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

by Devin McKinney

  Peter Fonda is devastated by the loss. When his daughter is born three years later, he names her Bridget. Bridget Fonda will do fine in movies—sometimes better than fine. She’ll be appreciated by viewers and critics for her wit, grace, and gravity, and the assumption will be that she has her head screwed on.

  End of curse.

  * * *

  Henry Fonda was young, cruelly so, when he met and married Sullavan. He had no experience, romantic or sexual, against which to gauge her drama or her moods. His first sex had been with an Omaha prostitute, probably in the early summer of 1925, and his first romances were fleeting affairs. Sullavan was the first woman to get all of him, and the first to take some of him when she left.

  The Moon’s Our Home (1936)—the couple’s sole film together—was created well after they’d played out their personal drama. In act 1, we meet a movie star, Cherry Chester, and an adventure novelist, Anthony Amberton, who hate each other despite having never met. In act 2, the combatants, in flight from the burdens of fame, hide out under their real names; anonymous to each other, they meet and fall in love. In act 3, the facts reveal themselves, and our stunned deceivers, evenly matched in love and loathing, finally square off.

  The screenplay, embellished by Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, was fashioned to showcase its battling stars; many lines suggest awareness of their offscreen history. But does the movie’s pulse come entirely from our knowledge of the Fonda-Sullavan drama, or partly from the screen’s ability to translate their intimate vibrations into erotic energy? The movie itself—that third mind that comes alive when film egos interact—senses the history of intimacies in play: The air between the stars crackles with the camera’s suspicion that something is up.

  Fonda had compared Sullavan to “cream and sugar on a dish of hot ashes,” and The Moon’s Our Home is layered that way: sweet frivolity covering bitter sediments. There are delicious moments of innocence, bits of silliness, and Sullavan’s glamour and sporting self-mockery. She looks beautiful in a black turtleneck or sledding togs, and she does funny things with her small body—like striding across a broad foyer in such a way that all locomotion seems to derive from the piston swivel of her hips. Henry contributes his totem-pole elegance, matchless profile, and dangling Byronic forelock.

  Some scenes could only have been written by Algonquin cynics who were also true romantic believers. Take the wedding scene: Anthony has purchased a marriage license days in advance, knowing Cherry will accept his proposal. She is inflamed to discover this. The couple exchange sotto voce curses while Walter Brennan, as a deaf registrar, reads the marriage ritual.

  “Do you want to call the whole thing off?” Anthony asks.

  “I certainly do.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “I most certainly do!”

  Deaf Brennan hears only a bride confirming her vow. By the end of their first fight, Cherry and Anthony are married; and the fight is forgotten the next instant, as they are bathed in congratulations and each other’s kisses.

  Hot ash is the movie’s other taste. The tension generated by the stars culminates near the end, when Sullavan throws a pillow at Fonda—and he throws it back, knocking her into a chair. You nearly flinch: The pillow hits her like a fist. Soon, they will be wrestling on the floor, and the camera will have to look away as another actor enters—less to acknowledge the actor than to avoid the indecent spectacle of Sullavan and Fonda ripping each other apart.

  The story ends with Cherry and Anthony nuzzling in the rear of an ambulance, she stuffed in a degrading straitjacket. Critic Molly Haskell tastes the hot ash in this: Sullavan “is made to look delighted at being so conclusively overpowered, but after the spirit she has shown throughout, the ending leaves a bad taste.” Yes, but—it’s Cherry who has been the force of nature, Anthony merely her intrepid explorer. This surrender is only a mood between moods: Soon the jacket will come off, and this twister will fly again.

  The Moon’s Our Home does justice to Sullavan’s charm—that mix of sex and madness, wit and vulnerability that made Henry and so many others go mad for her. It’s the charm that radiates from those rare people who carry no taint of dull normalcy, whose nature it is to soar over others, picking them up and letting them fall. Sullavan cursed and gifted Fonda with decades of experience in a few short years. Without her, a man like him might never have known what it meant, in the rawest terms of his own soul, to crash, or to fly.

  * * *

  The period from 1931 to 1932 is a dim time in our chronicle. We don’t quite know where Henry is, or what he is doing—though a stunning head shot from this period, Henry’s face swathed in shadows, a sailor’s striped jersey lining his collarbone, is marked with a Brooklyn address (5 Prospect Place), which might have been his temporary residence.

