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

by Devin McKinney

  The hospital announces on the nineteenth that he will leave in a few days. But something changes, and Henry, despite being listed in fair to satisfactory condition, is held for further observation.

  Eventually he feels better, and on Christmas, after sixteen days in the hospital, he returns home. “I’m not going down the chimney yet,” Henry promises. But it will be, he allows, “a quiet Christmas.”

  * * *

  The feeble, bony-legged bastard will not quit. A few days into January, he begins rehearsals for yet another new play, Lanny Flaherty’s Showdown at the Adobe Motel, about the reunion of two elderly rodeo stunt riders in a run-down lodge off a Dallas highway. Between days, he flies to Omaha for a celebration in his honor at the Community Playhouse. Perhaps he tells his friends there he’ll see them again.

  Showdown opens at the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 10. Henry is almost never offstage. The New York Times’s Frank Rich finds poignancy in Henry’s playing his true age onstage: “He walks in a stooped posture, leaning heavily on a cane”; his voice resembles “a distant radio signal.”

  The cane works as a prop, but the stoop is for real. As are the ebbing, quavering tones, and the deliberation with which Henry must manipulate his limbs. Many in the audience and backstage are distracted from the performance by their own fear that Fonda will collapse; indeed, a doctor warns Shirlee that if Henry isn’t taken home, he might die on the stage.

  The play ends with the star alone, in a chair, looking at the baby he holds in his arms. From out in the hushed dark, Rich sees Fonda’s face change from the ravaged, spotted countenance of an old man into “a peaceful, childlike death mask.”

  Henry struggles through twenty-four performances. On March 1, 1981, he takes his last bow and leaves his last stage. Bent, agonized, and on his feet.

  * * *

  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces on March 29 that Henry Fonda will receive a special award, “in recognition of his brilliant accomplishments and enduring contribution to the art of motion pictures,” to be presented by Robert Redford on the following night’s Oscar telecast. The president-elect of the United States, Ronald Reagan, as “a former member of the industry,” has also been invited to appear, via taped message.

  The following afternoon, while entering the presidential limousine outside the Washington Hilton, Reagan is shot by John Hinckley. The Oscar show is delayed by one night. Reagan, conscious and stabilized after touch-and-go surgery, insists that his message run as scheduled. He watches from bed as his prerecorded likeness greets the nation and blesses the event, and Henry Fonda treads lightly on weakened legs to address a monumental ovation, a collective fare-thee-well.

  The convergence is apt, even poetic: two men long connected by lines of fate, each at death’s door as they bookend the Oscars with twin emotional climaxes. But one is receding into twilight, the other just beginning his time in the sun.

  Reagan circles back to us, a smiling, abiding ghost. It is no accident that his moment arrives just now. He is corrective to the recrimination and self-disgust that have characterized America, its psyche and culture, since the 1960s. He is Hollywood Man, tall in the saddle and shooting movie quotes from the hip. He incarnates the conservative wish for an earlier, nobler (and whiter) America, with a revitalized belief in the American exceptionalism that Fonda’s watchful, dark-minded, representative man hated on instinct and opposed in action.

  It can seem as though Reagan has been standing behind Fonda all these years, waiting patiently for him, and the liberalism he represents, to age out. He was born six years after Henry, also in the Middle West. He got into movies on the death of a Fonda friend. The two were social acquaintances throughout the 1940s, when Reagan ascended to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild. She’s Working Her Way Through College, a 1952 remake of The Male Animal, stars Reagan as Professor John Palmer, a rewrite of Fonda’s Tommy Turner. Three years later, Reagan, as host of General Electric Theater, introduced Fonda’s TV movie Clown.

  But if he has always held Henry’s coat as an actor, politically Reagan has triumphed at every point. He was on the winning side in the HUAC–Hollywood episode. In 1966, he challenged incumbent Edmund G. Brown for the California governor’s office, and in 1970, he defended it against State Assemblyman Jesse Unruh; Fonda supported the Democrats, and they lost decisively.

