Jane Fonda: What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Misunderstanding?

Jane Fonda as Grace in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

It's the role of a lifetime for Jane Fonda. No, not Nancy Reagan. It's the hippie grandmother Grace in 2011's Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, now being shown on The Movie Channel.

Fonda plays the mother of uptight attorney Diane, played by Catherine Keener. Diane brings her two teenage children to her mother's house after their father demands a divorce, and it turns out to be a healing journey, as well as a cultural clash.

Grace, whose home reeks of pot, deals a little on the side and introduces her grandkids (Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff) to the wonders of the weed. It's done intelligently, with Grace resorting to it before losing them to an evening of them closing down (as so many teens do). Afterwards, she gives them sage advice: stay away from the brown stuff (heroin) and nothing up the nose (cocaine).

It's the first Fonda has toked on film since 9 to 5, where she plays an innocent who finds her inner strength with the aid of weed and some gal pals. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding is part Harold and Maude, part Pineapple Express and although some would say it's a bit contrived or heavy-handed, it's well worth seeing for Fonda's performance.

Jane was observed smoking some weed at a recent Oscar party; in 1969 asked Rex Reed, "You don't mind if I turn on, do you?" before he interviewed her the year she won a well-deserved Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

She's still vilified as "Hanoi Jane" even though she spent the war advocating for veterans. Fonda's thoughtful film about the Vietnam War, Coming Home, was trounced at the Oscars in favor of the controversial The Deer Hunter. Recent controversy is about Jane playing Nancy Reagan in a forthcoming film, and there's a note about Reagan in Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding.

The child of a famously stoic movie icon father and a beautiful mother who killed herself when Jane was 12, she played out her relationship with her father onscreen in On Golden Pond while getting her body bikini ready. She was also terrific as Lillian Hellman in Julia and in her current turn as a network executive on TV's The Newsroom.

She's still getting roles at the age of 75, and we're looking forward to more insight and enlightenment from Lady Jane.

UPDATE 8/14 - Fonda was honored with an AFI Life Achievement Award at a splendid ceremony with tributes from Lily Tomlin, Michael Douglas, Meryl Streep, Ron Kovic, Jeff Daniels, Peter Fonda, Troy Garity (her son with Tom Hayden, pictured) and many more. Fonda commented that it was good to see the award go to a woman; earlier winners were Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwick, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, and Shirley MacLaine.

UPDATE 12/14: Fonda, in one of her last appearances on HBO's The Newsroom, utters the line, "I sold my clothes, dealt a little pot.....Just kidding, I didn't sell my clothes," when her character Leona is trying to come up with funds to buy back her network. The role was doubtlessly informed by her marriage to CNN's Ted Turner. Recently we uncovered an exchange between Fonda and Bill Maher where Bill tries to get her to out Turner as "a big pothead" and Fonda gets an admission from Bill instead.

12/19: Fonda has been named Tokin' Woman of the Year for 2019. 

Lillian Hellman Nominated as Very Important Pothead / Tokin' Woman

Writer Lillian Hellman has been publicly nominated as a Very Important Pothead / Tokin' Woman by journalist Fred Gardner, who wrote in Counterpunch that he helped Hellman get marijuana to treat her glaucoma in the 1970s.

Gardner wrote me in an email, "I knew her very well '61-'71...The drink at the Huntington [when he suggested she try medicinal marijuana] was probably '77 or '78." He added, "Lil said she used mj when she was around people who used it. As in 'Whenever I'd be at a dinner with Gene Krupa...' "

According to the 1986 book Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman by William Wright, Hellman was a bit of a cougar in her later years, enjoying the company of young single men in New York in the mid-1970s "with a leaning towards the sort of outrageousness that produced the hearty Hellman belly laugh." At one gathering, Wright writes, "one of the company persuaded Hellman to smoke marijuana." The evening was "a raucous success" and Hellman had to be dissuaded from taking a walk down Park Avenue at 2AM by herself.

Hellman's most famous plays include The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Toys in the Attic (1960). Tokin' Woman Tallulah Bankhead starred in the original production of The Little Foxes, a revival of which starring Anne Bancroft was directed by Mike Nichols; Elizabeth Taylor earned a Tony nomination for her performance in the play in 1981 (her Broadway debut), and Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon co-starred in it in 2017. Hellman's memoir Pentimento (1973) was the basis for the 1977 movie Julia, in which Jane Fonda fittingly played her. (The film also features an early appearance by Meryl Streep.) A cocktail party she gave for George McGovern may have given him the idea to run for president. 

Hellman had a 30-year relationship with "Thin Man" writer Dashiell Hammett, and the two lived in a hotel managed by VIP Nathanael West in LA. She was blacklisted by the movie industry after telling the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1950: "To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." (This quote was rephrased and put in the mouth of a man in the film Trumbo; Hellman once got angry at Sue Mengers for quoting it in a lesser context.)

Hellman died in 1984 but remains current: On the red carpet at the Golden Globes on Sunday, "Mad Men" star Elisabeth Moss said she's appearing in London with Keira Knightley in Hellman's The Children's Hour.

Read more about Lillian Hellman. 

Photo (reportedly Hellman's favorite) by the late, great Irving Penn.