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

by Devin McKinney

  “There is something a bit wicked, perhaps too wicked,” Andrew Sarris writes when Advise and Consent is released, “in casting our most truthful actor as a liar.” But Leffingwell is less a villain than a kind of pod person, a bureaucratic simulation of liberalism. It may be more unnerving to see Fonda as a pragmatic opportunist than as an outright scoundrel, but he plays the role with bracing clarity: His Leffingwell is a man with little if any soul left.

  * * *

  That same suggestion of a cagey, self-preserving amorality just barely carries over into The Best Man. Into its first shot, in fact—a shot that is also the high point of Henry’s performance. As a presidential candidate, he watches his own image on television, head bowed slightly, eyes level. A hand contemplatively pinches the mouth, covering the lower half of the face. The character is thus defined as observer, ironist, man above; a shrewd analyst who knows his modesty is his meal ticket; and a candidate half-hidden from the public to which he shows an open face.

  This is brilliance—Fonda’s dimensional arrangement of a few physical elements in a shot that lasts mere seconds yet tells so much. Already, the movie is exciting. And it will stay exciting, though Fonda’s part requires him to cede the fun of irony and vanity to those around him. As in 12 Angry Men, it is his job to be the irritating voice of conscience, and to anchor a cast of characters more colorful, extreme, and otherwise entertaining than he.

  Directed by Franklin Schaffner and adapted by Gore Vidal from his hit play, The Best Man shares with Advise and Consent an insider’s perspective, a yoking of communism and homosexuality as political panic points, and a commingling of stars with well-known nonactors. But where Drury and Preminger imagine workaday Washington as a paranoid’s panorama, Vidal and Schaffner breathe deeply and happily the air of political carnival.

  The carnival is a Democratic convention, implicitly set in the very near future of 1964. Despite Vidal’s contestants—Secretary of State William Russell (Fonda) and Senator Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson)—being based on Stevenson and Nixon, this movie is Camelot through and through: an athletic stride out of the dark 1950s, with hearty treacheries bathed in sunshine and “vigah.” It moves the story’s setting from Chicago to Los Angeles, site of Kennedy’s benediction; a year earlier, Cliff Robertson played the young JFK in PT 109; Cantwell is a perverse composite of Nixon, McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy; and the president, according to Vidal, contributes critique and even “a couple of lines” to the screenplay. Funny, fast, oddly sexy (there’s a good deal of exposed flesh, even Fonda’s), the movie unreels as if under the approving gaze of Prince Jack himself—alive when it is filmed, dead by the time it opens.

  Kennedy has at least as many secrets as the average president, and Vidal’s narrative mechanism, like Drury’s, shifts on blackmail: Cantwell threatens to expose Russell’s nervous breakdown, and in response, Russell’s camp retrieves a gay innuendo from Cantwell’s navy days. Whereas his rival is challenged by nothing but the expedient of the win, Russell must weigh the value of victory against the compromise of principle.

  It would be easy to undervalue the subtlety of Fonda’s acting, which is all feelers and focus, all quiet attention. A continuity of spirit runs between Russell’s affectionate regard of the barnyard-blustering, terminally ill president (Lee Tracy) and the fascinated, revolted gaze he levels at Cantwell upon seeing through his rival’s humanoid crust to the pod within. Russell is both admirable and maddening, a man of wit and implacable standards, gentleness working against innate emotional limits. A man of nuances.

  Which makes him—yes—Stevensonian. Unelectable. Russell, declining to answer blackmail with blackmail, bows out of the race. But he ensures Cantwell’s defeat by pledging his delegates to a third candidate, a dark horse of presumably centrist stances. (As if that weren’t another kind of compromise.) It is hardly obvious, in the end, whether Russell is “the best man” or merely a loser who, in the words of the barnyard president, is “having a high old time with [his] divided conscience.”

