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

by Devin McKinney

  He misses feeling free in the company of men. Making movies with Ford is as close as he can come. Nearly every man on the set is a veteran of one war or another, and the western locations are male domains where poker is played, guns are spun, and bullshit flies. That must be why Fonda shoots three Ford pictures in less than a year after returning home—not to mention the combination fishing trip/bacchanalia he enjoys in Mexico with Ford, Ward Bond, and John Wayne immediately after wrapping The Fugitive.* The other postwar jobs are less satisfying, just as their results are thinner. The movie career itself has become a set of shackles, a mere economic-legal imperative.

  As a commodity, though, Henry sits prettier than ever. He’s a titan in a town where faint bells toll the death of the old order. The Zanuck contract expires in 1947, and Fonda has put Fox on notice that it will not be renewed, though he will continue to work with them on a per-picture basis. In fact, his new agent, Lew Wasserman—heir to Leland Hayward as the powerhouse deal maker of the next generation—has gotten Fox to increase his weekly salary to six thousand dollars, all on the promise of one movie a year.†

  But success in the contract wars means—what? Perhaps what Fonda has dreaded, and his risk-taking ancestors avoided: a future of peace and security, sheltering trees and blue skies. Fonda feels that old need for a change of scene. Word goes out that he is interested in Broadway again.

  The Tigertail farmer looks around at his citrus groves and scorched pasture and dying family. What will deliver him? It is the crisis an artist needs to stay alive.

  * * *

  What to say about the remaining pictures of this postwar interregnum? None is important; none is utterly without interest. In Anatole Litvak’s The Long Night (1947), Fonda is a steelworker driven to murder, who recalls the events of his ordeal while facing cops in an overnight standoff. This remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Lève (1939) labors to rebuild its French model virtually scene by scene; but where Carné directed the original in some kind of mystic trance, Litvak is a literalist whose gauge on rooms and props beats his feel for human behavior.

  On Our Merry Way (1948) is a star-studded omnibus, and less laborious than Tales of Manhattan, thanks to the slapstick inspirations Fonda finds with his partner, Jimmy Stewart. As jazz hipsters in a talent contest, Henry works gymnastic wonders with his long legs and a pair of diverging rowboats, and Stewart has a diabolically funny way of sucking a lemon.

  More interesting is Daisy Kenyon (1947), which brings together some eccentric types for a drama that ranks as slightly more than a classy soap bubble. A vehicle for Joan Crawford in her Kabuki prime, it puts Henry and costar Dana Andrews back at Fox, under the dark eye of director Otto Preminger—at this point, not the puffed-up Prussian of later fame, but master of small, atmospheric “mellers” with perversity and punch.

  Among Daisy Kenyon’s pleasures are an unusual number of thoughtful, unhurried scenes, and some piquant dialogue. (Fonda: “Were you ever carried over your own threshold before?” Crawford: “Not sober, darling.”) Henry plays in a style of wounded gravitas that contrasts profitably with Crawford’s lipsticky exertions and Andrews’s cool arrogance. It’s as if, swathed in Preminger’s shadows, he can expose a little more pain than usual; as if, placed in an unfamiliar genre under a domineering director and star, he can wear a new mask, while generating enough torment and sexiness to suggest that the mask is not something he was handed, but a face he brought with him.

  * * *

  Majesty and trash scrambled together: That is any good actor’s Hollywood career. But it’s too scattershot for Fonda. Moviemaking has gone dead for him, as dead as “the good life in California.” As much as pride or ego, it is the desire to dismantle the circumstances of his life that makes him seek independence as an actor, and test the leverage of his fame. His real goal is not to be happier in Hollywood, but to be rid of it.

  Through Fonda’s press coverage in these months, we trace the confusions of a man uncertain of what image he wishes to project, certain only that he is in the wrong place. “I look forward to Sundays,” he’s quoted in October 1946, “when I can put on my khakis and get out and irrigate, and plow, and pull off the vines that creep up over the window screens.” The next January, a piece calls him “the Burbank of Brentwood” and claims he grows most of the food his family eats. Columnist Jimmie Fidler eavesdrops on Fonda’s interview with a magazine correspondent: “Deftly, she tried to turn the conversation to things glamorous; persistently, Fonda insisted on giving out about a new fertilizer he’s using.”

