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

by Devin McKinney

  Henry always had a thing for nervy, chance-taking women. He must have appreciated the fact that, to run against Nixon, Gahagan had to buck her own Democratic leadership. Assured of party support if she would wait until 1952, when incumbent Sheridan H. Downey had pledged to retire, Gahagan refused. Withdrawing, Downey threw the party’s weight behind Manchester Boddy, the only other Democrat; and when Gahagan edged out Boddy, Downey became a prominent supporter of Nixon. By splitting their own vote, the Democrats—not least Gahagan—had already cleared much of Nixon’s path for him.

  A tight team of Republican schemers did the rest. In a symphony of smear orchestrated by campaign manager Murray Chotiner but played to the hilt by a possessed Nixon, Gahagan was dubbed the “Pink Lady.” Anti-Gahagan flyers were printed on pink paper; voters received anonymous phone calls whispering of un-American associations. The campaign was an innovation in character assassination, the linking of vagaries in a chain of fear connecting the voting booth to the chambers of foreign power.

  Nixon defeated Gahagan, and the 1950 race made history. It was not the first political contest to pivot on the threat of cultural war between the liberal powers of Hollywood and the interests of the American majority; nor was it the first race to be won on charges of disloyalty. But it took these stances, and the tactics they entailed, to new levels of audacity—Nixon’s passion as he shouted the slanders, his leveraging of lofty progressive ideals as weapons against themselves, his persona combining the attack dog and the aggrieved mutt.

  The maw of conservative backlash opened to vomit up a new age of malice. Nixon’s aura would overhang, underlie, and finally enshroud every other movement of the postwar period: Every important American development seemed to react against or quail beneath the darkness released in these early years of HUAC and Helen Gahagan. It is the defeated Pink Lady who tagged Nixon with his most enduring nickname: “Tricky Dick.”

  Come 1952 and Nixon’s placement on the Eisenhower ticket, many have forgotten the California smears—if they ever heard about them to begin with. But others remember. As Herbert S. Parmet observes, “Long after Watergate and the evidence of abuse of power, long after the passions over Vietnam subsided, middle-aged liberals invariably explained their hatred toward Nixon by citing ‘what he did to Helen Gahagan Douglas.’”

  This was true for elderly liberals, too. In his last interview, Henry Fonda will say he has hated Nixon ever since his annihilation of Helen Gahagan Douglas. “Such fuckin’ lies,” Fonda mutters, as if disbelieving still the phenomenon of a man like Nixon.

  * * *

  The two of them make an unlikely pairing. Differences are obvious: Where one is melancholy, the other is brooding. Where one is stoic, the other is self-pitying. One is a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican. One is a friend of Gahagan, the other her destroyer.

  In Nixon at the Movies, Mark Feeney writes that Fonda “can be seen as an almost metaphysical epitome of the anti-Nixon: light against dark, scruple against grasp, secular grace against secular sin.” Yet at the same time, he incarnates a Nixon essence in spite of himself. “What makes Fonda the supreme liberal icon of the screen isn’t the fineness of his intelligence, the finickiness of his bearing, or even the unique ineffability of that faraway gaze … No, it’s that he’s happiest, or at least more gratified, when his cause is lost. Nothing could be more Nixonian.”

  Both Fonda and Nixon were raised in sectarian churches—Christian Science and Quakerism—that emphasized austerity, servitude, repression. Both served in the navy in World War II, stationed on Pacific vessels, working in tandem with the air force. (Feeney quotes a navy friend of Nixon’s: “If you ever saw Henry Fonda in Mister Roberts, you have a pretty good idea what Dick was like.”) Both are gifted with superhuman control yet are capable of flagrant and dramatic outbursts. Emotional chaos is suppressed, released indirectly and often destructively, as inner mechanisms work overtime to channel the psychic overload.

  From there, though, the two fork as radically as lightning bolts. Out of Fonda’s darkness comes empathy. Even his loners and killers are men with the capacity and compulsion to feel others’ suffering; the drama lies in their transformation by this awareness. Out of Nixon’s darkness comes a vision of vengefulness, of others being made to suffer. Payback is the true drama of the great noir candidate; as John Erlichman (J. T. Walsh) says in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, at the apex of the Vietnam War: “We’ve got people dying because he didn’t make the varsity football team.”

