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

by Devin McKinney

  * * *

  For Fonda, it’s a familiar challenge, but in a new costume and a new era. How to make this man live? How to render his true size to the Americans who have forgotten him, or never really knew him?

  Henry’s insecurity manifests, as it had in the 1950s, in a need to establish dominion over his stage. The monologue continues to be unwieldy, and Henry decides he doesn’t trust the judgment of the director hired by producers Mike Merrick and Don Gregory. Soon the entire enterprise is, in his mind, hopeless, a folly. He threatens to quit unless major changes are made, not just to the play but to its direction. Desperate, Rintels and Merrick place a call to producer John Houseman.

  He’s an inspired choice. Houseman has been the legend behind the legend since the 1930s, when he produced the early triumphs of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. In Hollywood, he has helmed a number of prestigious projects by eccentric directors. He has known Fonda distantly since 1946, when at RKO they discussed a Herman Mankiewicz script called That Girl from Memphis, recalled by the producer as “some sort of sexy Western.” Years later, Houseman produced Jane’s bathetic In the Cool of the Day, and he next met Henry in January 1968, when directing an all-star CBS telecast from Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

  After viewing a Darrow rehearsal, Houseman conferences with star, writer, and producers. He feels that, with trims and tryouts, the play could produce one of Fonda’s great performances. While not keen on displacing the director, he agrees to step in.

  Henry requires minimal direction anyway. “My main use to him as a director,” Houseman will later write, “lay simply in my being out front and supplying him with a trustworthy, living mirror in which he was able to see his own reflection and check the truth of his performance.” Reasonable resemblance between actor and lawyer is achieved with body padding, a slash of hair across the forehead, and a pair of suspenders. Henry sleeps in his stage clothes to get the wrinkles right; Rintels continues to prune the text; Houseman calibrates stage blocking and lighting cues. Harmony is slowly, methodically reached between ego and art.

  Clarence Darrow is previewed in Louisville, with Henry’s voice amplified by a radio mike (a first for him). From there it goes to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Reviews are outstanding. “Fonda is doing something incredible here,” Earl Wilson reports from Chicago. A Washington reviewer calls the performance “the accumulation of all that Fonda has learned through the years as an actor”; another lauds his “Olympian feat” of acting in a play that is “an epic love poem to a man.”

  The acclaim continues after the play moves to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre on March 26, 1974. “It would be difficult to think of praise too high,” writes Clive Barnes in the New York Times. “If Clarence Darrow was not like this, he should have been.”

  The five-week run sells out, and beginnings are seen of a virtual Darrow cult. “People seem to have a compulsion to tell me what this show meant and did to them,” Henry says. Tour dates are scheduled for the western United States, running through late August. A television special is planned, and requests for command performances come in from around the world. Years later, Henry’s Darrow will still be sought by the cultural ministries of nations as far-flung as South Africa, Australia, and the USSR.

  * * *

  In the shower of glories, a few worthy doubts are raised. John Simon points out that Fonda, though a great actor, has never starred in a great play. Why has he never challenged himself against the modernist mysteries of Brecht, Pirandello, or Lorca; the grinding Nordic tragedies of Ibsen, Strindberg, or O’Neill; or indeed the classics of Molière and Shakespeare? Simon fears that Henry’s preference for the certitudes of community-theater staples like Saroyan and Wilder—and, not so implicitly, Darrow itself—will commend him to theatrical history only as “the great interpreter of the second-rate.”

  Columnist Jeffrey Hart notes a “curious current phenomenon, in which assorted actors are scoring big hits by impersonating well-known American personalities out of the past”—aside from Fonda, these include Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, and James Whitmore as Harry Truman.* “No doubt all this reflects the general ‘nostalgia’ boom,” Hart figures; but it “may also be part of the ‘Americanism’ mood attendant upon the Bicentennial and strengthened by frustration abroad.”

  But Clarence Darrow as it airs on television—and presumably as it is seen by audiences at its hundreds of stage performances—is far from a simplistic piece of Americana. Nor is it free of incredible demands upon Fonda the actor, despite its not being a great play, or necessarily a play at all.

