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

by Devin McKinney

  That is both virtue and limitation. Making sense is a way of dealing with reality but also of denying it. As the sensible man belittles the chaos of emotion, the sensible artwork belies the complexity of things. The narrative that is too focused and coherent to admit ambiguity in life or character will leave an audience renewed in its certitudes and empty of curiosities; communicate a point of view, but bring nothing to life.

  We’re reluctant to apply these disclaimers to The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), for it is one of the few films from Fonda’s Zanuck era that holds our interest now. And the project clearly means much to Fonda personally. He is instrumental in getting it made, and gives it some of his strongest, edgiest acting. Directed by action-film pioneer William A. Wellman and scripted by Lamar Trotti, it is not a work anyone will forget having seen. But at its core is a moral simplicity, a desire to make sense that reduces it. It shows Fonda as the too-conscious craftsman, too-justified liberal, and too-sensible artist, with all the limitations and virtues of the Nebraska son and Christian Scientist.

  Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel is set in the imaginary Bridger’s Wells, Nevada, in 1885. Two freelance cowpokes hear that a recent spate of cattle rustlings has climaxed in a rancher’s murder. A lynch mob finds three men who are implicated by circumstantial evidence. Despite protesting their innocence throughout a long night, the three are hanged at dawn by the vigilantes. It will be learned too late that they were innocent.

  The book is highly praised and a best-seller, but its lack of any positive resolution makes it a near-impossible piece of movie material. Antilynching dramas are not conducive to American self-esteem as the nation heads into the hardest phase of World War II, and Darryl Zanuck is against the project from the outset. While he perceives the prestige value of a film done right, he feels an open indictment of lynching is “certainly not entertainment for these times.”

  The others involved disagree. Clark asserts the film wouldn’t have been made but for the “high pressure salesmanship” of Wellman and Fonda. “Together,” he says, “they went to bat for the work.”

  As an antilynching statement, Ox-Bow is a strong dose. It is brave in implying a relation between manliness and sadism, and its energy is bracingly modern: The frames breathe realism, toughness, cool. Indeed, with its high-contrast lighting, hard-boiled dialogue, volatile characters, and sense of fate, Ox-Bow may be the first noir Western.

  The opening sequence, full of macho face-offs between itchy, horny cowboys, is an exhilarating buildup of tension. Fonda is again the strong center—terse, humorless, considered in his movements but always with a violent capability—and he plays the cowboy Gil Carter through the eyes as much as the mouth. “Make that clear,” he says in response to a taunt: the purity of Gil’s danger is his expanding eye sockets and narrowing pupils. Those eyes will become the center of consciousness and judgment in The Ox-Bow Incident—the eyes of the cynic, the man at the edge of the group.

  Yet the film still feels small and tinny. It is simple-minded, with a slick sense of despair, where the novel is messy and multidimensional. The movie trims Clark’s slow, lurching scenario, making a straightforward indictment of mob violence and lynch law at a time when that is a crucial but unpopular thing to do. In social terms, that’s quite a bit; in artistic terms, it’s simply not enough.

  Fonda is afraid of mess, but only, perhaps, because he knows it too well. There’s an exchange in Clark’s novel about the fear of the mess inside each of us. “Did you ever hear a man tell another man,” the narrator is asked, “about the dreams he’s had that have made him sweat and run his legs in the bed and wake up moaning with fear?” The narrator doesn’t respond, but he is listening. “We’ve all had those dreams. In our hearts we know they’re true, truer than anything we ever tell; truer than anything we ever do, even. But nothing could make us tell them, show our weakness …

  “We’re afraid our own eyes will give us away,” the narrator is told—or warned. “That’s what makes us sick to hear fear admitted.”

  Those are words Fonda would understand. They are the revelation of a strong man’s panicked inner life. Fear is the motor of his acts: He cannot live without feeling, yet he can never let himself feel too nakedly, and so he is trapped with dreams of fleeing—fleeing himself, the exposed and vulnerable thing that he is.

