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

by Devin McKinney

  Trim, well-assembled, adroit yet unimposing, Shirlee has the not-yet-formed nose of an adolescent girl, and her smile defines pert. Of Henry’s wives, she is the only one whose manner suggests no hidden agenda or dark inner world. She presents an image of health, youth, the good life; yet she is concerned with social ills, and works extensively for charities around greater Los Angeles. She is eager for people to get along, proud to be a helper, and her clearest ambition is to serve and support Henry. “I have tried to make Fonda the central pivot of my life,” she says, sharing her predecessors’ habit of calling Henry by his last name. When they meet, she is a beautiful young thing for Henry to sport on his arm. As years pass and his infirmities set in, she becomes an ideal combination of lover, caregiver, and domestic administrator.

  This will be by far the longest-lived of Fonda’s marriages, perhaps because it achieves the best balance between emotional feeling and psychic dependency. Shirlee, like Frances and Afdera, may desire a father surrogate; unlike them, she doesn’t seek to be abused or controlled. Her manner is vivacious and wholesome, but no one leaves an orphanage soft. Fiercely protective of family and home, she shields Henry from excessive press attention in his difficult last years. Shirlee’s toughness is also a necessary self-defense throughout the marriage, as the dark rages of Fonda’s middle age morph into the manifold quirks and irritations of an ailing old man.

  “He’s complex and difficult,” Shirlee says. “But I’m not easy either.”

  For the first time Henry has a wife willing, for reasons of her own, to place him ahead of everything else. That is not always what he wanted in a wife, but it is what he needs now.

  * * *

  In early 1967, Fonda purchases a nine-acre estate at 10744 Chalon Road, snug in the green, shaded windings of Bel Air. The forty-year-old, 9,400-square-foot house is a sprawling hacienda of white brick and Spanish tile, with exposed rafters, large windows, and cavernous rooms. Later, after it is furnished in Fonda style, hung with paintings, and festooned with overgrown plants, the home’s rustic opulence will remind one visitor of “a fancy new Mexican restaurant.”

  Henry and Shirlee take occupancy in 1969. After twenty years, he’s had enough of Manhattan’s noise, push, and vertical glamour. In Bel Air’s expansive warrens of wealth, the only sounds to break the hush are a car powering up a hill, or the motorized tools of landscaping crews. As the neighborhood gathered cachet in the late 1940s, the actor Clifton Webb called it “a delightful acreage … a Forest Lawn of the living.”

  Henry is hardly ready for the cemetery, but the move is an easing into twilight years, as evidenced in an increased dedication to restful and solitary hobbies. He continues to paint, and takes up needlework, particularly crewel embroidery. The dozens of fruit trees on the back nine allow him to resume his second life as a farmer. And he discovers bees. The retired battalion chief of the Alhambra Fire Department, hired to neutralize a hive found under the eaves, presents the dead husk to Fonda. Interest piqued, he takes out a subscription to the American Bee Journal, masters the apiarist’s eccentric art, and soon is home-bottling his own brand of honey—Henry Fonda’s Bel Air Hive.

  There are still plenty of ways to get stung in the golden land. In the late 1960s, Southern California garners a reputation as America’s locus of moral decadence and radical violence. Drugs, sex, Satan, and politics are in the witches’ brew, and straight America is nervous. In August 1969, just as the Fondas are settling in on Chalon Road, five people are slaughtered at the nearby Cielo Drive estate—now owned by director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate—where they’d summered in 1964. One of the dead, Jay Sebring, is a Hollywood hairdresser noted as an innovator in male styling. Henry, a client, attends Sebring’s funeral five days after the murders.

  Our man is also singed by the political flames of the moment. On October 17, 1970, Fonda plans to speak at a campaign rally for Representative John V. Tunney in the largely Mexican-American area of East Los Angeles. A riot following an antiwar rally in the neighborhood weeks before has left three people dead. Tunney has come, he says, to “establish a dialogue,” but his speech is quickly drowned out by protesters. Things turn ugly; Tunney and Fonda retreat as an angry crowd descends on their car.

