The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda

by Devin McKinney

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  For my father

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Frontispiece: The Grapes of Wrath

  List of Illustrations

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  PART 1

  1. Springfield, 1839

  2. The Elephant and the Black Dog

  3. A Time of Living Violently

  4. The Big Soul

  5. Ways of Escape

  6. A Sort of Suicide

  PART 2

  7. The Right Man

  8. The Wrong Man

  9. New Frontier and Hidden Agenda

  10. He Not Busy Being Born

  11. The Old Man Himself

  12. Omaha, 1919

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Fonda on Film, Stage, and Television

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  Also by Devin McKinney

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Frontispiece

  The Grapes of Wrath (1940). (Photofest)

  Prologue

  The Return of Frank James (1940). (Photofest)

  Chapter 1

  Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). (Jerry Ohlinger’s)

  Chapter 2

  Henry Fonda, age 14. (Photofest)

  Chapter 3

  Fonda’s first head shot, 1929. (Photofest)

  Chapter 4

  Let Us Live (1939). (Photofest)

  Chapter 5

  The Lady Eve (1941). (Photofest)

  Chapter 6

  Henry and Frances, late 1930s. (Photofest)

  Chapter 7

  With admirers, New York, mid-1950s. (Photofest)

  Chapter 8

  12 Angry Men (1957). (Photofest)

  Chapter 9

  Fail-Safe (1964).

  Chapter 10

  Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). (Photofest)

  Chapter 11

  Sometimes a Great Notion (1971). (Photofest)

  Chapter 12

  Will Brown. (Nebraska State Historical Society)

  Epilogue

  Douw Jellis Fonda’s tombstone. Caunawagha Cemetery, Fonda, New York. (Photo by the author)

  Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate” (1860)

  I now have a theory that our existence is a phantom—that it died, long ago, probably of old age—that the thing is a ghost. So the unreality of its composition—its phantom justice and make-believe juries and incredible judges.

  —Charles Fort, Wild Talents (1932)

  Prologue

  The Return of Frank James

  Once upon a time, he strode through meadows, was chased by Mohawks, buried the ax in the stump, and read from the law book as if it were the Bible. In all eras, he ran, galloped, slouched, and rounded into and out of the Hollywood dream of American history.

  As the prairie town’s tin star, he was hard but clean, proficient but haunted. As the comic victim of romantic love, he took pratfalls for lustful females. In war, he led armies and studied his thoughts while other men whacked maps with sticks. Other times, he was the loner, drifter, killer—the dark shape cornered with a gun, or the parolee flattened by sunlight against a scorched expanse of heartland. Even when falsely charged, he was the criminal of his own imagination, because he could so easily have done what they accused him of—robbed the bank, or committed the murder.

  He would appear in different places, looking familiar but never quite the same, sometimes leading the crowd, sometimes off to the side, an American artist caught up in representing his country’s history—the history of centuries or of hours ago—sometimes its forceful subject, sometimes its mere object. At his noblest, he embodied the highest promises of democracy. At his darkest, he was the quiet, antisocial, anti-pluribus American, the American whose “Don’t tread on me” meant just that: Leave me alone, or I might kill you.

  * * *

  You find Henry Fonda in every corner of the mythic history and imaginative geography mapped by the movies. Like any star of such duration, he puts his name to many bad movies along the way; the career in total recalls John Berryman’s remark about the collected works of Stephen Crane: “majesty and trash scrambled together.” But in the fullness of time, he creates an image of the national man that is kaleidoscopic, frightening, and wildly improbable.

  His best performances—You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Wrong Man, Fail-Safe, Once Upon a Time in the West, even The Lady Eve—are animated by the dark energy of contradiction. Viewers sense a man living in public and private dimensions at once, and recognize a continuity of mysteries in the actor. Fonda becomes the body and voice of the satisfied man’s paranoia, the good man’s bad urge, the hero’s despairing shade, and the patriot’s doubting conscience. In him and through him, the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.

  * * *

  “I suppose one human being never really knows much about another.” Asked in 1966 to characterize Fonda, his friend of almost three decades, John Steinbeck offered this shrugging axiom. But read on: “My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict.”

  Everything that matters about Fonda is in those words, and we want to get behind them—seek the sources of those conflicts, that violence, the imprisoned aura; to watch the face as opposites collide, the eyes as they search; to apprehend, finally, the truth of such a tribute. Our hunch is that Fonda, like any artist who leaves a line of clues across many years and a vast collection of works, can be read—if we devise a language to read him.