  Fonda lets us make of him what we will. As a man of sense, a Hollywood long-timer implicated in some of the best and worst screen product of the last thirty years, and a history-minded American, Fonda plays the character subtly enough to leave the conclusions to his audience of invisible judges. As Russell rides off in the last shot, he is neither best man nor worst man, nor even the troubled soul of American liberalism. He is, in every sense, just a man.

  * * *

  At the moment JFK is killed, Hollywood is in the midst of an unprecedented cycle of political thrillers and dramas: black-and-white movies full of stark figures and omens, paranoid visions taken to their all too conceivable ends. Unlike the anti-Axis thrillers of the 1940s, these pictures posit fascist threat from inside American institutions, thus turning J. Edgar Hoover’s warning of an “enemy within” against itself.

  Advise and Consent and The Manchurian Candidate appeared prior to Kennedy’s death, while others—The Best Man, Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove—are completed or in production when the news comes from Dallas. The assassination, among its other reverberations, sends studios scurrying to reconfigure release schedules, manage the sudden blurring of satire and bad taste, and loop new dialogue for a changed world.

  The release of Seven Days in May, about a militarist coup against a liberal White House, is postponed. The Best Man, announced for the summer of 1964, is expunged of Kennedy references. PT 109 is withdrawn altogether. The Manchurian Candidate, augury of Oswald, conspiracy, cover-up, and despair—basically, the rest of the 1960s—will likewise vanish for many years. Strangelove, slated for a mid-December premiere, is pushed off to late January; a mention of Dallas is redubbed. The climax of the Kubrick film—a Mack Sennett pie fight between diplomats and generals—has already been excised for reasons of length and style; so audiences will never hear George C. Scott intone over the inert body of Peter Sellers, “Gentlemen, the president has been struck down in the prime of his life.”

  Such atmospheric coincidences and piquant parallels occur all the time. But in the 1960s, they are occurring all the time.

  And Henry is in demand. In the months leading up to the assassination, there are more presidential roles than there are Henry Fondas to fill them. He must decline to play the chief executive in Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate, because he has already agreed to play the same part for his protégé Sidney Lumet in the film of another recent doomsday novel, Fail-Safe. After that, he will go straight into The Best Man.

  “I’m beginning to feel like a Kennedy,” he says, laughing, in March 1963.

  He is sitting in a dentist’s chair in Beverly Hills when the president is assassinated. He returns home, to find the television consumed by violent non sequitur: shaky video from Parkland Hospital, raw footage from Dealey Plaza, face after face stunned blank or twisted with grief. Reporters race around Dallas, chasing scraps of rumor, and Henry falls into a chair to stare with the rest of the country. For the next few days, American life is telescoped through the TV tube in a dense frenzy of cameras, cops, microphone sticks, a nation of hallways and briefing rooms and emergency ramps.

  Three years later, the world scarcely more settled than it was on that day, Fonda will participate in an NBC special, The Age of Kennedy. Chet Huntley’s narration of the late president’s political career will be interspersed with stiff but stately excerpts of Kennedy prose, read by Henry. Among the passages rendered in his inimitable tones—so flat, so plain and gentle—is this one, from the last chapter of Profiles in Courage:

  The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.

  If the passage speaks to the heroic image Kennedy saw in his head, it says more than a little about the Fonda hero—that image
long predating Kennedy’s, upon which the younger man may have modeled some of his own moves, set some of his own standards; that image whose constancy preserved the idea of an America in which Kennedy and the generation he helped awaken could one day grasp their chance to make history.

  Devastation is hard to register in a man like Henry, who holds so much back. This was the first president since FDR to excite his admiration. He watched as Kennedy silenced Nixon; ate meals and downed liquor with the now murdered man; enjoyed the individual and applauded the figure. Now the man has become a ghost, joining the others Fonda has collected in his lengthening life.

  * * *

  Artistically, Henry will wander in the wilderness of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kennedy’s murder, besides blowing the lid off, upends the fragile balance of ideals and energies upon which both the New Frontier and Fonda’s resurgence as cinematic statesman have been based. As if shocked into retrenchment—or merely sensing that the hour has passed—he will not play a president again for fifteen years.

