Finally, recall how the hero dies—killed by Japanese suicide strike while sitting in a wardroom aboard his ship. It is exactly the death Henry Fonda did not die on June 21, 1945, when the USS Curtiss was rammed by a kamikaze. Though Fonda did not perish, for more than a thousand nights on the stage, he gets to imagine he did. As Roberts, he is portraying his own specter.
* * *
At one stroke, he has traded Hollywood for Broadway, compost for caviar, family for free agency. He spends his days in rehearsal, his nights in French restaurants, town houses, and long black cars on the Avenue of the Americas. Henry likes his new life. On April 1, 1949, it’s announced that he has contracted to star in Mister Roberts for its Broadway duration, as well as to headline the imminent film version—which will be shot, it’s said, somewhere near Bermuda in the summer of 1950, with Josh Logan directing.
And the family? Henry stays in touch. In February, he admits to Earl Wilson that he’s “feeling selfish about leaving his kids in Hollywood.” For the first several weeks of the run, he flies back to Tigertail for weekend visits, but this proves burdensome, and Frances begins shipping the family’s belongings east. By April, a house has been leased in Connecticut; in June, after school is out, the Fondas begin their residence on Pecksland Road in the upper-class suburb of Greenwich.
Tigertail—where Jane and Peter grew up, which Frances helped pay for, and whose planning and construction she oversaw—is left behind, all its rustic stone-built rooms emptied. Eventually, the house and grounds will be sold. Then, in November 1961, they will be destroyed in the worst brush fire in the history of Los Angeles, one that consumes hundreds of houses in Brentwood and Bel Air.
The Fonda children are told they must trade their Pacific playland for a murky eastern manse. The Count Palenclar House, as it is called, has a beautiful exterior, but its rooms are dim and unwelcoming; Jane evokes Charles Addams. Peter remembers its “musky, attic-like atmosphere,” while the grounds and surrounding woods are distinguished by macabre vegetation: “Skunk cabbage, swamps, parasitic vines choking giant trees.” Over time, it will be overtaken by what he can only call an “unknown darkness.”
The kids detest Greenwich, find it snobbish, elitist, racist. The Hayward children are nearby—Margaret Sullavan, now divorced from Leland and remarried, has been in Greenwich for two years—and their presence helps offset the loss of Tigertail. But not enough.
Only Henry, it seems, is happy here, and he is happiest when going it alone. It’s notable that while he seems robust during this period, his children—not to mention Frances—are persistently ill. Peter contracts pneumonia in the winter of 1948, and is hospitalized with fever while at camp the following summer. Jane begins her battle with bulimia, grows susceptible to viral complaints, bites her nails, and discovers a talent for injuring herself in falls. She hurts her arm in a roughhousing incident and is scared to tell her father. “Dad asked me if I’d washed my hands, and when I told him I hadn’t, he exploded in anger, pulled me out of my seat and into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, took the broken arm … and thrust it under the water. I passed out.”
Certainly Fonda has redemptive streaks of tenderness, and never abandons his children when they are in direst need. (When Peter is feverish at camp, for instance, Henry moves to the nearby town until he recovers.) A conscientious planner, he buys each of his kids 2 percent shares in the Roberts production. The broken arm incident may, like many childhood anecdotes, be an exaggeration, enlarged over time. Yet it stems from a child’s real horror of a stern and retributive father.
It seems a trial for Henry to stay in the family home for long. Functions and responsibilities are always calling him away, and he takes an apartment in town. Jane persists all the harder in seeking her absent father’s approval, while gradually letting go of the mother who increasingly, it seems, is letting go of everything.
Frances has begun sobbing spontaneously, and spending more time in her room. As an adult, Jane will be told by Frances’s psychiatrist of her mother’s increasing paranoia and feelings of hopelessness: “She began to feel she was ugly … that she was poor and fat.”
Peter feels Frances isn’t always “there.”
