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

by Devin McKinney

  Behold the New Frontier. The phrase doesn’t originate with Kennedy. As William Safire notes, it is “in the air” for months before JFK patents it in his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. But at that moment, with so much else in the air, the words are a chime—the song of American ambition reaching forward and back at once, prairie cool and cowboy flash in the new world of IBM and superhighway. The great traumas of the century are past, while powers of justice and technology are on the march. “New Frontier”: why not!

  Of course it is only a golden moment, and its memory will be muddied over the next three years in a series of setbacks and advances, gross losses and irreducible wins. These are humid, bubbling times, but the lid is still firmly on the pot. Then everything changes: Kennedy is dead. A piece of his head flies off, and with it the lid. America is revealed as a cauldron—conspiracy, clamor, riot, war—that has been slow in the boiling.

  Politics and image will mix in new ways. More than any star of his generation—save John Wayne, who from The Alamo (1960) to The Green Berets (1968) defends Hollywood’s hawk agenda throughout the raucous decade—Henry Fonda is in that mix. Like “New Frontier,” he is a stabilizer in the midst of change. Histories speak through and circulate around him, as they do through and around Wayne; simply by moving, speaking, advocating, these men connect eras and create meanings.

  As J. Hoberman writes, Fonda in his changes has “tracked the trajectory of tormented liberalism—forged in the crucible of the 1930s, tested under fire during World War II, purged of its Communistic tendencies in the late 1940s.” His political metamorphosis achieves absolute form just as the country is emerging from Eisenhower’s “politics of fatigue” into Kennedy’s radiant newness; at the moment he is needed, Fonda lives again in the cool mien of Camelot elder statesmanhood.

  Our man is middle-aged by Kennedy time, and hardly a political innocent. Many years lie behind his emergence; numerous battles inform his choices.

  * * *

  Starting in the late 1930s, Fonda is firmly identified with his industry’s burgeoning liberal element, an identification encouraged by his involvement with both political causes and cause-driven films. Blockade is an unmistakable gesture in favor of the Spanish Loyalists; The Grapes of Wrath distills New Deal spirit; The Ox-Bow Incident jibes with controversy over lynching in the South; The Long Night puts a socialist spin on the plight of war veterans; even Fonda’s blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in the all-star antifascist thriller Jigsaw (1949) states his ongoing leftist allegiance as the Cold War begins.

  Under “political party,” the California Voter Registries for 1936, 1940, and 1942 list Henry and Frances Fonda as “DTS”(“declined to state”); not until 1946 do they declare themselves as Democrats. Before Pearl Harbor, Fonda identifies less with a party than with the Popular Front, an unofficial, unincorporated confederation of antifascist groups in America and Europe. Positing fascism as the chief threat to individual liberty and collective security, the Popular Front unites mainstream liberals and more radical groups; for a few years, lefties of all stripes—and even a few freethinking conservatives—find, if not synthesis, common cause.

  Fonda’s earliest affiliation is with the Anti-Nazi League, whose Hollywood chapter is founded in July 1936. The ANL’s mission is to promote—through rallies, ads, and other political appeals—a categorical denunciation of the Third Reich. Among its founders are screenwriter Dorothy Parker, director Fritz Lang, and actor Fredric March; members include James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Gale Sondergaard, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, and Douglas’s wife, Helen Gahagan. Film historian Charles J. Maland calls the ANL “the most prominent manifestation of Popular Front anti-fascism in Hollywood,” and Fonda’s involvement signals his perennial location on the activist spectrum—left of center, within firm boundaries of democratic dissent.

  The Anti-Nazi League quickly makes a name for itself. In 1937, Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio visits Hollywood to study film production; but his reception—clouded with espionage rumors, supposedly spread by the ANL—is so unpleasant that he leaves almost instantly. The next year, Hitler’s documentarian, Leni Riefenstahl, comes to town, and the ANL places an ad in Daily Variety, calling for an orchestrated shunning. The climate convinces Riefenstahl to postpone American exhibition of Olympia, her documentary about the Olympic Games in Berlin, for several years.

