Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  To Lauren Bacall, Fonda was “very funny,” though when they first met in 1955, doing The Petrified Forest on live TV together with Humphrey Bogart, he barely said a word. But they would eventually become good pals, both doing Broadway shows at the same time; they shared many suppers together. The two co-starred on-screen in Sex and the Single Girl (1964) and, Bacall told me, she “loved” her experiences with Hank Fonda. She recalled him sometimes asking if a scene or a piece of dialogue was really funny, she’d say it was, and he’d nod. “I adored him.”

  The story of the boa constrictor and the hijinks of his early days with best friend Jimmy Stewart (see Stewart chapter) suggest a very different kind of Fonda than was ever shown on the screen. Also, that Fonda was an outspoken liberal all his life while his closest pal was a staunch Republican suggests a man whose personal feelings considerably outweighed his political positions. When I once asked Fonda about this situation and how it affected his relationship with Stewart, he just said, “It’s easy—we never talk about politics.”

  During the making of Mister Roberts, Fonda and Ford had a major falling-out. Since Fonda had done the play for so many years and knew how extremely well it worked, he was dismayed when Ford began altering construction, cutting dialogue, muddying well-defined characters, adding service-comedy slapstick. Ford, who didn’t like too much talk in pictures, felt he was making a movie, not photographing a sacred text, and became incensed at Fonda’s questioning his authority in any way. This eventually led to a showdown that was to be refereed by the producer of the film (and of the original stage production), Leland Hayward. Both Hayward and Fonda would tell me the same basic series of events: Ford and Fonda sat on opposite sides of a table. Fonda started to explain his position. Before he had said more than a sentence or two, Ford stood up and socked the actor on the jaw, knocking him off his chair to the floor. “There I was on my can,” Fonda said, “looking up at him. What was I gonna do, get up and hit this old man back?” (Ford was about sixty, Fonda around forty.) The meeting was over. Soon after, Ford seems to have had a gall bladder attack—or so he always said—and was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy. Fonda and Ford didn’t speak for more than a dozen years.

  What Fonda didn’t know at the time was that when Jack Warner signed Ford to direct the hit play as a movie—this was circa 1954—the studio head had been insistent that either Marlon Brando or William Holden (both coming off very popular films) play the title role. Fonda hadn’t even been in a picture since Fort Apache in 1948 and therefore—though he had triumphed on Broadway—was not considered movie box office. Ford had just had two huge successes with The Quiet Man (1952; winning his sixth Oscar) and Mogambo (1953), starring Clark Gable, with Ava Gardner getting a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Ford told Warner he wouldn’t even consider anyone other than Fonda for the role he had originated onstage. Nobody ever told Fonda a word of this, however, until Barbara Ford passed it along as part of a request for him to participate in the documentary we were doing for the AFI. Fonda agreed, called Ford, and the two were speaking once more. But by then Jack Ford had made his last film, and the two never worked together again. The movie of Mister Roberts, unfortunately, fell between two stools: although a financial success, it wasn’t a great picture, and it wasn’t really the play. Despite its vividly reintroducing the actor to the screen, and while he never really stopped working, Fonda never did get the great picture roles again.

  But everything he did on Broadway was a hit, and like so many serious actors, he very much preferred doing plays to movies. What Fonda enjoyed was getting “into the role”—what athletes call being “in the zone”—and sustaining it for the length of a full act at a time, instead of the usual film method, which breaks short scenes into numerous camera angles, rarely even these played straight through, and almost always done totally out of any sequence with the characters’ development. Ford and Preston Sturges, among others, had a tendency to allow scenes to play through in long pieces, but that sort of directing was rare (and today nearly nonexistent), and even Ford had to follow schedules that generally paid no attention to the order of events in the story.

