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

by Devin McKinney

  * * *

  By mid-1936, Fonda is a watched man, almost famous, a recognizable presence and replaceable head in the Hollywood arcade. Handsome, unattached, he goes out often and is linked to various women.

  No doubt some of the links are real, albeit temporary, while others are the conjurings of publicity wizards. The gossips have gone so far as to announce in October 1935 that he is engaged—to Shirley Ross, an Omaha-born starlet who has appeared in Bombshell, Hollywood Party, What Price Jazz, and other musical comedies (as well as Manhattan Melodrama, the picture Dillinger was leaving when G-men plugged him in a Chicago alley). The affair is brief and insignificant, and the engagement talk vanishes like smoke.

  Henry is still a boy in many ways, and he has his fun. He may be lonesome nonetheless, and crave stability over variety. In early 1936, he—or his PR team—begins advertising for a wife. “Henry Fonda says it is all right with him if he gets married by next Christmas,” claims an article syndicated in May. “He has just bought a home in Beverly Hills, and although he admits there is no immediate prospect of a Mrs. Henry Fonda, the house is already [sic] for her.”

  On July 10, he boards a boat bound for England, in execution of a Walter Wanger loan-out. Wings of the Morning is to be filmed at the brand-new Denham Studios of UK film mogul Alexander Korda, and on locations from Surrey to Killarney. A love story with a horse-racing backdrop, it pivots on Gypsy curses, mistaken identities, and a beautiful lead actress in male drag—she being Annabella, sexy and French, who spends the first part of the film flirting with Fonda while disguised as an adolescent duke.

  Though it’s the first Technicolor picture produced in Europe, Wings will be received without excitement; Henry will collect more of the wan plaudits to which he is growing accustomed. (“One of the most personable, sincere, and able of our young leading men,” says one critic; you could fall asleep reading Fonda’s good reviews.) He has taken the job only because it offers him his first chance to go overseas. He lodges at the Savoy Hotel, then moves to a cottage in Buckinghamshire.

  One day, Henry is introduced to a group of wealthy female American tourists who have been invited to the set. In their number is a striking young woman of patrician bearing. Introduced as Frances Seymour Brokaw, she is a friend of the producer’s wife, currently touring Europe with a chaperone. She’s twenty-eight, with a lithe outline, penetrating countenance, and confident manners. Her blue eyes, though large and candid, are also veiled, as if they focus on some farther, sadder reality.

  * * *

  Born in Brockville, Ontario, on April 14, 1908, Frances comes from a family well placed in eastern society. She is related by marriage to such New York dynasties as the Pells, Stuyvesants, and Fishes; her father, Eugene Ford Seymour, descends from English royalty of the Tudor era; and her mother, the former Sophie Bower, has ancestry tracing back to Samuel Adams and the Revolutionary War.

  There’s money, glamour, and influence behind the Seymours, but Frances rides the caboose of the gravy train, for her father has squandered most of the family’s capital. Frances’s mother is a gentle, long-suffering woman for whom no one has an ill word, but there is disagreement on the nature of the father. One biographer characterizes Ford Seymour as “an alcoholic with a violent temper,” while another calls him “a part-time poet, with delicate, refined features … reserved and rather shy.” Jane Fonda remembers her grandfather as “an exceedingly charming, devilish gentleman,” while noting the suggestion of Frances’s psychiatrists that he may have been a paranoid schizophrenic. To her doctors, Frances described an increasingly impoverished Seymour home, barred windows, and rooms wired shut by a patriarch slowly going mad. She claimed to have been molested at the age of eight by the one visitor allowed to enter the house—a piano tuner.

  Like Henry, Frances has been married before; she has a daughter, Frances de Villers, nicknamed “Pan.” Frances’s husband is dead. George Tuttle Brokaw was a Wall Street lawyer, heir to a clothing dynasty, and a bully-bully sportsman in the Teddy Roosevelt mold. He was a multimillionaire with a mansion at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, and, presumably, many animal heads on his walls. He was also, like Ford Seymour, an alcoholic and abuser of women. His first wife, the future playwright and politician Clare Boothe, had miscarried four times before escaping to marry media magnate Henry Luce. It was said that each miscarriage was due to a Brokaw beating.