  * * *

  This is a critical biography, in that it does not find its subject to be either saint or simpleton; a psychological biography, in that it finds many things to have been acted out rather than plainly spoken; a straight biography, in that it observes decent constraints on how far one may veer from fact in pursuit of a hot surmise; a crooked biography, in that many interesting data, anecdotes, postulates, and possibilities have been left out because they contributed insufficiently to the whole—that being, we hope, a broad, deep, comprehensible sense of Fonda, the essence of his life and the weight of his work.

  As I see it, I’ve gone after the story. Every life makes its own kind of sense, and a book like this is useless unless it sifts fact and perception for the themes of a life formed by character—unless it goes after the story.

  The story being, perhaps, this: that Fonda was a solitary man who distinguished himself in the most public of arts; that therein lay his tension and his style; that his conflicts made him a vital artist and emotional mystery, a rather baffling and altogether fascinating man. And that repeatedly over the course of a long and lauded career, he
pulled off the amazing feat of being not only what he appeared to be but also what he didn’t appear to be.

  His solitude was deep and his style glamorous enough to constitute one ideal of the American character. The audience embraced it because it was strong, appealing, and reducible to its most favorable qualities. Yet Fonda’s best portraits not only hold up but grow richer because the years reveal a pentimento of sorrow and anger beneath their surfaces. Like great novels, his great performances yield themselves to time, to contexts of national and personal history.

  All of which is to say that if Americans opened their doors to Fonda for his virtue and sincerity, they kept his company for a deeper reason—the suspicion that, wherever he’d come from, wherever he might go, he traveled with ghosts.

  Part 1

  1

  Springfield, 1839

  Young Mr. Lincoln

  It is a basic American scene. Torches, a rope, a jailhouse, a crowd; darkness lit by fire, smashed windows, vulnerable door. A basic, terrifying scene. No American can fail to recognize it.

  Someone was murdered earlier tonight. Two men are in custody, and the crowd wants them. In front are elderly drunks who at another time might be lovable. “We’ve gone to a heap of trouble not to have at least one hangin’,” one drawls.

  Only Abe Lincoln, lawyer for the accused, is there to oppose them. He pushes through the crowd and defends the door of the law. Dressed in black, face glowing white, he screams at the crowd to listen.

  He allows that, had they lives to spare, the prisoners inside could stand some hanging. “But the sort of hanging you boys’d give ’em would be so—so permanent. Trouble is, when men start takin’ the law into their own hands, they’re just as apt, in all the confusion and fun, to start hangin’ somebody who’s not a murderer as somebody who is.”

  Lincoln knows that only the surrender of identity and responsibility makes the mob event possible. So as he speaks, he looks the lynchers in the face, becoming the mirror that reflects and judges them. He says their names, and shrewdly throws in a bit of Bible so they may walk away reassured of their morality.

  “This scene,” writes the German novelist Peter Handke, “embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever.” That’s lovely to imagine. But it doesn’t last two seconds. We know these same men will be back in a month, a decade, a century to hang someone else. We know they’ll succeed, because Abe won’t be there to stop them. Lincoln has risked his life to forestall what he knows to be inevitable—that in this world, mobs kill.

  It’s Springfield, Illinois, circa 1839. So much of the worst is still to come.

  * * *

  “A jack-legged young lawyer from Springfield”: That was John Ford’s Lincoln. He’d drawn this Lincoln from daguerreotype, the narratives of schoolbooks, the mythology of martyrdom. He’d fashioned a noble, humorous, cagey man with a reverence for law and an instinctive sense of right. This was the Lincoln photographed by Mathew Brady and chronicled by William B. Herndon, yet he was barely a historical figure. He was something both simpler and stranger: a product of the national imagination. Facts could be arranged as needed.

  Now this was a hero. Courageous, articulate, visionary, yet a common man, respected from mansion to shack. He’d been through pain of his own, and knew what other people suffered. Ford’s Lincoln had wit, love, and a sense of loss. Ford’s Lincoln was heartbreaking. It broke the heart to know that no leader so ideal had ever walked our country’s roads, in any century; and it broke the heart to imagine—as Ford imagined, and would have his audience imagine—that that ideal just might, this one time, have been the truth.

  To play his Lincoln, Ford wants that jack-legged young actor from Omaha. Henry Fonda has spent the last few years in Hollywood quietly making himself remarkable. Career-advancing intervals of romantic comedy and rural hokum have been cut with a handful of harsh performances: a mountaineer in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936); an ex-con in You Only Live Once (1937), first of the Bonnie and Clyde movies; an aristocrat in the plantation weeper Jezebel (1938), sweating feverishly as he carried Bette Davis to an Oscar; and brother Frank in Jesse James (1939), in which all Fonda had to do to steal the picture from Tyrone Power was spit a stream of tobacco juice and glare over his mustache.

