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

by Devin McKinney

  The emphasis is Frances’s, and it undercuts the sympathy Henry has found so wonderful.

  Frances has been nursing her pathos for a long time, and now it is handed to her on a plate. She is forty-one, and soon she will be alone. What does she imagine for herself? Her visions of the future may resemble those recorded by other depressives—Tom Heggen’s fear of surrender to the suicide of boredom, or the featureless void described by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar: “I could see day after day after day glaring at me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”

  Now Frances will move between planning a future and shrinking from it. First, on October 18, she has a new will written, apportioning her holdings between her children and mother, and excising Henry. It is a good move forward, a healthy act of spite. But around Thanksgiving, her lapses into psychosis become more extreme. Staying in Manhattan with her friend Eulalia Chapin, she speaks openly of suicide, and weighs insanity as a ploy to prevent Henry’s remarriage. According to Jane, Frances hacks off her hair, and wanders her friend’s Manhattan neighborhood in nightclothes. Chapin awakens in her apartment, to find Frances looming over her in the dark, examining her neck, curious to find the precise location of the jugular vein.

  She is taken by her mother back to Austen Riggs.

  More agony. On December 9, Pan gives birth to a premature infant at Hahneman Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania. According to reports, she and Abry have been vacationing in the Pocono Mountains, Frances accompanying them, presumably on furlough from Riggs. Frances writes to a friend, in fragments: “Pan lost her baby last Friday—premature—a girl who lived two hours—a difficult time.”

  Peter remembers that his mother spent Christmas week of 1949 at home, and “seemed all right.”

  It is just after Christmas that Dorothy Kilgallen, entertainment columnist for the New York Journal American, publicly breaks the story of the Fondas’ divorce agreement, and Henry’s desire to wed Susan Blanchard “as soon as it is legally possible.” “Miss Blanchard is in her twenties, Fonda in his forties,” Kilgallen tut-tuts. “It is understood Mrs. Fonda will take custody of the children without opposition from the actor, and also will be given an extremely large financial settlement.” The tone of disapproval is not surprising: Some say Kilgallen has gotten the scoop directly from Frances.

  In late January 1950, Frances is back at Riggs, and Henry meets with Dr. Knight to discuss her condition. Knight has little hope to offer. There has been further breakdown, more talk of suicide, decreasing contact with reality. Knight fears Frances will attempt the worst, and that Riggs is no longer equipped to secure her. He recommends she be moved to the Craig House sanitarium in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, New York, forty miles from Manhattan. Craig is another exclusive, expensive refuge for the rich and self-destructive—Zelda Fitzgerald had been there in the 1930s—but it is designed for maximum watchfulness over those inmates who might be inclined to hurt themselves.

  Frances is admitted to her last hospital on February 3.

  * * *

  Having studied the void that is her future, the character in The Bell Jar speaks of being seized by a need for controlled action, directed toward finality: “I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

  In March, Frances’s caretaker at Craig House, Dr. Courtney Bennett, reports improvements in her condition. She seems less depressed, more aware of the people around her; she plays a skillful game of bridge. The fog may be lifting. Too early to tell, though, what it is revealing.

  Accompanied by a nurse, Frances takes a day trip home to visit Sophie, Jane, and Peter. At one point, she excuses herself and goes upstairs to her bedroom. The nurse peeks in to check on her; Frances, startled, drops a box. The box is replaced and the nurse thinks nothing of it. But Frances has taken from it a small razor, which she hides somewhere in her clothing. That night, she smuggles it into Craig House. The date, Peter remembers, is April 7.

  Exactly a week later, at 6:50 in the morning, night nurse Amy Gray brings juice to Frances’s room and finds a note affixed to the bathroom door. It reads “Do not enter—call Dr. Bennett.” The nurse alerts the doctor, who enters the bathroom, to find Frances on the floor, bleeding from a deep gash in her throat.

  She is barely alive. Help is summoned, but Frances is beyond it. Within minutes, she has bled out. It is Friday, April 14, her forty-second birthday.