  Fonda enters a set that is both courtroom and law office, backed by a nighttime cityscape. As Darrow, he moves slowly, his lips set in frowning resolve, his hand feeling respectfully the wooden railing of the jury box. Darrow makes jokes. They are corny, Rotary Club standards. He describes hitting a baseball as a boy, grips the imaginary bat and points to the sky, and we fear that nostalgia may drape like sweet old linen over our violent history.

  At a certain point, Darrow makes another joke. It is not crucial which one—it might be different for different watchers—except that now you laugh. There has been a cumulative rhythm to Fonda’s ramble, acumen in Darrow’s homilies. Nixon is invoked without being named, and a sense impressed of how alike our eras are, with Darrow the spirit of a rueful native intelligence transcending time. Your laugh is rich and you feel suddenly free—free to believe in the ideal, the humor, the hero. Yes, along with its criminals and liars, pollution and poison, America contains this, too.

  And Fonda has you. He leads you past nostalgia into a recounting of forgotten crimes committed by Americans against Americans, capital against workers, strong against weak: the evils, readily translatable to our own or any time, of “evil men—men who are themselves criminals.” He makes the crimes and their consequences live by miming Darrow’s interactions with a gamut of crooks and victims. He defines the stakes with Darrow’s angry description of conditions in tenements housing Pullman railway employees. He incarnates the spirit of resistance by shouting the cry of striking laborers at club-swinging police:

  “Don’t you know what day this is? It’s the Fourth of July—Independence Day!”

  Of all actors, perhaps only Fonda, with his exact nuances—querulous expression, tone of outrage and amazement, the forward lean of his body into the living dark—could make that rebuke ring and sting, like some primal piece of democratic rhetoric.

  He does so much with this monologue. He combines his country’s nostalgic wish with its radical capability. He demonstrates that revolt is not a sixties aberration but a patriotic tradition. He conjures anew the American night, the ghosts of dead men and women, lost children, murderers, and heroes who move about in it. He brings that hush down upon his stage and his audience.

  Not least or simplest, Fonda infuses Darrow with himself, their two histories mingling, so that we feel the actor’s investment in the lawyer’s statement of self: “I know my life. I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect; it has been human, too human. I have tried to help in the world. I have not had malice in my heart. I have done the best I could.”

  Clarence Darrow is Henry Fonda’s last foray into the American dark, that night of crime and brutalized ideal where he finds his country and his hero, the mob and the man; where he casts out demons and raises the dead; where he reaches into himself, and past himself; and where, in the impassioned voicing of doubt, he awakens us to a belief we thought lost. He is as great as his cause.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1969, The Cheyenne Social Club is shooting at a ranch near Santa Fe. This is the kind of hot, dry country that saps younger men, yet Henry Fonda has been bragging to reporters about his health—passed a preshoot physical “with flying colors.”

  One day, though, he has difficulty breathing. He is taken from the set to Bataan Memorial Methodist Hospital. His diagnosis is first reported as influenza. This is later changed to a “respiratory cond
ition.”

  At the time, no one says “heart attack”; no one says “cancer”; no one says anything. No one but Fonda, who, according to a nurse, says on entering the hospital, “I’m just a tired old man, and I want to be left alone.”

  * * *

  He has always treated his body as a skilled shootist treats a beautiful rifle: He knows it was made to be used, but he is wise enough to keep it clean. Alcohol, tobacco, and other abuses are in moderation, just enough to grease the action. But time corrodes, elements weather, and well-tooled mechanisms may simply, suddenly fail.

  On April 23, 1974, a month into Darrow’s Broadway run, Henry collapses in his dressing room after a performance. The next morning, he is admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital, said to be suffering from exhaustion. Henry confesses to having felt winded lately. “I suddenly found myself out of breath one day,” he says. “I’m a great walker and I had to stop twice on my way to do a radio spot to help the Red Cross raise money. I mentioned it to my doctor, who sent me to a specialist. He told me: ‘You’re fibrillating.’”