  Ten years later, the day after Reagan’s presidential landslide, Henry said this: “I’m desolate. I think it is a worse tragedy than Milhous Nixon.” He amplified this the following year. Reagan is “talking a language that people haven’t heard for a long time and it impresses them. I listen to a Reagan speech and want to throw up!”

  The president, assuming he is aware of these sentiments, will bear no obvious grudge: Among the first responses to Fonda’s death will be a gracious statement from the Oval Office. But such magnanimity costs Reagan nothing, for he knows his influence on the American quest will finally dwarf any exerted or even dreamed of by Henry Fonda. These coming years will be his, and he’s been waiting for them a long time—ever since the night Ross Alexander blew his brains out in Beverly Hills.

  * * *

  On April 6, 1981, Henry enters Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego for an exploratory heart catheterization. A month later, he is back at Cedars-Sinai for a “diagnostic evaluation of his long-term cardiac condition.”

  The evaluation results in another heart surgery. Henry spends his seventy-sixth birthday in the ICU, receiving sedation. On May 20, his pacemaker is replaced, his condition listed as satisfactory.

  He is discharged June 8. For the next three months, he tries his best to rest, while consulting on the manuscript of his autobiography; sitting for a long interview with journalist Lawrence Grobel; and awaiting the release of the film he and Jane shot in New Hampshire the previous summer.

  * * *

  More and more now, he sits in his chair and drifts. In the kitchen, or in the bedroom near the plants. Sleeps, wakes; goes in and out of other realms of seeing.

  Drifts. Jane senses he is “already gone from us on some level.”

  * * *

  Fonda: My Life reaches stores in time for Christmas. It’s a curious production: Though billed as autobiography, it is Fonda’s life “as told to” playwright Howard Teichmann, with the actor placed in the third person. Both Jane and Peter will challenge the book in coming years for its selective arrangement of facts, its illusion of candor.

  It is self-serving and self-acquitting at many points, and so stylistically drab that it might have been designed for the exact purpose of discouraging any future interest in its subject. Many celebrity names are dropped in the book, many backstage stories told, but there is little fresh dirt and the dish is not deep. Still, sales are good and critics respectful, with Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post one of the few to pay the higher respect of straight talk. “Badly written, adulatory, fatuous,” he calls the book. Nonetheless it should be read: “This is Henry Fonda speaking and that is enough.”

  Simultaneously, the Grobel interview appears in Playboy magazine. It is the longest and most revealing talk Fonda has ever given in print, though it often recapitulates—and contradicts—stories told in the book. Both book and interview serve as publicity satellites for Henry’s film with Jane and Kate Hepburn, which now shapes up as a major hit of the holiday season.

  On Golden Pond premieres at the Motion Picture Academy Theater in Beverly Hills on November 18. Henry is too ill to attend, but Jane holds a brief press conference beforehand, saying, “He’s here in spirit. This is perhaps his last film and it may be his best.”

  She can hardly say otherwise. In shooting the picture with her father, Jane has achieved some degree of catharsis; as one of its producers, she hopes it will make money. And though it will not deserve mention alongside Henry Fonda’s best pictures, as a crowd-pleaser it cannot miss. By the time it opens nationwide on January 22, On Golden Pond has already been sanctified as a cl
assic, a symphony of senior sentiment, and Henry Fonda’s last great film.

  * * *

  As the loving husband, sadistic father, and sly curmudgeon Norman Thayer, Henry pauses to regard several photos of himself as a young man. In one, he holds baby Jane and stands next to Frances. Except that for the purposes of fiction, Jane is Norman’s daughter, Chelsea, and Frances, through retouching, becomes a young Katharine Hepburn as his wife, Ethel.

  As Fonda studies his younger self, then his seventy-five-year-old face in a mirror, the frisson is unrelated to the character he plays. It’s created instead by the phenomenon of an actor-icon projecting mortal awareness in real time. Call him “Norman Thayer,” but Henry Fonda is in fact playing, really for the first time, himself—his own iconicity, his own decrepitude and nearness to death. No matter how conscientiously he attempts to embody Norman, with Norman’s unique set of thoughts and worries, Fonda will spend the film cogitating on his own extinction.

