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As a starlet of 21, Fonda met the French director Roger Vadim. Consumed by desire, she writes, she hatched a Sex and the City-style plan to seduce him in 1963 on a film set in Paris. Word reached me that he was in the canteen, and as soon as we had a break, I ran straight from the scene to see him – scantily dressed in a teddy covered only by a trench coat, which managed to fly open as I entered the canteen, breathless, flushed, and clearly excited. That's what he needed, to see my excitement at seeing him. I was a fairly naïve, inexperienced, twenty-six-year-old. He was ten years older, and a lot of water had flowed under his bridge. …
Fonda wed her Frenchman in 1965, and in 1967 he cast her as the sexpot heroine of his fantasy Barbarella. I can laugh about it now, but the tensions and insecurities that haunted me during the making of that film almost did me in. There I was, a young woman who hated her body and suffered from terrible bulimia, playing a scantily clad – sometimes naked – sexual heroine. Every morning I was sure that Vadim would wake up and realize he had made a terrible mistake – "Oh my God! She's not Bardot!"
A similar sort of insecurity struck her two decades later, when second husband Tom Hayden dropped a bombshell: On the night I turned fifty-one Tom announced to me that he was in love with another woman. The bottom dropped out of my life with a devastation so abrupt and severe that my very existence appeared as a foreign landscape. I felt the pain of a dagger being turned in my heart. . . .
