The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (27 page)

The role is humbug, yet it takes Fonda two steps closer to his secret post-Frances theme of suicide. Squier arranges to be murdered by the gangster so the waitress may claim his life insurance and bankroll her escape. And so it happens: The writer is put down by a well-placed bullet and dies, sainted, in the waitress’s arms. Like Frances, Squier believes his sacrifice will set a loved one free. But her act was a curse disguised as a gift; Squier’s is an ancient literary device—a redemption. As Abe Lincoln redeemed American myth, Alan Squier redeems the myth of the noble suicide.

*   *   *

Fonda the celebrity works hard for his audience’s attention and then tests his ability to dodge the light he has drawn. Fonda the husband is wired the same way: Having acceded to wedlock, he does his best to exist as if he is alone in the world. Henry’s third marriage is barely two years old before rumors of disunity begin; they are denied, but in fact the couple are spending less time together (Susan has not joined Henry’s last two theatrical tours), and their mutual infatuations—his with youth, hers with sincerity—break down under the dull test of daily living.

As couples do, they figure to fill the space that separates them with a child. Though she cannot become pregnant, Susan’s relations with Jane and Peter in the months after Frances’s death—encouraging them to explore feelings Henry will not admit exist—prove she has a way with kids. As for Henry, he may be lukewarm on children, but he loves babies. So in November 1953, they adopt an eight-week-old girl, whom they name Amy. Buoyant and engaging, untouched by dark Fonda memory, she is doted upon by all.

But the marriage will not be saved. Susan is well aware of Henry’s discomfort over the difference in their ages. Perhaps guilt over the suicide, and a sense of being publicly judged, makes every social convention keener in him. As if rebuked by the youthfulness he once sought, Henry becomes less Susan’s husband and more her headmaster; Peter describes his father as being “astoundingly restrictive” with regard to Susan’s desires to dance, romance, and socialize.

Susan admits to being fearful of him. Fonda’s response to emotional distress is punitive, bordering on sadistic. On their honeymoon, the couple swim on the beach; Susan places Henry’s wristwatch in the sand, to find later the tide has taken it away. Ashamed, she begins to sob. Henry fixes her with a cold stare. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Crying is disgusting.” She must excuse herself and expend her tears behind a rock.

That is the marriage’s ominous beginning. Its end arrives near a movie location in Rome. In the summer of 1955, Fonda flies to Italy with Jane and Peter, Susan to arrive later with Amy. He has come to star in an epic realization of
War and Peace,
costarring Audrey Hepburn, and shot at Cinecittà film studios by the colorful Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. It’s to be one of the heaviest spectaculars yet mounted—“probably the biggest movie ever made,” a grinning Dino claims. The Tolstoy epic, as yet unmolested by movies, is lately the focus of competing desires: David O. Selznick and Mike Todd are among the would-be adaptors whom De Laurentiis has beaten to the post. The movie will have sixty speaking parts; eight thousand soldiers and three thousand horses will be supplied by the Italian army. The budget is six million dollars, with a projected running time of four hours.

Fonda is lured by the money, and by the challenge of portraying Pierre, Tolstoy’s idealist-intellectual, who bounces corklike on the tide of the Napoleonic wars—a forerunner of every idealist-intellectual Fonda has ever played. Except that Pierre is fat, unglamorous, a cuckold—not a hero, but a slogger, a seeker. Perhaps the mask will fit, as had the clown’s, and the real Fonda will disappear for a while.

*   *   *

But this mask only magnifies him. Every actor has his limits, and no wish to transcend them will provide what technique and physique do not. Fonda’s best work always emanates from his face and body; it seeps out, coalesces,
happens.
Everything about his Pierre, from shaggy black hairpiece to philosophical maunderings, is pasted on the surface. He will get better as the film progresses—will grow weary from the warlike grind of the four-month shoot, to arrive at a last defeat that looks real and has weight. But it is hardly a whole performance. In fact it’s one of Henry’s worst, in a film as large, extravagant, and trivial as international committee can contrive.

