The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (25 page)

“My life has been peppered with suicides,” Fonda will say near the end of his life, “and I don’t like to think back on them.” But in the post-Frances years, suicide is what he cannot stop thinking about.
Point of No Return
is his first dramatic gesture in its direction, but the crux is hedged, the whole irremediably flawed. He wants to go further.

*   *   *

Grimly focused, Fonda takes to the road with
Point of No Return,
embarking on a ballyhooed national tour days after the play closes at the Alvin. For the next seven months—late November 1952 through June 1953—he traverses the country, working hard every night. But is he working to deepen the play, or to maintain a basic level of entertainment, an illusion of wholeness?

Either way, the tickets sell. Opening the tour in Baltimore on November 24, the company breaks the house record for nonmusical shows. Similar returns will be counted elsewhere, along with glowing write-ups from local critics. Not that anyone mistakes expertise for profundity. The San Francisco critic admits
Point of No Return
“is not the greatest play ever written, Heaven knows, but the combination of playwright, director and actors has made it into a semblance of a great play.” Henry, he finds, makes “a thoughtful and forceful presentation, admirably calculated and projected.” That he has helped to calculate a semblance of greatness is far from the lowest praise an actor might receive.

When Henry regroups after the tour to consider his options for the autumn, he rejects or tables offers that appear frivolous (Edward Chodorov’s
Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
, a fashionable satire on the sacred cows of marriage and psychoanalysis), are well outside his performing repertoire (a musical based on the Steinbeck novel
Sweet Thursday,
for which he takes extensive vocal training—a male Mary Martin he’s not), or are beyond his capacity to creditably purvey (the dying homosexual husband in an adaptation of André Gide’s
The Immoralist
).

The choice Fonda makes is among the most fascinating and confounding of his career. The play itself, Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,
is well within his established range. But from the three options he is given by the producers—he may play either one of the two leads, or direct—the one he chooses is to play Lt. Barney Greenwald, a young Jewish lawyer. For Fonda to believe he can become Greenwald amounts to an act of hubris—one of the conspicuous few in this career of self-enforced limits.

The play is an extraction from Wouk’s 1951 novel about a revolt aboard a World War II U.S. Navy ship performing routine duty in the Pacific. Lieutenant Maryk has, at the height of a typhoon, seized control from his skipper, Captain Queeg, who, he claims, froze. Greenwald, Maryk’s defense attorney, believes Maryk is merely the tool of Lieutenant Keefer, a smug, navy-hating writer. Greenwald rescues Maryk by dismantling Queeg on the stand but then, in an epilogue, drunkenly confesses to remorse at his actions.

Wouk’s novel, in addition to a Pulitzer, has a year on the best-seller lists. The play’s popular profile as it approaches the stage far outdistances that of
Point of No Return,
or, for that matter,
Mister Roberts.
At the same time, Hollywood readies its film version, with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg and José Ferrer as Greenwald.

Fonda is sent the play by producer Paul Gregory and actor Charles Laughton, who have recently staged successful all-star table readings of verse plays by Shaw and Benet. Save for sex, Wouk’s play has all the elements of a moneymaker: single set, showy star parts, precise construction combining courtroom drama with an underdog premise and two devastating dramatic twists. Henry would be a fool to pass.

*   *   *

Counter to tradition,
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
will have its national tour before Broadway, not after, beginning on the West Coast and working east, logging seventy-odd performances before its New York opening in January 1954. Susan will not be along this time: “One-nighters make it too tough,” Henry tells a reporter. (For whom?)

With Fonda in place, the other roles are quickly filled. John Hodiak, dark-eyed incarnation of working-class brawn, plays Maryk, and the role of Queeg goes to Lloyd Nolan, a reliable second-level movie mug.

In early September, Henry flies to Hollywood, where rehearsals are to be held in the headquarters of the American Federation of Musicians. There, he finds actor Dick Powell has been hired to direct. The choice is an odd one: Powell’s chief fame has been as a featured singer and dancer in gaudy Warner Bros. musicals (
42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933
,
1935
,
1937
). In the years since, he has worked with ambitious auteurs (Rossen, Mann, Minnelli), and even directed a low-budget crime drama (the 1952
Split Second
). Still, his directorship of this prestigious stage piece is nearly as unlikely as is the conceit of middle-aged Henry Fonda playing a youthful Jew.

