NEW YORK - Hollywood actress Jane Fonda waged a decades-long battle against bulimia, unbeknownst to her friends, family members and ex-husband media mogul Ted Turner, she writes in a tell-all book set to hit US stores soon.
In excerpts of "My Life So Far" published in this week's edition of Time Magazine, Fonda recounts her 30-year battle with the eating disorder which began as a teenager in high school.
"We would binge and purge only before school dances or just before we were going home for the holidays, and then we would ferret away all the chocolate brownies and ice cream we could get and gobble it up until our stomachs were swollen as though we were five months pregnant," she writes in the book.
"Then we would put our fingers down our throats and make ourselves throw it all up," Fonda writes.
"For me the disease lasted, in one form or another, from sophomore year in boarding school through two marriages and two children, until I was in my early 40s. My husbands never knew, nor did my children or any of my friends and colleagues."
After her career in movies slowed, Fonday had a second encounter with fame in the 1970s, as a health and fitness guru who appeared to maintain her impossibly svelte physique via rigorous exercise.
In the autobiography, which will be published in the United States next month, Fonda also details the three-way sexual encounters she arranged for her first husband Roger Vadim, and the unraveling of a later marriage to CNN founder Ted Turner.
Fonda won an Oscar for her portrayal of a prostitute in the 1971 film "Klute" achieved pop icon status for her role in the 1968 sci-fi sex romp "Barbarella" directed by Vadim.
04/03/2005 18:21 GMT