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

by Devin McKinney

  Before leaving, Fonda repeats the words first uttered by General Sherman after the Civil War, when someone suggested he try for the presidency, and more recently paraphrased by Lyndon Johnson as he declined a second term in the White House.

  “If nominated,” Henry Fonda says, “I will not run.”

  Four years later, Ronald Reagan is president. It’s Morning in America, and the end of an era.

  * * *

  Perhaps Fonda’s tenure as dream president ended at the moment it peaked—back in 1964, when Fail-Safe opened. Based on a Eugene Burdick–Harvey Wheeler novel serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (supposedly it was read by JFK himself), it begins with World War III triggered by a computer malfunction. Filmed in the spring of 1963 and released late the following summer, into a presidential race with world annihilation a central issue, it has the effect both of prophecy and of remembrance. And every representative terror of this last moment before anticipation turns to dread plays out in the face of Henry Fonda’s president.

  The movie is a true left-wing conspiracy—directed by old-line New York liberal Sidney Lumet; scripted by blacklistee Walter Bernstein; produced by United Artists vice president and founding member of Hollywood SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) Max Youngstein; and headlined by Fonda, who as the film appears is campaigning for LBJ against the putatively bomb-crazy Barry Goldwater.* Henry is a longtime proponent of disarmament, having starred in the post-Hiroshima radio drama “Rehearsal,” about the detonation of a superbomb, and narrated an episode of Eight Steps to Peace (1957), a series of shorts about the United Nations’ nurturing of détente via weapons treaties.

  Despite the weight of its collective convictions, Fail-Safe comes across as a pure thriller, dynamic and unrelenting. A U.S. bomber group is reaching its assigned fail-safe points at the borders of Soviet airspace, when a computer blows a chip and transmits an attack code. As American and Soviet officers collaborate in pursuing the bombers, the American president—installed in a White House bunker, connected to the Soviet premier by telephone—tries with increasing desperation to avert the inevitable.

  Wait, moviegoers ask, haven’t we seen this? Fail-Safe reaches theaters several months behind Dr. Strangelove, with virtually the identical plot, and has the sorry fate to be a brilliant movie overshadowed by an exhilarating movie—a movie so fearsomely funny that its nihilisms have the ring of laughter in the cosmic madhouse inhabited by Swift and other comedians of the unthinkable. But Fail-Safe is both more dramatic and more earthbound than Kubrick’s spiraling absurdity. Instead of up, Fail-Safe goes down—into the bunker, the Pentagon, the gut.

  The unnamed president of the novel is a dead ringer for JFK. But as a Kennedy impersonator, Henry Fonda is no Vaughn Meader; to the role of president, he brings only himself. That is plenty. The bomb gives the film its relevance to the Cold War, to the latest election, to the world of 1964, but Fonda is present to give this moment its past—the long ago of Lincoln, and the closer context of twentieth-century American liberalism.

  Greil Marcus notes the recurrence of Lincoln imagery in The Manchurian Candidate, busts and portraits that appear “more muted and saddened in each successive scene, forced to bear witness to plots to destroy the republic Lincoln preserved.” In Fail-Safe, that role of helpless witness is taken by Fonda. Lumet shows him with head bowed and eyes closed, sitting beneath a large clock, bearing the weight of time. If we know Fonda, we know this president is not only listening, he is remembering—thus the sense of pastness. Presentness is in the immediacy of his readings, his shifts between control and panic. You believe Fonda in this nightmare setting, as he feels his way through a scenario of destruction no American actor before him has modeled.

  First emerging as a tall black shadow advancing down a hallway, the president is seen from behind as his young interpreter stares at the back of his neck, the private face a silver smear in the elevator door. From there, the Fonda body is divested of dominance, the face stripped of privacy. With Fonda confined to the bunker, Lumet uses his star’s height and slimness geometrically, and then bores in with close-ups, huge views from the vantage of a mesmerized fly, as Fonda attempts to negotiate apocalypse by phone.

