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

by Devin McKinney

  Her first radical act is to lie down in the provost’s office at the Fort Lewis military reservation near Tacoma, Washington, as part of an attempted Indian occupation. It is March 1970, and her first arrest. Upon their release, she and the other protesters agitate at nearby Fort Lawton, and are ejected; the next day, through her attorney, Warren Commission debunker Mark Lane, Jane files suit for civil rights infringement against Defense Secretary Melvin Laird.

  Like many from privileged backgrounds, Jane finds that activism simplifies her life and clarifies her identity. She separates from Vadim, and replaces her gay French duds and luxe hairstylings with somber, androgynous outfits and a battle-ready shag cut. Throughout 1970, she crisscrosses the country, participating in strikes, exhorting and leafleting, getting arrested, and otherwise sculpting an identity as straight America’s latest pain in the ass.

  On November 3, passing through Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport, Jane is detained by customs agents, who find a large volume of pills in her luggage. An agent attempts to place her under arrest, and there is a disturbance. The pills, it’s reported, comprise more than a hundred vials containing two thousand capsules of unknown content, in addition to prescription Dexedrine, Compazine, and Valium. Jane is charged with smuggling and assault, though she claims the mystery pills are vitamins. She pleads not guilty and requests a jury trial, Mark Lane again serving as her attorney; but charges are dropped when the drugs are found to be, indeed, vitamins. (Jane has obtained them, ironically, at her father’s behest, and through his physician.)

  The accumulation of arrests and antagonisms finally breaks Henry’s self-control. He begins referring to Jane as “my alleged daughter,” and tells her privately that, should he suspect her of subversion, he will report her to the FBI. Interviewed in the wake of the Cleveland episode, Henry fills Earl Wilson’s newspaper column with blank lines in place of an obscene three-word phrase beginning with “crock”:

  My daughter makes statements that she’s glad to have been in jail because so many wonderful people have been in jail! That’s a____! That’s not my daughter’s opinion, it’s Mark Lane’s and he’s a____!…

  All of us that love her, Peter and I and everybody, hope she isn’t going to let herself be destroyed.

  * * *

  In September 1967, Peter is autographing a still from The Wild Angels, showing himself and costar Bruce Dern standing before their bikes in silhouette. The figures speak to him with psychic precision: Blues and the Loser, the lost boy and his accomplice. And the larger vision: a modern Western, with motorcycles in place of horses.

  Peter asks Dennis Hopper, a bit player in The Trip, to be his costar and director. The Kansas-born Method actor, a veteran of both mainstream Hollywood and fringe exploitation, has never directed a film. He and Peter develop a treatment, titled The Losers, about cocaine dealers biking to Florida. American International declines to finance it, but when superstar satirist Terry Southern lends it his name and counsel, independent producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider consent to seed a budget of $360,000 to make the retitled project—Easy Rider.

  Shooting begins in New Orleans in February, with an unfinished script, ragtag crew, and director zonked on power and substances; three months of location shooting follow. Revising scenes daily, Peter and Hopper find their characters: Wyatt, controlled, wounded; and Billy, pugnacious, pleasure-seeking. A third character emerges—an alcoholic lawyer and liberal redneck, played by Jack Nicholson, working for union scale. The narrative, a series of encounters between freaks and straights on American back roads, is suffused with Peter’s desolation and Hopper’s paranoia.

  Easy Rider is the hit of the May 1969 Cannes Film Festival, but no one is prepared for its impact upon reaching America the following month. Some observers invest its arrival with millennial weight, while others dismiss it as youth-stroking fantasy. Peter and Hopper are anointed oracles of youth; Nicholson gets an Oscar nod and a ticket to the stratosphere. The picture grosses forty million dollars and joins the small group of films that have expressed something essential about these difficult times.

  Easy Rider is full of grace notes and irreducible thrills: the bikers climbing an L.A. freeway with Steppenwolf on the track; razor-flicking flash-forwards to an indistinct near future; Peter asking “How’s your joint, George?” in such a friendly tone. Land and atmosphere are palpable, the feel of heat and dust, shade and water. Death runs through the rock score like the river of the final frames. Beneath everything is a legacy of direct violence and ambiguous meaning inherited from the Western. The filmmakers catch the breath of the frontier—that ghost country all around us—give it the snap of contemporary danger, and put it to a pop pulse.

