The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (31 page)

His adaptation is titled
A Gift of Time.
William Hammerstein—Susan Blanchard’s stepbrother—signs on as producer; it may be at his suggestion that Henry Fonda is asked to star. Good sense would tell our man to decline: He has numerous commitments pending, and the play is looking at a late start in the theatrical season. The sterner reality is its subject matter. Who will pay to witness a man’s slow death from cancer?

It sounds unmanageable, or unwatchable. Kanin may be moved by the challenge of it, but Fonda has his own reasons to make the attempt. Together, they have the power to conceive and construct a show that wisdom says should not be done. Will they do it? Will they do it without flinching?

*   *   *

Fonda’s schedule is already backbreaking: ten days of location shooting in Washington, D.C., for
Advise and Consent;
the New York taping of
The Good Years,
a Lucille Ball TV special; the Hollywood taping of
Henry Fonda and the Family,
a Henry Fonda TV special; and a brief trip to Paris for a one-day cameo as Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., in
The Longest Day,
Darryl F. Zanuck’s mammoth chronicle of the D-Day invasion. (A fat check and high-line exposure in the most heavily hyped war movie yet made can be Fonda’s only motives for reuniting with Zanuck.)

Beyond these obligations, Fonda must not only schedule rehearsals and preview periods for
A Gift of Time
’s late-February opening but also make a research trip to Ciboure, the village on the Basque coast of France where the Wertenbakers lived. In November, Henry meets Lael in the company of his costar, Olivia de Havilland, who is making her comeback after long absences from screen and stage. They journey, she tells an interviewer, “to the radiologist’s, into the waiting room and into the room where the X-rays were first shown … We went into all the rooms of the house where the Wertenbakers lived.”

“We talked to Wertenbaker’s doctor and some of his Basque friends,” Fonda adds. “What strong faces they had.”

It is unusually immersive, almost Method, the way Fonda stretches his body and abilities to play the dying man. He spends an hour a day studying the rudiments of classical guitar, which he’ll play onstage. Already rail-thin, he fasts to drop more pounds.

Almost the entire burden of this risky, costly show rests on his shoulders. Aside from de Havilland, there are no stars. The production requires a large cast and technical management on a level usually reserved for musicals. Kanin envisions a montage approach, with scenes ranging from several spaces in the Wertenbaker home to cafés, doctors’ offices, a hospital room, even the deck of a transatlantic liner. Boris Aronson’s tripartite set offers multiple centers of action, each with its own props, furniture, and lighting cues; often all three are active at once, with scenes overlapping.

The rush to opening is intense, the physical stress on Fonda terrific. It’s unlikely that he has ever given himself so completely and recklessly to a role.

It culminates January 27, 1962, when
A Gift of Time
begins previews at the Shubert in New Haven. The stars are rewarded with curtain calls and roses, but in truth, people have been turned off. A playgoer sends an angry note to the
New York Times,
expressing outrage “that the theatre should concern itself with so unpleasant and painful a subject.” The review in the
Bridgeport Post
augurs the notices to come: The actors are fine, the play simply too much—ten scenes over two acts “is a long time to watch a man creep constantly nearer the grave.”

The Broadway opening comes February 22, at the Ethel Barrymore. Word has traveled from New Haven that the show is a downer. Ticket demand is so low that the producers have been unable to sell a single “party” block of seats in advance—unheard of for a Fonda play.

*   *   *

On March 11, Fonda and de Havilland appear on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
performing a scene in which the Wertenbakers return to Europe by ship. Cancer being unmentionable on TV, Sullivan’s setup says only that the hero “faces death from an incurable malady.” Based on this clip, the play looks maudlin—dialogue precious, acting stagy in the worst way. Olivia de Havilland basks in her own nobility, and Fonda affects a gruff, scratchy voice, a force that comes across as boorishness.

The televised scene ends on a kiss. On the Barrymore stage, though, it continues—and turns abuptly into something quite different.

“Lael!” Charles shouts from his deck chair. “Oh, Jesus.”

Terrified, he asks his wife to cover him with a blanket. They leave the deck (
lights down, stage right
) and arrive in their cabin (
lights up, stage left
). Charles stumbles into the bathroom, ordering Lael not to follow. An abscess has burst in his colon, and he is leaking blood and feces from an unhealed surgical incision. In a scene that suggests bedroom farce recast as biological nightmare, Lael races about in search of sanitary napkins. As she bandages her husband’s reeking wound with a belt of Kotex, the couple’s mad laughter is heard from offstage.

Interludes of humor and sentiment become fewer as the disease spreads and the end approaches. Charles says good-bye to a friend, then fumbles down some pills and passes out; demented with pain and medication, he abuses his wife. Fonda’s form grows wispier, the stage darker.

Lael had described her husband’s suicide in excruciating detail—a hurried swallowing of pills; injections of morphine into the leg; finally, the drawing of a razor across each wrist, the ebbing of blood, the dying embrace suggestive of a pietá. The stage rendition is faithful to the extremity of the scene. “I love you, I love you,” Lael whispers, holding Charles, “please die.”

A cut and bleeding corpse, a survivor asking release; after that, silence, and a black stage. The thing is finally done: Henry Fonda has committed suicide before his audience.

Henry’s press agent, John Springer, says the Barrymore first-nighters are “stunned,” and he remembers Paul Newman backstage, extolling “the God damnedest, greatest performance I’ve ever seen.” Certainly, many are stunned because they are moved. But they are also stunned that such an ordeal should ever have been staged.