  Suddenly, he is unconscious on a dressing room floor. He wakes up wearing an oxygen mask in a hospital bed. Around him are shapes and faces. There are wires on his skin, tubes in his veins, and a monitor displaying the jumps of his heart.

  Outside the hospital, Shirlee tells the gathered press that Henry “isn’t really sick … they put him in the hospital because that’s the only place you can keep this man down. He doesn’t know what rest is.”

  He focuses on breathing, and letting the shapes form into people. Three days pass with nothing but an announcement that Darrow’s remaining New York performances have been canceled. The hospitalization continues into May. The upcoming dates in Boston are likewise canceled.

  Then it’s decided that a temporary pacemaker will be installed in Henry’s chest. The backstage collapse, it seems, was not exhaustion, but oxygen loss due to an irregular heartbeat. His heart is in a badly weakened state—the almost certain result of a nonstop work and travel schedule sustained over four decades, combined with a lifetime’s accumulated stresses and suppressed emotions.*

  Fonda joins the company of William O. Douglas and Peter Sellers, who are among the celebrated recent recipients of the pacemaker, a device pioneered in 1960 by William M. Chardack, a cardiac surgeon working at a VA hospital in Buffalo, New York. A small box with a thin wire carrying electrical impulses is implanted near the heart, and its signals are transmitted to the muscles of the heart’s lower region to regulate pulse and blood flow. Early pacemakers were carried outside the body in a shoulder holster, and malfunctioned frequently; updated devices are more rugged, and as of 1975, some 200,000 Americans have them.

  Henry is fitted with the newest model, designed by physicists at Johns Hopkins and powered with rechargeable nickel-cadmium cells. A visitor, invited by Fonda to feel the device beneath his skin, describes it as “a hard spot on his chest, the size of a child’s wooden block.” A wall-plugged charger is held to the chest with a Velcro vest, emitting a beep until it is correctly placed, at which time the charging begins. “Once a week,” Fonda will explain a year after the implantation, “I have a little recharge—flip it on, read, nap, or do needlepoint.”

  He leaves Lenox Hill on May 7, returning two weeks later for an adjustment of the device. On the twenty-second, he is sent home to Bel Air. Darrow’s scheduled engagements are postponed indefinitely.

  We’ve entered the next phase of Henry’s life, and the first of his death.

  * * *

  Just weeks later, he is back playing Darrow at the Huntington Hartford Theatre in L.A. “The veteran of fifty years on stage and film showed no visible loss of strength, spirit, or imaginative genius,” writes one critic. “We cannot sit through Henry Fonda’s one-man triumph of dramatic craftsmanship in Clarence Darrow without being profoundly impressed by Darrow the man and Fonda the actor. Both were, and are, giants of our age.” Adela Rogers St. Johns—daughter of the attorney who defended Darrow in his 1912 bribery trial—writes, “A most incredible and soul-shaking thing has befallen me. I [have] seen—a spectre, an appearance as plain as ever Hamlet saw his father or Lady Macbeth saw Banquo. Moreover, it was a ghost of solid flesh…”

  Henry spends two evenings in a New York studio taping the television version of Darrow. It cuts twenty-two minutes from the play and adds six feet to the length of the stage, but otherwise it is a direct transfer of the theater experience. “The only difference from doing it as a play,” Henry says, “was that I was vaguely aware there were four cameras somewhere in the darkness.” Directed by John Rich, presented by Norman Lear and IBM, the show airs on NBC on September 4.

  Henry gets another checkup, and relaxes for the rest of the year. Then, the TV special having renewed interest in the play, Darrow returns to Broadway on March 3, 1975, this time at the Minskoff Theatre. Henry forgoes matinees, and his health continues to improve. Greeting a visitor to his town house, he runs up and down the stairs as proof of his stamina. Tour dates are lined up through mid-May.

  The tour completed, Henry plays Adm. Chester Nimitz in the World War II epic Midway. In July, after just a few weeks off, he and Shirlee depart for London, where Darrow begins a ten-week stand at the Piccadilly Theatre. Opening night is a triumph, with multiple curtain calls; moved by the reception, Fonda tells the audience that to play the West End is “every American actor’s dream.” Though he’s reported to be incensed at the nine-dollar charge for top seats, his is the hottest ticket in town.