  The theater, finally, is a real actor’s medium: once the curtain goes up, it’s just you and the cast and the audience—and this is what an artist like Fonda relishes—getting into the role and playing it for an hour or two without interruption. As Otto Preminger (especially notorious for letting an entire scene play in one shot) used to say, “Every cut is an interruption.” He meant not simply for the audience but especially for the actor trying to become lost in a part. I once mentioned to Gena Rowlands that I had directed a certain actor to just “be himself.” She warned me that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to say since many actors didn’t like themselves or know who they were, this often being the very reason they became actors. Maybe Hank Fonda was in this category. Certainly in life he did not have the kind of self-confidence in who he was or, at least, who he had been created into, that stars like Grant, Stewart or Wayne had.

  Yet he possessed a kind of rough-hewn but literate American poetry about him that remains unique. There is possibly no more touching utopian speech in pictures than Tom Joad’s vision of a better world at the conclusion of Steinbeck’s and Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, but it is Fonda’s extraordinarily beautiful incarnation of this man and those words that makes the moment both transfixing and ultimately transcendent. “I’ll be there,” he concludes; and Springsteen is right that the ghost of Tom Joad will always be there to haunt America for its broken promises—the ghost of Henry Fonda as well, having merged seamlessly into that outlaw mystic. As smoothly as he became the single convincing Abe Lincoln we’ll ever see. That Fonda could within his persona embody such different kinds of Americans also resonates mythically—Tom and Abe as twins—and confirms the deepest contradictions of the country.

  When I heard that he had died—in 1982, soon after his seventy-seventh birthday—the first thing I remembered was a summer night in Manhattan a few years earlier, when it happened that the Fondas and the Stewarts and I were all staying at the same hotel, the Pierre. As I was waiting for a cab at the 60th Street entrance, the two couples came bursting out the door all dressed up in formal evening clothes, bubbling with excitement and enthusiasm, obviously joyous to be together and going out on the town. Everyone was beaming and seemed to be talking at once. I waved, and said hi. The guys and Gloria and Shirlee all responded gaily, warmly said hello—commenting on what a coincidence it was that we were all at the same hotel—and I could suddenly see Hank and Jimmy as young, eligible bachelors in the late thirties sharing that house in Los Angeles. They didn’t really seem much older at that moment, as they waved so-long and piled into a waiting limousine, all talking at once again, and laughing.

  Born Henry Fonda, May 16, 1905, Grand Island, NE; died August 12, 1982, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1935: The Farmer Takes a Wife (Victor Fleming)

  1936: Spendthrift (Raoul Walsh)

  1937: You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang)

  1938: I Met My Love Again (Joshua Logan, Arthur Ripley); Jezebel (William Wyler)

  1939: Jesse James (Henry King); Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford); Drums Along the Mohawk (Ford)

  1940: The Grapes of Wrath (Ford); The Return of Frank James (Lang)

  1941: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges)

  1942: The Male Animal (Elliott Nugent)

  1943: The Immortal Sergeant (John M. Stahl); The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman)

  1946: My Darling Clementine (Ford)

  1947: The Fugitive (Ford); Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger)

  1948: Fort Apache (Ford)

  1955: Mister Roberts (Ford, Mervyn LeRoy)

  1956: War and Peace (King Vidor)

  1957: The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock); 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet); The Tin Star (Anthony Mann)

  1958: Stage Struck (Lumet)

  1962: Advise and Consent (Preminger)

  1964: The Best Ma
n (Franklin J. Schaffner); Fail-Safe (Lumet)

  1965: The Rounders (Burt Kennedy); In Harm’s Way (Preminger)

  1967: Stranger on the Run (Don Siegel)

  1968: Firecreek (Vincent McEveety); Madigan (Siegel)

  1969: Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)

  1970: Too Late the Hero (Robert Aldrich)

  1973: Ash Wednesday (Larry Peerce)

  1981: On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell)

  14

  BORIS KARLOFF

  “The Monster?” Boris Karloff confirmed with his famous lisp when I asked him how he felt about the role in James Whale’s 1931 production of Frankenstein with which he is immemorially identified. “I’m very grateful,” Karloff said with no irony or condescension. “The Monster not only gave me recognition as an actor but created for me a certain niche, which has given me a career.”

