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

by Devin McKinney

  In 1938, soon after Jane’s birth, the Fondas move to a large family cottage on South Chadbourne Avenue in Brentwood. (Again, the Haywards follow them to a nearby house on Evanston Street.) Then, in early 1940, Henry and Frances discover a nine-acre property at 600 Tigertail Road in Beverly Hills, overlooking the Pacific, with views of the Santa Monica Mountains. Though the land is costly, this verdant suburb is not yet the exclusive domain of the Hollywood elite. In Henry’s recollection, the landholder, Bell Telephone, is uncertain whether to sell or retain the thousands of acres. Selling would mean installing many miles of wire for phone service and utilities, and no one knows if such investment is justified. But by liquidating some of Henry’s holdings and pooling them with her own, Frances is able to purchase the property for $27,000. Peter remembers the family moving there “in increments” between 1942 and 1944.

  Tigertail is at first, Henry says, “a bare hill. Not even trees.” With his own hands, he plants groves of citrus and pine. The wilds of Beverly Hills in the predevelopment 1940s are unspoiled but treacherous. “In those days,” Brooke Hayward writes, “the sky belonged to patrols of turkey buzzards circling it leisurely, the hills swarmed with jackrabbits and deer, and at night packs of coyotes gathered on our lawn to howl at the moon.” The tall grasses are alive with king snakes and rattlers.

  The Fondas design and build a main house, with a number of outbuildings dotting the property. “Probably the most carefully planned home in these United States,” it’s called in a 1948 House Beautiful pictorial. “Before even the cement was mixed, trees were moved and transplanted on the grounds, flower beds were set out, a citrus grove was planted, and gardens were mapped.” There are Mohawk Valley touches in the styling of the house, with its artificially distressed shingling and colonial furnishings.

  For the kids, Tigertail is a pastoral wonderland, with horse stables, a two-story playhouse, and unlimited space. Brother and sister remember these as the happiest days of their childhood. In retrospect, they will understand their parents’ unhappiness, signs missed or ignored at the time; but for now, there are sufficient sun, grass, and animals to divert them from the mysterious doings of the adults.

  Henry works steadily during the construction, either at Twentieth Century–Fox—to which he is now contracted—or on the land. Frances’s task and distraction is to take over the household finances, including the buying and selling of stocks and real estate. She grows more withdrawn, eats less, and begins to hoard pills.

  At the same time, she multiplies her own money, while losing a good deal of Henry’s in a series of bad investments. The implications are plain: As Henry withdraws attention and affection from Frances, so she withdraws a portion of his solvency and independence. The emotional constriction of the situation, the time-bomb silences and secret retributions, mean that Frances’s manner and habits grow more institutional, as of one living in a prison, with herself as both inmate and jailer: She carries a ring around, with keys to every lock in Tigertail.

  Or maybe she simply misses the hospital—any hospital. In 1940, suffering headaches and weight loss, she retreats for three weeks to the Scripps Clinic near La Jolla. It is her first confinement for nervous symptoms.

  * * *

  Like many harried young husbands, Henry has stress at the office, and a boss he despises. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century–Fox, is also from Nebraska—little Wahoo is a mere thirty miles west of Omaha. Zanuck is only three years older, and, like Fonda, he left his virginity in one of Omaha’s many brothels. We don’t know if the two ever compared notes on their first sexual experiences, or, indeed, if they might have chanced to share the same initiator.

  But their common ground ends there. Unlike Fonda, Zanuck is a braggart who believes his own publicity. He is also an executive of raw brilliance who not only shepherds many daring projects to estimable ends but also manages to do little enough damage to others in the process. He becomes Henry’s necessary antagonist during his finest decade on the screen, enabling or obstructing some of his most important films.

  Zanuck’s credits reach back to the silent era. He’s risen from writing gags for dog star Rin Tin Tin to heading production at Warner Bros., where in 1931 he initiates that studio’s cycle of archetypal gangster films. After that, he forms a production company, Twentieth Century, with Joe Schenck, president of United Artists; the company merges with the failing Fox Film Corporation in 1935, and Twentieth Century–Fox is created. There, Zanuck produces a body of cinema whose elements are, as Mel Gussow puts it, “a little melodrama, a big musical, a lot of spectacle, and a preponderance of fictionalized history.” With plenty of Shirley Temple thrown in.