  Three decades have passed since he came on the screen: time enough to have established the contours of an image, for those contours to have sunk in as assumptions, and for those assumptions to come up for questioning. To large segments of the audience, old notions of screen heroism do not survive in the post-Kennedy years as anything but ironies. This is partly the fault of the stars, directors, and studios who flog a dying beast long after foreign film has raised the call for innovative technique and new approaches. In 1967, Pauline Kael delivers a sour elegy for the classic horse opera:

  What makes it a “Western” is no longer the wide open spaces but the presence of men like John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster, grinning with their big new choppers, sucking their guts up into their chests, and hauling themselves onto horses … stars who have aged in the business, who have survived and who go on dragging their world-famous, expensive carcasses through the same old motions.

  Every era must transmogrify a received image of heroism into something that is new, if only to itself, while dismantling the older model. But those brought up under the sway of that earlier heroism will feel its loss even as they refit it to new attitudes. And so a number of American writers of the 1960s see, or believe they see, Henry Fonda’s face in unexpected places.

  As Tom Joad, Henry burrowed into James Baldwin’s imagination back in the 1940s, and left there an image of refusal to be recalled and reclaimed during the civil rights struggle. In 1961, Joseph Heller publishes Catch-22, a novel that becomes a sacred text of the antiwar movement. One of its characters is Major Major, a laundry officer whose wish is never to be noticed—a wish made impossible by his “sickly resemblance” to a certain movie star: “Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda.”*

  Again in 1968, Fonda—both the man and the image—is on the political scene. The man is heard voicing ads for the Democratic Study Group, and narrating Pat Paulsen for President, a pseudodocumentary about the Laugh-In comedian’s bogus run at the White House. The image appears at that year’s Democratic National Convention, where Norman Mailer describes contestant George McGovern as “a reasonably tall, neatly built man, with an honest Midwestern face, a sobriety of manner, a sincerity of presentation, a youthfulness of intent, no matter his age, which was reminiscent of Henry Fonda.”

  Four years later, McGovern is his party’s frontrunner, educating America daily in the limits of his charisma. Now Mailer turns the South Dakota senator’s presentation as the “prairie populist” inside out, revealing dullness and piety as the obverses of sincerity and virtue. “There is a poverty of spirit in the air,” he writes; “a paucity of pomp and pleasure which [his] very moral principles forbid.” When he speaks of McGovern carrying “an absence of rich greeting, a delicate air of the cool,” Mailer is describing with precision the Fonda of 12 Angry Men and the campaign stump.

  Like Michael Herr in Dispatches, invoking Lt. Col. Thursday as precedent in America’s psychic mythology for the Vietnam aggression, Mailer puts Fonda’s image to the acid test of modernity. Attractive as our man might be, on the screen and in the flesh, new times force new recognitions: Yes, people begin to realize, there has always been a profound piety to Fonda—an archness, a fear of passion. He appears unyielding in a time when previously iron structures—government fortress, war machine, racist institution—are being pressured to yield; he opposes nakedness in a day that calls for the clothes to come off.

  American piety itself is under siege, and Fonda is guilty by association. His best films have opposed pieties of authority and patriotism, even when they were pietistic in style; but his dignity and familiarity—exactly what had positioned him well as New Frontiersman—set him back in the post-Kennedy years. Thanks in great part to the public criticisms directed at him by his daughter and son, Fonda is felt to carry the musty odor of outdated liberal traditions. Where he had for so long been an answer to American wants and needs, he is now—for the first time, really—out of date. He simply does not speak to what America is in 1966, or 1968, or 1970.

  For these writers, Henry Fonda lives, but he lives in memories of another America. He is a symbol now of old weight; a symbol, too, of the better aspects of vanishing days. As these writers’ memories are challenged by modern brutality and the call of relevance, Fonda’s face is reexamined with fresh eyes—or transposed onto strangers like Major Major, so that something like that remembered heroism might be spotted again, even if fleetingly, in the confounding features of a lost American whose sole wish is to stay lost.

