The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (21 page)

At its height,
Roberts
pulls in $35,000 a week—“bettering by several thousand,” John Leggett notes, “the receipts of its nearest rival, Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire.
” On March 29, little more than a month after opening,
Mister Roberts
receives the Antoinette Perry Award as the Best Play of the 1947–1948 season. Joshua Logan is named Best Director, and Henry receives the Tony for Best Male Performance.

Two years on, the play is still running. Atkinson will estimate it has been seen by 1.3 million people on Broadway, and another 85,000 at road-tour stops across the country. By then, Doug Roberts will have joined Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, and Wyatt Earp in the public mind as a classic Henry Fonda role, a patriotic paradigm, an American hero.

*   *   *

For all that,
Mister Roberts
has not survived as a great play. It is high middlebrow: better than slick, but without the depth to provoke revision. Still, it’s not difficult to guess why, in 1948, people responded to it intensely.

Roberts
is a rousing entertainment, with momentum and payoff; Logan’s showmanship keeps things active and dimensional. By spraying his actors with artificial sweat and putting them under tanning lamps, he creates the feel of tropical heat in a Manhattan winter. Scene changes are covered by the transmitted blare of war news, taking the audience back to all the radio alarms of recent years.

Stage designer Jo Mielziner has constructed an ultrarealist setting of bulkheads and portholes, which permeate the comedy with rust and stagnation. But on the whole, the play is an affirmation—of war, death, decency—at a time when the country is already shaping its popular memory of WWII.
Roberts
expunges brutality and recalls death as a sweet regret. It not only locates Eisenstein’s “womb of popular and national spirit”; it cuts into fresh veins of sentiment and nostalgia, releasing gushers of love and cash. This is the right play at the right moment.

It’s a moment that lasts well into the 1950s, as
Roberts
turns into a barnstorming commodity fronted by blandly handsome actors—in the United States, John Forsythe; in London, Tyrone Power. From its beginning on the Alvin stage, in days not so far removed from the end of war, the play softens and expands, like a prosperous gut, to serve the new mood of the American audience. People forget how taut, ironic, and ambiguous the thing was meant to be. The film version—directed by a drunken, ailing John Ford—will arrive in 1955 as a Technicolor botch, the play’s haunting edges only memories to those who’d seen it on the stage, and all but unimaginable to anyone who hadn’t.

The
Roberts
play in its first form is recalled as strange and touching, and it wouldn’t have become such a hit without Fonda. “He always wanted to face upstage,” Logan says. “I had to use tricks to get him so the audience could see him work.” Stage acting demands the actor project his voice and aura into the darkness, where the audience grasps it like a lifeline. Fonda’s instinct is to look the other way. He underplays, stays quiet, all but hides; the audience is again left to feel what is hidden.

Some part of him is still the Omaha novice who dreads the nightmare of being watched. But now he has all the armature of experience, and can use reticence to his advantage: By stepping away from his watchers, he draws them closer. “He’ll never be seduced by an audience,” Logan continues. “He won’t give them any more for their applause than he will without it.”

People have come to
Roberts
only partly to laugh. Finally, they wish to experience some degree of loss. That may be the private logic to Fonda’s underacting: His remoteness preserves the audience’s unease. Unlike Marlon Brando, who in
Streetcar
puts everything on display, Fonda tells himself, no, leave people wondering if they knew you at all. Like a shadow that grows taller with distance, Roberts increases in stature as he approaches the death he believes he doesn’t see coming.

*   *   *

Like Fonda, Doug Roberts is a post–Pearl Harbor naval volunteer who has risen to the rank of lieutenant, junior grade. Like Fonda, Roberts’s theater is the Pacific. Like Fonda, Roberts is a “typical eager beaver” who wants to see action, and does. Fonda wears his own navy cap and khakis onstage every night; the press make so much of the affinities between actor and character as to suggest that Fonda isn’t acting the role at all, only remembering it.

Heggen has told Logan that, while writing his hero, he had Fonda in mind; and indeed the novel presents a man remarkably like the Fonda we’ve been following:

There are people of wonderful conductivity who draw rather than repel the tenuous and tentative approaches that we call human relationships, and through whom, as through a nerve center, run the freely extended threads of many lives.… The quality they possess is not an aggressive one, nor a conscious one, and it can never be one acquired. It is native and inescapable and may even be unwelcome to its inheritor. It admits of greater loneliness than is commonly thought possible.

