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

by Devin McKinney

  The trip east is a head spinner. In a week, Henry has discovered Manhattan, Broadway, and the desire of a wealthy, sophisticated young woman. Each is a net that catches him forever.

  After that, Omaha must seem a gentle suffocation. Fonda accepts Gregory Foley’s offer of an assistant directorship at the Community Playhouse, and in the next year he squeezes all opportunity out of it. He acts in productions of The Potters, Secrets, The School for Scandal, The Enemy, Rip Van Winkle, Seventeen, and, opposite Do Brando, O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon. He is biding his time, keeping the stage beneath his feet and the fantasy alive.

  * * *

  Nineteen twenty-eight is the summer of his leaving. With a family friend, he drives east to the gnarled arm of Cape Cod. He’s heard of the summer-stock theaters that dot the island, servicing the entertainment needs of weekend commuters, maiden aunts, antique dealers, and sailors on liberty. The Cape is an outpost of Little Theatrism, and in the late 1920s, idealistic Ivy League drama graduates are as common as sand crabs on the beaches.

  Henry auditions first at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, and straight off he is playing a lead, in Kenyon Nicholson’s The Barker, a Broadway hit of the previous year. Then he moves down to the armpit of the Cape—to Falmouth, where he tries out for a troupe called the University Players Guild.

  He enters laughing. Joshua Logan, a Princeton undergraduate, is onstage in a comedy. He begins to speak, and “a high, strangulated sob came from the darkness,” Logan will later write. “I thought someone was having an asthma attack.” Logan imagines the sound issuing from “some odd human animal.”

  Begun by two Harvard students, Bretaigne Windust and Charles Leatherbee, the UPG is, like the Omaha Community Playhouse, powered by Progressive sentiment and populist ideals, presenting a repertory of recent Broadway hits, murder mysteries, and melodrama. There is also an aspect of pioneering to the venture: The group is in the process of constructing its theater on the outskirts of West Falmouth, and Henry is put to work painting walls, hammering nails, and wiring spotlights. Soon he will be making theater on a stage he has helped build.

  A gangly gawker hailing from regions most of the Princeton boys and Vassar girls have never seen, Fonda draws their fascination at once. Logan, eventually to become Henry’s close friend and collaborator, notes his oddly “concave chest” and “protruding abdomen,” his “extraordinarily handsome, almost beautiful face and huge innocent eyes.”

  Fonda’s parts at the UPG are a mix of whatever comes his way. He is first seen in The Jest, an Italian Renaissance costume piece; Fonda plays, of all things, an elderly count. Despite his intelligence and lack of upper-body muscle, Fonda is next cast as a brainless boxer in a sporting comedy, Is Zat So? At this, he does better: Young Henry is gifted at embodying subverbal man-beasts. In improvisation with Logan, he even transforms himself into ten-year-old Elmer, a small boy who mimics fish and birds.

  Henry is also in touch with his darker aspects. Though popular and convivial, he shows an innate seriousness and a tendency to stormy moods. In Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound, he incarnates a dead man adrift in the afterlife. “Several years ago in a New York theatre,” writes the Falmouth reviewer, “when Alfred Lunt found himself aboard a ghost ship outward bound for heaven or hell, he cast over his audience an eerie spell which we thought could never be repeated. But Henry Fonda repeated that experience for us in his excellent interpretation of the same role in the same play.”

  A key lesson in Fonda’s creative education comes when he reprises his hometown success, Merton of the Movies. “[N]ow he was aware,” stage manager and set designer Norris Houghton writes, “of the presence of the audience and its response to him, of which he had had no consciousness in Omaha.” As Fonda is less Merton, he is more himself embodying Merton in a self-aware process—mastering the actor’s ability to distance himself from the action so as to achieve control over character and affect, while each time believing in the act sufficiently to appear spontaneous. Fonda was “learning the technique of acting without realizing it … learning for himself such elements of what is known in the ‘Stanislavsky System of acting’ as ‘emotion memory.’”

  For these summer months, Fonda eats well, sleeps well, lives and laughs in camaraderie. The rest of the year is hard. There are jobs here and there. Charlie Leatherbee, in the off-season a stage manager for the prestigious Theatre Guild, gets Fonda a bit in Romain Rolland’s The Game of Love and Death, filling space behind stars Claude Rains and Alice Brady. The show, which opens November 25, 1929, is, in hindsight, an event of some moment—Henry Fonda’s Broadway debut—but its run is short.

