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

by Devin McKinney

  Named after the designer of the navy’s first flying boats, the Curtiss is a proud, rusty bucket with a seasoned crew and its share of scars. It was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, and returned fire, despite being exploded and burned belowdecks by a dive-bomber’s load. Nineteen crew members died, and many others were wounded, but in little more than a month, the ship was back in service, “ferrying men and supplies to forward bases at Samoa, Suva, and Noumea.”

  At the time Fonda comes aboard in February 1944, the Curtiss is based at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshalls, dead center of the Pacific theater. Flagship to the South Pacific Air Command, she is functioning as a seaplane tender—a repair and supply point for destroyers and small aircraft engaged in the great sea battles of 1943–1945 taking place in the Solomons and the Marianas. The Curtiss is also helping to carve a route of safe passage from San Francisco to Tokyo; in the later months of the war, as the Pacific campaign climaxes, the ship draws fire while nearing the home islands of Japan behind the ground troops who are battling for Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

  * * *

  Fonda’s job as ACI officer, however fulfilling, is stressful and unpleasant. In the heat of the Pacific, perpetually drenched, bracing himself against waves and nausea, sardined with a dozen others into a tiny radio room with the noise of bombardment all around, Henry clings to focus and fact. Action alternates with boredom; hours and days are ground down in rituals of consumption—liquor, coffee, tobacco—reading, waiting, surrendering to exhaustion in a swaying, sweating metal bunk.

  When action happens and an operation is called for, Fonda knows the intensest hours of his life. Operations demand of coordinating officers an ongoing mastery of the elements of chaos, of situations that have every potential for tragic failure. Evan Thomas paints a picture of the commotion in a shipboard radio room during such an operation—actually, it is the nerve center of Adm. William Halsey’s command in the leadup to the October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, but the room in which Fonda works can’t feel much different.

  Officers pored over a large chart table while sailors wrote on clear plastic plotting boards with grease pencils and relayed orders over a cluster of voice tubes. Airless, windowless, stuffed with men and machinery, [the room] reeked of a strange stew of smells: the acrid odor of radio tubes; the ever present, bittersweet warship smell of paint, lubricants, and a sealing solution called Cosmoline mingled with tobacco smoke and male sweat. Radio transmitters filled the stuffy room with the excited chatter of pilots on their bombing and strafing missions.

  To appearances, though, Fonda in his downtime is affable. In a March 1945 dispatch, Henry, on liberty after many weeks of duty, is seen drinking and singing with other officers. Though he enjoys relaxing, he is never less than an obsessively hard worker; one shipmate claims that “our doctor has had to order him to take it easier.”

  At worst, he suffers a hangover from excesses of tension, tedium, and drink. Writer Robert Ruark will recall sitting with Fonda on the day after Christmas, 1944. The Curtiss, anchored at Saipan, has just come through a bombing raid.

  Lieutenant Fonda was listless as he faced me across the mess table at lunch. He looked at his Spam and looked away again, quickly. He was a little green around the gills.… The Japs could come, and the Japs could go, but Mr. Fonda had his hangover to take his mind off the war.

  Gallows humor aside, these days death is coming closer to Henry than it has before or will again. During operations, he is one of death’s dealers; as a combatant in an open theater of war, he is among its vulnerable targets.

  In “The Good War,” his oral history of World War II, Studs Terkel speaks to Robert Rasmus, a business executive who as a young infantryman survived some of the worst battles of the European theater. Barely in his twenties, he has seen unspeakable things. Then, as he is being retrained stateside for the projected invasion of Japan, the atomic bomb is dropped. “How many of us would have been killed on the mainland if there had been no bomb?” is Rasmus’s question. “Someone like me has this specter,” he says.

  Those words could echo forever. How many men found themselves walking, marching, crawling with some version of that specter beside them? Was the specter every question never asked about the horror they had to swallow? Was it the man of feeling that had to be separated from the man of action? How many men left their specter behind in the war, and how many came home feeling the specter was now them?

