The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (32 page)

As a young actor playing a martyred president at a crucial time, Henry Fonda slips through the gaps. He gets inside our dark mind, our ongoing political fable. Across four decades, nine chief executives, and innumerable changes, he stays there. He persists as a memory that, having first evoked Lincoln at the apex of the New Deal, returns more than twenty years later on the New Frontier. He embodies a sense of what we were, still ache to be, and fear we can never be again.

*   *   *

Everyone knows the history that is made on November 22, 1963. But the year that follows, through which we trace the issue of that day, is just as crucial to the subsequent course of American affairs. The period of collective recovery from the assassination of a loved and hated president, 1964 is also an election year. John Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, thrashes deeper into the Asian jungle and pushes the Civil Rights Act into law. In response to the hawk rhetoric of his opponent, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s handlers devise a historic campaign commercial—a girl plucking a daisy, her voice melting into a countdown, the daisy into a death cloud—which is broadcast once on September 29, and never again.

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Former B-list leading man Ronald Reagan plays his last film role—a sleazy crime boss in Don Siegel’s remake of
The Killers—
and gives a nationally televised speech in support of Goldwater, which is the beginning of his own, infinitely more successful career in politics. The Free Speech Movement is born in Berkeley, setting off passions and plots that Reagan will combat as governor of California.

Conflicting ideologies are more clearly defined in 1964 than they have been since New Deal days. It is exactly what Reagan’s speech calls it: “A Time for Choosing.” It is also the year that climaxes Henry Fonda’s ascension to the presidency of the screen.

In 1960, many see the contest between JFK and Richard Nixon as a choice between new and old, life and death. Kennedy’s Cold War stance is not far left of Nixon’s, yet his candidacy promises a return of liberal principle and creative atmosphere after a decade of conservative stagnation. And when JFK arrives, Fonda is already there, equipped with leftist bona fides and populist associations. Appearing in a succession of political roles, he emerges as the soul of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., court historian of the Kennedy White House, would term “the vital center,” dramatizing the mainstream American identity in days of excitement and crisis.

Behold the New Frontier. The phrase doesn’t originate with Kennedy. As William Safire notes, it is “in the air” for months before JFK patents it in his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. But at that moment, with so much else in the air, the words are a chime—the song of American ambition reaching forward and back at once, prairie cool and cowboy flash in the new world of IBM and superhighway. The great traumas of the century are past, while powers of justice and technology are on the march. “New Frontier”: why not!

Of course it is only a golden moment, and its memory will be muddied over the next three years in a series of setbacks and advances, gross losses and irreducible wins. These are humid, bubbling times, but the lid is still firmly on the pot. Then everything changes: Kennedy is dead. A piece of his head flies off, and with it the lid. America is revealed as a cauldron—conspiracy, clamor, riot, war—that has been slow in the boiling.

Politics and image will mix in new ways. More than any star of his generation—save John Wayne, who from
The Alamo
(1960) to
The Green Berets
(1968) defends Hollywood’s hawk agenda throughout the raucous decade—Henry Fonda is in that mix. Like “New Frontier,” he is a stabilizer in the midst of change. Histories speak through and circulate around him, as they do through and around Wayne; simply by moving, speaking, advocating, these men connect eras and create meanings.

As J. Hoberman writes, Fonda in his changes has “tracked the trajectory of tormented liberalism—forged in the crucible of the 1930s, tested under fire during World War II, purged of its Communistic tendencies in the late 1940s.” His political metamorphosis achieves absolute form just as the country is emerging from Eisenhower’s “politics of fatigue” into Kennedy’s radiant newness; at the moment he is needed, Fonda lives again in the cool mien of Camelot elder statesmanhood.

Our man is middle-aged by Kennedy time, and hardly a political innocent. Many years lie behind his emergence; numerous battles inform his choices.