  * * *

  The Ox-Bow Incident has the same nocturnal preoccupation as Young Mr. Lincoln: The director of photography is Arthur Miller, who’d shot that film’s key scene of Abe and Ann at the riverside. One of the three hanging victims is played by Francis Ford, John Ford’s brother; he played a juror in Lincoln, the citizen who never spoke but nodded eagerly at the prospect of hanging someone. And crucially, Ox-Bow reverses the rescue fantasy of Lincoln by showing a hanging that is not averted. It’s as if Fonda wants to show all the things Lincoln only insinuated: the scapegoating reflex in our public life, the evil capability of the mass, the malignance in the American night.

  The Grapes of Wrath is evoked even more strongly, chiefly by Fonda’s presence as a man recoiling from the vengeful community toward the isolation of a moral position forced on him by circumstance. There is also the presence of Jane Darwell, soulful as Ma Joad, here a cackling sadist (also called “Ma”). There is the use, in both films, of “Red River Valley” as a melancholy motif. Ox-Bow’s closing shot, with the cowpokes ascending the hill out of Bridger’s Wells, recalls Lincoln and Joad climbing their hills at story’s end. Wellman’s direction throughout is keenly Ford-conscious, and this ponderous ascension has the feel of homage.

  Finally, the letter read by Fonda at the end of the film—a message from one of the hanged men to his wife—paraphrases some of Tom Joad’s last words. (“What is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?”) But see how Wellman shoots it: Fonda turns to stand in profile, and the camera’s focus inches forth so that his eyes are obscured by the brim of another man’s hat. Except for a single close-up at the very end, Fonda reads the entire letter with his main center of expressiveness unavailable to us.

  As a Fonda moment—one directed and determined partly by his presence within it—the scene is another thread in a theme running through his career: hiddenness—presence as absence, the power of what is not seen. Wellman complements the way in which Fonda’s illuminated eyes and shadowed mouth were shot in Let Us Live; returns us to the hidden cutting of the wrists in You Only Live Once; reminds us of the darkened Lincoln silhouette taking over the foreground of the Springfield courtroom; calls up Tom Joad, whose aloneness is shown in his strong, stooped back.

  In Clark’s novel, the cowpokes leave town and don’t look back: “‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ Gil said, as if he’d let it all go.” They won’t forget, but their responsibility now is to live as if one day they might. Fonda’s drama runs the other way. His sense of obligation is deeper than the normal person’s; his character can’t “let it all go.” He insists on riding out to the dead man’s widow and children with his letter and effects, as if in payment of a debt only he believes he owes.

  Fonda—like the characters he plays in those stories that mean the most to him—cannot imagine living without a responsibility to the dead.

  * * *

  “I was a typical eager beaver who wanted to shoot at Japanese,” Fonda will say as an old man.

  When the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacks the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Fonda is in Hollywood, shooting The Male Animal. Only two days before, the movie columns have carried a facetious account of a staged fight between him and costar Jack Carson.

  President Roosevelt, while appeasing the isolationists who oppose American involvement in the European war, has been sending arms and supplies to aid Britain’s campaign against Hitler. Secretly eager that the United States should join the battle, he has issued a series of veiled threats designed to draw fire from Japan, Germany’s military ally. Whether Roosevelt foresaw or indeed intend
ed a response on the scale of Pearl Harbor is a question that those on both sides feel they have answered. But in the realm of the certain, nearly 2,500 Americans are dead and another 2,000 wounded, casualties of a strike whose forebodings were ignored either because of strategy or what war historian John Costello calls a “shared disbelief” among the bureaucratic elites “that the Japanese would make a strategically ‘illogical’ attack on Pearl Harbor.”

  The Third Reich threatens to turn Europe into a fascist rally-cum-beer garden. America’s Great Depression will finally be dissolved by the cash flowing into and out of the war machine. Roosevelt will imprison thousands of Japanese-Americans in Nisei internment camps. The defense of freedom from fascism will engender destructive capabilities unprecedented in history. World War II will give us radar, mass-produced penicillin, napalm, the national-security state, and Catch-22.

  Illogical? The world has entered a new age of illogic.