  Fonda’s insides are in disarray, however ordered his exterior. Nixon’s innards, though, bespeak another level of madness—a muck of resentment, self-pity, and incomprehension that pours forth in the breakdowns and alcoholic fugues of his administration’s final days. But because the consummation of Nixon’s personal grudge happens to coincide with the post-1968 shift from liberation to repression, he is appreciated as a “great American” precisely for his pathologies. It is a disastrous alignment of social and personal forces—that old black magic some call historical inevitability.

  Nixon’s visionary move will be to turn the discontents of the white working and middle classes into a political weapon, the disregarded “silent majority” into the obstreperous power that will one day beat America’s radicals back to the margins. His boldness will be to embody his own paranoia so fully that America will spend several tragic years taking his image as its own, and years more paying the price.

  With the Gahagan campaign, Nixon was teaching the underdogs that they had teeth, and that teeth were for biting. The New Deal was over.

  * * *

  Adlai Stevenson is a New Dealer, United Nations delegate, peacemonger, and (the word is invented for him) egghead. He is known to read books and worry over nuances. Nothing could be easier for the Republicans than to neutralize Stevenson by branding him “intellectual,” as Gahagan was branded “pink.” Ike, the war hero, wins soundly in 1952.

  But four years later, Stevenson is again the Democratic nominee, and Fonda campaigns on his behalf, headlining rallies and delivering speeches. At a Students for Stevenson gathering at New York’s Barnard College, he says, “It is the sum of the little tiny selves which make a nation, and we must be mighty good to have made ours so good.” Often the words Fonda delivers are just that redolent of 1930s folk speech, that evocative of Tom Joad and the big soul—unsurprising, since John Steinbeck writes them.

  When the Democrats stage a cross-country fund-raiser on October 20, 1956—twenty-nine banquet halls linked by closed-circuit television in a spectacular called “Seventeen Days to Victory”—Fonda is at the Hollywood gathering, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and many others. Recapping the affair, D.C. columnist George Dixon notes that the famed faces were not well-treated by the broadcast technology. “Henry Fonda looked more scary than the Phantom of the Opera.… I was informed on the way out that the screen was a personal contribution of Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall, and that Richard Nixon was operating the projection machine.”

  It’s a microcosm of the Stevenson candidacy. Money, intellect, and liberal star power cannot prevent even a fund-raising gala from seeming a hapless colloquy of well-meaning losers. Elections are secured or surrendered on an accumulation of such perceptions. Eisenhower takes his second term more easily than the first.

  * * *

  Shot in the midst of the 1956 campaign, 12 Angry Men is a statement of ethical humanism, a blacklist-relevant warning against scapegoating and prejudice. Fonda makes it for the message as much as for the drama—and this fact has its bad effect on his performance. Less than a fleshly composite of living behaviors, his character is a moral beacon, dispassionate and unsensual, a man you ought to vote for but might not. He is Adlai Stevenson.

  Simple situation: A roomful of jurors debates a murder case, and one of them, a solitary holdout for reasonable doubt, fights to sway his fellows from a hasty and unjust verdict. Such is Fonda’s personal interest in
the project, and in playing the holdout, that he makes 12 Angry Men his sole excursion as a film producer, and locates a TV director, Sidney Lumet, to shoot a cast of tough actors in a filthy room.

  Though it fails commercially, the picture is soon recognized as both a drama of terrific impact and a superior civics lesson. Its success is mostly attributable to formal competence, clockwork exposition, and the dramatic advantages of a small, hot space full of street-level accents and sweating faces. The weak link is Fonda, who doesn’t sweat: Juror number eight is so virtuous, he lacks even glands.

  He is strange, this juror—aloof. When another man attempts conversation, number eight only grins and stares straight ahead. A rest room scene gives Fonda some naturalistic hand-washing business to engage in while a burly New York actor (Jack Warden) sounds off nearby, but it also tips us to the fussiness of this hero: He dries each fingernail in succession, grooms each cuticle. Number eight is a control freak, this man who doesn’t sweat or socialize, who only smiles the oddest, most alienating smile.

