Jane Fonda

Trying to meet her

In the 1980s I was given the opportunity to become a suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying salesman, opening up an office in Santa Monica, California with my territory being West of the Mississippi.

The product was Model 204, database management software that a company could use to better manage interrelated corporate data, for either the whole company or a particular project. It ran on the large IBM mainframe computers of the day, which required a special air-conditioned room and cost around $2 million dollars ($6 million in 2025 dollars). (Note that today’s iPhones are 5000 times more powerful than those huge machines were.)

Products like Model 204 were designed to allow a company to achieve the goal of actually managing its business on one of those machines. It was a hot and competitive market, which is why my company wanted in. Model 204 sold for $250,000 ($750,000 in 2025 dollars).

The company said they would locate us, my wife and me and our two kids, to anywhere we wanted and we chose Santa Monica, a Los Angeles town on the ocean. We picked it mainly because we had friends living in the neighboring town of Venice Beach.

Now the town was jokingly called “The People’s Republic of Santa Monica” because Tom Hayden, a 1960s political activist of Chicago Seven fame, had gotten himself elected mayor. He was also married to another famous political activist of the time, movie star Jane Fonda, known by her detractors as “Hanoi Jane” for her efforts in reaching out to the North Vietnamese during that war.

Here’s something else to know about them, they didn’t want to live in a Beverly Hills movie star house and, as the papers put it, lived in a bohemian neighborhood in Santa Monica California. It turns out the house we rented was in that same bohemian neighborhood, just one street over from theirs. I thought, how cool! Maybe I’ll get to meet Jane Fonda.

Well we never saw either of them, they just weren’t out and about, but we did trick or treat their house on Halloween with our 3 year old daughter. Tom Hayden answered the door and, having become a real politician, kissed our baby. We didn’t see Jane though. Sigh.

By the 1980s Viet Nam and the Chicago Democratic Convention were things of the past, but Jane was still a political activist. She was working, at the time, with protestors trying to stop the construction of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Francisco. She and other activists had chained themselves together in the roads to delay the heavy equipment. It wasn’t working.

While never meeting Jane, we did enjoy the neighborhood, being able to walk to the beach and along the boardwalk, which often appears in movies, with the Santa Monica pier at one end and a guy dressed in all white Arabian garb roller skating up and down playing Jimmy Hendrix style tunes on an electric guitar through an amp in a pack on his back. (I just Googled him, his name is Harry Perry and he’s still doing it!)

I started my work calling on various companies in my territory and following up on leads. One was Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) looking for a database management system to help them handle a major project of theirs. I told them all about Model 204. We had a good sales pitch since it was designed and built for NSA to manage all their spook data. PG&E was interested.

They didn’t want to just buy the software, they wanted a couple of applications written for them as well as part of the deal. My company didn’t do that, but there were a couple of fellows doing business in Washington DC, calling themselves DAGAR, that had done work for NSA using Model 204, and were interesting in being subcontractors for us on the PG&E deal.

I thought this was great and I started putting together one of my first business deals where PG&E would buy the software and DAGAR, working for us, would provide the two applications they wanted. We negotiated the contract and requirements for the applications and got started on the work.

It wasn’t too long before DAGAR had finished their part and I went in to close the deal, where they were to accept the software and write us a check. That didn’t happen. PG&E said the work wasn’t what they’d asked for and that there were requirements we hadn’t met. I explained that they hadn’t specified those. They said they needed them and wouldn’t pay without them. So I went back to DAGAR and they did the additional work for the extra features.

Once that was done I headed back up to San Francisco where PG&E informed me they still weren’t happy and needed extra features, which I explained weren’t part of the deal, but they got huffy and… OK, back to DAGAR who then added the additional features.

(We learned afterwards the PG&E had a reputation in California for beating up on their vendors.)

We went through this cycle a third time, and they started a fourth, trying to get even more work out of us without paying any more than originally negotiated. I told them that we’d done the work, and it was time for them to pay for the software and the services.

PG&E didn’t let it drop like that. I got a call from the PG&E corporate lawyer who summoned me to San Francisco. I got there and entered his office, which is bigger than the room you’re reading this in. (I don’t care, I’m sure it was bigger.)

He was sitting behind this huge desk and had me sit in a stuffed chair in front that sort of sank down so whoever was in it would be below him. He was going for maximum intimidation.

He leaned across the desk, took on a stern demeanor, and told me that I didn’t understand the degree of trouble I, personally, was in. I asked what that was. Aiming to scare the shit out of me he said: “We can hold you personally responsible for delays in the construction of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.”

It probably wasn’t the reaction he was going for, because I was having a hard time suppressing a huge grin that just wanted to break out. All I could think of when he said that was: “wait until Jane Fonda hears this!”

Epilog

My boss, Bob Roda (he appears in The Interview story) was a much better business man than I was. I told him the situation. He called up PG&E and told them he was sorry they were unhappy with the software and applications and that it was no problem, we’d just uninstall the software and applications and they wouldn’t owe us a thing.

They paid up the next day.

Despite my alleged role in the delay that power plant I never did get to meet Jane and tell her my story.

Post Epilog

Recently my grown grandson had a job doing technical maintenance on nuclear power plants. He’s was on the road and gave me a call, and I decided to tell him this story. He said “you have to be kidding Grandpa, I’m working at Diablo Canyon right now!”