None of the other principals has any Broadway experience. Producer Fred Coe is a past colleague of Henry’s, having put The Petrified Forest on TV two years earlier. Director Arthur Penn is a graduate of the Actors Studio and veteran of television, whose first film, The Left-Handed Gun, is in the can but as yet unreleased. Anne Bancroft, playing Gittel, is a Method adherent and unknown of twenty-six who has spent a few years on the Hollywood margins; Seesaw will be the Broadway debut of the woman soon to become, and remain for several years—until she is supplanted by Jane Fonda—the best actress in American movies.
Fonda stalls on a commitment: Jerry, he feels, is “underwritten.” In mid-June, a reading is held at East Seventy-fourth Street. Henry is charmed by Bancroft, wooed by Coe and Penn, troubled and tantalized by Jerry’s unyielding character. After he leaves with Afdera for their Mediterranean summer, Gibson dispatches rewrites from the States.
Henry is drawn in. He needs a play for the winter, and perhaps he feels challenged by these Actors Studio upstarts, with their emphasis on self-analysis as the key to truth. And the play itself—there’s something irresistibly right and inexpressibly wrong with it. It has a flaw and a flavor, a quality and a lack, something Fonda must try to master. Despite his doubts, he sends a cable from Europe: “Start it rolling. I am yours.” There’s grim resignation in the tone, yet upon his acceptance, the eighty-thousand-dollar budget magically appears—a quarter of it Fonda’s own money.
Though Gibson comes to believe Henry is miscast as Jerry, in reality the match is too perfect. Actor and character share Omaha origins, emotional limitations, unstable wives, and rageful habits. The problem with the text, everyone agrees, is an imbalance in intensity and sympathy between the characters: Gittel has humor and passion, while Jerry comes across as vague and truculent. She has desires; he has moods.
Playing such an unattractive version of himself ties Henry in knots. He will engage in verbal and even physical confrontation with Coe and Penn, but mostly, his anger will focus on the playwright. William Gibson has read his star too well. Despite the fact that he, like Tom Heggen, has not met Henry before, his intuitions have discerned Fonda’s type in other men; but where Heggen sculpted the hero, Gibson has drawn the bastard.
Has Henry taken the role to get closer to parts of himself, only to reconsider because they are the most unsavory parts? Does he condemn the playwright for failing to redeem his weaknesses, to deliver the actor from himself? Gibson, it seems to Henry, has left him dangling from a public scaffold constructed of his own worst traits.
His discomfort may run even deeper. The playwright’s wife happens to be Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a psychoanalyst at Austen Riggs during Frances Fonda’s stay there, and a close colleague of her doctor, Robert P. Knight.* In The Seesaw Log (1959), his diary of the play’s production, Gibson mentions neither his wife’s professional identity nor Fonda’s past connection with Riggs; it seems doubtful they ever discussed the one thing besides the play they had in common. But when Henry meets Dr. Brenman-Gibson, he is conspicuously ungracious.
Throughout November rehearsals, Gibson rewrites, and rewrites. Up to the opening, the play is in flux. Henry likes Bancroft, but their aesthetics are at odds: As actress and director discuss motivation, Fonda sits watching, Gibson writes, “with a fixed tolerant smile … a stony witness.” Asked to improvise with Bancroft, a bemused Henry simply declines.
Gradually, he isolates himself from the cast and crew; he and Gibson cease to speak; his performances grow erratic. The play has its first preview on December 5 in Washington, D.C. The AP correspondent gives Bancroft high marks for “zest and fine realism,” but Fonda “doesn’t reach any great dramatic peaks.” Subsequently, at a rehearsal in Philadelphia, Fonda and Coe come close to blows. The mood is so dark that a nauseous Bancroft must be tended by a doctor.
Finally, they open on Broadway, at the Booth Theatre on January 16, 1958. Before the curtain, Gibson appears at Fonda’s door to wish him luck—and the star nearly loses control, shouting at the playwright to get out. He tells Gibson he feels let down, set adrift, abandoned. Their relationship is finished. For Gibson, the tirade caps what he calls “the most odious experience of my life.”
