Wanger positions Fonda to come over as both a star and an actor. He helps him to cultivate an image appealing to both sexes, free of binding assumptions about social class or hypervirility, and applicable to a wider range of parts than is plausible for almost any other male star. Through Wanger, he’ll get into comedies, tearjerkers, social dramas, and even a Technicolor innovation or two. From 1935 to 1938, there is seldom a Fonda film on show that isn’t in some way special or topical, or that lacks some hook to lodge it in the public’s mind.
But the Fonda-Wanger partnership begins on a blank space—the movie that would have been Fonda’s first but wasn’t. On August 14, 1934, gossip queen Louella Parsons reports that Wanger has placed Fonda in a property called The President Vanishes. The producer’s notion of debuting Fonda in this politicized version of a Rex Stout mystery indicates that, from the start, Fonda’s handlers feel compelled to place him in proximity to politics, stand him next to flags.
The picture will be made without Fonda. He has either declined or been vetoed by the studio. Either way, Henry and Hollywood have not had the smoothest of meetings. He finds Hayward intimidating in his bluff assurance of every success, while Wanger is offering something suspiciously close to the moon and stars.
Henry returns to New York. What does he want? What does he not want? From the man comes a familiar shrug: “I had no ambition to be a movie actor.” I had no ambition—yet again. But we know by now that he does have ambition. We know, too, that his peculiar self-protecting tendency is to let himself be drawn along, lured into emotional and professional places he will not go on his own. We know that he needs men like Hayward and Wanger, as he has needed men and women before and will need them again, to push, convince, and inspire him to be himself.
We also know that The President Vanishes is scripted and shot, under Wanger’s production and William Wellman’s direction, in the fall of 1934; that it is released early the next year, to indifferent response; and that, at the time it is filming, Fonda is back in New York, onstage at the 46th Street Theatre, starring in his first Broadway lead, in a play titled The Farmer Takes a Wife.
* * *
Distracted by the Wanger offer, Henry fulfills his summer obligation to the Westchester Playhouse. There, he is cast in a production of Molnár’s The Swan, alongside actor Geoffrey Kerr. Kerr is the husband of June Walker, then among the foremost ladies of the American stage, peer of Hayes and Bankhead, already on Broadway when Henry Fonda was shooting marbles in Omaha. Walker, in her turn, is set to star in a new play coauthored by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly—the latter, coauthor of Merton of the Movies, and Broadway’s chief nostalgia merchant since the enormous 1930–1931 success of his Deep South comedy The Green Pastures.
Walker goes to Westchester to see Kerr in The Swan, and takes notice of Fonda. Henry overhears her whisper, “Wouldn’t he be wonderful as the farmer?” Walker then passes his name to Connelly, who requests Fonda’s presence in his suite at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue. There, Henry learns that he is under consideration for the male lead.
The farmer of the play is Dan Harrow, a roughneck on the shipping barges that crawl the Erie Canal in 1853, after the canal had connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and the eastern seaboard to the rest of America. Dan wants to get off the barges and onto a farm, and he tries to pull his feisty love interest, the cook Molly, with him. Thin stuff—though perhaps at the time, anything that hinted at the existence of blisters, sunburn, and labor was bound to give a whiff of realism.
The Gotham Hotel meeting goes happily. According to Connelly, who plans to direct the play, Fonda is awarded the hero’s role for his note-perfect reading of the boyish, calloused rough-and-ready hero: “He was patently ideal for the character, completely convincing, totally real.” According to Fonda, he is never asked to read a word. Rather, he gets the part because he has the good sense to compliment Connelly on his animated performance of the entire script.
After tryouts in Washington, D.C., the play returns to New York, where it opens October 30, 1934. Something about it connects; something in the mood of the Broadway audience is succored by the play’s return to simplicity. It is a prevailing American wish in late 1934, as at nearly every other time: Give us the simple of it. Stage our national past in a diorama of period costume and antique activity; show us a day when there were still dreams undiscovered, vistas unseen. Take us back; take us away.
