The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (18 page)

By the end of 1945, an estimated 140,000 people have been killed by the bomb, either at the moment or during the aftermath. Robert Rasmus and thousands of others are spared an invasion and get to return home, with or without their specters.

From there, the latest battle for the fate of the free world winds down fairly quickly. On August 13, American papers carry a picture of Henry receiving the Bronze Star from Vice Adm. G. D. Murray. August 14 is V-J Day. Fonda learns of the Japanese surrender the next day, and he is ordered to report at once to Washington, D.C.

On August 16, Fonda steps off the
Curtiss
and begins his journey back to the States. Five days later, he stars in the first of four live weekly installments of a radio show,
The Navy Hour;
in addition to hosting, he narrates and performs in war sketches and battle dramatizations. September 11, he is detached from the Office of Public Information and sent to the naval station in Los Angeles; November 10, he receives his Certificate of Satisfactory Service from the navy—the reserve officer’s equivalent of a discharge—and the next day is officially released to inactive duty.

But Henry Fonda will remain a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy until 1953, when he resigns his commission on the grounds that he is “overage in rank.” The resignation is accepted.

*   *   *

One of Fonda’s essences as actor and man is the contrast between his emotional being and what appears on the surface, his hidden and public faces. When he is most turbulent inside, he may be most immobile outside; as the hidden man screams, the visible man grows inhumanly quiet. His greatest acting comes when the hidden and the visible are forced into contact and the cracks and stresses in the controlled facade come close to breaking the man, the story, the image. It’s then that the specter shows itself, and long moments of doubt and fear are left graven on the eyes and minds of an audience.

Everything about Fonda suggests he is cut out for success in wartime. He has extraordinary self-control, a mind of unique finesse and subtlety, a family military history as spur and incentive, and a belief in America, or his personal version of it. Yet large parts of the man can do nothing but recoil from the spectacle before him. Clearly, to be a success in war, he has—like the other men around him—to exist as much as possible in one aspect of himself: the aspect that is useful, controlled, amoral. He must live as a wholly visible man. The moral residue of his actions is submerged, to resurface in its varied and enigmatic forms as what we have called the hidden.

That is how Fonda the civilian is
accustomed
to living—in repression, denial, control. But seldom has civilian life presented to his senses anything as extreme as war. So in suggesting what war did to Fonda, we have to wonder if he reached his limit—a point where hidden and visible were no longer manageably separate and where an accumulation of the deaths dealt and witnessed overtook his ability to make sense of it.

A silencing of horror has surrounded America’s memory of World War II. The mandate hanging over the men who came back was simple: Hold it in. Therefore, historian Michael Sturma says, “Reactions to combat stress among World War II veterans were most often characterized by emotional reticence and depression.” Apply this to Fonda, who spoke of his military past in dim generalities and lighthearted anecdotes. His intimations of trauma were more than stoic; they were benumbed. His war experience was brought down to dry sarcasm (“impressed the shit out of people”), querulous witnessing (“an eerie sight”), and shallow wonderment (“sort of took me back”).

It’s apparent that Fonda was, in the middle western manner, simply declining to probe his feelings. On the whole, he clearly preferred to leave the subject alone. That is another reason Fonda was “ideal” for this work, for this war: He was inclined to the exact repression of horror that was one of the war’s chief necessities and signal legacies.

When the war ended, he may have looked back and known that he’d played an important role in it. But it’s unclear whether he felt pride or achievement at having done what he sought to do—“to be with the fellows who handle the guns,” “to shoot at Japanese.” We don’t know if war was a trauma Fonda would have preferred to forget, or if it was merely an experience he’d once desired and then, having acquired it, locked it away, as so many others did with their own memories, those horrors experienced by silent men expected to remain silent.

Fonda was, above and beneath all else, a man who remembered. Repression, denial, deflection, and numbness are not erasers of memory, but ways of coping with its persistence; and often the stoic copes with experience that means too much by denying it means anything. Shortly before his death, Fonda was asked by Lawrence Grobel where he kept his Bronze Star.

“Peter lost it,” he said.

Grobel asked if he’d been upset by that.

“No,” Fonda replied. “It meant nothing to me.”

