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

by Devin McKinney

  All this time, Henry knows nothing. By the time a shortwave-radio alert penetrates his island seclusion, the mishap has hit the papers. Peter is listed in “very favorable condition”; Dr. Sweet says that despite needing three blood transfusions, the lad has made an “amazing comeback.” Reaching the hospital, Henry finds his son still unconscious, and takes up vigil at his bedside.

  Despite the rumors and surmises of ensuing years—even Jane has her doubts—Peter swears it is not a suicide attempt. Henry believes him, inasmuch as the circumstances do not seem to suggest he meant to hurt himself. But it’s several hours before Henry knows what the circumstances are. How can he avoid the word suicide as his frail son lies strung with tubes, eyes closed in a face so resembling Frances’s?

  But Peter stabilizes and regains strength. Meanwhile, the third marriage becomes everyday life. Organs regenerate, blood regains its flow, and life rolls forward.

  Parts of Fonda are invigorated as he enters his late forties—by marriage to Susan; by his new pastime of depicting superrealistic still lifes in pastel chalk; by the broad choice of theatrical works available to him; and overall by the possibilities that attach to being Henry Fonda at this point in time. Work and production, plans and projections put distance between him and the past. Frances fades from the visible plane; her ghost goes gray and indistinct in the memories of the living. “No one ever talked about Mom,” Peter says of these days. “No one seemed to miss her. It was almost as if she had never lived.”

  By “no one,” Peter means, more than anyone, his father. All is hidden in this man—until the instant when an opening appears. Dorothy Kilgallen has a spy in the room as Henry and Susan trade vows. “She remained cool and unflustered throughout the ceremony,” the spy relates, “but he wept.”

  Henry has been through a lot, and middle age lends new poignancy to every emotion. We don’t know if he cries because he is happy, or because he knows the vow he swears to Susan will not survive his need to keep her at a distance. We don’t know if the tears are shed in anticipation or remembrance—thoughts of Frances, himself, his motherless children, the sad mess of life.

  * * *

  On October 28, Henry gives his last Broadway performance as Mister Roberts. His leaving is due to a torn knee cartilage, which will require surgery and necessitate a twelve-week period of recuperation. Columnist Whitney Bolton, present that last night, writes that in his final scene, Fonda “was almost unable to go on speaking. Emotion gripped him and tightened his throat.” After the curtain, Josh Logan emerges to inform the audience of the special occasion and explain that the company has made a tradition of awarding a bottle of scotch to a departing cast member. Tonight, for the first time, the ritual will occur in public. “The handkerchiefs were out like moths in the moonlight,” Bolton writes.

  But Fonda is not finished with Roberts, or it with him. Star and specter will hit the road together in a nation-spanning marathon of performances between February and August of 1951. The itinerary has been announced far enough in advance for ticket orders to soar, and each midsize town to experience its own excitement. Launching in Pittsburgh, the road tour covers the belt line of Middle America, in cities where Broadway stars seldom appear—Charleston and Cleveland, St. Louis and St. Paul, Kansas City and Denver, Seattle and San Francisco—culminating in a farewell engagement at Hollywood’s Biltmore Theatre.

  “This is my first tour,” Henry tells a Wisconsin reporter. “It’s exciting: there’s an added something about going out and playing before audiences all over the country.” He has always loved the egalitarian grind of theater, whatever takes it away from cocktail entertainment and closer to soul-feeding labor. But the tour also has glamour and allure: To most Americans, Henry is still a movie star, something romantic and fantastic. Susan Blanchard accompanies him, and why not—she has youth and stamina and doesn’t mind being photographed.

  On March 19, the company, leaving Minneapolis by train, runs into a snowstorm and is stranded; that evening’s scheduled performance in Omaha is canceled. Emerging the next morning, blinking in a world of white, Fonda promises a special extra show for disappointed ticket holders. But the secondary train cars, containing props and scenery, are stuck behind—which entails Fonda’s addressing his hometown audience directly from the stage, explaining the layout of the Reluctant set, entreating each spectator to imagine the ship’s towering hull and paltry palm tree, the cargo winches and goat on the gangway. Fonda and his costars then perform the show with nothing but their bodies and costumes, miming everything from the moving of crates to the climactic heaving of the palm tree.