To judge by the critical response, Fonda understands and delivers on that wish. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson calls Fonda’s Dan Harrow “a manly, modest performance in a style of captivating simplicity.” For the Brooklyn Eagle reviewer, it is “an extraordinarily simple and lustrous characterization.” Another critic is sure Henry “will be transferred to the movie colony in jig time to become the newest of the leading men for Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett or Miriam Hopkins.”
The Farmer Takes a Wife runs for over a hundred performances and is a success for all—another ruby in June Walker’s tiara, another divan in Connelly’s parlor, and Fonda’s second Broadway triumph in a row. Henry will gain more than anyone from the play. The other principals have already arrived at the summit of their fame; the unknown Fonda—so appealing and free of airs, presenting a new, sharp-lined, dark-haired definition of our country’s natural man—is seized on as the one whose star may rise on the Americana the production typifies and exploits.
* * *
The part of Dan Harrow gives Henry a chance to toss cargo, have a fistfight, leap, lunge. But it is his gentleness that audiences respond to—his combination of the physical and melancholy, the manly and phantasmal: the Fonda we see in the film version of Farmer.
Probably the stage performance is less controlled than its filmed counterpart. Shooting the movie in Hollywood, Fonda, performing his first scene, will be warned by director Victor Fleming that he needs to pull back a bit. Henry is horrified to realize he’s hurling his voice at a sensitive microphone, moving his body in ways that seem overscaled so close to the lens—that Cyclops that represents the eye of the nearest viewer. So he retracts the gesturing, reins in the voice, and internalizes forever the one major piece of direction he will ever require as a screen actor.
Even magnifying the film performance by several degrees, it’s not difficult to imagine Fonda’s appeal as Dan Harrow on the stage, his sweetness and sadness. It is also easy to imagine that the sadness is real. On October 5, 1934, after Henry has returned from Hollywood but before he opens in The Farmer Takes a Wife, his mother, Herberta Jaynes Fonda, dies in Omaha. She suffers a coronary thrombosis, brought on by a blood clot developed after breaking a leg. Christian Science is not able to save her, nor prayer sufficient to raise her from the dead.
Not for the last time, Henry goes onstage immediately after the death of a loved one and does his job. Embodies sweetness, simplicity, the manliness of an American man, and, along with those qualities, conceivably, something else not so easily named.
* * *
Our young man goes west—more or less for good—in March 1935, two months after Farmer closes. Though he will spend more years residing in Hollywood than anywhere else, something never quite gels between Fonda and the town that makes him a star. He is pulled there by a contract, but he insists it carry a clause releasing him for summers on Broadway.
However much Henry wants Hollywood, it’s clear that Hollywood in 1935 wants him—or, more exactly, wants the qualities embodied by those who represent the screen’s new wholesomeness. This trend to the nostalgic, chaste, and rural is indicative of a movie industry still in the process of recuperating its image—an image marred during the previous decade by a run of scandals appalling to both the newspapers’ ink-stained moralists and a public addicted to movie-star gossip.* By the early 1930s, Hollywood is losing money to this perception of sin and scandal, and to the Depression. Every business forms its own response to fear and crisis; if Hollywood is known as “the dream factory,” and if the factory is beset by blown fuses
, defective belts, clogged lines, and leaky moldings, surely another dream—newer, happier, healthier—is the prescribed repair.
Rather than necessarily making better films in the mid-1930s, Hollywood will make nicer ones. It will scramble to regain virility, and shake off the taint of decadence. And that is where Henry Fonda fits. He is fresh, boyish, “simple.” His true blood—along with that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and a clutch of others—will cleanse Hollywood. He will become one of the town’s favored sons, a spearhead in his industry’s move toward respectability and higher purpose.