* * *
One night near the end of the first Greenwich summer, as Henry is leaving for a performance, Frances informs him that she is checking herself in to the Austen Riggs Center, a sanitarium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She encourages him not to worry—in fact, to spend more time in the city. Frances’s mother, faithful Sophie Seymour, moves in to take care of the children.
Established by a tubercular Manhattan internist in 1919, and describing itself as “the center of American ego psychology,” Austen Riggs has, by the late 1940s, become one of the most prestigious mental-health institutions in the country. Far from the state-funded snake pit of popular fiction, it is a model of the expensive, comfortable hospital-retreat, with its private rooms, neutral colors, and psychiatric idealism. Here, it’s hoped, the nervous modern psyche will be soothed by peaceful scenery and fine-tuned by a staff of world-famous analysts.
The pioneers of psychotherapy, some of them employed at Riggs, are toiling mightily in these high Freudian days of postwar mind science. But there is only so much even the most dedicated staff can do to arrest human breakdown, particularly in settings that may encourage rather than combat a patient’s sense of cloistered unreality. In Women and Madness (1972), Phyllis Chesler refers to the best U.S. mental hospitals as “special hotels or collegelike dormitories for white and wealthy Americans, where the temporary descent into ‘unreality’ (or sobriety) is accorded the dignity of optimism, short internments, and a relatively earnest bedside manner.”
It is largely these qualities that make Riggs a favored refuge of the New England elite, as its members succumb in increasing numbers to psychic stresses both real and whimsical. Numerous celebrities and children of the rich and renowned log time there; Margaret Sullavan will experience a brief stay, as will her daughter Bridget.
Frances makes several trips to Riggs. Clearly she finds there some surcease of sorrow. It may satisfy coeval needs to take care of others, and be taken care of. “Perhaps one of the reasons women embark and re-embark on ‘psychiatric careers’ more than men do,” Chesler suggests, “is because they feel, quite horribly, at ‘home’ within them. Also,” she continues—a point relevant to Fonda’s failure to answer Frances’s emotional needs—“to the extent to which all women have been poorly nurtured as female children, and are refused ‘mothering’ by men as female adults, they might be eager for, or at least willing to settle for, periodic bouts of ersatz ‘mothering,’ which they receive as ‘patients.’”
Frances’s first commitment lasts eight weeks. Under the supervision of medical director Robert P. Knight, she undergoes intensive analysis, some of which is paraphrased in Jane’s memoir—most tellingly, stories of abuse as a child and wife, the Seymour family history of mental illness, and Frances’s overwhelming love and fear of her father. Surprisingly, given that electroconvulsive therapy is, in the late 1940s, the only treatment for severe depression, there is no suggestion that Frances receives shock treatments. It’s probable, though, that she is injected with sodium amytal, also commonly used at this time, to facilitate truthfulness in therapy sessions.
Knight and his team work some kind of quick fix on Frances, yet she is home barely long enough to readjust to normal life. She returns to Riggs a few days into 1949, claiming postholiday exhaustion. Has she finally found a hospital she likes better than home? What is it about the institution that draws her back—is it the vanilla-colored walls, the morning oatmeal, the wise, strong, fatherly men who listen?
* * *
Frances has insisted Henry spend more time in New York, as if encouraging him to seek a liaison, a betrayal it will torture and please her to imagine in her Stockbridge cell. As Roberts rolls on through the spring and summer of 1949, Henry, following his wife’s suggestion, becomes even more of a stranger, deserting the
Gothic twilights of Greenwich for the well-lit stage of the Alvin, his demanding kids and depressed wife for the straightforward male romance he shares with Logan, Heggen, and the troupe.
Events make it inescapable that he will meet someone else while Frances is incapacitated. He is too much in demand; there are too many women casting their lashes and lusts his way—appraising his fine forty-four-year-old frame, his tanned jawline and nicely angled arm, perfect for clutching as flashbulbs pop.
The one whose gaze makes Henry look up, and look again, is Susan Blanchard. She is twenty-one years old and the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II, who, with partner Richard Rodgers, has most lately triumphed with South Pacific (coauthored and directed by Joshua Logan). Susan swims in the same splashy circles as Henry; the two wind up at the same parties, and discover rapport. She has done bits of stage acting, and even spent time under contract at Twentieth Century–Fox. She is familiar with the hype and whirl of the business, seems well adjusted to them.
