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Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin of 'Grace and Frankie' talk about friendship and getting old
Los Angeles — It is always a joy to interview icons like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin whom we talked recently for their “Grace and Frankie” comedy web television series which has been renewed for a fifth season.
Jane, 80, stars as Grace Hanson, a retired cosmetics mogul, and Lily, 78, as Frankie Bergstein, a hippie art teacher. The story is about two women who are brought closer together when their respective husbands confess to their wives that they are in love with each other. So Grace and Frankie, who don’t particularly like each other, find themselves living with each other and face the challenges of such an arrangement.
Below are excerpts of our interview with the two legends.
On what they have learned about their friendship through each other:
Lily Tomlin: We did know each other and we continued to know each other after “Nine to Five.” I just came to love Jane more and more every season.
In fact, we were just reading a new script from season five, which will be out next year and the scene was we were like having a fight. We'd really come to a kind of impasse. It was like we were going to say goodbye to each other in some way. I started to cry in the table read. It took over me in a second, I just started to weep and my face got all horrible, ugly crying and all that. I couldn't control it, I was going under. I felt that so deeply. I didn't want to think it could be true.
Jane Fonda: We just came from one of those Netflix things for Emmys and there was one of those where there are people, a big theater, an audience and they've seen a couple of episodes. Then we did a moderated Q & A, and we were being asked about how much longer we wanted to do it.
I started imagining that I wasn't doing it anymore and I got so sad too. I got really sad. It's like coming home every morning going to Paramount, going to the gate. Just the idea that I wouldn't be able to have her every day in my life. I don't know. We both are really blessed to be able to have this experience.
On how was the year 1968 like for Jane Fonda:
Jane: I was very, very pregnant. I was married to the director of Barbarella a French man by the name of Roger Vadim. I was also bedridden because I almost lost the baby. So I was in bed and the streets of Paris were burning. It was an amazing time.
When a woman is pregnant she's very, very sensitive to everything that's happening. It's a great teachable moment. A pregnant woman can learn and she absorbs things. To be pregnant in 1968 when, it wasn't just in France but in a lot of places in the world, tectonic plates were shifting.
It was while I was in bed that I saw what was happening on television. I saw people in this country marching against the Pentagon and I thought, what am I doing here? I want to be home being part of that. It was a turning point in my life with my little daughter in my belly. I keep forgetting it is the 50th anniversary.
La Nostalgie n’est pas ce qu’elle etait. That is the name of Simone Sognoret’s book; “Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.” I'm not nostalgic, no.
On consulting each other for event outfits and things they have in common like food habits:
Jane: We talk to each other. What are you going to wear? And I have a stylist that sometimes works with Lily.
Well, during one Grace and Frankie scene where was a lot of food and there were flies and I killed one of them and Lily got so upset. At first I thought she was kidding, but she wasn't. I don't kill flies anymore. (Laughter) You've taught me.
Lily: I just exclaimed over it.
Jane: She drinks these coffees. There is this wonderful gal, Bobby, who brings her food and stuff, brings these very rich coffees.
Lily: That is only once in a while. It's just an ice blended from Starbucks.
Jane: And I don't do that.
Lily: It’s quite ordinary. She has the exotic stuff from her world travels.
Jane: Espresso. (Laughter) She's on her phone more than I am.
Lily: Oh No!
Jane: And she always keeps her phone on a speakerphone. So I'm trying to learn my lines or something and she's carrying on this loud conversation. And the other person I think, oh my God, I hope they don't say anything bad about me because you can hear everything they say. (Laughter)
Lily: No, I don’t
Jane: Oh you do.
Lily: She's very direct and she holds her phone like this.
Jane: I'm not on my phone nearly as much as you are.
Lily: And she's dictating out loud, “I will be coming to the Waldorf Astoria, It’s very expensive there so we will go Dutch.” (Laughter)
On the scariest aspects of getting old and how they keep their optimism:
Lily: It’s hard to keep buoyant as every time you see something else is happening to you, to your body or your face or your hair. The demands on the business are so stringent. You think, oh God, can we keep this up that much longer? Yet I feel like I am Frankie, like I'm just as wholesome and heartfelt and dynamic as Frankie is. And Frankie doesn't seem to age.
So luckily I identify with Frankie. But there are so many things in life, and yes we have to come to terms with them, and I think maybe you've come to terms with them by ignoring them, rolling with them. You don't care, you take her few wisps of them and comb them back, whatever you have to do to keep going.
Jane: And I'm the opposite. (Laughter) You know, I've written two books about aging. I've really studied it deeply because whenever I'm afraid of something, the way I deal with it as I get to know it very well, know thy enemy.
So I like to spend years researching and studying it and interviewing people and everything. It's a fact of life. Death and aging is what makes sense of life. If we never died, then life would have no sense or meaning. It's like noise has no meaning without silence. Light has no meaning without dark. When we talk about aging, what we mean is that we come to the end of life then and die.
I believe that it's important to be very, very aware of that and think about it a lot and prepare for it because what you don't want to do is get to the end with a lot of regrets. So you have to think, well, how do I want to be at the end of my life? Then you have to work. You know we all want to have love around us, so we have to earn it in the years that are remaining. I may only have a couple of decades left at best. So I want to be sure that I continue to stand up straight. Like posture becomes really important. That sounds stupid, but it's in fact very important. — LA, GMA News
