The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (42 page)

Fonda performs as if feeling his physical tools and sensual powers in a new way. Part of Leone’s magic is to get, as Henry puts it, “in back of your mind, back of your eyes”—to enable actors to see themselves differently. So Fonda luxuriates in his own prowess as never before. Observing Morton’s death crawl, Frank spits a long sluice of tobacco and reholsters his gun: The spit is like a cobra’s kiss, the holstering sexual, as Fonda feels all the mechanics of muscle and arranges them in a flow that is visually liquid and sensually pleasing.

We’ve never seen this before: Henry is having sex with himself. And the sex is great.

*   *   *

The film is concerned with time, and with generations. Frank’s first act is to kill a small boy with a warm smile and a single shot to the heart; his last, to be killed by another boy—the stranger, a grown version of the boy whose brother died at Frank’s hands.

There is a moment when fear of the past first creeps into Frank’s heart. Captured at gunpoint, the stranger is tied up in Morton’s train car. He insinuates responsibility for the deaths of Frank’s men. The killer approaches warily, removes the stranger’s hat. Fonda comes eye to eye with Bronson, another actor of deep inwardness who regards the present as if across vast plains of the past.

“Who are you?” Frank asks.

“Dave Jenkins.”

Fonda’s cheeks sag; the cheroot dips in his mouth. Degrees of warmth and of life drain from his face.

“Dave Jenkins dead a long time ago,” says Frank.

The stranger smiles, not smugly. His smile is as sweet as the sweetest memory.

“Calder Benson.”

Frank’s skin drops slacker. The voice breaks.

“What’s
your
name?” he all but pleads. “Benson’s dead too.”

“You should know, Frank, better than anyone. You killed them.”

That cuts the trance. Frank slaps the stranger three times hard—smashing that smile, reasserting the present over the past, his own power over a ghost’s. And buys himself a bit more time.

There is no fathoming this brief scene. Its otherworldliness comes from Bronson’s immovable stare, deflecting all irony and disbelief; the eerie wailings on the sound track; the precise editing, keyed to the shared heartbeat of the two men. But it comes mostly from the Fonda close-up, and the impossible delicacy of his responses. For a few seconds, he is a Münch painting come to life. Our eyes cannot grasp the fear he expresses, nor can our words describe its depth, except to say we are seeing a man who sees a ghost.

Only a showdown—that western ritual, which in this decade has been acted out for real on many stages, many streets, between armies of bodies—will settle the debts of the past. The stranger is haunted by the memory of a blurred figure approaching in slowed motion. In the moments before the last draw, the memory returns, the blur clarifies, and out of the past steps Henry Fonda—thirty years younger, sexy and swaggering, eyes ablaze with youthful depravity, looking like Abe Lincoln crossed with Satan.

“He comes from the depths of the image,” Leone says, “just as he comes from the lower depths of memory.” And so the positions of that first encounter between stranger and killer are reversed: Frank is now the ghost, the stranger his witness. Young Frank pulls out a harmonica. His smile goes ugly as he says, “Keep your lovin’ brother happy,” and shoves the bar in a boy’s mouth. The boy is the stranger, and his wrists are bound. On his shoulders stands a man, bound as well, and around the man’s neck is a noose, suspended from a stone arch at the center of Monument Valley.

All the combined magics of Leone and Fonda—director’s audacity, actor’s force and symbolism—come to bear. Beyond the arch in the far distance is a great burst of sun and cloud, a spreading miasma, as if the spirits of this hallowed valley were rioting in the sky. Morricone’s operatic accompaniment climbs, shrieks, rains thunder; quick cuts go from sobbing boy to cursing brother to smiling killer. The boy pitches forward as the brother’s legs fly out of sight. The harmonica drops and dust covers the boy’s head. The music dissolves in the tolling of bells, and we perceive that one of the deepest Fonda themes has been turned inside out. He is the voyeur of his own crime:
He
is the man with the noose.