  All is transience and struggle. Henry becomes a familiar face in casting offices and audition lines, and he grows bitterly accustomed to being turned away. On the bum in the autumn of 1932, he settles in one corner of an apartment on West Sixty-fourth Street. His roommates are two Falmouth friends—Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick—and a long-boned youth, James Stewart, whose time with the University Players just missed overlapping with Fonda’s. The building, dubbed “Casa Gangrene,” is full of prostitutes; shady characters in fedoras lurk in the hallways. Word is that a famous mobster—Jack “Legs” Diamond, just lately assassinated by gangland enemies—had his headquarters two doors away. Fonda will remember these as some of his lowest days: Of the starvelings of Casa Gangrene, he is the one most consistently out of work.

  Jobs do come along. An office girl with pity will, it seems, always fix him with a job in some theatrical backwater, chauffeuring actors, stagehanding, carting supplies, rustling props—“stooging,” it’s called. The summer of 1932 finds Fonda at a theater in Surry, Maine, occasionally acting (he plays Inspector Enderby in A. A. Milne’s Michael and Mary), but mostly stooging. Back in New York in October, he appears—then disappears—in I Loved You Wednesday, a play described by one reviewer as “a sentimental romance with a fairly fantastic tinge.” The star is Humphrey Bogart; Henry plays a bar patron and speaks no lines.

  Then down to East Orange, New Jersey, for winter stock. Early in 1933, he is chosen by the already-legendary actress Tallulah Bankhead to understudy her male lead in the comedy Forsaking All Others; though the show runs from March to June, Henry never hits the stage. Come summer, he is at the Westchester Playhouse, in Mount Kisco, designing sets and avoiding his ex-wife. In December, he scores a small role as Tevvy in S. N. Behrman’s Love Story, starring Frank Conroy and Jane Wyatt; the show aspires to Broadway but dies after four nights in Philadelphia. Fonda then, by his recollection, gets a part in S. J. Perelman’s All Good Americans, possibly through the intercession of Jimmy Stewart, also a cast member.

  About this time, back in Manhattan, Henry applies for a job at a West Side flower shop. Conceiving of this as an acting exercise, Henry fixes the proprietor, one Mr. Goldfarb, in an earnest gaze and says something like: I have come all the way to your fine city of New York, Mr. Goldfarb, to be an actor. It hasn’t worked out for me. So now I have decided that it’s time for me to grow up. To put away childish things and become—yes, what I always wanted to be—a florist.

  Fonda is acting, but part of him must be telling the truth, because he gets the job. Now he is hauling flowerpots up and down a staircase, scaling an endless ladder in a tiresome dream. What keeps the body pressing against failure, the spirit against rejection? It must be the sense that there is no alternative to perseverance—or that the alternative is unthinkable.

  * * *

  Then, out of nowhere, the thing happens. Anyone who storms or steals past fame’s first forbidden gate gets through on a thing: a break of breaks, the moment of being seen.

  Fonda is cast in New Faces, a musical-comedy revue conceived by a fledgling impresario, Leonard Sillman. It’s conceived as a performance showcase for unknown stage talent, a collection of sketches, dances, song
s, parodies of pop culture—“a potpourri, a bouillabaisse,” in the words of composer Arthur Siegel, “in which there was something for everyone.” Sketch will follow sketch in rapid order, with music covering the cracks and blackout routines fronting the set shifts. For Sillman, Siegel says, pace “was very important. He didn’t want to give an audience a chance to think about what it just saw.”

  Fonda snags an audition. He admits he can’t sing, dance, or tell jokes; instead, he does his impression of a man changing a baby’s diaper while driving a car. Sillman—who is even younger than Fonda, and a hearty laugher—signs him. Henry becomes one new face in a troupe of twenty-two.

  The band of outsiders rehearses in whatever space is found (apartments, a church, a restaurant, unheated lofts) and runs performances for selected “angels” (investors). “Finances had to be pooled so that quarters could be doled out for lunch money,” runs a contemporary account. “Collections were taken to buy shoes for two penniless performers. Watches and jewels were in pawn…” Finally the balance is tipped when a producer places a call to Hollywood, and America’s Sweetheart herself, Mary Pickford, agrees to foot half the bill.

