So it is September, and the old lots at Twentieth Century–Fox are being torn down for real estate development. How the West was won, phase two. Fonda strolls through the ghost towns with a journalist, taking in the half-demolished buildings and displaced facades. “I made my first picture, Farmer Takes a Wife, on one of those sets,” he says—you can see him pointing. Here, he shot Way Down East; over there, Young Mr. Lincoln and the James brothers movies. The Ox-Bow and Clementine streets too are nearby.
“Now they’re going,” he says. “It’s kinda sad.”
Just a few weeks later, the hills between Brentwood and Bel Air will catch fire, and Tigertail will burn down to black ash and disperse in the Santa Ana winds.
Henry is nearing sixty. Time steals up on a man, and suddenly it is on his back. Though still straight and strong, each year he hunches a bit more with the weight of time. Another wife has come and gone, another half decade. Now whole continents of his past are vanishing; and part of that past—Frances—remains as a persistent sorrow. We imagine this as a point of reckoning; of putting memory to rest, and the mind at ease.
It will be done only through a part; only through work. Henry knows no other way. The parts have always found him, the great parts—Lincoln, Joad, Earp, Roberts, Balestrero—which he has needed as they have needed him. He has given the parts life, and they have allowed him to symbolize himself. And within each part, the scene: Abe at the graveside, Tom leaving the camp, Wyatt watching Doc, Roberts saying good-bye, Manny walking down the asylum hall. Each has been a statement of self as well as communion with another—a settling with obligation, a facing of ghosts, a farewell.
He needs another chance like that: a chance at an ending.
Hints of it turn up in Fonda’s remarks, these latter months of 1961. Walking through the Fox lot, he allows he’d like to make more movies, perhaps get off the stage for a while. But something is stopping him. A new play has been offered, and its producer is telling Fonda it could be the greatest role he has ever played.
It will not prove to be quite that. But it will conceivably constitute “the greatest acting challenge of his career,” as he will later call it. It will become a major project, a personal need. Henry will care about it as he has cared about little else lately.
And he would like to give us a sense of what is coming. Just before the end of the year, he announces he has agreed to do the play he’d been considering in September, and that it is “about a writer who kills himself.”
* * *
In late 1954, Charles Christian Wertenbaker—a novelist and journalist living with his wife and children in France—is given a few months to live: He has intestinal cancer. Rejecting hospitalization and life support, he chooses to spend his last days at home, suffering a hellish decline with the aid of black-market painkillers. Finally, at his limit of endurance, he opens his wrists with a shaving razor.
Lael Tucker Wertenbaker not only approves her husband’s suicide but aids it. And then writes about it: Her nonfiction chronicle Death of a Man (1957) spares no detail of Wertenbaker’s rapid and degrading demise. At the time, euthanasia is an unknown word, cancer goes unmentioned in obituaries, and Lael’s book is not read easily. It is then forgotten by all but playwright Garson Kanin. Known for his comedies, particularly the stage and movie hit Born Yesterday, he has aspirations to drama; he reads Lael’s book and is gripped by the need to put it on the stage.
His adaptation is titled A Gift of Time. William Hammerstein—Susan Blanchard’s stepbrother—signs on as producer; it may be at his suggestion that Henry Fonda is asked to star. Good sense would tell our man to decline: He has numerous commitments pending, and the play is looking at a late start in the theatrical season. The sterner reality is its subject matter. Who will pay to witness a man’s slow death from cancer?
It sounds unmanageable, or unwatchable. Kanin may be moved by the challenge of it, but Fonda has his own reasons to make the attempt. Together, they have the power to conceive and construct a show that wisdom says should not be done. Will they do it? Will they do it without flinching?
* * *
Fonda’s schedule is already backbreaking: ten days of location shooting in Washington, D.C., for Advise and Consent; the New York taping of The Good Years, a Lucille Ball TV special; the Hollywood taping of Henry Fonda and the Family, a Henry Fonda TV special; and a brief trip to Paris for a one-day cameo as Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., in The Longest Day, Darryl F. Zanuck’s mammoth chronicle of the D-Day invasion. (A fat check and high-line exposure in the most heavily hyped war movie yet made can be Fonda’s only motives for reuniting with Zanuck.)
