The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (30 page)

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In the fall of 1959, back in New York, rehearsals begin for another play: a minor work, but a major move toward the secret themes. Robert Anderson’s
Silent Night, Lonely Night
is a talk-driven piece about two married people sharing Christmas night at a New England inn. The woman is mulling a separation from her absent husband; Henry’s character, John Sparrow, is visiting his wife at a nearby asylum, where she has been driven by his philandering. The two converse through a long night and into the day; dust settles as the actors drift across a cozy, antiquey set.

Despite its humanistic decency, the play is as meager as an episode of
The Deputy.
Costarring Barbara Bel Geddes and directed by Peter Glenville,
Silent Night
proves uncommercial because of its air of defeat, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t trying to be liked. “I’m so sorry” is a dialogue motif; another is “That’s so sad.” And it has a fashionable fix on alienation, which forces Fonda to twist himself under lines like this: “I imagine if we could hear all the stifled cries for help in the world, it would be deafening.”

Opening at the Morosco Theatre on December 3,
Silent Night
is welcomed as enthusiastically as a sick aunt. Brooks Atkinson calls it “excessively verbose” and “uneventful,” and regrets the “slow, ruminative pace” of Glenville’s staging. Even the odd defender, like Jack Gaver of UPI, offers only oblique praise: Fonda and Bel Geddes, he feels, are so good “that I find this talky, almost motionless drama of loneliness an appealing entertainment. Certainly it is a play that could be deadly in the wrong hands.”

The broader feeling is that any hands would have been the wrong ones. The show closes after three months and a solid 124 performances, but it goes in the books as a failure.

Fonda cannot have mistaken Anderson’s play for dynamic theater. What interests him is the chance for performing therapy—getting closer to personal mysteries in the costume of a character hauntingly similar to himself. Like
Seesaw, Silent Night
is about a married man alone with a woman, a man whose depressive wife suffers offstage. But where Jerry Ryan is controlling and selfish, John Sparrow is kindly and sympathetic, attributing his own sexual and emotional betrayals not to hedonism or narcissism, but to the higher syndrome of alienation.

Adultery, asylums, depression, suicide—not one of Henry’s Frances-related preoccupations goes unreferenced. The unseen spouse is a kind of specter: Unwilling at first to admit her condition, Sparrow pretends she is dead. She is to the play what Frances has been to Henry’s art in these years—the absent body, the open wound—and the play allows Fonda to fulfill a fantasy of happier endings: The despondent wife clings to life, and the husband’s final resolve is to stay by her side, come what may.

Though
Silent Night, Lonely Night
will not make great profit, loft the art of the stage, or be remembered far beyond its season, from Fonda it is an offering, a Christmas gift to the ghost. Yet the gift is wrapped in sadness: There are limits on the ability of actors and other mortals to rewrite the past.

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These few months—late 1959 through early 1960—are a convergence point, at which the feminine planets in Fonda’s orbit come into alignment. As rumors of discord with Afdera creep out, Henry goes onstage as John Sparrow to relive memories of the wife who died. On New Year’s Day, a month into the run of
Silent Night,
Margaret Sullavan is found dead in New Haven. In February, Jane has her Broadway debut, and appears with beaming Dad on the cover of
Life.
And in these very weeks, Henry’s newest movie will open in cinemas across America—
The Man Who Understood Women.

The fourth marriage has begun to devolve from novelty to routine for two companions who feel lonesome in each other’s company. The summer of 1960 is again spent in Hollywood, but Henry and Afdera are often at different parties. Both attend the Democratic National Convention, held in Los Angeles in July—nominee John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, have been dinner guests at the Fonda town house—but their escapades are separate. The gaps between them widen. She enjoys entertaining; he does not. She is amused by her own immaturity; he is bored by it. Both play manipulative games, but the games have different rules.

The marriage is attenuated through the summer. When rehearsals begin in the fall for Fonda’s compulsory wintertime play, the choice of material suggests compromise—with commerce, with comedy, with the careless and carefree view of life promoted by frivolous farce and aristocratic wives.
Critic’s Choice
is the opposite of the “sad and boring” work that has lately taken Henry’s attention; it is Henry trying to fit another man’s dinner jacket.