  In Iowa, fire breaks out on an upper floor of the Fort Des Moines Hotel, where the Roberts company is staying. A power cut strands seventeen-year-old elevator operator Joan Galusha in her elevator car, and Fonda, on his way to the lobby, is enlisted by firemen to help give the fainting girl artificial respiration. He is served up as a local hero: “If I get a chance, I’m going to see Mr. Fonda and thank him,” Miss Galusha says. “He disappeared right after helping me.” Mister Roberts and the Lone Ranger in one!

  But the tour ends on a bum note. Josh Logan, concerned how Roberts will play before the Hollywood elite—he is keen to direct the movie—catches up in San Francisco. He finds the show’s comic-dramatic friction has been lost. It seems the other cast members, in awe of Fonda, have begun to emulate his reserve; full of competitive underplaying, the action has gone solemn and slow, and lost its tragicomic tension. Asserting eminent domain, the coauthor-director steps in to recharge the comedy and restore the balance.

  Fonda is deeply offended. He has effectively been directing the show throughout the tour and feels it is in fine shape. But he grits his teeth and shuts up—until the night before the Hollywood opening.

  “I don’t feel it’s my play anymore,” he explodes.

  “No, you son of a bitch,” Logan responds, “but it’s mine!”

  Despite his own annoyance, the director senses the subtleties of ego that are involved. Fonda “had become so identified with the part, and with the play,” according to Logan, “that in his mind he was its guardian and I had become a guy who was contriving to spoil it by putting low laughs into it.” Fonda goes so far as to tell Leland Hayward that he will not star in the much-anticipated screen version if Logan directs it.

  Fonda and Logan are brothers; they fight that passionately, that whimsically. But this is a warning of other backstage scenarios to come in the next decade, dustups with a common denominator—Fonda’s new intransigence against authority. His temper has usually been vented on those in his personal life, children or wives; now it is less discriminate. His ego has usually manifested itself as aloofness; now it is an animal thing—prowling the dark wood, savage, protective of its territory.

  * * *

  The new, makeshift Fonda family vacations in Malibu in the weeks following the Roberts road show. Henry must be happy, for all will remember it as a good summer.

  Leland Hayward, now as mighty a theatrical producer as he had been an agent, sends along what he is certain will be the next hot play: Point of No Return, an adaptation, by Paul Osborn, of John P. Marquand’s best-selling 1949 novel. It concerns New York bank executive Charles Gray and his personal and professional crisis at middle age. While sweating out a promotion, Gray revisits his Massachusetts hometown and has memories of youth, family, a girl loved and lost.

  The story is founded on the same critique of petit-bourgeois and corporate values that later in the 1950s will become a successful model for “probing” fiction on the page, stage, and screen: Executive Suite, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Patterns, The Apartment. The play is, in that sense, slightly ahead of the cultural curve, but that is probably of only marginal interest to Fonda. Something else about it gets into his brain. Though it’s far from perfect, he signs up, then flies back to New York for consultations.

  Fonda’s first venture after Mister Roberts is guaranteed a sizable audience. On the instant of his agreement, capi
tal and curiosity begin to flow. Rehearsals are announced for October 1, the Broadway opening for mid-December. Directing is H. C. Potter, spinner of dreary but popular screen whimsies (The Farmer’s Daughter, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House), shepherd of high-minded stage hits (A Bell for Adano, Anne of the Thousand Days). Leonard Lyons reports that Hayward “will charge $8 top for Fridays and Saturdays, assuming a $37,000 weekly gross.” By the time it opens, the play will have an advance ticket sale of half a million dollars—far more than even Roberts stimulated.

  Previews commence October 29 at New Haven’s Shubert Theater, where the show sells out and Walter Winchell’s scouts herald it as “absorbing and generally entertaining.” But Fonda again has trouble with his director; Potter, he feels, is unable to address key weaknesses in the play. Leland Hayward is forced to agree. Though the two are old friends, producer asks director to excuse himself, on the face-saving pretext of a prior film commitment.