Throughout
Roberts
rehearsals, as Fonda quietly commands the stage, Heggen lurks the theater in baggy, ash-stained suits, darkness circling his eyes, decaying teeth bared wolflike in occasional laughter. Thin and haunted to the point of neurasthenia, he is what Fonda might look like if drained of all but his doubts and demons. Both are deeply middle western; both studied journalism at the University of Minnesota and served in the Pacific. Like Fonda, Heggen joined the navy in part to escape domestic stress and professional discontent. Biographer John Leggett says Heggen had the “feeling, carried since his teens, of being doomed”; and the writer, like the actor, is fascinated by a man’s need to take his doom straight.

Finally, recall how the hero dies—killed by Japanese suicide strike while sitting in a wardroom aboard his ship. It is exactly the death Henry Fonda did
not
die on June 21, 1945, when the USS
Curtiss
was rammed by a kamikaze. Though Fonda did not perish, for more than a thousand nights on the stage, he gets to imagine he did. As Roberts, he is portraying his own specter.

*   *   *

At one stroke, he has traded Hollywood for Broadway, compost for caviar, family for free agency. He spends his days in rehearsal, his nights in French restaurants, town houses, and long black cars on the Avenue of the Americas. Henry likes his new life. On April 1, 1949, it’s announced that he has contracted to star in
Mister Roberts
for its Broadway duration, as well as to headline the imminent film version—which will be shot, it’s said, somewhere near Bermuda in the summer of 1950, with Josh Logan directing.

And the family? Henry stays in touch. In February, he admits to Earl Wilson that he’s “feeling selfish about leaving his kids in Hollywood.” For the first several weeks of the run, he flies back to Tigertail for weekend visits, but this proves burdensome, and Frances begins shipping the family’s belongings east. By April, a house has been leased in Connecticut; in June, after school is out, the Fondas begin their residence on Pecksland Road in the upper-class suburb of Greenwich.

Tigertail—where Jane and Peter grew up, which Frances helped pay for, and whose planning and construction she oversaw—is left behind, all its rustic stone-built rooms emptied. Eventually, the house and grounds will be sold. Then, in November 1961, they will be destroyed in the worst brush fire in the history of Los Angeles, one that consumes hundreds of houses in Brentwood and Bel Air.

The Fonda children are told they must trade their Pacific playland for a murky eastern manse. The Count Palenclar House, as it is called, has a beautiful exterior, but its rooms are dim and unwelcoming; Jane evokes Charles Addams. Peter remembers its “musky, attic-like atmosphere,” while the grounds and surrounding woods are distinguished by macabre vegetation: “Skunk cabbage, swamps, parasitic vines choking giant trees.” Over time, it will be overtaken by what he can only call an “unknown darkness.”

The kids detest Greenwich, find it snobbish, elitist, racist. The Hayward children are nearby—Margaret Sullavan, now divorced from Leland and remarried, has been in Greenwich for two years—and their presence helps offset the loss of Tigertail. But not enough.

Only Henry, it seems, is happy here, and he is happiest when going it alone. It’s notable that while he seems robust during this period, his children—not to mention Frances—are persistently ill. Peter contracts pneumonia in the winter of 1948, and is hospitalized with fever while at camp the following summer. Jane begins her battle with bulimia, grows susceptible to viral complaints, bites her nails, and discovers a talent for injuring herself in falls. She hurts her arm in a roughhousing incident and is scared to tell her father. “Dad asked me if I’d washed my hands, and when I told him I hadn’t, he exploded in anger, pulled me out of my seat and into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, took the broken arm … and thrust it under the water. I passed out.”

Certainly Fonda has redemptive streaks of tenderness, and never abandons his children when they are in direst need. (When Peter is feverish at camp, for instance, Henry moves to the nearby town until he recovers.) A conscientious planner, he buys each of his kids 2 percent shares in the
Roberts
production. The broken arm incident may, like many childhood anecdotes, be an exaggeration, enlarged over time. Yet it stems from a child’s real horror of a stern and retributive father.

