Jane Fonda's Workout, Part 2: Hanoi Jane's VHS Revolution

So there's something about the Jane Fonda workout that's never quite made sense to me.

I know I'm inclined to see mysteries everywhere, but I saw one here between the leg warmers and the leotards.

Six, seven, Aiden, pull down right, stretch it out.

Here's me trying to explain myself during an interview.

It is like mysterious to me thinking about all the facets of Jane Fonda and being like this woman at the height of her acting career, truly, and fairly controversial political activist got into everyone's homes and like

this

mastermind aerobics instructor.

It's such a weird thing.

She wanted to do that and then she did it.

Like, what?

Straight legs, reach your butt out behind you, Feel the stretch.

And flex.

Two, three,

four.

Reach six.

In the moment right before the workout became a phenomenon, Jane Fonda had a lot going on.

First, there was actress Jane.

And if I want to have an affair or play sex games or do M ⁇ Ms, you can't stop me.

M ⁇ Ms?

As a matter of fact, I smoke pot.

That's her 9-to-5, which came out in 1980, one in a string of critical and commercial hits that were produced by Fonda's own production company.

Her career was going fantastically, and she was making movies that had ideas and politics.

Movies that fit in snugly with another aspect of her persona, activist Jane.

Culturally, psychologically, economically, politically, gays and lesbians are discriminated against.

That's Fonda at a fundraiser in San Francisco talking about the importance of gay rights in 1979, decades ahead of most people.

San Francisco, they don't need me, but

they like me, and they like our organization, the Campaign for Equity.

But of course, not everybody liked Jane Fonda.

Also, in 1979, a number of conservative California state senators had just banded together to keep Fonda from sitting on the state's arts advisory board because of her activism during Vietnam.

Because she was also, to them, Hanoi Jane.

Hanoi Jane, why don't you just leave America?

Hanoi Jane is the extremely controversial figure that some people still passionately hate for what she did or supposedly did during the Vietnam War.

And what I couldn't quite understand, what was puzzling me, is how this back to what?

Your leaving was the best thing that ever happened to me.

And this.

They are a very powerful movement, especially in San Francisco.

They don't need me.

And this.

could possibly have led to this.

Are you ready to do the workout?

Yes!

How on earth did Jane Fonda become Exercise Jane?

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

This is the second episode of our two-parter about the 1982 Jane Fonda workout tape.

In the first, we looked at the complex relationship between Jane Fonda and Lenny Kasden that birthed the workout in the first place.

And if you haven't listened to that one yet, please go do so.

It will give you important context for this one.

As for this episode, this episode is about the other complicated relationship embedded in the workout.

The relationship between Jane Fonda and the American public.

It's one that started way before the workout and continues to this very day, but that, with the workout reached a fascinating inflection point.

The Jane Fonda workout changed how we see video, gyms, exercise, celebrity, and lifestyle branding.

But most of all, it changed how we see Jane Fonda.

So, today, I'm decodering the same question: two ways: How did Jane Fonda make the workout?

How did Jane Fonda, of all people, make the workout?

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As discussed in the last episode, in 1979, Fonda had opened an immediately successful workout studio in Los Angeles.

It led to two other studios, and in 1981, Jane Fonda's Workout Record and the best-selling Jane Fonda Workout Book.

And then in April of 1982, the workout video.

At the time, these all seemed like pieces in one big multimedia onslaught.

But the reason Jane Fonda became so closely associated with exercise for such an extended period is not because of the class or the book or the record.

It's because of the video and the 20 plus ones that came after it.

So I'm going to start today with that first video, the one that kicked it all off, much even to the surprise of Jane Fonda, who you'll recall I actually got to speak with.

It was really something I never expected.

In early 1982, making an exercise video was an out there idea.

And that's because pretty much everything having to do with video was an out there idea.

Only 2 million homes in America had a VCR at the time, and those homes almost exclusively rented.

No one was making video content for consumers to buy.

Except for a young man from Southern California named Stuart Carl.

He was kind of very much the innovative entrepreneur.

You know, he had started like the first waterbed magazine.

Stuart Carl died in 1991 at 38 of cancer, but Court Shannon, who you just heard, was a longtime colleague of his.

After dropping out of college in the early 1970s, Stuart had spent a few years as a waterbed salesman, thus the successful waterbed magazine.

But once he was in publishing, he noticed another nascent industry that could use a trade paper, video stores.

He started Video Store magazine, which gave him enough insight into the business to think both that video was going to be a big deal and that it was way too focused on renting movies and also pornography, which is a big part of the rental market at the time.

