Jane Fonda has always been brilliant at marketing, especially when the proceeds go to one of her causes.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Jane created the workout videos and associated stuff to fund what she called the Campaign for Economic Democracy.
Over the last few years, Fonda has been instrumental in the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, or G-CAPP. Her involvement is a result of her relocation to Atlanta during her marriage to Ted Turner. But Fonda has always been a political activist, like it or not, on the cutting edge of humanitarian causes.
Now comes word that the two-time Oscar winner has authorized use of her famous mug shot from a false arrest in Cleveland during the 1970s. It’s going to be put on T-shirts, mugs (it’s a mug shot, after all) and other merchandise to raise money for G-CAPP.
The black-and-white picture shows Fonda, fresh from shooting ‘Klute’ with her trademark haircut of the time, fist raised in the air. At the time Fonda was wisely protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Now that image will morph into a defiant plea to teens to keep from making lasting mistakes.
Thanks to the picture, we know that it was taken on November 3, 1970. Fonda was 32 years old and weighed 126 pounds. She was, and is, five foot eight.
She writes in her blog about the arrest, which was for drug smuggling’hilarious, but that was the paranoia of the time, and the persistence with which the police and FBI pursued anti-war activists.
‘Headlines across the country had the story of me being jailed on suspicion of drug smuggling. I was released on bond and months later, after every pill had been tested in a lab (with taxpayers’ money!). The charges were dismissed and there were a few paragraphs hidden in the back of papers that they were vitamins, not drugs.’
The result of all the publicity was that the number of students who showed up for her appearances after that grew to as many as 10,000 at a time.
Fonda, by the way, will be at the Tony Awards this Sunday in New York (broadcast on CBS). She’s nominated for best actress in a play, ’33 Variations,’ by Moises Kaufman. She’s up against two actresses from ‘God’s Carnage’ and the two from ‘Mary Stuart.’ They all deserve to win, but my guess is that the two pairs cancel each other out, and Fonda takes the statue. She deserves it.