Like Sullavan, she is small, even pixieish in appearance, with a face out of a locket. Her smile is a mischievous triangle and her eyes are hooded with intelligence, the suggestion of some ongoing inner dialogue. Amazingly for a woman of glamour in the 1950s, she wears black horn-rimmed glasses in public without self-consciousness. She has a sense of humor, and a lack of neurosis.
She has—no avoiding the word—youth. She is the opposite of what Frances has become: dreary, dolorous, old.
The two pursue an affair—at this point platonic, Henry swears. They stick to small, dark restaurants; only a few friends know. When Frances finds out, she will seem surprised. But some will claim she has known of the affair almost from the start, thanks to the grapevine of chatter and whispers running between New York and Greenwich.
Right now, though, she is still a patient at Austen Riggs, resting, recuperating, and receiving something she cannot get at home, from children, mother, girlfriends, or absent husband. But she must reemerge eventually: Unlike Henry, Frances cannot stand to be alone for long. To him, independence is life; to her, it is death.
* * *
The spiral, from this point, is only down. Small gestures at regeneration barely interrupt the process by which a mind is buried in an accumulation of sadnesses.
Frances ends her second stay at Riggs, and again seems fine on her return—whatever that means to others’ appraising eyes and smiling mouths. The Fondas move out of the Count Palenclar House into a sublet on Sherwood Lane, and Frances roughs out designs for the construction of a new home—Tigertail East, more or less. Around the same time, her daughter Pan—now seventeen and, thanks to Frances’s efforts to secure for her the bequest of her late father’s estate, one of the wealthiest heiresses in America—becomes engaged to Charles Abry of Philadelphia. He is also seventeen and, as heir to the S. H. Kress chain of five-and-dime stores, also splendidly wealthy.
Frances is excited by her daughter’s engagement, though Henry’s autobiography speculates she is equally disturbed by the approach of grandmotherhood.
But all plans are arrested when Frances is diagnosed with a kidney problem. It is sudden and serious. One biographer describes it as a “floating” kidney, or nephroptosis—quite simply, the unusual tendency of a person’s kidney to descend into her pelvis when she stands. The treatment of the day is surgery to stabilize the organ. Today, some “float” is considered normal, and surgery might not be indicated; but in 1949, the condition was assumed to be life-threatening.
Frances goes under the knife in April. Her attraction to hospitals is outweighed only by her dread of her own body and its ravaging by age and illness. Imagine her horror, on waking, to discover that the surgery has left a foot-long scar across her midsection.
* * *
Time will show that Henry is not as carefree as he seems. In these painful months, a few moments bear witnessing.
On May 19, 1949, the morning after Mister Roberts’s 522nd performance, Tom Heggen’s body is found in the bathtub of an apartment on East Sixty-second Street. Empty pill bottles are nearby; an unused razor blade lies at the bottom of the tub. The coroner rules it a “probable suicide,” but writer Alan Campbell, owner of the apartment, believes it was accidental. Josh Logan, too, will remain unconvinced: “I do know there was a time when Tom tried to die. But I’m sure that the time he didn’t try was when he did.”
Even if Heggen didn’t mean to die that day, there is enough reason to suppose he meant to die. The themes of his writing up to and including Mister Roberts were death, isolation, and disappointment. “I don’t much like myself,” he’d written his wife during the war, before Roberts was even begun, “and I was no good to anybody.” Logan’s immersion in South Pacific had left Heggen feeling abandoned, and he’d been unable to develop a second novel. He was earning more than four thousand dollars a week from the play and other royalties; money was not his problem. His problem, if he was a suicide, was the depression that falls when the fear of failure sinks deep enough to edge out every option—most crucially, the option to fail, as Heggen probably would have, to duplicate the success of his first creation.
