The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (29 page)

“Medics are warning Henry Fonda to take it easy,” writes columnist and old friend Erskine Johnson in the midst of it all.

But it’s the schedule Henry will maintain for the next several years: months in New York, doing plays; months in Hollywood, making movies; days and weeks between taping TV shows, voice-overs, promo inserts, and sundry one-offs. He is as industrious as a honeybee, constructing a hivelike world out of work. Afdera admits to a lack of ambition (“Each achievement is just another enslavement that drives you on to achieve the next thing”), but as a voyager in her own life, she doesn’t lack guts. For Henry, work remains less an adventure than a way of staying involved with his past, his memories, himself—of staying troubled by what troubles him.

Life, meanwhile, is the diversionary
now
of travel and temporary homes, contracts and children’s crises, ordering and managing the far-flung components of a wealthy and celebrated life.

*   *   *

He stays solvent by pinching pennies, taking good advice, being realistic. He has lucrative investment stakes all over the place—in Broadway shows (not only his own but others’, like
South Pacific
); in Southwest Airways (cofounded by Leland Hayward in 1941, it will become Pacific Air before merging with larger carriers); in Oklahoma oil. His entry into television, as both actor and product pitchman, has been immediately and conspicuously remunerative.

And it had been announced in early 1955 that he had—like other top stars in this new era, pressured by TV and freed by the breakdown of studio oligarchy—signed an independent production deal. Rather than limit himself to what is offered, he will pursue and develop projects on his own behalf, and distribute them through United Artists. The agreement pays him handsomely to make six pictures over three years, starring in at least three of them.

It’s also with commerce in mind that Henry makes his “comeback” as a cowboy. On television, the late 1950s are ruled by the likes of
Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Maverick;
at the cinema, by the horse operas of Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher, and Sturges. It is the Western’s commercial if not artistic, peak and Henry sees where he fits: too old to play a classic cowboy, just right to play the cowboy’s mentor, or a good-bad man on the far side of his prime.

In Anthony Mann’s
The Tin Star
(1957), he is a bounty hunter teaching the rudiments of six-gun morality to greenhorn sheriff Tony Perkins. Mann directs to listless formula, and Fonda matches him in projecting an authority as boring as it is convincing. Nearly as inert is
Warlock
(1959), with Henry as a marshal for hire shielding a fledgling township from marauders. The most compelling element is Fonda’s Clay Blaisdell, a man with substance, soul, and a capacity for betrayal. Henry, vests and guns glittering, looks great and gives the character coherence; the whole might have worked, had it a director who knew actors, who knew how to cut and frame on the human pulse—like John Ford. Instead it has Edward Dmytryk.

In early 1957, Fonda is quoted to the effect that he will never star in a TV series. Two years later, he agrees to star in one, and it’s a Western.
The Deputy
is one of the most frankly mercenary moves of our man’s career. Propositioned by cocreators Roland Kibbee and Norman Lear, Fonda doubts that the bullet-riddled TV schedule can stand another Western. But he is persuaded, he says, that such a commodity will enable him to “save a dollar … And I could use a saved dollar.” His representatives devise the most lucrative, least strenuous arrangement: He will star in only six of the initial thirty-nine episodes, while contributing walk-ons to the remainder. A makeshift production entity, Top Gun, is established to collect his end of the profits.

Henry’s Simon Fry is “Chief Marshal of the Arizona Territory” and mentor to the deputy of the title, played by Allen Case—a young actor of blinding ordinariness, supposedly handpicked by the star himself. Henry is so forthright about being in it for the money that by the time
The Deputy
premieres on NBC on September 12, 1959, the press is virtually scornful of the enterprise. TV critic John Crosby declares that the opening shots of bandits heisting a train “looked so startlingly like
The Great Train Robbery,
the very first movie ever made, that I thought the industry had been set back about eighty years.”

While not the worst TV series to carry Fonda’s name—that is still years off—
The Deputy
is barely passable as overnight fodder for rerun insomniacs. The plots are inane, the acting adequate to rotten, the sets slapped up. Henry walks through without sweat or other human juice. “I guess he doesn’t plan to kill himself with overwork,” Crosby mutters.