*   *   *

Starting in the late 1930s, Fonda is firmly identified with his industry’s burgeoning liberal element, an identification encouraged by his involvement with both political causes and cause-driven films.
Blockade
is an unmistakable gesture in favor of the Spanish Loyalists;
The Grapes of Wrath
distills New Deal spirit;
The Ox-Bow Incident
jibes with controversy over lynching in the South;
The Long Night
puts a socialist spin on the plight of war veterans; even Fonda’s blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in the all-star antifascist thriller
Jigsaw
(1949) states his ongoing leftist allegiance as the Cold War begins.

Under “political party,” the California Voter Registries for 1936, 1940, and 1942 list Henry and Frances Fonda as “DTS”(“declined to state”); not until 1946 do they declare themselves as Democrats. Before Pearl Harbor, Fonda identifies less with a party than with the Popular Front, an unofficial, unincorporated confederation of antifascist groups in America and Europe. Positing fascism as the chief threat to individual liberty and collective security, the Popular Front unites mainstream liberals and more radical groups; for a few years, lefties of all stripes—and even a few freethinking conservatives—find, if not synthesis, common cause.

Fonda’s earliest affiliation is with the Anti-Nazi League, whose Hollywood chapter is founded in July 1936. The ANL’s mission is to promote—through rallies, ads, and other political appeals—a categorical denunciation of the Third Reich. Among its founders are screenwriter Dorothy Parker, director Fritz Lang, and actor Fredric March; members include James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Gale Sondergaard, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, and Douglas’s wife, Helen Gahagan. Film historian Charles J. Maland calls the ANL “the most prominent manifestation of Popular Front anti-fascism in Hollywood,” and Fonda’s involvement signals his perennial location on the activist spectrum—left of center, within firm boundaries of democratic dissent.

The Anti-Nazi League quickly makes a name for itself. In 1937, Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio visits Hollywood to study film production; but his reception—clouded with espionage rumors, supposedly spread by the ANL—is so unpleasant that he leaves almost instantly. The next year, Hitler’s documentarian, Leni Riefenstahl, comes to town, and the ANL places an ad in
Daily Variety,
calling for an orchestrated shunning. The climate convinces Riefenstahl to postpone American exhibition of
Olympia
, her documentary about the Olympic Games in Berlin, for several years.

As its profile and influence crest, the ANL comes under official scrutiny. In 1938 Martin Dies, Democratic representative from Texas, convenes a panel to investigate Communist influence in domestic affairs. The Anti-Nazi League is rumored to have made financial contributions to Communist groups; as far as Dies is concerned, write Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, the ANL is “a front for the Communist Party, pure and simple.” League representatives hasten a telegram to his committee, “challenging it to substantiate [its] charges.” Dies promises to do so with a series of hearings—whereupon the White House and Congress are deluged with telegrams from Hollywood and elsewhere, demanding the investigation be nullified and the committee disbanded. Amazingly, the assault on opinion works: Dies, citing a “lack of funds and time,” cancels the hearings.

The victory is only contextual: Right now, most Americans fear Nazism more urgently than communism. Hitler and Stalin have yet to sign their nonaggression pact, and the Soviet Union is America’s ally in a world about to be at war. The Anti-Nazi League has the future on its side.

But the future has a way of becoming the past. In seven years, the war will be over; with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Stalin will be redrawn as America’s ultimate foe, and the Dies committee will return to make good on its first threat. By then, it will have mutated into a far more sophisticated form under its official designation, the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

*   *   *

The Popular Front agenda had demanded visibility, active dissent. In contrast, the Cold War is about hiddenness—official secrets, security councils, exposure as damnation. The politicians to whom, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, “‘Red’ really means loud-mouth or foreigner or Jew” have intuited that communism is the next enemy, secrecy the new source of power. Opportunism, fervor, a populace in equal parts panicked and passive create what becomes known, even before it is over, as the McCarthy era, after its chief visionary and loudest crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

McCarthy is right: There are spies inside the U.S.government. Definitive or at least credible cases have been made against Harry Dexter White, senior Treasury official and architect of the World Bank; Julian Wadleigh of the Department of Agriculture; Duncan Chaplin Lee, assistant to OSS director William J. Donovan; Alger Hiss of the State Department; and others. But the powerful spy rings of the 1930s and 1940s are defunct well before the height of the Red scare, and many quondam communists, fellow travelers, weekend pinkos, and all-American rabble-rousers are snagged in the net of the great McCarthy and HUAC fishing expeditions. Even Ronald Reagan will admit, long after his conservative conversion, that in these years “many fine people were accused wrongly of being Communists simply because they were liberals.”