  But that’s why we’ve bought the ticket—to see these actors portray themselves as we have come to understand them: Katharine Hepburn, clenched, efficient, indomitable; Jane Fonda, aerobicized woman and frustrated daughter; Henry Fonda, harsh parent and dying man. Everything that is supposed to make On Golden Pond powerful relies on the audience’s perception of these actors, their offscreen crises and accrued personae. Without them, the movie would neither make a fortune nor become beloved: Imagine Gregory Peck as Norman, Angela Lansbury as Ethel, and Faye Dunaway as Chelsea, and imagine a movie no one would remember.

  On Golden Pond delivers the goods. Scenes between Jane and Henry have an edge, produced by the daughter’s palpable terror of her father; they are not exactly dramatic, but they are as compelling as any confessional. Hepburn and Fonda attack Ernest Thompson’s precious dialogue with the industry and hardheadedness of woodpeckers. And it is difficult for even the cynical to resist the story’s primal pull, its canniness.

  But On Golden Pond asks its audience to passively consume sentiment rather than actively engage in feeling. Only Fonda’s performance of misanthropy signals contradiction, complication—life. Not that he undermines the melodrama: In the clinches, he goes mushy and delivers the goods. But he also makes the most out of Norman’s horrible cussedness, his flat determination to treat his daughter like garbage and go to the grave unchanged.

  Given that his physical means are so withered, and director Mark Rydell so uninterested in what cannot be plainly shown, Henry can work only very little of the hidden into the performance. Hiddenness becomes a matter of obfuscating costume (Norman’s eyeglasses and fishing hat), and revelation lies in the anxiety organic to the face of a dwindling man who will never quite be ready to die. Age diminishes nuance in Fonda’s face, but it exposes fear more nakedly than ever. Every smile is a stay against desperation, and the eyes struggle for purchase on a world that is turning unreal.

  On Golden Pond is the second-biggest Hollywood moneymaker of 1981 (after Raiders of the Lost Ark), and probably the biggest, even with inflationary adjustments, of Henry’s career. A large part of that success can be attributed to its frank embrace of morbid sentimentality, but it can be attributed as well to Fonda’s refusal to pretend he is eating sugar rather than sucking a lemon. Were he less abrasive, the audience’s collective skin would crawl up the theater wall. Yet there’s enough leeway for viewers to read Norman’s spitefulness as the ditherings of a geezer who, under his crust, is as lovable as the drunken lynchers of Young Mr. Lincoln.

  As always, the audience is free to turn each of Henry Fonda’s refusals into an affirmation—free to accept his appearance of sincerity, and feel a bit safer with its fears.

  * * *

  Darkness, when it comes, comes quickly. Heart troubles recur in late September, leaving Henry weakened. Throughout October and into November, he remains at home; one of his few journeys outside is to a private studio screening of his and Jane’s movie.

  He refuses at first to reenter the hospital, despite his worsening condition—a stubbornness common to frequently ill people who have decided enough is enough. Jane is on his side, but Shirlee insists. On November 16, Henry agrees to reenter Cedars-Sinai. The stated cause is minor—readjustment of his heart medication—but the days drag on and Henry remains bedridden. Thanksgiving comes and goes. By the end of the month, his release date is still undetermined. As On Golden Pond opens to widespread worship, the speculation is that he may spend the rest of the year in his hospital bed.

  * * *

  Christmas passes, and New Year’s.

  He is sent home in early January. A few weeks later, accepting Henry’s award for Best Performance as an Actor in a Motion Picture—Drama at the Golden Globes, Shirlee says things are looking up: “He’s getting well, he’s painting, he’s walking with a cane.” But Shirlee, some feel, has been in denial for a long time.

  * * *

  March arrives. As predicted by literally everyone, Henry receives the Oscar as the year’s Best Actor. He and Shirlee are watching at home when Sissy Spacek, the previous year’s Best Actress, announces his name. “He just burst into tears,” Shirlee says.

  Jane is on hand to make the acceptance. Upon leaving the stage, she hurries to Chalon Road with her husband and children and presents the award to her father. As wire photos are taken of Henry holding his Oscar, a succession of visitors is allowed in, one at a time, to offer congratulations. Fonda remains seated, swathed in sweaters, blankets, and a thick beard, which he vows he won’t shave until he gets well.