  For all his uniqueness, we can’t forget that Fonda is also a common man with common motivations, “a typical eager beaver.” When the United States goes to war, he is like millions of others: He wants in. Wants to test his mettle in situations demanding competence and courage; wants to defend democracy against its enemies. Doubtless recalling the Revolutionary War death of great-great-grandfather Douw Jellis and the Civil War heroism of grandfather Ten Eyck, he wants to extend the family history of distinguished sacrifice in wartime.

  He also wants to escape the life he has built for himself—to escape “Death in the guise of the new life in California … Death in the guise of marriage and family and children…” There has never been a shortage of men willing to risk quick death in foreign lands to avoid slow death by domesticity.

  The prospect of mobilization, camaraderie, and hierarchy must seem to Fonda like an exhilarating expulsion of pent-up energy. Not to mention the persistent male desire for the absolutes of life and death. William Wyler—Fonda’s director on Jezebel, and his successor as husband to Margaret Sullavan—will shoot combat documentaries with the Eighth Air Force, come back deaf in one ear, and articulate the impulse this way: The war, he said, was “an escape to reality. The only things that mattered were human relationships; not money, not position, not even family.… Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important.”

  Though a small child when her father goes to war, the adult Jane will sense this motivation in Henry: “He was genuinely patriotic and hated Fascism, but I think it was also about him wanting to get away.”

  * * *

  Some of Fonda’s friends have already left. James Stewart is commanding bombing missions with the air force; John Ford is directing a field photography unit for the navy. In late June or July of 1942, Fonda contributes voice-overs to Ford’s chronicle of the just-fought Battle of Midway—a three-day defense of a tiny atoll between Hawaii and Japan, in which American marines and B-17s have dealt the Japanese their first significant naval defeat of the war. Garish, grainy, jolting, The Battle of Midway gives us a glimpse of the extremity that pulls men into war and keeps them there.

  Fonda’s contribution quickens his urge to get out of Brentwood and into battle. It’s only a few weeks later, on August 24, 1942—the day after wrapping The Ox-Bow Incident—that he volunteers for military service. Fonda informs his family of what he has in mind but, pointedly and remarkably, tells no one at Fox. He drives himself to naval headquarters in Los Angeles and requests active duty: “I’d like to be with the fellows who handle the guns,” he says.

  He tries to switch from movie star to navy recruit as quietly as possible; but the papers love it and give it prominent play. It confirms for them not only Henry’s personal modesty but also that of the American character, the readiness of even the privileged to surrender safety for duty. “Without the usual Hollywood fanfare,” runs one story, “Fonda waited in line with other prospective recruits, took his medical examination and was sworn in. [Recruiting officer] Lt. Blanchard said Fonda will be sent to San Diego within a few days and can realize his wish to ‘handle the guns’ by competing for a rating in the gunner’s mate’s school.”

  “It has been my desire to join the service for a long time,” Henry tells the press, “and I am glad that I am able to get in and do a little pitching.” To accept a family deferment never occurs to him. Unlike other stars who sign up in the months after Pearl Harbor, he won’t jump the enlisted ranks to officer status, or, an even viler option, wear a uniform while staying out of the fight—whether by making propaganda films, touring with the USO, or hosting bond rallies at the Hollywood Canteen. Instead, he signs on as an apprentice seaman, the lowest rank available. That means eight weeks of boot camp with a horde of postadolescents. He is thirty-seven years old.

  It is, as well as a patriotic impulse, a Joad-like vanishing act, both altruistic and egotistical, self-sacrificing and self-serving—one man’s need, superceding all other claims, to become an anonymous American; to see what he is made of; to serve his country and his time; and to get free of his family.

  * * *

  On August 25, Fonda goes from the induction center to the boot camp in San Diego; upon arrival, he is detained by the Shore Patrol and sent back to Hollywood. It transpires that Zanuck has pulled strings to get Fonda’s service deferred so he can star in Immortal Sergeant. Patriotism or retribution? It hardly matters. Henry will spend the end of the summer in Imperial Valley, California, making a movie in which, he later sneers, “I won World War II single-handed.”