The video store would pay $80, $90, $100 for one copy of a feature film, and then they would rent that out for X number of dollars per night.

No one was actually transacting sales.

They didn't have something that people necessarily wanted to buy or own, especially at those price points.

I think Stewart's vision was in looking at the television overall in the home is, hey, there's a whole nother category that no one's ever touched, which is how to, how to cook, how to exercise.

The company Stewart founded was called Carl Video.

It specialized in what Stewart described as mid-vid, everything between, quote, jaws and deep throat.

Prior to the Jane Fonda workout, its offerings included the art of speed reading, video first aid kit, a series of cooking how-tos with titles like making bread and soups slash salads, and Exercise Now, which sold for $59.95 and was their first, if not the first, exercise video.

In mid-1981, it was the best-selling how-to cassette in the industry, which Court Shannon guesses means it sold a few thousand copies.

One day, Stewart's wife, Debbie Carl, who had seen the Jane Fonda workout book, suggested he make a video with her.

He thought it was a great idea, but he needed a way to get in touch with Fonda.

Okay, what's going to be the vehicle?

How are we going to get there?

Let's find a way.

He had a friend who referred him in and said, you should become involved in CED.

And that's how he connected with Jane initially.

For Fonda, the exercise business had always been tied up with the CED, the campaign for economic democracy, the political organization she founded with her then-husband, the activist and politician Tom Hayden.

The CED pushed for progressive legislation all over California, often by funding local political races.

And it was the reason the workout business existed in the first place.

Fonda had started her initial workout studio to fund the CED.

Her book made money for the CED.

In fact, the CED owned Workout Inc, the entity that encompassed all facets of the workout business.

By 1982, even before the workout video, proceeds from Workout Inc.

were providing CED with at least $30,000 a month and well over half of its yearly $400,000 operating budget.

Up to this point, Fonda hadn't been particularly concerned that her exercise-based fundraising would interfere with her acting career.

When Stuart Carl got in touch with her about doing a video, she wasn't so sure.

And he called me and I said no, you know, because I thought, well, that really will affect my career as an actor.

I mean, I can't do both.

Fonda also did not have a VCR or know anyone who had ever bought a videotape.

But then he kept asking.

And I think that the organization said, no, do it.

And so I did.

Her first move was to hire a director producer.

So I went to the guy who happened to be a friend of mine, Sid Galanti was his name.

And he was making the political campaigns for Tom.

And I said, well, you know, you're doing these commercials for Tom.

Would you film the workout?

So Sidney Galanti, the man who oversaw the first workout tape and many of the ones to follow, was a political campaign strategist for progressive candidates and causes who had been making political ads for years.

Here's an ad he made in 1964.

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Quick, Bat Girl, untie us before it's too late.

I've worked for you a long time and I'm paid less than Rob.

Same job, same employer means equal pay for men and women.

No time for jokes, Batgirl.

With the workout, Fonda, Galanti, Stuart Carl, and everyone else involved were starting almost from scratch.

There were a few exercise shows on TV, but none of them felt like an exercise class.

There weren't other people doing the workout on screen too.

And that's what Fonda wanted the video to feel like.

A class.

She already had quite a bit of experience as an instructor.

She regularly taught at the Beverly Hills studio.

While filming 9 to 5, she'd actually led a 4.30 a.m.

class there.

And it was a full class at 4.30 in the morning.

So with a budget of around $50,000 and just a few days to film, they recreated a class.

The set looks like a dance studio with a wood floor and folding chairs no one's using set up around the edge of the room.

There's a ballet bar and a payphone and a bulletin board with flyers tacked to it, and a bunch of other exercisers, dancers, who pipe up all routine long, giving Jane encouragement.

Jane herself is wearing a lilac and fuchsia striped leotard, lilac tights, dark purple leg warmers, and no shoes.

As an aside, Reebok only released the first athletic shoe for women, the Reebok Freestyle, this same year, 1982.

By 1984, boosted by the craze Fonda kicked off, it would account for half of Reebok's sales.

Anyway, though the workout is pretty taxing and fast, Fonda does the whole thing effortlessly.

She doesn't even appear to sweat.

Still, she says they kind of winged the whole thing.

I I mean, it was spittin' prayer.

When the workout was finally released, expectations weren't that high.

It was clear from the book, which had spent six months at number one on the New York Times bestseller list on its way to selling 2 million copies, that there was a mass audience for the Jane Fonda workout.