It may have amounted to a terror of boredom—one of the many names of death. Pointlessness yawns, swallowing the future, and the mind shrinks under the weight of so much empty time. Tom Heggen may have decided to meet that oblivion head-on, for staying alive without a reason is also death, as he knew. “The most terrible enemy,” Doug Roberts writes in his last letter to the Reluctant crew, is “the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a sort of suicide.”
A week and a half after Heggen’s death, on May 29, Henry is the guest star on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s NBC Radio show. In the first skit, the pair are excited by having finally scored tickets to Mister Roberts. As they sit in the audience, Fonda is heard performing part of a speech. “Gee,” Jerry gushes after the curtain, “Henry Fonda is really terrific, huh, Dean. That’s what I wanna be—a great actor.” He says Roberts has given him “the most vibrant, spine-tingling moments I’ve ever spent in the American theater.”
“Really spine-tingling, huh?”
“Yeah. I felt just like somebody’d dropped a live frog down inside my shirt.”
Convinced it is his destiny to quit comedy and become a serious actor, Jerry gets into Fonda’s dressing room and presses the star for a job in the Roberts cast. After much cajoling, Henry offers him the part of the goat.
There is a fantasy segment in which a down-home girl, Daisy Belle, wonders with whom she should attend the big barn dance—Hank or Jerry. Fonda provides a drawling parody of himself, circa 1935. But he seems flat in the skit, distracted.
The show ends with Martin, Lewis, and Fonda joining voices for a sprightly hate song to a lover who has overstayed her welcome:
Drop dead, little darlin’, drop dead
I need you like a hole in the head
Fonda moans the lyric far beneath Lewis’s monkey mewling and Martin’s lubricated lead, as if hoping to go unheard. He has been sluggish throughout the show; now he sings as if his stomach is full of rocks.
The day before the show airs, Frances writes to a friend about her kidney operation. “They just cut me in half,” she says.
* * *
In June, Frances, Henry, and Jane attend Pan’s graduation from her Baltimore boarding school. Soon thereafter, Pan and Abry are married, Henry giving away the bride. Frances accompanies the young couple on their European honeymoon. Before returning to New York on the Queen Elizabeth, she writes to Watson Webb, her children’s godfather, that “my better half will find me looking 100% better than when I left.”
Frances speaks as if she still has hope that Henry is not lost to her. And in fact, it’s around this time that the papers run photos of the two dancing and socializing at the Stork Club. They seem reasonably gay. Henry looks like what he is—esteemed, successful, the center of attention—while Frances is not worn or empty-looking at all, but beautiful, vital, proud. You would never know, from look
ing, that parts of both are already dead.
It is not long after this that Henry decides everyone—or at least he—has had enough. He inhales, sits Frances down in a quiet room, and asks her for a divorce. He says there is someone else.
“Well, all right, Hank,” Frances says—or Henry will say she said.
He will recall how well she took the news, the sympathy and “understanding” in her response. He suspects more than he tells. But he seems not to realize how little he ever understood his wife’s depression, or how cruel it is to interpret her final surrender as kindness and sympathy.
Frances has acquiesced to Henry’s leadership at every point. She has left her eastern element for an uncertain life in Hollywood; allowed her husband free rein to come or go, live and work in other worlds. She has gone along with his need to enlist, knowing how much she would be left to handle on her own. She has agreed to be transplanted again, to a cold, lonesome spot in the suburbs, and to endure gossip as her husband escorts a young lady around New York. Her response to each request has been some version of the refrain “Well, all right, Hank.”
If she can’t be happy, she will at least direct her own misery. Frances takes it all inside, smiling the martyr’s distant smile. And Henry believes, is willing to believe, that it is all right.
“The shock of Hank wanting to remarry,” Frances writes to Watson Webb in the fall of 1949, after Fonda has removed himself from the Greenwich house to the top floor of a brownstone on East Sixth-seventh Street, “was almost too much for me—and too soon after my immense operation.… Since he has told me he hasn’t been happy during our thirteen years of marriage all I can say is I wish him great happiness in this new marriage.”
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 16