  Through four decades during his lifetime, and now more than thirty years later, the name Boris Karloff has not only identified a star actor, but conjured up a certain sort of character as well, a very particular representative image. The identification certainly began with the sensation of Frankenstein, but this was deepened through the years by equally intense, brilliant performances in horror movies that most often were less than inspired. Yet he brought the same concentration and sense of responsibility to things like The Haunted Strangler (1958) as he did to more complicated roles in films like John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934); or, on the Broadway stage, with wickedly funny self-parody in Arsenic and Old Lace in the forties, or in the fifties with children’s story-book menace as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and with poetic realism as the Dauphin to Julie Harris’ Joan of Arc in Jean Giraudoux’s The Lark—a beautiful performance I was fortunate to see—and for which he received a Tony nomination. In 1966, his superb narration for the brilliant Chuck Jones feature cartoon of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas helped to make that work an abiding classic.

  Considering the majority of the movies in which he was cast (about 140 in all, including 40 silents, starting as an extra in 1916), it is not so remarkable that he almost always transcended his vehicles; but that audiences the world over still treasured him after so much screen junk is unique. They knew that Karloff’s star presence in even the worst of these gave them a measure of his considerable talent, grace and wit. Therein, of course, was the great irony of his horror image: it was absolutely nothing like the man, any more than the sinister-sounding stage name which William Henry Pratt chose for himself, the surname Karloff by itself sending chills up the collective spine throughout the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. It still does.

  Boris Karloff, as The Monster, takes a tea break during the making of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a superior sequel.

  Yet the audience also knew in some way that this consummate beyond-evil heavy was actually a tasteful, knowledgeable British gentleman—shocked by unkindness and never less than polite—with a sense of humor about himself and his roles, and only genuine gratitude to the public for their long-lasting affection. It was one of the reasons he kept working right through his eighty-first year. He was just an actor, he would say, who had been lucky enough to find a particular place on the screen and, as long as people wanted him, what right did he have to retire?

  Boris Karloff in the brief but memorable role of the gangster who gets killed while throwing a perfect bowling strike (“Watch this one,” he says) in Howard Hawks’ murderous original Scarface (1932), no doubt the most violent film of its time.

  Actually, he had plenty: a shattered knee and another injured leg, the two necessitating separate braces at least, and sometimes a cane or crutches, together with a severe case of emphysema that badly constricted his breathing. It was difficult for him to move about and speak both at once, but he never complained, was always prepared, and never held up shooting. Throughout his career (which included hosting a popular TV series called Thriller), he was known always as the quintessential professional.

  Over the years, I talked to a number of directors who had worked with Boris, and each of them spoke glowingly of him. On The Black Cat (1934), director Edgar G. Ulmer told me that Karloff occasionally would turn to the camera and say, “Boo!” Ulmer said, “Every time I had him come in by the door, he would open the door and say, ‘Here comes the heavy.’ He was a very lovely man … very charming—and he never took himself seriously. My biggest job was to keep him in the part, because he laughed at himself.” Chuck Jones got the idea to have Karloff narrate How the Grinch Stole Christmas from hearing his superb recording of Kipling’s Jungle Book. “What a nice man,” Jones said to me. “His passing is a great loss.”

  Karloff was the star of my first film as a director (Targets, 1968) and also the only reason the picture ever got made. Roger Corman had called me in 1966 with his producer hat on. I had just worked for director Corman as (uncredited) writer–second unit director on his then-current success, The Wild Angels (the first biker movie to work at the box office, making Peter Fonda a star, setting the stage for Easy Rider). And he was now offering me a picture of my own which he would finance, but only on the following conditions: since Boris Karloff owed Corman two days’ work, I was to shoot twenty minutes of new Karloff material in those two days, then take another twenty minutes of Karloff footage from another Corman horror epic, The Terror (1964), which, combined with my own material, would equal forty minutes of Karloff; then, over ten days, I was to shoot an additional forty minutes with other actors; therefore, with only twelve days of shooting, Roger would have a new 80-minute Karloff picture. Would I do it?

  The film that eventually resulted—with Karloff working five days and my shooting for an additional eighteen—was the one Boris himself liked to call his swan song. Though soon after ours, he did, in fact, do some scenes in four Z-budget Mexican-shot movies few ever saw, both he and his delightful last wife Evie always referred very warmly to Targets as Boris’ “last film.”