  * * *

  Fonda describes a kamikaze striking the Curtiss in early 1945, after the Americans have captured Iwo Jima and firebombed Tokyo. The plane, damaged by gunfire, misses its target and crashes in the ocean near the ship. Fonda and a partner volunteer as divers to see if documents may be recovered. The two descend, and thirty feet below the surface, they encounter a tableau from a Surrealist painting, or a uniquely disturbing dream: the wrecked plane, and floating upside down, the strapped-in corpses of the pilot and bombardier. “It was an eerie sight,” Fonda will recall. The hidden man remembers what he sees; the man of action cancels the feeling, recovers the documents, and retreats from the floating, inverted tomb.

  There are—according to his account—three outstanding events in Fonda’s war career. Each is an encounter with death, each a confrontation with his specter.

  The first is an antisubmarine operation staged sometime in early 1945. Navy cryptanalysts are intercepting and decoding a high percentage of Japanese cipher traffic; as intelligence man on the Curtiss, Fonda has received many of these intercepts, mainly detailing enemy sub movements. He plots an attack area based on an estimate of the sub’s position at a safe distance from its target; American search planes and patrol ships will swarm the designated area.

  He has performed this function several times, passing on the information to higher-ups, then leaving the loop and hearing no more about it. But this engagement occurs close enough to the Curtiss for Fonda to feel the depth charges as the targeted subs are hit. It is the first time he feels a sense of aftermath sticking to an attack he has directed.

  His autobiography presents the consequence flatly and factually: submarine parts bobbing on the surface of the sea. Among the things omitted is whether Fonda felt any elation at this deadly success—the elation that men in war zones are said to feel. Fonda will receive a Bronze Star for his part in this and similar engagements. The citation lauds his “keen intelligence, untiring energy, and conscientious application to duty.… His conduct and performance of duty throughout were outstanding and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.”

  The second event occurs at dusk on June 21, 1945. According to the navy’s Office of Public Information, the Curtiss is “operating in the Southern Ryukyus Islands, near Okinawa,” when lookouts report a kamikaze at eight hundred yards. It strikes the Curtiss’s starboard side seconds later and explodes a half-ton bomb. “The engine, part of the tail assembly and the heavy bomb ripped through the skin of the ship, opening two gaping holes and exploding on the third deck,” the OPI report reads. The sick bay, officers’ mess, pantry, library, and other areas are destroyed; fires threaten to detonate the ship’s own bomb- and ammunition-storage magazines. It takes the crew an hour to extinguish the blaze, with the help of nearby salvage vessels. In the end, twenty-eight men have been killed and twenty-one wounded.

  Among the areas destroyed on impact is the stateroom occupied by Fonda and his bunk mate. But on the night of June 21, the two happen to have been on shore leave on Guam. Here, in the final weeks of the war—midway between V-E and V-J days—Fonda is nearly claimed by the death he has thus far been able to evade.

  The third event is Hiroshima. Fonda accompanies his intelligence superior to Tinian, where they brief the crew of the bomber Enola Gay on weather conditions. The B-29 that carries the atomic bomb is, like Henry, a product of Omaha, where its captain, Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr., has personally selected it from the Martin Aircraft assembly line. The meeting itself is brief and businesslike, barely worthy of remembrance beyon
d being a tick mark on the agenda of the long-planned dropping of the bomb.

  Fonda knows, though not clearly or completely, what the mission is really about—that the planes will drop something extraordinary, and that many will die. He probably hears the word Hiroshima. But he does not know enough to be prepared for the resultant blast and its human toll and moral aftereffects. The reality, when it dawns, “sort of took me back,” he remembers.

  By the end of 1945, an estimated 140,000 people have been killed by the bomb, either at the moment or during the aftermath. Robert Rasmus and thousands of others are spared an invasion and get to return home, with or without their specters.

