The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (5 page)

“It is full of dust, guts, noise, and pith; what it lacks mostly,” Gunther noted—without going into the grimmer corners of Omaha history—“is effective civic leadership.”

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In 1904, William and Herberta Fonda moved from Omaha to Grand Island, 150 miles to the southwest. From a banker named George Bell, they rented the tiny six-room house where Henry was born on May 16, 1905. The next day’s
Grand Island Daily Independent
carried the announcement: “Dr. Roeder reports Uneeda Biscuits for sale at any old price from salesman William Brace Fonda this morning, a bright baby boy having arrived at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Fonda on West Division Street yesterday.”

When Henry was just months old, the Fondas returned to Omaha, and William gave up baked goods to work as a print jobber. Herberta gave birth to two daughters—Harriet McNeill in 1907; Herberta Jayne two years later—and the family moved to a larger house in the suburb of Dundee. William would soon be running his own print shop downtown, and suburban life fit the family’s ascending fortunes. Set at the city’s western edge along Happy Hollow Boulevard (what a lovely name), Dundee was developed as a residential suburb and annexed by the city in 1915. The contemporary description notes its “ornamental shade trees, shrubbery of various kinds, paved streets, electric lights, and sewers [that] have made Dundee an ideal city of homes.”

For entertainment, there was the nickelodeon across from William’s print shop, where Henry watched the two-reelers of William S. Hart and Charlie Chaplin. At Harney and Sixteenth streets, also a short walk from the shop, was the Orpheum Theatre—a grand stop on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit—where Harry Houdini did his magic act and a prepubescent Omahan named Fred Astaire danced with his sister, Adele. There were country clubs close to the Fonda home, and summertime activities in Krug Park—plays, concerts, hot-air balloons, ball games, circus acts, picnics.

It was the lemonade dream of American childhood, but Omaha was undergoing the radical, convulsive processes of urbanization. Henry Fonda had a close view of the heartland as it underwent these changes, albeit a view from a cushion: The Fondas had money, and even, for a period, a live-in servant—a white girl from Iowa named Minnie Stout. Dundee, though annexed to Omaha, was also its own world, miles from the rough and salty riverfront, the burgeoning city center, and South Omaha, with its stockyards, packing plants, and immigrant cemeteries.

For all that urban expansion lay before Henry’s eye, the enormous spaces and silences of the heartland offered hints of the unseen. People out there had a different way of seeing—both more practical and more mystical. Middle Western practicality was founded in the uncertainties of soil, weather, money, movement. But mysticism—as is often the case in unsettled cultures—was practicality’s hopeful ghost: Faith in the unseen meant life might not be reducible to the dirt in one’s hand.

Legends of the Pawnee, Otoe, Sioux, and the decimated Ponca Nation were still on the plains around Omaha, while white mysticism went back to the pioneer trails and something called “seeing the elephant.” Diaries, letters, and other reports of the day include references to this apparition, a Great Plains Moby-Dick invented by folk talk and journalese. “To have seen
the elephant,
” explains an 1889 dictionary of slang, “is to have had a full experience of life or of a certain subject or object.” Merrill J. Mattes calls the elephant “the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and the glory and the shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains.… This creature seldom appeared except on the fringes of danger, and then it was only a fleeting glimpse.”

As trails gave way to rails and towns expanded, the elephant grew dimmer. But Omaha in the early twentieth century was not far from those days when the diverse amazements of a pioneering life could be mythicized in the form of an exotic, towering beast. Henry Fonda’s boyhood views were not bound by factory and billboard. The unseen and undiscovered were still there, all around him: soil, sky, space. The elephant.

*   *   *

The Fondas were Christian Scientists. Mary Baker Eddy’s doctrine of self-healing, first espoused in
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
(1875), prohibited all medical intervention, claiming that bodily illness was soluble by faith. Theological Darwinism: Implicitly, the healthiest Christian was the most pious, while the pained and infirm were suffering nothing but a deficit of spiritual will. Eddy was a controversial figure: Mark Twain attacked Christian Science at length in a 1907 polemic, and Willa Cather coauthored a scathing biography of the church’s founder two years later.