If
Seesaw
evokes the volatility of the Sullavan marriage, and
Silent Night
the depression of the Frances years,
Critic’s Choice
—which opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 14—offers a likeness of Afdera’s Fonda: Hank the glamour boy, suave and socially adept. As a drama critic faced with reviewing his wife’s saccharine play (a situation based on the marriage of
New York Herald Tribune
critic Walter Kerr and playwright Jean Kerr), Fonda indulges his middle-aged penchant for tiresomely sardonic types who speak in pronouncements. The play is staged by Otto Preminger, reuniting with Fonda thirteen years after
Daisy Kenyon,
and aspires vaguely to an air of old Hollywood screwball comedy—minus any wild strokes of genius.

Like everything Ira Levin writes,
Critic’s Choice
is constructed with exceeding finesse: The thing makes sense. But it is fatally cute, with the stench of something too eager to be a hit. (Some of the stench may come from Preminger’s gaseous backstage outbursts, which cause Gena Rowlands, the actress first cast as Fonda’s romantic foil, to be replaced in previews.) Notices are tepid, and the show ends after five months and 189 performances: a hit, but far from a knockout.

On January 20, 1961, JFK is inaugurated in Washington, D.C. Henry cannot attend:
Critic’s Choice
is sold out for a benefit that night. But Afdera is in Washington, and, making the rounds of parties, she experiences private moments with Prince Jack. These do not lead to intercourse, astonishingly, but to insight: The baroness, like many others her age and younger, gets the sense—as if passed telepathically through JFK’s crinkly eyes and white teeth—that enormous changes are in the wind.

“I was discovering myself,” she will recall in her memoir, sounding like a budding flower child. “I was too deeply affected by all the many changes that were taking place. I was in tune with the present.” Whereas Henry, she comes to feel, is stodgy, close-minded, redolent of things past. “The 1960s were with us like a hungry lion, and everything I was feeling instinctively my husband was too old and too well-established to appreciate fully.”

Who can be certain what she wants, other than to be a single girl again? Come to that, what has Afdera
ever
wanted with Fonda? She knows the true answer, and offers it frankly: He is “the father I never had.” Her own father died before she knew him; growing up in a world of male privilege has taught the baroness that her power lies in cunning and manipulation. When Fonda appeared, she was twenty-four, yet essentially a child; a few years on, she has achieved a teenager’s maturity, and found a teenager’s sense of revolt. In time, like many aging postadolescents, she will look back with regret on the home she left, and wonder what leaving cost her.

“If it had been maybe ten years later,” she muses, “I might have understood more and tried to work things out better and do what he wanted me to do.” With such violence in her father’s legacy, she may have been attracted to the aspect of Fonda that is parental and punitive. Afdera even claims Henry hit her—once, and only once. “Just the slightest of slaps,” she swears, though he is overcome by remorse afterward. She admits she has goaded him to it, and that “if he had done it more often, I would have respected him more.”

This is the same woman who decides that Fonda is too backward to meet the coming age. Yes, Afdera is impossible. What does she want—to be punished or pampered, caged or liberated?

When she requests a divorce, Fonda implores her, as he had implored Susan, to reconsider—again, less out of love than shame. The separation is announced on March 16, and hopeful Henry paints it as “completely friendly, a chance for us to work out certain problems in our marriage.” But Afdera sounds wised-up, rueful, and ready to take the blame. “I can only reproach myself,” she tells the press. “Hank is an admirable man. I guess I was too immature.” Meaning, she has already moved on. Only a lover with the next adventure in sight can part so generously.

After obtaining a quickie divorce in Juárez, she flies back to Rome. Stoic Henry finishes out the contracted run of the Levin comedy.

Afdera will always have money, or find money; and since for her everything stems from lire and the accoutrements of the good life, she will always find a way to be happy. But she will remain torn between freedom and the cage. On July 31, 1966, she and a traveling companion, pop artist Mario Schifano, will be arrested at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport for smuggling marijuana, a charge carrying a maximum penalty of eight years. Afdera, who will freely admit to carrying Schifano’s stash, is not innocent of the illegality of the act, only of why it would matter to anyone. After three months, the sentence is suspended and a fine imposed, but Afdera spends the intervening time in jail.

