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

by Devin McKinney

  Almost instantly, the enterprise turns sour. There are too many talents wound too tightly; rehearsals are a crash of egos, techniques, even sexualities. Alliances and enmities form: The cast members get along, but Laughton and Gregory are contentious; Laughton and Wouk grow close, but Fonda dislikes Laughton; Laughton belittles the cast, and everyone thinks Powell is in over his head.

  There are ongoing troubles with the text. More importantly, the director, bred on movie sets, seems unable to shape performance and narrative away from the camera eye and toward the theater’s living darkness. Fonda huddles with Nolan and Hodiak, and the consensus is that Powell must go. Laughton reluctantly agrees. In a messy negotiation, by which Gregory grants him director’s billing and 2 percent of the gross profits, Powell is dismissed. But the producers have not heard the last of him.

  * * *

  Laughton takes over as director. If Powell’s shortfall is inexperience, Laughton’s is a command of theater so lordly, it is close to contempt. Cast member Charles Nolte remembers being ridiculed at length for his vocal mannerisms, and no fewer than three cast members are driven to walk out.

  Laughton’s training is steeped in artifice and attitude. A closeted gay man with masochistic leanings, he suffuses his performances with the odors of sensualism and self-loathing. Fonda’s style is as no-nonsense as Laughton’s is rococo, and he normally smells of nothing more louche than Old Spice. So perhaps it is both chemical disgust and a Mister Roberts–like defense of “the crew” when, at mid-rehearsal one day, Fonda impales Laughton on the spear of a direct and mortifying insult, delivered before the entire company: “What do you know about men, you fat, ugly faggot?”

  The remark is both an offense and an impertinence—like asking a bee what it knows about flowers—but it characterizes Fonda’s explosiveness in this period. It speaks as well to control: Fonda is more intent than ever on being the shaping intelligence, the decisive energy behind anything he is in. He knows his attack on Laughton will damage the older man’s authority, while defending the cast will empower his own position.

  But the other actors may also secretly fear the spear of his anger. “I consider Fonda the most interesting actor with whom I worked for many reasons,” Nolte—who also happens to be gay—will tell an interviewer some fifty years later. “I did study his acting technique because I was witness to it at first hand, and close up. It struck me as highly professional when it wasn’t frighteningly demonic.”

  * * *

  Yet somehow The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial makes it to port. Previews in Santa Barbara are followed by the San Diego premiere on October 13, and rapt audiences and rave reviews in city after city. Fonda has “the gift,” a critic writes after the November 4 show at El Paso’s Liberty Hall, “of commanding more attention even when his back is to the audience than most actors can scrape together with a spotlight and ten-piece orchestra.”

  By early December, the advance Broadway ticket sale is approaching $800,000. But chatter about dissension in the company persists. Columnist Wood Soanes has written that Henry is cold-shouldering both Hodiak and Nolan, “and is eager to get out of the proceedings,” suggesting it is because Nolan’s reviews have outshone his own. Louella Parsons likewise claims Fonda has stayed “aloof” from his costars during the Chicago layover, and that his “unwillingness to take any direction is said to be one reason that Dick Powell withdrew from the play.”

  “What direction?” Lloyd Nolan snaps the next day. “Powell doesn’t know anything about directing a play.… Charles Laughton took over a week before we were to start out and saved the show.” And what of Henry’s aloofness? “It’s a lie,” Nolan says. John Hodiak is moved to phone Parsons and quash the rumors. “[We’re] just one happy family, and except for a few minor misunderstandings we are all very congenial.” Parsons reserves her doubts: “[A]t least five people” tell her Fonda has been difficult.

  Then Powell reappears. He has, by legal fiat, been billed as director throughout the tour; when it arises that Laughton will be so credited in New York, Powell moves for an injunction to block the opening. He tells a reporter he wasn’t fired; he quit. Why? “I got into a slight squabble with Henry”—though one report has had an enraged Fonda putting his fist through a door. “He threatened to quit unless it was done the way he wanted. He’s like that, moody.”

  In the end, Powell cannot raise the $1.5 million bond needed to block The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial from making its scheduled debut at the Plymouth Theatre on January 20—which it does, to acclaim across the board. Kerr of the New York Herald-Tribune calls it “thrilling”; Atkinson of the New York Times says “shattering.” “Powerful, impressive,” writes Watts of the New York Post; “magnificent,” offers both Coleman of the Mirror and McClain of the Journal American; “brilliantly exciting,” contributes Hawkins of the World-Telegram and Sun.