  Frances was just twenty-two when they met, Brokaw nearly three decades older. She was working on Wall Street, fresh from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston—renowned as a training camp for ambitious girls seeking wealthy husbands—and she went after Brokaw with the same focus she would apply to Henry Fonda a few years later. A childhood of fear and genteel poverty had given her a strong will and a mercenary survival instinct; her chief ambition, she told a friend, was to “descend on Wall Street and marry a millionaire.” The relevant anecdote has an impatient Frances suggesting to Brokaw that it’s time he propose—whereupon the bully-bully type, caught off guard, accedes, meekly asking the future Mrs. Brokaw when the wedding will be.

  So, in January 1931, Frances, with every calculation, married a man much like her father, whose notoriety as a husband was despicable. Whether her pursuit of Brokaw suggests a malformed kind of love, a cold-eyed acquisition of capital, the need to be chained to a violent master, or all of these, may be debated. What is agreed is that George Tuttle Brokaw spent his last year in a sanitarium, the Hartford Retreat in Connecticut; that sometime in the overnight hours of May 28, 1935, he died; and that he left a cash bequest of approximately one million dollars to his wife, and to his four-year-old daughter, a yearly income in excess of $31,000 and property worth more than five million dollars.*

  * * *

  This, in harsh outline, has been the course of Frances’s twenty-eight years. She has been dominated and often terrorized by men. Incredibly strong and incredibly fearful, she knows what she wants, and what she wants is the worst thing for her. When she spots Fonda at Denham Studios under placid English skies, something clicks in her mind, and she decides that he will be her next husband.

  Like Henry’s, Frances’s self-presentation conceals a complex set of strengths and weaknesses. She overwhelms a goal once it is set; it’s her talent to place things in order, balance credits and debits, and act upon desire in the most deliberate way. That applies to money and to men. “When a woman really wants a man,” she is supposed to have said, “she should be the one who pursues and gets him.” Daughter Jane quotes her even more frankly: “I’ve always gotten every man I’ve ever wanted.”

  First, a potential rival must be dealt with. Henry is rumored to be involved with his costar, the provocative, fun-loving Annabella. But Frances satisfies herself that it is only gossip, and soon she and Henry are socializing in glamour spots along the Thames. Frances is gay and charming, yet her aura of control is a universe removed from Margaret Sullavan’s unpredictability. In fact, she seems an escape from drama and tempest: She evinces no particular interest in movies, and claims never to have seen Fonda on-screen.

  Henry, for his part, is still involved with Sullavan. They have only recently finished The Moon’s Our Home; the reunion has led to renewed romance and Hollywood house hunting. The day before shooting begins on Wings of the Morning, Hank writes “Dearest Peggy” a letter from the Savoy, extolling the English crew and “charming” Annabella, and noting it has been six years since he last wrote Sullavan a letter. Signing off, he expresses doubt that Peggy will visit him in England—evidently, she has hinted she might—along with hopefulness that she will.

  But very soon after, Henry meets Frances, and she makes quick work of him. We can imagine he is tugged by her assurance, dazzled by her command, refreshed by her alienness. But more vengeful motives may also be at work. He recalls Sullavan’s betrayal—hasn’t his suffering earned him the right to a fling?

  For Frances, though, it is no fling. She invites Henry to join her on the remaining stops of her European jour
ney. He accepts the invitation. Wings of the Morning is wrapped, posted for Hollywood and historical oblivion, and the two depart England for Germany. The Sullavan complication is discreetly tabled; the chaperone is dismissed.

  * * *

  Whirlwind is the word for their courtship: The gust of Frances’s energy carries Fonda along like a grain of sand. They find themselves in Adolf Hitler’s Berlin for the opening of the Summer Olympics on August 1, but they leave quickly, alarmed by the spectacle of fascist muscle. From there, the lovers travel to Munich, Austria, Budapest (where Fonda proposes), Paris (where Frances accepts), and finally homeward to New York. The news of their engagement travels fast—so fast, we have to wonder who cabled the press agents, and when. As early as August 24, headlines appear in stateside papers: “THEY’LL BE MARRIED—WIREPHOTO!”

