Jane Fonda once gave Chelsea Handler a dose of tough love.
“I got an email from Jane Fonda one day that said, ‘Hi, Chelsea, It’s Jane. I was wondering if you could come over to my house for dinner. I’d like to talk to you about a couple of things,’” Handler, 50, recalled in her new memoir, I’ll Have What She’s Having, released on Tuesday, February 25.
Handler noted that the message sounded “ominous,” explaining that she had been friends with Fonda, 87, for “at least 10 years” and it “seemed like sort of a terse email to get from her.” Handler replied and agreed to meet with Fonda that night at her home — opting not to drink so she could “be fully alert for my defense.”
“Jane’s demeanor seemed a bit cold, and I was anxious to find out exactly what I had done,” Handler wrote, noting that Fonda asked her if she knew why she had been invited over for dinner. Fonda said, “You may have noticed I was a little icy toward you when I saw you at Shonda Rhimes’s fundraiser for Congressman John Lewis.”
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Handler explained that she had attended the event three months before and had noticed Fonda being “icy” toward her, but she hadn’t “obsessed over it.”
“‘You behaved badly at my party. From the moment you came in, you had a black cloud hanging over you and you insulted people and it brought the whole party down. I don’t know what drugs you were on, but a few people told me you were horrible to them,” Handler wrote of Fonda, who inquired why the comedian had attended the party if she were in “that kind of mood.”
For Handler, Fonda calling her out on her “badly behaved self was as serious as it gets.” She added, “This was definitely not the woman I had dreamed of becoming.”
Handler called the moment “embarrassing, painful, and definitely cringeworthy,” but said she “didn’t let any of those things diminish the fact that Jane had taken the time out of her life to be honest with me.”
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“I needed someone to do that with me, and even in that moment of shame I knew she would never have to speak to me about my behavior again because that’s what that kind of honesty deserves: action,” Handler wrote, adding that she had recently begun therapy.
The moment led Handler to reflect on what she’s “trying to put out into this world,” which she noted was “definitely not what I was doing at Kane’s party.”
“The truth of the matter was: Who knows what drugs I was on? It could have been anything,” Handler said, noting that her “behavior on drugs” depends on her “state of mind.”
Struck with Fonda’s “brutal honesty,” Handler acknowledged the news was “hard to hear” and shared with the 9 to 5 star that she had been in therapy for two months to deal with her “deep anger.”
“‘Good,’ she told me. ‘Go find out what your problem is, because your gifts are plentiful, and sometimes people with the most gifts have the easiest time throwing them in the trash. Don’t be a product of your environment, Chelsea. Make your environment be a product of you,’” Handler recalled, noting that this moment was “the definition of sisterhood.”
Since that night, Handler has seen Fonda “many times,” including at a climate change event that the activist was hosting. In an email exchange after the event, Fonda shared that it “meant a lot” to her that Handler followed through.
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At Fonda’s 80th birthday party, Handler made an effort “not to blow it.”
“It was my first attempt to prove to her that I would only be on my best behavior from here on out. And I kept trying to prove it to her,” Handler wrote, noting that she showed up when Fonda had hip surgery, has since done fundraisers with her and had the actress on her podcast. “I redeemed myself with Jane and there was such value in that — in proving to someone that you are indeed the person they thought you could be.”
Ahead of the memoir’s release, Handler exclusively talked to Us Weekly about becoming the best version of herself that she could be.
“You want to get rid of the bad behavior that’s hurtful to others or hurtful to yourself, and also adopt this new version of you,” she shared in an Us cover story earlier this month. “I don’t want to lose all the edge I was naturally born with — that’s who I am — so it’s a bit of Whack-a-Mole. You’re like, OK, I’m auditioning different versions of myself, seeing which ones make the most sense for this improved version of me.”
I’ll Have What She’s Having is out now.