But it was unclear if that size audience would exist in the completely unproven field of home video.

Initially, it seemed like maybe not.

It entered the Billboard video charts a month after its release at number 23.

But the workout video had something going for it.

Jane Fonda.

She started going around the country on a tour called Exercise 82, teaching in-person exercise classes to hundreds of women.

The events for which you had to buy tickets were fundraisers for the CED, but you could also buy merch there: a Jane Fonda workout sweatshirt and sweatpants, the book, the video, the record.

Now, inhale, open your arms to the side.

Exhale and raise them over over your head.

Now reach with the right arm lift.

Stretch now left.

Stretch and right.

Carl Video took note of the live events and offered to organize even more.

They piggybacked on them with in-person events at local video stores and on local media, and they got the video into bookstores and big box retail outlets before that was common.

By late 1982, the video was becoming a phenomenon in its own right.

left stretch

it didn't matter whether it was us in the company or the distribution companies or the stores they're like going this is unbelievable court shannon who is now a media and advertising consultant and who worked at carl video at the time again how could this grow so fast sell so much and do it week in week out month after month it seemed like it was an out-of-control rocket ship by 1984 fondas tape had sold 275 000 copies at 60 a pop 160 in 2020 money breaking all records for VHS sales up to that point and becoming the best-selling video of all time.

But this doesn't capture the scope of its success.

It wasn't just a hit.

It was a category creator.

At the time, no non-theatrical video had ever sold more than 100,000 copies.

Fonda's video more than doubled that and kept going.

all the way to 17 million.

It not only pushed VCR sales through the roof and created the exercise video category, it created the for-sale video category, meaning every tape you could buy and bring home.

It was the breakout hit that led directly to every weird and not-so-weird video of the 1980s VHS boom.

And all of this was thanks to Jane Fonda, which brings me back to the mystery I was mulling over at the top of the show.

Because

didn't people hate her?

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So I just want to say here that my curiosity about the Jane Fonda workout is deeply generational.

I was born in 1981 when Exercise Jane was about to become fully ascendant, and the whole thing is a curious artifact of my childhood.

She's one of the first celebrities I can remember knowing about because my mom had the Jane Fonda workout record, and I learned who she was from the cover.

I've learned a lot more about Jane Fonda since then, but I've come to see that there's another way that my age informed my curiosity about the workout.

By informing my understanding of the Vietnam War.

One of the things that most puzzled me about the workout was totally tied up in Vietnam.

And it was this.

If Jane Fonda's Vietnam activism had been so controversial, how did the workout become so successful?

If so many people despised her, why had others let her into their house to teach them how to do pelvic tilts?

How had she gone from someone so political to someone so not?

How had Hanoi Jane become exercise Jane?

And the answer to that is actually that a lot of Americans, not just me, misremember Hanoi Jane.

And to understand how, I have to go back to her origins.

I have to go back and look at Jane Fonda and Vietnam.

In 1970, Fonda, back in America after years in France and newly politicized, throws herself into activism.

She becomes involved in the fight for Native American rights, marches with women seeking welfare reform, does fundraisers for the Black Panthers, and most especially dives into the already robust anti-war effort.

From the start, she is especially focused on the GI movement, the growing cohort of enlisted and former members of the armed forces who opposed the war in Vietnam.

It was a pretty head-spinning transformation for much of the American film-going and celebrity-attuned public.

The blonde sex kitten in Barbarella had seemingly overnight become a political radical with a dark shag haircut.

In 1971, her film career on hold, she toured the country and then South Asia alongside a number of other celebrities in a popular variety show for the troops, an anti-war version of Bob Hope's USO tours called FTA, which stood for free the army, but only if you were being polite.

Here's Jane playing the first lady, Pat Nixon, in one of the sketches.

Mr.

President, there's a terrible demonstration going on outside.

Oh, there's always a demonstration going on outside, Pat.

Yeah, but Richard, this one is completely out of control.

They're storming the White House.

Oh, in that case, I better call out the Third Marine.

You can't, Richard.

Why not?

She is the Third Marine.

By this point, Nixon was already paying attention to her.

Starting in 1970, his FBI had begun spying on her, going through her mail, illegally accessing her bank information, trailing her five-year-old daughter to school, and actively attempting to discredit her.

In one instance, by trying to plant fake gossip items, in another, by arresting her at an airport on trumped-up drug charges.

Nixon was recorded speaking about her on the White House tapes in 1971.

Jane Fonda.

What in the world is the matter with Jane Fonda?

