CELEBRITY SKIN Not-so-plain Jane makes her own calamity BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

I never thought badly of Jane Fonda, until very recently.

Like most Americans, I never gave her a hell of a lot of thought, certainly not as much as she assumes we all do.

As one of the millions of Americans who opposed the Vietnam War — millions who eventually became a large majority in this country — I didn’t necessarily judge her negatively for going to Hanoi to say the things that many Americans were saying and thinking back home. I also remember her as Barbarella, a film that was quite the shocker in the late ’60s. By today’s standards, however, we could probably catch it on daytime television, no problem.

So aside from not caring much about Jane Fonda’s politics, I never cared much about her sexual daring, onscreen or off. I could probably have spent the rest of my life not caring who Fonda slept with, where, when, and under what circumstances. So her recent allegation that her late ex-husband, French director Roger Vadim, liked to invite others into their bed, elicits a deafening, "MORE THAN I NEED TO KNOW!!!!" Fonda elaborates that she not only participated in these threesomes with Vadim and whomever, she actually solicited some of the third parties.

Who wants or needs to know this? I don’t. You don’t. Fonda and Vadim’s daughter, Vanessa, probably really doesn’t.

Fonda says she lives in Atlanta now to be near Vanessa, who also makes her home there. My guess is that Vanessa might think about moving to Timbuktu — or anywhere on earth where her mother’s sexcapades aren’t common knowledge.

I am unlikely to pass judgment on consenting adults for their private sexual practices. But Fonda’s need to tell all, and her willing compliance makes her a whore — not because of the sex, but because she is apparently willing to use the sex tale to make more money, regardless of who may be destroyed in the process.

There is absolutely no reason why Fonda should spill her guts now, except to sell more copies of her new, (coincidentally) just released autobiography. She seems willing to throw herself, her children, and her grandchildren on the pyre of profit. They will all live with her indiscretions long after she, like the late Vadim, has gone to the grave.

Fonda tells 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl that she does not consider herself a good mother. She also says she volunteers in a program she funded in Atlanta schools to help young woman make good motherhood decisions. Fonda’s need to subject her own children to her private sexual history at this late date shows that her own maternal skills aren’t getting any better.

Her days in Hanoi, she says, showed extremely bad judgment. That may be, but it doesn’t appear that her judgment is improving with age.

She says her husbands molded her, each of the three in their own image. Does this mean that the pitiful woman we see before us is the residual of her years with her last husband, conservative billionaire Ted Turner? I doubt it. (I also doubt anybody could ever make Fonda do anything she didn’t want.)

A friend of mine went to the fancy Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, with Fonda. She says Jane did a lot of envelope-pushing even then and got away with it. My guess is she still is and still will.

Now to see who is dumber: Fonda or a public that will actually pay to read her drivel.