  His eyes become a register of the film’s action, “a reproach to worldly vanities.” Shouting into the hot line, the president asks if it’s possible that one of the fighters might reach its target; when it’s announced that it is, Lumet cuts to a single Fonda eye filling half the frame. In the Pentagon, a pitiless strategist (Walter Matthau) argues for an all-out nuclear strike. “History demands it,” he intones; at the mention of “history,” Fonda’s eyes open and his head snaps up. Contemplating the casualties, Fonda asks, “What do we say to the dead?” There is history behind this moment—both the country’s and the actor’s: When Fonda invokes a responsibility to the departed, it is something very close to a statement of soul.

  The moment that fulfills the story and creates continuity with the past comes when the president commits himself to the only act of good faith he can offer. If Moscow is destroyed, he swears, he will order the bombing of New York City—where, in addition to eight million people, his own wife happens to be. Fonda says the words haltingly, as if not trusting the sound of his own voice; and as he does, he covers his face with his hand, shadowing his features from the audience’s view.

  It’s one of his great scenes. With nothing but a hand, a voice, and a shadow, past and present are joined, and epiphany crafted. All the submerged intensities of Fonda’s performing history return to fill the scene, to expand its dramatic and political contexts. At the same time, acting out a world-changing ending—imagining the moment when the lid flies off—Fonda holds his hand exactly where the third bullet will, a few months later, enter John Kennedy’s brain as he rides in an open car.

  * * *

  We’d like to plumb the moment, take it apart, find its cogs and springs. But it’s impossible: We cannot quite “see” what we are seeing. Rather, we feel what we are not seeing—that hum of history, that Lincoln tone still thrumming beneath the machine noise of Fail-Safe, of American life as it now is, as it is about to become; a heroism that hates to kill, that instead of boasting “Bring it on” asks, “What do we say to the dead?”

  That is the agenda, open and urgent in Lincoln’s America, that has become all but invisible in ours, and which Fonda, in his hiddenness, revives for us. At the eve of world war, Young Mr. Lincoln sounded the pure and decisive tone of myth, originating within Eisenstein’s “womb of national spirit.” The tone sang of integrity, equality, beneficent destiny; of affirmation against darkening skies. And it would sound but once.

  Yet it persists as memory. Henry Fonda helps to sustain it in the dark of the movie mind, while the presidents of his time transform and deform it in the bright light of the arena. After Young Mr. Lincoln, no actor is more identified with the presidential role than Fonda, and Fonda is inconceivable as any other kind of president than Lincoln—that bearer of burdens who, when he looks past the faces of ordinary folk, sees eternity looking back. Lincoln was one of the very few men to ever suggest this depth in our White House, and Fonda is fit to represent him, because damned if he doesn’t act like he knows some of that burden.

  The older he has grown, the more Fonda’s face has become the picture of memory, the more those Lincoln tones are the plaintive music of his voice. He need only present himself for us to know the ache, sense the hidden, feel that other, heroic past—just as if it truly happened, as if we were there when it happened.

  As if it might happen again: even now, today.

  10

  He Not Busy Being Born

  Once Upon a Time in the West

  On a ranch in California’s Conejo Valley, some fifty miles northwest of Hollywood, Henry is trying to shoot a movie—a Western called Welcome to Hard Times.

  “I’ve made lots of westerns here,” he tells a reporter, “but it won’t be long before even this place is gone.”

  Just over t
he rise, bulldozers roar, clearing acres earmarked for the planned suburban community of Thousand Oaks. How the West was won, phase three.

  * * *

  The 1960s are about novelty, evolution, reinvention—in one word, transformation. The works and acts of visionaries as different as Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Beatles, Muhammad Ali and Norman Mailer, James Brown and Jane Fonda have in common a desire to destroy the accepted limits on social behavior and human capability. The decade’s defining figures are determined to live up to the transformative demands they have set themselves; that, and the enormity of popular response to this wholesale questioning of the traditional, is what makes the 1960s a glorious rupture in our recent time.

