The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda
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Authors: Devin McKinney
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Actors & Entertainers, #Humor & Entertainment, #Movies, #Biographies, #Reference, #Actors & Actresses
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For my father
Contents
Frontispiece:
The Grapes of Wrath
2.
The Elephant and the Black Dog
9.
New Frontier and Hidden Agenda
12.
Omaha, 1919
Fonda on Film, Stage, and Television
List of Illustrations
Frontispiece | The Grapes of Wrath |
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate” (1860)
I now have a theory that our existence is a phantom—that it died, long ago, probably of old age—that the thing is a ghost. So the unreality of its composition—its phantom justice and make-believe juries and incredible judges.
—Charles Fort,
Wild Talents
(1932)
Prologue
The Return of Frank James
Once upon a time, he strode through meadows, was chased by Mohawks, buried the ax in the stump, and read from the law book as if it were the Bible. In all eras, he ran, galloped, slouched, and rounded into and out of the Hollywood dream of American history.
As the prairie town’s tin star, he was hard but clean, proficient but haunted. As the comic victim of romantic love, he took pratfalls for lustful females. In war, he led armies and studied his thoughts while other men whacked maps with sticks. Other times, he was the loner, drifter, killer—the dark shape cornered with a gun, or the parolee flattened by sunlight against a scorched expanse of heartland. Even when falsely charged, he was the criminal of his own imagination, because he could so easily have done what they accused him of—robbed the bank, or committed the murder.
He would appear in different places, looking familiar but never quite the same, sometimes leading the crowd, sometimes off to the side, an American artist caught up in representing his country’s history—the history of centuries or of hours ago—sometimes its forceful subject, sometimes its mere object. At his noblest, he embodied the highest promises of democracy. At his darkest, he was the quiet, antisocial, anti-
pluribus
American, the American whose “Don’t tread on me” meant just that:
Leave me alone, or I might kill you.
* * *
You find Henry Fonda in every corner of the mythic history and imaginative geography mapped by the movies. Like any star of such duration, he puts his name to many bad movies along the way; the career in total recalls John Berryman’s remark about the collected works of Stephen Crane: “majesty and trash scrambled together.” But in the fullness of time, he creates an image of the national man that is kaleidoscopic, frightening, and wildly improbable.
His best performances—
You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Wrong Man, Fail-Safe, Once Upon a Time in the West,
even
The Lady Eve
—are animated by the dark energy of contradiction. Viewers sense a man living in public and private dimensions at once, and recognize a continuity of mysteries in the actor. Fonda becomes the body and voice of the satisfied man’s paranoia, the good man’s bad urge, the hero’s despairing shade, and the patriot’s doubting conscience. In him and through him, the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.
* * *
“I suppose one human being never really knows much about another.” Asked in 1966 to characterize Fonda, his friend of almost three decades, John Steinbeck offered this shrugging axiom. But read on: “My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict.”
Everything that matters about Fonda is in those words, and we want to get behind them—seek the sources of those conflicts, that violence, the imprisoned aura; to watch the face as opposites collide, the eyes as they search; to apprehend, finally, the truth of such a tribute. Our hunch is that Fonda, like any artist who leaves a line of clues across many years and a vast collection of works, can be read—if we devise a language to read him.
* * *
This is a critical biography, in that it does not find its subject to be either saint or simpleton; a psychological biography, in that it finds many things to have been acted out rather than plainly spoken; a straight biography, in that it observes decent constraints on how far one may veer from fact in pursuit of a hot surmise; a crooked biography, in that many interesting data, anecdotes, postulates, and possibilities have been left out because they contributed insufficiently to the whole—that being, we hope, a broad, deep, comprehensible sense of Fonda, the essence of his life and the weight of his work.
As I see it, I’ve gone after the story. Every life makes its own kind of sense, and a book like this is useless unless it sifts fact and perception for the themes of a life formed by character—unless it goes after the story.
The story being, perhaps, this: that Fonda was a solitary man who distinguished himself in the most public of arts; that therein lay his tension and his style; that his conflicts made him a vital artist and emotional mystery, a rather baffling and altogether fascinating man. And that repeatedly over the course of a long and lauded career, he pulled off the amazing feat of being not only what he appeared to be but also what he didn’t appear to be.
His solitude was deep and his style glamorous enough to constitute one ideal of the American character. The audience embraced it because it was strong, appealing, and reducible to its most favorable qualities. Yet Fonda’s best portraits not only hold up but grow richer because the years reveal a pentimento of sorrow and anger beneath their surfaces. Like great novels, his great performances yield themselves to time, to contexts of national and personal history.
All of which is to say that if Americans opened their doors to Fonda for his virtue and sincerity, they kept his company for a deeper reason—the suspicion that, wherever he’d come from, wherever he might go, he traveled with ghosts.
Part 1
1
Springfield, 1839