Undoubtedly, this religion had a deep influence on Fonda’s ways of thinking and feeling. Eddy’s doctrine was all about denying weakness and putting mysticism to a purpose, with nothing bloody or sexy to its sense of sin. Though he didn’t pursue Christian Science as an adult, Henry’s values were molded by its precepts. Peter Fonda writes that his father, far from rushing to succor his children’s everyday wounds and viruses, tended to respond “as if they were caused by some sort of sin in our soul,” and that this “must have been due to the whisperings of Christian Scientist influences in his youth.”

There is also something Fondian about the contradictions of the faith. Christian Science, for all its plainness, presumed the existence of miracle and magic. It taught not merely that disease could be allayed by prayer and wounds healed by hand but also that, through sufficient investments of effort and belief, the dead could be raised. The emblem of the faith was a gold seal depicting a crown and a crucifix, the whole circled with an inscribed creed. The words of the creed remain unchanged, and to this day they are seen emblazoned on the windows of Christian Science reading rooms around the world:

CAST OUT DEMONS

CLEANSE THE LEPERS

HEAL THE SICK

RAISE THE DEAD

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Whenever Henry spoke of his parents, it was with reverence, not insight. His mother, he said, was “an angelic woman.” As for Fonda senior, “Everything he did was wonderful.”

Henry remembered flying, at the age of four, a kite built by his father. The wind was strong and threatening, but William took control, and his son looked up in awe. As well as toys for the children, Fonda senior constructed amateur radio sets in the basement; he was a skilled handyman. He was also, Henry would learn, remarkable in ways not so obvious to a boy’s eyes. “Only when I grew up and moved away did I realize exactly how much I loved him, how much he meant to me and what an unusual man he was.”

Fonda’s third wife remembered wondering about the nature of parental discipline and emotional authority in the Fonda house. “I was always trying to find out but he said he didn’t remember a lot.… Perhaps he didn’t want to remember.” That “perhaps” opens a door, behind which there might be nothing at all. Or something: Daughter Jane refers to the “biological vulnerability to depression” that runs in her family, and her own suspicion that William Fonda was afflicted with chronic melancholy—trailed by what Winston Churchill, a depressive, called his “black dog.”

In a family snapshot contained in Henry’s autobiography, five Fondas are arranged informally before a garden trellis. Chubby, smiling Henry sits between his sisters, Harriet and Jayne. His eyes and face are soft; he is perhaps twelve. Nearby, William, about to say something, glances back at Harriet. His eyes are tired, the sockets dark. The impression is one of premature age and a collapsing center.

The dark around the father’s eyes is the dark behind the son, a place that we cannot fully penetrate—and a place where his identity begins. A child is formed by everything that touches him, but there’s only so much that tangible influences will tell us about an artist. The map of creative imagination begins and ends where the individual ceases to be shaped and begins shaping; where the story becomes not what the world has made of the boy, but what he makes of the world.

Henry’s teenage years are mostly unremarkable. Mostly. We’ll leave him for a while in that vague region—private, innocent, an ordinary American boy living the lemonade dream while it lasts.

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Playing Gil Martin, hero of
Drums Along the Mohawk
—the second teaming with John Ford, released at the other end of 1939—Fonda makes the man earnest, courageous, tenacious, and a little dull. Ford wants that of him, reasoning that it will mean more to an audience to see the brave man frightened, the unmovable man moved.

The source is a historical best-seller, adapted by four screenwriters, but it could have been mounted with Fonda in mind, for it encompasses a broad swath of his own family’s history. New York’s Mohawk Valley, 1776: Newlyweds Gil and Magdalena (Claudette Colbert) are at work on their American dream—field, forest, cabin; at night, a stuffed pipe and soft pillow. Skirmishes have occurred lately among colonists, Indians, and British. But for now, the Martins’ vista vibrates with peace.

The rural landscape, infused with color on the verge of oversaturation, is quite beautiful to look at. There are burnished wood interiors, miles of sky, and towering forests. Even the shadows are midnight blue. But the picture is deformed by reactionary coarseness: The Mohawks are a monstrous swarm projecting arrows and fire, and the sexual politics are barely more tolerable. All that ties the film to a pioneer’s pain is Fonda. He redeems Gil’s dullness as the flat surface of a deep man, and haunting tones fall from his performance like droplets from a placid sky.