  He spends the winter months of 1928–1929 and 1930–1931 in Washington, D.C., as a dance pantomimist with the National Junior Theatre, a troupe that performs for children. In March 1930, he returns to Omaha to star in a Community Playhouse production of A Kiss for Cinderella. This is the young actor’s life—rejection, retrenchment, scrambling for lines and bits; winters in the cold mazes of Manhattan, sleeping on other people’s divans, haunting casting offices and coffee shops.

  He leaves Famouth, finally, in early 1932. The company has one more summer of repertory, after which it will cease to exist in its original form. It will mutate into something called the Theatre Unit, then into Stage Associates, a cooperative of producers and actors whose aim, as of January 1935, is to bring to Broadway “stimulating plays in the most professionally competent manner and with the most efficiency.” Among the Stage Associates are Falmouth veterans Fonda, Logan, Houghton, and Leatherbee, as well as James Stewart, Mildred Natwick, Burgess Meredith, and Aleta Freel, wife of Fonda’s close friend, actor Ross Alexander.

  But Stage Associates is another sweet ideal in a time full of them. Leading light Charlie Leatherbee will die later in 1935, at the age of twenty-seven. A year after that, fire will destroy the theater he, Logan, Fonda, and the others built.

  By then, Henry is in Hollywood, nearly a star. But the Falmouth years are the most constructive of his theatrical life—a workshop, with himself as the project. He hammers sets and constructs the frame of an identity; makes lifelong friends, tastes freedoms, tries the limits of his voice and body. Seasoning himself in the safety of a community, he stocks memories of great nights on the boards, love in the dunes, theater in the sun.

  * * *

  And a fair amount of pain.

  Henry meets Margaret Sullavan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1929, when they both appear in a musical comedy revue and she, as part of a synchronized production number, slaps him silly. “She intrigued me,” he says.

  That summer, Sullavan—whom friends call Peggy—appears in Falmouth at Leatherbee’s invitation, and joins the University Players. She and Fonda costar in the opening production of the 1929 season, The Devil in the Cheese. It is a debacle for the ages. A live, spiky fish displaces water from an onstage tank; a loose turtle swims off the stage and crawls up the aisle; attempts at thunder, fire, and hurricane turn the stage into a wet, chaotic smear; a monkey urinates on Sullavan’s shoulder. And at the end, the audience stands in ovation to see disaster so heartily engaged.

  The two are next costarred in The Constant Nymph, a tale of love and obsession in the Tyrol, whose tragic climax arrives when Sullavan dies in Fonda’s arms. All present are spellbound by the combined spectacle of her dying and his suffering—an omen of their performing futures.

  Hank and Peggy go on to costar in a dozen or so regional stage productions, one marriage, one divorce, one Hollywood movie, and innumerable offstage tumults. Margaret Sullavan, a society belle from Virginia—small in stature, delicate in inflection, with a voice always described as “husky”—blows across the plain of Fonda’s emotional life like a little twister, devastating the house of his mind.

  Her face is made for the soft dazzle of a movie camera—small, round, charmlike, with hints of sadness to the sloping eyes. Her body is compact, agile, a tomboy’s body, yet certain of every stance and movement; even tall, strong men appear timorous
beside her. She enjoys acting and does it with apparent ease, while showing a blithe disdain for show business in her career calculations. “By the time I am thirty-five,” she is recorded as saying, “I will have a million dollars, five children, and I will have starred on Broadway.” At which point, she will set aside childish things and get on with the business of living. And that is pretty much what she does.

  Henry describes her as “cream and sugar on a dish of hot ashes.” At Falmouth, she becomes the third point in romantic triangles that hadn’t existed before, and her presence brings out tensions and truths. Charlie Leatherbee is in love with Peggy, while the sexually or at least sensually ambiguous Logan has an undeclared crush on Henry. (Desire informs his every description of Fonda’s body and face.) But their unrequited likes can only stand by and watch as Fonda and Sullavan become infatuated. The two even discover they share the same birthday.