  A spokesman for the Chicano Moratorium Committee claims Tunney—a Democrat running for Senate against Republican and former actor George Murphy—had come to East L.A. only “to try to buy votes with free beer and with Mexican flag buttons with his name on them.” Henry is not injured in the melee; only shaken, perhaps, by the distance between days once defined by Tom Joad and now by César Chávez. In six years, he will be supporting his son-in-law, Tom Hayden, against Tunney in the California Senate race.

  * * *

  On the whole, though, he appears happier—and certainly healthier—for the changes. His skin regains luster, and he looks well preserved even beside a much younger wife. The trim, monochrome suits of the urban gentleman are replaced by mod western gear; anyone glancing up at the right moment may spot Henry Fonda in his black Mercedes sports coupe, waiting to turn onto Sunset Boulevard.

  He fights to retain each atom of physical command. Rising every morning before six, he sits in the sauna, then does sit-ups on a slanting board. He rides a stationary bicycles, takes megavitamins, and drinks a high-protein milk shake with lecithin powder and a raw egg. Gossip says he’s had cosmetic surgery. Evidently performed sometime in late 1970, it is only a touch-up: “I had a little eye work done,” Henry is quoted as saying when asked how he stays so young-looking.

  It sounds cheesy, but what of it? A movie career is a devil’s bargain, and something inside him has known that from the beginning.

  Time again to make payments on the bargain. In 1970, he signs as pitchman for the General Aniline and Film Corporation (GAF), doing commercials for vinyl flooring and View-Master slide machines. The contract, specifying eleven TV spots per year, requires two weeks of work and is rumored to be worth $250,000. Sales rise in response to the ads, and Henry is seen to have legitimized a new market for established stars—soon even Laurence Olivier will be endorsing Kodak cameras.

  In this guise Fonda evolves a bit further as image and presence—less man, more symbol. Columnist Bob MacKenzie describes the odd phenomenon of watching Fonda walk into a kitchen to appraise a woman’s floors. He’s got no reason to be there, other than that he is Henry Fonda, arbiter of all he surveys. He “belongs wherever he chooses to amble,” MacKenzie accepts, “and his judgment of a kitchen floor or a pearl-handled six-shooter is obviously the judgment of the final authority.”

  The commercials are absurd, but brief. They move product and create work. And as Henry says, “A good commercial is better for a person than a bad movie.”

  * * *

  Or a bad TV show. ABC announces in April 1970 that Fonda will star in The Smith Family, slated for the fall. He’ll play Chad Smith, an LAPD detective sergeant with a wife and three children; the stories “will touch on today’s gap between generations and the problems of today’s youth in their attempt to remodel the world.”

  Henry’s still trying.

  Though he claims to be intrigued by its focus on a cop’s domestic life, the show’s real attraction is the cut-and-paste production method patented by executive producer Don Fedderson. “The Fedderson System,” previously tested on two hit family shows built around older male stars—My Three Sons, with Fred MacMurray, and Family Affair, with Brian Keith—simply involves shooting all of the star’s scenes up front in a two-month burst, then filming the remainder in his absence.

  Fonda, seduced by money and ease into believing the result will be more than the sum of its detachable parts, films fifteen episodes in October and November, and promotes the show hard. “The scripts were all completed,” he says, “the money and ownership were right, but most importantly I believed in the characters and the concept of the show.… All the cast and crew are excited because we feel it will not only be successful but good. Very good.”
<
br />   With Janet Blair costarring as the wife and Ronnie Howard as the older son, The Smith Family debuts in January 1971 as a midseason replacement. “Henry Fonda stars as Chad Smith … a man you’ll like,” TV Guide’s ad vaguely assures. Response to the show is blandly positive; rather like the homemaker in the GAF commercial, viewers look up to find that Henry Fonda has wandered in to admire their floors.

  The Smith Family is bad. Very bad. Structure is split between domestic scenes with a laugh track and cop scenes so listless they make Dragnet look like Brigadoon. Henry sulks through on fatherly forbearance, with smiles that resemble dyspeptic grimaces. “There is nothing here that really lifts the spirit,” says the Associated Press critic. “The wish is that this show had been done with more style, more insight, more wit, more guts, and had more meat and bones to it.”