  * * *

  In June 1972, marauders break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., for the purpose of bugging telephones. They are nabbed, and their plot traced to a cadre of Nixon aides: Tactics once tested on Helen Gahagan are now the circuitry powering the White House as a dominion of the hidden. Slowly, a presidency is dismantled by revelations of dirty trickery, of democracy diverted by men crouching in corners. Oval Office tapes reveal Nixon’s complicity, and he resigns to avoid impeachment.

  For a solid year, through the drama of investigation and resignation, the country tastes bile. How could we have been so duped? How were we so used? Disgust breeds desires for revenge and purgation, but also renewal. America wants to invest trust in a man it respects. Don’t look at me, says Vice President Gerald Ford, who, in pardoning Nixon, frustrates the revenge instinct and outrages his pact with the people. Americans will enjoy only secondary revenge for Watergate—through a refusal to elect Ford in 1976.

  Again the times respond to Henry Fonda’s enduring presence. After a decade of portraying mostly nonheroes and nonentities, he will star in a one-man stage show and send the country into raptures of admiration for a long-dead lawyer, a man it would find hard to tolerate were he still alive—a deep-grain radical contrarian who defended socialists and murderers, claimed crime was caused by mental illness and poverty, and had the gall to say the Bible couldn’t be taken literally. After that, Fonda will make a private industry of playing upper-level bureaucrats, the highest officers of civic, military, and even cleric administration.

  Soon he is nearly as much the president as Ford, and far more respected. His authority is so entrenched, it is scarcely noticed—which is to say it lacks surprise. His political performances of the Kennedy years had that surprise, the vibrancy of an ideal newly realized. And they came at a point when history, it seemed to many, had turned a new page, upon which any man or woman with a claim—including Henry Fonda, carrying baggage stamped “New Deal,” “Popular Front,” “Old Left”—could mark his or her name.

  But now Fonda is in a rut with these roles, as the country is in a rut with itself: ruts o
f fatigue and old habit, of “malaise.” So it may be Henry’s way of jumping the rut when, in 1976, year of election and bicentennial, he makes a television appearance that pivots on his refusal to lead. On January 26 and February 2, CBS airs a two-part episode of Maude, a sitcom produced by Fonda’s old associate Norman Lear.

  It begins in Maude’s living room, where the indomitable heroine (Bea Arthur) has established a campaign headquarters. The campaign: Henry Fonda for president. Maude has conceived it in the midst of a manic depression, but she is also motivated by a genuine disgust with American politics.

  Only, Fonda has not been informed of his candidacy; and Maude’s husband, Arthur, tells her it’s stupid to nominate an actor for president. When Maude asks whom he wants for president, and Arthur says Ronald Reagan, the studio audience explodes with laughter.

  The campaign hurtles forward. Maude’s grandson says Henry has won a mock election at school (“He clobbered Tony Orlando and Dawn”). Maude advances Henry’s daughter Jane as his perfect running mate. Then, shockingly, the fantasy takes form: Drawn in by a false invitation, Henry Fonda is at the doorstep. All stare in astonishment as he towers over them, a wintry monument in a Burberry coat.

  The truth comes out. Somewhat aghast, Fonda protests that he knows nothing about being president; that he is unqualified and inexperienced.

  “Mr. Fonda,” Maude says, “you have something that no other candidate has … spiritual honesty. Mr. Fonda, you are the quintessential American, and the only one who can bring to this country the leadership it so desperately needs.”

  Henry informs Maude that she has, essentially, mistaken a man for a phantom. The words are sensible, but they ignore the degree to which, even if he cannot be the president of our waking lives, he has become the president of our movie fantasy. Maude may be nominating a phantom, but she is also nominating the actor through whom phantoms of idealism continue to exist as potentials.