  From promoting himself as the suburban farmer, Fonda goes in the opposite direction, insisting in September 1947 that he is “a city slicker, right off the sidewalks of Omaha,” and that he prefers the city: “Out in the country … the crickets bother me and the roosters crow too early in the morning.” Two months later, a story notes that Fonda “would like to do a stage play—and Broadway wants him back—but Hollywood has the hooks in for a long time to come.”

  But something is happening, by chance, on the other coast.

  Late in 1947, Fonda flies to New York to talk to Joshua Logan, his old friend from the University Players. Logan has had both better times and worse times since the group split, from Stanislavskian study to Hollywood failure and nervous breakdown. Now he is the most successful director on Broadway, a man whose magic touch makes killer hits. Among his war-era smashes are Charley’s Aunt, By Jupiter, Annie Get Your Gun, and John Loves Mary. Each has been an unceasing tap releasing cash to its backers. Logan’s shows don’t merely have legs; they have arms, breasts, and great rounded rumps. Brooks Atkinson, eminence gris of the New York Times drama desk, calls him “the wonderman of the musical stage.”

  Physically and psychically, Logan has always been Fonda’s virtual opposite: tall and broad of frame yet given to softness and paunch, with ironic eyes, a delicate mustache, southern manners, and, above all, an emotionalism manifesting in frequent tantrums and collapses. Still, Henry has an idea for a film, and he hopes to interest Logan in directing it. But Josh demurs: his new play is just going into casting. Here it is, he says, and here’s Tom Heggen, who wrote it with me. As long as you’re here, too, why don’t you sit down and let us read it to you?

  It’s a coy proposal, offered in a spirit of what the hell. But in fact, the coauthors have envisioned Fonda as their star all along—at least since they wrote the play’s last words, and lowered the curtain on the death of their hero.

  * * *

  The play is Mister Roberts; Logan and Heggen have adapted it from Heggen’s novel. It’s a comedy-drama set on the USS Reluctant, a supply ship in the Pacific near the end of World War II. Lt. (j.g.) Doug Roberts is beloved of the crewmen whom he defends against the tyrannies of the ship’s captain. Despite being befriended by medical officer Doc and hyperactive Ensign Pulver, he is lonesome and unhappy. His sole desire is to get into combat, a transfer the captain won’t allow; a bargain between the two alienates Roberts from the crew. After a forged signature secures the transfer, news arrives that Roberts has died in a kamikaze strike while awaiting transport to the war’s last battle zone.

  Henry has never been in a major stage hit, but he knows one when it is read to him. Something in the impromptu performance of the fervent, melodramatic Logan and his chain-smoking, rather dissolute partner Heggen; something in the arc of the character this odd couple have constructed; something in the whole of the thing tells Fonda to jump on it.

  Published in 1946, Heggen’s was among the earliest American novels of the war. Logan was alerted to it by Leland Hayward, then a fledgling Broadway producer; he and Heggen met, clicked, and wrote the play in a series of marathon sessions. The partnership was fraught—“I was a corpulent manic depressive,” Logan recalled, “and Heggen was a thin manic depressive”—but the coauthors’ complementary crazies preserved the downbeat in material that could easily have gone mawkish. The novel’s content is the raw business of service comedy, yet its pace is too grave for slapstick, its prose t
oo precise for easy consumption; there is something spooky and mournful to it. The play catches that. Rich in grown-up laughs, with a judicious spray of low clowning, it is informed by the persistence of sadness as chronically sad people feel it.

  Fonda is willing to give up almost everything to do Mister Roberts. His commitment to it is an act of hope, will, nerve, and barreling brutality to the family that will be uprooted by his decision. Most important for Fonda, though, it is an act—a move away from decay and illness toward growth and health. He has been waiting for the thing that will enter his life with the force and suddenness of a Sullavan or a Ford, a Lincoln or a Joad: the thing that will take him from safety to a new frontier of freedom.

  Most look at Roberts and see a hit. Fonda sees his deliverance.

