The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (50 page)

Among the dozens of Fondas buried there is Douw Jellis, victim of Iroquois scalpers in 1780. His stone, so old that it looks primeval, can barely be read; its colors are those of earth and extreme age. To the touch, it feels like any organic thing planted in the same soil for hundreds of years: mossy and moist, cool and rough. The silence of the hilltop is absolute, the monumentality of the trees intimidating, the sense of being an interloper powerful and less than pleasant. The Fonda cemetery is a place one respects instantly, and is not unhappy to leave.

This is another measure of history, one that renders us inarticulate and immobile, small and uncertain; one too great for that civic space that is the size of a postage stamp and the length of a press release. Where the first is about the usable image, the recognizable ideal, the other is about ghosts.

Somewhere in between the two is where we have found Henry Fonda, if we can say we have found him at all.

*   *   *

His place in the American pantheon is secure. For as long as we read, we will read Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, and Hemingway; and as long as the dreams of the movie screen exert any grip on us, Henry Fonda will be there, as keen and fixated a witness as they to our quest, our tumult, and our crimes.

Like those artists with whom he properly belongs, Fonda refused America’s cheapest promises and most destructive myths. He was a man who acted as though there was a certain kind of life he was obliged to live, some long-ago death he was bound to honor. He was an American another American could claim as one’s own, with greater pride because he was no saint or simpleton, but broad and deep, at once nobleman and son of a bitch. One would need to both defend and question his behavior, to take stock of the lives he damaged as well as those he strengthened, and wonder how much the bad finally mattered against the good; how much the private sins of one difficult man, whose motives were often a mystery even to himself, negated the great values to which he gave living expression.

Those values were an interwoven set of assumptions, stances, and skepticisms, and they belonged to an individualistic, fair-minded American, one who believed in the complexity of the ordinary; whose eyes told him that life was a terror and a tragedy; who felt arrogance was folly and power the weapon of bullies; who demanded an ethical accounting of his country, his fellows, himself. Who often failed, as man and artist, to meet that accounting, but who walked and talked so as to feel justified in the eyes of the dead—as if they were his true audience, his invisible watchers and unseen judges.

*   *   *

These were the values that for fifty years he acted out on the country’s movie screens, and that would remain alive, one hoped, somewhere on the screen of its memory—even in the first years of a new century, when it seemed more and more as if those values had been
buried
alive, existing as little but a nagging recollection, a despised and unfashionable form of patriotic conscience.

Watching him over the past decade, one has been stunned by the relevance of his critique of America, his persistence in seeing the ghost—his own, and ours. In a time when the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, one has been moved by Fonda’s belief, and by his refusal. It’s been worth attending to him in these bad years, times when the values he turned into behaviors have been trumpeted to the skies, while lying so dead on the ground that it has been a daily struggle to remember, or conceive of, an America in which they might have existed at all.

But he’s still there: Look and listen. When we feel our memories weakening, our sense of the past dissolving, we may look at him. We may look at Henry Fonda and begin to remember, as he remembers.

Notes

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

For books included in the selected bibliography, publication information is found in that section. Dates in brackets refer to the year of original publication. The following abbreviations are used:

PROLOGUE

“majesty and trash”: John Berryman,
Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001 [1950]), xiii.

“I suppose”: Steinbeck,
America and Americans,
224.

1. SPRINGFIELD, 1839

“This scene”: Peter Handke,
Short Letter, Long Farewell
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 115.

“A jack-legged young lawyer”:
FML
, 127; see also McBride, 302.

read most of the Lincoln books:
FML
, 125.

he was named in Hollywood columns:
Sheboygan Press,
10/23/1935.

“It’s like playing Jesus”: Curtis Lee Hanson, “Henry Fonda: Reflections on Forty Years of Make-Believe,” in
Playing to the Camera: Film Actors Discuss Their Craft
, ed. Bert Cardullo et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 213.

“What the fuck”:
FML,
127.

The film, shot mostly around Sacramento: See
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032155/locations
;
Oakland Tribune,
4/16/1939.

“I first saw this film”: Eistenstein, 139–49.

“one of the most dramatic”: Thomas Dixon, Jr.,
The Clansman
(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905), ii.

“Like writing history”:
Village Voice Film Special,
11/30/1993.

The Birth of a Nation
grossed: ibid.

Henry Brocj:
The Crisis,
June 1916, 87.

“If the people”:
Oxford American
56 (2007): 119.

“would play Ku Klux Klan”: O’Hara, 109.

Appearing as one of Griffith’s Klan riders: McBride, 81.