  On November 6, the play, minus a director and still only “generally” entertaining, begins a three-week stand at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. Hayward places a call to Greece, where Elia Kazan—the most influential director on Broadway, stager of modern milestones by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams—is vacationing. Kazan flies to Boston for a performance; his comments engender extensive rewrites and reconstructive rehearsal. Cast changes and final touches are added over two weeks at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theatre.

  Local reviews are again fine. But the new and improved production, Fonda feels, is little but an empty shell with a higher gloss. He plays the remainder of the previews “feeling that I was cheating on an audience in every possible way.”

  Less than a month has been devoted to pretryout rehearsals and getting the text in shape; even in published form, Osborn’s adaptation reads like a work in progress. From day one, Henry knows there’s something wrong, and he is ravaged by nerves and sleeplessness in the preview period. In Philadelphia, his throat bothers him, and a doctor finds bleeding fissures on his vocal cords: apparently, Fonda has been yelling too much in rehearsals.

  What is he yelling for? “An honest second act,” he says.

  Everyone’s instincts—Hayward’s for the money, Fonda’s for the art—are confirmed when Point of No Return opens at the Alvin Theatre on December 13. It’s a hit, and a sizable one, but no magic attaches to it. The notices are glumly approving. “Sound, professional theatre work,” Brooks Atkinson calls the play in the New York Times, while Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York Post respects its “expert showmanship.” John Mason Brown of the Saturday Review says it is “distinguished throughout by the kind of professionalism which restores one’s faith in the theatre.” Other scribes plumb their souls for phrases like “impressive accomplishment,” “expertly loaded,” and “thoroughly efficient.”

  * * *

  Fonda is unhappy with Point of No Return and will remain so, though his involvement with it will be extensive—a Broadway run of 356 performances, another coast-to-coast tour, and even initial agreement to a Hayward-produced film version, which is never made.* Fonda is unhappy because he has taken on a play that is not there, a character not on the page, a core conflict not brought out but sketched in air.

  What attracted him? Charles Gray is a protagonist Fonda feels he might understand, yet who exists at a safe remove—roughly his own age, likewise a veteran of World War II, with a wife, children, and an existence split between city job and suburban home. Gray is proud to suffer silently, though early hurts have left him stunted. A number of lines about ghosts and fate jibe with the inner logic of Fonda’s career.

  Such implications may have induced Fonda to hope the play would deepen with rewriting. But although Henry rages, and his throat bleeds, he will be unable to make Point of No Return work in a personal way, or as anything but a popular success.

  What’s missing, he’s said, is “an honest second act.” The climax of the second act is the suicide by pill overdose of Gray’s father. In the novel, the son’s discovery of the father’s body is a memory swimming “deep beneath the waters of experience”: “There was nothing to explain the spasm of fear which shook Charles except his father’s utter stillness. He was out in the hall again, closing the bedroom door very softly, before he faced the full realization that his father was dead.” The play presents the discovery as a brief spotlit flashback between overloaded dialogue scenes:

  A single light goes up on the GRAYS’ living room. JOHN GRAY lies motionless, stretched out on the sofa, one leg and arm hanging down. On the floor is a newspaper, an empty glass and a pill bottle. CHARLES is kneeling, dazed. He places the limp arm upon the body, kisses the forehead, reaches for the bottle and rises. Slowly he places the bottle into his pocket.

  “My life has been peppered with suicides,” Fonda will say near the end of his life, “and I don’t like to think back on them.” But in the post-Frances years, suicide is what he cannot stop thinking about. Point of No Return is his first dramatic gesture in its direction, but the crux is hedged, the whole irremediably flawed. He wants to go further.

  * * *

  Grimly focused, Fonda takes to the road with Point of No Return, embarking on a ballyhooed national tour days after the play closes at the Alvin. For the next seven months—late November 1952 through June 1953—he traverses the country, working hard every night. But is he working to deepen the play, or to maintain a basic level of entertainment, an illusion of wholeness?

