The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (19 page)

He seems not to have told anyone about the incident until years later. As for Frances, she is back in bed at Tigertail before Henry knows she has gone.

“In those days,” Jane says of her father, “his major emotion was rage.” Peter tells stories of routine transgressions being answered with hairbrush beatings and kicked-in doors. Henry’s rage was no doubt a rage at failure—his own failure to be what his family needed him to be, and his family’s failure to be as controlled and self-sufficient as he—their failure, in effect, to live as if they didn’t need him. But it is insanity to expect young children to have the same controls against fear and pain that an adult like Henry had spent years building. And Henry—though he was, in Peter’s words, “a very difficult man”—was assuredly not insane.

So there must have been more to his rage. It must have been, finally, the rage of the confined: the man who rages at his chains.

*   *   *

“Death in the guise of the new life in California is not going to prevail over me.”

How is Walker Percy’s character able to speak Henry Fonda’s mind so precisely? To articulate the fear in all these escapes from home and hearth, wife and children, the dream of success and nightmare of contentment?

“Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me. What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness, marriage till death do us part yes but long dead before the parting, home and fireside and kiddies such a travail and a deadliness as to make a man run out into the night with his hands over his head?”

Is it only the successful middle-aged man’s malaise that is being expressed? Self-pity, nostalgia, ego chasing its own youth? And if so, is that any less a human condition than another?

The nature of our man is to look always at the emptiness before him—not at the fullness or the bounty. To go toward the thing that is missing, vanished, hidden; because whatever that thing is, wherever it hides, that is where the ghosts are and the truth lies.

“What is this sadness here? Why do folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not. Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo’s ghost, yelling at the top of his voice:
Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go?
”

The mind of the man whirls in its self-made tempest, this suddenly visible world of Shakespearean specters: ghosts, thieves, phantom justice, make-believe juries, incredible judges. And finally, Percy’s character calls back the name and suicide of an old friend—he who was found dead in a barn, years ago, somewhere in the land of fantasy and youth:

“Ross Alexander left his happy home in Beverly Hills, saying: I’m going outside and shoot a duck.”

Death is the curse on all living things. It is also answer to all problems, mediator of all fears, and master of all unknowns. And if, like Henry Fonda, you are an artist with an art to apply, maybe you can make death your friend. Maybe you can know the many names of death yet go on living. If, like Frances Fonda, you do not have that escape; if you lack the means to manage fear; and if you feel you are being swallowed by the unknown, you may have no course but to choose death as answer, mediator, master.

But that’s not me, says the stoic, he whose soul on one side is soft with every regret ever felt and on the other is caked hard as dry Nebraska earth by suppression, religion, convention, ego, sensibleness, manliness, Americanness.

“To know the many names of death,” says Percy’s man, and ours, “is also to know there is life. I choose life.”

6

A Sort of Suicide

Henry and Frances

Doom is the dark shape in Henry Fonda’s screen life, a compulsion toward it the spur to many of the performances we remember—Dave Tolliver, Eddie, Lincoln, others to come. Not fatalistic but fated, brought to his doom by an inability to be other than what he is, this version of the Fonda hero is wired by instinct to the absolute, the final.

Henry plays this man with the subtlest of magics. He plays him with understanding. How does he understand?

To get answers, we seek patterns. The suspicion of pattern in this next, pivotal phase is that he is carrying out in life the compulsion we identify in these characters, acting in ways that will force confrontation and hasten fate.

The core of compulsion, personality, and experience that yields the artist’s creations also produces the man’s cruelties. The sadness is that the doom to come is not truly his, but another’s. This is life, the supporting players are made of flesh, and the flawed hero Fonda portrays is himself.

*   *   *

The war, raw and recent, is present in the trilogy of films Fonda makes with John Ford after coming home:
My Darling Clementine
(1946),
The Fugitive
(1947), and
Fort Apache
(1948). These movies are very far from World War II in time and place, but it’s hard to imagine them coming from artists who hadn’t seen death up close. They are about other wars, other men facing deadly responsibility; they are studies in heroism, how it shapes and destroys men; and they are Fonda’s first mature engagement with the evolving, troubling aspects of his own heroic persona.

Based on Graham Greene’s novel
The Power and the Glory, The Fugitive
follows a priest’s flight through an unnamed Latin American country, a newly Marxist state, whose clergy are being purged. Greene’s priest is a man of dubious purity—alcoholic, father of a bastard—but also a believer who meets his ending with a martyr’s open eyes. Ford (via the Dudley Nichols screenplay, which he supervised) gives the illegitimate child and ethical torment to the priest’s pursuer, a fanatical army officer (Pedro Armendáriz), thereby rendering the hero absurd: He is tested against bad luck and persecution, but not, as a hero must be, against himself.

Transplanted to Mexico, Ford trades his native assurance for a tourist’s reverence, reaching for art like a supplicant at a shrine, and he gaffs the nervous excitement that makes Greene’s world sweat and vibrate. Fonda looks waxen, with eyes mascaraed for the Christly effect; his motifs are to appear always on the edge of tears, and to speak in a slightly deepened, denasalized register.

There’s hotter fever and truer delirium in the dust pools of Monument Valley, where Ford and Fonda make
Fort Apache,
an epic of the U.S. Cavalry. A fictionalization of Custer’s last stand, it is in some ways a traditional Western; in other ways, it is not one at all. Fonda plays Lt. Col. Owen Thursday, an aristocratic commander who detests Fort Apache and all the “uncivilized” land around it. Upon learning that the Apache Nation has removed from its government reservation to Mexico, Thursday makes it his all-absorbing goal to return them—violently. Though his second in command, Captain York (John Wayne), warns that all-out attack will be suicidal, Thursday carries it through, and is slaughtered along with most of his regiment.

