Hawks was talking to me about Wayne one time, and he said, “The thing about Duke is—he’s like a big kid. I don’t think, with all that’s happened to him over the years, that he’s ever really come to terms with it. Almost as though all of it was just a little over his head.” And Ford, when I told him that I was planning on giving Wayne a birthday present of a book, said, gruffly: “He’s got a book.”
Strangely, perhaps what they were both driving at was Wayne’s remarkable quality of innocence. He was, indeed, always a little childlike—bewildered, enthusiastic, generous, impatient, excitable, easily moved to laughter, and just as easily to tears. When he read a transcript of the interview we did, he roared with delight at every profanity, like a boy who’d just seen dirty words in print for the first time: “Jeez, isn’t it too bad you can’t talk like this in pictures!”
The Duke “went West,” as Ford used to say, eight months after our visit at the Beverly Hills bungalow. The fatal cancer, I learned, caused him excruciating pain. In 2004, Maureen O’Hara published her autobiography (‘Tis Herself), which contains a moving account of Wayne’s last days. They had done five films together, including Ford’s classic The Quiet Man; she adored Wayne, and referred to him as probably her best friend in show business.
And Lauren Bacall was very fond of Duke, having co-starred in two films with him, two decades apart, the second being his last, The Shootist. On Blood Alley (1955), while Bacall was married to Humphrey Bogart and despite their polar opposite political views, she got along extremely well with Wayne (she would tell me in 2002). She referred to the “chemistry” they had, saying one of the things that made him so appealing was how uncomfortable he seemed to be much of the time. When Wayne was asked for an autograph, he produced a card with a stamped autograph on it.
The final memorable image of John Wayne, just before that door closes on the outsider walking away from the home, in John Ford’s epic, The Searchers (1956), which is now universally accepted as being among the best of American films.
Duke brought Bacall home on the final night of shooting Blood Alley, after they’d had a few drinks and he’d got somewhat drunk. Bogart was waiting, and Wayne was noticeably awkward around him. It was hard to imagine the two of them in a movie, much less in the same room. Bacall called the moment “ridiculous.” Wayne quickly excused himself, saying his wife Pilar would be on him if he didn’t get home soon. A tabloid story said that Bacall and Wayne had fallen in love on The Shootist, though the paper had commented that they were the least likely couple on earth. Bacall told me she had known of his cancer during shooting, and how bad it was. The first locations were at high altitudes, and Wayne had breathing difficulties, often requiring oxygen. A few times he had to be held up. Duke never spoke of these things, however. One day on the set, while waiting for a setup, Wayne reached out and held her hand, saying nothing. Another morning, a crew member arrived remarking on what a beautiful day it was. Wayne’s response, Bacall said, made her understand what he was thinking: He said that “every day you wake up is a beautiful day …”
To me, Duke had always seemed slightly out of breath, as though he hadn’t yet caught up on the last twenty years, not to mention the last twenty minutes. Both Ford and Hawks truly loved him, of course, and even knowing him a little, as I did, it was pretty difficult not to like him. All this, and a lot more, obviously communicated itself to the public—still the top American star more than seventy years since his beginning. His visual legacy has defined him as the archetypal man of the American West—bold, innocent, profane, idealistic, wrongheaded, good-hearted, single-minded, quick to action, not given to pretension, essentially alone, ready for any adventure—no matter how grand or daring; larger, finally, than life or death.
Born Marion Michael Morrison, May 26, 1907, Winterset, IA; died June 11, 1979, Los Angeles, CA.
