While the Grace and Frankie stars are undeniably close, you may be surprised to learn that Jane Fonda is Jane #2 in Lily Tomlin’s world. Jane #1, as she coined it, will always be her partner of 50 years, Jane Wagner.
Wagner is a writer, director, and producer herself—and instantly impressed Tomlin with her work when they first met in the early 70s. “I was doing my Edith Ann album in ’71,” Tomlin recalled in a 2006 interview. “She’d done a thing on television called J.T.—it was about a kid in Harlem—and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she’d ever written.”
Fast forward to the present, and the two have a relationship that’s still going strong. From coming out to the world to collaborating on award-winning projects to contemplating the idea of children, here’s everything you need to know about Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s decades-long romance.
They immediately clicked.
After Tomlin asked Wagner for help with her comedy album, she “didn’t hear from her for a while” after reaching out to her.
“Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away,” Tomlin told Metro Weekly.
Tomlin waited until her mother died to publicly come out as gay.
“My mother would have died. Literally. If she’d lived to see me come out,” the actress told The Telegraph in 2015. “Bless her heart, she was Southern, basically fundamentalist, but she was very witty and sweet and kind, and she adored Jane. She died 10 years ago. She was 91. So that was always kind of a dilemma for me.”
In 1975, TIME approached Tomlin with the opportunity to come out on the cover of its magazine, and even though it was “a hard decision to make,” Tomlin ultimately decided to turn it down because she wanted to be acknowledged for her acting, not her sexual identity, she told Ellen DeGeneres in an interview alongside Fonda.
Tomlin and Wagner have always loved to work together.
Wagner is an experienced screenwriter, and she’s worked on several projects with her wife, including Tomlin’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (for which she won a Tony Award in 1986) and the movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
“We share similar feelings about people and about the world,” Tomlin said of Wagner in 1988. “She’s able to verbalize it and I’m able to physicalize it. She writes satirically but tenderly, and she loves farce and black comedy and broad slapstick. When you put all this together and make an audience laugh and be moved, it’s just glorious.”
They finally got married in 2013 in an intimate ceremony.
Tomlin told People they tried to be incognito when they went for their marriage license. “We went in Van Nuys because if anyone should see us, we didn’t want them to write about us,” she said.
They got married at a friend’s house a few days later. “It was sweet,” Tomlin said. “We didn’t have any rings, so I went into our jewelry and was digging out rings. I said, ‘We have to have some kind of rings!’”
But ultimately decided to not have children together.
Tomlin says being a mother was never an “aspiration” of hers, but the couple did consider having children at one point. “[Jane] has a very handsome nephew and we thought, ‘Well, we could get his sperm and I could bear his child,’” Tomlin told The Guardian in 2015. “In retrospect, we say every day, ‘I’m so glad we didn’t have any children.’ When I think of the world now, I don’t want to even deal with having to raise a child.”
But even back in 1973, Tomlin publicly spoke about not wanting to have kids on The Johnny Carson Show—which was a big deal at the time. “If you didn’t want to get married or have children, well, that’s off the scale. So the audience just got dead silent,” Tomlin told Vanity Fair in 2013, which the outlet recalled as a feminist moment.
Tomlin broke the ice with a joke. “And I said what I said, ‘Well, I like children, but I don’t want to bear children. By the way, who has custody of yours?’ And everyone laughed. It diffused the tension in the moment.”
They’ve been together 50 years now.
Tomlin confirmed the milestone number in her interview with DeGeneres. Their secret to long-lasting love? Mutual “admiration and respect,” she told People.
Despite their differences—Tomlin prefers to keep a schedule and likes to garden; Wagner constantly needs to be reminded of appointments and rather stay indoors and read—they’ve always complemented one another.
“We really care about each other,” Wagner said in a 1994 interview with the Chicago Tribune. “I love her,” Tomlin echoed. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to her.”
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