As soon as people find out what Ann Czaja does for a living, she knows what’ll come next: First, “Do you have chocolate with you?” And then, “How can I get your job?”
The job is master chocolatier with Lindt Chocolate, the world’s leading producer of premium chocolate. “We are experts in the field of confectionary chocolate,” Czaja tells Glamour from her home in New Hampshire. “All of us who are master chocolatiers did classic apprenticeships as chocolatier pastry chefs. We honed our skills and have devoted our lives to chocolate,” she says, adding that there are worse things to devote your life to. She’s also the senior product developer in research and development for Lindt, as well as their brand spokesperson. “I get to create the chocolate, but I also get to teach about chocolate.”
Growing up, Czaja didn’t have much exposure to sweets. “It was a treat now and then,” she remembers. But after moving to Switzerland, she fell for great chocolate. And now of course, she is more than an enthusiast. She’s a pro. Because working with chocolate doesn’t just mean having an obsessive love of chocolate—thought Czaja definitely does. It means having a refined palate as a product developer, she explains. “It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time.”
When we reach her—approximately a week into most cities stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of coronavirus—Czaja says she’s still going into Lindt’s USA headquarters two times a week and senior management is assessing next steps. But before the crisis, Czaja would arrive at 7:30 A.M. and not leave until 6 P.M. “Usually, I’m in the lab making prototypes, or meeting with marketing, or teaching new hires and on-boarding them with chocolate knowledge,” she says of a typical day.
The constant, she notes, is tasting chocolate. “The other day I probably ate a dozen truffles while making samples of new LINDOR prototypes, but [otherwise] the secret is to spit,” she reveals. “I have to spit. I used to do a lot of quality checks, and I’m on panels that tastes the cocoa beans, plus other products, so I eat a lot of chocolate.” (For the record, she is also a two-time triathlete. Isn’t life all about balance?)
Her hard work has paid off. In fact, you’ve probably sampled it yourself. Some of her newest products include the Lindt Classic Recipe 45% and 55% milk chocolate with cocoa bars, now on store shelves. For Czaja, the real perk of the job is seeing one of her ideas come to fruition—in signature packaging. “They’re all my babies,” she says.
Here, Czaja talks the road not taken, not getting into medical school, and the power of a mid-life pivot.
Master chocolatier Ann Czaja in the Lindt laboratory working on the brand’s new 45% and 55% milk chocolate with cocoa bars.
The logical part of me knew this feeling could just be part of “adulting,” the realization that the bloom can’t stay on the rose forever. But the voice inside me that I’d learned to listen to to get me the career I had said I needed a breather. I told my husband that night that I had to quit. My exact words were, “I need a break. I can’t keep this up. I just want to stop.”
“What happens after that?” he asked. I didn’t know. I’d never quit anything before.
His next question was, “Should we go travel?”
He had worked in the restaurant business his entire life. When he moved to New York from the midwest to be with me two years earlier, he’d taken a job that he didn’t love but that paid the bills. He put in long hours that were at the opposite end of my day. Weekends together were non-existent. As I finished at the office in the early afternoon, he would head into the restaurant. He’d get home around 2 a.m, an hour before I got up for work. Twice we had dates in that late-night-early-morning window: an after-work drink and dinner for him, an early morning coffee and breakfast for me. On one of those occasions we were sitting in a diner near our apartment around 3 a.m. He was eating pancakes and an ice cream sundae; I had a BLT. The TV on the wall suddenly played the all-too-familiar Special Report music and the graphics reserved for breaking news. William and Kate’s first baby had just been born. My phone started to buzz with emails, and the alerts rolled in. Date over. I kissed him goodbye and headed into the studio.
So that night, when he asked, “Should we go travel?” I didn’t hesitate. I pictured a year of uninterrupted dates and going to sleep at the same time.
Yes.
To be clear, I didn’t want to eat, pray, or love. I wasn’t in the dark days of a breakup, and my job hadn’t ended. I didn’t need to find myself. There was no crisis (yet), but I knew that a pre-emptive strike was needed. A pause for pause’s sake. It wasn’t so much an epiphany as that internal voice, telling me this was the right thing to do. It was the same voice that had guided my previous life-changing decisions—studying abroad, moving to New York, marrying my husband. It was always louder and clearer than the strains of fear and anxiety and confusion that often haunt big choices. When this voice spoke, it was never a matter of should we do this, but rather how soon can we?