  Zanuck is among the few who know instantly that talking pictures are not a fad. He has a sixth sense about story values, personally supervises the script construction and final edits on many pictures, and often takes a pseudonymous writing credit. For these skills he is genuinely, if grudgingly, admired by his directors—the likes of John Ford, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Jean Renoir, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

  In the 1940s, Fox becomes the top studio in Hollywood, and Zanuck, writes biographer George F. Custen, “would transform himself from a purveyor of colorful but basically escapist entertainment into the industry’s preeminent serious producer.” The phrase “serious producer” is like the phrase “great American”—we would do well to be wary of it. Zanuck wins Best Picture Oscars with How Green Was My Valley (1941), Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), and All About Eve (1950), and scores only slightly less exalted hits with Song of Bernadette (1943), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and The Snake Pit (1948). If some of the Zanuck “classics” are insufferably trite today, and others oafishly sensational, a few retain shreds of what we can only call power.

  By 1940, Zanuck has collected a stable of reusable stars: not only the Temple phenomenon, but also Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Loretta Young, and the skater Sonja Henie. They are mediocre actors and soft idols, however affable and reliable. None commands the actorly weight to confer real prestige on a studio—and Zanuck has the self-made, ill-educated man’s thirst for prestige. Meanwhile, Henry Fonda is turning into one of the most prestigious items in pictures. He carries the library whiff of literature, the noble dust of history, and it is largely through Zanuck productions like Young Mr. Lincoln, Jesse James, and Drums Along the Mohawk that Fonda has achieved such stature.

  Yet each man regards the other with hostility. There is something about Fonda—a refusal to buy all the way in, to become a contract player—that must look to Zanuck very much like a presumption of superiority. It may be that he dislikes watching Fonda reap the reward of prestige projects without showing due fealty to the producer whose sweat and aggression make them possible.

  The actor, for his part, may resent the producer on matters of fundamental difference. Where Fonda is tall, lean, and quiet, Zanuck is squat, bullish, and loud. Where Fonda projects modesty, Zanuck is an inveterate attention grabber. Where Fonda is wreathed in public and critical esteem, Zanuck hears only the hosannas of yes-men. Where Fonda suffers, Zanuck revels—in women, parties, opulence, pushing patriotic product and homespun values while indulging what Gussow terms a “divided allegiance in matters of morality.”

  * * *

  But none of that matters to Fonda, so long as he remains his own man. In 1938, his contract with Wanger expires; offers fly at him, and in the following year he does some of his best acting. His commercial draw is increasing: “Henry Fonda is fast becoming a matinee idol in spite of himself,” says a contemporary report. From a distance, Zanuck watches Fonda develop; he counts his profit and waits for his moment.

  The Grapes of Wrath comes into play. Though it seems made for the screen, most producers shy away from its suggestion that something may be broken in the American system. Only Zanuck seems interested in taking up the novel’s challenge, or exploiting its dollar value. “We intend to follow the exact book,” he assures John Steinbeck, while allo
wing that some content will have to be sacrificed to the censors. Steinbeck, though less than easy with Zanuck’s promises, takes his deal.

  Ford is evidently not the producer’s first choice as director, nor are all the actors in place from the outset. But as Custen writes, “one casting decision was never questioned: Henry Fonda was always Zanuck’s choice to play Tom.” Perhaps, but Custen doesn’t say what Zanuck does to get Fonda—and to get him where he wants him.

  In recounting their meeting, Fonda will note a single salient detail: Zanuck, an avid polo player, has the affectation of swinging a polo mallet—whoosh, whoosh—while talking.

  Zanuck lays it on the line. Tom Joad is an epochal part, and Fonda is ideal for it. Whoosh, whoosh. But to get it, he will have to sign a contract tying him to Fox and Zanuck for seven years. Whoosh.

  Inside, our hero curses. Out loud, he asks for the pen, and signs.

  The deal will force Fonda to bite the bullet as an actor for most of the next decade, getting his shot at Joad in return for seven years of whatever contract trash is handed him. So Henry learns something new and bitter about the nature of necessity in Hollywood: No whore gets to shine without finally being reminded he is a whore. He will loathe Darryl Zanuck until the day he dies.