  As its profile and influence crest, the ANL comes under official scrutiny. In 1938 Martin Dies, Democratic representative from Texas, convenes a panel to investigate Communist influence in domestic affairs. The Anti-Nazi League is rumored to have made financial contributions to Communist groups; as far as Dies is concerned, write Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, the ANL is “a front for the Communist Party, pure and simple.” League representatives hasten a telegram to his committee, “challenging it to substantiate [its] charges.” Dies promises to do so with a series of hearings—whereupon the White House and Congress are deluged with telegrams from Hollywood and elsewhere, demanding the investigation be nullified and the committee disbanded. Amazingly, the assault on opinion works: Dies, citing a “lack of funds and time,” cancels the hearings.

  The victory is only contextual: Right now, most Americans fear Nazism more urgently than communism. Hitler and Stalin have yet to sign their nonaggression pact, and the Soviet Union is America’s ally in a world about to be at war. The Anti-Nazi League has the future on its side.

  But the future has a way of becoming the past. In seven years, the war will be over; with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Stalin will be redrawn as America’s ultimate foe, and the Dies committee will return to make good on its first threat. By then, it will have mutated into a far more sophisticated form under its official designation, the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  * * *

  The Popular Front agenda had demanded visibility, active dissent. In contrast, the Cold War is about hiddenness—official secrets, security councils, exposure as damnation. The politicians to whom, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, “‘Red’ really means loud-mouth or foreigner or Jew” have intuited that communism is the next enemy, secrecy the new source of power. Opportunism, fervor, a populace in equal parts panicked and passive create what becomes known, even before it is over, as the McCarthy era, after its chief visionary and loudest crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

  McCarthy is right: There are spies inside the U.S.government. Definitive or at least credible cases have been made against Harry Dexter White, senior Treasury official and architect of the World Bank; Julian Wadleigh of the Department of Agriculture; Duncan Chaplin Lee, assistant to OSS director William J. Donovan; Alger Hiss of the State Department; and others. But the powerful spy rings of the 1930s and 1940s are defunct well before the height of the Red scare, and many quondam communists, fellow travelers, weekend pinkos, and all-American rabble-rousers are snagged in the net of the great McCarthy and HUAC fishing expeditions. Even Ronald Reagan will admit, long after his conservative conversion, that in these years “many fine people were accused wrongly of being Communists simply because they were liberals.”

  Fonda is off to the side, observing. This is some of what he sees:

  In October 1947, HUAC, chaired by New Jersey congressman J. Parnell Thomas, schedules hearings on communism in Hollywood. In support is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, led by John Wayne. Among the committee’s “friendly witnesses” is Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild and—along with his then- wife, actress Jane Wyman—an FBI informant on Commie scuttlebutt. Meanwhile, industry Left-leaners, branding themselves the Committee for the First Amendment, establish a presence at the Washington hearings in the form of a delegation led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston.

  The hearings are dominated by the testimony of the Hollywood Ten—a group of screenwriters hostile to HUAC. Among them is John Howard Lawson, one of the few openly Communist writers in Hollywood, and author of the Fonda-Wanger Bl
ockade. Lawson’s appearance, while courageous, is also arch and self-righteous; refusing to answer direct questions, he lectures. Ultimately, he is escorted from the dock by police. The next day’s witness is Dalton Trumbo, who is likewise charged with contempt and jailed.

  Trumbo explains the refusal of the screenwriters to answer questions: “The accused men made their stand before the Committee to reestablish their right of privacy, not only in law but in fact.” But many feel that such intransigence has only made HUAC’s job easier. “It was a sorry performance,” says John Huston of the Hollywood Ten testimony. “They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle.”

