It’s a pose every cook will recognise: knees bent and back braced to gain optimal eyes on the gas burners, brow furrowed in vigilant concentration, wooden spoon at the ready. Around you, a kitchen in moderate disarray and the knowledge that you could have ordered pizza. It is the moment not long before serving up a one-pot-too-many meal that has got slightly out of hand to more people than you were expecting. And, hovering at the edges of your mind, the dread that your bouffant hair might catch fire.
It was also something of a contrast from Jane Fonda’s day job in 1967: donning moulded silver lurex and futuristic weaponry to play the title role in the sci-fi romp Barbarella, directed by her then husband Roger Vadim (who characterised the space warrior she played in the film as “just a lovely, average girl with a terrific space record and a lovely body”). If only Fonda had been able to bring Durand Durand’s positronic ray home to finish off the potatoes.
“Home” was a picturesque French farmhouse in the village of Saint-Ouen-Marchefroy, west of Paris, whence Fonda and Vadim would repair when filming duties in Rome were done. David Hurn, who had photographed the Beatles on the set of A Hard Day’s Night and captured key moments on the first four Bond films, took the playfully provocative and endlessly reproduced pictures of Fonda in character.
But he also photographed her out of character and in a domestic setting – if we understand domestic to mean lolling in a hammock or perching on Vadim’s knee in a bucolic garden surrounded by beautiful people caressing cats and quaffing wine out of raffia-clad bottles. One such beautiful person is John Phillip Law, who played Pygar in Barbarella – elsewhere, Fonda is pictured astride the back of his motorbike. This was the actress in her full European glory, halfway through her marriage to Vadim (who had already had relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve), her Vassar studenthood behind her and her reincarnation as an activist ahead of her; Hanoi Jane was just a few years around the corner. And far, far in the future, which makes sense when you look at those pots and pans, was the fitness queen Fonda who would espouse eating by colour and rigorous workouts.