  “An entertainment that uplifts the spirit in a darkening world,” says the Daily Express. “It takes one noble man to play another. Henry Fonda is that man.”

  He’s making up for lost time. The pacemaker is a miraculous new tool in life extension, and Fonda is prominent among its success stories. Soon the American Heart Association will name him its Man of the Year.

  * * *

  In early 1976, X-rays show a tumor near Henry’s lung. He checks into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and on March 17 undergoes his second surgery in two years.

  The operation lasts seven and a half hours. Thought at first to be beneath the right lung, the tumor is instead found to be growing from the right side of the diaphragm—some of which must be removed, though the lung is spared. Doctors will later report that the tumor in Fonda’s abdomen, though it is benign, “had grown to the size of two grapefruits within a four-month period.”

  The surgery has meant the cancellation of Darrow’s projected college tour,* but Henry’s recovery looks promising. Then it goes sour. Perhaps other X-ray omens are found. His release is delayed, and more college dates go by the board. Finally, on April 13, he is sent home, though without a clean bill of health. He spends the next several weeks recuperating under clouds of uncertainty.

  Whispers of cancer begin to circulate. They intensify after Fonda flies back to New York on June 14 for a scheduled checkup. In Hollywood, rumors of illness can be every bit as damaging to perception and career as illness itself. Henry is furious at the rumors, and unbowed by the physical setback.

  “I’m not afraid,” he assures an interviewer. “I’m optimistic that I will lick this.”

  But he will not say what “this” is.

  * * *

  Most of Fonda’s late pictures are of no importance to the man himself; most are not good and were probably not meant to be good. Projects as dumb or desiccated, cynical or saccharine as The Serpent and Ash Wednesday (both 1973) may be justified at least on the grounds that they keep our man active, his joints moving and his assets liquid.

  The first is an espionage thriller with many snaky hisses on the sound track and many dour spooks walking endless corridors; Fonda plays the director of the CIA, and though he is physically there, he really could care less. Ash Wednesday is a soap opera with Elizabeth Taylor as a woman undergoing plastic surgery, and Henry as her tycoon husband. Otherwise trashy and ghoulish, it contains a fine Fonda portrait of a wealthy stud gone to seed, whose respo
nse to his wife’s stunning new face combines romantic regret, clinical admiration, and bemusement at her naïve faith that mere cosmetics could ever touch his cold mind or selfish heart.

  Fonda is an august presence in several World War II movies. As Cardinal Schuster in a film about Mussolini, The Last Four Days (1974), his nonplussed expression and sepulchral outline hold firm against Rod Steiger’s gross overacting. He reveals creditable emotion as a military man with two sons in action in the international production The Biggest Battle (1978), but the film is unworthy of him. Midway (1976) is a war spectacular in the long tradition, more coherent and exciting than usual, though unwittingly racist: The American actors savor their salty dialogue and esprit de corps, while the Japanese players, including the great Toshiro Mifune, are like robots exchanging binary code.

  Elsewhere, Henry settles into the inevitability of playing men aware of their age, whereby he may convey on-screen the fear of death he will never quite admit in life. My Name Is Nobody (1973) is a spoof on the spaghetti Western genre, which has by now peaked. (Sergio Leone is the film’s executive producer, as well as prime target of its parody.) As a famed gunslinger brought out of retirement by an overzealous young gun, Fonda is dignified—too dignified: Either he isn’t in on the movie’s joke or he doesn’t think it’s funny.

  He’s far looser in The Great Smokey Roadblock (1977), despite its having been shot in the wake of his tumor surgery and cancer scare—and the fitting of an earpiece that compensates for an estimated 40 percent hearing loss. Fonda is Elegant John, an independent trucker who escapes from a hospital ward, hijacks his rig, and transports a crew of prostitutes cross-country. Affectionate and sloppy, the movie has a mid-seventies vibe of being an agreeable shambles. “There’s a bit of Easy Rider in it,” Henry says, accurately.