The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (34 page)

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Shot in the midst of the 1956 campaign,
12 Angry Men
is a statement of ethical humanism, a blacklist-relevant warning against scapegoating and prejudice. Fonda makes it for the message as much as for the drama—and this fact has its bad effect on his performance. Less than a fleshly composite of living behaviors, his character is a moral beacon, dispassionate and unsensual, a man you ought to vote for but might not. He is Adlai Stevenson.

Simple situation: A roomful of jurors debates a murder case, and one of them, a solitary holdout for reasonable doubt, fights to sway his fellows from a hasty and unjust verdict. Such is Fonda’s personal interest in the project, and in playing the holdout, that he makes
12 Angry Men
his sole excursion as a film producer, and locates a TV director, Sidney Lumet, to shoot a cast of tough actors in a filthy room.

Though it fails commercially, the picture is soon recognized as both a drama of terrific impact and a superior civics lesson. Its success is mostly attributable to formal competence, clockwork exposition, and the dramatic advantages of a small, hot space full of street-level accents and sweating faces. The weak link is Fonda, who
doesn’t
sweat: Juror number eight is so virtuous, he lacks even glands.

He is strange, this juror—aloof. When another man attempts conversation, number eight only grins and stares straight ahead. A rest room scene gives Fonda some naturalistic hand-washing business to engage in while a burly New York actor (Jack Warden) sounds off nearby, but it also tips us to the fussiness of this hero: He dries each fingernail in succession, grooms each cuticle. Number eight is a control freak, this man who doesn’t sweat or socialize, who only smiles the oddest, most alienating smile.

The film
12 Angry Men
stands among the best-crafted fantasies of liberal heroism ever to come from Hollywood, as well as being one of the films that give Henry Fonda his stature before the popular audience. But atmosphere and acting, more than ethics, carry the force of the drama, while the producer-star is less a bleeding heart than a glass of milk: tall and white, contained and cool. Did we mention he resembles Stevenson? We see why so many voters—not only conservatives but also liberals craving boldness, rhetoric, glamour—could not get behind a man so impeccable and unexcitable. There’s a dearth of passion in this character, dryness in place of the spurt of life.

To this day,
12 Angry Men
is screened in high school classrooms. It should be. It lets each of us believe we can be the hero, the holdout; shows us how, as citizens, we ought to behave. But no one should place it on a level with
Young Mr. Lincoln.
Its limitation as art and politics is to shortchange the democracy it extols. It lacks the mystery, danger, and confusions, the dark potential and black magic that live in democracy, and in its great fables.
Young Mr. Lincoln
’s humanism shines the brighter for its pervading dark and persistent fear.
12 Angry Men
has more in common with campaign commercials, which reduce the redemptive lies of myth to planks in a party platform.

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In 1960, Stevenson’s place is taken by the young senator who had just missed becoming his running mate in 1952. John F. Kennedy has been a figure of swelling glamour since emerging as a Massachusetts congressman in the same freshman class with Nixon. Since then, he has risen to the Senate and paid his dues as a team player—sponsoring no innovative bills, leading no brave charges, but proving himself a reliably telegenic face and pleasing voice in party politics.

Like most erstwhile Stevensonians, Fonda shifts allegiance to JFK. The choice seems clear: Kennedy is younger and handsomer; he radiates athleticism and cool millions; he has hair. But it is a compromise, as well. The fact that both the senator and his younger brother and chief adviser, Robert, are, like Nixon, past allies of Joe McCarthy must give Henry some troubled hours.
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Fonda might prefer a candidate as intellectual, irreproachable, and experienced as Stevenson. But he has had enough of losing.

And he finds rapport with JFK—knows him “intimately,” he’ll say years later. The two share numerous traits. Kennedy, as Gore Vidal writes at the time, “is withdrawn, observant, icily objective in crisis, aware of the precise value of every card dealt him.” We picture Hank and Jack relaxing, chatting in low masculine tones in the library at East Seventy-fourth Street, enjoying scotches and cigars brought by Fonda’s Puerto Rican houseboy. They are men of the world, conversant in history, literature, art, travel, women—what are known as the finer things. They talk about the movies, no doubt: Joseph Kennedy, Sr., philanthropist and ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Prohibition bootlegger and paramour of silent-screen goddesses, has deep, dirty roots in the film business, and his eldest living son, bedding starlets and cultivating celebrity, will decorate his own presidential campaign with Hollywood dazzle.