  In the room are notes Frances has written to her children, to her mother, and to Dr. Bennett. The message of each is essentially the same: “I’m very sorry, but this is the best way out.” There is no note for Henry.

  Telephoned by Sophie, he rushes to Craig House. The two attend a hastily arranged funeral service at McGlassen & Son mortuary in Beacon, after which the suicide verdict is summarily entered by Dr. L. Edward Cotter, deputy medical examiner for Dutchess County. Frances’s body is then removed to the town of Hartsdale, New York, where it will be cremated; the ashes will be interred with the remains of previous Seymours in the family cemetery in Ogdensburg, New York.

  Sophie and Henry return to Greenwich and tell Jane that Frances has died in the hospital—of a heart attack. Peter, when he arrives home, is told the same.

  “She was making a wonderful recovery and expected to be discharged soon,” a bewildered Dr. Bennett tells reporters. The texts of the notes to Bennett and Nurse Gray are released to the press by Assistant District Attorney Edward Russell.

  That night, Henry drives to New York, uncertain whether to go onstage—for Roberts must play again this evening to a capacity house. Backstage, he discusses his options with Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan, and, in what many have found to be the single most unfathomable fact about this very mysterious man, Henry Fonda—hours after discovering that his estranged wife has killed herself, attending her funeral, and consigning her remains to the flames—decides to climb into his costume and give his 883rd performance as Mister Roberts.

  That can be taken as evidence of an actor’s discipline, a husband’s daze, an egotist’s narcissism, or all of these. But the decision to “go on” is not uncharacteristic of actors. We think of Ross Alexander reporting to the set the day after his wife killed herself; and of Brooke Hayward’s insistence, as a young actress, that she be allowed to give a scheduled performance in her Off-Broadway play, despite the discovery of her mother’s body in New Haven earlier the same day.

  Asked by Lawrence Grobel if the Roberts performance on the night of April 14, 1950, was the most difficult of his career, Fonda replies, “Probably.” In the autobiography, he claims it is his own sober decision. But he tells Grobel that in fact Hayward and Logan convinced him to go on, and that he was “too numb” to resist—which makes Fonda seem less the controlled Christian Scientist and more the man struck helpless by a first premonitory wave of sorrow and guilt.

  The next day, the papers report both Frances’s suicide and Fonda’s decision to perform—while noting pithily, if not wholly accurately, that Frances “apparently killed herself because of the actor’s romance with a younger woman.” The AP story states that Henry, “pale with fatigue,” appeared at the Alvin an hour before showtime, as his understudy was preparing to go on. Assured by Hayward that few in the audience would have heard the news, and that press would be barred from the theater, Fonda agreed to perform. At night’s end, a phalanx of friends rushed him to a cab.

  Those who watch him onstage that night express admiration and mystification. A frequent spectator of the play says, “He was even sharper than usual.” Stage manager William Hammerstein, Susan Blanchard’s stepbrother, believes Fonda’s performance is essentially identical to the 882 that have preceded it. “He went on and played and played very well,” marvels Josh Logan; Susan says, “I think he didn’t know what else to do.”

  But actor Eli Wallach—a young unknown hidden among the chorus of Reluctant crewmen—suggests the performance goes harder on the star than it appears from the orchestra seats. “When [Fonda] was out there,” he remembers, “it was
as if he’d been spun around three or four times until dizzy, then pushed out into the spotlight. He wasn’t with it, but he made it through to the end.”

  * * *

  “Men commit actions,” Phyllis Chesler writes; “women commit gestures.” There is terrific aggression implicit in Frances’s suicide, and in its theatrical manner. First, there is the exclusion of Henry from her will, then the smuggling of a razor from their home. Choosing a blade over pills means Henry can never tell himself her end was clean, painless, or accidental. And rather than open her wrists, she cuts her throat from ear to ear: a last broad red smile from the wife so fearful of losing her beauty.

  None of the six messages she leaves is addressed to Henry. The act itself is the message.

