Women Coming of Age, Signed Presentation from Jane Fonda to Katharine Hepburn
[Signed Presentation by Jane Fonda to Katharine Hepburn] Fonda, Jane. Women Coming of Age. First Edition. 1984. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed, “To Kate—I think of you always with love. You are my inspiration and show us all the way to do this gracefully, Jane.” Book is from the estate of Katharine Hepburn’s sister. Laid in is a bookmark from an Old Saybrook, CT bookstore (near the Hepburn family home in Fenwick). An image of Hepburn with Fonda’s father is included in the book (page 21). Co-written with Mignon McCarthy. Photographs by Harry Langdon.
The affection Jane Fonda felt for Katharine Hepburn was not just Hollywood hyperbole. It was real. They became close on the set of the Fonda-produced One Golden Pond, the second-highest grossing film of that year (trailing only Raiders of the Lost Ark). Hepburn played opposite Jane’s father Henry Fonda, and they both won Oscars for their performances. Hepburn told her friend and biographer Scott Berg, “’It seemed as though I was the mother Jane had fantasized having … and if her father and I could make everything all right in the movie, somehow things would be all right in real life.” By the end of the film, per Scott Berg, Hepburn “was full of admiration” for Jane as well. This book, incorporating the principles on the Jane Fonda Workout, offers health and fitness advice on how to age gracefully. Did the book age as well as Hepburn? Well, its author—Jane Fonda--is now eighty-six, a decade older than Hepburn at the time of this book’s publication, and is still going strong.
“Suddenly time itself became exquisitely precious. Time spent with my father. My own time remaining. I felt the need to project myself into the future, to visualize who I want to be and what I want my life to be at its close. I realized that I have only one life, and unless some miracle occurs it’s more than half over.”
--Jane Fonda