  On September 8, a reception, sponsored by a Chrysler heir, is held for the couple at the Waldorf-Astoria. In a letter to Sullavan, posted the following day from the Gotham Hotel, Henry suggests he was less than forthcoming about meeting Frances, let alone their now-public wedding plans. Has he let Peggy discover the fact for herself, in black and white in the New York Times, or, worse, from a gossiping friend? He apologizes to Sullavan for having been such a “blundering fool” in his handling of the matter; his concurrent lovers have barely missed scraping each other’s shoulders in passing. Perhaps he privately enjoys bringing the once-dominant Sullavan up short. It would be a human thing to enjoy, and Henry is nothing if not human.

  The wedding, on September 16 at Christ Church on Park Avenue, affords ritual splendor and maximum pomp. The bride wears blue taffeta, the groom a silk hat and swallow-tailed tuxedo. Frances’s maid of honor is her sister, Margery; Josh Logan is Henry’s best man; ushers are Leland Hayward and Frances’s brother, Roger. There are hundreds of guests, enough flowers for a Rose Bowl float, sidewalks lined with fans and photographers. The arches of the Methodist shrine shelter the couple; the streets outside part for them. Henry can only feel dazed as bells chime over his head; it has been just two months since he and Frances were introduced.

  * * *

  They are so much alike—but in the wrong ways. Each is a stoic, an absorber and hoarder of pain; each is confident that fear and weakness can be bolstered by rigidity. They share behaviors but not dreams, repressions but not freedoms, and their battle will be conducted in a thousand grim silences and gnashings of teeth between two people whose need for control is like anyone else’s need for air.

  Frances has gotten Henry to the church on time. If their marriage is a power battle, she has won the first round. But Henry takes the next. The day after they are married, they return to Hollywood so that he may begin shooting his next movie. Frances has been thrust out of her world and into Henry’s, and she will have to adjust to the climate, codes, and facades of a new way of life.

  In a typical story, Louella Parsons asks the couple how they met. They giggle like children.

  “Mrs. Robert Kane asked me to meet the American leading man who was playing in Bob’s picture,” said Mrs. Fonda who has a very fair skin, big blue eyes and is much prettier than any of her pictures indicate. “I really like motion pictures, so I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to. What’s his name?’ Mrs. Kane replied, ‘Henry Fonda.’”

  “Just think, she had never even heard of me!” interrupted Henry with mock chagrin.

  It’s a con, on the public and on themselves. Frances’s “I really like motion pictures” is contradicted by other sources, and Fonda admits that he has begun to secede from the union almost immediately.

  The marriage will produce some good times and happy results, but Frances and Henry have struck a dark bargain. She will get the worst of it.

  * * *

  As he constructs a simulacrum of domestic happiness, Fonda begins to cultivate anger in his acting. As he achieves stardom, his protagonists seek anonymity. The more materially comfortable he becomes, the more his characters are defined by class conflict. Fonda’s acting continues to grow, mainly through a commitment to showing pain and doubt on-screen. It can’t be accidental that, with few exceptions, all of Fonda’s greatest work comes in the years he is married to Frances—or the years just after, as he deals with her specter.

  His persona splits in the late 1930s into two modes: that of the wanted man and the workingman. In the first group are films like You Only Live Once, Let Us Live, Jesse James, and The Return of Frank James; in the second, films such as Slim, Blockade, Spawn of the North, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath. In either mode, Fonda projects anger over affirmation. Even playing Watson, assistant to the inventor in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Henry pours a little acid on the refined sugar of costars Don Ameche and Loretta Young, implying the existence of another, realer world outside the frame.

  He is almost always more convincing, attractive, and memorable when at odds with something—the situation, the community, himself. Witness his pivotal success in Jesse James: As brother Frank, Henry injects the prestige Western of 1939 with the unstintingly mean style of a man born to hate. The Return of Frank James (1940), an inert and pointless sequel, opportunistically apes the ambience and even the plot of the recent Young Mr. Lincoln, contriving Frank’s rescue of an innocent man from lynching. Directed by an uninspired Fritz Lang, Frank James sacrifices the Jesse James sensation of Fonda as a bracingly bitter taste in a bowl of corn mush—which was all that gave the first film its savor and surprise.

  Two other films of this period—You Only Live Once (1937) and Let Us Live (1939)—star Fonda as the luckless modern man before the bar of justice, in whom simplicities of guilt and innocence are blurred. The character is wrongly accused, but he troubles the narrative and the audience by always seeming guilty: he wears a cloak of existential shame, and his redemption is deflated by feelings of futility.