But Fonda’s approbation may go beyond the sharing of such moments. Kennedy embodies complementary disciplines of professionalism and suffering: his father a man of devouring ambition, who sees his sons as arms of his ambition; his older brother, blown up in a World War II fighter plane; his own mettle tested in the Pacific, where he rescued himself and his shipmates on PT-109; his body racked by back and leg pain, cortisone injections to delay the creep of Addison’s disease. Stricken with an infection after undergoing back surgery in 1953, he comes so close to death that last rites are read over him. No one who knows Kennedy “intimately” doubts his toughness.

His compulsions—political, intellectual, sexual—are right for this moment. They go outward, not inward, and seem to increase the common energy. Compulsion in JFK is sexy, a positive charge; where it darkens Nixon, it gives Kennedy his glow. Whatever his secrets—and there are plenty—he comes across as an ad for openness, frank seduction, glamorous visibility, where Nixon is the picture of a man accustomed to living in his own shadows.

JFK is nominated at the convention, and Henry is there, participating in a staged spectacular at the L.A. Coliseum as Kennedy christens the New Frontier. Feeling the magic, Fonda shifts in the following months into high campaign gear. Emcees a Democratic rally in Long Beach; chairs the Hollywood Program Committee for Kennedy; sits on the dais as the candidate regales an audience of 200,000 in Manhattan’s Garment District; stars in a four-minute campaign ad that details the PT-109 story (and draws a direct link between JFK and FDR); and even joins Jackie Kennedy in a TV special exhibiting the Camelot couple’s family photos and home movies.

Fonda goes all out. And this time his man is elected, JFK defeating Nixon in the closest presidential contest of the century—a retrospective hint of the silent majority’s readiness to snatch history back from the youngsters and dissenters who have, in this open moment, claimed it.

Three weeks after Kennedy is sworn in, Henry appears on
The Ed Sullivan Show
to recite Lincoln’s second inaugural address and bestow, by proxy, the Emancipator’s blessing on the new administration. Later, JFK will appoint Fonda to the advisory board of his National Cultural Center, to serve in an honorary capacity with the likes of George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Robert Penn Warren, and Thornton Wilder. When on May 19, 1962, Kennedy holds his famous birthday party at Madison Square Garden, Fonda will be an honored guest. The president will thank him in his address, and Jack Benny will tease our man’s well-known sympathies by pointing him out as “a registered Republican and vice-president of the John Birch Society.”

Henry will laugh along with everyone. Maybe America is coming back around to something he can recognize—less fearful and closed, less about the angry will of the majority and the politics of attack. He believes in Kennedy, but more than that, he has refused to harden into suspicion or shrink to exclusionism. Unlike others—John Ford, Duke Wayne, Ronald Reagan—he has preserved his liberal faiths through these dank years of blacklisting and panic, compromise and lies. And here he sits in the Garden, in the glow of a president he admires, whose own compromises and lies he does not know, or can live with.

In America, you hope for something better. Henry has the right to laugh.

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Energized to find himself back on the winning team, he signs on for a series of roles—
Advise and Consent
(1962),
The Best Man,
and
Fail-Safe
(both 1964)—that constitute his first engagement since the 1940s with political content. Each comes out of Cold War anxiety over bombs, Communists, queers, enemies within; taken in sequence, the films advance in their evocations from the recent past to the hot present to the bleak beyond, writing a mordant postwar prognosis in paranoid style.

Adapted from Allen Drury’s 1959 best-seller,
Advise and Consent
is a potboiler whose subject is the hidden agenda: Everyone in this perfervid Washington is hoarding secrets, telling lies, or threatening blackmail. Though filmed in the first year of Kennedy’s presidency (and ornamented with the stunt casting of his brother-in-law Peter Lawford as a randy northeastern senator),
Advise and Consent
is not really a Kennedy movie. Full of sinisters and subversives, the Otto Preminger drama is imbued less with optimistic auguries of the New Frontier than with the combined piety and paranoia of the Nixon-McCarthy years.