  From there, the latest battle for the fate of the free world winds down fairly quickly. On August 13, American papers carry a picture of Henry receiving the Bronze Star from Vice Adm. G. D. Murray. August 14 is V-J Day. Fonda learns of the Japanese surrender the next day, and he is ordered to report at once to Washington, D.C.

  On August 16, Fonda steps off the Curtiss and begins his journey back to the States. Five days later, he stars in the first of four live weekly installments of a radio show, The Navy Hour; in addition to hosting, he narrates and performs in war sketches and battle dramatizations. September 11, he is detached from the Office of Public Information and sent to the naval station in Los Angeles; November 10, he receives his Certificate of Satisfactory Service from the navy—the reserve officer’s equivalent of a discharge—and the next day is officially released to inactive duty.

  But Henry Fonda will remain a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy until 1953, when he resigns his commission on the grounds that he is “overage in rank.” The resignation is accepted.

  * * *

  One of Fonda’s essences as actor and man is the contrast between his emotional being and what appears on the surface, his hidden and public faces. When he is most turbulent inside, he may be most immobile outside; as the hidden man screams, the visible man grows inhumanly quiet. His greatest acting comes when the hidden and the visible are forced into contact and the cracks and stresses in the controlled facade come close to breaking the man, the story, the image. It’s then that the specter shows itself, and long moments of doubt and fear are left graven on the eyes and minds of an audience.

  Everything about Fonda suggests he is cut out for success in wartime. He has extraordinary self-control, a mind of unique finesse and subtlety, a family military history as spur and incentive, and a belief in America, or his personal version of it. Yet large parts of the man can do nothing but recoil from the spectacle before him. Clearly, to be a success in war, he has—like the other men around him—to exist as much as possible in one aspect of himself: the aspect that is useful, controlled, amoral. He must live as a wholly visible man. The moral residue of his actions is submerged, to resurface in its varied and enigmatic forms as what we have called the hidden.

  That is how Fonda the civilian is accustomed to living—in repression, denial, control. But seldom has civilian life presented to his senses anything as extreme as war. So in suggesting what war did to Fonda, we have to wonder if he reached his limit—a point where hidden and visible were no longer manageably separate and where an accumulation of the deaths dealt and witnessed overtook his ability to make sense of it.

  A silencing of horror has surrounded America’s memory of World War II. The mandate hanging over the men who came back was simple: Hold it in. Therefore, historian Michael Sturma says, “Reactions to combat stress among World War II veterans were most often characterized by emotional reticence and depression.” Apply this to Fonda, who spoke of his military past in dim generalities and lighthearted anecdotes. His intimations of trauma were more than stoic; they were benumbed. His war experience was brought down to dry sarcasm (“impressed the shit out of people”), querulous witnessing (“an eerie sight”), and shallow wonderment (“sort of took me back”).

  It’s apparent that Fonda was, in the middle western manner, simply declining to probe his feelings. On the whole, he clearly preferred to leave the subject alone. That is another reason Fonda was “ideal” for this work, for this war: He was inclined to the exact repression of horror that was one of the war’s chief necessities and signal legacies.

  When the war ended, he may have looked back and known that he’d played an important role in it. But it’s unclear whether he felt pride or achievement at having done what he sought to do—“to be with the fellows who handle the guns,” “to shoot at Japanese.” We don’t know if war was a trauma Fonda would have preferred to forget, or if it was merely an experience he’d once desired and then, having acquired it, locked it away, as so many others did with their own memories, those horrors experienced by silent men expected to remain silent.

  Fonda was, above and beneath all else, a man who remembered. Repression, denial, deflection, and numbness are not erasers of memory, but ways of coping with its persistence; and often the stoic copes with experience that means too much by denying it means anything. Shortly before his death, Fonda was asked by Lawrence Grobel where he kept his Bronze Star.

  “Peter lost it,” he said.

  Grobel asked if he’d been upset by that.

  “No,” Fonda replied. “It meant nothing to me.”