  Their dynamics are in place immediately, Fonda alternately brooding and admiring, Sullavan whimsically following her mood of the moment. He is openly love-struck, more exposed in his devotion; Sullavan, the coquette, wields more power. “Hank was much in love with Peggy,” Houghton recalls, summing up the imbalance, “and Peggy thought she might be in love with Hank.” Where Fonda, like everyone else, calls her “Peggy,” Sullavan addresses him as “Fonda.”

  As they share their Falmouth triumphs, Sullavan is the only one to achieve success in the outside world. Where Henry returns to Omaha for a prodigal-son performance at the Community Playhouse, she returns to the family manse in Norfolk, Virginia, for her society debut. Where he gets a bit part in a short run, she understudies the lead in the southern road-company production of Preston Sturges’s Strictly Dishonorable, a big hit. Where he works odd jobs, cadges meals, and hunts for work, she gets the lead role and sparkling reviews in A Modern Virgin. By late 1931, Sullavan’s name buzzes on Broadway, and the movies come sniffing.

  During these years, she and Henry split and reunite multiple times. On June 2, 1931, they go as far as obtaining a marriage license from the New York State Department of Health. (Under “Occupation,” Henry puts “Artist”; Sullavan enters a dash, as if waving off a silly question.)

  When the University Players are invited to Baltimore for a nine-week season of repertory in the fall of 1931, Sullavan—fresh from the road company—rejoins as a minor star. Fonda initially objects to Sullavan’s return but soon the two are, to no one’s surprise, again a hot item. They are noted by gossip columnists and become minor Baltimore celebrities. But Henry has grown more combative and self-protective, and their battles are epic: “They fought so terribly,” says one witness, “that you’d have to get out of the room.”

  And so, following the logic of doomed couples throughout history, they decide to get married. They apply for a new license, this time at Baltimore City Hall, and then lie about it: When the application is exposed in a local gossip column, Sullavan denies it exists. But the lie is revealed soon enough, and the two marry in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel on Christmas Day, 1931.

  H. W. B. Donegan of Christ Episcopal Church officiates, and the Falmouth gang is in attendance. But it’s a glum affair, with no blissful effusions from the couple. Nothing is said about eternity—they know themselves at least that well.

  * * *

  If the young, raw Henry can be found anywhere on film, it is in his romantic comedies of the later 1930s. They are themselves malformed, irrational, stupefying, full of pratfalls and low comedy. Fonda’s strangled voicings and desperate gestures are often less hysterically funny than simply hysterical.

  Conceived as a gilded chariot for French opera star Lily Pons, touted by RKO as a high-line import item, the musical-comedy romance I Dream Too Much (1935) has a proto-Cassavetes scenario about a volatile marriage capped by an elaborately wacko musical climax. As a struggling composer whose wife becomes a singing sensation, Henry is intense, controlling, and dangerously jealous. It’s not all script, either: The character as written is insane, but Henry makes him more so. His mood swings are out of balance with the air of triviality, and they are not eased by a climax that turns the composer’s wretched opera into an orgy of Deco production, leaving behind scenes from marital hell and memories of emotional violence bobbing like body parts.

  Often a Fonda comedy’s only tension comes from what is repressed. That Certain Woman (1937) is, as well as a comedy, a morbid soap opera highlighted by premature death, an illegitimate child, and a crippled wife named Flip. Yet it’s dull for all that, except in flashes, here and there, of Fonda playing one of his very few weak-willed characters. What he represses, and therefore expresses, are doubts about himself—about his power. Is he a match for Bette Davis? Is he a match for any woman, let alone her master? Henry is most endearing when the butch Davis teases him for not being rugged enough, and the Fonda voice, that classically placid and soothing instrument, tightens to a near shriek.

  A better-worse example is The Mad Miss Manton (1938)—a terrible movie, but one in which gremlins of repression and expression run rampant. “You are a nasty creature, aren’t you?” Fonda asks Barbara Stanwyck. “But in time I’ll beat it out of you.” Tremble, temptresses! But Henry’s efforts at masculine dominance are only funny. In one scene, he is bound, gagged, and stuffed in a bed next to a pop-eyed China doll; elsewhere, he plays a comic death scene as a cop warbles “Home on the Range.” The Mad Miss Manton is broken at intervals by piercing screams; they might represent the cri de coeur of Fonda’s hapless man in a world of willful women who force him into silence, a suffocating bed, a dishonorable grave.