  He returns to boot camp on November 18, and after eight weeks, he graduates as an ordinary seaman, third class, service number 562 62 35. This is followed by sixteen weeks of specialized training as a quartermaster—Henry finishes third in the class—and then his first assignment: quartermaster, third class, on the USS Satterlee, a destroyer docked in Seattle. After several weeks, he is told to report to naval HQ in New York for reassignment to an officer training program. Docking in Norfolk, Virginia, on August 26, 1943, Fonda takes the train to New York, and on September 15, he is sworn in as a lieutenant, junior grade (j.g.).

  From there, he is sent to Washington, D.C., to report for his duty assignment. The navy brass present Fonda with an offer—an inevitable one, given his civilian status: He may serve out the duration by making training films and other vehicles for the War Office. He declines, saying he would prefer to work in intelligence.

  It is the navy’s Office of Strategic Services, created during World War II under the direction of renegade admiral William “Wild Bill” Donovan, that becomes the first organization in the United States designed for the gathering of foreign intelligence, and precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fonda becomes an accidental pioneer: In 1943, military intelligence is being transformed by new communications technologies and an emphasis on joint intelligence among the service branches. Henry does not say why he is set on this aspect of naval operations, but the work of intelligence is profoundly congruent with his character, style, and inclinations.

  He could have been a spy—a great one. Intelligence is about the hidden, and Fonda realizes that his natural reticence will harmonize with the hush-hush nature of the work. His job will call on his fortes of reading, listening, and absorbing to form raw units of fact and conjecture into justified predictions. There is, as well, a sensation of control: Marshaling predictions into coherent patterns to make prophecies of success or disaster confers a magisterial perspective.

  Speculation is nearly all we have to go on here, since Fonda remained evasive or silent on his motivations for choosing intelligence work, his feelings about it, and, to a great degree, its nature. Speculation is a limited instrument, but it lets us suppose why he sought to make this particular contribution to the war, and why that contribution may finally have left him hollow.

  * * *

  On October 4, Fonda reports to the school for officer candidates at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. There, he’ll receive indoctrination instruction—that is, training for the newly created Air
Combat Intelligence (ACI) section, whose graduates will be required to synthesize vast amounts of information, including aerial photographs, encoded intercepts, captured documents, POW interrogations, and daily bulletins, and use them in the planning of bombing missions.

  An ACI candidate “should have had experience in dealing with people and have been successful in his chosen profession,” and “be of good physical appearance, have a quick alert mind and a large measure of self-confidence, have a positive and pleasant personality and be free from nervousness.” F. S. Crosley, the retired navy commander who recommends Henry for duty in the ACI section, believes he “demonstrates officer-like qualities of leadership, military bearing, loyalty, judgment and intelligence.” Being an actor doesn’t hurt: “[I]t has been determined,” Crosley notes, “that individuals with acting, broadcasting and moving picture experience have made the best progress at [the ACI] school.”

  Indeed, Henry thrives in this world of quadrants and bearings, where there are no unruly children, neurotic wives, or mallet-swinging moguls—only head-down, fact-based work, and plenty of it. Throughout the ACI school, writes Melville C. Branch, “there was a favorable atmosphere of educational and behavioral maturity, intelligence, energy, and thoughtful patriotism.… Discipline was definite, but consensual rather than conspicuously enforced.” Fonda is made the company’s drill instructor, and the officer in charge of indoctrination remarks on his fitness report, “Lieutenant (junior grade) Fonda is outstandly [sic] sincere and loyal. He is intelligent and an indefatigable worker.”

  Henry graduates fourth out of forty-four officer candidates. “That impressed the shit out of people,” he will recall.

  He has a brief furlough, which will end just after New Year’s, 1944, during which he sees Frances and the children. Then, from Quonset Point, he is reassigned to Kaneohe, Hawaii, across the island of Oahu from Pearl Harbor, for a two-week intensified course at the navy’s antisubmarine school.* Fonda requests duty on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Fleet; instead, he is sent to the navy’s Marshall Islands command in the central Pacific. Arriving April 11, he is appointed to the staff of Vice Adm. John H. Hoover—subordinate to Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of Pacific forces—and given his second and final ship assignment, as officer courier on the USS Curtiss.