Over the next few weeks we hatched a plan to leave New York and began to tell family and friends. Some people thought it was completely crazy, that we were being irresponsible. Just as many said they wished they were doing the same. I gave my bosses 10-weeks notice. It was by far the scariest moment of the entire process, not because I had doubts, but because once I uttered the words, I knew there was no going back. (I spent the moments before the meeting panicking in a bathroom stall.) The first executive reacted in disbelief, then said he understood that I might need a break and asked if I wanted to take off a month or two or even six, as a sabbatical. He suggested that he could find a different spot for me at the show, with different hours. I was honest and direct with him: I wanted a year off to travel, and my last day would be mid-January. I think he mistook this announcement as a whim. He ended the meeting encouraging me to think it over. But I’d made up my mind.
Encourage she has. Through the Tory Burch Foundation, the designer started the Embrace Ambition summit last year, to connect female entrepreneurs for professional development and personal growth in an honest and meaningful way. Now in its second year, the event has grown beyond a one-day gathering in New York into a week-long series in Tory Burch stores across the country. (It’s free to attend, but you have to apply for a ticket. “They had to write an essay about why they should come,” Burch says. “In the first 24 hours, we had 1,200 applicants with 1,200 essays that were heart-wrenching and beautiful and inspiring.”) The series kicks off in Philadelphia, but if you can’t make it in person, you can catch the conversation on a live stream. (There are also guidebooks, articles, and more to keep the conversation going all year.)
Founding a company, being a creative director, CEO, philanthropist, mentor, and mother doesn’t come without its bumps in the road. “I’ve been through a fair amount in 14 years,” she says. “Being a very private person, going through things in a very public way is not always easy. Protecting my family, building a business, [running a] business in 2008 when markets changed overnight, bringing a team along that believes in you—it’s not always easy.” But harnessing her ambition made things a little easier. Soak up some of her wisdom here.
Throw out any preconceptions about the word “ambition.” “In retrospect, I’ve always been a bit ambitious in various ways,” says Burch. But she never really thought of herself that way until she was called ‘ambitious’ by The New York Times. “I remember the exact moment when he [the journalist] said ‘Wow, you’re ambitious.’ And I was like, ‘Iow, that’s such a rude thing to say.’ It was the first article written on our company, and it seemed like a negative,” she recalls. A friend helped change her thinking. “She called and said, ‘You know, I love the article, but you shied away from the word ambition.’ I was a bit taken aback. But I realized that she was absolutely right. It really struck a chord and really set the trajectory for the next years to come on how I felt about the word, what it meant to me, what I felt it should mean.” The change in how people think of the word may not change overnight; it can be a process, like it was for Burch. “Over time I made this shift of when someone called me ambitious, I took it as a compliment,” she says. “I redefined my relationship with the word. It’s still something that I think about to this day, and I describe myself as ambitious. I’m proud of that.”
Burch at her Spring 2019 show during New York Fashion Week.
WWD/REX/Shutterstock
Your personal ambition might not be obvious—but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to find it. “I have always been ambitious—starting a company is not for the unambitious—but it has manifested in different ways throughout my life,” Burch says. “I started a sorority as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. I became an entrepreneur before entrepreneurship was talked about. And, of course, being a mom was one of my greatest ambitions. Identifying and prioritizing your ambitions can be tricky. Mine came at a crossroads when I found out I was pregnant with my third son. I had just been offered the position as president of a big fashion company, but I knew I couldn’t take the job and be the kind of mom I wanted to be to three boys under the age of four.” After a lot of thinking, she decided to jump. “It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” she says. “When I left, I had no idea that I would begin conceptualizing our company. Taking a step back gave me a new perspective, and a new ambition began to emerge. Ambitions evolve with time.”