Selected starring features (with director):
1930: The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh)
1939: Stagecoach (John Ford)
1940: Dark Command (Walsh); The Long Voyage Home (Ford); Seven Sinners (Tay Garnett)
1942: Reap the Wild Wind (Cecil B. DeMille)
1945: They Were Expendable (Ford)
1948: Fort Apache (Ford); Red River (Howard Hawks); Wake of the Red Witch (Edward Ludwig); 3 Godfathers (Ford)
1949: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford); Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan)
1950: Rio Grande (Ford)
1952: The Quiet Man (Ford)
1953: Hondo (John Farrow)
1954: The High and the Mighty (William A. Wellman)
1956: The Searchers (Ford)
1957: The Wings of Eagles (Ford); Jet Pilot (Josef von Sternberg)
1959: Rio Bravo (Hawks); The Horse Soldiers (Ford)
1962: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford); Hatari! (Hawks)
1963: Donovan’s Reef (Ford); McLintock! (Andrew V. McLaglen)
1965: In Harm’s Way (Otto Preminger); The Sons of Katie Elder (Henry Hathaway)
1967: El Dorado (Hawks)
1969: True Grit (Hathaway)
1970: Rio Lobo (Hawks)
1975: Rooster Cogburn (Stuart Millar)
1976: The Shootist (Don Siegel)
13
HENRY FONDA
Henry Fonda was the star of the first Broadway stage production I ever saw; it was the summer of 1952, and I had just turned thirteen. The play, Point of No Return, was a kind of drawing-room drama, adapted by Paul Osborn from a novel by John Marquand. I went by myself and sat in the last row of the balcony for a Saturday matinee, and still recall the excitement of seeing (albeit from a considerable distance) a movie star whom I had seen a couple of times on the screen, one my parents were especially impressed with as an actor and as a person. I can’t now recall anything much about the play or the production except that I enjoyed it so much that going to the theater became a regular event in my life.
There was, however, one transfixing moment which came about because of my youth and the extreme differences between that time and the present. Somewhere in the middle of the play, Fonda’s character said, “Goddamn it.” I remember blushing deeply and glancing around quickly to see if anybody else had been as shocked. No one seemed even remotely troubled. In those days, and for about another decade and a half, there was no swearing on the screen, radio or television, and hearing a star of Fonda’s magnitude speak that way had an unforgettable impact. How tough it would be to similarly shock even an innocent teenager today!
Although I didn’t actually meet Henry Fonda until fourteen years later, I did see him on the Broadway stage in five other (more memorable) productions, two of them new works: as the defense attorney in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, directed by Charles Laughton, and with Anne Bancroft in the two-character play Two for the Seesaw, by William Gibson, directed by Arthur Penn. Fonda had a remarkable ease on the stage, a commanding presence though always as understated as he was on the screen. And a particular way of phrasing and speaking that was quietly mesmerizing, with a kind of raw beauty. I also saw him in revivals of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in which he was the quintessential Stage Manager; and in his enthralling one-man interpretation of the famous trial lawyer for an eponymous evening called Clarence Darrow. All by himself, for two hours, he filled the huge stage with the utmost simplicity and grace. Long before anyone was saying it—both on stage and screen—Hank Fonda was a national treasure.
Henry Fonda as Sheriff Wyatt Earp on a bustling Sunday morning in Tombstone for John Ford’s first postwar Western My Darling Clementine (1946), among his finest works of Americana, and among Fonda’s most personable performances.
Now if Fonda would have run for President or governor, you could have been sure he’d have won, and no one would’ve been unhappy about it, either. Was there ever a more reassuring President on the screen than Fonda in Fail-Safe? He was the definitive Lincoln (Young Mr. Lincoln), the most likeable presidential candidate (The Best Man), and the mo
st convincing Secretary of State (Advise and Consent), having a quality most politicians lack—true solidity. When Henry Fonda said something, you believed it—whether spoken as a country boy or a playboy, college professor or criminal, sheriff, outlaw, architect, fisherman or hillbilly—whether he was supposed to be Wyatt Earp or Frank James or Teddy Roosevelt, Jr.
Believability is a special quality of real stars and no one had it more than Fonda; see him, for example, in some potboiler like Battle of the Bulge (which he wins single-handedly) and note how scene after scene is made convincing by his presence, his subtle playing. He was, in fact, a consummate actor who was able to project facets of his own unique personality into an amazing variety of characters. Too many of his good movie performances over the years were wasted on bad projects—first, from his home studio, 20th Century-Fox—later, from a great deal of bread-and-butter work. Having started acting in the theater, first in Nebraska (where he was born), later on Broadway, Fonda returned to the New York stage with noteworthy results (first with more than 1,700 performances of Mister Roberts) more often than any other American star of his stature, and pictures were the poorer for his absence.