Beyond these obligations, Fonda must not only schedule rehearsals and preview periods for A Gift of Time’s late-February opening but also make a research trip to Ciboure, the village on the Basque coast of France where the Wertenbakers lived. In November, Henry meets Lael in the company of his costar, Olivia de Havilland, who is making her comeback after long absences from screen and stage. They journey, she tells an interviewer, “to the radiologist’s, into the waiting room and into the room where the X-rays were first shown … We went into all the rooms of the house where the Wertenbakers lived.”
“We talked to Wertenbaker’s doctor and some of his Basque friends,” Fonda adds. “What strong faces they had.”
It is unusually immersive, almost Method, the way Fonda stretches his body and abilities to play the dying man. He spends an hour a day studying the rudiments of classical guitar, which he’ll play onstage. Already rail-thin, he fasts to drop more pounds.
Almost the entire burden of this risky, costly show rests on his shoulders. Aside from de Havilland, there are no stars. The production requires a large cast and technical management on a level usually reserved for musicals. Kanin envisions a montage approach, with scenes ranging from several spaces in the Wertenbaker home to cafés, doctors’ offices, a hospital room, even the deck of a transatlantic liner. Boris Aronson’s tripartite set offers multiple centers of action, each with its own props, furniture, and lighting cues; often all three are active at once, with scenes overlapping.
The rush to opening is intense, the physical stress on Fonda terrific. It’s unlikely that he has ever given himself so completely and recklessly to a role.
It culminates January 27, 1962, when A Gift of Time begins previews at the Shubert in New Haven. The stars are rewarded with curtain calls and roses, but in truth, people have been turned off. A playgoer sends an angry note to the New York Times, expressing outrage “that the theatre should concern itself with so unpleasant and painful a subject.” The review in the Bridgeport Post augurs the notices to come: The actors are fine, the play simply too much—ten scenes over two acts “is a long time to watch a man creep constantly nearer the grave.”
The Broadway opening comes February 22, at the Ethel Barrymore. Word has traveled from New Haven that the show is a downer. Ticket demand is so low that the producers have been unable to sell a single “party” block of seats in advance—unheard of for a Fonda play.
* * *
On March 11, Fonda and de Havilland appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing a scene in which the Wertenbakers return to Europe by ship. Cancer being unmentionable on TV, Sullivan’s setup says only that the hero “faces death from an incurable malady.” Based on this clip, the play looks maudlin—dialogue precious, acting stagy in the worst way. Olivia de Havilland basks in her own nobility, and Fonda affects a gruff, scratchy voice, a force that comes across as boorishness.
The televised scene ends on a kiss. On the Barrymore stage, though, it continues—and turns abuptly into something quite different.
“Lael!” Charles shouts from his deck chair. “Oh, Jesus.”
Terrified, he asks his wife to cover him with a blanket. They leave the deck (lights down, stage right) and arrive in their cabin (lights up, stage left). Charles stumbles into the bathroom, ordering Lael not to follow. An abscess has burst in his colon, and he is leaking blood and feces from an un
healed surgical incision. In a scene that suggests bedroom farce recast as biological nightmare, Lael races about in search of sanitary napkins. As she bandages her husband’s reeking wound with a belt of Kotex, the couple’s mad laughter is heard from offstage.
Interludes of humor and sentiment become fewer as the disease spreads and the end approaches. Charles says good-bye to a friend, then fumbles down some pills and passes out; demented with pain and medication, he abuses his wife. Fonda’s form grows wispier, the stage darker.
Lael had described her husband’s suicide in excruciating detail—a hurried swallowing of pills; injections of morphine into the leg; finally, the drawing of a razor across each wrist, the ebbing of blood, the dying embrace suggestive of a pietá. The stage rendition is faithful to the extremity of the scene. “I love you, I love you,” Lael whispers, holding Charles, “please die.”
