Take a good look at one of the most famous women of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.
She was born to fame, was obsessed with radical politics, married and divorced famous and powerful men, made a fortune in exercise videos and remains a formidable actress.
Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, kicking off our week with our Mug Shot Monday series presenting unflattering looks at big stars in the throes of police trouble.
As you must surely realize by now, our current victim is Jane Fonda, pictured here in 1970 just after she finished shooting Klute, the biggest movie of her career which won her an Academy Award as best actress in 1972. (She plays a New York prostitute who is key to solving a mysterious missing-husband case.)
Unlike most of our mug shot victims Fonda, then in her early thirties, comes off looking good here. Henry Fonda’s daughter is flashing her “power-to-the-people” salute, and sporting what she called her “Klute haircut.”
Questions: what did she do to warrant the above photo, and how did she happen to find herself in Cleveland, Ohio?
For a lengthy explanation, look no further than Fonda’s official website. Her explanation, in short, blame it all on the Nixon administration. Seems Fonda had just come from a speaking engagement at a Canadian college — part of her anti-Viet Nam war campaign (her infamous visit to North Vietnam was two years in the future).
When I re-entered the US at the Cleveland airport all my luggage was seized and gone through. They discovered a large bag containing little plastic envelopes…that contained the vitamins I took with each meal. They confiscated that as well as my address book (which was photocopied) and arrested me for drug smuggling.
I was handcuffed and put in the Cleveland jail, which is where the mug shot was taken.
Not mentioned is the allegation that Fonda had kicked a policeman. In any case, the incident made the expected headlines, with the actress concluding that President Richard Nixon’s administration had hoped this ‘scandal’ would cause college speeches to be cancelled and ruin my respectability.
As often happens to star celebrities in legal trouble, the incident was quietly resolved largely out of public attention. I was released on bond and months later… the charges were dismissed…there were a few paragraphs hidden in the back of the papers….
At the time all this occurred, Fonda was still married to her first husband, French director Roger Vadim (who launched Brigitte Bardot’s movie career). The husband-and-wife team’s Barbarella, the spicy, futuristic adventure movie in which Fonda plays a highly sexed heroine, was two years in the past.
The Vadim marriage lasted until three years after this mug shot was taken. Fonda then married Sixties radical Tom Hayden, and in 1991, CNN founder Ted Turner. As they say in Citizen Kane, the marriages didn’t necessarily end badly but — they ended.
