The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (28 page)

After the filming of
War and Peace
ends, the two share a tour of Venice. Henry invites Afdera back to New York; Afdera’s fiancé, inexplicably unaware of her interest in Fonda, consents to this final spurt of premarital freedom. In New York, she stays at a hotel, rather than at Fonda’s new, recently purchased residence—an elegant four-story town house on East Seventy-fourth Street, off Lexington Avenue. But word of the relationship travels fast, as she knows it will. With maximum dexterity and minimum personal unpleasantness, Afdera has forced the duke’s hand: In a rage heard across Rome, he severs the engagement.

Plainly, she knows the fine Italian art of subterfuge. Henry’s complicity in all of this is unknown.

*   *   *

It is near Christmastime, 1955. Fonda is already shooting his next film,
The Wrong Man,
a crime drama directed by Alfred Hitchcock, on locations in Manhattan and Queens. Afdera returns to Rome—says she finds the film “sad and boring.”

She would. Her aversion to
The Wrong Man
is as comprehensible as Henry’s interest in it. The picture has nothing to do with the Fonda of the breezy, charming Roman affair, and everything to do with the man obsessed by the memory of his dead wife.

8

The Wrong Man

12 Angry Men

In late 1947, Fonda traveled to New York to interest Josh Logan in a film project. Instead, Logan introduced him to Tom Heggen and
Mister Roberts,
and the project was sidelined.

It was to have been a film of John O’Hara’s
Appointment in Samarra
. Published in 1934, the novel is set in the fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, among the upper middle classes. It follows Julian English, a self-loathing drunk and eventual suicide, and his downfall over a four-day period. The tragedy is Julian’s inability to evade his doom, or himself—hence the title, with its metaphor of fate derived from an Arabic folktale.

Henry Fonda had met and become friendly with O’Hara just before World War II. He’d induced O’Hara to write a screenplay adaptation of
Appointment,
and around the same time, the novelist was credited as a contributor of “original material” to the Fonda-Stewart segment of
On Our Merry Way.
In a September 1948
Saturday Review of Literature
article, Fonda cited
Appointment
as being among his current reading.

The film was never made—partly because
Roberts
intervened, partly because no studio at that time would have financed the straight filming of such a downbeat narrative. The novel is candid about sex, adultery, the ethnic hatreds of suburban enclaves, and all manner of dirty games. How could postwar Hollywood have made a decent movie of it? But O’Hara continued to hope. In 1963, he bemoaned the difficulty of casting an ideal Julian, saying he would have preferred Fonda “in the old days”; two years later, he is staunchly insisting, against studio pressure, on retaining the suicide ending. The project was an object of interest as late as 1969, with Paul Newman the likeliest star.

Fonda had to know that the novel would never reach the screen uncompromised. Yet something in his more than forty-year-old body would not surrender the prospect of playing a not yet thirty-year-old wastrel, the crumbling center of a story whose dramatic arrangement is to foreclose hope on a suicide. Would not surrender it, anyway, until
Mister Roberts
came along—the story of another death wish, with the advantages of being both commercial and a stage play, and therefore a way of escaping home and Hollywood.

Fonda had already demonstrated his interest in the theme of self-destruction. Surely he felt he knew something about Julian English, and that Julian knew something about him. The character’s complex combines guilt, a loathing of domesticity, and an overwhelming awareness of his own weakness. Fonda’s interest came at the time when life with Frances had passed its point of no return; perhaps he hoped, by making the movie, to divert some disaster of his own. Or maybe he wanted the opposite—to risk a crack-up of art and life.

Fonda’s interest in the O’Hara novel suggests many possibilities. What is not possible is that the role of Julian English meant nothing special to him—that in pursuing the character he was not pursuing another specter, another version of himself.

*   *   *

The more phantasmal Frances becomes, the more she emerges as the most urgent and interesting presence in Henry’s work. She haunts
The Wrong Man
—though Hitchcock would bristle at any suggestion that the film might be as personal for Fonda as it is for himself.

Hitchcock first sought Henry to star in the 1940
Foreign Correspondent,
and again two years later in
Saboteur,
but the teaming has had to wait for its perfect moment. Based on fact,
The Wrong Man
revisits Hitchcock’s favored scenario of the innocent man implicated by circumstance, while the hero is another of Fonda’s dogged sufferers. The source is Herbert Brean’s 1953 report, published in
Life
magazine, of a real case. Christopher Emanuel “Manny” Balestrero, bass player in the house band at the Stork Club, is charged with the armed robbery of an insurance office, jailed, and tried. As he is fed through the system, his wife, Rose, shrinks to a state of near catatonia. Exoneration comes only by a fluke: The robber is caught committing another crime. But the wife, so far as we see, gets no better.

As a Hitchcock film,
The Wrong Man
has clear themes—the randomness of fate, the fragility of identity—and a clear failure. The first half, recounting Manny’s arrest and imprisonment, is quiet, objective, and paced with “the somnambulistic quality of a bad dream,” as Brean described the real Balestrero’s experience. A break occurs when Manny is released on bail and focus shifts to his wife, from Manny’s martyrdom to Rose’s depression. Hitchcock reckoned this a misjudgment, and undeniably, a certain tension is lost in the break.

But as a Fonda film,
The Wrong Man
has a different unity. The shift becomes Manny’s—the transfer of his anxiety from himself to his wife. The film’s “personal” element passes from Hitchcock to Fonda, our focus from the director’s passive observation to the character’s encounter with his wife’s depression.

What actor and director share is a fascination with watching: the robbery victims who identify Manny from sheltering darkness; the gawks of his children, prosecutors, jurors; and finally, Manny’s own helpless regard of Rose’s decline. But where Hitchcock is fascinated by the power of the gaze to instill fear, Fonda demonstrates the limits of witnessing as an instrument of empathy. His great screen characters have been men who act because they see. But although the Catholic Manny trusts in redemption, he can do nothing to help his wife. Witnesses in this story have the power to judge, but not to understand; to condemn, but not to save.