I feel so sorry for Henry Fonda.

He's a nice man.

She really is.

She's a great actress and she looks pretty, but Lord, she's often on the wrong track.

An aide reportedly said of Nixon around this time that what Brezhnev, the then head of the Soviet Union, and Jane Fonda said, got about the same treatment.

And this was all before her famous trip to Hanoi.

In 1972, in advance of the upcoming election and in response to the war's widespread unpopularity, Nixon was pursuing a strategy called Vietnamization, pulling back American troops so that the war could be carried out by South Vietnamese forces and an unprecedented amount of American bombs.

As American soldiers left Southeast Asia, for many people, the war was becoming less urgent, but not for Fonda.

That if he reduces the number of white American deaths

and reduces the cost of the war, that our conscience can be pacified, that the American people don't care whether millions of people in Asia are killed in our names.

News reports corroborated by the Swedish ambassador to Hanoi suggested that the Nixon administration was intentionally bombing river levees in North Vietnam that, should they give way, would destroy the rice fields, potentially starving a million people.

The administration denied this at the time, though later the Nixon tapes would reveal Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, talking about this very possibility with little concern.

But Fonda was very concerned.

In July of 1972, at the invitation of the North Vietnamese government, she traveled to Hanoi specifically to gather evidence of the bombings.

Nixon is aiming at the one most vulnerable point, since it is an agrarian society, and that is their crops, their land, their agriculture.

At the time that she went, 300 Americans had already visited or would soon visit North Vietnam, including famous ones like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Susan Sontag, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

Many of them had or would do exactly what Fonda did: bring letters to and visit with American POWs being held by the North Vietnamese and broadcast over radio Hanoi, though only Fonda would be photographed, laughing and smiling, sitting atop a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun aiming at the sky, ready to shoot down an American plane.

The moment and those photos haunt her reputation to this very day.

But that didn't start right away.

So though some State Department officials were trotting out the word traitor while Fonda was still in North Vietnam, in the days after she came back to the U.S.

in July of 1972, her trip wasn't that big of a story.

Her return was mentioned in a gossip column in the Washington Post and on page 9 of the New York Times.

On her way back to the States, though, Fonda had stopped in Paris to show the footage she'd taken of the levies to the media.

And this got attention, not so much as a story about Fonda, but as a story about the American military.

The media accepted her testimony as accurate.

Mary Hirschberger is a historian and the author of Jane Fonda's War, a political biography of an anti-war icon.

This really tipped what had been sort of a low-level concern into an international issue that President Nixon could not ignore.

I think this fact that Nixon administration officials felt somewhat humiliated by this actress who they scorned really led to a lot of the initial outrage at Jane Fonda in Vietnam.

Nixon had been heaping scorn on the student activists and anti-war protesters he'd famously called bums for years.

But Rick Perlstein, writing in his popular history of this time, Nixonland, says that in making herself such a problem for the administration, Fonda inspired a more pointed Nixon strategy, one that would outlast Nixon's own presidency.

He writes, Fonda's trip marked the emergence of a new narrative about Vietnam, that people like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon weren't responsible for the disaster, but people like Fonda stabbing American soldiers and South Vietnamese allies in the back were.

Over the next couple of weeks and months, attacks on Fonda increased, led by right-wing political figures calling her traitorous, communistic, and shrill.

Jesse Helms, who was running for his first term as senator at the time, was then the executive vice president and chairman at a North Carolina-based TV station, and he regularly denounced Fonda on TV.

In August, First Lady Pat Nixon criticized the visit.

That same month, Representative Fletcher Thompson sought to subpoena Fonda to speak before a congressional committee holding hearings on travel to hostile areas, i.e., North Vietnam.

Another congressman would later introduce legislation that would restrict such travel because of Fonda.

The veterans of foreign wars called her a traitorous meddler and said she should be prosecuted and she would be chastised and censured by a couple of state and city legislatures and excoriated in a handful of newspapers.

But all of this didn't come to very much.

At the time in 1972, yes, you can say there was a lot of venom directed against her, a lot of criticism.

She was called a traitor.

But this did not get much traction because at this time, fewer than 50% of Americans supported the war.

This may also explain why the anti-aircraft gun photo, which has since become the iconic image of Fonda's supposed treachery, wasn't yet central to the attacks on her.

That photograph, nobody paid much attention to it at the time.

I suspect the primary reason is that at the time, in 1972, a lot of Americans were horrified at the bombing.

What that picture showed is not just James Fonda on an anti-aircraft emplacement, but what you don't see is that there are planes up in the sky that are dropping bombs on people.