By now, the word’s out about Harvey Weinstein: Actresses’ stories about former Hollywood heavyweight producer allegedly harassing and assaulting them helped catalyze the #MeToo movement’s 2017 shift into high gear. What played out would not only expose and take down Weinstein, who continues to deny the allegations, but many (many) other high-profile men. Now, Lena Headey, who plays ice queen Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, has talked in more detail about her experiences with Weinstein, alleging that he hurt her career for a decade.
Headey had previously opened up in an October 2017 series of tweets about her interactions with him. In 2005, she tweeted, he made a suggestive comment to her at the Venice Film Festival, which she laughed off. Some time after, she wrote, he asked her to come up to his hotel room to get a script. Her body, she wrote, “went into high alert,” and Headey said that she spoke up for herself: “I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen.” He apparently became “furious,” and when his room key didn’t work, Headey wrote, he walked her back to the elevator, holding her arm tightly and telling her not to speak to anyone about it.
After these incidents, Headey says, she was virtually iced out of her career for almost a decade. She told The Sunday Times that refusing the advances she alleges meant she barely saw any roles from Miramax, the studio Weinstein co-founded.
“After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘Fuck, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life,’ because I did two jobs for Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing,” she told the newspaper.
A decade with little to no work is hard on anyone, but luckily Headey landed on her feet with one of the biggest roles on one of the biggest shows on television. Weinstein, on the other hand, has recently lost his defense lawyer and is due back in court March 7 for a pre-trial hearing after being indicted last May on charges of rape. His trial, which now includes five charges of sexual assault, is scheduled to begin in May.
I’ll be honest: I love The Big Bang Theory, but I have no idea what super-asymmetry is, nor do I think I’ll understand it anytime soon. But that’s why I write about TV and not science. For Sheldon and Amy, though, super-asymmetry is their baby—and it’s a storyline that Big Bang producers have said will feature heavily into this final season.
But it doesn’t take a scientist to know that being intellectually smart has nothing to do with street smarts or common sense. Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard have been poster boys for that notion since day one—and tonight’s episode, “The Planetarium Collision”—proved my point tenfold.
The episode begins with Amy in the lab working on her own project when Sheldon interrupts to discuss super-asymmetry. Amy says she’s busy, but Sheldon doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does, but he thinks Amy will want to hear what he has to say. Whatever the case, it’s typical Sheldon behavior.
So while Amy is working late, Sheldon recruits Penny as his audience of one to go over the latest super-asymmetry developments. (Perhaps she can explain to me what’s going on? Because I still have no clue.) During their talk, Sheldon confides that it feels like Amy hasn’t had time for their joint project ever since they returned from their honeymooon. He doesn’t understand why she puts her own “dull” projects over their collaboration. It’s frustrating that he’s so clueless about his wife’s passions, but this is Sheldon we’re talking about. Amy didn’t marry him because he says the right things.
Sheldon doesn’t always do the right thing either. In the next scene, he pays a visit to President Siebert and tells him that Amy is too distracted by the commitments she has to her own lab. Maybe he can free her up from that so she can focus on her project with Sheldon?
This is wrong on so many levels—Sheldon really should know better by now—but it’s also obvious that he thinks he’s doing a good thing. Case in point: He couldn’t wait to tell Amy the good news; it’s not like he was hiding this from her. Plus, as we later learn, Amy also told Sheldon she was spread too thin and wished she had more time to focus on her research. So while Sheldon’s move was selfish, I believe he didn’t understand the consequences of his actions. President Siebert, on the other hand, should be fired for his.
PHOTO: Michael Yarish/Warner Bros. Entertainment
When Amy returns to her lab later in the day, she finds a colleague—Dr. Park—in her place. He says he’s taking over now that she’s taking a temporary sabbatical to focus on other work. Amy is beside herself, completely at a loss for how this could have happened. Turns out, President Siebert took Sheldon’s suggestion and never bothered to confirm such a huge internal change with Dr. Fowler herself. Is that even legal? How does someone go on sabbatical without knowing they’re going on sabbatical?
Furious, Amy drops by President Siebert’s office. Siebert says he’s confused because Sheldon assured him this is what Amy wanted. Sheldon—who’s finally starting to catch on how messed up this is—tries to play dumb by adding, “Sure, so a couple of men get together behind closed doors to decide the fate of a woman’s career! I thought we had moved past this!”
