An ‘Odd Couple’ for our time
Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda address Distinguished Speaker Series subscribers on Oct. 24 at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center. Photo by Deidre Davidson
Fonda and Tomlin share their, timely, sometimes uncomfortable humor
Of all the odd couples portrayed on stage and film, beginning with Art Carney and Walter Matthau on Broadway, followed by Matthau and Jack Lemmon in film and Tony Randall and Jack Klugman on television, the oddest of them all are Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the current cable comedy “Grace and Frankie.”
The two older women move in together after their husbands begin an affair with one another. It gets more uncomfortably funny when the former husbands begin planning their wedding with their ex-wives’ help.
Fonda and Tomlin appeared last month at the Redondo Performing Arts Center as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series. Even in real life, they are an odd comedy couple, but not in the cringe producing way of “Grace and Frankie.”
Fonda, the “straight man” of the comedy team, is show business royalty. Her father was Broadway and Hollywood star Henry Fonda, her brother was “Easy Rider” star Peter Fonda and niece Briget is an Emmy and Golden Globe nominee.
“My father was a wonderful man, but a midwesterner, from Omaha. He didn’t talk much. I once asked Yolanda King if her dad [Martin Luther King] ever sat her on his lap and told her how to live. She said, ‘No.’ I told her mine never did either. But she had her dad’s sermons and I had my dad’s ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ ‘Young Abe Lincoln,’ and ‘12 Angry Men.’”
Tomlin, the wisecracking comic of the team, grew up in blue-collar Detroit.
“We lived in an old apartment filled with every kind of person you could imagine,” Tomlin recalled. “I just loved going from apartment to apartment. I’d dance the chicken and play canasta in one and go to another apartment with doilies on the furniture and look at the old people’s photo albums, They’d tell me, ‘Isn’t it time you went home. Your mother might be worried.’ I’d say, ‘No, I told her I’d be home late.’ Then I’d see mom outside with an apron on with all the neighborhood kids calling my name. She’d take a switch off a tree and I’d run like a turkey. I was fearless in childhood.”
It was Fonda’s turn.
“Your dad stood you on the end of a bar when you were 4, and had you sing. My dad never did that. He drank secretly.”
“Your dad drank secretly?” Tomlin said, incredulously. “My dad kept an open bottle of Kessler in the fridge next to an Orange Crush chaser. He’d sit me on his knee and sing minstrel songs, like ‘Old Daniel Tucker.’
Tomlin sang a verse in her warm, gruffly, John Prine voice:
Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man
Washed his face with a fryin’ pan
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
And died with a toothache in his heel
Fonda went to Paris to study art.
“I thought if I told my dad I was going to study art he wouldn’t mind so much that I was dropping out of college,” she said. “I went to one art class and I went skinny dipping with Greta Garbo. Then I got in trouble and dad made me come home.”
“I’ve had it up to here with your stories about studying art in Paris,” Tomlin said with an exasperated wave of her hand.
Fonda was undeterred. “I also skinny dipped with Michael Jackson. I think I’m the only person who ever skinny-dipped with Garbo and Michael. Michael stayed in my cabin during ‘Golden Pond.’”
“Maybe the audience would like to hear how you skinny-dipped with your dog,” Tomlin suggested. Fonda welcomed the challenge.
“I was making ‘Monster-In-Law’ when my wonderful golden retriever Roxy died. A few months later I found an urn on my living room table with a card that said, ‘Until we meet again.’ It looked like bath salts, so I ran a bath and didn’t realize until I saw a bone floating that I was bathing with Roxy,” Fonda said.
Tomlin went to Wayne University in Detroit to study medicine.
“It was a silly idea,” she said. “I was good in biology, but not too good at calculations. Like if I had to compute your thyroid medication, the results could be unfortunate. I was a cut-up. After school, I worked as a tray girl taking food to the patients on the ob-gyn floor. When I took the trays away, I’d roll up the linens and cradle them like a baby. Everyone one was so enamored of me, a cute young girl taking such good care of a little infant. Then I’d toss the baby down a laundry shoot.”