But the producers’ choice of Powell may not have been a choice at all. Laughton biographer Simon Callow notes that Paul Gregory had “somehow” convinced RKO Pictures, already in production on the film version of
The Caine Mutiny,
to cede partial rights so that the play could premiere before the film. Most studios would have vetoed such a request. But in 1953, Dick Powell, in addition to being an actor and director, is a production executive at RKO—which may explain at one throw why those partial rights are granted, and a director without theatrical experience is hired to steer a major stage production.

Almost instantly, the enterprise turns sour. There are too many talents wound too tightly; rehearsals are a crash of egos, techniques, even sexualities. Alliances and enmities form: The cast members get along, but Laughton and Gregory are contentious; Laughton and Wouk grow close, but Fonda dislikes Laughton; Laughton belittles the cast, and everyone thinks Powell is in over his head.

There are ongoing troubles with the text. More importantly, the director, bred on movie sets, seems unable to shape performance and narrative away from the camera eye and toward the theater’s living darkness. Fonda huddles with Nolan and Hodiak, and the consensus is that Powell must go. Laughton reluctantly agrees. In a messy negotiation, by which Gregory grants him director’s billing and 2 percent of the gross profits, Powell is dismissed. But the producers have not heard the last of him.

*   *   *

Laughton takes over as director. If Powell’s shortfall is inexperience, Laughton’s is a command of theater so lordly, it is close to contempt. Cast member Charles Nolte remembers being ridiculed at length for his vocal mannerisms, and no fewer than three cast members are driven to walk out.

Laughton’s training is steeped in artifice and attitude. A closeted gay man with masochistic leanings, he suffuses his performances with the odors of sensualism and self-loathing. Fonda’s style is as no-nonsense as Laughton’s is rococo, and he normally smells of nothing more louche than Old Spice. So perhaps it is both chemical disgust and a Mister Roberts–like defense of “the crew” when, at mid-rehearsal one day, Fonda impales Laughton on the spear of a direct and mortifying insult, delivered before the entire company: “What do you know about men, you fat, ugly faggot?”

The remark is both an offense and an impertinence—like asking a bee what it knows about flowers—but it characterizes Fonda’s explosiveness in this period. It speaks as well to control: Fonda is more intent than ever on being the shaping intelligence, the decisive energy behind anything he is in. He knows his attack on Laughton will damage the older man’s authority, while defending the cast will empower his own position.

But the other actors may also secretly fear the spear of his anger. “I consider Fonda the most interesting actor with whom I worked for many reasons,” Nolte—who also happens to be gay—will tell an interviewer some fifty years later. “I did study his acting technique because I was witness to it at first hand, and close up. It struck me as highly professional when it wasn’t frighteningly demonic.”

*   *   *

Yet somehow
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
makes it to port. Previews in Santa Barbara are followed by the San Diego premiere on October 13, and rapt audiences and rave reviews in city after city. Fonda has “the gift,” a critic writes after the November 4 show at El Paso’s Liberty Hall, “of commanding more attention even when his back is to the audience than most actors can scrape together with a spotlight and ten-piece orchestra.”

By early December, the advance Broadway ticket sale is approaching $800,000. But chatter about dissension in the company persists. Columnist Wood Soanes has written that Henry is cold-shouldering both Hodiak and Nolan, “and is eager to get out of the proceedings,” suggesting it is because Nolan’s reviews have outshone his own. Louella Parsons likewise claims Fonda has stayed “aloof” from his costars during the Chicago layover, and that his “unwillingness to take any direction is said to be one reason that Dick Powell withdrew from the play.”

“What direction?” Lloyd Nolan snaps the next day. “Powell doesn’t know anything about directing a play.… Charles Laughton took over a week before we were to start out and saved the show.” And what of Henry’s aloofness? “It’s a lie,” Nolan says. John Hodiak is moved to phone Parsons and quash the rumors. “[We’re] just one happy family, and except for a few minor misunderstandings we are all very congenial.” Parsons reserves her doubts: “[A]t least five people” tell her Fonda has been difficult.

