Actresses: The Blonde Black Panther

By the mysterious code of the mysteriously well-connected, the shabby, fly-infested Hotel Tahiti in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera is the place one goes to if one is too rich to bother with the Taj Mahal. Last week, amid the wandering beer barons and compliant courtesans, a newcomer dashed in and out in a bright succession of tight slacks and V-necked blouses, occasionally pausing to effulge a visitor with her smile, occasionally cutting out of the creepy joint in her baby-blue Ferrari.

Jane Fonda didn’t need the Hotel Tahiti to convince anyone else that she’d made it big, but maybe it helped persuade her. At 28, after a headlong decade of public vocalizing about the difficulty of being a famous actor’s unfamous offspring, Henry Fonda’s daughter has established herself on her own as one of the world’s most sought-after film actresses. No fewer than three completed movies starring her will be released in the next six months: La Curee, directed by her husband, Roger Vadim; Any Wednesday, the screen version of the Broadway comedy; and Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown, with Michael Caine. If she can’t quite take

her pick of roles from here on out, she can count on a reasonable selection.

A Certain Angle. Fonda’s eminence is either inevitable or unlikely, depending on the eyesight, mood and metabolism of the observer.

From the beginning, there has been the question of The Name, and she has never made up her mind whether it was a help or a horror. “When you’re Miss Jane Smith,” she says, “and win a beauty contest in Ohio and you go to Hollywood and you’re disastrous, it couldn’t matter less, because you have nowhere to fall from. I felt that, being Jane Fonda, people would be judging me from a certain angle. I’d have to be great or not at all. I know now that I was desperately, desperately, desperately in love with acting, but it was like a woman in love with a man she’s afraid of—she’ll build such defenses. So instead of acting I painted, I studied languages, I studied music, I worked for the Paris Review.”

She was 21 before she dropped the diversionary maneuvers and enrolled at Lee Strasberg’s celebrated Actors Studio. “It was because of Lee that I became an actress,” she says flatly.

Not everyone agrees that Strasberg deserves sole credit for making her an actress, partly because not everyone agrees that she is an actress. In the

Oscar-winning Cat Ballou, she was outclassed by everything onscreen, including Lee Marvin’s horse. In any case, there were others who helped along the way. An old family friend, Joshua Logan, directed her in starring roles in both her first film (Tall Story) and first play (There Was a Little Girl), and Daddy, “nonverbal” as she thinks he is, could not have been a total liability.

But mostly there was the whole French nation, which welcomed her three years ago as if she were the D-day fleet. Jane is not a beautiful woman in the conventional sense, but she has a strikingly attractive face—very much like her father’s, but appropriately softened—and spectacular blue-violet eyes. The French saw something extra as well —some exotically sexy combination of Annie Oakley and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. The French press fell all over its inkpots in its search for purple. “On the outside, she’s true to her image,” wrote Journalist Georges Belmont, “tall, blonde, the perfect American, with long, flexible movements. I watched her move backward and forward and thought in a flash of the black panther I used to watch at the zoo.”

Under the circumstances, she was a dead cinch to catch the attention of France’s leading feline fancier, Director Roger Vadim, who “discovered” large batches of the nation’s most celebrated pussycats (among them Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Catherine Deneuve), and more or less married most of them. Jane fell desperately, desperately, desperately in love with him, made a movie for him (La Ronde), and was rewarded last year with a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas. This marriage, they have since discovered, is not considered legal in France. But they plan to rectify matters with another ceremony; Jane, romantic thing that she is, wants it to be performed on a French ship by a French captain, preferably during a storm.

Sharing Life. “I’m terribly relaxed with Vadim,” says Jane, referring to him as always by the single name, as in Napoleon, or Garbo. “Vadim is not a man who has to prove himself with women. He’s known beautiful women; he was married to beautiful women. I would feel insecure with a man who had to prove himself, who was restless, who had things he hadn’t done. If I hadn’t met Vadim, I can’t imagine that I would have married. It’s so difficult for two human beings to share a life. Vadim puts it very well. He says you have a mistress, and maybe twice a year you’ll bring her flowers and she’ll be ravished with joy. You forget your wife’s birthday and it’s a drama. People change after marriage. They become very bourgeois. They’re dead.”

All the same, Jane is getting in a few domestic licks of her own, has bought a ten-room house in Houdan, near Paris, to which she plans to remove herself and bear a child when film schedules permit. In the meantime, there is the problem of getting to know Vadim’s two children by one former wife and one former friend. She is devoting herself to the task with Methodological thoroughness: on the coffee table of her Hotel Tahiti suite, alongside copies of The Last 100 Days and Psycho-Cybernetics, rests a handy manual called What Shall I Tell My Child?