In spite of all this, the show works. The audience is piqued by the cold-water realism of George Jenkins’s tenement-flat set, and the ambient street sounds heard over the scene changes. The play has a feel of the city and eight million hidden lives; the mood is one of hard-earned intimacy between man and woman, actor and actress. Bancroft receives superlatives (Walter Winchell announces “the birth of a star … Broadway’s newest Miss Radiance”), while Fonda throws off such magnetism that he cannot help but win his audience even while playing a son of a bitch.
Yet the play’s success leaves Henry feeling a fraud. Convinced Gibson has failed him, he may secretly know he has failed himself. It has been his job to humanize Jerry Ryan, but he has not been able to believe in the man’s decency—that is, his own—enough to do so. Feeling broken on the rocks of his own limitations, he has raged at others for not setting him free.
Still the audience cheers. Seesaw will spend almost two years on Broadway, tour America’s regional theaters, become a popular summer-stock property, be made into a drab film version, and finally return to Broadway as a musical. Fonda the investor will reap many returns from the play before selling his quarter share at what is reported to be a 300 percent profit. But Fonda the actor will leave exactly six months after opening night—the swiftest escape his contract allows.
* * *
The antidote to bitter success in cold Manhattan is California breeze. The summer of 1958 is spent on the Malibu beach with Afdera and the kids. Fonda then lingers in Hollywood for the remainder of the year, making movie deals, cropping his charisma to fit fluff. Though he told Paris reporters a year earlier that he “can’t stomach Hollywood,” he knows his commercial viability, and hence his lifestyle, will not be sustained by two-character dramas at the Booth Theatre.
He signs for The Deputy, shoots Warlock in Hollywood and Utah, and, after a Christmas in New York with Jane and Peter, returns for a romantic comedy called The Man Who Understood Women. This negligible item places Fonda next to hot international star Leslie Caron in the story of a starlet and a “genius” movie producer. Henry’s performance is impressively committed, if only to the consequence of nothing, while the film itself is stupefying—as scattershot as a riot, as indiscriminately colorful as a vomiting of jelly beans, yet supremely dull.
Coming through Roberts, Greenwald, Pierre, Manny, and Jerry, Fonda has become rather a connoisseur of misery. To engage him these days, a part must tap into his sense of pain, not pleasure, and it will be a while before he can begin to be convincingly loose and funny again. For now, all of his caring, and all of his neuroses, are poured into the deep black funnel of the theater. His collaborative tempers have been getting shorter, his creative nerves rawer; being “uncompromising” has meant imposing his will and enforcing his interpretations.
This obsession with control has acted as cover and compensation for a deeper one. Henry’s goal onstage in this decade has been to examine states of helplessness and melancholy, to delve into depression and death. His concurrent screen work has mostly incarnated solidity, self-determination; but his stage tendency is toward a portrayal of total vulnerability, a final baring of psyche and skin.
* * *
In the fall of 1959, back in New York, rehearsals begin for another play: a minor work, but a major move toward the secret themes. Robert Anderson’s Silent Night, Lonely Night is a talk-driven piece about two married people sharing Christmas night at a New England inn. The woman is mulling a separation from her absent husband; Henry’s character, John Sparrow, is visiting his wife at a nearby asylum, where she has been driven by his philandering. The two converse through a long night and into the day; dust settles as the actors drift across a cozy, antiquey set.
Despite its humanistic decency, the play is as meager as an epi
sode of The Deputy. Costarring Barbara Bel Geddes and directed by Peter Glenville, Silent Night proves uncommercial because of its air of defeat, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t trying to be liked. “I’m so sorry” is a dialogue motif; another is “That’s so sad.” And it has a fashionable fix on alienation, which forces Fonda to twist himself under lines like this: “I imagine if we could hear all the stifled cries for help in the world, it would be deafening.”