  * * *

  If we linger over this stretch of mediocrity, it is only to note the varieties of abjection Fonda puts his back to—and the miracles of art that can occur in a commercial medium, no matter the impediments. So, following a nonchronological course from worst to best, we stroll through an unhappy Fonda phase that, if it isn’t quite a season in hell, is surely a fortnight in purgatory.

  Lillian Russell (1940). A musical, with Alice Faye as the once-famed Broadway singer. Fonda is third-billed as one of her many suitors, slack-shouldered in a role that forces him back to the boyish ardor of earlier films. Asked about it at the time, Fonda says he hasn’t seen it: “I know I’m bad, and I don’t intend to find out how bad.”

  Chad Hanna (1940). Jane Darwell, John Carradine, and screenwriter-producer Nunnally Johnson return from The Grapes of Wrath to mount a story of traveling circus performers. Henry is palpably disagreeable to playing, at thirty-five, another clod-kicking juvenile, mouthing phony hillbillyisms and carrying slop to pigs. Zanuck released this misery on Christmas Day.

  Immortal Sergeant (1943). In August 1942, Fonda enlists in the United States Navy, and neglects to inform anyone at Fox of the fact. Though it is unprofessional of him, no one will criticize a screen star who selflessly surrenders his career for the duties and dangers of a common sailor in wartime.

  But Zanuck will again prove himself Henry’s master as gamesman and mallet swinger. The instant Fonda arrives at boot camp, Zanuck has him recalled on the pretext that he is needed to star in a piece of propaganda. This is Immortal Sergeant, a dreary story of heroics in the Libyan desert, whose script combines The Lost Patrol with a dire romantic plot. While the film has no measurable impact on morale, it does dampen Fonda’s crisp escape from Hollywood, his perfect “fuck you” to Zanuck—and that must have placed a sweet taste behind the producer’s smile.

  The Magnificent Dope (1942). Henry is the bumpkin exploited by an adman in this Capraesque monkeyshines, which renews the great American myth of the honest man’s triumph over cynicism and slickery. Fonda gamely applies himself to the thousand small, sour tasks of professionalism.

  The Big Street (1942). Based on a Damon Runyon story, its every inhabitant has an inexhaustible line of colorful crapola, and a heart softer than a circus peanut. Fonda plays Pinks, a nightclub busboy inexplicably devoted to a woman he calls “Highness” (Lucille Ball), a gangster’s moll who disdains and exploits him.

  The movie is too bad to watch, the plot too good to resist. Highness, hit by a car and crippled, decides she must go to Florida, never mind why. Pinks wheels her all the way from Broadway to Miami Beach. When she starts acting cuckoo, Pinks consults a shrink, who asks, “Didja ever hear of a thing called paranoia?” He explains that paranoids are fine people, so long as their fantasy is preserved; contradict it, though, and they collapse—“Unless it’s restored.” (“He ain’t a very good doctor, Pinks,” says costar Agnes Moorehead, in the understatement of the 1940s.)

  Pinks goes to elaborate lengths to reconstruct Highness’s illusion, finally dragging his paraplegic love around a nightclub floor. Then, having induced her to hallucinate that she is both glamorous and self-ambulating, he carries her to the veranda, where she dies in his embrace beneath the stars. Strange. Very, very strange.

  Tales of Manhattan (1942). An omnibus, directed by Julien Duvivier. Fonda’s partner is Ginger Rogers, and their segment is the least interesting in the picture. In its single funny moment, Rogers does something to prompt a roar (yes, a roar) from Fonda. Hard to remember what.

  Wild Geese Calling (1941). Our space- and time-traveling star is now a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest, 1895, climbing a tree as cleverly as lineman Slim will scale an electrical pole forty years later. Back from Let Us Live are director John Brahm and cameraman Lucien Ballard; the screenplay is by pulp novelist Horace McCoy. The film is not wretched. Narrative contrivance is met by an overall impression of human bustle, some spirited make-believe, and the perennial tension to be wrung from a childbirthing climax set in a remote cabin on a stormy night.

  You Belong to Me (1941). In which Fonda is paired for the final time with Barbara Stanwyck. The movie trades on Henry’s image, inherited from The Lady Eve (still to come), as the passive player in l’amour fou, and, as in The Mad Miss Manton, he is feminized: Stanwyck as the husband-wife works; Fonda as the wife-husband sulks and shops. But with Stanwyck’s support, he makes an exceptionally appealing romantic-comedy lead—likable even when self-centered or pathetic.

