I'm Shocked When a Famous Person Propositions Me

03/03/23 • 3 min

In this Story... with Joanne Greene

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I Share a Cigarette with Jane Fonda

In 1977, the new film starring Jane Fonda was “Julia”. It’s about the writer Lillian Hellman’s lifelong friendship with Julia, a wealthy American who fought against the Nazis when they invaded the university she was attending in Vienna. I worked at KRE radio in Berkeley and it was rare for me to land an interview with an A level celebrity. The publicist had told me to meet Ms. Fonda at the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill, in her suite. Jane Fonda was not only an actress at the time but a major anti-war activist and environmentalist. That’s what gave her hero status for me.
I was nervous as I knocked on the door of her suite. Twenty-three year-old me, about to interview Jane freakin’ Fonda. She answered the door herself, wearing jeans and a sweater – like a normal person. Whoa. I’d expected a whole staff or at least a personal assistant. She seemed to be alone as she welcomed me in, so warmly it was like we were longtime friends. The space was gorgeous but stiffly formal, with silk upholstered Louis IV style furniture in a range of beige tones. I got the sense that she’d be more comfortable in a big burgundy velvet arm chair. As soon as we sat down, and I started setting up my cassette player and microphone on the mahogany end table, she asked, “Joanne, do you by any chance have a cigarette?”
“Actually, I do,” I said, flabbergasted that she needed something from me.
‘Would you mind if we shared one? I barely smoke and I don’t buy my own but every now and then...like right now...I just want to have a few puffs.”
“Happy to,” I said, pulling my pack of Marlboros out of my purse. It was the hard pack I loved – at least at that moment in my smoking life. We shared a cigarette, which I lit with a match before smelling the Sulphur, a habit I maintain to this day ....it smells so good.... It was like two high school girls, sneaking a cig before class. With every puff, I tried not to physically pinch myself. Am I really sitting here, in an extravagant San Francisco Hotel suite, chit chatting with the Jane Fonda.
“One more thing” she said, before I hit record to start the actual interview. “Can this cigarette be our secret? I have a reputation to uphold!”
“Absolutely,” I said.
The statute of limitations on that secret is surely up by now, don’t you think?

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I Share a Little Women's History

"By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" by Joanne Greene is available for pre-order from your online favorite book sellers. Release date June 20,2023
Learn more at joanne-greene.com
In this Story...I Share a Little Women's History
I couldn’t throw out, okay or recycle, the pink “While You Were Out” slip that showed I’d missed a phone call from Gloria Steinam. It was 1976 and I was producing a weekly feminist show for Berekeley’s KRE Radio called “Women Making Waves.” You get the double meaning, right? Airwaves? And “making waves’, like making trouble?
Gloria was one of my heroes, a feminist role model of the highest order, and Ms. Magazine, of which Gloria was co-founder the year I graduated from high school, was something between a manual and a bible for me.
In 1977, I went to Houston for the National Women’s Conference because a group of Lesbian Separatists raised the money for my roundtrip flight. Listeners to my radio show, they thought the only way they’d get the truth about what happened was to send their own reporter. Alice, the station manager, said yes because it wasn’t going to cost her anything. It didn’t occur to me how big a deal it was that a woman was running the radio station.
I met Margo, a fellow journalist. in the elevator of the Houston Convention Center, on my way to pick up press credentials. “Where are you staying?” she asked in a lilting southern accent. When I shrugged, she said, “It’s settled. You’ll stay in our guest room! And I’ll drive you to and from the conference each day.” Southern hospitality is really something.
There were so many women, from every state, every ethnicity, and every walk of life, all there to claim their rights. For the right to an abortion, to love whom they want, for decent childcare. rape crisis centers. shelters for battered women. Rights for prostitutes who consciously chose their profession. The organization, based in S.F., was called COYOTE, an acronym for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.” And then there was conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly with her bullhorn, trying to keep women out of the military, out of the board room, and send all of them, all of us, back into the kitchen. Four former First Ladies spoke, and I washed my hands in the Ladies’ Room right next to feminist icon Kate Millet.
I recorded everything – the plenary sessions, the conversations happening in the hallways, interviews with the most fascinating women I could find – and somehow, with the help of the radio station’s production director, I turned it into a one-hour documentary called “Women on the Move”, the title of the conference.
I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment was a slam dunk, that there would be National Women’s Conferences every few years. That this was just the beginning of normalizing rape crisis centers, that battered women shelters would spring up in cities across the country. What never entered my mind in 1977 was that Roe v. Wade could be overturned by the Supreme Court, and that women in nearly half of our nation would, once again, be forced to choose between risking their lives or taking an unwanted pregnancy to term. Of course, I also couldn’t have imagined that the Supreme Court would legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states. It’s a good thing I’m not a betting woman. Happy Women’s History Month.