  By season’s end, early ratings have plummeted, along with Henry’s enthusiasm: He declines to publicize the second season at all. But what about the domestic life of a cop, the belief, the excitement—? “He does it for money,” TV writer Lawrence Laurent declares.

  On September 15, season two premieres to the sound of crickets. ABC pulls The Smith Family at midseason, and cancels it after the first of the year.

  * * *

  The theater has changed since Henry’s heyday. The thing now is to provoke the audience with nudity and noise, radical exhortation and Total Experience. He notes the shift but is uncertain what to do about it.

  Lately, most of his theatrical juice has gone into the Plumstead Playhouse, a company cofounded in 1968 by Martha Scott, Robert Ryan, and Henry to showcase established and emerging stars in classic American plays. Named after the first professional theater in America, the nonprofit production company boasts, on paper if not always onstage, such worthies as Mildred Dunnock, Godfrey Cambridge, Roddy McDowall, John McGiver, and Estelle Parsons; but Henry becomes its most visible exponent.

  Our Town and The Front Page are announced as Plumstead’s first offerings. Henry will play the Stage Manager in the former, a reporter in the latter. “We might fall on our puss,” he admits as rehearsals begin, but it must be money he is thinking of losing, since the creative risk is far from awesome. To some, even the performers look bored. Journalist Jane Wilson studies the Our Town cast in a midtown rehearsal space in the summer of 1968. “Stifling boredom filled this room,” she writes. “What fun, these movie stars had thought, to spend innocent autumnal weeks as the Plumstead Players at a homey theater on Long Island, how cleansing to get back to the root of the matter, back to basic American theater. But now, as they waded through Thornton Wilder’s archetypal corn, some of the first flush of enthusiasm had clearly worn off.”

  That doesn’t prevent Plumstead’s Our Town from being a reasonable success. Opening at the Mineola Theatre in September, it goes to Broadway in November 1969, and has a short run in Los Angeles early the next year. Like Generation, though, it is only a successful waste of time for Henry. It shows he can still fill seats, and draw moisture even from the gimlet eyes of theater critics. But it has not been a play to draw revelations from an actor, or stir new life in an audience.

  It may be his portrayal of the Stage Manager—addressing the audience, watching the young wed and the old die—that sparks Fonda’s notion of a one-man show on the theme of parents and children. Assembled, to Henry’s design, by writer-director Sid Stebel, incorporating cuttings from Socrates, Shakespeare, Thoreau, O’Neill, Bob Dylan, and others, Fathers vs. Sons premieres in April 1970 at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. Later in the year, Fonda takes the evening—now called Fathers Against Sons Against Fathers—on a brief tour of regional theaters. As well as a meditation on filial themes, Fonda conceives of it as a cheap, portable annuity for his late years.

  He has not been so variously and vigorously involved in theater since the University Players. But everything is a revival or a rehash: He is working hard merely to stay in place. In December 1971, he directs an all-star production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial in Los Angeles; simultaneously, the Plumstead Playhouse readies its staging of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, with Henry headlining a cast that includes Jane Alexander, Strother Martin, and Richard Dreyfuss. Opening at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in January 1972, the show goes on a national tour, which occupies Fonda through the spring and summer.

  But the Saroyan play is less robust than the Wilder, its revival even more superfluous. “Seen now, in a new context,” writes the Long Beach critic, “the play seems vapid, pointless, and pretentious. Since the play has not changed, apparently we have.”

  * * *

  Yet hidden between these safe, sober endeavors is Henry’s sole venture into anything resembling radical theater. He’s sent a play entitled The Trial of A. Lincoln in late 1970, soon after its premiere in Hartford, Connecticut. Penned by white playwright James Damico, the piece combines racial politics with Pirandello illusion to dramatize black urban anger. It also calls upon Fonda to portray the ghost of the historical figure with whom he is most dearly associated—not the jackleg youth, but the sallow sage of Brady’s portraiture.

  Set in the basement of an urban police department, the play begins as courtroom drama: A modern-day black militant has labeled Lincoln a racist, and the president’s risen spirit charges libel. Finally, in the Pirandello twist, the ghost trial is revealed as a setup, a mechanism by which police administrators have sought to defuse racial tensions in the force.

