“I presume y’all know who I am.” The opening of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), with John Ford (in beret) directing. (Photofest)
“I never saw a man mourn for a companion more than he did for her.” (Photofest)
Fonda with Frances and stepdaughter Pan on the set of Blockade (1938). Her father’s bequest made Pan one of the wealthiest heiresses in America. (Photofest)
With Peter and Jane, before they started talking back. (Photofest)
Darryl F. Zanuck, c. 1940, minus cigar and polo mallet. (Photofest)
Shooting The Grapes of Wrath with John Ford, late 1939. Fellow Fox star Alice Faye visits. (Photofest)
“They’re all gone ’r dead.” Fonda, John Carradine, and John Qualen in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Preston Sturges shows Fonda how to take a flying leap for The Lady Eve (1941). (Photofest)
With Harry Morgan in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Director William A. Wellman’s instruction to Fonda: “Don’t shave.” (Photofest)
Receiving the Bronze Star from Vice-Admiral G. D. Murray, Marianas Islands, August 1945. Fonda will soon go home to a depressed wife, needy children, Darryl Zanuck, and a paternity suit. He can’t wait. (Photofest)
Frances and Henry at the Hollywood premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, a love story set in a mental hospital. Late 1945. (Photofest)
The real Wyatt Earp was a pimp and a killer. But John Ford printed the legend, and made a classic. Fonda dances with Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine (1946). (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Two manic-depressives writing a comedy: Tom Heggen and Josh Logan, 1947. (Photofest)
Onstage with Jocelyn Brando and David Wayne in Mister Roberts (1948). Note the false tropical sweat. (Photofest)
Susan Blanchard, late 1940s. (Photofest)
Henry and Susan on the town, c. 1954. “She was very young herself,” Jane said, “and I often think of the sacrifices she must have made for us.” (Photofest)
“Death in the guise of marriage and family”: onstage with Leora Dana in Point of No Return (1951). (Photofest)
Fonda (onstage with Lloyd Nolan) declined the role of Norman Maine in the remake of A Star Is Born to play Lt. Barney Greenwald in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953). (Photofest)
In John Ford’s film of Mister Roberts (1955), with William Powell and Jack Lemmon. The director was drunk, the star miserable, the movie a huge hit. (Photofest)
Fonda, Bogart, and Bacall in The Petrified Forest for television, 1955. (Photofest)
Romance in the ruins: with Afdera Franchetti, Rome, late 1955, soon after they met. (Photofest)
And five years later: the faces say it all. (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
“The somnambulistic quality of a bad dream”: The Wrong Man (1957). (Photofest)
On set with Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart. “I bought a story called Rear Window,” said Josh Logan in 1955. “We were going to shoot it in one of the apartment districts in New York, with Henry Fonda making it in the daytime while he appeared in Roberts at night. But then I got involved in other matters.” (Photofest)
The holdout: as Juror No. 8 in 12 Angry Men (1957). (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Opposite Anne Bancroft in Two for the Seesaw (1958). Playwright William Gibson called the production “the most odious experience of my life.” (Photofest)
The Deputy (1959), costarring Allen Case. “The thought of having an annuity from the residuals is very satisfying,” Fonda said. (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Rehearsing A Gift of Time (1962) with costar Olivia de Havilland and director Garson Kanin. Peter’s telegram to Henry on opening night: “Get out there and kill yourself.” (Photofest)
Pod person: Advise and Consent (1962). (Photofest)
Egghead: The Best Man (1964), with Cliff Robertson and Kevin McCarthy. (Photofest)
President: shooting Fail-Safe (1964) with director Sidney Lumet. (Photofest)
The Fondas at Grand Central Terminal during filming of Jane’s Sunday in New York (1963). (Photofest)
Lost in the sixties: as a panty-hose mogul in Sex and the Single Girl (1964) …
… as a spy in The Dirty Game (1966) …
… as a widower in Yours, Mine and Ours (1968, with Louise Troy) …
… and as a cop in Madigan (1968, with James Whitmore, left). (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
With Shirlee at a charity function, c. 1966. “Fonda is definitely a loner,” she said. “I love people and I love parties…. I force him to go.” (Photofest)
In his East 74th Street town house, mid-1960s. (Photofest)
“Now that you’ve called me by name …” Sergio Leone (in white hat at right) directing Once Upon a Time in the West, spring 1968. (Photofest)
The virility of an aging conqueror: as Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). (Photofest)
Henry and kids after a performance of Our Town, December 1969. (Photofest)
