Jane Fonda Vividly Opened Up About Her Best Kiss Ever – And Left Jimmy Fallon Hot Under The Collar

The two-time Oscar winner appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to chat about her life. And as people familiar with her will know, she’s led a pretty incredible one in her 83 years. When she sat down with Fallon, they chatted about everything from Fonda’s famous activism to current events.

Fonda was there partly to promote an initiative called Fire Drill Fridays, which helps to highlight environmental issues. But she was happy to talk about her past as well. She recalled that at one point in the early 1970s she’d planned to give up her screen career and dedicate herself full-time to activism, though of course she chose not to in the end.

So Fonda’s generally more than happy to talk about her personal life on chat shows. And yes, that includes the naughtier details. Take her appearance on Ellen in 2015 when she played “Never Have I Ever.” She revealed she’d made out with someone half her age, hooked up at a party and joined the mile high club.

So Fallon knew what he was getting into. And he asked Fonda to play a game called “Best, Worst, First” that saw the star tell a story relating to each of those things. As well as the first kiss tale, on the subject of “worst uninvited guest” Fonda recalled an alarming but hilarious incident about a bear.

Fonda had been vacationing in the woods along with her baby grandson when a bear paid them a visit. “I was in bed and I heard this weird noise – like the rattling of a door,” she recalled. “I got up and went into the living room, and I turned around and my Golden Retriever came running out whelping and yelling.”

“I’m like, ‘What’s this?’ And I go running in – whoo! There’s a bear!” the actress continued. “Right in the middle of my small bedroom, heading right for my grandson’s crib, but I knew what to do.” It wasn’t necessarily what you’d expect, though it was very on brand for Jane Fonda.

Fonda opened her negligee and flashed the animal while screaming wildly. Maybe that’s not what bear experts would advise a person do, but it worked. After that, she said, the bear “urinated on my antique rug and then turned around and sat down.” The star screamed one more time and it wandered back out.

That’s a pretty wild story, but it wasn’t even the wildest one Fonda had to tell. Another option that came up on the game was “Best kiss.” Whose was Fonda’s? Spoiler alert: it wasn’t any of her ex-husbands – not Ted Turner, Tom Hayden or Roger Vadim. But that still left a lot of potential candidates.

Fonda’s shared many onscreen kisses with many different people. But she let slip an interesting tidbit in a 2018 interview with The New Yorker. Of her ex-husbands, she admitted, “The three of them and me, we’re all challenged in the area of intimacy. I sometimes think, ‘Did the perfect man for me come along and I ran away scared?’”

Speaking of intimacy, though, it was always a defining part of Fonda’s appeal as a pin-up. One of her most daring roles was in the 1968 movie Barberella, which was absolutely packed with ridiculous but risqué set-pieces. The man who directed it was Fonda’s aforementioned first husband, Roger Vadim.

Barbarella has a lot of completely bonkers love scenes. In the movie Fonda got to hook up with various characters in strange ways – none of her co-stars were her best kiss, though, by the way – and take her clothes off in a zero-gravity environment. It’s that kind of a movie. And it helped establish her as an It girl.

During Fonda’s marriage to Vadim she attended wild parties with the hottest Hollywood celebrities. The likes of Marlon Brando, Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper would turn up at the couple’s home. And yep, Fonda was fond of soaking up the rays on a verandah without wearing any clothes. Talk also flew at the time that Fonda was bisexual, which she didn’t specifically deny.

Plenty of Fonda’s movies have involved scenes of kissing, love or intimacy. Over the years she’s shared these with Craig T. Nelson in Grace and Frankie, George Segal in Fun with Dick and Jane, Robert De Niro in Stanley and Iris and plenty, plenty more. And she was never shy about things when she got a crush on a co-star.

Fonda did five films with one of these co-star crushes: the legendary Robert Redford. When talking about her movie Barefoot in the Park with The Hollywood Reporter in 2011, she said, “All I remember is falling in love with Bob Redford. I had a mad crush. I couldn’t wait for those cuddling scenes in bed!”

In 2017 Fonda made her most recent film with Redford, Our Souls at Night. Fonda enthused about the movie to USA Today at that year’s Venice Film Festival. “I wanted to see what it was like to fall in love with him again,” she explained. “It was fun to kiss him in my 20s and then to kiss him again in my almost-80s.”

That same year, Ellen DeGeneres asked Fonda if Redford was a good kisser, and she was quick to answer in the affirmative. Fonda said, “The only problem with working with Bob is that I just look into his [eyes] and I kinda fall into his eyes and forget my dialogue.” But despite that confession, even he wasn’t her best kiss.

And no, Fonda and Redford never actually hooked up off-screen. Though their celluloid romances have always been very believable, they really did just remain friends. Redford’s been married twice, first to Lola Van Wagenen and then to Sibylle Szaggars. He wed the latter in 2009, the same year Fonda started a relationship with music producer Richard Perry.

Perry and Fonda looked set to go the distance at first. They started living together and Fonda was, naturally, remarkably open about their private life. In 2012 she told The Sun newspaper, “The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely want to discover that before dying. It has happened with Richard, I feel totally secure with him.”

But then in January 2017 Fonda and Perry announced that they were breaking up, albeit on friendly terms. At the time an anonymous insider told Closer Weekly magazine, “When her kids learned that Jane was no longer happy, they encouraged her to do whatever she had to do to make her life better.”