But she will absorb the bad publicity, the distaste attaching to a glamour girl whose days in the spotlight, along with her youth, are fleeting. She’ll move forward with the resilience of one born certain that life is a banquet, and that some courses will be finer and rarer than others.

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In September 1961, our man is back in Hollywood.
Critic’s Choice
had its last curtain on May 27, and Fonda, accepting Preminger’s offer of a plum part in his next big-budget screen controversy,
Advise and Consent,
has rented a Bel Air house for the months preceding initial shooting.

Save for the odd comely companion, Henry is alone in these weeks. But he cannot abide idleness, and so has chosen to squeeze himself into the crowded mural of
How the West Was Won,
an all-star Cinerama spectacular directed in relays by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall. Obscured by cocked hat and ropy mustache, Fonda plays a buffalo hunter and Indian scout in the segment done by Marshall—the only one of the three directors with whom he has no contentious history. It’s a rich, leathery piece of acting in a film that, for all its bulging sense of land and space, is in no small measure a racist whitewash.

So it is September, and the old lots at Twentieth Century–Fox are being torn down for real estate development. How the West was won, phase two. Fonda strolls through the ghost towns with a journalist, taking in the half-demolished buildings and displaced facades. “I made my first picture,
Farmer Takes a Wife,
on one of those sets,” he says—you can see him pointing. Here, he shot
Way Down East;
over there,
Young Mr. Lincoln
and the James brothers movies. The
Ox-Bow
and
Clementine
streets too are nearby.

“Now they’re going,” he says. “It’s kinda sad.”

Just a few weeks later, the hills between Brentwood and Bel Air will catch fire, and Tigertail will burn down to black ash and disperse in the Santa Ana winds.

Henry is nearing sixty. Time steals up on a man, and suddenly it is on his back. Though still straight and strong, each year he hunches a bit more with the weight of time. Another wife has come and gone, another half decade. Now whole continents of his past are vanishing; and part of that past—Frances—remains as a persistent sorrow. We imagine this as a point of reckoning; of putting memory to rest, and the mind at ease.

It will be done only through a part; only through work. Henry knows no other way. The parts have always found him, the great parts—Lincoln, Joad, Earp, Roberts, Balestrero—which he has needed as they have needed him. He has given the parts life, and they have allowed him to symbolize himself. And within each part,
the scene
: Abe at the graveside, Tom leaving the camp, Wyatt watching Doc, Roberts saying good-bye, Manny walking down the asylum hall. Each has been a statement of self as well as communion with another—a settling with obligation, a facing of ghosts, a farewell.

He needs another chance like that: a chance at an ending.

Hints of it turn up in Fonda’s remarks, these latter months of 1961. Walking through the Fox lot, he allows he’d like to make more movies, perhaps get off the stage for a while. But something is stopping him. A new play has been offered, and its producer is telling Fonda it could be the greatest role he has ever played.

It will not prove to be quite that. But it will conceivably constitute “the greatest acting challenge of his career,” as he will later call it. It will become a major project, a personal need. Henry will care about it as he has cared about little else lately.

And he would like to give us a sense of what is coming. Just before the end of the year, he announces he has agreed to do the play he’d been considering in September, and that it is “about a writer who kills himself.”

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In late 1954, Charles Christian Wertenbaker—a novelist and journalist living with his wife and children in France—is given a few months to live: He has intestinal cancer. Rejecting hospitalization and life support, he chooses to spend his last days at home, suffering a hellish decline with the aid of black-market painkillers. Finally, at his limit of endurance, he opens his wrists with a shaving razor.

Lael Tucker Wertenbaker not only approves her husband’s suicide but aids it. And then writes about it: Her nonfiction chronicle
Death of a Man
(1957) spares no detail of Wertenbaker’s rapid and degrading demise. At the time,
euthanasia
is an unknown word, cancer goes unmentioned in obituaries, and Lael’s book is not read easily. It is then forgotten by all but playwright Garson Kanin. Known for his comedies, particularly the stage and movie hit
Born Yesterday
, he has aspirations to drama; he reads Lael’s book and is gripped by the need to put it on the stage.