Prime-time blues: on TV in The Smith Family (1971). “It was hell,” Fonda said. (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Fonda gave this 1969 pencil drawing, Third Floor Rear, to an Albuquerque family whose daughter was a production assistant on My Name Is Nobody. (Photofest)
Clarence Darrow (1974). His last great performance. (Jerry Ohlinger’s)
Leaving Lenox Hill Hospital after his pacemaker operation, May 7, 1974. (Photofest)
Elizabeth Taylor, Warren Beatty, and Lauren Bacall were among those who rushed to Washington, D.C., for the late 1977 opening of First Monday in October, costarring Jane Alexander (back row, far left). (Photofest)
“The loons! The loons!” With Jane and Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond (1981). (Photofest)
The Best Actor, March 30, 1982. “I don’t want it because I don’t believe in it,” Fonda had once said of the Oscars. Hearing his name, he burst into tears. (ITV/Rex USA)
ALSO BY DEVIN McKINNEY
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
About the Author
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, which The New York Review of Books said “carries sentences not unlike those Norman Mailer used to write forty years ago.” He has written for The Village Voice, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The American Prospect, and Film Quarterly. He lives in southern Pennsylvania.
THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST. Copyright © 2012 by Devin McKinney. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Rob Grom
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
McKinney, Devin.
The man who saw a ghost: the life and work of Henry Fonda / Devin McKinney.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-00841-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01776-5 (e-book)
1. Fonda, Henry, 1905–1982. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.F558M35 2012
791.43'028'0924—dc23
[B]
2012028274
eISBN 9781250017765
First Edition: October 2012
* Platte: derived from the French word for flat. Nebraska: “flat water” to the Otoe Indians.
* In fact, not all of these happened to be on Broadway in the spring of 1927. Suffice it to say that Henry saw many shows in a short time.
* Sullavan’s otologist, Dr. Julius Lempert, believed she had “deliberately developed for her work what I should call a cello voice, which was not her natural voice, because she could hear low tones better than high ones.” Sullavan’s donation of both her outer and middle ears for research, Lempert said, would be a great boon to science. See New York Times, January 9, 1960.
* There had been, in 1921, the manslaughter trial of Fatty Arbuckle; in 1922, the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor; in 1923, the asylum death of drug-addicted action star Wallace Reid;
in 1924, Charlie Chaplin’s marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl, and their sensational divorce trial three years later.
* The official cause of Brokaw’s death was heart attack, but others believe he drowned, by intention or alcoholic accident, in the sanitarium’s pool. See FML, 119.
* Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Although Henry Fonda is a pleasant actor with an engaging emotional sincerity, he is not the chap to pick a placid script out of the doldrums.” See New York Times, 9/24/1937.
* A vignette of Fonda at this juncture appears in Henry Somers’s 2004 novel A Subway Ride to the Pacific, about two New York buddies who enter the army in 1943. One of them is stunned to see, among the students in a Hawaii classroom, Henry Fonda.
“Some of the guys found it hard to believe that he was there, in person. They asked if he was really in the class or just visiting. ‘I’m just another student,’ Fonda replied, ‘and I don’t expect to be treated any different.’ … Here was Fonda. His shirt opened at the neck, sleeves rolled up and wearing wrinkled khakis. He was just another serviceman and that was the way he wanted it.” See Somers, 84.
* Jane never uses Barbara Thompson’s name, but hers was the only paternity action ever brought against Fonda.
* An effect memorable for its use in Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, released earlier the same year.
* After describing the fishing trip (including a whorehouse jaunt) in salacious detail in his autobiography, Fonda records, with some wonderment, that Frances had chosen not to go along—begging the question of why any wife would accompany her husband on what was clearly planned as an all-male spree. See FML, 176–77; Syracuse Herald-American, 1/4/1948.
† In 1945, Hayward had sold the Hayward-Deverich Agency and its client list to Wasserman.
* There is a 1958 teleplay version, starring Charlton Heston.
* The first claim is certainly false (many, including Fonda, said Ford saw the play multiple times), and the second probably so, with the “homosexual” bit making us wonder again how repressed were Logan’s true desires: accuse your enemy, etc.