Instead of the photos, the focus was on Fonda's Radio Hanoi broadcast, in which he addressed American soldiers in South Vietnam.

This is Jenny Fonda, speaking from Hanoi.

A phenomenon has been taking place in the United States called the GI movement.

Prior to 1968,

many of the soldiers, the grunts, the snuffies, the ground troops in South Vietnam,

had believed what their officers and and their generals had told them.

In focusing on the broadcasts, our critics were hoping to establish a lineage between Fonda and Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose, two American women who had been charged with treason for broadcasting on German and Japanese radio during World War II.

There was also a Vietnamese woman who had broadcast in English on Radio Hanoi, who was known as Hanoi Hanna.

Sometime in late 72 or early 73, Fonda got the nickname Hanoi Jane at first to connect her to these women.

But the name took on a life of its own in 1973 when Fonda called returning POWs who said the North Vietnamese had a blanket torture policy, liars.

It's a comment for which she would later apologize, but that spurred a lot of immediate and intense hostility, like people burning her in effigy and death threats, as well as much of the long-lasting anger.

If she doesn't like it here, I believe that she should go inside with all of those people over here and go have it with them.

It also prompted this song, which you heard earlier, a country western track performed by Leon Rausch.

By this point, her acting career was in a precarious position.

Talking to the New York Times in 1982, she said, Nixon was president and I couldn't get a job.

I can't say I was blacklisted, but I was graylisted.

So clearly, many people were very angry with Jane Fonda.

What's important to keep in mind is that for all of the people who were angry with Fonda, there were even more who were not angry with her, who shared her views on this deeply unpopular war and admired her for expressing them.

The American public at the time was living with the reality of the war.

They knew what the bombing was doing to Vietnam.

There were a lot of Americans who were really distressed about it, and her popularity actually increased at the time.

In 1973, the Gallup poll listed Fonda as one of the most admired women in America for the first time on a list topped by Pat Nixon.

Articles written now about this period tend to say this is when Fonda became controversial, and that's just been the case ever since.

But it's not.

By 1974, the level of ire towards her was already abating.

With the Watergate scandal as a backdrop, Fonda seemed right and righteous, a personal survivor of Tricky Dick's dirty tricks.

By 1975, with the war over and Nixon out of office, she returned to acting, no longer on any gray list.

On the occasion of one of her first significant films in years, 1977's Julia, she went on the Tonight Show.

Johnny Carson introduced her like this.

My first guest tonight is a gal that I admire highly, not because she is such a fine actress, which she is.

And I admire her not only as a professional, but because as a person who has taken a stand on issues that at times were unpopular and was willing to stand up and be counted.

She's been called a radical.

And it's a funny thing how people who were called radicals at the time

now are considered people who, a lot of them, who were right on.

And a lot of people wish that they had taken those stands previously.

Anyway, in 1978, Fonda's IPC films, her production company, which takes its name from her political organization, the Indochina Peace Campaign, released Coming Home.

Coming Home is about a paraplegic Vietnam vet played by John Voigt and the married woman whose mind and sexuality he opens, played by Fonda.

It's going to be very hard for him.

He's not going to like the fact that I've changed.

You know, that I've never been on my own before.

The movie, a critical text about Vietnam that focuses on the experience of a wounded and disillusioned veteran, was very much in conversation with Fonda's anti-war work and the accusations of betrayal that she'd faced after her trip to Hanoi.

Basically, it's her Vietnam movie.

She won her second Oscar for it.

What you see happening in the late 1970s is that while almost everything that Fonda does is still in a conversation with her Vietnam activism, that conversation is generally admiring.

A People magazine cover from 1977 says, Jane Fonda, America loves her again.

Of course, not everyone loved her.

Particularly on the right, she remained a reliable boogeyman, and there were a smattering of protests of her exercise tour, just as there are protests of her now.

But in the late 1970s, to most people, she wasn't Hanoi Jane anymore, if she ever had been.

Though loathing her was a familiar position, it had also become a fringe one.

It wouldn't stay that way, but by the time it returned, Fonda would be less associated with politics than she'd been in years.

Because by then, she would have become exercise Jane.

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Almost immediately, the workout in all its iterations starts to change people's relationship to Jane Fonda.

Here's President Ronald Reagan in 1983 mentioning Fonda, not to critique her, but to joke about her workout.

I was worried that I'd get out of shape in this job.

But thanks to Mike David's diet and Jane Fonda's workout book,

I did just great.