  We are well out of Zane Gray country here, and brushing up against Kafka. In these two films—made prior to World War II but containing some of what that war was about—Fonda’s nervous, acidulous persona interacts with a modernist sense of defeat, and lays blocks in the foundation of film noir. Look at the era: The aftermath of the Depression wearies America, as do recurrent clashes among Communists, capitalists, and socialists. War brews overseas: Henry Fonda has seen Hitler’s Reich up close and made his hasty escape, as millions of Europeans in these years will not have the luxury of doing. The world pulses with horrors happening and waiting to happen. So You Only Live Once and Let Us Live—listen to those titles—have, whatever their flaws and evasions, a new urgency to press on their audiences, a new conviction about the value of life.

  The new dramatic setup, and the new popular fear it answers, force from Fonda new effects. The contrasts are exciting as the farmer goes to the city and turns fugitive, and the actor escapes Americana to emerge in the here and now of an explosive and terrifying time.

  Set in a nameless, sunless American city, Let Us Live centers on Fonda’s Brick, a hard-boiled cabbie with a devoted sweetheart (Maureen O’Sullivan), middle-class dreams, and a “representative” face. Brick and his friend Joe—whose pinko talk of social injustice affiliates him with John Steinbeck’s radical Okies—are erroneously fingered as the perpetrators of a fatal holdup. They’re marched through the legal system, past trial and conviction to the point of execution, before being rescued by chance. But rather than redeemed, Brick is made more cynical: The process of justice has been one of scarification, of bad luck canceled by dumb luck.

  Directed by German emigré John Brahm and shot by Lucien Ballard, Let Us Live packs a lot of movie; peer into its darkness and you may see a dozen later films—Detour or White Heat, Cabaret or Eraserhead—hiding inside. Only two scenes leaven the gloom with the conspicuous use of light. The first has Brick and Joe exposed under blinding light as their accusers bear false witness from enveloping shadows. The second has Brick in his cell, eyes cast upward as he says:

  When I was just a kid I was standing on a street corner with my old man … wat
ching a parade go by. Band’s playin’ … He hoisted me up on his shoulders so I could see the flag. He said to me, “You know, son, that’s not just a flag, it’s a symbol. It’s a symbol for millions of people all over the world. It’s all their hopes and beliefs. It’s freedom and justice, all the things men fight for. Think all those people are wrong?”

  The bottom of Fonda’s face is in shadow, mouth hidden, eyes the focus. It’s as if the words were coming from elsewhere, Fonda’s eyes searching out the picture the words struggle to draw.

  Let Us Live culminates Fonda’s move from the pasture to the town, daydreams to night terrors. But it is also a calculation meant to ride the memory of another movie—You Only Live Once. Appearing in early 1937, it’s loosely inspired by the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Texas bank robbers who tore a swath through six states before dying, less than three years earlier, under machine guns in a Louisiana field. They are turned into young lovers Eddie and Joan, an ex-con and a receptionist who dream of home and happiness but wind up running for their lives.

  Produced by Walter Wanger and directed by Fritz Lang, Fonda’s eighth film is the first to become a socially resonant hit. Pauline Kael will later write that it “expressed certain feelings of its time,” and place it among the best American movies of the 1930s. It may be that, but it is also ravaged by age and convention: Too much of the screenplay is dull homily, and there is insufficient charge in the filmmaking. What charge there is comes in nighttime exteriors that are unnaturally beautiful and vibrant with symbol.

  You Only Live Once comes alive in the dark. Walking with Joan in a lushly overgrown garden of night, Eddie describes his first arrest—for beating up a kid he caught torturing a frog. The lovers are shown upside down in a pool of water. A frog crouches on a pad. Suddenly it jumps—exploding the water, the reflection, the moment, the future. Of course, it is the frog Eddie once tried to save, come up in time to prophesy doom. Fairy-tale elements are at work, as if Lang could revisit in his mind and conjure with his camera the Grimm-fabled forests of his lost Germany. The moment is just as corny, poetic, and touching as John Ford’s fade from the Sangamon in spring to the ice of winter, from a girl’s lovely face to her snowy grave.