*   *   *

On November 10, 1944, Frances is the subject of a brief line in Dorothy Manners’s Hollywood column: “Mrs. Henry Fonda is off to New York for a spell and has rented an apartment.” On December 18, Louella Parsons picks up the ball: “Mrs. Henry Fonda, who had been desperately ill with flu in New York, arrives in Hollywood tomorrow morning to spend Christmas with her children.”

The five-week sojourn in New York—Jane and Peter back at Tigertail with nannies, husband hunched in a radio room somewhere in the Pacific—may be accounted for by a hospital stay, a reunion with friends, or a romantic assignation. Each of her survivors will agree that Frances had affairs while Henry was at war.

At least one of her lovers becomes known to her children. Jane recalls being told by a friend of her mother’s about a man named Joe, a musician. Frances, the friend says, “was crazy about him.” True to pattern, though, he sounds like bad news—a drinker and “loose cannon.” The friend says Joe brought a gun to Tigertail and shot a hole in the ceiling. Joe may also be the man recalled by Peter as an itinerant artist who briefly occupied the children’s playhouse at Tigertail. Peter says the man taught him to play the harmonica; he doesn’t mention a gun.

Touchingly, both children are pleased at the thought of their mother having an affair. But the liaison ceases, in all probability, when Henry comes home in August 1945. It’s equally probable that Frances and Henry never manage to renew whatever physical relationship they had before the war.

It is always dispiriting to speculate about the sex lives of others, but less so if we accept that sex has something to do with patterns of behavior and the course of lives. Fonda’s autobiography records that, sometime late in 1946, Frances begins administering the household—paying bills, following stocks, answering letters—from the couple’s bed, leaving no room for Henry among the stacks of bills and receipts.

Frances gives no reason. Does she need to? She is pushing Henry out of the sack.

*   *   *

The reason for the expulsion—and Fonda’s reluctance to delve into it—might be found in a forgotten episode stemming from the weeks Henry spent in Imperial Valley, California, in September 1942, filming
Immortal Sergeant.
Almost a year later, in July 1943, Henry found himself the subject of a paternity suit brought by one Barbara Thompson, described in the press as a “twenty-five-year-old brunette divorcée” from Hollywood with four children—the latest of whom, a girl named Sharon, born June 21, was, if the mother could be believed, Fonda’s.

Thompson claimed to have met him at an Imperial Valley nightclub the previous September, introduced by a man from the studio. “I accepted Fonda’s invitation to have a drink,” she said. “We had several of them.” The actor then invited her to his room, where, according to Thompson, he seduced her. “I stayed with him during the remainder of his stay in the Imperial Valley—some two or three weeks.” Thompson’s suit demanded $2,000 a month in child support, $5,000 for medical bills, $10,000 for attorney’s fees, and $2,500 for court costs.

Fonda, of whom the navy would say only that he was “somewhere on the ocean,” issued no statement at first. But Frances did. She was adamant in supporting her husband. “It’s not true,” she said; “I know it’s not true.” Further: “Henry told me he didn’t know the girl, and had never met her.… He denied the charges emphatically and said the suit was ridiculous.” Did she believe him? “Of course I believe him.” A spokesman for Twentieth Century–Fox revealed that Thompson had been in touch with the studio several months before, asking for a fifty-thousand-dollar settlement (later reduced to ten thousand). Only after these demands were refused did Thompson threaten legal action; Fonda, on leave in Hollywood at the time, had said she could “go ahead and sue.”

It then surfaced that Thompson was wanted on a warrant stemming from an incident in Long Beach the previous July 23, just weeks before her alleged meeting with Fonda; the warrant charged her with “failure to appear for trial on disorderly conduct and vagrancy charges.” As this was announced, Thompson’s attorney said his client was “being removed to a hospital because of a nervous condition.” And still more: sometime in 1942, Thompson had wed a serviceman in Honolulu while still legally married to her first husband, and was presently suing to annul the earlier union.

A lull in the case lasted through early October, by which time Fonda had been transferred to the naval air station at Quonset Point. Through his attorneys, he stated that he planned to “exercise the rights given him by the soldier’s and sailor’s civil relief act,” which would allow him to defer any legal action until two months following the end of his service. His commanding officer affirmed Fonda would be unable to leave the base for another three months; Los Angeles judge John Gee Clark said he would not compel Fonda to appear in court for that period of time.

