There is also something Fondian about the contradictions of the faith. Christian Science, for all its plainness, presumed the existence of miracle and magic. It taught not merely that disease could be allayed by prayer and wounds healed by hand but also that, through sufficient investments of effort and belief, the dead could be raised. The emblem of the faith was a gold seal depicting a crown and a crucifix, the whole circled with an inscribed creed. The words of the creed remain unchanged, and to this day they are seen emblazoned on the windows of Christian Science reading rooms around the world:
CAST OUT DEMONS
CLEANSE THE LEPERS
HEAL THE SICK
RAISE THE DEAD
* * *
Whenever Henry spoke of his parents, it was with reverence, not insight. His mother, he said, was “an angelic woman.” As for Fonda senior, “Everything he did was wonderful.”
Henry remembered flying, at the age of four, a kite built by his father. The wind was strong and threatening, but William took control, and his son looked up in awe. As well as toys for the children, Fonda senior constructed amateur radio sets in the basement; he was a skilled handyman. He was also, Henry would learn, remarkable in ways not so obvious to a boy’s eyes. “Only when I grew up and moved away did I realize exactly how much I loved him, how much he meant to me and what an unusual man he was.”
Fonda’s third wife remembered wondering about the nature of parental discipline and emotional authority in the Fonda house. “I was always trying to find out but he said he didn’t remember a lot.… Perhaps he didn’t want to remember.” That “perhaps” opens a door, behind which there might be nothing at all. Or something: Daughter Jane refers to the “biological vulnerability to depression” that runs in her family, and her own suspicion that William Fonda was afflicted with chronic melancholy—trailed by what Winston Churchill, a depressive, called his “black dog.”
In a family snapshot contained in Henry’s autobiography, five Fondas are arranged informally before a garden trellis. Chubby, smiling Henry sits between his sisters, Harriet and Jayne. His eyes and face are soft; he is perhaps twelve. Nearby, William, about to say something, glances back at Harriet. His eyes are tired, the sockets dark. The impression is one of premature age and a collapsing center.
The dark around the father’s eyes is the dark behind the son, a place that we cannot fully penetrate—and a place where his identity begins. A child is formed by everything that touches him, but there’s only so much that tangible influences will tell us about an artist. The map of creative imagination begins and ends where the individual ceases to be shaped and begins shaping; where the story becomes not what the world has made of the boy, but what he makes of the world.
Henry’s teenage years are mostly unremarkable. Mostly. We’ll leave him for a while in that vague region—private, innocent, an ordinary American boy living the lemonade dream while it lasts.
* * *
Playing Gil Martin, hero of Drums Along the Mohawk—the second teaming with John Ford, released at the other end of 1939—Fonda makes the man earnest, courageous, tenacious, and a little dull. Ford wants that of him, reasoning that it will mean more to an audience to see the brave man frightened, the unmovable man moved.
The source is a historical best-seller, adapted by four screenwriters, but it could have been mounted with Fonda in mind, for it encompasses a broad swath of his own family’s history. New York’s Mohawk Valley, 1776: Newlyweds Gil and Magdalena (Claudette Colbert) are at work on their American dream—field, forest, cabin; at night, a stuffed pipe and soft pillow. Skirmishes have occurred lately among colonists, Indians, and British. But for now, the Martins’ vista vibrates with peace.
The rural landscape, infused with color on the verge of oversaturation, is quite beautiful to look at. There are burnished wood interiors, miles of sky, and towering forests. Even the shadows are midnight blue. But the picture is deformed by reactionary coarseness: The Mohawks are a monstrous swarm projecting arrows and fire, and the sexual politics are barely more tolerable. All that ties the film to a pioneer’s pain is Fonda. He redeems Gil’s dullness as the flat surface of a deep man, and haunting tones fall from his performance like droplets from a placid sky.