Quite a concept, isn’t it? A man making a decision for a woman without actually consulting that woman or listening to what she wants. Infuriating much?
President Siebert apologies and assures Amy that she’s very important to the university. But he says it’s not so easy to course correct and get back her project. I’m not Amy, but if I was, I would have sued the man right there.
The next time we see Sheldon and Amy, they’ve gone to bed angry. Sheldon has a dream with Arthur Jeffries (Bob Newhart) where he learns once again why he was wrong. Sheldon wakes Amy and says he feels terrible about what he did and didn’t mean to be malicious. Amy says he wasn’t malicious, he was selfish. Then she tells Sheldon that the real issue is that she’s afraid of getting lost in their relationship. That the things that are hers are getting subsumed into theirs. Sheldon thanks her for explaining her fears to him—and for using the word subsumed—and the credits roll.
But the problem is that for most women, these infuriating issues in the workplace (and a marriage) aren’t tied up in 22 minutes or with the arrival of Bob Newhart. President Siebert most likely gets to keep his job without being reprimanded for nearly sabotaging a woman’s career. Amy may not. And while Sheldon instigated all of this, Siebert should have done his due diligence before signing off on such a major development. He didn’t. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out how wrong that is.
My very last question for Jane Fonda is rather broad: “What do you think of being deemed an icon?”
“Well,” she starts before a brief pause, “an icon is somebody that you hold up as an example to represent something. And when you mention their name people know what it is you’re talking about. And, I guess, in my case, it’s a strong, brave woman who hasn’t steered away from controversy. A woman who, more than anything, has kept going.”
Jane Fonda’s enduring tenacity—that keep goingness, even at 80—isn’t lost on me. In 2012, my own mother lost her husband, my stepfather, to a lengthy and laborious battle with liver disease and soon found herself in a particular state of limbo. Here was a woman who, after 63 years of traveling the world, raising five children (three were triplets!), becoming a successful financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, and imbuing her Arkansas community with female empowerment, was forced to put life on hold for months on end to nurse and nurture her partner of 21 years through his final days. And then, after he died, forced to renegotiate the world as a widowed woman of “a certain age.”
Some months into this new chapter I reminded Mom of a quote I’d recently unearthed by Jane Fonda. “We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the metaphor, the old metaphor: You’re born, you peak at midlife, and decline into decrepitude,” she said in a 2011 TED Talk. “A more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase—the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity.”
Fonda was referring to what she dubbed her “Third Act,” the point in time when age isn’t a burden but rather a period of reinvention, reinvigoration, and, in a sense, fearlessness. Eight years later and my mother still clings to that quote as she, now at 70 and in her own Third Act, continues up her staircase, having found a whole new joy in her career in lieu of retirement, traveling internationally at least three times a year, and regularly wearing out her grandchildren with her near constant motion.
When I tell Fonda this, I can practically hear her smile on the other end of the phone. “It makes me so happy you told me that,” she says. “You know, when you’re my age, you have to continue to be an example. You can’t just say it—you have to do it. Then women like your mother will say, ‘Oh, if Jane can do it, so can I!’ It’s nice to be viewed that way at 80. At 30, if you had told me that I would live this long and be considered an icon, I would’ve told you you were out of your friggin’ mind!”
And yet, what Fonda continues to accomplish as a proud octogenarian would raise even millennial eyebrows: The fifth season of Fonda’s hit Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, which she co-leads along with Lily Tomlin, premieres in 2019; earlier this year she appeared alongside Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen in the $80+-million-grossing comedy Book Club; and, this month on HBO, Fonda stars in a documentary that looks back on both her life and nearly 60-year career. The title? Jane Fonda in Five Acts.
PHOTO: Getty Images
PHOTO: Shutterstock
Over the years Fonda, who took home two Oscars for her roles in ‘Klute’ (1971) and ‘Coming Home’ (1978), became one of Hollywood’s most impressive hyphenates.
