The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (10 page)

After a few months, Henry rents a bungalow with Jimmy Stewart, his comrade from Casa Gangrene, and another stage veteran recruited for pictures. The two live, briefly, like boys whose pockets bulge with candy money. They double-date with Lucille Ball and Ginger Rogers, have nights out at the Cocoanut Grove, drive Henry’s Ford roadster into the hills. They fly a large model plane made of balsa wood in their backyard—a Martin bomber they’ve built themselves, whose construction was begun back in New York, and which Stewart transports to Hollywood by Pullman car.

It is a strange place, a strange life. The skeins of connection and coincidence between professionals in Henry’s new, suddenly smaller world can seem unending. Still new in town, he lunches, costars, and house-hunts with ex-wife Sullavan. By this time, she has already been married to and divorced from the director William Wyler. Wyler will soon be directing Fonda in
Jezebel
—alongside Bette Davis, whom Fonda kissed behind the Princeton Stadium in 1927. Leland Hayward, Sullavan’s next husband, is agent to them all.

Then there is the brief, brutal saga of Ross Alexander and Aleta Freel. Henry knows them from Falmouth and Mount Kisco, and he stood as best man at their wedding; soon after, Freel’s name would follow Fonda’s on the roll of the short-lived Stage Associates. The couple have left for Hollywood in advance of Henry, and both are under studio contract. Alexander, costar of the Errol Flynn actioner
Captain Blood,
is even approaching a certain level of stardom. But on December 7, 1935, Freel shoots herself in the head. Her husband, rushing toward the sound, discovers her body by stumbling over it. He claims his wife had been despondent over the failure of a recent screen test.

Within days, Alexander is back at work. Louella Parsons writes admiringly, “The day following the suicide of Mrs. Alexander, Ross, knowing that Warner Brothers needed him in an important scene that called for many extras, astonished everybody by appearing on the set and insisting on going on.” Yet barely more than a year later, Alexander will kill himself at his home, during a gathering of friends but out of their sight, also with a bullet to the head.

The one known outcome of the suicides—the first of many to strike close to Henry Fonda—is that a young radio announcer, hailing from Illinois by way of Iowa, receives his Hollywood break. A Warner Brothers casting director places Ronald Reagan in a western role meant for Alexander, feeling the actors’ voices are similar.

If Aleta Freel had not killed herself, would Ross Alexander have lived? If Ross Alexander had lived, would Ronald Reagan have gotten into the movies? If Ronald Reagan hadn’t gotten into the movies, would he have become president?

*   *   *

There’s another thing to be pointed out about Hollywood and Henry Fonda, the same thing that accounts for Ronald Reagan’s entry into film: the sound of the voice. By 1935, the movies had talked for eight years, and it was accepted that voice as much as body defined the actor, that one could not become a star without distinctive tones. There is not an icon of the Hollywood 1930s whose voice is not central to his or her legend: Tracy’s gruffness, Hepburn’s clenched jaw, Grant’s suave cadence, Cagney’s bullet phrasing.

Fonda and his contemporaries moved into the space left by the stars whose mystique was built solely on movement and expression, and who now found they were unable to seduce an audience with its ears wide open. David Thomson notes the paradox that the coming of sound placed an unprecedented emphasis on silence—that is, on the trade-off between a voice and the silence that might precede or follow it, or the silence sounded in the timbre of the voice itself. He writes of how “a generation of favorites slipped away because they did not have access to that emotional quietness, and the allure that attaches to any mystery or reticence in a medium that seems to be giving you all the visual evidence.”

Fonda has that access, that allure. It’s partly the voice that leaves people at a loss for how to describe him. Here is a young man of uncommon reserve, so much of whom is implied in silence, lack of show. He seems smarter than Cooper, more virtuous than Gable, more melancholy than McCrea, more elusive than Tracy. Viewers who haven’t seen anything quite like him before, who lack better words to describe it, call it “modest,” “honest,” “simple.” But how do we describe simplicity in a way that does justice to its complexity? How do we prove the existence of the invisible, or translate a message in vanishing ink? Words like
simple
fall short when applied to Fonda, because they are asked to describe something not at all obvious—something that is there to be felt, yet is not there to be seen.

*   *   *

So Henry has made it inside the gate. The future begins here. The next few years will fly past, and parts will accumulate. It will be determined by the pooled wisdom of Hollywood that he is to be taken seriously. He’ll earn high regard for professional principle and integrity in performance. He’ll begin the process of defining himself as a screen actor of rare and troubling depth, an American institution, a worthy bore.

His talent has barely begun to be tapped. Greatness lies ahead. But our theme to this point has been a sad one: that by the time Fonda reaches the screen and is for the first time widely seen—by our ancestors and proxies in the American movie houses of 1935, those encountering a complete unknown named Henry Fonda—basic parts of the man have already flowered and withered.

“Youth is a time of living violently,” Henry’s Falmouth colleague Norris Houghton writes, “and tears belong as much to violent living as do laughter and shouting.” As a man, Fonda has been outgunned in love; as an actor, he’s gone from dusty Omaha to sandy Cape Cod, dour Manhattan to pixilated Hollywood. He’s been near enough to the edge of personal despair and professional failure to have come within spotting distance of his own abyss. He’s had other losses—deep, personal ones. Extremities of emotion have been exposed, and now are hidden. So Fonda’s subsequent career will be an expression less of discovery and attainment, the all-American pleasure in having and being, than of loss and wonder—qualities of estrangement and searching seeming to sound from a distant, different America that lurks somewhere inside the country, and inside ourselves. With the passage of a few years and a few key parts, we, the audience, begin to engage deeply with Henry Fonda.