  * * *

  He has already signed the contract on his next picture, but contracts can be voided: That’s why God created agents like Lew Wasserman. Henry returns to California with roughly a month to learn his part; then comes a lightning round of rehearsals back east, followed by out-of-town previews. Things fall into place with incredible speed. These are men with jobs to do, war veterans in a military mind-set, and matters like family will not be allowed to slow the boat.

  Henry will take an apartment in New York until Roberts is on its feet; only then will the family join him. If divorce is on his mind, he doesn’t press the point. Frances, typically for her, is acquiescent, even helping her husband run his lines. Maybe she is excited by his excitement; maybe she feels there is nothing else she can do; maybe, like Henry, she is biding her time.

  Mister Roberts previews at the Shubert Theater in New Haven in early January 1948, and then has practice runs in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Fonda can only be elated at getting back to the theater. The work of a unified company toward a presentation in live time is what Henry has been missing in movies; his instincts snap to life under white lights and dark watchers. He even experiences some of the fun of old theater days. In Philadelphia, a goat led up the Reluctant gangway in one scene makes an unscheduled deposit on the stage—and Henry may just recall the urinating monkey of Falmouth.

  The show comes together as a winner, and preview audiences reel before it. Just before the Broadway opening at the Alvin Theatre on February 18, Walter Winchell writes that Roberts appears to be “a gilt-edged investment. It is being hounded by censors in the stix [sic] and serenaded by reviewers, a surefire combination.”

  No one projects a small, respectable success. The expectation is that audiences will stagger out sore from laughter, choked with sobs; that theater history will be made. In a period that has seen the innovative pageantry of Oklahoma! and Carousel, and the new drama of The Glass Menagerie and All My Sons—with others like A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and South Pacific soon to arrive—Mister Roberts must make its claim for Broadway event of the decade.

  It does. From the cheer that greets Fonda’s first stage appearance in more than a decade to the burst of sorrow and joy that erupts at the final curtain, opening night is a sustained thunderclap. The ensuing ovation lasts hours, it seems. “There were too many curtain calls to count,” says Logan, deprived of his onstage bow by the neurotic Heggen, who refuses to leave the wings. The audience, Henry will recall, were “standing on their seats, hollering, whistling.” Called out to speak, he offers to do the play again from the beginning. “And they went into convulsions all over again.”

  The next day’s critical acclaim is universal, or near enough to dwarf any doubters. The Post’s Earl Wilson calls Roberts “one of the greatest plays of the decade.” In the New York Times, Atkinson thanks Logan and Heggen for “a royal good time.” “Noel Coward sat next to me and weeped [sic] in turn from the laughter and pathos,” writes Jack O’Brian of the Associated Press, extolling the show’s “brilliant detail, its deep human insight.” “Pretty wonderful,” John Lardner of The New Yorker writes. Logan and Heggen “have written the best comedy, the best war play—to come right down to it, the best new play of any kind—that has been seen this season.”

  Roberts is a smash of rare proportions, a cultural happening. The play’s hero becomes a household name, and its creators achieve new levels of eminence: Heggen will be featured in the Saturday Review of Literature, Logan will be given a spread in Life, and Fonda will radiate heroism from the cover of Newsweek. Henry in particular is the man of the moment. For the next year, he will race between theater, radio studio, and TV soundstage, performing scenes and transmitting the Roberts mystique.

  At its height, Roberts pulls in $35,000 a week—“bettering by several thousand,” John Leggett notes, “the receipts of its nearest rival, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.” On March 29, little more than a month after opening, Mister Roberts receives the Antoinette Perry Award as the Best Play of the 1947–1948 season. Joshua Logan is named Best Director, and Henry receives the Tony for Best Male Performance.

  Two years on, the play is still running. Atkinson will estimate it has been seen by 1.3 million people on Broadway, and another 85,000 at road-tour stops across the country. By then, Doug Roberts will have joined Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, and Wyatt Earp in the public mind as a classic Henry Fonda role, a patriotic paradigm, an American hero.

  * * *

  For all that, Mister Roberts has not survived as a great play. It is high middlebrow: better than slick, but without the depth to provoke revision. Still, it’s not difficult to guess why, in 1948, people responded to it intensely.

