The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (41 page)

“This Leone fellow,” Henry will say when filming is finished. “He seems to get right inside your head, making you think differently, react to situations as never before and perform as you’ve never performed in the past. I’ve done things for him that I once would have backed away from.”

Thus influenced, he will achieve closer communion with the ghost that lives in his acting than he ever has, or ever will again.

*   *   *

When
Klute
appears in June 1971, Jane Fonda is reborn as a quintessential woman of the new decade. The performance is a further innovation in screen acting, as cogent a contribution to cultural life as Bogart’s detective or Brando’s brute. Directed by Alan J. Pakula,
Klute
—about a New York prostitute shadowed by both an investigator and a killer—is attuned to moods of quiet and trembling in the heart of the city. The look suggests noir, but the audience has a new sense that character arises less from plot contrivance than from inspiration and accident.

Jane’s Bree Daniels exists, as few screen characters do. Take the scene in which, smoking grass in her silent apartment, she sings herself a formal hymn about marching with God. The song is retrieved, like Peter’s cemetery scene, from memory—it was sung in chapel at the Emma Willard School—and Jane inserts it on impulse. Yet the need to sing the song is Bree’s, and it places us in the room with her. We cannot say where the song comes from, or why it should haunt us.

Bree’s scenes with her therapist are improvised by Jane. In a monologue that builds from cliché to breakthrough, Bree articulates her need to self-destruct. At the same time, Jane sounds the gap between herself and her father—Henry’s compulsion to honor limits, and her own to push them. As she approaches insight, her hands grip the air, her energy intensifies, her eyes pin the thing in place. Bree, the character, finally goes too far—speaks the truth of herself before knowing what to do with it—and Jane, the actor, presses her fists to her mouth, as if that could take it all back.

The performance is a freehand masterpiece painted in air, the more impressive for having been alchemized out of chaos and in the face of terrific scorn, both public and private.

But scorn only propels her. In February 1971, she is present at the Winter Soldier hearings, a gathering of GIs, who relate horrors witnessed and committed in Vietnam. She cofounds a satirical musical revue, FTA (“Fuck the Army”), as an alternative to Bob Hope shows, and shoots a film with radical French auteur Jean-Luc Godard. In the fall, FTA plays at army outposts and off-base coffeehouses before touring U.S. installations along the Pacific Rim. Around this time, Jane introduces her father to a group of antiwar GIs; their accounts from the quagmire place a deep wedge between Henry and the war he has so equivocally backed.

In the midst of this, she manages to be Oscar-nominated for
Klute.
Hearing the news, Jane seeks Henry’s advice—they are speaking again—and when her name is called, she accepts the prize with what may be the briefest speech ever given by a recipient in the acting categories: “There’s a great deal to say, but I’m not going to say it tonight. Thank you.”

The words, she grants, are her father’s, pretty much verbatim: In Fonda style, a moment primed for excess is cooled with restraint, yet filled with implications. The award is a miracle of discernment in the muddled and myopic history of the Oscars; Jane is dignified and impressive. Middle America, innately respectful of televised awards, must acknowledge her.

Then she goes, in the eyes of millions, finally and irrevocably too far. In July 1972, Jane makes her infamous trip to Hanoi. She has heard reports that American planes are bombing dikes in the Red River Delta of North Vietnam. The collateral effect of these strikes, White House strategists project, will be to flood the surrounding rice paddies and cause widespread starvation. Nixon denies the bombing; Jane’s goal is to gather evidence.

Partly at the encouragement of antiwar activist Tom Hayden, encountered a few months before, Jane flies to Hanoi as an invited guest. One day, her hosts lead her to an antiaircraft gun in a training area; asked to sit in the gunner’s seat, she does. She then grips the gun’s controls, the barrel pointing skyward, and laughs. A photo is taken. Others seem to show Jane applauding and serenading the North Vietnamese. The photogs cannot believe their luck, the tour guides’ heads spin with the propaganda possibilities, and Jane does not realize what has happened.

