate leaders; some married into nobility. One, who remains a friend, recently told me that Vadim was jealous of her friendship with me, that he had said to her once, "You think Jane's smart, but she's not, she's dumb." Vadim often felt a need to denigrate my intelligence, as if it would take up his space. I would think that a man would want people to know he was married to a smart woman--unless he was insecure about his own intelligence. Or unless he didn't really love her.
I hesitated to write about my experiences in this regard. I thought, "There are enough people who dislike me, I don't need to give them even more ammunition." But then I saw that if the telling of my life's journey was to matter to other women and girls, I would have to be honest about how far I'd come and the meaning of where I'd been.
In my public life, I am a strong, can-do woman. How is it, then, that behind the closed doors of my most intimate relations, I could voluntarily betray myself? The answer is this: if a woman has become disembodied due to lack of self-worth--I'm not good enough--or abuse, she will neglect her own voice of desire and only hear the man's. This requires compartmentalizing--disconnecting head and heart, body and soul. Overlay her silence with a man's sense of entitlement and inability (or unwillingness) to read his partner's subtle body signals, and you have the making of a very angry woman, who will stuff her anger for the same reasons she silences her sexual voice.
•BEHIND ENEMY LINES
When she returned to the U.S., in 1970, Fonda began making serious movies and taking up political causes, including the antiwar movement. The combination of her celebrity and advocacy eventually brought an invitation to visit Hanoi.