Two scenes stand out. In the first, a battle-bloodied Gil rests among the dead and dying; as Magdalena dresses his wound, he relates the battle. Others hurry in and out of the frame, but Ford holds on Fonda, who moves his face this way or that to avoid seeing the things he describes: an Indian impaled on a spear; a comrade’s revel in the slaughter; a friend—named Ten Eyck—“with his head blown half off.”

The other high point is a chase. The settlers are under attack; Gil flees for the military fort, miles away. Pursued by three Mohawks through the night, across an astounding variety of terrain, Gil might be running the breadth of the continent—from flatland to forest, through streams and stands of pine, the sky changing from black and purple to blue and white. The color deepens, the image broadens, and nature swallows the minuscule runners in a succession of monumental vistas.

You wonder what enacting the chase means to Henry. Whether he thinks of grandfather Ten Eyck, messenger of war, chased by the howl of history down his neck; whether he savors the presence of Ten Eyck’s name in the story. Henry’s run for his life carries us clear back to the marquis, the first runner—finding trouble, fleeing trouble, running toward safety, toward danger, an open sky, a new world.

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Fonda could have been safe for life in Omaha, if he hadn’t drifted. In fact he was a drifter before he was an artist.

“I had no ambition to be an actor,” he will later say. “But it was summer, and I had nothing else to do…”

Coming from conventional people, Henry drifts to conventional options. His first steps into the world are those of one trying to follow a design for living. First, he studies journalism at the University of Minnesota—a creative, active occupation, nominally stable—but his grades are only average, and the deeper itch is not scratched. He drops out in the summer of 1925, at the end of his sophomore year, and moves back to Omaha.

There follow two years of sideways drift, in and out of transient jobs: iceman, mechanic, window dresser. But between punches of the clock, he keeps an option open—the Omaha Community Playhouse, where he acts for the first time in that first summer after leaving college, and where he continues to work, part-time, performing odd jobs, from stage dressing to janitorial tasks.

“It was a nightmare”: So Fonda will describe his first experience of acting. He’s all of twenty, and has been invited to audition by a family friend, Dorothy “Do” Brando, who is active in the Community Playhouse. To kill time in the Omaha summer, he reads for the juvenile lead in Philip Barry’s recent comedy
You and I.
To his surprise, and even dismay, he’s cast by the director, Gregory Foley.

Hank steps onto the boards at first rehearsal, and—“It was a nightmare.” He will one day characterize the nightmare specifically in terms of witnessing: “I didn’t dare look up. I was the kind of guy who thinks everybody is looking at
him.”

Eventually, he does look up, and he sees that, indeed, everybody
is
looking at him. Somewhere between his two great fears, and the great fears of the Middle America he will one day represent—the fear of seeing, the fear of being seen—he’s caught forever.

*   *   *

All the conventions of his upbringing remind Henry that the theater is no life for a man. Acting is not exactly a respectable profession today; it certainly was less so in bourgeois Omaha in the mid-1920s. Only a few generations before, actors on tour were told by saloonkeepers to eat their dinner out back, with the pigs. The call of convention induces Fonda to take an entry-level position with the Retail Credit Company of Omaha. He is only filing papers at first, but his efficiency and dedication stand out and soon they are grooming him for the managerial track.

The journey thus far has been entirely ordinary. Most members of the middle class go through these uncertainties of identity, and most take a straight path. But Henry—typical though he is in so many ways—is not “most.” So he preserves that opening, that stage door, back of which lie the nightmare and the desire.

The Omaha Community Playhouse is only a year old when Fonda joins, but in its genome are decades of history, theory, aspiration. It grows out of the Progressive Era, a period of political reform and social experiment lasting from the 1890s to the 1920s. A group of Omaha benefactors joins in the Little Theatre movement—what Dorothy Chansky terms a concerted effort by “writers, various kinds of activists, university professors and other educators, clubwomen, settlement workers, artists, and social elites” to bolster local playhouses against the onslaught of Hollywood, whose growing popularity is transforming many stage theaters into movie houses. The Community Playhouse is founded in 1924, and its first president, Omaha architect Alan McDonald, avows its purpose: “To raise the drama from a purely amusement enterprise into an educational, cultural force.”