  Roberts is a rousing entertainment, with momentum and payoff; Logan’s showmanship keeps things active and dimensional. By spraying his actors with artificial sweat and putting them under tanning lamps, he creates the feel of tropical heat in a Manhattan winter. Scene changes are covered by the transmitted blare of war news, taking the audience back to all the radio alarms of recent years.

  Stage designer Jo Mielziner has constructed an ultrarealist setting of bulkheads and portholes, which permeate the comedy with rust and stagnation. But on the whole, the play is an affirmation—of war, death, decency—at a time when the country is already shaping its popular memory of WWII. Roberts expunges brutality and recalls death as a sweet regret. It not only locates Eisenstein’s “womb of popular and national spirit”; it cuts into fresh veins of sentiment and nostalgia, releasing gushers of love and cash. This is the right play at the right moment.

  It’s a moment that lasts well into the 1950s, as Roberts turns into a barnstorming commodity fronted by blandly handsome actors—in the United States, John Forsythe; in London, Tyrone Power. From its beginning on the Alvin stage, in days not so far removed from the end of war, the play softens and expands, like a prosperous gut, to serve the new mood of the American audience. People forget how taut, ironic, and ambiguous the thing was meant to be. The film version—directed by a drunken, ailing John Ford—will arrive in 1955 as a Technicolor botch, the play’s haunting edges only memories to those who’d seen it on the stage, and all but unimaginable to anyone who hadn’t.

  The Roberts play in its first form is recalled as strange and touching, and it wouldn’t have become such a hit without Fonda. “He always wanted to face upstage,” Logan says. “I had to use tricks to get him so the audience could see him work.” Stage acting demands the actor project his voice and aura into the darkness, where the audience grasps it like a lifeline. Fonda’s instinct is to look the other way. He underplays, stays quiet, all but hides; the audience is again left to feel what is hidden.

  Some part of him is still the Omaha novice who dreads the nightmare of being watched. But now he has all the armature of experience, and can use reticence to his advantage: By stepping away from his watchers, he draws them closer. “He’ll never be seduced by an audience,” Logan continues. “He won’t give them any more for their applause than he will without it.”

  People have come to Roberts only partly to laugh. Finally, they wish to experience some degree of loss. That may be the private logic to Fonda’s underacting: His remoten
ess preserves the audience’s unease. Unlike Marlon Brando, who in Streetcar puts everything on display, Fonda tells himself, no, leave people wondering if they knew you at all. Like a shadow that grows taller with distance, Roberts increases in stature as he approaches the death he believes he doesn’t see coming.

  * * *

  Like Fonda, Doug Roberts is a post–Pearl Harbor naval volunteer who has risen to the rank of lieutenant, junior grade. Like Fonda, Roberts’s theater is the Pacific. Like Fonda, Roberts is a “typical eager beaver” who wants to see action, and does. Fonda wears his own navy cap and khakis onstage every night; the press make so much of the affinities between actor and character as to suggest that Fonda isn’t acting the role at all, only remembering it.

  Heggen has told Logan that, while writing his hero, he had Fonda in mind; and indeed the novel presents a man remarkably like the Fonda we’ve been following:

  There are people of wonderful conductivity who draw rather than repel the tenuous and tentative approaches that we call human relationships, and through whom, as through a nerve center, run the freely extended threads of many lives.… The quality they possess is not an aggressive one, nor a conscious one, and it can never be one acquired. It is native and inescapable and may even be unwelcome to its inheritor. It admits of greater loneliness than is commonly thought possible.

  Throughout Roberts rehearsals, as Fonda quietly commands the stage, Heggen lurks the theater in baggy, ash-stained suits, darkness circling his eyes, decaying teeth bared wolflike in occasional laughter. Thin and haunted to the point of neurasthenia, he is what Fonda might look like if drained of all but his doubts and demons. Both are deeply middle western; both studied journalism at the University of Minnesota and served in the Pacific. Like Fonda, Heggen joined the navy in part to escape domestic stress and professional discontent. Biographer John Leggett says Heggen had the “feeling, carried since his teens, of being doomed”; and the writer, like the actor, is fascinated by a man’s need to take his doom straight.