It seems a trial for Henry to stay in the family home for long. Functions and responsibilities are always calling him away, and he takes an apartment in town. Jane persists all the harder in seeking her absent father’s approval, while gradually letting go of the mother who increasingly, it seems, is letting go of everything.

Frances has begun sobbing spontaneously, and spending more time in her room. As an adult, Jane will be told by Frances’s psychiatrist of her mother’s increasing paranoia and feelings of hopelessness: “She began to feel she was ugly … that she was poor and fat.”

Peter feels Frances isn’t always “there.”

*   *   *

One night near the end of the first Greenwich summer, as Henry is leaving for a performance, Frances informs him that she is checking herself in to the Austen Riggs Center, a sanitarium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She encourages him not to worry—in fact, to spend more time in the city. Frances’s mother, faithful Sophie Seymour, moves in to take care of the children.

Established by a tubercular Manhattan internist in 1919, and describing itself as “the center of American ego psychology,” Austen Riggs has, by the late 1940s, become one of the most prestigious mental-health institutions in the country. Far from the state-funded snake pit of popular fiction, it is a model of the expensive, comfortable hospital-retreat, with its private rooms, neutral colors, and psychiatric idealism. Here, it’s hoped, the nervous modern psyche will be soothed by peaceful scenery and fine-tuned by a staff of world-famous analysts.

The pioneers of psychotherapy, some of them employed at Riggs, are toiling mightily in these high Freudian days of postwar mind science. But there is only so much even the most dedicated staff can do to arrest human breakdown, particularly in settings that may encourage rather than combat a patient’s sense of cloistered unreality. In
Women and Madness
(1972), Phyllis Chesler refers to the best U.S. mental hospitals as “special hotels or collegelike dormitories for white and wealthy Americans, where the temporary descent into ‘unreality’ (or sobriety) is accorded the dignity of optimism, short internments, and a relatively earnest bedside manner.”

It is largely these qualities that make Riggs a favored refuge of the New England elite, as its members succumb in increasing numbers to psychic stresses both real and whimsical. Numerous celebrities and children of the rich and renowned log time there; Margaret Sullavan will experience a brief stay, as will her daughter Bridget.

Frances makes several trips to Riggs. Clearly she finds there some surcease of sorrow. It may satisfy coeval needs to take care of others, and be taken care of. “Perhaps one of the reasons women embark and re-embark on ‘psychiatric careers’ more than men do,” Chesler suggests, “is because they feel, quite horribly, at ‘home’ within them. Also,” she continues—a point relevant to Fonda’s failure to answer Frances’s emotional needs—“to the extent to which
all
women have been poorly nurtured as female children, and are refused ‘mothering’ by men as female adults, they might be eager for, or at least willing to settle for, periodic bouts of ersatz ‘mothering,’ which they receive as ‘patients.’”

Frances’s first commitment lasts eight weeks. Under the supervision of medical director Robert P. Knight, she undergoes intensive analysis, some of which is paraphrased in Jane’s memoir—most tellingly, stories of abuse as a child and wife, the Seymour family history of mental illness, and Frances’s overwhelming love and fear of her father. Surprisingly, given that electroconvulsive therapy is, in the late 1940s, the only treatment for severe depression, there is no suggestion that Frances receives shock treatments. It’s probable, though, that she is injected with sodium amytal, also commonly used at this time, to facilitate truthfulness in therapy sessions.

Knight and his team work some kind of quick fix on Frances, yet she is home barely long enough to readjust to normal life. She returns to Riggs a few days into 1949, claiming postholiday exhaustion. Has she finally found a hospital she likes better than home? What is it about the institution that draws her back—is it the vanilla-colored walls, the morning oatmeal, the wise, strong, fatherly men who listen?

*   *   *

Frances has insisted Henry spend more time in New York, as if encouraging him to seek a liaison, a betrayal it will torture and please her to imagine in her Stockbridge cell. As
Roberts
rolls on through the spring and summer of 1949, Henry, following his wife’s suggestion, becomes even more of a stranger, deserting the Gothic twilights of Greenwich for the well-lit stage of the Alvin, his demanding kids and depressed wife for the straightforward male romance he shares with Logan, Heggen, and the troupe.