The show exists for two seasons, has a brief life in syndication, and disappears up its own vacuum. But in the diversionary now, it is making money and doing its job. Surely Fonda, having just produced and starred in a film that received great reviews, international awards, and an Oscar nod, can taste the irony. That film,
12 Angry Men,
has been acclaimed, yet it sold scarcely enough tickets to fill a bread box;
The Deputy
is recognized as an emptiness, yet it wins ratings and renewal. Fonda labors on the former, and makes a dime; moseys through the latter, and makes a mint.

MCA Television and Top Gun squeeze a small fortune from
The Deputy.
The Western genre is left a bit more depleted, the irony is swallowed, and the dollar is saved.

*   *   *

Of the four plays Fonda stars in between 1958 and 1962, only one—Ira Levin’s
Critic’s Choice
—is an obvious concession to the diversionary now of money and profile: light comedy, with Henry playing the unlikely combination of powerful theater reviewer and desirable husband-stud, all-around right man. The others place him as the wrong man in a sad situation—confused, angry, depressed, dying—and pull him toward the ending and exorcism of these years.

In spring 1957, Fonda is sent
Two for the Seesaw,
the first play by William Gibson, a novelist (
The Cobweb
) and TV playwright (
The Miracle Worker
) of growing reputation. It observes the brief love affair between two lonesome New Yorkers: Jerry Ryan, an uprooted Omaha lawyer, and Gittel Mosca, a dancer from the Bronx. Taciturn Jerry has fled smothering marriage to a wife who is undergoing a breakdown; tempestuous Gittel has an ulcer and abandonment issues. They are the sole characters.

None of the other principals has any Broadway experience. Producer Fred Coe is a past colleague of Henry’s, having put
The Petrified Forest
on TV two years earlier. Director Arthur Penn is a graduate of the Actors Studio and veteran of television, whose first film,
The Left-Handed Gun,
is in the can but as yet unreleased. Anne Bancroft, playing Gittel, is a Method adherent and unknown of twenty-six who has spent a few years on the Hollywood margins;
Seesaw
will be the Broadway debut of the woman soon to become, and remain for several years—until she is supplanted by Jane Fonda—the best actress in American movies.

Fonda stalls on a commitment: Jerry, he feels, is “underwritten.” In mid-June, a reading is held at East Seventy-fourth Street. Henry is charmed by Bancroft, wooed by Coe and Penn, troubled and tantalized by Jerry’s unyielding character. After he leaves with Afdera for their Mediterranean summer, Gibson dispatches rewrites from the States.

Henry is drawn in. He needs a play for the winter, and perhaps he feels challenged by these Actors Studio upstarts, with their emphasis on self-analysis as the key to truth. And the play itself—there’s something irresistibly right and inexpressibly wrong with it. It has a flaw and a flavor, a quality and a lack,
something
Fonda must try to master. Despite his doubts, he sends a cable from Europe: “Start it rolling. I am yours.” There’s grim resignation in the tone, yet upon his acceptance, the eighty-thousand-dollar budget magically appears—a quarter of it Fonda’s own money.

Though Gibson comes to believe Henry is miscast as Jerry, in reality the match is too perfect. Actor and character share Omaha origins, emotional limitations, unstable wives, and rageful habits. The problem with the text, everyone agrees, is an imbalance in intensity and sympathy between the characters: Gittel has humor and passion, while Jerry comes across as vague and truculent. She has desires; he has moods.

Playing such an unattractive version of himself ties Henry in knots. He will engage in verbal and even physical confrontation with Coe and Penn, but mostly, his anger will focus on the playwright. William Gibson has read his star too well. Despite the fact that he, like Tom Heggen, has not met Henry before, his intuitions have discerned Fonda’s type in other men; but where Heggen sculpted the hero, Gibson has drawn the bastard.

Has Henry taken the role to get closer to parts of himself, only to reconsider because they are the most unsavory parts? Does he condemn the playwright for failing to redeem his weaknesses, to deliver the actor from himself? Gibson, it seems to Henry, has left him dangling from a public scaffold constructed of his own worst traits.

His discomfort may run even deeper. The playwright’s wife happens to be Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a psychoanalyst at Austen Riggs during Frances Fonda’s stay there, and a close colleague of her doctor, Robert P. Knight.
*
In
The Seesaw Log
(1959), his diary of the play’s production, Gibson mentions neither his wife’s professional identity nor Fonda’s past connection with Riggs; it seems doubtful they ever discussed the one thing besides the play they had in common. But when Henry meets Dr. Brenman-Gibson, he is conspicuously ungracious.