You wouldn't believe the muscle I developed in my left arm.

I think it's fair to say that Reagan mentioning Fonda must have been something of a risque joke unto itself, but this captures the extent to which the workout had started to dominate the perception of her, to, in her own words, supersede everything else about her.

Though the workout video was still funding the CED, on its face, it wasn't political at all.

The book had actually had its share of politics, a feminist framing, a chapter on environmental dangers, Fonda calling herself an activist multiple times in the text, but you could buy the video because it was a great exercise routine and Fonda looked great doing it and not think about anything else.

And this changed how Fonda resonated.

The video refashioned her into a different kind of star, a relatable one.

I was in a drugstore buying something and I was at the counter and I said something to the pharmacist and somebody three rows back in the line said, oh my God, it's Jane Fonda.

And they knew it because of my voice.

They recognized my voice because my workout had been coming into their house.

And I realized when you're on television and you're coming into somebody's home,

then the relationship between you and the audience changes a lot.

It becomes far more intimate.

When you're doing Jane, as people would say, Jane isn't a movie star anymore, let alone Hanoi Jane.

She's the woman in your house, encouraging you to make it burn.

And Jane was soon encouraging people on multiple tapes.

Over the next 12 years, she would release over 20 videos and inspire, this is a conservative estimate, 100 other celebrity exercise tapes.

This was the most obvious knock-on effect of the workout.

All of the other celebrities who looked at Fonda's success and thought, I could do that.

It begins in 1983.

Oh, you have some wonderful music.

Now we're going to begin our breathing and our stretching, right, girls?

Everybody get up, take your hands below, you're gonna breathe in.

You're gonna breathe in.

That's from the legendary actress, singer, and dancer Debbie Reynolds' exercise tape, Do It Debbie's Way.

Reynolds had also founded a fitness studio of her own in Los Angeles in the 1970s, but she implies right at the top that her video was inspired by Fonda.

But you know what happened to me?

I went out and I bought all these other tapes, which are excellent, but I found that I really couldn't keep up with them.

Well, maybe I didn't want to keep up with them because they're really fast.

I like to do everything.

Do it Debbie's Way was targeted at an older crowd, and it features celebrity appearances by Dion Warwick and Florence Henderson, and one knowingly sloppy backup dancer, the Oscar-winning actress Shelly Winters, in an I'm only doing this for Debbie Sweatshirt, who cracks wise throughout the entire class.

Though it can be at times a little half-hearted, Do It Debbie's Way ultimately sold at least 130,000 copies.

Along with Every Day with Richard Simmons, which also came out in 1983, also made by Carl Video, it was proof that this exercise video thing could work for people other than Jane Fonda.

And then it was off to the races.

We're going to take you on a trip down the center of your body, back to spawn, break down to your foundation, your feet, and out to every extremity.

We're going to be able to do it.

That's from the gymnast Mary Lou Retton's Fun Fit, a workout for kids that was just one of dozens of tapes from the 1980s.

Another was NFL player Lyle Elzado's 1984 tape, No Sweat, the exercise program for everyone, which has a lot of crossover with Arnold Schwarzenegger's pumping iron.

When you approach weights, you don't approach it with a sensitivity, you approach it with a warlike attitude, and we're gonna do war with the weights.

You ready?

Begin.

One,

two.

Marie Osmond, Caitlin Jenner, Alyssa Milano, Shirley McLean with Exercise for Your Mind, Not Your Body, and Angela Lansbury all put out videos in the 1980s.

I think femininity and sexuality go hand in hand.

It used used to be thought that women lose interest in sex after menopause.

But now we know that just isn't true.

In 1990, former porn actor Tracy Lords does her workout, jazz warm-up, to Tracy Lords, in rhyming couplets.

By 1992, fitness video sales across America totaled $415 million,

and celebrity tapes had started to settle into a more set formula, which strongly resembled Jane Fonda's original workout.

Less talking and more straightforward routines.

A good example is Cher Fitness, a step routine very much in the no-nonsense Fonda mode that features Cher in an indescribable Raven Black leotard with tutu accents that sold 1.5 million copies.

a lot of fat, it's over, and you've really had a good time.

I mean, I must say, it's difficult for me, but I never,

I never hate it.

I always enjoy it.

But even as Jane and Cher dominated the market, other celebrities were still doing their thing.

Like a Stalgetti with her young at heart.

Raise your arms up high and say out loud,

I feel lousy.

I feel lousy.

Raquel Welch's A Week with Raquel.