On July 14, she makes the first of ten broadcasts, transmitted over Radio Hanoi and within earshot of both fighting troops in the south and captured prisoners in the north. She lauds the North Vietnamese and indicts the bankruptcy of the government and culture of the United States. She asks servicemen to question their mission, urges the adoption of the North Vietnamese peace plan, and equates Nixon with the war criminals of Germany and Japan. Jane doesn’t foresee that the crimes she has come to expose will be overshadowed by her own fawning regard of a brutal regime; nor does she win converts by contending that captured U.S. pilots testifying to torture in North Vietnam are “liars, hypocrites and pawns.”

She has force-fed Middle America something it cannot swallow. Pundits release a spew of Archie Bunkerisms, one suggesting the name Jane be forever synonymous with betrayal, “to convey the impression of a female Judas goat.” Treason hearings are launched in the House of Representatives and the Justice Department. Maj. Ted Gostas, a POW in Hanoi, recalled being made by his captors to read the text of one of Jane’s broadcasts. “I felt betrayed,” he said.

I had seen a movie years ago when Henry was young. It was about
Drums on the Mohawk
or something. You know, “Leatherstocking” stuff. Well, Henry ran away from Indians chasing him with tomahawks. They poop out and he gets safely to reinforcements. How often I thought of that in prison.

There’s a certain heroism in going too far for the right reasons, and a certain cruelty. In exposing Nixon’s lies, Jane has done damage to the men at his mercy; in opposing the war, she has helped to marginalize the radical resistance. For the damage to individuals, Jane will apologize many times. For the damage to the movement, nothing may really be blamed, perhaps, but cycles of passion and backlash, a momentum of events beyond individual control.

But for any act of magnitude, there are innumerable results. Another is that Henry Fonda admits to a change of heart on Vietnam, and on Jane’s politics generally. In January 1973, he attends her wedding to Tom Hayden, and three years later he supports Hayden’s bid for the California Senate against incumbent John V. Tunney. In March 1974, hours after opening on Broadway as Clarence Darrow, Henry hosts a benefit for Jane’s action group, the Indochina Peace Campaign. And in his autobiography he says, very simply, “She’s been vindicated. That war was obscene.”

But Jane will always carry the mark of the dangerous woman. In the 2004 presidential race, her name will be used to discredit Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran and passing acquaintance.
*
Publicizing her memoir the following year, Jane will be spit on by a veteran. In 2010, an American woman recruiting Muslim extremists via the Internet will use the alias “Jihad Jane.” And unto eternity, the urinals in certain U.S. Army latrines will be decorated with pictures of Jane: target practice for the troops.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jane transformed herself to fit the sexual and political extremes of husbands who magnified qualities she admired in her father. That left people asking how strong a personality she really had. Henry observed, as far back as 1961, that if Jane “goes out with a liberal, the next day she spouts his philosophy, but I doubt that she realizes what it means.” But in the years from 1969 to 1972—her most fruitful and extreme, as artist and activist—her quest has been to discover for herself, often alone and scorned, what it means. That has been the point of all these changes and risks, these demands on self and society, and they have left not just the daughter but the father—and the country they both love—changed forever.

*   *   *

“We blew it” is the obvious or hidden accusation in the films that crown the Hollywood Renaissance:
The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Five Easy Pieces, Zabriskie Point, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Mean Streets
,
The Parallax View, Chinatown, Shampoo, The Missouri Breaks,
and of course the
Godfather
movies.
We came this close to something—the truth, a clean getaway, our American dream—and we blew it. Easy Rider
strikes the perfect theme for a country that has become a Roman circus of conquest and cholesterol, dark parades and bad dreams.

As for Peter, he does not blow it: He makes it.
Easy Rider
earns his fortune, turns Hollywood upside down, and stands as a film. These matters achieved, he returns to being a journeyman, albeit one with aura. He directs
The Hired Hand
(1971), a Western, and
Idaho Transfer
(1973), an ecological cautionary tale. The first is a picture-poem of great beauty, the second a perversely compelling experiment in monotony. Both are classic “We blew it” stories, and so low-key that they go all but unnoticed by critics or audiences. He then returns to drive-in roots with entertaining redneck hits like
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
(1974),
Race with the Devil
(1976), and
Fighting Mad
(1979).