  The film 12 Angry Men stands among the best-crafted fantasies of liberal heroism ever to come from Hollywood, as well as being one of the films that give Henry Fonda his stature before the popular audience. But atmosphere and acting, more than ethics, carry the force of the drama, while the producer-star is less a bleeding heart than a glass of milk: tall and white, contained and cool. Did we mention he resembles Stevenson? We see why so many voters—not only conservatives but also liberals craving boldness, rhetoric, glamour—could not get behind a man so impeccable and unexcitable. There’s a dearth of passion in this character, dryness in place of the spurt of life.

  To this day, 12 Angry Men is screened in high school classrooms. It should be. It lets each of us believe we can be the hero, the holdout; shows us how, as citizens, we ought to behave. But no one should place it on a level with Young Mr. Lincoln. Its limitation as art and politics is to shortchange the democracy it extols. It lacks the mystery, danger, and confusions, the dark potential and black magic that live in democracy, and in its great fables. Young Mr. Lincoln’s humanism shines the brighter for its pervading dark and persistent fear. 12 Angry Men has more in common with campaign commercials, which reduce the redemptive lies of myth to planks in a party platform.

  * * *

  In 1960, Stevenson’s place is taken by the young senator who had just missed becoming his running mate in 1952. John F. Kennedy has been a figure of swelling glamour since emerging as a Massachusetts congressman in the same freshman class with Nixon. Since then, he has risen to the Senate and paid his dues as a team player—sponsoring no innovative bills, leading no brave charges, but proving himself a reliably telegenic face and pleasing voice in party politics.

  Like most erstwhile Stevensonians, Fonda shifts allegiance to JFK. The choice seems clear: Kennedy is younger and handsomer; he radiates athleticism and cool millions; he has hair. But it is a compromise, as well. The fact that both the senator and his younger brother and chief adviser, Robert, are, like Nixon, past allies of Joe McCarthy must give Henry some troubled hours.* Fonda might prefer a candidate as intellectual, irreproachable, and experienced as Stevenson. But he has had enough of losing.

  And he finds rapport with JFK—knows him “intimately,” he’ll say years later. The two share numerous traits. Kennedy, as Gore Vidal writes at the time, “is withdrawn, observant, icily objective in crisis, aware of the precise value of every card dealt him.” We picture Hank and Jack relaxing, chatting in low masculine tones in the library at East Seventy-fourth Street, enjoying scotches and cigars brought by Fonda’s Puerto Rican houseboy. They are men of the world, conversant in history, literature, art, travel, women—what are known as the finer things. They talk about the movies, no doubt: Joseph Kennedy, Sr., philanthropist and ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Prohibition bootlegger and paramour of silent-screen goddesses, has deep, dirty roots in the film business, and his eldest living son, bedding starlets and cultivating celebrity, will decorate his own presidential campaign with Hollywood dazzle.

  But Fonda’s approbation may go beyond the sharing of such moments. Kennedy embodies complementary disciplines of professionalism and suffering: his father a man of devouring ambition, who sees his sons as arms of his ambition; his older brother, blown up in a World War II fighter plane; his own mettle tested in the Pacific, where he rescued himself and his shipmates on PT-109; his body racked by back and leg pain, cortisone injections to delay the creep of Addison’s disease. Stricken with an infection after undergoing back surgery in 1953, he comes so close to death that last rites are read over him. No one who knows Kennedy “intimately” doubts his toughness.

  His compulsions—political, intellectual, sexual—are right for this moment. They go outward, not inward, and seem to increase the common energy. Compulsion in JFK is sexy, a positive charge; where it darkens Nixon, it gives Kennedy his glow. Whatever his secrets—and there are plenty—he comes across as an ad for openness, frank seduction, glamorous visibility, where Nixon is the picture of a man accustomed to living in his own shadows.

  JFK is nominated at the convention, and Henry is there, participating in a staged spectacular at the L.A. Coliseum as Kennedy christens the New Frontier. Feeling the magic, Fonda shifts in the following months into high campaign gear. Emcees a Democratic rally in Long Beach; chairs the Hollywood Program Committee for Kennedy; sits on the dais as the candidate regales an audience of 200,000 in Manhattan’s Garment District; stars in a four-minute campaign ad that details the PT-109 story (and draws a direct link between JFK and FDR); and even joins Jackie Kennedy in a TV special exhibiting the Camelot couple’s family photos and home movies.