  Rings on Her Fingers (1942). Fonda’s movements have spring and flex, and he spends much of the picture lounging, leaning, pivoting, or angling in unfamiliar ways. In the dance scene, he and Gene Tierney start out moving like bread sticks, then break hilariously into an explosive jitterbug. The film is directed by Rouben Mamoulian, who may remember Fonda from years before, having directed him in The Game of Love and Death, his Broadway debut.

  The Male Animal (1942). Elliott Nugent and James Thurber contrive a hit play from the politics of the wartime college campus and prevailing American codes of manliness. Fonda seems at first almost too tailor-made for the part of Tommy Turner, bespectacled professor and scrawny, fuddled idealist. At the climax, as Tommy reads the jailhouse prose of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the star removes his glasses, combs his hair, and becomes Henry Fonda—and the scene has the smell of an actor doing his specialty. But it’s a fine picture from stellar material, directed at stage speed by cowriter Nugent. Fonda is given one of his finest romantic partners in Olivia de Havilland, who combines glamour, common sense, and a winning lack of neuroticism.

  The Lady Eve (1941). It’s either the genius of the system or the cretinism of chance that gives Fonda one of his career triumphs at a time when his work is virtually devoid of pleasure. But it is solely the genius of writer-director Preston Sturges that sees earnest Fonda as a timeless hero of screwball comedy.

  Casting him as Charles “Hopsie” Pike—explorer of tropical interiors, student of snake life, and patsy to con woman Barbara Stanwyck—Sturges locates in Fonda fine grades of innocence that have been elusive to other directors. From his first appearance in white dinner jacket, we sense we’re watching not a new Fonda, but a Fonda detailed and sharpened, made comedically exact and brought newly alive. He is beautiful as he sits and reads his book, with humor in his beauty, precision in the lines of his body: Fonda’s physical discipline produces a funniness of being. Yet his face is magnificently solemn, impervious to the flutterings of the avaricious debs at surrounding tables, sweet predators who want his body, his money, his mouth, and perhaps even a bit of his strange, private mind.

  Then Stanwyck’s Eve catches his face in her hand mirror. She extends a leg, and Hopsie trips and crashes like a small
skyscraper. There is nothing in Hollywood comedy like Fonda’s fall, or Stanwyck’s smile at the moment Eve knows Hopsie is hooked. From that point, Fonda’s face alternates fear, a revolted turn-on, and the blanks of a man worrying every question to death in his head; his body lines go berserk as Stanwyck folds and crunches him into the director’s frame like a stuffed animal into a trunk.

  “You’re certainly a funny girl to meet for anyone who’s been up the Amazon for a year,” Hopsie tells Eve, and in this sexy, absurd context, phrases like “funny girl” and “up the Amazon” tickle us in odd places. We get the most erotic scene in any Henry Fonda picture—a long, sustained shot of Hopsie and Eve clinching faces, she sensuously stroking his hair and whispering, he looking terrified and tumescent, his eyes cast upward in ecstatic martyrdom, a Joan of Arc burning at the stake of sex.

  This is only the beginning of The Lady Eve. It goes on to be a perfect immersion in the Sturges world, with all its well-defined yet constantly recombinant elements—a world dominated by actors and chance, in which jungle beasts and a cruise-ship steam whistle, a rainstorm and a locomotive conspire to make life joyful. The Lady Eve is a sexy machine, a witty snake, a gift. And proof again that, whatever Henry’s self-isolating tendencies as a man, as an actor he needs friends around him, artists of sympathy, in order not just to emerge but to take his fullest, most inspiriting shapes.

  * * *

  There must be times when Fonda’s career is incoherent to him. He is the actor as artist as craftsman, focusing on a narrow but deep range of expression and investigation, a certain class and cadre of American man. But the Zanuck regime blasts his focus, and Fonda hates it because he, more than most of his contemporaries, is ravenous for focus.

  He thrives under directors who know just what they are doing, with scripts that are suggestive but solidly built. The Fox contract forces Fonda into swamps of inanity, attempts at populism that—as drama, comedy, or even fantasy—make no sense. And Fonda, craftsman and conventional man, wants to make sense.