Why I'm Fonda Hanoi Jane: actress, activist, American. What's not to like?

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: My Life So Far, Jane Fonda - Book Review

To many, maybe even most, Americans, Jane Fonda is the Wal-Mart of activist celebrities--a category killer when it comes to personifying the loathsome limousine liberal, that subspecies of Hollywood Democrat which, in some tellings, is more responsible for the great Republican political ascendancy than the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton's zipper problems, or George W. Bush's tax cut strategery.

As her new autobiography, My Life So Far (Random House), makes clear, Fonda helped create the very template of the Movie Star As Social Conscience. In the late 1960s and early '70s, bra-less and still sporting her trendsetting shag cut from Klute, Fonda was ubiquitous, decrying mistreatment of Indians here, standing shoulder to shoulder with migrant workers there, and marching for women's lib elsewhere.

Most controversially, she spoke out against the Vietnam War and visited the North Vietnamese capital in 1972; there she made radio broadcasts critical of U.S. policy, posed sitting "laughing and clapping" (her words) on an antiaircraft gun, and took home the sobriquet Hanoi Jane.

Despite her tow profile for the last 15 years (part of which she spent as Mrs. Ted Turner), hatred of Fonda was strong enough that the actress even became an issue during the 2004 presidential campaign, when a faked photo of her standing next to John Kerry was widely circulated.

Merely to be seen next to her was as toxic as the nuclear meltdown at the center of one of her many memorable movies, The China Syndrome. How else to explain that "Hanoi Jane Urinal Stickers" still sell briskly on the Web? Fonda herself has said she would never campaign for a politician because she carries too much baggage.

Fonda haters will find much to enjoy in My Life, including embarrassing revelations from the iconic feminist. For instance, she not only brought in most of the money to the household she shared with her first husband, the shiftless French director Roger Vadim, but she dutifully cooked the meals, mixed the drinks, and procured the women for the menages a trois he insisted upon. (In true Gallic fashion, Vadim repaid his debt by billing her the "American Brigitte Bardot," casting her in the title role in the 1968 intergalactic soft-porn stinker Barbarella, and calling her stupid and unfaithful in his sybaritic tell-all, Bardot, Deneuve, and Fonda.)

My Life is also chock full of unintentionally hilarious sentences that Fonda's anti-fans will love. "My personal vagina was nothing but...