Opening at the Morosco Theatre on December 3, Silent Night is welcomed as enthusiastically as a sick aunt. Brooks Atkinson calls it “excessively verbose” and “uneventful,” and regrets the “slow, ruminative pace” of Glenville’s staging. Even the odd defender, like Jack Gaver of UPI, offers only oblique praise: Fonda and Bel Geddes, he feels, are so good “that I find this talky, almost motionless drama of loneliness an appealing entertainment. Certainly it is a play that could be deadly in the wrong hands.”
The broader feeling is that any hands would have been the wrong ones. The show closes after three months and a solid 124 performances, but it goes in the books as a failure.
Fonda cannot have mistaken Anderson’s play for dynamic theater. What interests him is the chance for performing therapy—getting closer to personal mysteries in the costume of a character hauntingly similar to himself. Like Seesaw, Silent Night is about a married man alone with a woman, a man whose depressive wife suffers offstage. But where Jerry Ryan is controlling and selfish, John Sparrow is kindly and sympathetic, attributing his own sexual and emotional betrayals not to hedonism or narcissism, but to the higher syndrome of alienation.
Adultery, asylums, depression, suicide—not one of Henry’s Frances-related preoccupations goes unreferenced. The unseen spouse is a kind of specter: Unwilling at first to admit her condition, Sparrow pretends she is dead. She is to the play what Frances has been to Henry’s art in these years—the absent body, the open wound—and the play allows Fonda to fulfill a fantasy of happier endings: The despondent wife clings to life, and the husband’s final resolve is to stay by her side, come what may.
Though Silent Night, Lonely Night will not make great profit, loft the art of the stage, or be remembered far beyond its season, from Fonda it is an offering, a Christmas gift to the ghost. Yet the gift is wrapped in sadness: There are limits on the ability of actors and other mortals to rewrite the past.
* * *
These few months—late 1959 through early 1960—are a convergence point, at which the feminine planets in Fonda’s orbit come into alignment. As rumors of discord with Afdera creep out, Henry goes onstage as John Sparrow to relive memories of the wife who died. On New Year’s Day, a month into the run of Silent Night, Margaret Sullavan is found dead in New Haven. In February, Jane has her Broadway debut, and appears with beaming Dad on the cover of Life. And in these very weeks, Henry’s newest movie will open in cinemas across America—The Man Who Understood Women.
The fourth marriage has begun to devolve from novelty to routine for two companions who feel lonesome in each other’s company. The summer of 1960 is again spent in Hollywood, but Henry and Afdera are often at different parties. Both attend the Democratic National Convention, held in Los Angeles in July—nominee John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, have been dinner guests at the Fonda town house—but their escapades are separate. The gaps between them widen. She enjoys entertaining; he does not. She is amused by her own immaturity; he is bored by it. Both play manipulative games, but the games have different rules.
The marriage is attenuated through the summer. When rehearsals begin in the fall for Fonda’s compulsory wintertime play, the choice of material suggests compromise—with commerce, with comedy, with the careless and carefree view of life promoted by frivolous farce and aristocratic wives. Critic’s Choice is the opposite of the “sad and boring” work that has lately taken Henry’s attention; it is Henry trying to fit another man’s dinner jacket.
If Seesaw evokes the volatility of the Sullavan marriage, and Silent Night the depression of the Frances years, Critic’s Choice—which opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 14—offers a likeness of Afdera’s Fonda: Hank the glamour boy, suave and socially adept. As a drama critic faced with reviewing his wife’s saccharine play (a situation based on the marriage of New York Herald Tribune critic Walter Kerr and playwright Jean Kerr), Fonda indulges his middle-aged penchant for tiresomely sardonic types who speak in pronouncements. The play is staged by Otto Preminger, reuniting with Fonda thirteen years after Daisy Kenyon, and aspires vaguely to an air of old Hollywood screwball comedy—minus any wild strokes of genius.
Like everything Ira Levin writes, Critic’s Choice is constructed with exceeding finesse: The thing makes sense. But it is fatally cute, with the stench of something too eager to be a hit. (Some of the stench may come from Preminger’s gaseous backstage outbursts, which cause Gena Rowlands, the actress first cast as Fonda’s romantic foil, to be replaced in previews.) Notices are tepid, and the show ends after five months and 189 performances: a hit, but far from a knockout.