So was Perry Fonda’s favorite kiss? No, it actually goes back further than that. The end of the relationship with Perry seemingly prompted Fonda to make some changes in her life, though. “I’m living on my own – and I love living on my own,” she told the Daily Express newspaper in 2018. “I don’t think I’ll ever live with a man again.”

Fonda may be a little hard to please when it comes to relationships, then. Kissing, too. In 2018 she told The Guardian that she didn’t like the way modern actors made out on screen. “I’m not a big mouth opener on camera,” she said. “Every time I see a love scene with young ones they come at each other like this…” and mimed a gaping mouth.

Fonda continued, “…and I’m thinking, ‘Well, where does the fun come in?’ Because the fun is the sensuality of lips. And then slowly moving beyond that. But not trying to swallow each other. I would not want to go right into a tongue kiss, quite frankly.” So there’s a vivid detail.

If that was the sort of description Jimmy Fallon expected when he invited Fonda on his show, he most definitely got it. As soon as the option for “First Kiss” came up, she recalled, “I was in summer stock Hyannis Port, Maine. And I had a crush on the stage manager, whose name was James Franciscus.”

Does that name sound familiar? “The audience is too young to know who that was,” Fonda said, but some older viewers might have had their memory jolted. Franciscus was the star of the 1963 TV show Mr. Novak, and like Fonda herself he was considered a pin-up of the era.

“He was so handsome. And he walked me out to the end of a pier and he kissed me,” Fonda added, with no small amount of enthusiasm. “And the stars began to whirl and the pier began to shake, and my knees gave way and I slid down to a pile at his feet.” Fallon had to fan himself with his hand.

The star said, “I’ve never had a kiss like that ever since.” And Fallon was enthralled, replying, “Holy moly, I’ve never heard a story like that. Oh my god, I feel like I had my first kiss.” Fonda added, “It was like Hemingway, you know, in The Sun Also Rises. The earth shook.”

Fallon quipped, “I’m going to make sure my wife isn’t watching tonight.” But he’ll have to make sure she never picks up Fonda’s autobiography, either. In her 2005 book My Life So Far, Fonda went into more detail about her romance with the actor, including losing her virginity to Franciscus when she was 18.

Franciscus himself was 20 years old when the pair met for the first time. Fonda recalled in her memoir, “On the first day of the [theater] program, we were introduced to the stage manager, James Franciscus, whom everyone called Goey, and the moment I saw him the complexion of the summer changed.”

If you’re wondering about the nickname, Franciscus told Motion Picture Magazine in 1964, “My middle name is Grover, but when I arrived on the scene, my brother couldn’t pronounce it – it came out sounding like Goey. So, I’ve been Goey to my family and friends ever since.” And Fonda was definitely one of those friends.

“I was smitten,” Fonda admitted in her memoir. “My previous inarticulate philanderings had not prepared me for true romance, and I was very shy with him.” Franciscus felt the same way about her as well. And they were also connected by their love of the arts: Fonda was fascinated by the “heroic and profound” poem Franciscus was penning.

The romance blossomed. “I discovered there were things about Goey to like beyond his looks and the fact that he went to Yale: he was smart and literate; he had a sense of humor, lived in New York City, and was a preppy (only by virtue of Yale), but didn’t belong to a fraternity,” Fonda wrote. “His family wasn’t rich... and he had a passion. Other boys I’d liked had hobbies but no passion.”

And yes, Fonda detailed that glorious first kiss in the memoir as well. “When our lips parted I stepped back and had to sit down, plunk,” she recalled. “Everything was swirling: the sea, the sky... It was my first swoon and while it wouldn’t be my last, there’s something special about that first swoon – and the boy who caused it.”

But as we know, the relationship didn’t last in the end. A year after Fonda began dating Franciscus, the romance started to fade. “The relationship dimmed,” she explained in My Life So Far. “I was getting bored. He seemed stuck. His poem problematic. He could never get past the first act.”

Franciscus proposed to Fonda just as the relationship was hitting this rough patch, and she said no. This sounded the death knell for their romance. Fonda wrote that after that “it became impossible for us to continue seeing each other as friends, and my first real love affair came to a whimpering end after a year and a half.”

So the pair went their separate ways. They never appeared in a movie together, despite how interesting that would have been – but they did by all accounts remain pals. Franciscus described Fonda as “a fine girl” to Motion Picture Magazine in 1964 and looked back affectionately on their travels together.

Sadly, Franciscus passed away in 1991, dying of emphysema at the age of just 57. He’d been married twice, and he had four children and two grandchildren by the time he died. In that same year Fonda – who’d been living a more low-key life out of the public eye – married her third husband Ted Turner. Time had taken the former lovers on very different journeys.

Fonda’s not looking for any more relationships these days. In October 2020 The Ellen DeGeneres Show guest host Tiffany Haddish asked the 82-year-old actress about her love life, and she answered, “I don’t have time. I’m old and I’ve had so much of it. I don’t need it right now because I’m too busy!”

But people remain interested in whether the one-time sex symbol will settle down or even marry again. In March 2021 Fonda told Harper’s Bazaar magazine, “I don’t want to be in a relationship, a sexual relationship, again. I don’t have that desire.” And some of that was her feeling she couldn’t be intimate with a man any more.

“It’s not [the men]. It’s me,” Fonda mused. “If a guy had come along and said, ‘Come on, Fonda, show up,’ I would have run away scared. I was attracted to men who never would have done that to me because they couldn’t necessarily show up themselves.” Still, never say never. And if she does start dating again you can bet she’ll tell Jimmy Fallon all about it.