And it's easy.

Every morning when you wake up, just turn on your VCR.

Make sure that you're on the right day.

And follow by the way.

Here's Mark Wahlberg's Marky Mark workout.

What's up?

It's the monk V Cock D.

In-gym workout.

We're about to get busy with some fat weights and all that.

Also making tapes in the 1990s.

Rita Moreno, Sally Struthers, Heather Locklear, Florence Henderson, Latoya Jackson, Regis Philbin, O.J.

Simpson, Cindy Crawford, Mary Tyler Moore, Dixie Carter, Suzanne Summers, Paula Abdul, Claudia Schiffer, Joan Rivers, and Milton Burrell, who did a segment in his low-impact, high-comedy workout in drag as, you know it, Jane Fonda.

Hi, I'm Jane Fonda.

I know just what you're all thinking.

She looks much better in person than she does on the screen.

By the late 90s, things started to peter out on the celebrity front, seeding ground to trainer-led routines like Thai Bow and Buns of Steel, which were also influenced by Fonda.

Compared to almost all of these videos, Fondas were the cream of the crop, not just because hers were the first and least ridiculous, but because you might have noticed she's a lot more A-list than most of these other celebrities.

Exercise tape makers tended to be trying to up their profile or hold on to it.

Fonda's videos, in contrast, were part of a big, lucrative, relatively long-running business, a significant enterprise that she'd gotten into at the height of her fame, and they made her distinct from these one-off video makers.

But not as distinct as when she was just a movie star.

Fonda was not without ambivalence about the workout.

She writes in her autobiography of the workout: I began to think, hey, wait a minute, what about me as an actor?

What about the causes I'm fighting for?

It made me uneasy.

I didn't want pelvic tilt to define me.

But over the course of the 1980s, she becomes more involved in the exercise business anyway.

It just interested her, even as she steps back from films, which increasingly did not.

Between 1982 and 1990, she made four movies and 13 workout tapes.

In 1987, she separated the workout business from the CED, having made it $17 million.

And ironically, it's exactly this year, 1987, when Exercise Jane is fully ascendant and Fonda is widely seen as the least overtly political she's been since the start of her career, that Hanoi Jane comes roaring back into the foreground.

It seems to start as Fonda is readying to film Stanley and Iris, which will turn out to be her last movie until 2005 in Waterbury, Connecticut.

When it's announced that Fonda will be filming there, a Waterbury resident, World War II veteran, and member of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter writes an angry letter to the local paper urging the city not to give comfort and support to Jane Fonda.

He also prints up 250 bumper stickers saying, I'm not Fonda, Hanoi Jane.

As chronicled in Mary Hirschberger's book, Jane Fonda's War, this letter massively snowballs.

It's soon followed by more, first from other local VFW members, not necessarily veterans of Vietnam, and then from ones all over the country.

Even as most Waterbury residents defend Fonda, protests begin in which there are calls for Fonda to be executed and that eventually attract the support of the Ku Klux Klan.

The ire towards Fonda that had always been in the background, it hadn't been lessening, it had been festering.

Starting earlier in the 1980s, the idea that Nixon had first floated, that America could only have been defeated from within, started to gain traction.

Ronald Reagan wins an election running on a platform of restoring America to itself.

Movies like Rambo reframe Vietnam veterans as skilled, brilliant fighting machines who could never possibly have invested in a fair fight.

And all the while, the realities of the war itself begin to recede from memory.

Mary Hirschberger again.

15 years later, what people really remembered was the fact that in the mid-1970s, they had lost a war to a country that was much smaller, much poorer, barely even had an Air Force, and they need an explanation for that.

Jane Fonda, a one-time pin-up, turned outspoken anti-war feminist, turned exercise entrepreneur who all the way back in 1972 had been very clear that America had lost this war, becomes one such explanation.

Until the people in this country understand that it's been an American defeat, hard as it is for Americans to accept, a third world underdeveloped country with no industry, 90% of whose people are peasants, has defeated the mightiest imperialist power in the world.

Though Hanoi Jane had its roots in the 1970s, this is when it really explodes.

When the people who agreed with Fonda about the war are thinking about other things, and the people who didn't are more aggrieved than ever.

Fonda herself experienced this period as different from the one that came before.

Telling me was when Hanoi Jane was turned into an art form.

During the Reagan administration, that was when it really escalated.

Ah, they thought, aha, we can scare people away.

from joining any anti-war movement by turning Jane Fonda into a pariah.

Well, you don't want to be like like Jane Fonda.