  Peter’s performance is passive bordering on posthumous, yet it bears comparison to his father’s work. Peter too is the soulful center of a Ford-like community of oddballs; his is the gaze around which an inspired director frames a vision. It is this still center that distinguishes Easy Rider from all youth cinema before it. Conceivably, the movie might exist without Henry Fonda in its genes, but it would be something else entirely—would be a glorified Hell’s Angels on Wheels.

  Peter explodes his own placid surface just once, when Wyatt experiences a death trip in a rainy New Orleans graveyard. Towering above Saint Louis Cemetery #1, a tight maze of crypts abutting a ghetto, is a tomb bequeathed to the city by its Italian Society: a sitting woman with her hand upraised. Reluctantly, Peter obeys his director’s command to climb the monument and sit in the woman’s lap. Hopper, retrieving his Method training through sheets of wine and speed, calls from below: She’s your mother. Talk to her.

  Peter does, and soon breaks down, sobbing into the cold face and empty eyes. It is embarrassing and uncomfortable, a primal scene: The camera finds the lost boy in the arms of his dead mother, arms as cold as the grave, attempting his own rebirth.

  It doesn’t happen—or at least we don’t witness it. Only the effort. But this is one gauge of the New Hollywood as Easy Rider and other films will define it: Scenes may happen without completing or culminating. Life flows past, the frame catching only pieces, and new movies will require of audiences a new openness to obscurity and chance. The magic will be in the catching, and resolutions may dangle out of reach, or suggest themselves as the ghosts of a thousand possibilities.

  Or they may be cut off completely, as in life. Easy Rider’s money shot is the bikers’ execution on a country road—shotgun blast, cycle leaping over meadow like a riderless horse, and exploding. For Peter, it is the longed-for suicide pact and romantic gesture, the lost boy and his accomplice blasting through, together—after which they are simply gone, like Frances, like Bridget Hayward, like Stormy McDonald. The only residue lies in the burning wound, the perspective pulling back like the trailing off of memory, the goneness of life.

  “We blew it,” Wyatt says in the frontier firelight, just before the end. Peter ad-libs the line, knowing it is cryptic but feeling right with it, and he fights Hopper to retain it as the film’s closest thing to a statement.

  The words could fit any point in American history when the great goal had slipped away, after seeming close enough to touch. Like the day after Lincoln was killed; or the day someone first realized the 1960s had ended on the abortion of so many rebirths, that time had run out before culmination was reached and transformation achieved. A thousand possibilities were blown, and they blow now in the dust of a country that—in Easy Rider and in the films that follow from it—is suddenly more open, inexplicable, fast, and random than movies have ever allowed it to be.

  * * *

  Early in 1968, Henry receives an offer from an Italian director he has never heard of. The director’s name is Sergio Leone, and he has been after Fonda for years.

  Between 1964 and 1966, Leone loosed on Europe three Westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—that blew the genre open. They propose floridly Italian actors in Spanish locations as Americans in the Old
West. Actors mug and sweat; guns go off like cannons; Ennio Morricone’s music suggests Wagner on the hoof. The photographic vistas are enormous, the humor broad and killings innumerable, the films explosive and altogether new.

  After Leone’s “Dollars trilogy” mopped up at the Italian box office, United Artists secured American distribution and staged a staggered U.S. release. The bet paid off: White middle-aged American men were enraptured, and the little-known Clint Eastwood, as Leone’s unnamed hero, became a star.

  Now the spaghetti Western rules, and Leone’s success earns him a deal with Paramount, an all-star cast, and the use of John Ford’s Monument Valley. A sheaf of scenes is assembled, something about a woman, a bandit, the railroad, revenge.… Well, what does story matter? Leone is a big-picture man. For casting, he is certain of just one thing—Fonda, on whom he has been fixated since the late 1940s, when Ford Westerns flickered on the flyspecked screens of cinema societies in postwar Rome.