  Like the Anti-Nazi League, the Committee for the First Amendment has started out full of vigor, charged with mission. But now history is on the other side. Out of fear, exhaustion, and a desire to get back to business, the movie industry, like most of America, makes a willing exchange of democratic danger for bureaucratic surety. It’s the first phase in a transformation that will climax in the late 1960s, after assassination and cover-up have woven themselves into the patterns of American thought—the transformation, in Greil Marcus’s words, “of what in the United States had been taken as open, public life into private crime or hidden conspiracy.”

  * * *

  Most of Fonda’s work with those blacklisted occurs after the blacklist era has ended. In 1959, Warlock is directed by Edward Dymtryk, Hollywood Ten member, who, after going to jail for refusing to testify before HUAC, reconsiders, then testifies twice, naming several of his former associates in the Communist party. Fail-Safe (1964) is scripted by the blacklisted, nontestifying Walter Bernstein, and Madigan (1968) is cowritten by Abraham Polonsky, Hollywood Ten member and subsequent exile.

  Apart from Blockade, Fonda’s preblacklist filmography contains only one instance of “social propaganda” from a known Communist source. You Belong to Me (1941) is written by Claude Binyon, from a story by Dalton Trumbo—in later days the grand old man of the blacklist, a hero retrieved from 1950s pseudonymy to write Exodus, Spartacus, and others. This minor comedy has Fonda as a pampered, sickly millionaire married to a domineering doctor (Barbara Stanwyck). Feeling emasculated, the millionaire takes a pseudonym—aptly—and a low-level sales job in a department store; when the ruse is discovered, he is brought into the manager’s office to face representatives of the employees’ union.

  Actor Larry Parks—in 1941 a nobody, five years later a star for his turn in The Al Jolson Story—plays the man who speaks for the union. Two other workers, one of them played by the familiar character actor Jeff Corey, look on silently. The employees demand the millionaire’s firing, on the grounds that he is depriving a needy man of a job. Parks pronounces the underdog’s right to a fair shake, and a fast-moving film stops dead for an insertion of ideology in the form of undramatized speech. It is, undeniably, propaganda, albeit in the service of compassion and economic good sense.

  But there’s a twist. The playboy protests that he needs the job, too—not for money, but for personal reasons. Not buying it, Parks tells the manager, “He refuses to argue his case openly and above-board. He classifies his defense as”—uttering the next words as if they are dirty—“something personal and private. He hasn’t given a single reason why he shouldn’t be dismissed immediately.” This is starting to sound familiar.

  Fonda asks the manager to recommend him for another job. “You mean take it away from some other poor fellow?” Parks interrupts. “I promise you that when we get through publicizing your case, there won’t be a company in the United States willing to hire you.”

  None of these people knows what is to come in the next ten years. But we do.

  Fonda’s millionaire backs off. Before leaving, he turns his severance pay over to the employees’ fund.

  Nine years later, Larry Parks will be subpoenaed by HUAC. In an emotional testimony, he’ll admit to having briefly been a member of the Communist party. He’ll name names, and, despite repenting, will find himself unemployable in Hollywood. As will Jeff Corey, who doesn’t cooperate with the committee, and who until his mid-1960s reemergence in supporting parts sustains himself as an acting teacher. As will Dalton Trumbo, who justified his refusal by exalting “the right of privacy, not only in law but in fact.” These men will be damned with the same phrases heard in You Belong to Me, their careers crippled by the same threats; but here and now, they endorse the language and logic of the blacklist.

  It is a hard irony, at the least; at the most, a warning against dogma, and a suggestion of why a man like Henry spends most of his life closer to the political middle than to any extreme.

  Jane Fonda will later criticize her father for not taking a public stand against the blacklist, without taking into account that many good men and women were in the same position. It’s true that in his postwar politics, he is usually supporter rather than activist. By the end of 1947, he is out of movies and in the theater, a zone of limited influence that doesn’t really interest the investigating committees.* Unlike other Hollywood liberals, such as Edward G. Robinson and Melvyn Douglas, Fonda will not suffer the fate of being graylisted in the 1950s, when stars must make the crucial transition from movies to television. He grows distant from old friends Ward Bond and John Wayne because of the Red scare but does not rescind the relationships entirely; he continues to socialize and work with those men and others who have complied with HUAC.