Yet his Lincoln, his Mister Roberts (though he didn’t like the movie version of it), his Earp (in My Darling Clementine), his Tom Joad (in The Grapes of Wrath), have immortalized him—with such few others as James Stewart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne—as a somehow more learned, yet equally individual aspect of The American. Because it was the Nebraska upbringing that kept him accessible to the heartland of the country, right from his first movie (in a part he originated on the stage), the title role in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935). This one picture made him a star. His second film was the first shot outdoors in Technicolor, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), and Fonda’s personification in it of a young mountaineer gave syndicated cartoonist Al Capp the inspiration for his popular, now immortal American hero, Li’l Abner.
It was this country boy–city boy duality that was perhaps Fonda’s most tantalizing and ambiguous aspect. He could effortlessly switch from simple rural to civilized urban or some enormously attractive combination of the two, and did throughout his career, from his first great film performance as Lincoln in one of John Ford’s finest, most inspiring pieces of Americana, Young Mr. Lincoln, to the illiterate ex-con Okie, Tom Joad, in Ford’s version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and on. Indeed, Tom Joad (and therefore Bruce Springsteen’s song “Ghost of Tom Joad”) became synonymous with Hank Fonda as the great outlaw Spirit of America, yet the following year the same actor could play a hapless, bookish scientist in a wild screwball comedy, The Lady Eve. In 1942’s The Male Animal (based on the stage play by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent), Fonda could be as entirely convincing as the college professor who believes in the freedom of ideas and risks his position for that principle, as he was playing a simple, honest cowboy in 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident, or as the more complicated western lawman in Ford’s and Fonda’s first postwar film, My Darling Clementine (1946).
After doing the title role on Broadway for more than 1,700 performances, Fonda’s portrayal in Mister Roberts (1955) was brought to the screen by John Ford and, after Ford became ill, by Mervyn LeRoy. The last of seven films Fonda did with Ford, this one ended in acrimony, not resolved until late in the sixties.
If John Ford at his best is probably the finest American director, Henry Fonda played in more Ford pictures than any other star actor but Wayne, and holds the record for three in a row that couldn’t be more different: Young Mr. Lincoln, in the same year as the New England farmer in Drums Along the Mohawk (Ford’s first in color), and the following year as Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. On through Ford’s most poetic Western (and among his most personal), My Darling Clementine, then expressive if miscast as an outlaw priest in The Fugitive, then on to Ford’s complex (and essential) Fort Apache, in which Fonda gives a brilliantly ambiguous portrayal of a proud, strict, very intelligent but racist cavalry colonel who leads his men into an Apache massacre.
Fonda’s innate quality of overriding intelligence, a kind of inborn faith and wisdom, with an entirely liberal spirit (which was certainly true of the actor’s own politics) runs through all his work, whether in Ford’s (and Mervyn LeRoy’s) somewhat misbegotten version of Mister Roberts, through Alfred Hitchcock’s nightmarish drama The Wrong Man, based on a true story, with Fonda quietly magnificent as the Stork Club musician arrested for a robbery he did not commit. One of Hitchcock’s key works, and among Fonda’s finest performances, it came out the same year as 12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s powerful first theatrical feature, starring Fonda as an architect who is the lone dissenting juror in a murder trial. If there is an archetypal “Henry-Fonda-as-he-was-thought-of-in-life” movie, it is 12 Angry Men. No coincidence that it was one of the very few pictures Fonda himself produced. In Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Fonda is as much the quintessential thinking-man’s liberal Democrat as he was in 12 Angry Men, and Vidal’s provocative script about a presidential convention conveys obvious parallels between Fonda’s character and Adlai Stevenson, another quintessential egghead Democrat.