  “This makes me feel very happy,” he says in a high, quiet voice. Though wan, he promises he is “feeling better all the time.”

  After the pictures have been taken and congratulations given, Shirlee asks everyone to allow her husband some rest. “He’s still a very sick man.”

  No doubt Henry has recognized some of his visitors, with others little more to him than shapes and faces, phantoms floating and smiling on waves of color.

  * * *

  “Some days he seems fine,” Shirlee tells an interviewer. “On others, he kind of fades. I just have to play it by ear, hour by hour.”

  A nurse sees Henry five days a week, and Shirlee has a cot near his bed. “If he wants something,” she says, “he asks for it graciously, and he always has a word of thanks.”

  * * *

  On July 8, Henry is back at Cedars-Sinai, this time for treatment of a urinary-tract infection and further adjustment of his medication. He is discharged on the twenty-fourth, and he spends the next sixteen days at home. They are the last he will spend outside a hospital.

  * * *

  Periods of relative lucidity alternate with days of disconnection, times when his mind leaves the land of the floating faces.

  West, past the mountains to the sky, orange and blue. East, where lies Omaha, where lie the graves of his mother and father.

  * * *

  He is rehospitalized on August 8 for further unspecified heart treatments.

  Three days later he is reported stable and in intensive care. Shirlee, Jane, and Peter are with him. Hospital spokesman Larry Baum says any life-prolonging measures will be determined by the family and doctors, when and if they become necessary.

  * * *

  Shapes, faces, colors.

  * * *

  News items on his condition appear daily. The media are on death watch.

  Three days after reentering the hospital, Henry takes a turn for the worse. His condition is downgraded to serious. He is fading fast. Yet he remains conscious and responsive.

  * * *

  Drifts.

  Story’s almost over.

  But I have seen the elephant.

  * * *

  The shape leans over him and smiles. The face asks how he feels. He says he is fine. He says he feels no pain.

  * * *

  Henry dies at 7:55 on the morning of August 12, 1982. The certified cause is cardiorespiratory arrest—“respiratory failure brought on by heart disease.” Shirlee is at his bedside;
Jane and Peter are en route to the hospital.

  Later that day, wife and children gather outside the Chalon Road house for a brief announcement to the press.

  “He had a good night,” Shirlee says. “He talked with all of us and he was conscious at all times. He woke up this morning, he sat up, and just stopped breathing.”

  * * *

  Obituaries are run on the late news, and statements of tribute heard from Barbara Stanwyck, Charlton Heston, Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Jane Alexander, David Rintels, and others. Cedars-Sinai is flooded with calls from admirers wishing to send flowers and condolences. “People really loved him,” says a hospital spokeswoman.

  From President Reagan come these words:

  Nancy and I were deeply saddened to learn of Henry Fonda’s passing today. Henry Fonda was a true professional, dedicated to excellence in his craft, whose skill and precision as an actor entertained millions. Throughout his long and distinguished career Henry Fonda graced the screen with a sincerity and accuracy which made him a legend. We will miss Henry and extend a deep sympathy to his family.

  In the USSR, the government paper Izvestia reports the death of “a noted American actor.” Corriere della Sera of Milan, Italy’s largest daily newspaper, remembers Fonda as “a democratic figure in the jungle of the movie world.” La Stampa of Turin calls him a “civil and proud hero.”

  “I’ve just lost my best friend,” Jimmy Stewart says.

  * * *

  A week later, the contents of Henry’s will—executed on January 22, 1981—are announced. It bequeaths $200,000 to daughter Amy Fonda Fishman, with the remainder of the estate and all personal effects going to Shirlee. The stipulation is made that, should Shirlee die within ninety days, the estate will go to the Omaha Community Playhouse. No bequests are made to Jane or Peter, on presumption of their financial independence.

  Henry’s eyes will be donated to the Manhattan Eye Bank.

  As for burial or funeral services, there will be none. Henry Fonda has specified, in the plainest language, that his bodily remains be “promptly cremated and disposed of without ceremony of any kind.”