On January 20, 1961, JFK is inaugurated in Washington, D.C. Henry cannot attend: Critic’s Choice is sold out for a benefit that night. But Afdera is in Washington, and, making the rounds of parties, she experiences private moments with Prince Jack. These do not lead to intercourse, astonishingly, but to insight: The baroness, like many others her age and younger, gets the sense—as if passed telepathically through JFK’s crinkly eyes and white teeth—that enormous changes are in the wind.
“I was discovering myself,” she will recall in her memoir, sounding like a budding flower child. “I was too deeply affected by all the many changes that were taking place. I was in tune with the present.” Whereas Henry, she comes to feel, is stodgy, close-minded, redolent of things past. “The 1960s were with us like a hungry lion, and everything I was feeling instinctively my husband was too old and too well-established to appreciate fully.”
Who can be certain what she wants, other than to be a single girl again? Come to that, what has Afdera ever wanted with Fonda? She knows the true answer, and offers it frankly: He is “the father I never had.” Her own father died before she knew him; growing up in a world of male privilege has taught the baroness that her power lies in cunning and manipulation. When Fonda appeared, she was twenty-four, yet essentially a child; a few years on, she has achieved a teenager’s maturity, and found a teenager’s sense of revolt. In time, like many aging postadolescents, she will look back with regret on the home she left, and wonder what leaving cost her.
“If it had been maybe ten years later,” she muses, “I might have understood more and tried to work things out better and do what he wanted me to do.” With such violence in her father’s legacy, she may have been attracted to the aspect of Fonda that is parental and punitive. Afdera even claims Henry hit her—once, and only once. “Just the slightest of slaps,” she swears, though he is overcome by remorse afterward. She admits she has goaded him to it, and that “if he had done it more often, I would have respected him more.”
This is the same woman who decides that Fonda is too backward to meet the coming age. Yes, Afdera is impossible. What does she want—to be punished or pampered, caged or liberated?
When she requests a divorce, Fonda implores her, as he had implored Susan, to reconsider—again, less out of love than shame. The separation is announced on March 16, and hopeful Henry paints it as “completely friendly, a chance for us to work out certain problems in our marriage.” But Afdera sounds wised-up, rueful, and ready to take the blame. “I can only reproach myself,” she tells the press. “Hank is an admirable man. I guess I was too immature.” Meaning, she has already moved on. Only a lover with the next adventure in sight can part so generously.
After obtaining a quickie divorce in Juárez, she flies back to Rome. Stoic Henry finishes out the contracted run of the Levin comedy.
Afdera will always have money, or find money; and since for her everything stems from lire and the accoutrements of the good life
, she will always find a way to be happy. But she will remain torn between freedom and the cage. On July 31, 1966, she and a traveling companion, pop artist Mario Schifano, will be arrested at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport for smuggling marijuana, a charge carrying a maximum penalty of eight years. Afdera, who will freely admit to carrying Schifano’s stash, is not innocent of the illegality of the act, only of why it would matter to anyone. After three months, the sentence is suspended and a fine imposed, but Afdera spends the intervening time in jail.
But she will absorb the bad publicity, the distaste attaching to a glamour girl whose days in the spotlight, along with her youth, are fleeting. She’ll move forward with the resilience of one born certain that life is a banquet, and that some courses will be finer and rarer than others.
* * *
In September 1961, our man is back in Hollywood. Critic’s Choice had its last curtain on May 27, and Fonda, accepting Preminger’s offer of a plum part in his next big-budget screen controversy, Advise and Consent, has rented a Bel Air house for the months preceding initial shooting.
Save for the odd comely companion, Henry is alone in these weeks. But he cannot abide idleness, and so has chosen to squeeze himself into the crowded mural of How the West Was Won, an all-star Cinerama spectacular directed in relays by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall. Obscured by cocked hat and ropy mustache, Fonda plays a buffalo hunter and Indian scout in the segment done by Marshall—the only one of the three directors with whom he has no contentious history. It’s a rich, leathery piece of acting in a film that, for all its bulging sense of land and space, is in no small measure a racist whitewash.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 22