  Earl Wilson believes it is “one of the great shows of our time.” Legendary theatrical producer Billy Rose compares the play favorably with the bloated film version (another thorn in Dick Powell’s side), calling it “a throat-grabbing chunk of life.” Columnist Mel Heimer writes, “I am in that near-comatose state where I feel it may be the finest thing I ever have seen in the theater.”

  * * *

  Maryk, just acquitted, is celebrating with his shipmates. Greenwald staggers in drunk. He baits Keefer, whose war novel lampooning the regular navy is approaching publication. Then the lawyer describes the shame he feels. Queeg, though petty and paranoid, represents the unsung military that protected democracy between the wars, while cynics like Keefer pursued private ambition and Hitler incinerated European Jews for soap.

  The Caine mutiny violated the sanctity of rank in wartime; the acquittal ratified disloyalty. “Queeg deserved better at my hands,” Greenwald says. “He stopped Herman Goering from washing his fat behind with my mother.”

  Greenwald’s indictment lifts The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial to within reach of the great American plays—not because it makes sense, but because it makes drama. It is up to Fonda to render Greenwald’s ethnic terror convincing and real; if he fails, the play is sabotaged by a wet lump of desperate jabber. But on those nights when he breaks his own emotional limits, the epilogue carries the play past any spot where an audience might safely have left it behind.

  Greenwald enables Fonda to portray a man done in by his own controlling nature, whose triumph brings desolation. Henry calls the epilogue “the toughest scene [I’ve] ever played.” He is uncertain how to deliver it, before realizing the only approach is to create the emotion anew in every performance, from first mutterings to final condemnation, inebriation to rage. He must reexperience that mounting ferocity each night as if for the first time.

  He cannot always manage it. But on those nights he does, Fonda breaks down and cries.

  * * *

  Fonda at middle age has his fists in a perpetual clench. But when violence comes, it is not he who delivers it, but his director. The punch is a drunken flail, packing more pathos than power. It is especially sad because the director is John Ford, who more than any filmmaker has had the sensitivity to see what lies beneath Fonda’s skin, and the love to bring it out.

  Ford is directing the film version of Mister Roberts, for which Henry has been drawn back to Hollywood after a seven-year absence. Smash play, legendary director, beloved star, big budget—the dominoes are lined up for a box-office hit and a great film.

  The picture has been under discussion since 1948, when it’s assumed that Joshua Logan will direct Fonda in Caribbean locations. But plans are postponed, partly by the continuing success of Roberts as a touring commodity. By late 1953, that success has crested, and the gears crank again to hoist a Roberts for the screen. Leland Hayward produces, and Logan, per the assumption, is tapped to direct; but he and Fonda are still on the outs, and Logan is besotted with Marlon Brando, the new Method sensation. William Holden is mentioned as a fallback, while Fonda—felt to be past his peak for playing young naval officers—is bare
ly in the running.

  But Hayward begins to question the wisdom of handing the film’s costly reins to Logan, whose only movie experience has come fifteen years before, in the form of codirecting one film and dialogue-coaching two others. Hayward asks him to step aside in favor of John Ford, surefire when it comes to sea stories and masculine comedy. (Ford’s involvement also promises the cooperation of the U.S. Navy.) Logan, understandably peeved, claims Ford has never even seen the play and, further, that he has disparaged it as “homosexual” in nature.*

  Soon after Logan’s axing, Louella Parsons makes it known that Hayward and Warner Bros. want Brando. But Brando’s involvement is complicated by the lawsuit threatened by Twentieth Century–Fox for his refusal to appear for work on a Michael Curtiz picture, The Egyptian. Meanwhile Fonda, “who has aged considerably since he starred in Mister Roberts on Broadway,” will shoot a screen test for the lead, Parsons reports. “However, there’s a possibility he will play the role of the doctor instead of the younger man.” What ignominy for Henry, to move up an age bracket and down a billing level in a property for whose popularity he is chiefly responsible.