His mood is bad throughout the filming. “You understand, don’t you,” he asks the director, King Vidor, early on, as if in warning or challenge, “that I can be a real son of a bitch?” Having approved a first script by novelist Irwin Shaw, Henry finds his daily pages are a farrago of fiddlings imposed the night before by Vidor and his wife. De Laurentiis provides his star with a lavish hotel suite, personal driver, and Roman ransom of daily luxuries, but he refuses to let Fonda deglamorize Pierre: No fat suit on my Fonda, the Italian commands, and no glasses! Henry says he must wait for Dino to leave the set before slipping his specs back on; though assuming the producer ever looks at rushes, Pierre’s glasses must be an agreed-upon thing, as Fonda peers through them owl-like for two-thirds of the picture.

Fonda, always ready to admit he has avoided seeing many of his own movies, will not bother himself to view this one. “If I’d seen it,” Henry will say of
War and Peace
a year after its release, “I’m sure I would have to tell you that I was lousy.”

The family, as usual, is left to its own devices. Jane and Peter find sundry adventures up and down the Appian Way, among romantic ruins and at embassy dinners; both claim to lose their virginity this Roman summer. But Susan is the wife, she has the baby, and she is stuck. Weeks go by; she and Henry see little of each other. Parts of the heart die every day.

“It was as if we were sort of passing each other on different levels, not really connecting,” Susan will tell journalist Barry Norman two decades later. “He was a very self-sufficient person in terms of his work.” Susan wants what most wives want—sustained intimacy—and Fonda has failed her, as many husbands fail their wives. He is an extraordinary success, and an ordinary failure.

She leaves. Like Frances, she must have that moment of realizing what her future with Fonda will be; but she is not so susceptible to despair. Susan is in some ways her predecessor’s happier twin—a daughter of privilege, familiar with society and eager for experience, but lovingly raised and unburdened by self-hatred. Though hurt by Fonda’s harshness, she is simply too healthy, and youthful, to be brought low by his neglect or his judgments.

She means to live a life, as long and happy a life as she deserves.

*   *   *

She bids Henry good-bye and informs him she’s returning to New York with the children. Whether or not he has the right to be, he is stricken. For the second time in their life together, Fonda weeps. He makes repeated transatlantic phone calls, pleading for reconsideration, but Susan, wiser and tougher than her age, holds firm and doesn’t look back.

The separation will be officially announced in December; the following May, Susan, petitioning the court in Reno, Nevada, will be granted a divorce decree by District Judge A. J. Maestretti on a charge of “extreme mental cruelty”—a formulaic indictment, but probably not so far off the truth, although Fonda, through his attorney, will make a formulaic denial. Susan will be granted sole custody of Amy, but she will allow Henry generous visitation throughout the girl’s childhood.

By the time the divorce is finalized, he will be in another place entirely. For now, he is stuck in Rome, shooting his scenes of slog and hunger, in his off-hours haunting art galleries and corner cafés, perfectly alone and miserable with it.

We might call that irony, or an apt turning of tables. But failure is not villainy: Without evil intent, Fonda has again gotten himself in a foolish position, an impossible relationship. Susan has problems with Henry’s stinginess and denial of intimacy, but for him, the marriage is cracked in another way. Whatever happens between them, he will feel shame: if the marriage continues, the shame of the age difference; if it ends, the shame of being a three-time loser.

But for every door that closes, a window opens; and who knows how many brightly feathered birds fly through Fonda’s open window in these weeks? Rome, like all large cities, is also a small town—as well as cradle of the paparazzi. So Henry’s sudden singleness is well known, and he becomes the subject of more gawking and gossiping than he’s known since before he married Frances. He commiserates nonphysically with Audrey Hepburn (who is having her own troubles with husband Mel Ferrer), and is said to have a brief affair with his other female costar, Anita Ekberg, at this moment one of the world’s most desirable women. He is spotted solo at the Venice Film Festival. Though Walter Winchell transmits Fonda’s denial of a split with Susan, the Broadway blabbermouth also reports Henry “laughing” with Italian starlet Loren Pastini.

Our man is in a highly public sulk—yet so poised in his woundedness, so long and fine in a tuxedo, that he can’t help but make sulkiness alluring. Among the rare birds who flock about him, pecking crumbs of intrigue, is a twenty-four-year-old baroness named Afdera Franchetti.