Latter days show Peter at ease with the limits placed on him by heredity and history. He has worked prodigiously, and is as likely to plug a nostalgia-begging anthology of sixties pop as he is to give a first-rate performance in
The Limey
(1999), which contains one scene—a self-dramatizing reverie about the great decade, delivered to a clueless concubine barely out of her teens—as good as any he has played.

There is no wrapping up the story of a father and son, but if our purpose has been to draw reflective traces from tandem journeys, one or two remain. As a beekeeper in
Ulee’s Gold
(1997), Peter channels Henry’s middle-aged modes of speech and movement into his warmest acting since
The Hired Hand.
He has never been more submerged in an imaginative projection of his father—the cussedness and courage, the stone-ground love—yet he has seldom seemed more natural on the screen. His Ulee is both performance and séance.

Wanda Nevada
(1979), a Disneyesque ball of corn, is the last film Peter has directed, and the only one in which he and his father appear together. As an ancient prospector, Henry comes on to the tune of “Clementine” and delivers two or three lines. Wearing a baseball cap, goggles, and great mangy beard, he looks half man, half horsefly. But the walk is unmistakable, as are the up-tilted triangular nose and the husked-out voice snapping sentences into middle western word clusters.

Between takes, Peter shows Dad the porpoises he has lately had tattooed on his shoulder. Henry is so aghast, he is unable to speak. Really, now—after all that has come and gone between them? Apparently, Omaha propriety never dies; it only waits to be offended.

But Peter smiles. “He doesn’t want to talk about them,” he says of Dad and the porpoises. “God bless him.”

*   *   *

Once Upon a Time in the West
is such an odd film. So estranged from earthly reality it could be occurring on the moon, its mythic confrontation between avenger and criminal nonetheless meshes with the temporal conflicts of the late 1960s. This epic Western should have nothing to do with Vietnam and student protests, or with Henry Fonda and his offspring, yet it does.
Once upon a time
: Why can’t the time be a hundred years ago, or right now?
*

Jill (Claudia Cardinale), a New Orleans prostitute just wed to a desert entrepreneur, arrives in Sweetwater, Arizona, to find her new family massacred and herself the inheritor of a desirable property; she is watched over by Cheyenne, a fugitive accused of the murders (Jason Robards). Meanwhile a stranger with a harmonica (Charles Bronson) patiently contrives a showdown with a veteran gunman, Frank (Fonda). The stranger and the fugitive forge an alliance while the gunman engages in cat and mouse with his employer, Morton (Gabrielle Ferzetti), a railroad tycoon desperate to secure the widow’s property and reach the Atlantic Ocean before he succumbs to cancer.

But the plot is only an excuse for actors and identities to walk the same spaces and regard each other as if they have met before—which they have: across the story, across the genre, across time. From its first shots—three assassins materializing in three doorways—to its last image of figures receding in smoke drifts, this is a haunted work. The harmonica-blowing stranger is pure phantom; Cheyenne is all flesh. Jill—brutalized, stripped of frills to become earth mother of the new West—is the only character to be absorbed rather than defeated by time.

Frank is the most haunted of them all. Strong, fast, and ruthless, he appears omnipotent. But he is repeatedly outmaneuvered by those who see further ahead than he, or further back. His destiny is to understand finally that he is not omnipotent at all but answerable, in blood, to the demand of the past.

Frank’s passage has poignancy because he is not a soulless psychopath, but a master of cruel necessity who, in another life, might have been president. Leone restores to Fonda the physical magnificence he has lacked since the great Ford films; we’ve lost sight of how
ordinary
this beautiful man has been made to look by a legion of prosaic camera hacks. Liberated and challenged by Leone’s wide screen, Henry dominates it with the virility of an aging conqueror.

From this come moments that are revelatory. When Frank coerces sex from Jill on a bed suspended from ropes in a cave—a scene so lulling and disturbing—Fonda shows a gift for malevolent eroticism. Elsewhere, Frank, betrayed by an inept spy, places a cheroot in his mouth. He lowers his face to light it, draws smoke as if savoring the taste of punishment, and flicks a look at the spy from under his hat brim.
There he is
—the killer that Leone’s eyes saw in Fonda long ago. This is the Man with No Name.