  But for others, tradition is life. A man inclined to prize old values and protect old wounds is bound to feel he was not made for these days. Venerated by one segment of society, he may find himself the target of another, one whose faith is defined in a line of Bob Dylan’s: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

  This man may feel that even his children are hastening that end. By decade’s end, “Kill your parents” has become the Dylan line’s sinister complement. Parricide, the unvoiced desire, finds voice in some widely noted words and images—Jim Morrison climaxing a Doors song by raping his mother and murdering his father; 1968’s Wild in the Streets, in which a nineteen-year-old becomes president and parents are force-fed LSD in pogroms; Weatherman Bill Ayers’s declaration, “Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents. That’s where it’s really at”; or Charles Manson warning straight America that its children are “running in the streets—and they are coming right at you!”

  * * *

  In 1966, Henry Fonda becomes an institution. His sixtieth film, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, is released in June; later that month, a party is held at New York’s swanky L’Etoile restaurant to mark his third decade of Hollywood stardom. The celebration serves as overture to a Fonda film retrospective at the New Yorker Theater, and as coda to his stage comeback in a hit comedy, Generation, now closing after three hundred performances.

  The play has more than done its business, and Henry’s reviews have been impeccable. But it may chafe him to find anniversaries and retrospectives suddenly abounding. In a piece accompanying the retrospective, Peter Bogdanovich writes: “Were he never to play another role, his Lincoln, his Mister Roberts, his Earp, his Tom Joad would have immortalized him … as a special, most individual aspect of The American.” The words are truthful and sincere, and sound like an elegy.

  Right now, the Fonda kids are more to the point. As Henry celebrates his thirty years in movies, Peter—currently on drive-in screens as a drug-taking, church-wrecking Hell’s Angel—is arrested in Los Angeles in connection with a quantity of marijuana. Across the ocean, Jane—now an expatriate actress married to a director of glossy erotica—sues Playboy magazine for publishing nude photos of her.

  Henry’s son and daughter are driven in the sixties toward the eternal goal of youth: the first expression of self. They take every chance that comes their way, and glory in the risk of going too far. By pushing limits, they tempt the disaster that lies behind the decade’s promises, and place themselves among those who will define its ending.

  * * *

  At Boston’s Colonial Theatre at the dawn of the decade—January 29, 1960—There Was a Little Girl, written by Daniel Taradash and directed by Joshua Logan, opens in previews. The girl is played by Jane Fonda, her father by the veteran actor Louis Jean Heydt. The curtain rises; first scene goes smoothly. Then Heydt exits—and drops dead. Heart attack. With an announcement to the audience, the show goes on, Heydt’s understudy filling in.

  Consider the moment. Jane, only twenty-two and playing a daughter, loses her “father.” Josh Logan is a beloved uncle who has exploited familial anxiety to goad his protégée: “You’re going to fall behind your old man,” he tells Jane in rehearsals. “When the curtain goes up, there’ll be a ghost of your father sitting in the chair.” And Heydt, we note, is fifty-four when death finds him in the wings—exactly Henry’s age.

  Jane spends the best part of her career working off of her father’s silent example, his ghost in the chair. He is present from the start, when Jane is seventeen and a graduate of the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. In June 1955, the Omaha Community Playhouse stages a week of benefit performances of Odets’s The Country Girl, starring Henry. Jane is suggested for the ingenue, a part requiring tears. Dad leaves daughter to find her own emotional motivation, and to do so, she pretends that her father is dead.

  Her next guru is Lee Strasberg, whom she meets in the summer of 1958, when the Strasbergs and Fondas are neighbors on the Malibu shore. Guiding force of the Actors Studio, he espouses a variety of the Stanislavskian Method, which emphasizes the player’s personal experience. Actors fear his critique but adore him for elevating them to equality with directors and writers. Jane requests private lessons from the master and gets them, for one reason: “There was such a panic in the eyes,” Strasberg will later recall.

  Jane is a docile girl who imagines herself a rebel, a beautiful girl who hates her looks, a daughter who worships her father but must erase him to create herself. She has spent a listless year at Vassar, forlorn months as an art student in Paris. Acting has been “a bit of a romp,” no more. But Strasberg gives her permission to take the romp seriously, and a vocabulary to define what her father refuses even to discuss.