  With this part, Henry constructs obvious arcs to the past—by playing his young Lincoln at a later age, and by walking in the proximate steps of George Billings. Yet those arcs, begun so long ago, end squarely in the present day, with the Great Emancipator interrogated and judged by a new, Pantherized black militancy.

  This drama of racial confrontation will have its unlikely reopening in Arizona, then travel to Los Angeles and Detroit. Already in the cast are Billy Dee Williams as the militant and Moses Gunn as his defender—two black actors well known in New York but not in the provinces. Fonda signs on as the company’s brand name and joins rehearsals in January 1971.

  The part is a stern physical challenge, with rehearsals lasting as long as twelve hours. Fonda self-applies layers of heavy makeup; onstage, he wears four-inch lifts and trains his legs to walk on what amount to small stilts. Henry says he finds the play “very provocative, very powerful”; asked how audiences will respond, he sounds almost eager for controversy. “We have no idea what the reaction will be. When we play it in Detroit, for instance, it could very well provoke riots.”

  Response to the March 27 preview in Tucson is mixed but excited; the local reviewer finds that “a hurried poll among Saturday night’s audience indicated a favorable reaction.” There are a handful of walkouts at the opening in Phoenix two nights later, but the play is praised as “one of the most explosive statements of the black cause in modern drama.” Fonda’s presence is valued, though he is seen to be primarily the catalyst for larger discussions: “The performance is superb, but largely window dressing.”

  The play then goes to Los Angeles, where in a drastically edited version it is called “the most thoroughly entertaining new play in years.” But Henry’s personal reviews are again variable. To one critic, he “possesses wit, warmth, and true spirit,” while another believes he “plays Lincoln a bit stiffly, even stuffily.”

  The Trial of A. Lincoln moves on to Detroit. No riots. Yet something upsets Fonda’s faith in the production, and word leaks that it will not be going to Broadway after all. Reportedly, he is troubled by disagreements over the text. Fonda having a well-developed sense of his own marquee value, it may nettle him to be overshadowed by the play’s issues, his costars, or both; maybe he is depressed by his middling reviews.

  Anyway, he is out of the show—just that abruptly. He resumes his previous obligations, and never discusses the play again; it’s almost as if it had been a passing delirium. Meanwhile, as the producers scramble to find Henry’s replacement, the playwright is said to be doing a
nother major revision.

  To date, The Trial of A. Lincoln has never been staged in New York.

  * * *

  It will be almost two years before Fonda receives the script that effectively settles every qualm, his and ours, about what he should be doing in the theater right now. Clarence Darrow conjoins nostalgia and challenge. It is another ghost trial; a bridge between past and present forms of American radicalism; and a one-man show that works.

  Based on Irving Stone’s biography, the play is the work of David Rintels, a TV writer whose notable previous credit is the controversial legal drama The Defenders. Reading it in the fall of 1973, Fonda has doubts. The shapeless text runs well over three hours; he’s uncertain of his ability to physicalize the bullish, overweight attorney; and he has verbally committed himself to a new Edward Albee play, Seascape.

  But in reading the Stone book, Darrow’s autobiography, and courtroom transcripts, Henry comes alive to his subject. Like most Americans, he recalls little of Clarence Darrow beyond the landmark defenses—of Socialist Eugene V. Debs; child-killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; and science teacher John T. Scopes, defendant in the Tennessee “Monkey Trial.” “I didn’t know about his fights for labor,” Fonda says, “for the eight-hour day, for the poor, the blacks, or his own nightmarish trial on a charge of buying off a jury, for which he was acquitted.”

  He finds commonality with the “Old Lion.” Both men revere their fathers, leave small towns for the big city, are lonesome liberals in conservative outlands. Both have passed in and out of cultural favor: As Leslie Fiedler writes, Darrow, after becoming a folk hero, had by the early 1920s “begun to look like yesterday’s liberal, the provincial and slightly ridiculous spokesman for the not-quite-enlightened middlebrows.” Yet repeatedly he’d jolted the populist nerves of the country despite public doubt, powerful opposition, and his own misanthrophy; always he strove to be, in Stone’s memorable phrase, “as great as his cause.”