After spending 20 years in Georgia, 74-year-old Jane Fonda came back to Los Angeles for a knee replacement operation and decided to stay.
The reason: she met influential music producer Richard Perry and they are now living together.
“I came for a new knee and got a new lover, too” she tells me delightedly when we talk in a West Hollywood office.
When they met she was still on crutches and, she says with a wink: “I was very, very serious about my therapy because when you’re in a new relationship you have to be able to kneel.”
She adds: “I can tell you I have never been happier. This is not what I expected because first of all I never thought I’d live this long and I never thought I’d get to this age and be as happy as I am.
“Love is the most important thing in the world. It doesn’t necessarily have to be of a sexual variety, although that’s nice too, but boy, having love in your life is the most important thing and I’m lucky to have lots of love in my life.”
She has also gone back to work, co-starring in a new movie, Peace, Love and Misunderstandings in which she plays Grace, a hippie grandmother living in Woodstock who holds protest meetings in the town square, smokes and sells and lot of dope and howls at the moon with her goddess-worshipping friends.
“I feel that I can understand Grace and I dig her,” she says.