A cut and bleeding corpse, a survivor asking release; after that, silence, and a black stage. The thing is finally done: Henry Fonda has committed suicide before his audience.
Henry’s press agent, John Springer, says the Barrymore first-nighters are “stunned,” and he remembers Paul Newman backstage, extolling “the God damnedest, greatest performance I’ve ever seen.” Certainly, many are stunned because they are moved. But they are also stunned that such an ordeal should ever have been staged.
Critics too are uncertain. Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York Post finds it “one of the most depressing plays ever written.” Howard Taubman of the Times writes that the play “does not achieve tragic dimension.” “Strangely unmoving and dramatically slack,” says Time. Famed stage director Harold Clurman, reviewing for The Nation, calls Fonda “the best thing in the play as it now stands” but says the characters are “ciphers … pegs for pathos.” In the Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr likewise appreciates the star’s “plain, unblinking, straightforward and unbelievably controlled” performance. But the play fails by outweighing fiction with realism: “The real thing has usurped the place of the ritualized thing, the drama of death has given way to the presence of death.”
The show is officially not a hit. Lights go out for good on May 12, after ninety-two performances. Anything longer might have proved unendurable for the stars: Fonda has continued to lose weight after the opening, and de Havilland is rumored to be covered with bruises. Briefly, and improbably, a film version is rumored—to be co-produced by Kanin and Fonda and shot over the summer of 1962, on French locations, with both stars repeating their roles. But the rumor stays a rumor.
The Ethel Barrymore Theatre seats barely a thousand people—which means that far more viewers have watched The Deputy on any given Saturday night than have seen A Gift of Time during its entire run. To Fonda, that is probably just as well; his labor in this play has been a private act of empathy and remembering. He has done it for Frances, and for himself—not for the public, and not for history.
He has staged a proper ending. It is important that the ending be witnessed, and just as important that it be hidden: presence as absence. In You Only Live Once, he hides his hands; in The Grapes of Wrath, he turns his back; in The Ox-Bow Incident, we do not see his eyes; in Mister Roberts, he faces upstage. In A Gift of Time, hiddenness is again called on, as both theatrical “cheat”—how to realistically depict the cutting of wrists, the release of blood?—and personal catharsis. The stage direction reads “His back is seen, and her face, watching.” There is a witness to the act, but it is not us.
His post-Frances career is brought to a climax. If on the stage Henry has become Frances, dead by a razor, in life he has been more like Lael, the witness to a loved one’s decline, the pleading survivor. “I love you, I love you, please die.”
Remember the graveyard: The stick points at the grave, and back at the man. Fonda’s fate all along, his curse and his cure, has been to become the thing that haunts him. In performing suicide, he has dramatized an obligation to Frances. Whatever understanding he achieves is tardy, and only symbolic, but Fonda can hardly take symbol, or the autobiographical implications of his recent roles, further than this—to introject the loss that has, for more than a decade, shadowed him; and to bleed Frances from his veins while joining her in the loneliness of the last act.
* * *
For Henry Fonda, right man—husband, father, master of control—the psychology of self-annihilation is a thing not to be discussed. But for Henry Fonda, wrong man—artist of sorrows, bearer of obligations—it may be the truest, deepest language he knows.
Go back to late 1935. Fonda is still a fresh face in Hollywood, with two starring roles to his credit, and buzz already that he’ll be the screen’s next Lincoln. He has much to be proud of. Yet these may be his worst of times, with such exhilaration and loss in so brief a period.
December 25, 1931: He marries Margaret Sullavan.
March 1932: Hank and Peggy separate; she humiliates him with Jed Harris.
October 5, 1934: Herberta Fonda dies.
October 7, 1935: William Fonda dies, one year almost to the day after his wife. Henry leaves the set of Way Down East to fly hurriedly to Omaha.
October 31, 1935: A small item appears in newspapers across the country, informing fans that Henry Fonda, presently shooting The Trail of the Lonesome Pine at Big Bear Lake in California’s San Bernardino National Park, has nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. He had been listening to his car radio while running the motor—presumably in an enclosed garage—and was rescued by an assistant director who found him slumped in the seat.
