JANE FONDA reveals it took more than 60 years for her to get over her mother’s shocking suicide and the cold detachment of her superstar father Henry.
Writing with incredible candor, the 73-year-old Academy Award winner pours out her heart in her new book “Prime Time.”
Jane always felt abandoned by her parents and was only 12 when her mother Frances took her own life while being treated in a psychiatric facility.
Henry was performing on Broadway in "Mr. Roberts" at the time and told his children, Peter and Jane, that it was a heart attack rather than face the difficult truth – she cut her own throat.
Searching for answers, “Jane studied photo albums of baby pictures and there were none of her in her mother’s arms,” said a source. “The photos revealed no emotional closeness to this baby girl.”
A deeply wounded Jane could not understand her mother’s actions until she retrieved hospital records from the upstate New York asylum and discovered that Frances had been abused as a young girl.
The cloud started to lift when Jane realized that her mother’s remoteness and suicide had nothing to do with her.
Had she figured that out sooner, Fonda writes she could have focused on more “character-enhancing things” rather than her obsessions with ballet, dieting, sun tanning, exercise and plastic surgery.
Today, Jane says she’s the happiest she’s ever been – and the three-times-wed star has found love again with music producer Richard Perry.
“Love and good sex are the best rejuvenators,” writes the former sex kitten, “better than any face-lift!”