Two scenes stand out. In the first, a battle-bloodied Gil rests among the dead and dying; as Magdalena dresses his wound, he relates the battle. Others hurry in and out of the frame, but Ford holds on Fonda, who moves his face this way or that to avoid seeing the things he describes: an Indian impaled on a spear; a comrade’s revel in the slaughter; a friend—named Ten Eyck—“with his head blown half off.”
The other high point is a chase. The settlers are under attack; Gil flees for the military fort, miles away. Pursued by three Mohawks through the night, across an astounding variety of terrain, Gil might be running the breadth of the continent—from flatland to forest, through streams and stands of pine, the sky changing from black and purple to blue and white. The color deepens, the image broadens, and nature swallows the minuscule runners in a succession of monumental vistas.
You wonder what enacting the chase means to Henry. Whether he thinks of grandfather Ten Eyck, messenger of war, chased by the howl of history down his neck; whether he savors the presence of Ten Eyck’s name in the story. Henry’s run for his life carries us clear back to the marquis, the first runner—finding trouble, fleeing trouble, running toward safety, toward danger, an open sky, a new world.
* * *
Fonda could have been safe for life in Omaha, if he hadn’t drifted. In fact he was a drifter before he was an artist.
“I had no ambition to be an actor,” he will later say. “But it was summer, and I had nothing else to do…”
Coming from conventional people, Henry drifts to conventional options. His first steps into the world are those of one trying to follow a design for living. First, he studies journalism at the University of Minnesota—a creative, active occupation, nominally stable—but his grades are only average, and the deeper itch is not scratched. He drops out in the summer of 1925, at the end of his sophomore year, and moves back to Omaha.
There follow two years of sideways drift, in and out of transient jobs: iceman, mechanic, window dresser. But between punches of the clock, he keeps an option open—the Omaha Community Playhouse, where he acts for the first time in that first summer after leaving college, and where he continues to work, part-time, performing odd jobs, from stage dressing to janitorial tasks.
“It was a nightmare”: So Fonda will describe his first experience of acting. He’s all of twenty, and has been invited to audition by a family friend, Dorothy “Do” Brando, who is active in the Community Playhouse. To kill time in the Omaha summer, he reads for the juvenile lead in Philip Barry’s recent comedy You and I. To his surprise, and even dismay, he’s cast by the director, Gregory Foley.
Hank steps onto the boards at first rehearsal, and—“It was a nightmare.” He will one day characterize the nightmare specifically in terms of witnessing: “I didn’t dare look up. I was the kind of guy who thinks everybody is looking at him.”
Eventually, he does look up, and he sees that, indeed, everybody is looking at him. Somewhere between his two great fears, and the great fears of the Middle America he will one day represent—the fear of seeing, the fear of being seen—he’s caught forever.
* * *
All the conventions of his upbringing remind Henry that the theater is no life for a man. Acting is not exactly a respectable profession today; it certainly was less so in bourgeois Omaha in the mid-1920s. Only a few generations before, actors on tour were told by saloonkeepers to eat their dinner out back, with the pigs. The call of convention induces Fonda to take an entry-level position with the Retail Credit Company of Omaha. He is only filing papers at first, but his efficiency and dedication stand out and soon they are grooming him for the managerial track.
The journey thus far has been entirely ordinary. Most members of the middle class go through these uncertainties of ide
ntity, and most take a straight path. But Henry—typical though he is in so many ways—is not “most.” So he preserves that opening, that stage door, back of which lie the nightmare and the desire.
The Omaha Community Playhouse is only a year old when Fonda joins, but in its genome are decades of history, theory, aspiration. It grows out of the Progressive Era, a period of political reform and social experiment lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. A group of Omaha benefactors joins in the Little Theatre movement—what Dorothy Chansky terms a concerted effort by “writers, various kinds of activists, university professors and other educators, clubwomen, settlement workers, artists, and social elites” to bolster local playhouses against the onslaught of Hollywood, whose growing popularity is transforming many stage theaters into movie houses. The Community Playhouse is founded in 1924, and its first president, Omaha architect Alan McDonald, avows its purpose: “To raise the drama from a purely amusement enterprise into an educational, cultural force.”