November 16, 1935: Another version of the same incident is printed. It was late at night, and Henry was testing his car battery. He let the motor run. For entertainment, he turned on the radio; for warmth, he shut the garage doors. “They got him out just in time,” the story says.
Fonda, in his enigma, leads us to ask the plausible worst—whether the incident was misadventure, as the reports imply, or his attempt, perfunctory or in earnest, to end his own life. We wonder if we have been placing Fonda at too objective a distance from suicide. Maybe his life is, as he has said, “peppered with suicides” for the simple reason that like finds like. Maybe for him the wish for oblivion is no mere witnessing of another’s pain, but a thing inside, which he feels or remembers every day. Maybe the stick points at the grave, and back at the man.
There is much to recall in light of this. The dark around the eyes of William Fonda; Jane’s remarks on the strain of family melancholy, and what she speculates was her father’s genetic vulnerability to depression; Henry’s history of befriending, and sometimes marrying, suicidal people; all the roles he has played in which despair is the stain, and suicide the cleansing.
We recall as well Henry’s long-nurtured desire to play Julian English, the doomed hero of Appointment in Samarra. We note that the novel appeared in 1934, a year before the incident at Big Bear Lake, and that Julian ends his life in a car seat on a cold morning, his lungs full of carbon monoxide.
9
New Frontier and Hidden Agenda
Fail-Safe
Election Day is a farce to many Americans, but beneath that disgust runs an ever-receding memory, or myth, of our shared political life’s having once been a richer thing. We believe it was different long ago—that other choices existed, that our politics had soul, sadness, honor, caring. That is why Lincoln remains our most revered president: We mourn the example we’ve lost, the absent father of our politics.
There is an ache in us. Mostly the ache stays hidden, for exposing it would mean admitting fear, doubt, ambiguity—everything Americans loathe. Yet because the pain is no less real for our denial of it, we have always needed a myth, a film, a fable to salve it. That hunger for fiction admits gaps in our reality.
As a young actor playing a martyred president at a crucial time, Henry Fonda slips through the gaps. He gets inside our dark mind, our ongoing political fable. Across four decades, nine chief executives, and innumerable changes, he stays there. He persists as a memory that, having first ev
oked Lincoln at the apex of the New Deal, returns more than twenty years later on the New Frontier. He embodies a sense of what we were, still ache to be, and fear we can never be again.
* * *
Everyone knows the history that is made on November 22, 1963. But the year that follows, through which we trace the issue of that day, is just as crucial to the subsequent course of American affairs. The period of collective recovery from the assassination of a loved and hated president, 1964 is also an election year. John Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, thrashes deeper into the Asian jungle and pushes the Civil Rights Act into law. In response to the hawk rhetoric of his opponent, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s handlers devise a historic campaign commercial—a girl plucking a daisy, her voice melting into a countdown, the daisy into a death cloud—which is broadcast once on September 29, and never again.
In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Former B-list leading man Ronald Reagan plays his last film role—a sleazy crime boss in Don Siegel’s remake of The Killers—and gives a nationally televised speech in support of Goldwater, which is the beginning of his own, infinitely more successful career in politics. The Free Speech Movement is born in Berkeley, setting off passions and plots that Reagan will combat as governor of California.
Conflicting ideologies are more clearly defined in 1964 than they have been since New Deal days. It is exactly what Reagan’s speech calls it: “A Time for Choosing.” It is also the year that climaxes Henry Fonda’s ascension to the presidency of the screen.
In 1960, many see the contest between JFK and Richard Nixon as a choice between new and old, life and death. Kennedy’s Cold War stance is not far left of Nixon’s, yet his candidacy promises a return of liberal principle and creative atmosphere after a decade of conservative stagnation. And when JFK arrives, Fonda is already there, equipped with leftist bona fides and populist associations. Appearing in a succession of political roles, he emerges as the soul of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., court historian of the Kennedy White House, would term “the vital center,” dramatizing the mainstream American identity in days of excitement and crisis.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 23