  The show goes on. Fonda is not at first prominent; he and a few others, including a classical dancer named Imogene Coca, do a deadpan group dance during blackouts. But later, Fonda will stand in for an ailing singer to deliver the show’s hit song, “She’s Resting in the Gutter and She Loves It.”

  New Faces imparts welcome silliness to an uneasy springtime, and a cool breeze to a few thousand souls stewing in the cauldron of the Great Depression. Critics and playgoers turn out to root for the underdogs; reviews are encouraging. Time’s critic believes the show “lacks pace and polish, [but] contains enough wit to make it good entertainment of its type.” The Associated Press says it is “a fairly witty and pseudo-sophisticated revue and, more important, is a box office sell-out.” Staged at the Fulton Theatre and running for 149 performances, from March through July 1934, New Faces is a small hit.

  And Fonda is a hit in it. His song and dance routines are enough to convince at least one spectator that he could be the next idol of musical comedy. Tractor mogul and part-time producer Dwight Deere Wiman says he would like to place Fonda under contract for one year, during which time he’ll receive instruction as a singer and dancer. The dangling carrots are one hundred dollars a week and Henry’s vision of himself in a tuxedo, spinning into the night.

  Funny that he was first noticed and pursued not for his moody magnificence or wholesome mug, but for talents—singing and dancing—that in his hands would have been the blunt tools of low comedy. His entire career shows that when walking, running, riding, or gesturing, Fonda was an instinctive artist of the body; and that as a dancer, he was either comical (when well used) or merely stiff (when not). We can only conceive of young Henry as a limited musical comedian, a gangly clown and piercing crooner, Ray Bolger crossed with Alfalfa.

  A lethal notion—but here, in nearly its last manifestation, is that raw youth who is lost to time. Henry the jackal, loose, limber, and laughing hysterically, partnered with the divinely silly Coca, convincing two men of high standards and great foresight—agent Leland Hayward and film producer Walter Wanger—not only of his star power but the wisdom of getting him under contract and allowing him to grow.

  * * *

  Hayward is an independent talent spotter with an impressive client list, a high-powered mentor in Myron Selznick—older brother of producer David, and first of the Hollywood superagents—and a job résumé that touches every scroungy corner of the publicity racket. Slightly older than Fonda, likewise a son of Nebraska, he is always on the hunt for clients. He and Henry, passing each other in the theatrical agencies, have a vague acquaintanceship. Henry introduces Hayward to Margaret Sullavan, who first becomes his client and later his wife, but Hayward expresses no interest in representing Fonda.

  That is, until he attends New Faces and sees Fonda doing whatever our lost Fonda does: lamenting his gutter princess, flapping his arms, popping his eyes at the pop-eyed Coca. (Long, tall Henry is having a backstage fling with his gamine costar, a light, jocular affair, and surely that translates into charm in the performance.) Hayward goes backstage and expresses his interest in obtaining Fonda as a client. Fonda informs Hayward of the offer already before him.

  The agent urinates, metaphorically, on the Wiman deal. One hundred a week is nothing; seven hundred and fifty! Hayward promises in thunder. (“Hayward has the agent’s habit of thinking about money in big figures,” according to a 1936 profile, “and encourages his clients to do the same, even when they are broke.”)

  When New Faces finishes its run, there is a telegram from Hayward, telling Henry to get on the next plane to Hollywood. Fonda—as he has a tendency to do—reacts as if trying to sidetrack his own success. He says no, he’d rather not: “It wasn’t my ambition,” he’ll say one day, “to be in the movies.” Nor had it been his ambition, back in Omaha, to be an actor; nor will it be his ambition, a few years from now, to play Lincoln. In Fonda, there is clearly a pressing, though no less absurd, desire to somehow go unnoticed as he practices his very public art.

  Fate, though, with strong hands steering—Do Brando’s, John Ford’s, Leland Hayward’s—holds its track. Hayward has seen something in Fonda’s silly routine: a magnetic apparition, an odd human animal, a rising star.

  But as the star rises, the animal recedes. The blackout ends, the revue rolls on, and that Fonda is gone.

