Susie Steiner writes: Mark Lawson chose to leave his trickiest question for Jane Fonda until last, as is traditional. "There's … um … been a lot of speculation … um in the British media…. Have you had Botox?"
"Don't you people know about lighting?" shrieked Fonda, 67. "No I have not had Botox. There is something happening in America with Botox and laser treatment and that's that everyone looks alike. I see someone walking towards me in Hollywood and I think I know them, but I don't know who they are. I haven't been in England as a single woman for a long, long time, but what I love about it here is that people look like they're supposed to look. It's real and a little shabby and so what?"
There is something magnetic and elegant and intelligent about Fonda, which compensates entirely for her occasional love of self-help-speak. In Hay to promote her biography My Life So Far, she drew a 1200-strong crowd who gazed, awestruck, at her glittering dark glasses, turquoise jewellery and coiffed hair. This was not typical Hay attire (where was her cagoule?).
Fonda has been doing the publicity trail all week and so the stuff of biography is well-trodden ground, but what the audience at Hay got was a dose of her sheer charisma and passion. She told some wonderful anecdotes about Katharine Hepburn — who sounded both maternal and envious by turns. Hepburn was "prickly", yet she cheered Fonda on during difficult scenes in On Golden Pond. "She didn't like that I had children," said Fonda. "She didn't like that I had a dog, and a business. Acting was her whole life whereas I had other things going on."
Fonda drew inevitable applause from the audience for her criticism of the Bush administration and of the neo-conservatives who hijacked her anti-war activism and used it against both her and the Left. "When Bush was elected, a lot of progressives said we should leave but I don't think we should — I think we should stay and fight. We're just walking wounded at the moment, but we'll come back." At Hay, she was preaching to the converted.
What did she hope to achieve in the future, one audience member asked. She replied: to smash patriarchy. "We live in a system that says somebody has to be on top, usually a white male. It's a toxic paradigm, for men and women. I would like to encourage women to claim their voices and to encourage men to claim their hearts. Jesus said, 'We will get into the kingdom of heaven when men become women and women become men." (There was some uncomfortable rustling of cagoules at the mention of Jesus, but it quickly passed.)
The gush was not the preserve of Fonda alone, however. During questions from the floor, a distinctly Welsh voice piped up: "I just want to say I think you're fabalus. Absolutely fabalus."