Little Theatre was a middle-class phenomenon with progressive intentions and a conservative agenda. “Like other reform activities in the era,” Chansky writes, it “had contradictory strains; it included forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia, sometimes within the same production company or publication.” Certainly the movement took for granted the cultural supremacy of those who drove and financed it: “Most Little Theatre workers assumed that their middle-class, Protestant heritage was a standard by which all culture could be measured.”
But in the context of middle-class, suburban Omaha in the 1920s, the Community Playhouse does not do badly. Under Foley, it cops to light Broadway fare but also stages naturalism, futurism, high farce—Shaw, Wilde, Molnár, O’Neill, Capek. Audiences are kept alive to past classics and modern currents, and the ideological limitations of Little Theatre are perhaps pushed out a few inches. The contradictions noted by Chansky provide the ideal opening into acting for a young man whose exteriors and values are conventional but whose ambitions and perceptions are extraordinary. Little Theatre allows Henry Fonda to experiment with states of safety and expressiveness, diverting him from aimlessness and the Omaha blues while giving him access to another world—that torturing, tantalizing state of watching and being watched.
The key turns in the fall of 1926, when Henry plays the lead in Merton of the Movies, a George S. Kaufman–Marc Connelly comedy about a Middle Westerner who stumbles into Hollywood stardom. Omaha’s theatergoers give Henry a standing ovation, and later, in the Fonda parlor, the family eagerly dissect the show: Henry, mother Herberta, sisters Harriet and Jayne—all but William, who has been skeptical of his son’s stage ambitions from the first, and who, at this moment of triumph, hides himself behind a newspaper.
Feminine praise pours over Prince Henry, while the elder remains hidden, judging all by his silence. Then a sister begins to speak in merest mitigation of the praise, suggesting how Henry might better have crafted his performance this way or that.
“Shut up,” the father says. “He was perfect.”
And just that fast, he is back behind the newspaper.
Henry’s life is decided that night. In quick order, bourgeois distractions will be traded for a new mode of existence, one that for several years will be all rail and no station, all fall and no net. In a few months, he will quit the credit office and become Foley’s assistant director at the Community Playhouse.
First, though, he will hit the road with a hard-drinking Abe Lincoln impersonator, playing to farm families along the heartland circuit.
Beyond that waits the itinerant life of an unemployed actor in hungry days. Soon Henry will be toiling in repertory up and down the coasts of New England; living on rice in a Manhattan garret; pioneering a course eastward, whence the Fondas had first come. Tracking the elephant, the black dog at his side.
* * *
As he moves, Fonda keeps an eye on the terrain—observes his fellow citizens, judges and sometimes condemns them. But because he has the “appearance of sincerity,” he is accepted; and because he has more than that, he is admired, elevated.
He represents our best ideals. He also represents much that we do not like to talk about. Fonda breaks with the mass of Americans on a basic point: He has a compulsion toward remembrance. Not nostalgia, but recall—true, deep, and clear. It’s this that makes him a critic at the same time he is leader and representative. As a nation, we seldom allow ourselves to remember too vividly the bad we’ve done. Yet always Fonda seems to ask: What does it mean to remember it as it happened, to remember it all?
It’s an eminently American quality to live as if history didn’t exist. We’re encouraged, by our cultural heritage as much as our leaders, to forget the past. But Henry Fonda acts as if he has never forgotten anything.
3
A Time of Living Violently
Fonda’s first head shot
The Henry Fonda who left Omaha was raw youth, an actor with ambition but without a persona, willing to hurl himself at any challenge. He was a leaper, a laugher, a fighter; he played characters with exotic accents; he sang, danced, walked on his hands. There was nothing his arms and legs, face and voice wouldn’t try.