* * *
He eases himself into his contract, and into the monotonous flow of publicity. Glossies are taken, and interviews awarded to columnists eager to print a studio’s PR. Many quotes are dispensed, and juicy items planted about handsome Henry vis-à-vis some starlet with equal need of exposure. Fonda tests out his interview mien—eagerly unexciting, candidly unrevealing—and begins accumulating his store of personal anecdotes, highlights of his career and development, to be honed over many years and many tellings.
After a few months, Henry rents a bungalow with Jimmy Stewart, his comrade from Casa Gangrene, and another stage veteran recruited for pictures. The two live, briefly, like boys whose pockets bulge with candy money. They double-date with Lucille Ball and Ginger Rogers, have nights out at the Cocoanut Grove, drive Henry’s Ford roadster into the hills. They fly a large model plane made of balsa wood in their backyard—a Martin bomber they’ve built themselves, whose construction was begun back in New York, and which Stewart transports to Hollywood by Pullman car.
It is a strange place, a strange life. The skeins of connection and coincidence between professionals in Henry’s new, suddenly smaller world can seem unending. Still new in town, he lunches, costars, and house-hunts with ex-wife Sullavan. By this time, she has already been married to and divorced from the director William Wyler. Wyler will soon be directing Fonda in Jezebel—alongside Bette Davis, whom Fonda kissed behind the Princeton Stadium in 1927. Leland Hayward, Sullavan’s next husband, is agent to them all.
Then there is the brief, brutal saga of Ross Alexander and Aleta Freel. Henry knows them from Falmouth and Mount Kisco, and he stood as best man at their wedding; soon after, Freel’s name would follow Fonda’s on the roll of the short-lived Stage Associates. The couple have left for Hollywood in advance of Henry, and both are under studio contract. Alexander, costar of the Errol Flynn actioner Captain Blood, is even approaching a certain level of stardom. But on December 7, 1935, Freel shoots herself in the head. Her husband, rushing toward the sound, discovers her body by stumbling over it. He claims his wife had been despondent over the failure of a recent screen test.
Within days, Alexander is back at work. Louella Parsons writes admiringly, “The day following the suicide of Mrs. Alexander, Ross, knowing that Warner Brothers needed him in an important scene that called for many extras, astonished everybody by appearing on the set and insisting on going on.” Yet barely more than a year later, Alexander will kill himself at his home, during a gathering of friends but out of their sight, also with a bullet to the head.
The one known outcome of the suicides—the first of many to strike close to Henry Fonda—is that a young radio announcer, hailing from Illinois by way of Iowa, receives his Hollywood break. A Warner Brothers casting director places Ronald Reagan in a western role meant for Alexander, feeling the actors’ voices are similar.
If Aleta Freel had not killed herself, would Ross Alexander have lived? If Ross Alexander had lived, would Ronald Reagan have gotten into the movies? If Ronald Reagan hadn’t gotten into the movies, would he have become president?
* * *
There’s another thing to be pointed out about Hollywood and Henry Fonda, the same thing that accounts for Ronald Reagan’s entry into film: the sound of the voice. By 1935, the movies had talked for eight years, and it was accepted that voice as much as body defined the actor, that one could not become a star without distinctive tones. There is not an icon of the Hollywood 1930s whose voice is not central to his or her legend: Tracy’s gruffness, Hepburn’s clenched jaw, Grant’s suave cadence, Cagney’s bullet phrasing.
Fonda and his contemporaries moved into the space left by the stars whose mystique was built solely on movement and expression, and who now found they were unable to seduce an audience with its ears wide open. David Thomson notes the paradox that the coming of sound placed an unprecedented emphasis on silence—that is, on the trade-off between a voice and the silence that might precede or follow it, or the silence sounded in the timbre of the voice itself. He writes of how “a generation of favorites slipped away because they did not have access to that emotional quietness, and the allure that attaches to any mystery or reticence in a medium that seems to be giving you all the visual evidence.”
