*Legendary actress Jane Fonda just did a wide-ranging sit down with The Hollywood Reporter for its Hollywood Masters interview series, and revealed that she once went skinny dipping with Michael Jackson.
It all went down on the New Hampshire set of her 1981 movie “On Golden Pond.” He had come to visit her and co-star Katharine Hepburn, one of MJ’s heroes.
“[He] came and stayed for 10 days,” recalled the actress, whose new movie, “Youth,” opens Dec. 4. “And when I first asked [Hepburn] permission she was not happy. Then the crew said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s Michael Jackson!’ We lived together. I went skinny dipping with him — also, by the way, with Greta Garbo.”
Speaking on October 7 to a student audience at the Loyola Marymount University School of Film & TV, where she was taking part in the ongoing Hollywood Masters interview series moderated by THR’s Stephen Galloway, Fonda added: “But she accepted him; he wanted to be a movie star — he had just finished doing ‘The Wiz.’ And he had a tape recorder with him, and every day I would bring him to the set, and in between scenes she would sit down in a chair and pull over a chair for him and tell him stories. I wish I knew where those tapes were. And every story embedded a lesson: for example, she talked about Laurette Taylor — and anyone who was alive to see Laurette Taylor in ‘Glass Menagerie’ has seen as great a moment of acting as [there is]. So she described to Michael seeing this transcendent piece of acting [and how] she then saw her 25 or 30 years later playing the same role, [and] the magic was gone. And she said to Michael, ‘She wasn’t hungry anymore.’ What a great thing to say to a young, rising star like Michael: ‘You gotta stay hungry.’”