For more than three years, nothing was heard of the case. Then, on December 3, 1946—Fonda had been home for more than a year—it was reported that Thompson had dropped her suit. Lawyers for both parties agreed to make no public disclosure of the details, but papers printed Fonda’s incensed statement. The suit, he claims, “was filed maliciously and without probable cause with the intent to injure me in the esteem of the public.… I certainly rue the day I decided to become an actor. I would have been better off as a farmer.”

And with that, the mysterious Barbara Thompson collected her infant and walked into the Hollywood mist—another ghost, carrying a ghost in its arms.

What truly happened back in Imperial Valley? One would be more than inclined to credit Henry’s enraged denials and dismiss Barbara Thompson as a scheming opportunist were it not for a passing comment in Jane Fonda’s memoir. Several years into his marriage, Jane writes, “my father began having affairs.” Frances, she feels, was ignorant of these until the highly publicized paternity suit; confronted with Barbara Thompson’s claims, she paid the woman to abandon her suit and keep quiet.
*

If Jane’s assertion is true, Henry not only had the affair, but he excoriated his mistress in public, then expected Frances to second his lie while paying to suppress the truth of the betrayal. It rankles now to recall how, in his autobiography, Fonda referenced Frances’s wartime affairs while implying he had none of his own; registered dazed bafflement at being ousted from the conjugal bed—coincidentally, at just the time Barbara Thompson dropped her suit; assumed a martyr’s stance in declining to protest this expulsion; and quoted an anonymous friend to the effect that Henry, despite many amorous invitations, displayed a canine faithfulness to Frances throughout their marriage.

*   *   *

Money may purchase the silence of unwed mothers, but truths will come out in other ways. Before Fonda is even back in mufti, the gossips flash rumors of his divorce. “They say his domestic affairs are not too happy,” concludes a report on Fonda’s Bronze Star; soon after, columnist Harrison Carroll quotes Fonda “angrily [denying] the divorce rumors.” On November 10, Louella Parsons says Frances is in a hospital near Los Angeles, “getting herself a good rest”; the affected casualness cannot fool readers into believing the hospital is anything but a sanitarium.

As for Henry’s latest escape, it may fairly be brought down to an obsession with manure. In the
House Beautiful
pictorial on Tigertail, he claims that the secret to his plentiful produce “‘lies in the fertilizer. You’ve got to spread it around.’ And Hank Fonda, with an acre under cultivation, with a greenhouse to care for, with berry bushes, vegetable gardens, fruit trees and citrus groves to supervise, needs plenty to spread.” Peter recalls that in this period, Henry “was seriously into making the best and the most compost in the greater Los Angeles area.”

Much of Fonda’s publicity just after the war focuses on his devotion to farming, model airplane building, and other escapist pursuits. One journalist claims that “the hottest ‘news’ that came out of our comprehensive hour-and-a-half conversation was that the speedy, gasoline-powered model monoplane which he and [Jimmy] Stewart are building in Henry’s workshop will soon be ready for flight.”

As Henry toils in the sun, devoting himself to the sciences of manure and monoplanes, Frances sits in a dark bedroom, with her key ring and her bills, growing more obsessed with her looks. That is, with losing them; that is, with losing Hank. Grimly preoccupied with the body and all that can be wrong with it, she continues her inculcation of neuroses in Jane and Peter.

At a certain point, Frances’s doctors recommend a hysterectomy. She books a room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. But when Henry goes off on location for John Ford’s
My Darling Clementine
—filmed in Arizona and Utah, April through June of 1946—she doesn’t tell him of her plans. Instead, she takes Peter and flies to Baltimore on the pretext of visiting daughter Pan at boarding school. Peter recounts that, without his knowledge, Frances authorized the Hopkins doctors to check her son for a tapeworm as the possible cause of his persistent thinness. The six-year-old was restrained and a probe was inserted in his anus. “I screamed and yelled and cried and struggled,” Peter writes, “but they only gripped me harder and became angry with me, like my father.”