“I didn’t want to be an actor. I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Fonda said. “But my father’s fourth wife wanted me out of the house and I lost my secretary’s job because I wouldn’t sleep with my boss. So I started studying acting and [legendary acting instructor] Lee Strasberg told me I had talent.”
“You wouldn’t sleep with your boss, but you slept with the head of the mailroom,” Tomlin said.
“No, I slept with the head of the studio,” Fonda corrected her. The studio head was Ted Turner, founder of Turner Cable.
“I lived in Atlanta with Ted for 20 years. It was a wonderful time. I’m an activist more than anything else. In California and New York, you’re in an elite bubble. You’re disconnected from the lives of most people. Georgia is Middle America conservative. In Hollywood, no one goes to church, in Georgia everyone does. Ted didn’t, but his friends did. I studied religion at the Interdenominational Theological Center. I was the only white person there. I hadn’t worked in 15 years so no one knew who I was. I was brought up an atheist, and I got saved. I learned that to be an activist you need to listen to people with your heart and not judge them,” Fonda said.
Tomlin’s big breaks came at a porno theater.
“In 1972, I was trying to get Richard Prior on my first special. I’d seen him on Ed Sullivan and all the time at the Improv. He was so brilliant and beautiful. I adored him. But he didn’t know who I was. He wanted me to go to a porno movie with him to prove I was worthy of having him on my show. I said only if I pay my own way. People at the movie recognized me from ‘Laugh-In.’ They yelled, ‘Hey Lily.’ So I passed the test.”
Fonda and Tomlin met in 1977 when Fonda went to see Tomlin in her one-person show “Appearing Nitely” at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. Fonda was developing “9 to 5,” a movie about three secretaries who take revenge on their sexist boss.
“I didn’t want to be in a movie about secretaries,” recalled Tomlin, who had earned an Academy Award nomination for her role as a Gospel singer in her first film Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” But she had been a Fonda fan since seeing Fonda in her Academy Award-winning role as a call girl in the 1971 movie “Klute.”
“I wore my hair in a shag like Jane’s in ‘Klute’ for two years,” Tomlin said.
The third “9 to 5” secretary was Dolly Parton.
“Her breasts were so big she couldn’t see the keys on her typewriter,” Fonda noted. “One day she beckoned us with her long nails to listen to the song she’d written for the movie.”
“After Jane and I heard Dolly’s song,” Tomlin recalled, “we looked at each other and knew the movie would be a big hit.”
Fonda has won two Academy Awards for Best Actress, and received an Honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. Tomlin has earned seven Emmys, two Tonys, a Grammy, and in 2003, received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Both underplayed their long, celebrated careers.
“I wasted a lot of time getting famous,” Tomlin said.
“I wasted a lot of time getting married,” Fonda said.
Fonda, 81, and Tomlin, 80, were similarly dismissive of suggestions they’ve done enough.
Following the Distinguished Speaker’s appearance, Fonda took a red-eye to Washington, D.C. to get arrested the following day with Sam Waterston, Tomlin’s ex-husband on “Grace and Frankie.” It would be Fonda’s third consecutive Fire Drill Friday arrest in D.C.
“I was doing all right, driving an electric car and recycling. That was a good place to start, but not to stop. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish girl, touched my heart when she said, ‘We have to act like our house is burning down,’” Fonda said.
Tomlin co-founded the LGBT Center Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center in Los Angeles with her longtime lover Jane Wagner.
“There’s so much to do, it’s a shame we’re finite creatures,” Tomlin said.
Then she looked at the audience and said, “These people here live normal lives. Have a little supper, watch Masterpiece Theater. Maybe take a night out to hear us speak. Those of us who sacrifice, we sacrifice all the way. I haven’t seen a sunrise or a sunset in I don’t know how long because I keep blindfolded to what’s going on. Because if I kept my eyes open to what’s going on, I’d be wrenched in despair.”
The audience laughed, lightly.
Then she punctured the tension, saying, “That’s kind of what happened to Fonda, here.”
A burst of laughter followed.