* The show’s full title was Henry Fonda Presents The Star and the Story. Amazingly, given still-recent events, Dick Powell was among its coproducers. See Fresno Bee, 7/20/1954.
* Henry was among the celebrity clients of pioneering New York yoga instructor Blanche DeVries. See Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (New York: Viking, 2010), 339. See also Lowell Sun, 11/30/1950, and NBN, 51.
* Gibson’s novel The Cobweb is set in a thinly veiled version of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, where both his wife and Knight had worked.
* However, in these years Fonda was a prominent left-wing voice in radio. He played a scientist in “Rehearsal” (broadcast on Independence Day, 1946), an installment of The Fifth Horseman, a miniseries arguing for United Nations control of nuclear weapons. A Man with a Cause (aired May 17, 1948), with Fonda as a government official, concerns the plight of Holocaust victims and other European refugees seeking passage to the United States. Sponsored by the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons, it addressed the postwar rise in American xenophobia, particularly the prejudice against European Jewry so often implicit in anti-Communist rhetoric.
* The bill was defeated by the southern congressional contingent, as it would be when Gahagan reintroduced it two years later.
* “Perhaps I was wrong in McCarthy’s case,” Kennedy would admit later—in words narrated by Fonda in the 1966 NBC special The Age of Kennedy. “Perhaps we were not as sensitive as some and should have acted sooner. That is a reasonable indictment that falls on me as well.”
* Stunned to find his name in Heller’s novel, Fonda talks to Richard Brooks, flagged in 1963 as most likely writer-director of the film version. “I’d like to be in your movie,” he tells Brooks, “but I guess the Henry Fonda part is the only one I could play.” What a pioneering meta-moment that would have made. See Lowell Sunday Sun, 10/20/1963.
* In the fall of 1964, Fonda joined an “airborne political road show” for the Democrats, appearing at airport rallies throughout the western United States, and he narrates a syndicated TV special called “Sorry, Senator Goldwater … The Country Just Can’t Risk It,” which ran days before the election. See Long Beach Independent, 10/21/1964; The (Madison) Capital Times, 10/30/1964.
* “The subject of fat is almost an obsession with me,” Logan said in 1953. “I hate it to such a degree that it affects my attitude toward the world.” See The New Yorker, 4/4/1953, 38.
* Offended by its gamut of sex scenes, from incest to lesbianism to rape, Bennett Cerf—chairman of Random House, and a friend of Henry—refused to publish the novel. Though the book’s narrative only distantly parallels the Fonda family saga, Henry was encouraged to consider suing for defamation; he declined, telling Cerf, “I don’t have time for nonsense like that.” See Henry Guthrie, The Exhibitionist (New York: Fawcett, 1968 [1967]); Time, 10/27/1967 (available at http://w.w.w.time.com/time/magazine/,article/0,9171,841150,00html); San Antonio Express-News, 1/16/1972.
* Nor is it coincidence that Henry narrated, around the same time, a TV documentary called The Really Big Family, about a week in the life of a middle-class Seattle couple with eighteen children.
* As a screenwriter for hire, McCoy had cowritten two of Henry’s early vehicles—The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Wild Geese Calling.
* In his autobiography, Fonda says he was hesitant to accept the USO invitation because he didn’t agree with the war (FML, 292–93); but at the time, his support of U.S. policy was quite clear.
* Jane and Kerry knew each other from the Winter Soldier hearings, but a photo supposedly showing the two together at an early 1970s antiwar rally proved to be a fake.
* During the filming, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Mickey Knox, who wrote the movie’s English dialogue, recalls Fonda’s “rare show of emotion” at the news—one way in which the outside world of political murder and social chaos contributed to the alchemy of this masterpiece. See Mickey Knox, The Good, the Bad and the Dolce Vita: The Adventures of an Actor in Hollywood, Paris, and Rome (New York: Nation, 2004), 265.
* Whitmore had already given Will Rogers the solo treatment, and William Windom would soon portray war correspondent Ernie Pyle in a one-man show.
* There may also have been a genetic component: The younger of Henry’s two sisters, Herberta, died after two open-heart surgeries. See Syracuse Herald-Journal, 9/5/1969.
* TV comedy host Steve Allen, it was announced, would replace Fonda on the tour. Requests for refunds would be honored. See Athens Messenger, 3/21/1976.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 48