Critics too are uncertain. Richard Watts, Jr., of the
New York Post
finds it “one of the most depressing plays ever written.” Howard Taubman of the
Times
writes that the play “does not achieve tragic dimension.” “Strangely unmoving and dramatically slack,” says
Time
. Famed stage director Harold Clurman, reviewing for
The Nation
, calls Fonda “the best thing in the play as it now stands” but says the characters are “ciphers … pegs for pathos.” In the
Herald Tribune
, Walter Kerr likewise appreciates the star’s “plain, unblinking, straightforward and unbelievably controlled” performance. But the play fails by outweighing fiction with realism: “The real thing has usurped the place of the ritualized thing, the drama of death has given way to the presence of death.”

The show is officially not a hit. Lights go out for good on May 12, after ninety-two performances. Anything longer might have proved unendurable for the stars: Fonda has continued to lose weight after the opening, and de Havilland is rumored to be covered with bruises. Briefly, and improbably, a film version is rumored—to be co-produced by Kanin and Fonda and shot over the summer of 1962, on French locations, with both stars repeating their roles. But the rumor stays a rumor.

The Ethel Barrymore Theatre seats barely a thousand people—which means that far more viewers have watched
The Deputy
on any given Saturday night than have seen
A Gift of Time
during its entire run. To Fonda, that is probably just as well; his labor in this play has been a private act of empathy and remembering. He has done it for Frances, and for himself—not for the public, and not for history.

He has staged a proper ending. It is important that the ending be witnessed, and just as important that it be hidden: presence as absence. In
You Only Live Once,
he hides his hands; in
The Grapes of Wrath,
he turns his back; in
The Ox-Bow Incident,
we do not see his eyes; in
Mister Roberts,
he faces upstage. In
A Gift of Time,
hiddenness is again called on, as both theatrical “cheat”—how to realistically depict the cutting of wrists, the release of blood?—and personal catharsis. The stage direction reads “
His back is seen, and her face, watching.
” There is a witness to the act, but it is not us.

His post-Frances career is brought to a climax. If on the stage Henry has become Frances, dead by a razor, in life he has been more like Lael, the witness to a loved one’s decline, the pleading survivor. “I love you, I love you, please die.”

Remember the graveyard: The stick points at the grave, and back at the man. Fonda’s fate all along, his curse and his cure, has been to become the thing that haunts him. In performing suicide, he has dramatized an obligation to Frances. Whatever understanding he achieves is tardy, and only symbolic, but Fonda can hardly take symbol, or the autobiographical implications of his recent roles, further than this—to introject the loss that has, for more than a decade, shadowed him; and to bleed Frances from his veins while joining her in the loneliness of the last act.

*   *   *

For Henry Fonda, right man—husband, father, master of control—the psychology of self-annihilation is a thing not to be discussed. But for Henry Fonda, wrong man—artist of sorrows, bearer of obligations—it may be the truest, deepest language he knows.

Go back to late 1935. Fonda is still a fresh face in Hollywood, with two starring roles to his credit, and buzz already that he’ll be the screen’s next Lincoln. He has much to be proud of. Yet these may be his worst of times, with such exhilaration and loss in so brief a period.

December 25, 1931: He marries Margaret Sullavan.

March 1932: Hank and Peggy separate; she humiliates him with Jed Harris.

October 5, 1934: Herberta Fonda dies.

October 7, 1935: William Fonda dies, one year almost to the day after his wife. Henry leaves the set of
Way Down East
to fly hurriedly to Omaha.

October 31, 1935: A small item appears in newspapers across the country, informing fans that Henry Fonda, presently shooting
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
at Big Bear Lake in California’s San Bernardino National Park, has nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. He had been listening to his car radio while running the motor—presumably in an enclosed garage—and was rescued by an assistant director who found him slumped in the seat.

November 16, 1935: Another version of the same incident is printed. It was late at night, and Henry was testing his car battery. He let the motor run. For entertainment, he turned on the radio; for warmth, he shut the garage doors. “They got him out just in time,” the story says.

Fonda, in his enigma, leads us to ask the plausible worst—whether the incident was misadventure, as the reports imply, or his attempt, perfunctory or in earnest, to end his own life. We wonder if we have been placing Fonda at too objective a distance from suicide. Maybe his life is, as he has said, “peppered with suicides” for the simple reason that like finds like. Maybe for him the wish for oblivion is no mere witnessing of another’s pain, but a thing inside, which he feels or remembers every day. Maybe the stick points at the grave, and back at the man.

There is much to recall in light of this. The dark around the eyes of William Fonda; Jane’s remarks on the strain of family melancholy, and what she speculates was her father’s genetic vulnerability to depression; Henry’s history of befriending, and sometimes marrying, suicidal people; all the roles he has played in which despair is the stain, and suicide the cleansing.

We recall as well Henry’s long-nurtured desire to play Julian English, the doomed hero of
Appointment in Samarra.
We note that the novel appeared in 1934, a year before the incident at Big Bear Lake, and that Julian ends his life in a car seat on a cold morning, his lungs full of carbon monoxide.

9

New Frontier and Hidden Agenda

Fail-Safe

Election Day is a farce to many Americans, but beneath that disgust runs an ever-receding memory, or myth, of our shared political life’s having once been a richer thing. We believe it was different long ago—that other choices existed, that our politics had soul, sadness, honor, caring. That is why Lincoln remains our most revered president: We mourn the example we’ve lost, the absent father of our politics.

There is an ache in us. Mostly the ache stays hidden, for exposing it would mean admitting fear, doubt, ambiguity—everything Americans loathe. Yet because the pain is no less real for our denial of it, we have always needed a myth, a film, a fable to salve it. That hunger for fiction admits gaps in our reality.