No symbol lies deeper in Fonda’s art than the hanging rope, and no reversal could be, at this climax of a career, more powerful. It is the last, darkest revisioning of Fonda as the noble man who understands the will to murder, of the father as a man who would destroy his children.

The tolling bell and swirling dust carry us back to the present—to the crack of the stranger’s gun and the killer’s spin as he is hit. Frank staggers, crumples slowly, shot in the heart: a small, secret vengeance from the murdered boy of the first massacre. He squints into the sun, and gasps for the last time: “Who are you?”

The stranger rips off the harmonica as if pulling out his own heart. He shows it to Frank—the last witnessing—and pushes it in his mouth. Finally naked before the past that has been stalking him, buckling under its gathering weight, Frank remembers everything. Nods, accepts. Exhales and falls.

Time has slain the father. Death and memory join in the last breath.

*   *   *

Released in the spring of 1969,
Once Upon a Time in the West
is a hit with European cineastes and Marxists. Its relevance to radical politics is intuited by the Parisian students, veterans of the historic strike of the previous May, who line up to see it. In the United States, however, it passes like a phantom ship in the night. Cut by nearly an hour—just too long, Paramount feels, with not enough bullet ballet—it will nonetheless be ridiculed for its excessive length and ragged continuity.

Other reasons may be adduced for this neglect.
Once Upon a Time in the West
appears just weeks behind
Easy Rider; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
will follow a few months later. Why should anyone think that the American imagination will be taken by this long, dusty Italian horse opera? The New Hollywood is busy being born, and the Fonda kids are more to the point.

By any reckoning,
Easy Rider
and
They Shoot Horses
are important films. But next to the Leone-Fonda achievement, they are as nothing. It will be Henry’s triumph—or simply the fruit of his endurance—to have finally outdistanced his progeny in the race to creative transformation. For
Once Upon a Time in the West
is, in addition to what director John Boorman calls “both the greatest and the last Western,” the finest film Henry Fonda has made, with a performance at least the equal of any he has given.

Transformation is in the eyes: how we see the world, how we are seen by it. And the performance of Frank, for all that it involves Fonda’s complete being, lives in his eyes. Eyes that have gone weary in these confounding days when children have revolted, politics have failed, and all the action has seemed to be occurring in someone else’s America. Eyes that have nonetheless remained alive, desirous, cunning, and that now, on Leone’s desert floor, are so dead they appear transparent, ageless, cleansed of the past—as if to be born again.

11

The Old Man Himself

Sometimes a Great Notion

Four summers before his death, Henry Fonda makes a last visit to the little six-room house where he was born. In 1966, he had financed moving the house from the corner of West Division Street in Grand Island to the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, just outside of town.

Twelve years later, Lew Cole, the museum’s public relations director, will describe Fonda’s visit.

“He quietly walked through each of the rooms, studying details of the furniture, walls and floors. Then he came to the bedroom where he was born. He stood looking at the brass bed for several minutes with a distant gaze.

“Then he said, ‘That’s enough,’ and walked out the door.”

*   *   *

Shapes, faces, colors.

*   *   *

As Henry Stamper in
Sometimes a Great Notion,
the film of Ken Kesey’s novel about an Oregon logging family, Fonda delivers a full-throated, foul-tempered voice from a face bristly enough to scour pots. Aged sixty-five and playing a decade older, he has never seemed less a specter, more a solid piece of natural matter.

For the location shoot in the summer of 1970, Henry rents a house on the dunes near the Columbia River with his wife, Shirlee, and daughter Amy. Raised by Susan Blanchard, Amy is now in her late teens; she has kept to her schoolwork and avoided public notice. Days off the set, father and daughter walk, talk, fish, and sift the sand for agates.

The other actors love Fonda as children love the towering, enduring tree of their summers. Paul Newman, who is both starring and directing, claims
The Farmer Takes a Wife
was the first movie he ever saw. “Henry has always held a very special place in my heart,” he says. “I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that I’m just as much in awe of him today as I was then—if not more so.”