  Fonda has leaped past his competition, and past himself. He’s one of Hollywood’s biggest near-stars and most protean support players; he’s shown tensile strength on the screen, and a gift for charismatic silence. He’s handsome and healthy, but when the climax comes, he dies eloquently, memorably.

  So he seems fated to play the sixteenth president. The two have had a long association: At the age of twenty, Fonda toured the Midwest with a Lincoln impersonator, portraying Lincoln’s secretary in a sketch he wrote himself. He estimates he has already read most of the Lincoln books that exist. And there was that scene in his very first film, The Farmer Takes a Wife—a brief encounter between the Fonda character and a prepubescent John Wilkes Booth. In terms of the story, the meeting between Booth and Fonda’s river rat in an 1850s canal town had no function. But in the context created by Young Mr. Lincoln four years later, it was a clear case of foreshadowing.

  Fonda cannot claim surprise at being asked to play Lincoln: As early as 1935, he was named in Hollywood columns as the next Abe of the screen. But when John Ford calls, rational Fonda resists. Playing Lincoln’s secretary is one thing, but the man himself? “It’s like playing Jesus,” he says.

  Ford, a stout, fleshy, hard-drinking Irish-American, is already famed for his dark glasses and floppy hat, his briar pipe and profanity. He is keenly aware of his personal power and developing legend, and he wields them as weapons of fear. He cows Fonda with a four-letter aria: “What the fuck is all this shit about you not wanting to play this picture? You think Lincoln’s a great fucking Emancipator, huh? He’s a young jack-legged lawyer from Springfield, for Christ sake.”

  Heroes come of humble beginnings, and artists are humbled to become great.

  Henry sits for the laborious application of prosthetics and pancake. Photos and screen tests are taken, and all are stunned with the result. The great man’s gravity is there: The nose is soft putty, but the brow ridge is as hard and dark as a log.

  The film, shot mostly around Sacramento, is completed in time for its world premiere, in Springfield, on March 30, 1939—exactly a century from the point the events it portrays took place. Soon it goes into broad release and is recognized as a profound piece of American popular art, warm and earthy as bread from a cabin stove.

  From the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein it will draw, in 1945, one of the most poignant appreciations ever written of a movie. “I first saw this film on the eve of the world war,” Eisenstein will recall, a crucial detail that directs him to Young Mr. Lincoln’s “womb of popular and national spirit.” He will extol “its unity, its artistry, its genuine beauty,” and, with a poet’s yearning tugging at his technician’s mask, describe how “the rhythm of the montage corresponds to the timbre of the photography, and where the cries of the waxwings echo over the turbid flow of muddy water and through the steady gait of the little mule that lanky Abe rides along the Sangamon River.”

  Eisenstein cares only so much about the rhythm of the montage. For this moment, he wants nothing but to ride along that river, see that beautiful country.

  * * *

  The archetypal Hollywood director, D. W. Griffith, released his first masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. It was based on The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s best-selling novel of ten years before—an exhortatory romance meant to illustrate how, in “one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race,” an “‘Invisible Empire’ had risen from the field of Death and challenged the Visible to mortal combat … and saved the life of a people.”

  That “Invisible Empire” was, of course, the Ku Klux Kl
an. Dixon painted the postbellum night riders as heroes, protecting the South from carpetbaggers, and magnolia belles from black rapists. Griffith disclaimed any personal racism, yet he inflated Dixon’s theses with thunder, pageantry, and innovative technique. Made to sweep history in its wake, and granted a famous endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson—“Like writing history with lightning”—The Birth of a Nation grossed over sixty million dollars and was viewed by more Americans than any film yet made.

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People succeeded in getting it banned in many cities but could not prevent its seep into the American mind. On leaving a theater in Lafayette, Indiana, that was screening the Griffith film, a man named Henry Brocj shot and killed Edward Manson, a black high school student. Bosley Crowther, later film critic of the New York Times, was a boy in North Carolina in 1915. “If the people coming out [of the theater] did no more than abuse the Negroes they saw in the street,” he recalled, “it was fortunate. Actually, a lot of people would throw rocks at them and do things of that sort.” In his novel Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara flashes back to the Pennsylvania boyhood of his protagonist, describing how his street gang “would play Ku Klux Klan, after having seen The Birth of a Nation.”

  Historians concur that Griffith’s film played a significant role in the surge of race violence that marked the late teens and early twenties. Certainly it was instrumental in the revival of the Klan: It became a recruiting tool for the terror group, and well into the 1960s, Klan chapters throughout the South were known to screen private prints in chamber of commerce basements and Masonic lodges whenever blood courage and race inspiration were called for.