Probed for Fonda’s fixations rather than Hitchcock’s,
The Wrong Man
reveals a new logic. Its first half is unified because it posits a problem with a solution. The second half, dominated by the wife’s melancholia, offers no solution. Without it, there is neither hope nor drama, only decay. In Hitchcock’s terms, the film fails because it has strayed from a resolvable crisis to an irresolvable one; but in Fonda’s terms, this parallels the hero’s inability to save his wife.

A key scene is Manny’s meeting with Rose’s psychiatrist. The doctor suggests she belongs in a place that will give her the treatment she needs. “You mean an institution?” Manny asks. The shot is medium close on Fonda as he stares away from the doctor, who speaks of the “maze of terror” in which Rose is caught. All that he says applies to Frances:

“She’s living in another world from ours … a frightening landscape that could be on the dark side of the moon.”

“And I’m not there?”

“You’re there. And the children are there. But not the way you
are.
Monstrous shadows that say hateful things. Now she knows that she’s in a nightmare, but it doesn’t help her to know. She can’t get out.”

“Is it incurable?”

“No case is incurable.”

Art is not imitating life here; it is cutting life open. Can Henry be thinking of anything but the day, some seven years earlier, when he and Dr. Knight agreed to commit Frances to the sanitarium where she ended her life?

Fonda’s gift for vibrant understatement allows him to center Hitchcock’s bold visual ideas while being as self-effacing as a screen star can be. Manny is repeatedly defined as the passive center of an oppressing frame; to anchor the film, Fonda must show subtleties of fear in the face of a man almost too scared to breathe.

So the most memorable images are silent: an extreme close-up through the slot in a cell door, Fonda’s face hidden but for his desperate eyes; Manny’s lips moving in prayer as a dissolve melds his face with that of the criminal. In an amazing scene, Manny falls back against the cell wall, and the camera swirls as the shadows of the bars thicken and darken. This predicts both the horrified dream states of
Vertigo
and the shower drain of
Psycho
. It is an overflow of panic, with Fonda’s face perfectly, passively expressive of a man surrendering himself to fate, as a martyr to flames.

The film ends on a pathetic encounter in the sanitarium, Manny walking out of Rose’s room and down a dark corridor—a shot to be repeated in
Vertigo
. Music rises to drown the desolation and carry us to the closing image of a faceless family strolling beneath palm trees: The Balestreros, end titles tell us, made it through, and now live happily in Florida. It’s a Hitchcock trademark to linger on human wreckage before insisting at the close that everything has come right. But Fonda and Hitchcock have gone too far into their fears, separate and shared, to make credible such a simple happiness.

*   *   *

The Fondas vacation in Kennedy country—Hyannisport, Massachusetts—over the summer of 1956. Afdera visits Henry there; she also meets Jane and Peter for the first time, and their mutual disdain is immediate.

But Henry and his new lover have found a level of amusement. Each distracts the other from the deeper, uglier stuff of life. If their decision to marry has the almost ironic quality of an accession to entertainments that will not last, that doesn’t belittle it: Nothing could be more human than the shared desire of two scarred people to be entertained for a while.

On March 10, 1957, they are married in the library of the Fonda town house. Seventeen-year-old Peter is best man, and Afdera’s eyes are still puffy from the beating administered by her brother. (Later, she will go to the macabre length of scissoring her eyes—only her eyes—from every wedding photograph.) The newlyweds spend a brief, flu-ridden honeymoon in a Canadian chalet, followed by a few weeks in Hollywood. The summer is spent in a villa on the Mediterranean: The avowed purpose is a second honeymoon, but Jane, Peter, and assorted friends accrue over the weeks. Henry and the baroness attend the Cannes Film Festival, socialize with Garbo, Hemingway, Picasso, and Cocteau, and witness the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

As Henry’s soul seeks resolution and his face perfects the arts of despair in
The Wrong Man,
he publicly acts out a version of
la dolce vita—
tags along as Afdera gathers glamour, plans parties, and redecorates the town house (she likens it to “a dentist’s waiting room, or the Hilton, Nebraska, circa 1950”). Henry spends many hours alone, reading novels and scripts, doing yoga, painting. (It’s in these years that his realistic oil studies of objects and textures begin to attract serious demand among friends and collectors.) But mostly their married life is a welter of soirees and events, villas and yachts, comings and goings; the town house is home base, but effectively there is no home. (Peter calls this the Fondas’ “renting period.”) It is all financed by a diverse and almost unbelievably constant stream of product from Henry.

We wonder how he tolerates the pace, but the truth is that he demands it: Too much leisure means indolence, and indolence is sin. Look at the amount of business logged merely in the months between Hyannisport and the wedding:

In early summer 1956, Fonda acquires film rights to Reginald Rose’s teleplay
Twelve Angry Men,
and forms a company, Orion Productions, to make it; he and Sidney Lumet—a young television director making his first film—shoot it in a West Fifty-fourth Street studio over three weeks, while Henry commutes to and from Hyannisport. In the autumn, he is in Hollywood filming a Western,
The Tin Star,
and stumping for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. After, he flies to Florida with Alfred Hitchcock, meets the Balestreros, and films the closing of
The Wrong Man.
He then signs for a part in
Stage Struck,
a drama directed by Lumet, and continues planning for the film version of
Clown.
After the turn of 1957, he does publicity for
12 Angry Men
and shoots his
Stage Struck
scenes. Throughout, he is a harried father taking calls from Peter’s headmaster, and a frequent flier to assignations with the baroness.