  Then there is the doctor’s note. A few days after Frances’s suicide, Henry receives a letter from Dr. Knight of the Riggs Center. The doctor assures him that the divorce request was not the cause but only the “immediate trigger” of the despair that led Frances to take her life, and that she committed the act “in a mood of exacerbated hopelessness.” (Though this seems to contradict the premeditated nature of the act, not to mention the symbolism of Frances’s having carried it out on her birthday.) Dr. Knight then suggests that Frances, aware of her slim chances for recovery, and sorrowful at her inability to make Henry happy, “arranged this solution” out of loving motives.

  Let us not malign Dr. Knight, a cofounder of the Menninger Clinic, president of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychiatric Association, and, by all testimonials, a caring man. But it’s a fact that clever patients can manipulate those who would heal them. We wonder if Frances, upon deciding her ending, implanted these maudlin thoughts of martyrdom in the doctor’s head—if, in effect, she authored that awful condolence herself. Certainly, Frances can hardly have left her survivor a more lasting legacy of guilt if the words had come from beyond the grave, written in her own hand.

  As to the manner of death, there is clearly intent to its preparation and staging. In answer to Henry’s acclaimed stage comeback, Frances’s suicide is likewise a theater of dying; and no less is it an act of public assertion, a final naked display of what Frances had come to believe was her real identity—a human shell, cut in half and emptied.

  On May 11, 1950, it is reported from Greenwich that Frances’s will has been filed in probate and that it “disposes of an estate of more than $400,000 in real and personal property and $3,500 in Greenwich real estate.” The principal beneficiary is Sophie, who receives the title to her Los Angeles home, one thousand dollars in cash, all of Frances’s personal effects, and 60 percent of the residual estate. The remainder is to be divided between Jane and Peter, who will inherit Sophie’s share upon her death. Pan, already wealthy, is left a house in Newark, New Jersey.

  What is it that makes Frances’s will particularly newsworthy, a month after her suicide? One thing: the beautiful, vengeful fact that Henry is not in it.

  * * *

  Some years later, Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham will describe a function at which “a tactless woman” asks Fonda this question: “What is it like to be married to all those women, and two of them committed suicide?” To which Henry replies, “Everyone has to save himself.”

  Though he has cared for his wife within the limits of his ability, though he has suffered stresses and regrets, Fonda has sacrificed few prerogatives through the fourteen years of this marriage. But we’re not without understanding for him. He must feel despair creeping about his neck like the swampy vines of Greenwich. He knows he is unable to pull Frances from the hole begun for her in childhood, deepened in marriage to George Brokaw, and widened in every year of marriage to himself—a man uninclined to express feeling, lend emotional succor, or sympathize in depth with those closest to him.

  As Fonda will say later, “It was just a bore to have a wife who wasn’t always well.” That cold candor harmonizes with words we’ve come across before. It may be that Henry feels as keenly as anyone around him—Sullavan or Frances, Heggen or Logan—that boredom is one of the many names of death. It may be that he himself tends to the very depression that has sunk, or threatens to sink, those remarkable individuals to whose mysteries he has always found himself attracted, whose frictions have fired his creativity.

  The need to seek out such depths as Henry has gleaned in Frances, to venture so near to another’s impulse toward death, and then to flee while pretending a lack of comprehension—this is selfishness. But it is also, to Fonda, as basic a necessity as work and freedom. If Frances has for many years been doomed to fall, he is equally doomed to go on, in both the performing and existential senses—doing creative penance for his emotional sins, tracking the elephant of doom as his black dog of fear takes the point.

  His job, finally, is to act; his responsibility, to live.

  Frances joins Aleta Freel, Ross Alexander, Tom Heggen, the others who have fallen before and will fall after. Given all she suffered, the wonderment may be that she held on to life as long as she did. Henry, though, must make it through to the end.

  Part 2

  7

  The Right Man

  With admirers, New York, mid-1950s

  America couldn’t be happier with him.