Throughout November rehearsals, Gibson rewrites, and rewrites. Up to the opening, the play is in flux. Henry likes Bancroft, but their aesthetics are at odds: As actress and director discuss motivation, Fonda sits watching, Gibson writes, “with a fixed tolerant smile … a stony witness.” Asked to improvise with Bancroft, a bemused Henry simply declines.

Gradually, he isolates himself from the cast and crew; he and Gibson cease to speak; his performances grow erratic. The play has its first preview on December 5 in Washington, D.C. The AP correspondent gives Bancroft high marks for “zest and fine realism,” but Fonda “doesn’t reach any great dramatic peaks.” Subsequently, at a rehearsal in Philadelphia, Fonda and Coe come close to blows. The mood is so dark that a nauseous Bancroft must be tended by a doctor.

Finally, they open on Broadway, at the Booth Theatre on January 16, 1958. Before the curtain, Gibson appears at Fonda’s door to wish him luck—and the star nearly loses control, shouting at the playwright to get out. He tells Gibson he feels let down, set adrift, abandoned. Their relationship is finished. For Gibson, the tirade caps what he calls “the most odious experience of my life.”

In spite of all this, the show works. The audience is piqued by the cold-water realism of George Jenkins’s tenement-flat set, and the ambient street sounds heard over the scene changes. The play has a feel of the city and eight million hidden lives; the mood is one of hard-earned intimacy between man and woman, actor and actress. Bancroft receives superlatives (Walter Winchell announces “the birth of a star … Broadway’s newest Miss Radiance”), while Fonda throws off such magnetism that he cannot help but win his audience even while playing a son of a bitch.

Yet the play’s success leaves Henry feeling a fraud. Convinced Gibson has failed him, he may secretly know he has failed himself. It has been his job to humanize Jerry Ryan, but he has not been able to believe in the man’s decency—that is, his own—enough to do so. Feeling broken on the rocks of his own limitations, he has raged at others for not setting him free.

Still the audience cheers.
Seesaw
will spend almost two years on Broadway, tour America’s regional theaters, become a popular summer-stock property, be made into a drab film version, and finally return to Broadway as a musical. Fonda the investor will reap many returns from the play before selling his quarter share at what is reported to be a 300 percent profit. But Fonda the actor will leave exactly six months after opening night—the swiftest escape his contract allows.

*   *   *

The antidote to bitter success in cold Manhattan is California breeze. The summer of 1958 is spent on the Malibu beach with Afdera and the kids. Fonda then lingers in Hollywood for the remainder of the year, making movie deals, cropping his charisma to fit fluff. Though he told Paris reporters a year earlier that he “can’t stomach Hollywood,” he knows his commercial viability, and hence his lifestyle, will not be sustained by two-character dramas at the Booth Theatre.

He signs for
The Deputy,
shoots
Warlock
in Hollywood and Utah, and, after a Christmas in New York with Jane and Peter, returns for a romantic comedy called
The Man Who Understood Women.
This negligible item places Fonda next to hot international star Leslie Caron in the story of a starlet and a “genius” movie producer. Henry’s performance is impressively committed, if only to the consequence of nothing, while the film itself is stupefying—as scattershot as a riot, as indiscriminately colorful as a vomiting of jelly beans, yet supremely dull.

Coming through Roberts, Greenwald, Pierre, Manny, and Jerry, Fonda has become rather a connoisseur of misery. To engage him these days, a part must tap into his sense of pain, not pleasure, and it will be a while before he can begin to be convincingly loose and funny again. For now, all of his caring, and all of his neuroses, are poured into the deep black funnel of the theater. His collaborative tempers have been getting shorter, his creative nerves rawer; being “uncompromising” has meant imposing his will and enforcing his interpretations.

This obsession with control has acted as cover and compensation for a deeper one. Henry’s goal onstage in this decade has been to examine states of helplessness and melancholy, to delve into depression and death. His concurrent screen work has mostly incarnated solidity, self-determination; but his stage tendency is toward a portrayal of total vulnerability, a final baring of psyche and skin.