Her looks suggest a hot-blooded European version of Susan Blanchard, with a similar knowing cast to the eyes, a tease on the lips. According to her, she and Henry meet at a dinner party, where she tempts him with persistent requests for condiments and side dishes. The symbolism is fit for a novel: She salts his open wound, peppers his curiosity, promises a generous appetite and challenges his ability to meet it. She fancies his elegance and separateness. “There was something pure and sensitive about him,” Afdera offers in her ghostwritten memoir. “His eyes were very blue, cool and detached. He looked untouched and untouchable.”

Fonda is taken by her gaze, her insouciance, and perhaps the transparency of her flirtations. Maybe his real connection with Afdera is beneath his consciousness, somewhere in the viscera. She writes of a feeling that is “barbaric and primeval—the hot blood of my ancestors”: perhaps she awakens some of Fonda’s ethnic corpuscles? He is of Italian descent, too, after all. Rome is called the Eternal City; and some would say the Latin trace, once in the bloodstream, never leaves it.

*   *   *

Afdera and Henry edge into a platonic affair, appearing as companions at parties and galleries, enjoying the conspiratorial humor of “friends” who know they are tempting themselves and each other. But even to pursue friendship is risky for these two in a land where manly saber rattling is still a way of life. Fonda is not officially separated, let alone divorced, and Afdera is publicly affianced to Augusto Torlonia—Italy’s so-called “Lord of Earth,” a pistol-toting duke who in 1949 has survived an assassination attempt by a shepherd employed on one of his many estates.

Afdera combines the flexible morality of the international set with the resilience of the peasant, and she has the face of a sophisticated cherub whose smile is animated by centuries of violence and decadence. The Franchettis exist in the middle echelons of old-world nobility, a lineage of minor counts and consorts, existing on money from ancient bequests. Their bloodlines connect them to a legendary Europe of curses, palaces, plots; their kind—some call it aristocracy; others, like Peter Fonda, call it “Eurotrash”—are accustomed to privilege, to scandal, to upheaval. They take nothing overly seriously, least of all pain. Afdera in particular rejects gloom absolutely.

But Franchetti history may leave her no other choice. Her father, a friend of Mussolini and famed explorer of North Africa (Afdera is the name of a live Ethiopian volcano), was killed in a plane crash when his daughter was three—the result, according to rumors, of a bomb planted by a prewar provocateur. The war years were desolating for the family. After the Fascist takeover, the Franchetti palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal was occupied by the Nazis; later, it was liberated—that is, reoccupied—by the Americans. Afdera’s beloved older sister, a nurse afflicted with tuberculosis, survived a hospital bombing but was left with shattered nerves and anorexia, and died an early death. Her mother, a delicate case, succumbed to depression and hysteria. A wasting illness will bring her demise not long after Fonda has entered the picture.

The Franchettis have internalized the emotional extremes of an extravagant history. Rape and domination are the way of the world, love and brutality complementary flavors in the sauce of life. Afdera’s father proposed to her mother by submerging her head in a canal until she said yes. A generation later, Afdera will be beaten by her brutish brother after he learns she has chosen Fonda over the titled Torlonia. She doesn’t bother forgiving such acts, because they are not considered real offenses: The baroness respects physical violence as the sign of a masterful male.

She is impossible. There’s clearly more to her than that, yet she lives and thrives by such games. You want to shake her. Then you see that cherubic smile spreading, asking for the back of your hand, and you realize how complex is the psychology of a woman taught to hold what she has, and gather more, by getting men to hit her.

On the surface, there’s little to the baroness but looks, high blood, and joi de vivre; but, using them to the full, she makes her impression. Afdera’s may be one of the many gamine faces and footloose spirits that go into creating the character of Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany
’s, which her friend Truman Capote is writing during the Fonda years. She was a teenage idolator of Ernest Hemingway, of whom her brother is a close friend; when
Across the River and into the Trees
was published in 1950, it was speculated (mainly by Afdera) that she had inspired the novel’s young Italian heroine. Even before Fonda appeared, Afdera had splashed in many fountains, pursued many adventures, known many nights when it must have seemed the stars shone for her alone.

To Henry she is something new, and most unlike any of his previous wives: She lacks Sullavan’s histrionics, Frances’s depression, and Susan’s emotional expectations. Asked in later years to sum up the woman who will be his fourth wife, phrasemaker Fonda will simply say, “She’s a character.” Which is middle western code for
She’s crazy.