In the final scene, York, the new commander, approves a heroic painting of Thursday, along with the official narrative that he died nobly. The delirium of
Fort Apache,
its deep confusion of ideology and image, resides in this cover-up—which some take as Ford’s endorsement of the Cold War mentality, others as evidence of a more conflicted agenda. York consecrates his lie while gazing through a window at a line of cavalrymen, many of whom will perish under his command: a double exposure of ghosts at the instant truth becomes myth.

Twenty years later, in the midst of another war, correspondent Michael Herr will recall
Fort Apache
as a “mythopathic moment”: “More a war movie than a Western,” Herr calls it in
Dispatches,
“Nam paradigm, Vietnam, not a movie, no jive cartoon either where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flatted out and frizzed black and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game, ‘Nobody dies,’ as someone said in another war movie.”

Call it delirium or mythopathy, but there is a virus of doubt in
Fort Apache.
Henry Fonda carries it, by paradoxically seeming absolutely certain of himself—by never undercutting Thursday’s arrogance with softness, his vanity with romance, or his madness with flamboyance. Rigid with the character’s contempt for all things, Fonda experiences physical freedom only with Thursday’s death—a woozy, crumpling spiral, a pitiable dissolve on a sun-drenched rock. It’s scientifically faithful to a soulless man’s way of dying, as if every suppressed emotion has been channeled into a body confused at its failure to perform. Fonda’s acting is impressive in its armored monotony: A kind of death has been caught here, and a kind of life.

As Marshall Wyatt Earp in
My Darling Clementine—
Ford’s retelling of the O.K. Corral shoot-out in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881—Fonda is again the emotional enigma around which other characters function and the story evolves. He constructs Earp through a variety of subtle moves and obfuscating expressions, yet he achieves a constancy of character whether playing against a more transparently showy actor or simply enjoying a joke with himself. That constancy comes partly from the changes wrought by time upon Fonda’s body, which looks as able as ever but now moves more carefully, as if not every lunge or embrace can be taken for granted.

Withal, he radiates professionalism, mastery—and age. The hairline is higher, the eyes less avid. The classic late voice settles in. Fonda’s Wyatt is like wine aged in oaken vats of experience; his projection of depth, toughness, and warmth makes his prewar performances seem callower than they were. This is a movie star coming into his maturity, and an actor-craftsman achieving complete control over his tools.

Yet Fonda’s Wyatt is also dynamic and surprising, a self-made man always in the process of making himself up. A straight shooter who seldom smiles, Wyatt nonetheless has a humor laced with perversity. We see it when he teases the theater proprietor by suggesting he might not prevent an angry crowd from tying him to a rail. But when Wyatt watches the tubercular Doc Holliday recite lines from
Hamlet,
and we sense his emotional grasp of the poetry, it is not the least bit maudlin. Fonda’s face shows tenderness, pity, empathy: Wyatt watches Doc sideways, as if straight on would hurt too much.

That face—what spirits of lightness and solemnity pass through it as the muscles and skin seem scarcely to move. At Ford’s community dance, when Wyatt grudgingly invites Clementine to waltz, competing miseries and anticipations play in the face; like Sturges in
The Lady Eve,
Ford uses his star’s apparent indifference to womanly charms for purposes of comic discomfort. Indeed, director and actor kid masculinity throughout the story, as Earp undergoes a process of hygienic and tonsorial dandification.

We cannot say whether Wyatt is a total square or the ultimate hipster, because Fonda uses his stiffness as a form of innate American poise—leveling his hat in the hotel window, sky and buttes reflected behind him; escorting Clem down Main Street with long, courtly strides; spinning the heroine on the dance floor with a rich smile. And the famous bit of leg business, Fonda balancing on a chair by dancing his feet on a post as Linda Darnell taunts him from behind. But just as nice is the grin Fonda tosses to the side after Darnell has left: so subtle, this flash of private humor from a man most alive within himself.

Ford takes Fonda’s measure and directs from a complementary depth. After Wyatt meets Old Man Clanton, he rides on toward his brothers in the valley ahead, and flames seem to rise inside his body. It is the queerest illusion—until Ford dissolves to the brothers around a campfire and visual metaphor becomes practical reality. Elsewhere, there is Darnell wiping away tears on the hem of her skirt; the ghostly stagecoach that rides through the shoot-out at a key moment, coming from nowhere, going nowhere; a Clanton boy falling dead, gunshots exploding in a water trough an instant later—a novel twist on the “dead man’s echo.”
*
Clementine sounds the bell in an empty hotel lobby; it rings hollowly and fades—the pathos of that emptiness; Wyatt enters, and two lonesome people share a lonesome moment.

Clementine
is winsome and easy, somber and strange, self-concealing and self-revealing. Feeling itself through Fonda, working its way forward on the rails of his nerves, it takes on every humane quality the star can give it through the openings in a part that seems all but unplayable. The film and its star express the knowledge, hard won in life and little observed in movies, that a man’s real heroism is found in his response to the convergence of irresistible forces—the events to which he must react, the people to whom he feels obligated.

*   *   *

Henry and Frances cannot be speaking much these days; the marriage is a mausoleum for their youth. The family lacks unity, each member taking a separate path to an isolated sadness. Jane rides horses and discovers boys, not yet beset by the eating disorders that will gnaw at her through adolescence and beyond. Peter gets into mischief, destructive escapades that signal his future. In one of the worst, he and Billy Hayward, son of Leland and Margaret, come upon a book of matches in a field of haystacks, and a vast piece of Tigertail pasture is destroyed.