Born as Patricia Crum in Oakland, California, she is the daughter of writer Anna Gertrude Bosworth and attorney Bartley Crum, one of the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten during the Red Scare at the start of the Cold War in 1947. Her younger brother, Bartley Crum Jr., and her father both committed suicide. Bosworth wrote a memoir about her family ANYTHING YOUR LITTLE HEART DESIRES published by Simon&Schuster.
After receiving her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1955 she became a member of the Actors Studio, in Manhattan.For the next ten years she worked on Broadway (most notably in the hit comedy “Mary, Mary” by Jean Kerr) and in the film “The Nun’s Story” (she played Audrey Hepburn’s best friend) In 1964 she quit acting and went into journalism freelancing regularly for the New York Times where she wrote on the arts and culture. She also became an editor at McCalls magazine, then Holiday, and then worked as managing editor of Harpers Bazaar. She joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 1988 and has been there ever since. She has contributed articles to The Nation and the New York Times book review as well as Esquire. In the 199os she began teaching non-fiction writing at Columbia and Barnard; she lectured at Yale and the New School and is currently co-chair of the Biography Seminar at NYU. By then she had published biographies of Montgomery Clift and the photographer Diane Arbus; she is also the author of a short biography of Marlon Brando. In 2oo9 she took over the Playwright/Directors Unit at the Actors Studio which she runs with Estelle Parsons. Bosworth is the winner of the Front Page award. She was also a senior fellow at the National Arts Journalism program at Columbia where she researched Jane Fonda’s impact onmedia and media’s impact on Fonda especially during the Vietnam war.
As actress, activist, businesswoman, wife, and mother, Jane Fonda has pushed herself to the limit, attempting to please all, excel in every arena, be everything. We’ve read her version of her controversial life, yet nothing can prepare us for this genuinely revelatory account of Jane’s engrossing, sometimes shocking journey.
Supplemented by the psychiatric records of her suicidal, bipolar mother, Fonda’s FBI file, and interviews with her intimates, this perceptive portrait strips away hype and the subject’s own mythmaking. Patricia Bosworth shows us what a toll Jane’s quest to excel (and please her demanding father, Henry) exacted and sheds light on truths she’s glossed over: her rejection of her mother before her suicide; the death threats and self-doubts of her antiwar crusade; her second husband Tom Hayden’s habit of putting her down while spending her fortune; the emotional downfall that led her to stop acting and marry Ted Turner.
Lee Strasberg once said that Jane had "panic in her eyes," and it is this wounded but so familiar woman—human yet still heroic, the embodiment of a generation’s conflicts and triumphs—whom Bosworth captures so utterly and definitively.
Title: Author, "Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman"
Show Date(s):9/16/11
Website: http://www.patricia-bosworth.com/