  * * *

  On November 10, 1944, Frances is the subject of a brief line in Dorothy Manners’s Hollywood column: “Mrs. Henry Fonda is off to New York for a spell and has rented an apartment.” On December 18, Louella Parsons picks up the ball: “Mrs. Henry Fonda, who had been desperately ill with flu in New York, arrives in Hollywood tomorrow morning to spend Christmas with her children.”

  The five-week sojourn in New York—Jane and Peter back at Tigertail with nannies, husband hunched in a radio room somewhere in the Pacific—may be accounted for by a hospital stay, a reunion with friends, or a romantic assignation. Each of her survivors will agree that Frances had affairs while Henry was at war.

  At least one of her lovers becomes known to her children. Jane recalls being told by a friend of her mother’s about a man named Joe, a musician. Frances, the friend says, “was crazy about him.” True to pattern, though, he sounds like bad news—a drinker and “loose cannon.” The friend says Joe brought a gun to Tigertail and shot a hole in the ceiling. Joe may also be the man recalled by Peter as an itinerant artist who briefly occupied the children’s playhouse at Tigertail. Peter says the man taught him to play the harmonica; he doesn’t mention a gun.

  Touchingly, both children are pleased at the thought of their mother having an affair. But the liaison ceases, in all probability, when Henry comes home in August 1945. It’s equally probable that Frances and Henry never manage to renew whatever physical relationship they had before the war.

  It is always dispiriting to speculate about the sex lives of others, but less so if we accept that sex has something to do with patterns of behavior and the course of lives. Fonda’s autobiography records that, sometime late in 1946, Frances begins administering the household—paying bills, following stocks, answering letters—from the couple’s bed, leaving no room for Henry among the stacks of bills and receipts.

  Frances gives no reason. Does she need to? She is pushing Henry out of the sack.

  * * *

  The reason for the expulsion—and Fonda’s reluctance to delve into it—might be found in a forgotten episode stemming from the weeks Henry spent in Imperial Valley, California, in September 1942, filming Immortal Sergeant. Almost a year later, in July 1943, Henry found himself the subject of a paternity suit brought by one Barbara Thompson, described in the press as a “twenty-five-year-old brunette divorcée” from Hollywood with four children—the latest of whom, a girl named Sharon, born June 21, was, if the mother could be believed, Fonda’s.

  Thompson claimed to have met him at an Imperial Valley nightclub the previous September, introduced by a man from the studio. “I accepted Fonda’s invitation to have a drink,” she said. “We had several of them.” The actor then invited her to his room, where, according to Thompson,
he seduced her. “I stayed with him during the remainder of his stay in the Imperial Valley—some two or three weeks.” Thompson’s suit demanded $2,000 a month in child support, $5,000 for medical bills, $10,000 for attorney’s fees, and $2,500 for court costs.

  Fonda, of whom the navy would say only that he was “somewhere on the ocean,” issued no statement at first. But Frances did. She was adamant in supporting her husband. “It’s not true,” she said; “I know it’s not true.” Further: “Henry told me he didn’t know the girl, and had never met her.… He denied the charges emphatically and said the suit was ridiculous.” Did she believe him? “Of course I believe him.” A spokesman for Twentieth Century–Fox revealed that Thompson had been in touch with the studio several months before, asking for a fifty-thousand-dollar settlement (later reduced to ten thousand). Only after these demands were refused did Thompson threaten legal action; Fonda, on leave in Hollywood at the time, had said she could “go ahead and sue.”

  It then surfaced that Thompson was wanted on a warrant stemming from an incident in Long Beach the previous July 23, just weeks before her alleged meeting with Fonda; the warrant charged her with “failure to appear for trial on disorderly conduct and vagrancy charges.” As this was announced, Thompson’s attorney said his client was “being removed to a hospital because of a nervous condition.” And still more: sometime in 1942, Thompson had wed a serviceman in Honolulu while still legally married to her first husband, and was presently suing to annul the earlier union.