Late in the movie, the Newman character is chain-sawing a tree trunk. It splits, spins, and crashes down on Henry Stamper. He is rushed to emergency, his arm dangling. The limb is lost, but the old man hangs on. Flat on his back, eyebrows shooting up like puffs of weed, Fonda writhes in pain.

“Don’t you believe ’em,” he says.

Newman asks who.

“
Them.
They’re trying to put me in the grave. I’m not even close…”

Suddenly the face collapses. Old Stamper moans inconsolably.

“
Oh, Lor-dee, Lorrrr-deeeeeeee. Son of a bitch!”

Fonda has never made anything like this sound before: the wail of a man fighting off death. Performance blurs with existence, and it is almost too real to bear.

But if the man has glimpsed death, the artist has seized that vision to render it as a masterstroke. Fonda’s cry is controlled, rich, a Shakespearean rattling of the soul.

The rest of the film may be forgotten; this sound, never.

*   *   *

The former Shirlee Mae Adams has been at Henry’s side, unobtrusively, for the latter half of the 1960s. Entrusted by divorcing parents to an Illinois orphanage at the age of four, she spent her youth in study and prayer, but on coming of age, she has pursued the worldly occupations of flight attendant and fashion model. Shirlee is thirty years old and comfortable on the margins of the spotlight when Henry meets her in late 1962, at the premiere of
The Longest Day.

She claims, like Frances before her, never to have seen Henry’s movies. Yet she too is taken by the handsome stranger, and single-minded in her pursuit: “It took me six months to track him down,” she says.

In the summer of 1963, as Henry films
The Best Man,
Shirlee is a frequent guest at his Beverly Hills rental; Walter Winchell reports the couple’s “midnightly trysts” at PJ’s, a Hollywood rock ‘n’ roll club. The next summer, between shooting
The Rounders
in Arizona and
In Harm’s Way
in Hawaii, they share the guesthouse at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air—soon to be one of America’s most infamous addresses. In the fall, they are seen together at Broadway shows. By this time, columnists are pointing out that Shirlee, nearly thirty-three, is on the cusp of mandatory retirement for airline “stews.” On December 3, 1965, they are wed—at Fonda’s instigation—in the chambers of Justice Edwin Lynde in Mineola, New York.

Trim, well-assembled, adroit yet unimposing, Shirlee has the not-yet-formed nose of an adolescent girl, and her smile defines
pert.
Of Henry’s wives, she is the only one whose manner suggests no hidden agenda or dark inner world. She presents an image of health, youth, the good life; yet she is concerned with social ills, and works extensively for charities around greater Los Angeles. She is eager for people to get along, proud to be a helper, and her clearest ambition is to serve and support Henry. “I have tried to make Fonda the central pivot of my life,” she says, sharing her predecessors’ habit of calling Henry by his last name. When they meet, she is a beautiful young thing for Henry to sport on his arm. As years pass and his infirmities set in, she becomes an ideal combination of lover, caregiver, and domestic administrator.

This will be by far the longest-lived of Fonda’s marriages, perhaps because it achieves the best balance between emotional feeling and psychic dependency. Shirlee, like Frances and Afdera, may desire a father surrogate; unlike them, she doesn’t seek to be abused or controlled. Her manner is vivacious and wholesome, but no one leaves an orphanage soft. Fiercely protective of family and home, she shields Henry from excessive press attention in his difficult last years. Shirlee’s toughness is also a necessary self-defense throughout the marriage, as the dark rages of Fonda’s middle age morph into the manifold quirks and irritations of an ailing old man.

“He’s complex and difficult,” Shirlee says. “But I’m not easy either.”

For the first time Henry has a wife willing, for reasons of her own, to place him ahead of everything else. That is not always what he wanted in a wife, but it is what he needs now.