Fonda is off to the side, observing. This is some of what he sees:

In October 1947, HUAC, chaired by New Jersey congressman J. Parnell Thomas, schedules hearings on communism in Hollywood. In support is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, led by John Wayne. Among the committee’s “friendly witnesses” is Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild and—along with his then- wife, actress Jane Wyman—an FBI informant on Commie scuttlebutt. Meanwhile, industry Left-leaners, branding themselves the Committee for the First Amendment, establish a presence at the Washington hearings in the form of a delegation led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston.

The hearings are dominated by the testimony of the Hollywood Ten—a group of screenwriters hostile to HUAC. Among them is John Howard Lawson, one of the few openly Communist writers in Hollywood, and author of the Fonda-Wanger
Blockade
. Lawson’s appearance, while courageous, is also arch and self-righteous; refusing to answer direct questions, he lectures. Ultimately, he is escorted from the dock by police. The next day’s witness is Dalton Trumbo, who is likewise charged with contempt and jailed.

Trumbo explains the refusal of the screenwriters to answer questions: “The accused men made their stand before the Committee to reestablish their right of privacy, not only in law but in fact.” But many feel that such intransigence has only made HUAC’s job easier. “It was a sorry performance,” says John Huston of the Hollywood Ten testimony. “They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle.”

Like the Anti-Nazi League, the Committee for the First Amendment has started out full of vigor, charged with mission. But now history is on the other side. Out of fear, exhaustion, and a desire to get back to business, the movie industry, like most of America, makes a willing exchange of democratic danger for bureaucratic surety. It’s the first phase in a transformation that will climax in the late 1960s, after assassination and cover-up have woven themselves into the patterns of American thought—the transformation, in Greil Marcus’s words, “of what in the United States had been taken as open, public life into private crime or hidden conspiracy.”

*   *   *

Most of Fonda’s work with those blacklisted occurs after the blacklist era has ended. In 1959,
Warlock
is directed by Edward Dymtryk, Hollywood Ten member, who, after going to jail for refusing to testify before HUAC, reconsiders, then testifies twice, naming several of his former associates in the Communist party.
Fail-Safe
(1964) is scripted by the blacklisted, nontestifying Walter Bernstein, and
Madigan
(1968) is cowritten by Abraham Polonsky, Hollywood Ten member and subsequent exile.

Apart from
Blockade,
Fonda’s preblacklist filmography contains only one instance of “social propaganda” from a known Communist source.
You Belong to Me
(1941) is written by Claude Binyon, from a story by Dalton Trumbo—in later days the grand old man of the blacklist, a hero retrieved from 1950s pseudonymy to write
Exodus, Spartacus,
and others. This minor comedy has Fonda as a pampered, sickly millionaire married to a domineering doctor (Barbara Stanwyck). Feeling emasculated, the millionaire takes a pseudonym—aptly—and a low-level sales job in a department store; when the ruse is discovered, he is brought into the manager’s office to face representatives of the employees’ union.

Actor Larry Parks—in 1941 a nobody, five years later a star for his turn in
The Al Jolson Story—
plays the man who speaks for the union. Two other workers, one of them played by the familiar character actor Jeff Corey, look on silently. The employees demand the millionaire’s firing, on the grounds that he is depriving a needy man of a job. Parks pronounces the underdog’s right to a fair shake, and a fast-moving film stops dead for an insertion of ideology in the form of undramatized speech. It is, undeniably, propaganda, albeit in the service of compassion and economic good sense.

But there’s a twist. The playboy protests that
he
needs the job, too—not for money, but for personal reasons. Not buying it, Parks tells the manager, “He refuses to argue his case openly and above-board. He classifies his defense as”—uttering the next words as if they are dirty—“something
personal
and
private
. He hasn’t given a single reason why he shouldn’t be dismissed immediately.” This is starting to sound familiar.