Then Powell reappears. He has, by legal fiat, been billed as director throughout the tour; when it arises that Laughton will be so credited in New York, Powell moves for an injunction to block the opening. He tells a reporter he wasn’t fired; he quit. Why? “I got into a slight squabble with Henry”—though one report has had an enraged Fonda putting his fist through a door. “He threatened to quit unless it was done the way he wanted. He’s like that, moody.”

In the end, Powell cannot raise the $1.5 million bond needed to block
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
from making its scheduled debut at the Plymouth Theatre on January 20—which it does, to acclaim across the board. Kerr of the
New York Herald-Tribune
calls it “thrilling”; Atkinson of the
New York Times
says “shattering.” “Powerful, impressive,” writes Watts of the
New York Post;
“magnificent,” offers both Coleman of the
Mirror
and McClain of the
Journal American;
“brilliantly exciting,” contributes Hawkins of the
World-Telegram and Sun.

Earl Wilson believes it is “one of the great shows of our time.” Legendary theatrical producer Billy Rose compares the play favorably with the bloated film version (another thorn in Dick Powell’s side), calling it “a throat-grabbing chunk of life.” Columnist Mel Heimer writes, “I am in that near-comatose state where I feel it may be the finest thing I ever have seen in the theater.”

*   *   *

Maryk, just acquitted, is celebrating with his shipmates. Greenwald staggers in drunk. He baits Keefer, whose war novel lampooning the regular navy is approaching publication. Then the lawyer describes the shame he feels. Queeg, though petty and paranoid, represents the unsung military that protected democracy between the wars, while cynics like Keefer pursued private ambition and Hitler incinerated European Jews for soap.

The
Caine
mutiny violated the sanctity of rank in wartime; the acquittal ratified disloyalty. “Queeg deserved better at my hands,” Greenwald says. “He stopped Herman Goering from washing his fat behind with my mother.”

Greenwald’s indictment lifts
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
to within reach of the great American plays—not because it makes sense, but because it makes drama. It is up to Fonda to render Greenwald’s ethnic terror convincing and real; if he fails, the play is sabotaged by a wet lump of desperate jabber. But on those nights when he breaks his own emotional limits, the epilogue carries the play past any spot where an audience might safely have left it behind.

Greenwald enables Fonda to portray a man done in by his own controlling nature, whose triumph brings desolation. Henry calls the epilogue “the toughest scene [I’ve] ever played.” He is uncertain how to deliver it, before realizing the only approach is to create the emotion anew in every performance, from first mutterings to final condemnation, inebriation to rage. He must reexperience that mounting ferocity each night as if for the first time.

He cannot always manage it. But on those nights he does, Fonda breaks down and cries.

*   *   *

Fonda at middle age has his fists in a perpetual clench. But when violence comes, it is not he who delivers it, but his director. The punch is a drunken flail, packing more pathos than power. It is especially sad because the director is John Ford, who more than any filmmaker has had the sensitivity to see what lies beneath Fonda’s skin, and the love to bring it out.

Ford is directing the film version of
Mister Roberts,
for which Henry has been drawn back to Hollywood after a seven-year absence. Smash play, legendary director, beloved star, big budget—the dominoes are lined up for a box-office hit and a great film.

The picture has been under discussion since 1948, when it’s assumed that Joshua Logan will direct Fonda in Caribbean locations. But plans are postponed, partly by the continuing success of
Roberts
as a touring commodity. By late 1953, that success has crested, and the gears crank again to hoist a
Roberts
for the screen. Leland Hayward produces, and Logan, per the assumption, is tapped to direct; but he and Fonda are still on the outs, and Logan is besotted with Marlon Brando, the new Method sensation. William Holden is mentioned as a fallback, while Fonda—felt to be past his peak for playing young naval officers—is barely in the running.

But Hayward begins to question the wisdom of handing the film’s costly reins to Logan, whose only movie experience has come fifteen years before, in the form of codirecting one film and dialogue-coaching two others. Hayward asks him to step aside in favor of John Ford, surefire when it comes to sea stories and masculine comedy. (Ford’s involvement also promises the cooperation of the U.S. Navy.) Logan, understandably peeved, claims Ford has never even seen the play and, further, that he has disparaged it as “homosexual” in nature.
*