As a lover, too, he was eager for all-or-nothing bets. So he fell for another actor, a starlet of imperial breeding, impossible demands, and unstoppable talent. When it came crashing down, the noise stunned the boy into silence. He drew back, guarded his obsessions and fears, and began vouchsafing his talent through an opening that, for both good and bad, could seem the narrowest point of emotional entry a screen star ever presented to an audience.
Fonda knew disillusion long before the audience’s eyes met him in The Farmer Takes a Wife. He was experienced in varieties of loss. That—and the inborn Nebraska austerity—must be why, from the start, he made such a grave impression; why he had a rare feel for anger and sadness; and why, at the other end of things, he could seem closed off, unreachable, an enemy of feeling.
* * *
Wearing a Union army uniform, slick hair sliced in the center, young Henry squints into the sun. Hands clutched at his back, he embodies the military posture of Maj. John Hay, presidential secretary. Beside him, much taller, wrapped in a shawl and black raiment, eyes shaded by a stovepipe hat, is the Lincoln impersonator, George Billings.
A crack runs through the photograph like a vein in old skin, a score in marble, a divide in time. It’s the spring of 1926. At one hundred dollars a week, Fonda has been hired by Billings—once a Hollywood carpenter, now the star of a silent film called The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln—to write a show-length sketch out of famed Lincoln speeches. Additionally, Henry is to act the part of Major Hay, which mainly requires his paying rapt attention to the great man’s orations.
Billings and Fonda ride the circuit of little theaters and picture palaces across Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. Thanks to the intensity of the star’s portrayal, they are a success. “Lincoln of Stage Sinks All of Self in Soul He Plays,” reads the Evening Courier of Waterloo, Iowa, where they play the Strand Theater. “I pride myself that when I am acting, no one can see Billings,” the star says, using words Fonda will paraphrase many times in the course of his own career. “The audience … see only the character I am living for that moment.”
A scene from the show is described. Major Hay tenders Lincoln the death warrant of a Union soldier prosecuted for desertion. Hay then reads a letter from the man’s wife, explaining that she had called her husband away “in a time of great need” and pleading with Lincoln to spare his life. “As the long-fingered hands gripped the death warrant and tore it in two and two again,” the witness records, “many eyes watching Lincoln were wet with tears. And Lincoln’s own eyes streamed tears into the shawl.”
George Billings is a drinker. Some nights he fails to appear, and Fonda is onstage alone, gamely reading Lincoln’s letters. Finally, after one such night, Henry leaves the theater and doesn’t return.
But
picture him sitting at the side of the stage, witnessing, as Billings declaims the second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…” At the exact melodramatic point, the theater’s modest orchestra keens the melody of “Hearts and Flowers.” And Fonda watches this aged woodworker, drunkard, and ham actor believe in himself, in Lincoln, perhaps even in the promise of his country.
Maybe that is how it went, nights when George Billings’s eyes “streamed tears into the shawl.” Those who would know are long dead now.
* * *
The prairie road offers no spectacle, and meager reward. So you leave. You dream of elsewhere: New York City, cradle of the real American theater.
Henry gets his first taste of it in the early spring of 1927. An Omaha woman asks if Henry might travel to Princeton, New Jersey, and drive back with her son, who has purchased a new Packard. Henry grabs the chance and practically lives for a week on Theatre Row. He sees, by his account, such eminences as Helen Hayes in Coquette, Otis Skinner in The Front Page, Ethel Barrymore in The Constant Wife, Charles Bickford in Gods of the Lightning, Glenn Hunter in Tommy, and Humphrey Bogart in Saturday’s Children.*
From this trip comes an anecdote so unlikely, it stands a chance of being true. Henry double-dates with his friend and two sisters named Bobbi and Bette. Sitting in the twilight behind Princeton Stadium, he plants a nervous peck on his debutante—seventeen-year-old Bette Davis, who notifies Henry the next day that her mother will soon announce her daughter’s engagement to the young man from Omaha. Gasping, Henry flees the scene—only to bump into Davis a decade later, by which point she is an Oscar winner and they are costars in a comedy called That Certain Woman.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 4