Fonda has that access, that allure. It’s partly the voice that leaves people at a loss for how to describe him. Here is a young man of uncommon reserve, so much of whom is implied in silence, lack of show. He seems smarter than Cooper, more virtuous than Gable, more melancholy than McCrea, more elusive than Tracy. Viewers who haven’t seen anything quite like him before, who lack better words to describe it, call it “modest,” “honest,” “simple.” But how do we describe simplicity in a way that does justice to its complexity? How do we prove the existence of the invisible, or translate a message in vanishing ink? Words like simple fall short when applied to Fonda, because they are asked to describe something not at all obvious—something that is there to be felt, yet is not there to be seen.
* * *
So Henry has made it inside the gate. The future begins here. The next few years will fly past, and parts will accumulate. It will be determined by the pooled wisdom of Hollywood that he is to be taken seriously. He’ll earn high regard for professional principle and integrity in performance. He’ll begin the process of defining himself as a screen actor of rare and troubling depth, an American institution, a worthy bore.
His talent has barely begun to be tapped. Greatness lies ahead. But our theme to this point has been a sad one: that by the time Fonda reaches the screen and is for the first time widely seen—by our ancestors and proxies in the American movie houses of 1935, those encountering a complete unknown named Henry Fonda—basic parts of the man have already flowered and withered.
“Youth is a time of living violently,” Henry’s Falmouth colleague Norris Houghton writes, “and tears belong as much to violent living as do laughter and shouting.” As a man, Fonda has been outgunned in love; as an actor, he’s gone from dusty Omaha to sandy Cape Cod, dour Manhattan to pixilated Hollywood. He’s been near enough to the edge of personal despair and professional failure to have come within spotting distance of his own abyss. He’s had other losses—deep, personal ones. Extremities of emotion have been exposed, and now are hidden. So Fonda’s subsequent career will be an expression less of discovery and attainment, the all-American pleasure in having and being, than of loss and wonder—qualities of estrangement and searching seeming to sound from a distant, different America that lurks somewhere inside the country, and inside ourselves. With the passage of a few years and a few key parts, we, the audience, begin to engage deeply with Henry Fonda.
This is the moment before that begins to happen. His first movie audiences have to wonder if they are seeing in this young actor a new face, or an old apparition; a fresh persona, or a glowing plainsman who, both young and old, straddles ages with those first words cast into the future by an old man’s younger self, the wild boy now vanished:
“Be ashamed, an old man like you.”
4
The Big Soul
Let Us Live
“The only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda,” James Baldwin wrote, recalling the Hollywood movies he saw as a youth in the 1930s and 1940s. “I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had color
ed blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don’t walk like that! and he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away from the camera.”
Why couldn’t a black adolescent in a big eastern city see something of himself in white, middle western Henry Fonda? Fonda, as Baldwin saw it, was not just walking away; he was showing us his ass. Baldwin was writing of the few small, useful things he’d been able to derive as a child from his country’s movies, those images of defiance that contributed to his “first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me.” For Fonda to show us his ass, using the walk that to Baldwin and his friend identified him as a fellow outcast, meant he was making a small refusal that was recognizable to them alone.
Fonda might have smiled to hear such talk. Yet metaphor, the possibility of many meanings—colored blood, small refusals—arises from a great actor as organically and unconsciously as it does from a rich novel or a suggestive painting.
Emerging from the heart of the country as one talented American—really, no more than that—he reemerges on its movie screen as one version of the perfected American man. But Fonda spends these years focusing inward, on his own dilemma, as well as outward to find his place in the greater context of politics, mass movements, wars; and the processes are interlocked. What is remarkable is how far his personal journey becomes one in which millions of Americans feel they can share, an open road along which they see their country passing and an image of themselves approaching, wearing Henry Fonda’s face.
Fonda’s men are antiheroes who decide they must commit to a common cause—less because the cause is right than because isolation of the kind they feel natural with implies, finally, surrender and death. Fonda’s hero must realize the degree to which he is not just the unum in the American equation but also one of the pluribus; realize, though it galls him, that he is—truly, dreadfully, awesomely—an American.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 7