  In early 1964, Leone submitted the script of A Fistful of Dollars to Henry’s agents. The agents responded that their client would never consider such a role as this “Man with No Name.” (They gave him The Rounders instead.) The next year, Leone envisioned his elusive idol as the Man’s quick-drawing ally in For a Few Dollars More. Again, the answer was no. (Battle of the Bulge.) But now Leone is going Hollywood, and Henry’s (new) agents advise him to jump aboard the mad Italian’s money train.

  Disliking the script, Fonda goes to Eli Wallach, a friend since Mister Roberts. As the Mexican bandit of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wallach has lately delivered the performance of a career, and he gives Henry the lowdown: Leone commands an invigorating, anarchic set; shoots “from sunup to sundown”; has “some kind of magical touch.” He urges Fonda to do the picture.

  Doing it will mean weeks of shooting on Spanish plains and back in Monument Valley, endless mountings and dismountings of horses, eating dust and baking in the sun, all in service to a director who speaks no English and whose set is a noisy chaos. Henry is sixty-three. He hates chaos and distrusts horses.

  After a genial meeting with Leone and a comprehensible script revision, Fonda watches the Dollars trilogy. The films win him over: “I thought they were funny and entertaining in every possible way.” At last Leone has his Fonda.

  But what role will Henry play in this movie, so grandly titled C’era una volta il West (“Once upon a time, there was the West”)? Leone’s large belly tingles as he lays it out: Noble Fonda will be the villain and deadly king snake of the piece—a man called Frank, whose first act in the film is to kill a child.

  Something inside Fonda tingles right back.

  He reports to the Cinecittà set in Rome in March 1968 wearing a bushy mustache, heavy eyebrows, and dark contact lenses. Leone erupts: The Fonda face is what he has paid for—unwhiskered mouth and blue eyes. Thirty years before, John Ford had molded his star’s face into Lincoln’s; now, Leone desires the face that has been molded by those intervening decades. In a reverse of Fonda’s first great screen transformation, the director will strip the face to its sunburned surface. For the first time, we will see it in all its age, complexity, and beauty.

  “This Leone fellow,” Henry will say when filming is finished. “He seems to get right inside your head, making you think differently, react to situations as never before and perform as you’ve never performed in the past. I’ve done things for him that I once would have backed away from.”

  Thus influenced, he will achieve closer communion with the ghost that lives in his acting than he ever has, or ever will again.

  * * *

  When Klute appears in June 1971, Jane Fonda is reborn as a quintessential woman of the new decade. The performance is a further innovation in screen acting, as cogent a contribution to cultural life as Bogart’s detective or Brando’s brute. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, Klute—about a New York prostitute shadowed by both an investigator and a killer—is attuned to moods of quiet and trembling in the heart of the city. The look suggests noir, but the audience has a new sense that character arises less from plot contrivance than from inspiration and accident.

  Jane’s Bree Daniels exists, as few screen characters do. Take the scene in which, smoking grass in her silent apartment, she sings herself a formal hymn about marching with God. The song is retrieved, like Peter’s cemetery scene, from memory—it was sung in chapel at the Emma Willard School—and Jane inserts it on impulse. Yet the need to sing the song is Bree’s, and it places us in the room with her. We cannot say where the song comes from, or why it should haunt us.

  Bree’s scenes with her therapist are improvised by Jane. In a monologue that builds from cliché to breakthrough, Bree articulates her need to self-destruct. At the same time, Jane sounds the gap between herself and her father—Henry’s compulsion to honor limits, and her own to push them. As she approaches insight, her hands grip the air, her energy intensifies, her eyes pin the thing in place. Bree, the character, finally goes too far—speaks the truth of herself before knowing what to do with it—and Jane, the actor, presses her fists to her mouth, as if that could take it all back.

  The performance is a freehand masterpiece painted in air, the more impressive for having been alchemized out of chaos and in the face of terrific scorn, both public and private.