All this makes even more impressive Fonda’s amazing facility as a light comedian in what is probably Preston Sturges’ greatest screwball comedy, 1941’s classic The Lady Eve, certainly among the top five in that treasured, long-lost genre. That’s the one in which Fonda (at age thirty-five) played an ale-heir millionaire who studies snakes and, after a long while in the jungle, finds himself on an ocean liner with the sexiest, smartest, most attractive card-shark con artist you could ever imagine, played by Barbara Stanwyck (at age thirty-four). Strangely, The Lady Eve was the single time in Fonda’s long, valuable career that he played this sort of absentminded innocent professor–type, or did the kind of slapstick-pratfall business he does repeatedly here, and so wonderfully that you’d think he would have made a specialty of these roles. If you doubt his range, compare the Sturges work with his Lincoln and Joad which immediately preceded it.
When Fonda finally got the Best Actor Oscar, it was for one of his most obvious (yet beautifully calculated, if a bit exaggerated) performances, in On Golden Pond; the release had been held up over a year, and by the time of the Awards ceremony, Fonda was too weak to attend. Jane Fonda (producer and co-star of the picture) accepted in his name. That was in 1982, the same year Hank died. Sixteen years earlier, when I met him, however, at age sixty-one, he looked no more than forty-five, quite boyish still, and indestructible. When he finally aged, it happened very quickly. Our first meeting was in 1966 as part of the James Stewart profile I was doing; I interviewed him for an hour or so at his Bel Air home on Chalon Drive. The same place in Los Angeles where we spoke on January 3, 1969, his last wife Shirlee letting me into the house for taping an interview with Fonda, parts of which we would later film for the documentary, Directed by John Ford. It was a pleasant afternoon, talking casually on tape.
HF: I’d been on the set when Ford was doing Stagecoach, because I was under contract to Walter Wanger [producer of Stagecoach] but I sort of snuck in the back and watched a couple of times. I’d never met him and was a fan.
PB: Weren’t you under contract with Fox?
Not yet. Grapes of Wrath started that—a long story. Because Grapes was the bait they dangled in front of me to get me to sign the contract.
You were with Walter Wanger …
And when Wanger dissolved his company, I became a freelance and, among a lot of pictures, I did several at Fox: Jesse James and Farmer Takes a Wife. Anyway, Lamar Trotti and Kenneth Macgowan [writer and producer of Young Mr. Lincoln] first told me about it, and I said, “Are you kidding? I can’t play Lincoln.” The idea was like playing Jesus or something—I just didn’t want to try it, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to read it. They eventually came to my home and Lamar read Young Mr. Lincoln to me and my wife, sitting in our living room, and it was a beautiful script. But I said, “Fellas, I just don’t see myself playing Lincoln. And if I can’t see it
, then I don’t see how I can do it.” Well, eventually they persuaded me to make a test of it. I agreed to do that because I wouldn’t be committed—I could just do the test—I could let them put the makeup on me and then look at the rushes and decide. So I did. It was a good, important test, took most of the day. It took them three hours just to put the makeup on me. And subsequently, they call me and I come in and I see it, and this guy on the screen—right away—it was Lincoln. But a minute later he opens his mouth and my voice came out and I was destroyed again. Because that didn’t fit—my voice. I can’t stand the sound of my voice anyway. I rarely go to my movies because I can’t stand the sound of my voice. I’m not the only one—there’re many people don’t like to hear themselves—it isn’t what they think it sounds like. Anyway: “Don’t bother me, boys—I can’t do it—so forget it!”
Then, months later, they finally assigned Ford to the picture, and I get a call to come in and see him. I had still never met him. So I go into his office at 20th Century, and Ford’s sitting there, with a slouch hat. This is the first time I see the whole bit—the cigarette and the handkerchief in the mouth, and the pipe and the handkerchief, chewing on both back and forth. And I stood there [standing up at attention to illustrate] like a sailor in his white hat in front of the admiral. That’s really the way I felt. I mean, I was Henry Fonda and this was John Ford! And one of the first things he said was something like: “What the fuck is all this shit about you not wanting to do Lincoln?!” The admiral, God here, was using dirty words to make me feel that I was a stupid son-of-a-bitch. “What the fuck you think this is?! You think he’s the goddamn emancipator? He’s a jack-leg lawyer in Springfield, for Christ’s sake!” Anyway, he went on and on like this, and I don’t think I said anything, my mouth was just hanging open. But before it was over, I agreed to do the picture.
Who the Hell's in It Page 36