You don't want to join an A.

Look what happened to Jane Fonda.

It's hard not to think that the workout enabled this spin, because of course, immediately after the war, nothing had happened to Jane Fonda's career.

It had rebounded, and then some.

And it's only later, of her own volition, that she had moved into exercise.

In June of 1988, in response to what happened in Waterbury, Fonda did a 2020 interview with Barbara Walters, where she said she regretted criticizing the POWs and sitting on the anti-aircraft gun and apologized to the veterans that she'd hurt.

This isn't a clip from that original interview, but Fonda has since apologized many, many times.

And this is one of them.

I will go to my grave regretting the fact that I was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun.

But it doesn't matter.

Instead of clearing the air, the apology just breathes further life into the scandal, which remains at a fever pitch for close to a decade.

The VFW passes a resolution asking Congress to try her for treason.

Legends about Hanoi Jane, which had spread through the armed forces, spread faster still.

Stickers of her face show up in Army-based urinals, and stories about how she personally got POWs killed become military lore, eventually traveling farther and further with the advent of the internet.

No matter how many times the made-up stories about Fonda's behavior in Hanoi are debunked, people still believe them.

Earlier in the show, when I wondered why the workout was so widely embraced when Fonda was still so disliked, disliked, I was asking that question through the lens of all of this.

The late 1980s and the early 1990s, when Fonda was way more controversial than she had been when the workout actually came out.

The success of the workout seemed mysterious to me because I was a kid when all of this was going down.

And all I knew about Fonda was that she had an exercise record, and somehow that some people really didn't like her.

As ever, it wasn't everyone.

As all this was going on, the workout tapes kept coming, kept selling.

They kept coming when she got divorced from Hayden, when she married Ted Turner, when she started to live a more private life, when she retired from acting in 1990.

The last workout tape didn't come until 1994, and like a flashbulb, it left a long afterimage.

Even after she stopped releasing tapes, their influence continued to shape the world of fitness.

And of course, how we see her.

While we were working on this piece, a video of Jane Fonda from 1979 went viral on Twitter.

We played a bit of it at the top of the show.

Culturally, psychologically, economically, politically, gays and lesbians are discriminated against.

They are a very powerful.

It was really popular.

200,000 likes, 55,000 retweets.

And it's one of a number of videos featuring Fonda doing something impressive and political, like say getting arrested for climate change, that have gone viral in the last few years.

The subtext around these tweets, often the explicit text, isn't just admiration, it's surprise.

Whoa, check out Jane Fonda.

This is also generational.

People of my generation and younger having the realization that a woman they thought was the queen of exercise or just on Grace and Frankie has been fighting the good fight since before they were born.

I don't want to diminish the Jane Fonda workout, which I only came to admire as a bigger and bigger deal the more I knew about it.

It was one of the preeminent lifestyle phenomena of the 1980s and 90s, and it helped normalize strenuous physical exercise for women.

And it still works, and people are doing it right now when they can't go to the gym, which is actually how it started, when gyms were much less welcoming to women.

But it was only ever a piece of Fonda, and for a while there, its popularity obscured more substantial things about her.

In My Life So Far, which came out in 2005, she wrote, it isn't easy for me to accept the fact that many young people, if they know me at all, know me as the woman in the exercise video that their mother used.

Fonda is 83 now.

She's lived about as full a life as any celebrity, as any woman has, and she's still at it.

I think it's only in the years since she unretired in 2005 that Exercise Jane has started to take its proper place in the scheme of Jane Fonda, just a part of the 50 years she has spent throwing herself, not without missteps, into things that matter.

She may do a mean pelvic tilt, but you should see her life.

It's better.

Are they using you?

I hope they use me.

What am I here for if not to be used by good people for good things?

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Clea Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Mark Harris, Jeff Wexler, Merritt Jacob, Carol Burke, Jerry Lemke, Joe Pickett, Nick Pruer, Kaylee Morgan, Kimberly Christman, Amanda Cormier, Lenny Kasden, and June Thomas.

Though I mentioned Jane Fonda's My Life So Far, Mary Hirschberger's Jane Fonda's War, and Rick Perlstein's Nixon Land in the episode itself, there are some other texts that were essential to reporting this episode.

Thank you to Carol Burke's Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High and Tight, Jerry Lembecki's Hanoi Jane, War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, and James Michael Rafferty's doctoral thesis: Politicizing Stardom, Jane Fonda, IPC Films, and Hollywood, 1977-1982.

Thanks for listening.

See you next month.