For the novel, Drury had reconstituted a number of recent personalities and scandals from Capitol Hill, centering them on what was roughly a replay of the Alger Hiss trial. In 1948, journalist Whittaker Chambers claimed to have been, some ten years before, a link between New Deal bureaucrat Hiss and Soviet contacts. Questioned by HUAC, the patrician Hiss denied being a spy, while Chambers—a repentant former Bolshevik—looked the classic self-loathing snitch. But Chambers held to his story, and evidence was produced to support it. Tried twice for perjury, Hiss spent forty-four months in prison.

The effects were far-reaching. The witch-hunt gained credibility, while the residuum of the New Deal was cast in the worst possible light. Chambers’s tormented conversion from communism to God, capital, and
Time
magazine was deeply influential on, among others, Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon had been HUAC’s main interrogator on the case, and he brandished it for years thereafter as his sole unimpeachable win.

In
Advise and Consent,
Robert Leffingwell, a liberal diplomat, is nominated for secretary of state by an ailing Rooseveltian president; the appointment is imperiled by the surprise testimony of a man claiming he and the nominee once belonged to the same Communist cell. Leffingwell reduces the witness to incoherence and his charges to slander. As it turns out, though, the charges are true, Leffingwell’s defense a lie foisted on a credulous committee, several members of which have their own soap operas bubbling on the side.

The film’s accuser, approximating Chambers, is portrayed by Burgess Meredith as a trembling Judas, while Fonda’s Leffingwell combines the righteous bearing of Hiss with the intellectual-political profile of Stevenson. Watch how Fonda’s body glides and his focus narrows as Leffingwell demolishes the dubious witness: Like a bird of prey, he circles and swoops as the mouselike Meredith dissolves in confusion and pathos.

“There is something a bit wicked, perhaps too wicked,” Andrew Sarris writes when
Advise and Consent
is released, “in casting our most truthful actor as a liar.” But Leffingwell is less a villain than a kind of pod person, a bureaucratic simulation of liberalism. It may be more unnerving to see Fonda as a pragmatic opportunist than as an outright scoundrel, but he plays the role with bracing clarity: His Leffingwell is a man with little if any soul left.

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That same suggestion of a cagey, self-preserving amorality just barely carries over into
The Best Man.
Into its first shot, in fact—a shot that is also the high point of Henry’s performance. As a presidential candidate, he watches his own image on television, head bowed slightly, eyes level. A hand contemplatively pinches the mouth, covering the lower half of the face. The character is thus defined as observer, ironist, man above; a shrewd analyst who knows his modesty is his meal ticket; and a candidate half-hidden from the public to which he shows an open face.

This is brilliance—Fonda’s dimensional arrangement of a few physical elements in a shot that lasts mere seconds yet tells so much. Already, the movie is exciting. And it will stay exciting, though Fonda’s part requires him to cede the fun of irony and vanity to those around him. As in
12 Angry Men,
it is his job to be the irritating voice of conscience, and to anchor a cast of characters more colorful, extreme, and otherwise entertaining than he.

Directed by Franklin Schaffner and adapted by Gore Vidal from his hit play,
The Best Man
shares with
Advise and Consent
an insider’s perspective, a yoking of communism and homosexuality as political panic points, and a commingling of stars with well-known nonactors. But where Drury and Preminger imagine workaday Washington as a paranoid’s panorama, Vidal and Schaffner breathe deeply and happily the air of political carnival.

The carnival is a Democratic convention, implicitly set in the very near future of 1964. Despite Vidal’s contestants—Secretary of State William Russell (Fonda) and Senator Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson)—being based on Stevenson and Nixon, this movie is Camelot through and through: an athletic stride out of the dark 1950s, with hearty treacheries bathed in sunshine and “vigah.” It moves the story’s setting from Chicago to Los Angeles, site of Kennedy’s benediction; a year earlier, Cliff Robertson played the young JFK in
PT 109
; Cantwell is a perverse composite of Nixon, McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy; and the president, according to Vidal, contributes critique and even “a couple of lines” to the screenplay. Funny, fast, oddly sexy (there’s a good deal of exposed flesh, even Fonda’s), the movie unreels as if under the approving gaze of Prince Jack himself—alive when it is filmed, dead by the time it opens.