  What a lovely couple they were—Boris and Evie—a real love match as I came into the story, with Boris nearly eighty years old, Evie about thirty years younger. They were married for twenty-four years, since 1945. The day before the wedding ceremony he was divorced from his fourth wife, librarian Dorothy Stine, to whom he had been married for fifteen years. They had one daughter, Sara, his only child. Prior to 1930, then, his biographers seem to agree that Boris was married three other times.

  From March 20 through 24, 1967, we filmed all his scenes—nearly half the script—five long, consecutive days and nights. He immediately went off to Mexico, shot all of his stuff back-to-back for the four programmers, then went home to England. Targets was released in 1968 to considerable praise, especially for Boris. He died in England the following year, 1969, about ten months after a private L.A. running of the movie for him and Evie.

  Targets is inconceivable without Karloff. The film’s story evolved directly from Karloff’s very existence, from his amazing longevity as a star of horror films. In trying to figure out what to do with the specifications Corman had set for the work, Polly Platt (my collaborator on the screen story, production designer of the picture, and my first wife) and I asked ourselves repeatedly what Karloff could play that would be relevant to a sixties audience. And how this would connect to the Karloff footage we were supposed to use from The Terror—a fairly lame Victorian-style horror film set in post-revolutionary France and co-starring a very young and callow Jack Nicholson as a pretty unlikely Legionnaire.

  We didn’t want to do a period film, and so kept trying to imagine what sort of a heavy Karloff could play in a contemporary setting. All sorts of bad ideas were floated between us until one morning the solution came to me out of a frustrated joke. Since The Terror—which had been shot by Corman and several of his protégés (including bits by Francis Coppola)—was such a poor movie, in my mind I pictured running the end of that film, having the lights come up in a projection room where Karloff would be seated next to Corman; he would turn to him and say, �
�Roger, that is one of the worst films I have ever seen!” Suddenly, I realized the idea of Karloff essentially playing himself, an aging horror movie star, would enable us to use the Terror footage as a film within a film and therefore not have to be part of our story. This was liberating.

  Then we recalled that Harold Hayes—the editor of Esquire, for which I had been writing since 1961—had suggested once that perhaps a film could be built around a character like Charles Whitman, the young Texas man who a year or two before had, with an arsenal of weapons, climbed to the top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin and started shooting people below at random, killing many, wounding more, before turning a gun on himself. What if Karloff in our movie wanted to retire because his own sort of Victorian horror had been rendered considerably less horrible compared to this sort of modern horror: a clean-cut American boy suddenly turning sniper and randomly killing strangers. We could cross-cut between the two characters—two seemingly unrelated stories—until fate finally brings them together. After writing a draft like this, I met with director-writer Samuel Fuller—a good friend—and he solved most of the other problems, at the same time suggesting a far better ending. Corman liked the script, we sent it to Karloff in England, he liked it, and we had a picture.

  Boris Karloff (with Wallace Ford) as the religious fanatic in John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934), an art picture of its time, with a screenplay by Dudley Nichols and co-starring Victor McLaglen.

  The character Karloff would play was named Byron Orlok—quite obviously founded on the actor himself—and his reasons for wanting to quit not only from a feeling of being old-fashioned and outmoded, but also from a general disgust with the sort of films he had ended up doing. One speech of his went: “‘King of Blood,’ they used to call me, ‘Mr. Boogie-Man’! ‘The Marx Brothers make you laugh, Garbo makes you weep, Orlok makes you scream.’ And once I thought I’d be an actor … It’s not just the pictures that got bad—I’ve got bad.” Boris called me from outside London and, after praising the basic script, said, “But since I’m playing myself, Peter, could I possibly not say such terrible things about myself?” I argued that the more wretched the self-criticism was, the more the audience would say, “No, no, it’s not true,” that they would be all the more on his side, wanting him to be all right with himself. Boris didn’t sound entirely convinced, but never again brought up the point. He did all the self-castigation with relish, and did indeed become only more sympathetic.