  Fonda goes all out. And this time his man is elected, JFK defeating Nixon in the closest presidential contest of the century—a retrospective hint of the silent majority’s readiness to snatch history back from the youngsters and dissenters who have, in this open moment, claimed it.

  Three weeks after Kennedy is sworn in, Henry appears on The Ed Sullivan Show to recite Lincoln’s second inaugural address and bestow, by proxy, the Emancipator’s blessing on the new administration. Later, JFK will appoint Fonda to the advisory board of his National Cultural Center, to serve in an honorary capacity with the likes of George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Robert Penn Warren, and Thornton Wilder. When on May 19, 1962, Kennedy holds his famous birthday party at Madison Square Garden, Fonda will be an honored guest. The president will thank him in his address, and Jack Benny will tease our man’s well-known sympathies by pointing him out as “a registered Republican and vice-president of the John Birch Society.”

  Henry will laugh along with everyone. Maybe America is coming back around to something he can recognize—less fearful and closed, less about the angry will of the majority and the politics of attack. He believes in Kennedy, but more than that, he has refused to harden into suspicion or shrink to exclusionism. Unlike others—John Ford, Duke Wayne, Ronald Reagan—he has preserved his liberal faiths through these dank years of blacklisting and panic, compromise and lies. And here he sits in the Garden, in the glow of a president he admires, whose own compromises and lies he does not know, or can live with.

  In America, you hope for something better. Henry has the right to laugh.

  * * *

  Energized to find himself back on the winning team, he signs on for a series of roles—Advise and Consent (1962), The Best Man, and Fail-Safe (both 1964)—that constitute his first engagement since the 1940s with political content. Each comes out of Cold War anxiety over bombs, Communists, queers, enemies within; taken in sequence, the films advance in their evocations from the recent past to the hot present to the bleak beyond, writing a mordant postwar prognosis in paranoid style.

  Adapted from Allen Drury’s 1959 best-seller, Advise and Consent is a potboiler whose subject is the hidden agenda: Everyone in this perfervid Washington is hoarding secrets, telling lies, or threatening blackmail. Though filmed in the first year of Kennedy’s presidency (and
ornamented with the stunt casting of his brother-in-law Peter Lawford as a randy northeastern senator), Advise and Consent is not really a Kennedy movie. Full of sinisters and subversives, the Otto Preminger drama is imbued less with optimistic auguries of the New Frontier than with the combined piety and paranoia of the Nixon-McCarthy years.

  For the novel, Drury had reconstituted a number of recent personalities and scandals from Capitol Hill, centering them on what was roughly a replay of the Alger Hiss trial. In 1948, journalist Whittaker Chambers claimed to have been, some ten years before, a link between New Deal bureaucrat Hiss and Soviet contacts. Questioned by HUAC, the patrician Hiss denied being a spy, while Chambers—a repentant former Bolshevik—looked the classic self-loathing snitch. But Chambers held to his story, and evidence was produced to support it. Tried twice for perjury, Hiss spent forty-four months in prison.

  The effects were far-reaching. The witch-hunt gained credibility, while the residuum of the New Deal was cast in the worst possible light. Chambers’s tormented conversion from communism to God, capital, and Time magazine was deeply influential on, among others, Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon had been HUAC’s main interrogator on the case, and he brandished it for years thereafter as his sole unimpeachable win.

  In Advise and Consent, Robert Leffingwell, a liberal diplomat, is nominated for secretary of state by an ailing Rooseveltian president; the appointment is imperiled by the surprise testimony of a man claiming he and the nominee once belonged to the same Communist cell. Leffingwell reduces the witness to incoherence and his charges to slander. As it turns out, though, the charges are true, Leffingwell’s defense a lie foisted on a credulous committee, several members of which have their own soap operas bubbling on the side.

  The film’s accuser, approximating Chambers, is portrayed by Burgess Meredith as a trembling Judas, while Fonda’s Leffingwell combines the righteous bearing of Hiss with the intellectual-political profile of Stevenson. Watch how Fonda’s body glides and his focus narrows as Leffingwell demolishes the dubious witness: Like a bird of prey, he circles and swoops as the mouselike Meredith dissolves in confusion and pathos.