  Come the 1950s—midlife and mid-century—as stars of similar vintage fall behind, Henry Fonda achieves cross-media ubiquity. He capitalizes on, contributes to, or somehow connects with virtually every entertainment trend and innovation of the time: television, wide-screen spectacular, Method acting, the inescapable Western. By dint of apprenticeship, luck, strategic compromise, and dedicated artistry, he has won the ability to do anything he likes. He has beaten the game.

  It’s only himself he can’t figure out. He is forty-five. At the peak of his life and work, with youth behind him and age ahead, he is an ordinary man with ordinary questions. Where does he belong? What are the limits of his ability? Is he a good man or a villain?

  Writer and critic A. Alvarez quotes Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear!” Alvarez then references the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who reads those lines as a description of “‘the mid-life crisis,’ that long period of hopelessness and confusion, a kind of male menopause, which often occurs at some point in the thirties or early forties and marks the transition from youth to middle age.”

  Henry Fonda’s middle age—the period following the ascension of Mister Roberts, and the low of Frances’s death—is a dark wood full of thorns and dangers, with no clear path. It is his most volatile period—his most various in artistry, his most confounding in behavior—and it bespeaks a man whose straight way is lost.

  It’s to Henry’s credit that he does not recede into his Dantean darkness. His middle age is ceaselessly productive and persistently interesting. As a public man, he is forever moving, relocating, remarrying, his eyes darting into new social sets, new creativities. As an actor, he goes places he hasn’t yet ventured. But as a professional, he is newly demanding and combative. A new egotism drives him, a latent craziness that cracks his self-control.

  Behind it is Frances. She hounds Fonda through these middle years, pushing him to work, fight, despair, live. Her own ordeal ceased with her death, but his has taken a new form. Through all the muddled episodes and mystifying works of these postsuicide years, the crux of his ordeal is to battle toward expression through a dark wood of guilt and pain, the thorns of an exquisite self-loathing.

  And if he cannot find the straight path, he will hack one out—one that is crooked and difficult and even, in its purest moments, noble.

  * * *

  Fonda prepares to make Susan Blanchard his third wife by shedding the coverings of his previous existence. He leaves the Greenwich house for another in the equally affluent suburb of Darien; abandons the Manhattan bachelor flat to lease a four-story
brownstone in the East Sixties. The children are here and there, Jane immersing herself in friends and horses, Peter the ward of Grandma Sophie. Jane recalls that Frances’s sister and brother-in-law threatened a custody bid around this time, and she suggests that Henry’s inclination was to let his children go; it was Susan who convinced him to fight for them. A few months after Frances’s death, Henry successfully petitions the Greenwich courts for guardianship of the assets she has left Peter, an estate totaling sixty thousand dollars.

  The wedding occurs three days after Christmas, 1950. It is a small, chic affair held in the Upper East Side apartment of Susan’s mother and stepfather, the Hammersteins. Neither of Henry’s children is present. Despite its rebound aspects, not to mention the age difference, the marriage looks sunny: Henry and Susan are spotted around town, giggling. The children, far from thinking her an intruder, adore their young stepmother. She is the supportive older female Jane has never had, and an object of wonder to dreamy Peter.

  The girl is a winner. Henry has good times with her. But he is the same parched and private man he was before.

  They take their honeymoon on the Virgin Island of Saint John. And without any malign intent, ten-year-old Peter blows a hole in their getaway. While target-shooting with two friends on a skeet range near Ossining, New York, the boy mishandles a .22-caliber pistol and shoots himself in the abdomen.

  The wound appears small, but as a handy chauffeur speeds him to town, Peter knows he is dying. Miraculously, a surgeon from nearby Sing Sing prison, with expertise in violent wounds, is on the scene. Dr. Charles C. Sweet finds damage to Peter’s liver, stomach, and kidney; his heart has only just been spared. In the course of emergency surgery, near-fatal amounts of blood are lost. Three times, the boy’s heartbeat ceases. Jane and Sophie are told he won’t make it. Then adrenaline is shot straight into the struggling heart, and it returns to life.