  But John Ford speaks: “Bullshit! That’s Fonda’s part.” He even makes his own participation contingent on Fonda’s hiring. Within days, Parsons will announce that Hayward and Jack Warner have decided, in closed conference, to give Fonda the role. Two eminences of an earlier Hollywood, James Cagney and William Powell, are cast as the Captain and Doc; hot young Jack Lemmon will play Pulver.

  When his Court-Martial contract expires at the end of May and Hayward sends notice that Roberts location shooting is set for September 1, Fonda chooses to depart the play and grab the movie. His return to the screen after seven years is an important story, both publicly—it gets the cover of Life—and personally. To fuse his two acting selves in the consummate realization of the role that has arguably meant the most to him is a rare chance. To avoid jinxing it, he denies having meant to abandon the movies, or disliking Hollywood: “I had no intention of quitting Hollywood when I left. Three great plays … just kept me away. I never intended to pull up stakes.”

  Much publicity attends initial filming on Midway Island, where Ford shot his great battle documentary more than a decade before, and not far from the vortex of Fonda’s own navy service. Sailing out, Henry poses with Susan and the kids against the blue waters off Hawaii. He retains all the charisma of the Hollywood star: Pearl Harbor looks like his private swimming pool.

  * * *

  Fonda’s command, so inseparable from his coldness, is impressive. He travels between the divergent worlds of theater and film stardom without any evident bump to the psyche; he resumes the movie star’s mask, and the stress it conceals, that easily. The gap between 1948 and 1955 might never have occurred, except that Fonda looks what he is—namely, seven years older. Taut, wiry, a most attractive middle-aged man, but one who is too old to be playing Mister Roberts.

  On the set, though, he’s more the coiled snake than ever, where John Ford is, from the start of shooting, an angry boar flashing its teeth. The old man’s alcoholism is peaking, and his health is poor; even at his best he is, in Fonda’s phrase, “an Irish egomaniac.” Worst, Ford seems bent on making Roberts into, imagine this, a John Ford picture—broad comedy and ample slapstick, lusty men and busty women, a Quiet Man on the waves. With his screenwriters, Ford has reworked the elusive thing that haunted the Alvin stage into a thick-skulled service comedy about lugs on a tub. The tumultuous shore leave, for instance, is no longer suggested by the crew members’ shredded clothing and black eyes; now it is a full-scale disaster romp with rioting sailors, club-swinging MPs, and a motorcycle flying into the drink.

  Immediately, Fonda sees the movie shaping up as dumb and unfunny. He has been investing ever more of his ego in controlling the shape and direction of his projects; here he finds the story and character he most prizes being wrested away. But because it is Ford, Henry doesn’t shout—as he has lately shouted at Logan, Potter, Powell, and Laughton. Instead he goes sullen. His scenes lack snap; his body is drawn and hostile; there is no bloom of youth on his Roberts. And his off-camera mode is passive-aggressive, even mutinous: According to Jack Lemmon, Fonda encourages the younger actor to “screw up” his scenes, which involve much of the farcical business Ford enjoys and Henry detests.

  Finally it comes to a head. Stories vary, but most place the confrontation in the privacy of Ford’s room after hours. The director has requested a private conference. What’s eating you? he asks Fonda. Henry starts to explain—and Ford, unaccustomed to being answered by his actors, cuts him off with accusations of treachery. More words, getting hotter. And suddenly, Fonda feels a blow to his chin, coming from Ford’s aged but wrathful fist. Fonda is propelled backward over a table.

  This is followed by tears and remorse. Ford appears at Henry’s door to apologize. But the subtle bond that distinguished the partnership has snapped.

  It’s the most dismal episode in either man’s professional life. The two will have clipped and sarcastic exchanges on the Roberts set, and speak only occasionally in the years following. But in 1971, Fonda will contribute an affectionate anecdote to Peter Bogdanovich’s valedictory chronicle, Directed by John Ford; and to the end, he will speak of “Pappy” as one of the greats.

  In an interview conducted in 1973, Ford’s grandson Dan asks him his feelings about Fonda. “Just a great actor, a real professional,” the director says, gruff and phlegmy, his voice full of tobacco, whiskey, history. “All in all, just a fine man.”

