"An irresistible biography of the accomplished, controversial actress whose roles on screen and off helped define a generation. Whether you love Jane Fonda or abhor her, "Jane Fonda" is a detailed and generous exploration not only of the contradictory world Fonda grew up in but of the many people who shaped her." --Jeannette Walls, author of "The Glass Castle"
Patricia Bosworth has gone beyond the image of an American superwoman to reveal a Jane Fonda more powerful and vulnerable than ever expected. Fonda emerged from a heartbreaking Hollywood family drama to become a '60s onscreen ingenue and then an Oscar-winning actress. At the top of her game she risked all, rising up against the Vietnam War and shocking the world with a trip to Hanoi. While becoming one of Hollywood's most committed feminists, she financed her husband Tom Hayden's political career in the '80s with exercise videos that began a fitness craze and brought in millions of dollars. Just as interesting is Fonda's next turn, as a Stepford Wife of the Gulfstream set, marrying Ted Turner and seemingly walking away from her ideals and her career. Fonda's multilevel story is a blend of the deep insecurity, magnetism, bravery, and determination that has fueled her inspiring and occasionally infuriating public life.
"The definitive portrait of a woman conflicted, torn between ferocious ambition, family, and feminist causes." --Gail Sheehy, author of "Passages"
"The Private Life does Jane Fonda the service of making us remember why she was relevant in the first place: the movies. Bosworth's thorough account of this wild, uniquely twentieth-century Hollywood life makes Jane Fonda the actress even more intriguing." --"San Francisco Chronicle"

"A memorable and moving book about a man -- indeed, a family -- of Fritzgeraldian proportions -- a distinguished and gripping American saga". -- Todd Gitlin, Chicago Tribune

Through the prism of her father's life as a lawyer and well-known political activist, Patricia Bosworth sheds light on an important era in modern American history -- from the heady, hope-filled days of Roosevelt's New Deal to the dawn of the Cold War.

In the course of a remarkable career, Bartley Crum represented movie stars and labor leaders, advised presidents and presidential hopefuls, emerged as a key figure in the creation of Israel, and became a forceful voice for civil rights. But when his defense of the Hollywood Ten made him a target of the FBI's andcommunist hysteria, public pressures and personal demons brought his once-charmed life to a tragic end. Interweaving public and private vignettes, his daughter's memoir re-creates Crum's life and times with rare and moving honesty.

"Consider this beautiful, saddening book on a par with Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy....It is an extraordinary document...written with blood and tears". -- Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

"Extraordinary...as beautifully written as any memoir I have ever read". -- Charles Kaiser, The New York Observer

(Limelight). ..".Because of Bosworth's artistry, her ability to choose the right details, and her own immersion in the subject... this book] is an amazing excursion into a life." New York Times Book Review "It stands as the definitive work on the gifted, haunted actor." Los Angeles Times "Here it is the real thing inside Montgomery CLift. I've known other actors as well, but none with such a harrowing tale. I kept wondering, could Patricia Bosworth have been there? Everywhere? The book is that vivid and intimate." Elia Kazan

Diane Arbus's startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives; they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography. Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane's pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane's art took during the sixties. Bosworth's engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.