  But scorn only propels her. In February 1971, she is present at the Winter Soldier hearings, a gathering of GIs, who relate horrors witnessed and committed in Vietnam. She cofounds a satirical musical revue, FTA (“Fuck the Army”), as an alternative to Bob Hope shows, and shoots a film with radical French auteur Jean-Luc Godard. In the fall, FTA plays at army outposts and off-base coffeehouses before touring U.S. installations along the Pacific Rim. Around this time, Jane introduces her father to a group of antiwar GIs; their accounts from the quagmire place a deep wedge between Henry and the war he has so equivocally backed.

  In the midst of this, she manages to be Oscar-nominated for Klute. Hearing the news, Jane seeks Henry’s advice—they are speaking again—and when her name is called, she accepts the prize with what may be the briefest speech ever given by a recipient in the acting categories: “There’s a great deal to say, but I’m not going to say it tonight. Thank you.”

  The words, she grants, are her father’s, pretty much verbatim: In Fonda style, a moment primed for excess is cooled with restraint, yet filled with implications. The award is a miracle of discernment in the muddled and myopic history of the Oscars; Jane is dignified and impressive. Middle America, innately respectful of televised awards, must acknowledge her.

  Then she goes, in the eyes of millions, finally and irrevocably too far. In July 1972, Jane makes her infamous trip to Hanoi. She has heard reports that American planes are bombing dikes in the Red River Delta of North Vietnam. The collateral effect of these strikes, White House strategists project, will be to flood the surrounding rice paddies and cause widespread starvation. Nixon denies the bombing; Jane’s goal is to gather evidence.

  Partly at the encouragement of antiwar activist Tom Hayden, encountered a few months before, Jane flies to Hanoi as an invited guest. One day, her hosts lead her to an antiaircraft gun in a training area; asked to sit in the gunner’s seat, she does. She then grips the gun’s controls, the barrel pointing skyward, and laughs. A photo is taken. Others seem to show Jane applauding and serenading the North Vietnamese. The photogs cannot believe their luck, the tour guides’ heads spin with the propaganda possibilities, and Jane does not realize what has happened.

  On July 14, she makes the first of ten broadcasts, transmitted over Radio Hanoi and within earshot of both fighting troops in the south and captured prisoners in the north. She lauds the North Vietnamese and indicts the bankruptcy of the government and culture of the United States. She asks servicemen to question their mission, urges the adoption of the North Vietnamese peace plan, and equates Nixon with the war criminals of Germany and Japan. Jane doesn’t foresee that the crimes she has come to expose will be overshadowed by her own fawning regard o
f a brutal regime; nor does she win converts by contending that captured U.S. pilots testifying to torture in North Vietnam are “liars, hypocrites and pawns.”

  She has force-fed Middle America something it cannot swallow. Pundits release a spew of Archie Bunkerisms, one suggesting the name Jane be forever synonymous with betrayal, “to convey the impression of a female Judas goat.” Treason hearings are launched in the House of Representatives and the Justice Department. Maj. Ted Gostas, a POW in Hanoi, recalled being made by his captors to read the text of one of Jane’s broadcasts. “I felt betrayed,” he said.

  I had seen a movie years ago when Henry was young. It was about Drums on the Mohawk or something. You know, “Leatherstocking” stuff. Well, Henry ran away from Indians chasing him with tomahawks. They poop out and he gets safely to reinforcements. How often I thought of that in prison.

  There’s a certain heroism in going too far for the right reasons, and a certain cruelty. In exposing Nixon’s lies, Jane has done damage to the men at his mercy; in opposing the war, she has helped to marginalize the radical resistance. For the damage to individuals, Jane will apologize many times. For the damage to the movement, nothing may really be blamed, perhaps, but cycles of passion and backlash, a momentum of events beyond individual control.

  But for any act of magnitude, there are innumerable results. Another is that Henry Fonda admits to a change of heart on Vietnam, and on Jane’s politics generally. In January 1973, he attends her wedding to Tom Hayden, and three years later he supports Hayden’s bid for the California Senate against incumbent John V. Tunney. In March 1974, hours after opening on Broadway as Clarence Darrow, Henry hosts a benefit for Jane’s action group, the Indochina Peace Campaign. And in his autobiography he says, very simply, “She’s been vindicated. That war was obscene.”