Is Jane Fonda a Boca Babe?

How much plastic surgery is too much?

I tuned into the View this week just in time to see Jane Fonda being interviewed to promote her new book about climate change.  I love Jane, I’ve been a huge fan ever since she was trashed in the press for supporting the Vietcong.  Hanoi Jane was my hero.   I thought it was a mistake for her to marry Tom Hayden, a grim pockmarked activist, who had all the charisma of a rodent and made her sleep on the floor, but she didn’t regret it.  She got a lovely daughter out of that marriage.  

She recently revealed that her biggest regret was that her marriage to Hayden prevented her from having sex with Marvin Gaye, a regret I can relate to.  I wanted to bonk Craig, the carpenter, while married, but I spent all my sexual energy avoiding sex with my husband.   Her next husband, Ted Turner was at least handsome and charismatic, but also bi-polar and a serial cheater. 

Fonda reinvented herself in old age with the brilliant Netflix sitcom, Grace and Frankie, co-starring Lily Tomlin.  It’s about two older women who are forced to share a house after their law partner husbands come out as a gay couple.  In the show Fonda actually still looks like herself, although it’s clear she’s had work.

But I wouldn’t have recognized her on the View this week promoting her latest book about climate change, if she hadn’t been introduced.   Her image was so flattened in the remote video it was hard to actually see her real face, but her new lips were hard to miss.  She was now sporting the guppy look and the strangely lengthened chin that seems to come with plastic surgery for the very old for some reason. 

Like other elderly stars (she’s 82) she’s looking more and more like a generic Boca Babe:  fish lips, long chins, mouths stretched towards their ears, unmoving foreheads, and skin like flesh-colored plastic wrap stretched over the bones.  The look is unmistakable.   I see a lot of them since I live next to Boca.   Is there a clone farm for old ladies in Florida where they churn out replicas of each other?

  I admit it, I was upset.

 Fonda is a feminist icon, for good reason.  She’s been out there on the front lines forever and she really cares about fighting the good fight.   She’s said a few times that she regrets her plastic surgeries, especially her breast implants which she had removed and vows to stop.  But she can’t seem to give it up.   She’s gone gray with an adorable pixie cut, but since it looks great on her it’s hardly revolutionary.  But the gray is undercut by the amount of collagen in those puffy lips and cheeks. Forgoing the fillers and lifts is the hard part. 

How come British actresses can get away with getting old?   Maggie Smith, Judy Dench, Helen Mirren (although she admits to considering surgery.) are all sporting wrinkles. 

  My hero is a British star you may not have heard of:  Anne Reid, now in her eighties.  She stars in the marvelous Last Tango in Halifax—the British Grace and Frankie— about two old people who were young lovers and rediscover each other 60 years later in old age.  Both stars, Derek Jacobi and Reid are in their eighties and look it.    It’s a revelation.  We are so indoctrinated to think that old equals ugly that watching these two swoon over each other induces cognitive dissonance.  But after a while—when we get to know them-- they become better looking.  There must have been a time when old didn’t equal ugly and this is a reminder of it.

  But then the Brits have an actual magazine called The Oldie.   I can’t even imagine an American version.

Ageism is the last acceptable prejudice.  It’s taken over from fat-hating which until recently--and until Lizzo--was acceptable.  Now the body positivity movement is trying to stamp it out.  Hooray for them.  When do we oldies get our own Lizzo?   A star who is aging naturally but is still gorgeous.   Maybe Meryl Streep?  Jamie Lee Curtis?  Jodie Foster?    Will they have the courage to stay away from the knife?    

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