PHOTO: Alamy
Mere minutes into the two-hour retrospective and it’s clear that Fonda has always had her own definition of a life well lived. As the daughter of famed actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw (who committed suicide when Fonda was just 12 years old), Fonda’s complicated relationship with celebrity didn’t bring her to her eventual craft until her early twenties. After studying art in Paris, Fonda had returned to the states, where she met legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg, who helped her channel sensitivities and insecurities into dramatic motivation. After taking Strasberg’s class, Fonda made her Broadway debut in 1960’s There Was A Little Girl, which earned her first of two career Tony nominations. An illustrious film career followed. Movies like Tall Story (1960), Cat Ballou (1965), and Barefoot in the Park (1967), with Robert Redford, established her as a bankable movie star. Barbarella (1968), directed by her first husband, french auteur director Robert Vadim, made her an international sex symbol. With meatier, more mature roles in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Klute (1971), Julia (1977) and Coming Home (1978), she became an awards darling, receiving best actress Oscar nominations for all four, and actually taking trophies home for Klute and Coming Home.
But the late sixties and seventies also found Fonda adopting a more profound role: that of political activist. An intense critic of the Vietnam War, she began organizing anti-war efforts. And, in 1973, she married fellow activist and politician Tom Hayden. (The pair divorced in 1990.)
Her newly-ignited passion roused detractors. Fiery pro-war Americans—who deemed Fonda as nothing more than “just an actress”—bitterly turned on her. In 1972, Fonda made a visit to Hanoi in order to get a first-hand glimpse of the effects the war and was subsequently photographed smiling and laughing while sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapon. “That’s one of the only things from my past that still hurts me,” Fonda says, referring to the U.S. citizens who nicknamed her “Hanoi Jane.” (Fonda, in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, claimed she was manipulated into taking the picture.) “The continuing of the lies—I was the victim of fake news, and it’s painful that people still believe that about me,” she says. “It also pains me because it means there are a lot of people out there that still don’t understand what the Vietnam War was really about. And that is scary. If you don’t understand, then we will do it again.”
Despite the setback, Fonda was steadfast in her advocacy while also maintaining her career as an actress. Life, it seemed, began to exist on two planes: If Fonda wasn’t starring in seminal films, she was militant in her support for everything from the Black Panther movement to Native American rights to victims of sexual abuse. “I remember when we were doing 9 to 5, she was making calls in between takes to raise money for one of [ex] Tom [Hayden]’s campaigns,” says her Grace and Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin. “Jane’s commitment is profound. If she feels like she is doing the right thing, she’s fearless.”
PHOTO: Rebecca Ponsdomenech
Fonda (right) with American labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez in 1979.
Through the decades, and long before it was trendy, Fonda figured out how to make Hollywood and activism service each other. In fact, her now-legendary ascent to aerobics guru—starting in 1982 with Jane Fonda’s Workout, which launched a home-exercise revolution—was in service to her side hustle. Over the course of her career Fonda has produced 23 workout videos (that have sold more than 17 million copies) along with five books and 13 audio tape. The success of these projects has given Fonda the freedom to further dedicate herself to causes like the Women’s Media Center, a non-profit she, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem founded in 2005 to champion women in the media through advocacy, leadership training, and original content creation. “Public speaking. Lobbying Washington—all of that is a lot easier when you have a hit behind you,” she says. “So I’m not apologizing for being a celebrity anymore. And I’m not considering stopping acting. I’m going to keep it up as long as I can because I know that helps my activism.”
And her efforts have inspired a new generation of Hollywood hyphenates. “Jane could easily just sit back and be like, ‘I made it and I can do whatever the hell I want,'” says Brooklyn Decker, who plays Fonda’s daughter in Grace and Frankie. “But she still looks to the people who aren’t being represented in this country and she says, How can I help you? She’s still fighting for people who can’t or don’t know how to fight for themselves. She understands that ‘Fonda’ is bigger than her.”
As big as the name may seem, though, it seems the Fonda Movement hasn’t yet peaked. “I am still smack dab in my third act now. I have another 10 years until the end of my third act,” she says. Indeed, this calendar year includes a push for employment reform on behalf of domestic workers and a potential 9 to 5 sequel. “I don’t know whether to call it a coda or an epilogue. But I am going to do a lot,” she says. “There’s a lot on my horizon.”
Jane Fonda in Five Acts premieres on HBO on Monday, September 24. This profile is part of a full week honoring iconic women. For more, head here.