Ford dissolves: Dan Ford,
Pappy: The Life of John Ford
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 139.

Ann Rutledge: Wilson,
Honor’s Voice
, 115–18.

“He mourned her loss”: Schurz, 58.

“A highly dubious business”: Vidal,
United States,
666.

“symbolic significance”: Wilson,
Honor’s Voice,
125.

“I never seen a man”: ibid., 120.

“showed that in mourning”: Alvarez, 126.

“a gaze of cosmic reproaches”: Eisenstein, 149.

“is that of Lincoln as”: McBride, 303.

“preparing himself”: Graham Greene,
Graham Greene on Movies: Collected Film Criticism 1935–1940
, ed. John Russell Taylor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 242.

2. THE ELEPHANT AND THE BLACK DOG

“One of Mr. Fonda’s”: Springer, 54.

Fonda,
from the Latin:
http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm#Origins
.

“was one of the leaders”: ibid.

Dutch reform movement: Newman, 573–85.

at around 1628: Ross and Ross, 83.

Douw Jellis:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=amfonda&id=ind00295
.

“on the rapids”: Sherman Williams,
Stories from Early New York History
(New York: Scribner’s, 1906), 299.

“venerable old David”: Bonney, 83.

“house was plundered”:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=amfonda&id=ind00295
.

“At midnight June 30, 1863”:
http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm
#Ten Eyck.

“I had orders to spare nothing”: ibid.

the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad:
www.kancoll.org/books/andreas_ne/railroad/railroad-p4.html#BMRR
.

William… was born there in 1879:
http://www.fonda.org/notables.htm
.

William married:
http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/henry-jaynes-fonda/4hmquk6fx4gu/14#
.

“ordinary American people”: Brough, 21.

“great highway” of westward migration: Mattes, 23.

At first, the departed: ibid., 87.

crosses marking their graves: ibid., 82.

“he believed deeply”: Hofstadter, 36.

“a general need for Americans”: Shortridge, 9.

“This is America”: Gunther, 274.

“To curse a farm”: Wills, 308.

the city of Omaha: Bristow, 1, 83–92.

“On Saturday nights”: Walker D. Wyman, “Omaha: Frontier Depot and Prodigy of Council Bluffs,”
Nebraska History Magazine
17 (1936): 143–54.

“a great place for aggressive hijinks”: Gunther, 255.

“Dr. Roeder reports”:
http://www.stuhrmuseum.org/virtualtour/fonda.htm
.

“ornamental shade trees”: J. Sterling Morton and Albert Watkins,
History of Nebraska; From the Earliest Explorations of the Trans-Mississippi Region
(Lincoln, NE: Western Publishing and Engraving Co., 1918); available at
http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/topic/resources/OLLibrary/MWHNE/mwhne000.htm
.

nickelodeon:
High Point Enterprise,
10/30/1976.

Orpheum Theatre: William Kalush and Larry Sloman,
The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 81; Nebraska State Historical Society (
http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/timeline/astaire_fred.htm
). Later in life, Henry claimed to have been pulled up on stage once as Houdini’s assistant. See:
Kingsport
Times-News,
2/23/1975.

Minnie Stout: U.S. Census Report, Omaha, Douglas County, NB, 1910; available at
www.ancestry.com
.

“To have seen
the elephant
”: Albert Barrére, ed.,
A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant
(London: Ballantyne Press, 1889), 344.

“the popular symbol”: Mattes, 61.

The Fondas were Christian Scientists:
FML
, 21;
PB,
106.

Mark Twain attacked: Mark Twain,
Christian Science
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1907]). Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine,
The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993 [1909]).

“as if they were caused”:
DTD,
64, 116.

“an angelic woman”: Brough, 8.

“Everything he did was”: Anita Summer, “Famous Men Remember: ‘The Little Things’ About My Father’s Greatness,”
Family Circle,
6/15/1975, 6.

“I was always trying to find out”: Norman, 87.

“biological vulnerability”:
MLSF,
35.

“black dog”: Anthony Storr,
Churchill’s Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

“I had no ambition to be”: Ross and Ross, 85.

“It was a nightmare”: ibid.

“I didn’t dare look up”: ibid.

the Retail Credit Company: ibid.

“writers, various kinds of activists”: Chansky, 2.

“To raise the drama”:
http://www.omahaplayhouse.com/history.aspx
.

“Like other reform activities”: Chansky, 3.

“Most Little Theatre workers”: ibid.

“Shut up”: Cole and Farrell, 10.

3. A TIME OF LIVING VIOLENTLY