  Either way, the tickets sell. Opening the tour in Baltimore on November 24, the company breaks the house record for nonmusical shows. Similar returns will be counted elsewhere, along with glowing write-ups from local critics. Not that anyone mistakes expertise for profundity. The San Francisco critic admits Point of No Return “is not the greatest play ever written, Heaven knows, but the combination of playwright, director and actors has made it into a semblance of a great play.” Henry, he finds, makes “a thoughtful and forceful presentation, admirably calculated and projected.” That he has helped to calculate a semblance of greatness is far from the lowest praise an actor might receive.

  When Henry regroups after the tour to consider his options for the autumn, he rejects or tables offers that appear frivolous (Edward Chodorov’s Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, a fashionable satire on the sacred cows of marriage and psychoanalysis), are well outside his performing repertoire (a musical based on the Steinbeck novel Sweet Thursday, for which he takes extensive vocal training—a male Mary Martin he’s not), or are beyond his capacity to creditably purvey (the dying homosexual husband in an adaptation of André Gide’s The Immoralist).

  The choice Fonda makes is among the most fascinating and confounding of his career. The play itself, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, is well within his established range. But from the three options he is given by the producers—he may play either one of the two leads, or direct—the one he chooses is to play Lt. Barney Greenwald, a young Jewish lawyer. For Fonda to believe he can become Greenwald amounts to an act of hubris—one of the conspicuous few in this career of self-enforced limits.

  The play is an extraction from Wouk’s 1951 novel about a revolt aboard a World War II U.S. Navy ship performing routine duty in the Pacific. Lieutenant Maryk has, at the height of a typhoon, seized control from his skipper, Captain Queeg, who, he claims, froze. Greenwald, Maryk’s defense attorney, believes Maryk is merely the tool of Lieutenant Keefer, a smug, navy-hating writer. Greenwald rescues Maryk by dismantling Queeg on the stand but then, in an epilogue, drunkenly confesses to remorse at his actions.

  Wouk’s novel, in addition to a Pulitzer, has a year on the best-seller lists. The play’s popular profile as it approaches the stage far outdistances that of Point of No Return, or, for that matter, Mister Roberts. At the same time, Hollywood readies its film version, with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg and José Ferrer as Greenwald.

  Fonda is sent the play by producer Paul Gregory and actor Charles Laughton, who have recently staged successful all-star tab
le readings of verse plays by Shaw and Benet. Save for sex, Wouk’s play has all the elements of a moneymaker: single set, showy star parts, precise construction combining courtroom drama with an underdog premise and two devastating dramatic twists. Henry would be a fool to pass.

  * * *

  Counter to tradition, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will have its national tour before Broadway, not after, beginning on the West Coast and working east, logging seventy-odd performances before its New York opening in January 1954. Susan will not be along this time: “One-nighters make it too tough,” Henry tells a reporter. (For whom?)

  With Fonda in place, the other roles are quickly filled. John Hodiak, dark-eyed incarnation of working-class brawn, plays Maryk, and the role of Queeg goes to Lloyd Nolan, a reliable second-level movie mug.

  In early September, Henry flies to Hollywood, where rehearsals are to be held in the headquarters of the American Federation of Musicians. There, he finds actor Dick Powell has been hired to direct. The choice is an odd one: Powell’s chief fame has been as a featured singer and dancer in gaudy Warner Bros. musicals (42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, 1935, 1937). In the years since, he has worked with ambitious auteurs (Rossen, Mann, Minnelli), and even directed a low-budget crime drama (the 1952 Split Second). Still, his directorship of this prestigious stage piece is nearly as unlikely as is the conceit of middle-aged Henry Fonda playing a youthful Jew.

  But the producers’ choice of Powell may not have been a choice at all. Laughton biographer Simon Callow notes that Paul Gregory had “somehow” convinced RKO Pictures, already in production on the film version of The Caine Mutiny, to cede partial rights so that the play could premiere before the film. Most studios would have vetoed such a request. But in 1953, Dick Powell, in addition to being an actor and director, is a production executive at RKO—which may explain at one throw why those partial rights are granted, and a director without theatrical experience is hired to steer a major stage production.