  Maybe that is Henry’s compromise, and maybe he makes it because he knows how compromise works. He is no more a radical in his politics than in his art, but his politics, like his art, are honest and devout, and have much to do with remembering. He has a broad and a large view; he knows the landscape. So he pitches his tent in the middle ground. It’s only a fact: People usually last longer, living in the center.

  * * *

  Though he will become a bitter detractor of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry initially supports his 1952 presidential bid. In the late 1940s, the former Supreme Allied Commander is courted as a candidate by both parties; and his declaration as a Republican does not alter the general perception of him as a political moderate, and an alternative to the current chief executive. Isolationists are angered by Harry Truman’s infusions of American force and money into Europe through NATO; interventionists by his fumbling administration of the Korean War; liberals by his investment in hydrogen bomb testing and the mandating of federal loyalty oaths. The moment is felt to call for a cleansing.

  It’s hard to say what liberals believe Eisenhower will offer them beyond the reflected glow of guts and glory, a mystique to which not only right-wingers are vulnerable. Opponents of blacklisting may hope Eisenhower’s military credibility will retard the trend toward the patriotism of fear. Fonda is sufficiently soured on Truman not just to endorse his opponent but also to narrate a long-playing record, Ike from Abilene, distributed by the GOP as a bonus for campaign donors.

  But hopeful liberals don’t like Ike for long. Weeks before the election, a cluster of notables stages a public defection from Eisenhower to his Democratic rival, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson—a candidate they have seen up to now as unelectable. Fonda joins this mass defection, which includes John Steinbeck, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., Edna Ferber, John Jacob Astor, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Stevenson’s campaign manager reckons the disillusionment is “based on the compromise, the shifts of position, [and] the abandonment of principles” exhibited by Eisenhower, such as his failure to condemn Senators McCarthy of Wisconsin and Jenner of Indiana—the two biggest Red-baiters in Congress—and his devil’s pact with the ultraconservative Senator Taft of Ohio. “Eisenhower seems to have lost the ability to take any kind of stand on any subject,” Steinbeck writes.

  Then, at the Republican National Convention in July, the candidate grips the hand of another man whom, like Taft and McCarthy, he needs but secretly despises. Richard Nixon is the Republican senator from California, a key member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and star prosecutor in the Alger Hiss espionage tri
al of 1948. Nixon is a rising star, a force; like a true believer with a talisman, he has gripped, stroked, and squeezed the postwar panic around communism. That prescience will make his career, and shape the next three decades of life in the United States.

  Witnessing the clammy grip of compromise at the convention, Fonda must utter curses. He remembers Nixon. Not just from the Hollywood-HUAC hearings, from which the California senator, after questioning Jack L. Warner and delivering the committee’s mission statement on opening day, largely absented himself, and not just from the Hiss trial. No, Fonda remembers him most keenly from the 1950 California Senate race, which pitted Nixon against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, representative since 1944 of Los Angeles’s highly liberal Fourteenth District.

  A former opera star and actress, Gahagan had her spotlight moment as Queen Hash-a-Motep in the 1935 camp epic She. Married to actor Melvyn Douglas, Gahagan went into politics. Fonda was a friend, but he’d have found common ground with Gahagan if they’d been strangers: In terms of her beliefs, she was Henry Fonda in a dress. During the 1930s, she was a Popular Fronter and proponent of the New Deal; as a Democratic party novice, she made her name advocating for labor and small farmers.

  In the House, Gahagan was a staunch liberal, but no pinko. As Stephen E. Ambrose would later note, “she had spurned Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in the 1948 election, which was a litmus test for fellow travelers.” She was less than completely predictable on foreign policy, challenging both Communist dictatorships and the Truman Doctrine of unilateral aid to Communist-besieged Greece and Turkey. Significantly for Fonda, she sponsored an antilynching bill in 1947, just as hangings of black men in the Carolinas were making headlines.*