Beauty Archivist: From Barbarella to Klute, How Hair Liberated Jane Fonda
Words: Grace Ellington
Make it stand out
Has any haircut symbolised a change in a star’s persona more dramatically than Jane Fonda’s transformation from the fluffy butter blonde mane of Barbarella (1968) to the chestnut brown, heavy, layered shag of Klute (1971)? For Fonda, the cut symbolised her own evolution; the profound changes she was initiating in her personal life and her political consciousness. For much of the public, the whiplash from seeing their sexual fantasy rejecting their gaze in such an abrupt way felt like a betrayal. Especially whilst Barbarella was still in cinemas.
In Barbarella, director and Fonda’s then-husband Roger Vadim, portrayed his wife as a literal sex symbol. As in, truly a symbolic personification of his own ideas about sex rather than a fleshed out character with personal motive. The long cotton candy textured blonde bouffant visually associated her with Vadim’s ex-wife Brigitte Bardot, placing her into the classic canon of 60s sex kitten bombshells.
It was a place Fonda struggled occupying and competing within. She felt compared unfavourably to Bardot, including by Vadim himself and, even worse, the comic book character Barbarella was said to have been based on Brigitte. “When I first became an actress, I was told that I didn’t look right. That I wasn’t right. I had to dye my hair blonde.” She wrote. “I had to wear falsies, my lips were repainted. That all helps to make your mind alienate you from what you are, not only inside, but outside.” Jane, who suffered from bulimia, has spoken of how her condition was aggravated portraying the free loving futuristic sex symbol whilst feeling cripplingly insecure about her body.
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Yet the audiences loved it and Barbarella was a smash hit with critic Pauline Kale writing “Jane Fonda, having sex on the wilted feathers and rough scroungy furs of Barbarella is more charming and fresh and bouncy than ever – the American girl triumphing by her innocence over a lewd comic strip world of the future.” And yet Fonda, newly anointed the personification of wholesome American sex appeal, was on the precipice of great change.
Interesting that the movie in which Fonda emerges both as a serious talent and fully emancipated from her blonde bombshell persona is Klute, the neo-noir, surveillance thriller directed by Alan J Pakula, in which she plays a ‘call girl’. As Bree Daniels, a role that could have easily been highly sexualised, Fonda gives a complex and understated performance, one that earns her an Oscar.
The haircut, known as “The Klute”, was not cut specifically for the role. The chop was hairstylist Paul McGregor’s response to Jane’s request to “do something”. She wanted to be liberated from the blonde hair that was linked to her persona as an object of male fantasy. The symbolism of Fonda cutting off her hair was not lost on Vadim and he went on to cite it as the moment he knew their marriage was over.
“Jane is, of course, beautiful on screen as Bree in the rich warmth and depth of Klute’s cinematography, but, beauty and sex appeal no longer feel like her main defining feature as they had previously.”
The fact that she decided to keep the style for her role as Bree, a character who finds agency and power in her ability to act as a fantasy object for men whilst withholding her true self from them, speaks of Fonda’s desire to breathe complexity and depth into the role. The confronting nature of the look also possibly prevented stills from the film, in which she appears in states of undress, being divorced from the nuanced context of the movie and appreciated solely as the newest racy look from the Barbarella star.
Jane is, of course, beautiful on screen as Bree in the rich warmth and depth of Klute’s cinematography, but, beauty and sex appeal no longer feel like her main defining feature as they had previously. There is a realness to her appearance that feels personality led more than aesthetic. Bree has an aloof, self assured quality, she is neither a femme fatale nor damsel in distress, but a layered combination of independence, emotional intelligence and paranoia induced vulnerability. The unexpectedness of Bree’s counterculture shag makes it a bit harder to project noir archetypes onto her and you have to do a bit of work to get to know her - work that is quickly rewarded by Fonda’s performance.
Jane Fonda says in her memoir, My Life So Far that she was just starting to try to understand the women’s movement when she received the Klute script. Previously she had been resistant to feminism as she understood it. Fonda was enmeshed in a marriage that seemed outwardly progressive for its embrace of free-love non-monogamy, an aspect of their relationship that mostly served Vadim, but was truly heteronormative in its expectations on Jane to play the role of trophy wife and accessory to the French director. At home, pregnant with her first child, Fonda had for the first time started to watch news reports on the war in Vietnam and question her outlook and surroundings.
She came to Klute with the first stirrings of the shift that would shortly see her become a radical and activist. Initially worried portraying a sex worker might be at odds with her political awakening she called her friend, the musician and feminist, Barbara Dane, for her take. Dane advised her to take the role on the grounds that it allowed her to go deep - if you can go deep into any woman and show the whole human being, it is feminism.
It is fitting that the Klute shag, and Fonda’s physical and spiritual rebirth, was debuted to the wider public six months before the film's release in the 1970 mugshot taken after her arrest on drug smuggling charges at Cleveland airport. The pills found on Jane were actually vitamins and her arrest was more related to her involvement in the anti-war movement. “The activism upon which I embarked in 1970 changed me forever in terms of how I saw the world and my place in it,” Fonda explained in My Life So Far. Part of that meant refusing to “look the way I was supposed to anymore.” Her dark choppy layers, defiantly raised fist and serene gaze made the mug shot an instantly iconic image and emblazoned the shag into the minds of a generation of women wanting to liberate themselves from the expectations of how they should look.