"It won't be the heart and lungs and vital organs. "I think it happens sort of slowly," she says. There was no epiphany, no one moment when she realized it was happening to her. When people who were your idols, the people you've hung on to for surival, your parents, go, you know you're not going to be exempt. When they die, man, you step up to the turnstile. When your parents are still alive, there are barriers between you and your own mortality. The true, true recognition that I was going to die was when my father was dying, to be perfectly honest. "Weren't we immortal? I think we were immortal. It was not sexist, either, by the way."īack then, in the days of "Barbarella," she never thought about getting old. So what?"įurthermore: "I'm not ashamed of 'Barbarella.' I think 'Barbarella' is a great camp movie. There's no question 'On Golden Pond' helped sell my Workout program because people saw me in a bathing suit. "I'm sure there are some people who would couch it in those terms," she says."I don't know how to answer this. She's come a long way from bulimia and "Barbarella," but some might argue that she is still selling her looks. She has talked about the fact that she was once bulimic, keeping her weight down by forcing herself to vomit.Īnd there were critics who felt that her sex-object role in "Barbarella," back in 1968, was the work of a Svengali husband-director, Roger Vadim. "If we buy into the demands to conform physically to some fashionable image of someone else, that's getting on a treadmill of anxiety that I personally have been victimized by," she says. Isn't middle age about spreading and sagging and accepting it gracefully? Isn't the message of this glossy new tract with her glorious kisser on the cover the same insidious one that middle-aged women have been subjected to all along? That unless you look 22 when you're 50, unless you look like Fonda, you've had it?ĭon't women buy her book, or Raquel's or Victoria's or Sophia's, because of the implicitly cynical promise that somehow we'll all end up looking like her?įonda is calm. "In all my probings of the biological reasons for getting older," she writes, "I've found that the process of aging is, to a large degree, negotiable." And now: Hot Flashes (as of the first printing, she hadn't had any). She is a lightning rod for a generation whose rhetoric has evolved from Burn Baby Burn to Feel the Burn. If you want to trace the changes in American culture over the last 20 years, all you have to do is look at her. Down below, a whole city is on the move - mostly, it seems, in sweats and sneakers. She is sitting in her hotel suite overlooking Central Park. I haven't heard too many of them complaining, 'I want this program put forward by someone who's dumpy.' " Millions of men and women in this country have done my program and read my books and have been turned on to health and fitness. "I worked hard for it and I'm proud of it and I'm not going to apologize for it. "I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I look very well for my age and that I'm extremely healthy," she says, munching an apple. She is indefatigable in the face of the ultimate inevitabilities, this prophet of the new puritanism. She has a new book, "Women Coming of Age," and a new fight. It's been a stressful day all the way around. "Donahue" in the morning, local TV in the afternoon, radio and print in between. It's tough being a Modern Woman with Something to Promote. "You're not going to take too many close-ups," she says to the photographer, as she settles her 47-year-old sacroiliac into an uncompromising chair. OL4799540W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 92.74 Pages 252 Ppi 300 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0671636588 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 20:16:46 Boxid IA100711 Boxid_2 CH120120907-BL1 Camera Canon 5D City New York Donor
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