  He introduces her, for instance, to the idea of the “counter-need,” a secret desire contradicting each conscious motivation. He also informs her that the ability to understand any dramatic act is already contained in her personal store of buried dreams and dread wishes. As Jane explains it to Lillian Ross in 1962, you needn’t commit murder to understand how murder occurs, for “somewhere inside yourself, you will find some relevant experience.”

  Like wishing your father was dead?

  * * *

  Peter is more closely shadowed, it seems, by his mother. He and Frances share queer bonds—beginning with the Johns Hopkins trip, mother undergoing hysterectomy as son is probed in another room. In the cold chambers of her last years, Peter is often the only witness, apart from medical professionals, to Frances’s decline. Her long fade and abrupt disappearance implant his lifelong sense that grown-ups can’t be trusted—that authority itself is a lie.

  “Difficult and very sensitive,” Susan Blanchard describes him as a boy. He grows up with a tendency to illness, and an itch for dangerous games. That he doesn’t directly intend to burn his father’s acreage or shoot himself in the stomach does not mean the acts are unmotivated: No small boy plays with fire and guns because he is free of anger.

  In his junior year at boarding school, Peter is involved in an incident: an instructor, referring to Henry, asserts that any man married so often must be “a no-good son of a bitch.” Peter attacks the man physically, not ceasing until pulled away by others, and the aftermath intensifies his certainty of adult conspiracy.

  Withdrawn from school, sent back to Omaha and placed in the charge of his aunt Harriet, Peter declares himself “not part of this system.” He studies at the University of Omaha, connects with other misfits, and rehearses for life as a square peg. During family summers, Peter and Henry share private moments, but never enough of them.

  The boy cannot but imagine himself a disappointing son. To prove himself in Dad’s arena, Peter ventures into acting. In 1961, he stars at the Omaha Community Playhouse, and does a summer apprenticeship at the Cecilwood Theatre in Fishkill, New York. By the end of the year he has secured his Broadway debut: Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, a military comedy, earns Peter fair notices (“a rare combination of total self-assurance and appealing modesty,” says Life). Soon into the run, he marries twenty-year-old Susan Brewer, stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich, who has recently ended his tenure as Howard Hughes’s chief adviser.

  Our rebel is on the rise, with solid neophyte credentials and high-ranking in-laws. If Peter never becomes his fathe
r’s equal, at least he may cease to be a disappointment.

  * * *

  Jane moves to New York in the fall of 1958 to continue with Strasberg. She models in town and works winter stock in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where an unknown Warren Beatty, at a rival theater, is prepping for Broadway. At the guru’s encouragement, she enters psychoanalysis.

  Henry doesn’t get any of it. “I don’t know what the Method is,” he says in 1962, “and I don’t care what the Method is. Everybody’s got a method.” Some methods are less agreeable than others to a man of Henry’s limitations and background. Method actors, in Norman Mailer’s summary, “will act out; their technique is designed, like psychoanalysis itself, to release emotional lava.” But Fonda no more welcomes an actor’s lava than he does a wife’s tears or a child’s diarrhea. The neediness and gabbiness of the Method revolt him: “Analysis,” he says, “is a way of life for them.”

  But Jane continues with her facial calisthenics and miming exercises, her analysis of ego and art—until sidetracked by Josh Logan, who offers her an exclusive contract for stage and movies. He wants to test her beside his other discovery, Warren Beatty, her fellow veteran of Fort Lee, in a soap opera. That script proves unconquerable, but Logan, still keen to mate his virginal beauties, adapts the play Tall Story, a college-basketball farce. Beatty drifts from the picture, and Anthony Perkins is substituted.

  Making her first movie, Jane feels trapped inside what she will later call “a Kafkaesque nightmare.” She is horrified by her screen test: “I left the projection room in a state of shock, with a resolution to lose weight.” Logan suggests she have her jaw surgically fractured and chiseled, and her back teeth pulled to achieve the gaunt glamour cheeks of the moment. (More than likely, he is projecting his own body issues onto her.*) But Jane resists his advice and makes a fetching screen debut when Tall Story appears in early 1960. Strikingly physical, she is unvanquished by the stagnant air and ugly look of the film; her focus is total, and she even coaxes Perkins into his most convincing show of heterosexual arousal.