  He offers a tall tale or two about their virgin encounters on Young Mr. Lincoln. There is a pause. Though he has been reminiscing about the first time he and Fonda worked together, Ford may be more keenly recalling the last time. It’s as if a chasm of nearly twenty years is being mulled in the gap between sentences. For when he speaks again, Ford notes that Fonda had “a fine war record. He never advertised the fact, but … I’m very proud of him. He was in the Navy.”

  Those are Ford’s last recorded words on Fonda; he will die a few months later.

  * * *

  After the apology, Ford begins boozing in earnest. Somehow, he survives the remainder of the Midway shoot, further locations in Hawaii, and a few working days in Hollywood, as the production nears a state of chaos. (Leland Hayward remembers Ward Bond, a supporting player—and no moderate drinker himself—serving as uncredited director during Ford’s spells of alcoholic unconsciousness.) Finally, Ford is overtaken by gall bladder distress and removed from the filming: an honorable, if painful, out for everyone.

  The rest of the scenes are shot by Mervyn LeRoy, a decent-minded hack with the pictorial gifts of a warehouse foreman. And in a final irony, the film’s presumptive first director, Josh Logan, is called upon to contribute several bridging scenes and dialogue inserts, and even to reshoot some slapstick—most of it so corny and clanking it matches seamlessly with Ford at his crocked Irish worst.

  Released in the summer of 1955, Mister Roberts gets celebratory reviews and becomes one of the top moneymakers of its year. It is still considered a beloved film today; although, as with many works so designated, it is rarely mentioned, for the simple reason that it is an embarrassment. A story that calls for a poet’s sad touch is covered with Ford’s fumbling thumbprints; the skeletal play becomes a wide-screen whale spouting gouts of buffoonery and sentimentality.

  Mister Roberts had, in no small sense, saved Fonda. He has done the role on stage, radio, television, now film; and after seven years, a thousand-plus performances, and miles beyond number, he consecrates to history a hollow Leviathan. The picture will be a hit—but then, so will the likes of Operation Petticoat (1959) and The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960), lubricious and witless co-optations of the Roberts model. It will even be taken for a classic. But Fonda knows it is crap.

  “I despised that film,” he says of Mister Roberts. At least he has the memory of what was.

  * * *

  Come the 1950s, television prese
nts itself as the ideal screen for Fonda’s blander aspect. The new entertainment appliance, which by 1953 sits in half of all American homes, will be blamed for much ill-defined social evil; it will plug straight into every American tendency to complacency, conformity, and imaginative sloth. So it’s not in the happiest sense that Fonda seems made for it—as do numerous other, less talented members of his acting generation, from Robert Cummings to Robert Young. Henry’s thinness and pallor blend with the transmission fuzz of early broadcasts; his darkness is diminished and his dullness magnified by the unsubtle camera, the gray-and-white image.

  Fonda will have been on television for years by the time it ceases to be called a fad. His first appearance is in April 1948, on a show called Tonight on Broadway—two weeks into the run of Roberts, he is interviewed live from the Alvin Theatre. In October 1950, he performs a Roberts scene on ABC’s Showtime USA, and in July 1953, he plays his first original TV part—the title character in The Decision at Arrowsmith, an adaptation from Sinclair Lewis.

  In 1954, Henry is offered a substantial sum to front his own show. The Star and the Story is a half-hour anthology series guest-starring the requisite supply of second- and third-echelon movie veterans. The show’s subject matter, judging by the episode listing, displays a curious dependence on the short stories of Somerset Maugham.* Fonda’s contribution is his name, a brief introduction to each story, and two product endorsements per episode, delivered straight to the camera. The show is not unsuccessful (thirty-nine episodes are broadcast between January 1955 and April 1956), but it’s the commercials—Fonda hoisting a glass of Rheingold to extol it as “the largest-selling lager beer in the East”—that get the most attention.

  Endorsements are not new for Henry—since 1936, he’s been hired to sell shirts and shoes, razor blades and self-sealing envelopes, Schaefer beer and Camel cigarettes—but they’ve always been in print; some onlookers question the propriety of a great actor pitching products via the tube, as opposed to in the pages of Collier’s. TV critic Hal Humphrey, while admitting the power of $150,000 as an inducement, finds it “appalling to see an actor of this stature going so commercial and mediocre.” The star is more of a realist. “I am an actor and this is part of acting,” Henry says. “Yes, I am being very commercial, and for commercial reasons. I am getting more money for this than I would for a movie.”