My Life So Far (65 page)

Lyndon LaRouche fielded these folks in major airports around the country back in the late seventies. It was hard to walk by with Vanessa and Troy and maintain my composure.

(Anne Marie Staas)

On Malibu beach between scenes in
California Suite
with director Herbert Ross.

(Photofest)

Another thing that made the class special was Leni’s choice of music. This was the beginning of the disco craze, and most other types of classes relied on this high-volume, repetitive beat to drive the class forward. Not Leni. The music she brought in was Al Green, Kenny Loggins, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergass, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye.

Up until then I had known next to nothing about current popular music. If I listened to the radio, it was to NPR for the news. Now these new sounds entered my life. I began to move to a different rhythm, becoming one of those people you see through their car windows singing and grooving to music only they can hear. I never did go back to ballet.

I had ceased bingeing and purging the year before (more about that later) but was still a recovering food addict and way too compulsive when it came to exercise. I hated to miss even a day, and when there were no scheduled classes, I would hire Leni to teach me privately.

One day an idea hit me: Leni and I could go into the exercise business together! It was perfect. Here was
one
thing that I
understood
in my gut: how exercise could affect a woman’s body and mind. I knew it myself from ballet and now was learning another way from Leni. Helping women get fit was a business I could understand and respect. If it was successful, it could help finance CED!

Leni liked the idea. We searched for names for the business and decided on Jane and Leni’s Workout.

During this time, I began to teach the routine myself in St. George, Utah, where I was on location with
The Electric Horseman,
my third film with Bob Redford. At night after work women of all ages and a few men from the film crew came from miles around to take the class, which I held in the basement of a small spa. The experience of teaching such a diverse group opened my eyes to a much broader array of the benefits of exercise than I had ever expected. One woman said she’d stopped needing sleeping pills. People told me they felt less stressed. Most profound, though, were the testimonials that showed how women were starting to feel differently about themselves—empowered. Clearly we were on to something that mattered more than just how a person looked, and no one was really talking about that beyond the vanity stuff.

Leni and I began to interview teachers to hire for a studio. We found a space in Beverly Hills, on Robertson Boulevard, and I hired an architect to begin renovation plans. I wanted to offer ballet, jazz, and stretch classes and felt we needed some easier and shorter classes in addition to Leni’s marathon routine. Then the time came to set up the actual business structure and draw up contracts. What happened then is painful to write about.

My primary goal in going into this business was to raise money for CED. My lawyer at the time persuaded me that the best way to do the contract from a tax perspective was to have CED own the business. What would Leni’s role be, then? Leni was no more a businesswoman than I was, and it was clear that neither of us could actually
run
the Workout. I would have to hire someone to do that job. Yet if we were going into the business together, she couldn’t be just one of the teachers; it was
her
routine that would be the foundation for the business. But if she was a partner in the usual sense, how could we square that with CED owning the business? No one, least of all me, ever imagined that the Workout could become as successful as it did. So round and round we went, me with the lawyer. What to do about Leni?

Looking back, I see so clearly that the answer to “What to do about Leni?” was to
talk to her,
find out what she wanted and what it would take to make us both feel that our needs were addressed. Instead I let the lawyer frame the debate, putting Leni into the position of adversary who (we were sure) would fight against CED owning the business. (I was to take no money at all for myself out of the business.) Then one day Leni told me that she had met and was going to marry a wealthy man, and they were planning a round-the-world trip for two years on a sailboat they had built. But I doubt that she would have done this had she felt able to sit down with me and work out a fair deal for herself.

The Workout went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, beyond anything any of us had ever imagined. For those of you who came to one of the Workout studios and did the advanced Workout class, that was a somewhat easier version of Leni’s original routine. The one-and-a-half-hour video called
Workout Challenge
was a replica of the class I took with Leni. It is important that I tell this story—and that Leni finally get the credit due her for her original routine.

Many years elapsed. Leni found herself training my then-husband, Ted Turner, at a gym in West Los Angeles. That’s how she and I reconnected and became friends. And that’s when I learned that because of a growing-up as traumatic as any I have ever heard about, Leni had been robbed of the ability to speak up on her own behalf. The word
no
was not part of her vocabulary, and she had felt powerless earlier to negotiate with me and the lawyer. Had we been able to sit face-to-face as women—Leni owning her voice and me not ceding mine to the lawyer—things could have been worked out. At least I’ve tried over the intervening years to make it up to Leni.

W
e weren’t at all prepared for the huge success. The Workout was very small, with only three studios and bathroom facilities suited to the modest mom-and-pop-type business I had envisioned. But from the minute we opened our doors in 1979 it was like an avalanche, without our once having to pay for advertising. Talk show hosts Merv Griffin and Barbara Walters
asked
to come and film classes. People flocked from all over the country. It became a “must visit” site for tourists from other
countries.

I hired a woman activist from CED, the only person I knew with an MBA, to run the studio. We learned as we went, and it was never easy. We often had upward of two thousand clients a day—seventy thousand a year—working out in three small classrooms. In summer the air-conditioning wasn’t up to the task, the bathrooms weren’t large enough, clients would get into fights if someone took their accustomed place in front of the mirror, and teachers bridled at having to start and end on time and follow a set routine. Yet the clients kept coming, filling just about every class. There were beginning, middle, and advanced Workout classes, and stretch classes.

My friend and birthing coach Femmy DeLyser became director of the Pregnancy, Birth, and Recovery Workout classes, which were immensely popular. I’d regretted having to give up all exercise both times I’d been pregnant and felt committed to providing a safe, effective way for women to stay fit while waiting for their deliveries. It was Femmy’s inspired idea to also have classes for the moms
recovering
from childbirth. The babies would come with them and were often incorporated into the exercises—lying on their mothers’ bellies during abdominal work, for instance—and the classes would end with lessons in baby massage. These classes proved wonderful on many levels, not least of which was their social value: The women enjoyed comparing notes about their birthing experiences while they nursed and discussing how others were dealing with new-mother issues. Later Femmy and I did a pregnancy, birth, and recovery book and video, using pregnant women from the class, including actress Jane Seymour. Women who had just given birth demonstrated recovery exercises and baby massage. It was the first of its kind.

The Workout.

(Kelvin Jones)

I traveled the country raising money for Tom’s campaigns by teaching huge workout classes like these.

Two years later (1981), I wrote my first
Jane Fonda’s Workout Book.
It was number one on
The New York Times
Bestseller List for a record twenty-four months (that was before they put such books in their separate How-To books section) and was translated into over fifty languages. It was while writing the book that I realized I needed to study physiology to more deeply understand what was happening during exercise. For instance, I had learned from personal experience that an exercise was more effective if I worked hard enough to cause a burning sensation in the muscle, but I didn’t know why. I knew what aerobic meant—sort of—but not really. So I began to research sports physiology and talk to doctors, like Dr. James Garrick at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, with whom I did a sports medicine video. I did the same with nutrition—discovering, for instance, why complex carbohydrates give more lasting energy than simple carbs, why having a healthy breakfast and a light dinner was advisable, and why some fat is healthier than others. My bedtime reading changed from books like
The Wealth of Nations
to
Gray’s Anatomy.
I studied the process of aging and menopause and co-wrote a book with another CED activist, Mignon McCarthy, called
Women Coming of Age,
which also became a best-seller.