  Good-bye, my fancy! Farewell, jackal.

  * * *

  Somewhere beneath the Hollywood palms waits an independent producer with the odd name of Walter Wanger—rhymes with ranger. Fonda, at Hayward’s insistence, meets him in the Beverly Hills Hotel in the summer of 1934.

  Insulated by the theater, Henry has not heard of the producer. Rather than a cigar-chewing vulgarian, he encounters a high-talking New Dealer, a cravat-wearing, ideal-spouting archetype of the Hollywood liberal whose dogma is that movies should uplift and edify “the masses,” cleanse the great unwashed in wellsprings of knowledge and quality production design. Fonda refuses to be awestruck. But he listens to the deal, because Wanger has a history to go with his grandiloquence.

  Born Walter Feuchtwanger, he’d been a stage producer at the dawn of the Little Theatre movement, then protégé to pioneer movie mogul Jesse L. Lasky, whose company, Famous Players–Lasky, formed with Samuel Goldwyn, was the forerunner of Paramount Pictures. In the silent era, Wanger had helped bring early classics like The Sheik (1921) and Beau Geste (1926) to the screen; later, he would lure to the movies many writers and directors whose careers had been made on the stage (Cukor, Sturges, Mamoulian). Wanger had gone on to work for both Harry Cohn at Columbia and Irving G. Thalberg at MGM; in the latter post, he was William Randolph Hearst’s studio liaison on properties starring Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. By 1933, when he struck out on his own, he’d become famous for infusing his productions with leftist political content.

  As an independent, he would produce classics by Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, and Ophuls. He would marry actress Joan Bennett, and, in 1951, bestow a legend on Hollywood by shooting her lover, agent Jennings Lang, in the groin. After serving four months on an honor farm near Los Angeles, Wanger would seek out director Don Siegel to make the prison drama Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). The two would then collaborate on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, during which Wanger would introduce Siegel to an aspiring actor-writer named Sam Peckinpah, thus providing the latter with his entry into movies. Wanger’s main labor in late years would be hauling the disastrously expensive Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton remake of Cleopatra to the screen. He would die in 1968, his achievements little noted, an exile in the land he helped make.

  But now it is the summer of 1934, and Wanger is a prince of Hollywood. Stars like Sylvia Sidney and Charles Boyer are in his stable; he’s conquered the industry on his way to becoming its resident champion of “problem films,” the man who is called “a fine and dar
ing producer” (Fritz Lang), “a daring experimenter” (Time), and a purveyor of “one of the fanciest shell games even this industry has seen” (Otis Ferguson).

  He has been tipped to Fonda by Hayward. Wanger comes from Broadway, and he still has spies reporting to him from Forty-second Street. (He is, in fact, a close friend of Fonda’s nemesis, Jed Harris.) Hollywood has fairly recently discovered sound, and the miraculous or mortifying effect of the human voice on the screen image. The movies are hungry for actors who can talk, and that means actors from the stage: already, erstwhile Broadway players like Fred Astaire, Edward G. Robinson, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the Marx Brothers are building movie careers that will far outclass their collected achievements in the theater.

  In Fonda’s summary, Wanger’s deal is this: “I could go back to my beloved theatre in the winter and come out the next summer to do two pictures for one thousand dollars a week.” A remarkable offer, by any standard; it speaks of Wanger’s visionary eagerness to invest faith and dollars in the unknown. But Henry resists: “I turned to [Hayward] and said, ‘There’s something fishy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. And he laughed and laughed.”

  Wanger is one of the half dozen key people in Fonda’s professional life. But Henry will not recall him warmly, seeming to blame him for the cornpone quality of his early parts. He’s being unfair. Wanger convinces Fox to cast the unknown stage actor in The Farmer Takes a Wife, though the executives desire Joel McCrea or Gary Cooper (both unavailable). Wanger takes half of Fonda’s five-thousand-dollar-a-week loan-out fee, but by far the greater profit, in the long run, is Henry’s. Wanger produces six of his first thirteen films, and lends him for the others, but part of Wanger’s contract is that the star gets approval on loan-outs. And if Fonda’s pickings are initially slim, they improve immensely once the producer places him in two key properties—The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and You Only Live Once.