This is the moment before that begins to happen. His first movie audiences have to wonder if they are seeing in this young actor a new face, or an old apparition; a fresh persona, or a glowing plainsman who, both young and old, straddles ages with those first words cast into the future by an old man’s younger self, the wild boy now vanished:

“Be ashamed, an old man like you.”

4

The Big Soul

Let Us Live

“The only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda,” James Baldwin wrote, recalling the Hollywood movies he saw as a youth in the 1930s and 1940s. “I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in
The Grapes of Wrath
, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film:
white men don’t walk like that!
and he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away from the camera.”

Why
couldn’t
a black adolescent in a big eastern city see something of himself in white, middle western Henry Fonda? Fonda, as Baldwin saw it, was not just walking away; he was showing us his ass. Baldwin was writing of the few small, useful things he’d been able to derive as a child from his country’s movies, those images of defiance that contributed to his “first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me.” For Fonda to show us his ass, using the walk that to Baldwin and his friend identified him as a fellow outcast, meant he was making a small refusal that was recognizable to them alone.

Fonda might have smiled to hear such talk. Yet metaphor, the possibility of many meanings—colored blood, small refusals—arises from a great actor as organically and unconsciously as it does from a rich novel or a suggestive painting.

Emerging from the heart of the country as one talented American—really, no more than that—he reemerges on its movie screen as one version of the perfected American man. But Fonda spends these years focusing inward, on his own dilemma, as well as outward to find his place in the greater context of politics, mass movements, wars; and the processes are interlocked. What is remarkable is how far his personal journey becomes one in which millions of Americans feel they can share, an open road along which they see their country passing and an image of themselves approaching, wearing Henry Fonda’s face.

Fonda’s men are antiheroes who decide they must commit to a common cause—less because the cause is right than because isolation of the kind they feel natural with implies, finally, surrender and death. Fonda’s hero must realize the degree to which he is not just the
unum
in the American equation but also one of the
pluribus;
realize, though it galls him, that he is—truly, dreadfully, awesomely—an American.

*   *   *

By mid-1936, Fonda is a watched man, almost famous, a recognizable presence and replaceable head in the Hollywood arcade. Handsome, unattached, he goes out often and is linked to various women.

No doubt some of the links are real, albeit temporary, while others are the conjurings of publicity wizards. The gossips have gone so far as to announce in October 1935 that he is engaged—to Shirley Ross, an Omaha-born starlet who has appeared in
Bombshell, Hollywood Party, What Price Jazz,
and other musical comedies (as well as
Manhattan Melodrama,
the picture Dillinger was leaving when G-men plugged him in a Chicago alley). The affair is brief and insignificant, and the engagement talk vanishes like smoke.

Henry is still a boy in many ways, and he has his fun. He may be lonesome nonetheless, and crave stability over variety. In early 1936, he—or his PR team—begins advertising for a wife. “Henry Fonda says it is all right with him if he gets married by next Christmas,” claims an article syndicated in May. “He has just bought a home in Beverly Hills, and although he admits there is no immediate prospect of a Mrs. Henry Fonda, the house is already [
sic
] for her.”

On July 10, he boards a boat bound for England, in execution of a Walter Wanger loan-out.
Wings of the Morning
is to be filmed at the brand-new Denham Studios of UK film mogul Alexander Korda, and on locations from Surrey to Killarney. A love story with a horse-racing backdrop, it pivots on Gypsy curses, mistaken identities, and a beautiful lead actress in male drag—she being Annabella, sexy and French, who spends the first part of the film flirting with Fonda while disguised as an adolescent duke.

Though it’s the first Technicolor picture produced in Europe,
Wings
will be received without excitement; Henry will collect more of the wan plaudits to which he is growing accustomed. (“One of the most personable, sincere, and able of our young leading men,” says one critic; you could fall asleep reading Fonda’s good reviews.) He has taken the job only because it offers him his first chance to go overseas. He lodges at the Savoy Hotel, then moves to a cottage in Buckinghamshire.

One day, Henry is introduced to a group of wealthy female American tourists who have been invited to the set. In their number is a striking young woman of patrician bearing. Introduced as Frances Seymour Brokaw, she is a friend of the producer’s wife, currently touring Europe with a chaperone. She’s twenty-eight, with a lithe outline, penetrating countenance, and confident manners. Her blue eyes, though large and candid, are also veiled, as if they focus on some farther, sadder reality.

*   *   *

Born in Brockville, Ontario, on April 14, 1908, Frances comes from a family well placed in eastern society. She is related by marriage to such New York dynasties as the Pells, Stuyvesants, and Fishes; her father, Eugene Ford Seymour, descends from English royalty of the Tudor era; and her mother, the former Sophie Bower, has ancestry tracing back to Samuel Adams and the Revolutionary War.

There’s money, glamour, and influence behind the Seymours, but Frances rides the caboose of the gravy train, for her father has squandered most of the family’s capital. Frances’s mother is a gentle, long-suffering woman for whom no one has an ill word, but there is disagreement on the nature of the father. One biographer characterizes Ford Seymour as “an alcoholic with a violent temper,” while another calls him “a part-time poet, with delicate, refined features … reserved and rather shy.” Jane Fonda remembers her grandfather as “an exceedingly charming, devilish gentleman,” while noting the suggestion of Frances’s psychiatrists that he may have been a paranoid schizophrenic. To her doctors, Frances described an increasingly impoverished Seymour home, barred windows, and rooms wired shut by a patriarch slowly going mad. She claimed to have been molested at the age of eight by the one visitor allowed to enter the house—a piano tuner.