  These films are painful, but they are in varying degrees alive, because they draw on the tension between Fonda’s challenged manliness and the effortless dominance of his costars. Each one is a woman; each woman is a challenge; and each challenge is a mirror cast on Fonda. Every movie he makes is a piece of an ongoing account—that of Henry Fonda’s responses to life, to experience, to the country around him, to the woman before him.

  * * *

  After a brief cohabitation in a Greenwich Village flat, Fonda and Sullavan separate in March 1932. The fighting has been constant, and the professional inequality gnaws at the young husband.

  He moves to a fleabag hotel. Even before the divorce comes through, Sullavan is found to be dallying with theatrical producer Jed Harris, who, it is said, is intent on making her into a star. Peggy, for her part, may love Harris, or hope to use him, or both. The Vienna-born producer is exotic, dashing, and powerful. Before the age of thirty, he’s had a half-dozen Broadway hits, been on the cover of Time, and become known as a diabolical consumer of people.

  Harris lives with, and has a son by, the stage actress Ruth Gordon; jolted by the Sullavan development, Gordon leaves him, writes plays, and goes on to be even more successful. But Fonda’s world comes down around him. Sullavan soon leaves New York, en route to Hollywood; she stops in Chicago to initiate divorce proceedings, and wires Fonda the news on May 16—their shared birthday.

  Fonda tells of being spiritually rescued at this dire point by a stranger in a Christian Science reading room. He doesn’t detail the substance of this counsel, but we know the Eddy doctrine advises self-sufficiency and self-succor. Rather than show his pain, Henry will swallow it. Rather than act it, he will repress it.

  * * *

  Sullavan and Fonda will stay in each other’s lives; webs of celebrity inbreeding will continue to connect them. In the summer of 1933, they will work together at the Westchester Playhouse in Mount Kisco, New York, where Sullavan is the company’s designated leading lady and Fonda is a set designer. Soon after, when both are in Hollywood, there will be a single screen pairing, followed by brief talk of remarriage. Sullavan will wed Fonda’s agent (and her own), Leland Hayward, in 1936; soon the couple will be living less than a block away from the Fondas in the Hollywood suburbs. When the Fondas move to Connecticut thirteen years later, Sullavan and her fourth husband will be found living nearby. Jane Fonda will become best friends with
Margaret’s older daughter, Brooke, while Peter will suffer an agonizing schoolboy’s love for her younger daughter, Bridget.

  Margaret Sullavan will have a dark final decade. Partly from fear that she is losing her looks, she withdraws from the screen; her final appearance is as a terminally ill woman in 1950’s No Sad Songs for Me. Six years later, she drops out of a hit stage comedy, claiming illness; and soon after, set to star in an installment of the live CBS drama series Studio One, Sullavan disappears from the set, having decided that she would be “unable to give the role ‘the kind of performance’ it deserved.”

  Her depressions grow more frequent. She starts to lose hearing in her right ear, which makes her anxious about missing dialogue cues. There is a retreat to a sanitarium; in 1958, she undergoes ear surgery. Meanwhile, she stays attentive to her children, her husband, her gardens—and ultimately, she plans her return to the stage in a play entitled Sweet Love Remember’d.

  She’s in New Haven, Connecticut, performing in previews, when her body is found in a hotel room on January 1, 1960. Death comes in a handful of barbiturates. Though the medical examiner reckons it an accident, with signs of acid poisoning, not everyone is convinced—especially when it’s learned that the outcome of her ear surgery was still in doubt, and that she had bequeathed her remains for deafness research.*

  The curse continues beyond her. During and after her days of crisis, Sullavan’s three children—Brooke, Bridget, and Bill—undergo numerous breakdowns and crack-ups. Bill survives mental institutions and drugs to become a successful film producer; Brooke, an actress, outlasts daytime soap opera, drink, drugs, and a disastrous marriage to come out with Haywire, an unnerving memoir of growing up in a brocaded fantasyland of wealth and mental illness. It’s Bridget, the middle child, who doesn’t come through. She dies only nine months after her mother. It is likewise a pill overdose, and unmistakably a suicide.