Prime Time - Jane Fonda [107]
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl wrote, “Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” I like the metaphor Frankl uses to illustrate why the tension of striving, even in the elderly, is positive: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
I think one reason Katharine Hepburn remained strong into her advanced age was because, like an old arch, she assumed the load of the elder. When we worked together on On Golden Pond, she very deliberately took me under her wing, using every opportunity to pass on her wisdom. She let me know she’d been watching as I overcame my fear of doing a backflip for the film and said that mastering something you fear is what keeps you from getting “soggy” in life.
One day while we were having tea together, Hepburn told me how she would get up every morning at five to write about her life’s experiences. One chapter, she said, was called “Failure.” “You know, Jane,” she remarked, “we learn far more from failure than we ever do from success.”
Katharine Hepburn, Dad, and me on the set of On Golden Pond.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
On Golden Pond
KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
She made me understand the value of self-consciousness. We tend to think of self-consciousness as something bad—as being awkward or uncomfortable with oneself. But the way Hepburn made me see it was more as a consciousness of self, an awareness of how our presence affects people. “This is your package,” she said to me once, pinching my cheek. “We all have our package, what presents us to the world. What do you want your package to say about you?”
RON GALELLA/WIRE IMAGE
My late friend the singer Michael Jackson spent several days visiting the set and watching Katharine and my father act. In between scenes, Hepburn would make a point of having Michael pull up a chair next to her so she could tell him stories. One of them was about Laurette Taylor, one of the great American theater actresses. Katharine had seen Taylor early in her career, when she had been “absolutely brilliant” in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. A number of years later, when Taylor had become famous, Katharine saw her again in that role. “The magic was gone,” said Hepburn, watching Michael to see if he was paying attention. “She’d become too successful. Lost the hunger. Sad, sad, sad.” It was an important lesson for a rising star, which Michael was at the time. Hepburn never hammered me over the head with her wisdom. She simply layered it into our daily contacts in ways that made me think and feel challenged.
Speaking at Harvard in 2000.
I work with teenagers, through my nonprofit organization in Georgia, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. When I am with them, I try always to remember what my friend and mentor in the field of youth development, Dr. Michael Carrera, says: “Young people may forget what you say or what you do. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” Helping the young feel worthy, loved, challenged, and hopeful is what will make them strong and resilient. And more often than not, what they need is for us to listen, really listen—with our hearts, countenancing them with our eyes, not tuning out while we figure out what to say back to them.
These are the footprints we want to leave behind, ones they can step into confidently as they move through midlife and into their own Third Acts.
In Santa Monica, California, I discovered a real hub