The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (75 page)

Devin McKinney is the author of
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History,
which
The New York Review of Books
said “carries sentences not unlike those Norman Mailer used to write forty years ago.” He has written for
The Village Voice, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The American Prospect,
and
Film Quarterly
. He lives in southern Pennsylvania.

THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST. Copyright © 2012 by Devin McKinney. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Rob Grom

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

McKinney, Devin.

The man who saw a ghost: the life and work of Henry Fonda / Devin McKinney.—1st ed.

       p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-00841-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-01776-5 (e-book)

  1.  Fonda, Henry, 1905–1982.   2.  Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.   I.  Title.

PN2287.F558M35 2012

791.43'028'0924—dc23

[B]

2012028274

eISBN 9781250017765

First Edition: October 2012

*
Platte: derived from the French word for flat. Nebraska: “flat water” to the Otoe Indians.

*
In fact, not all of these happened to be on Broadway in the spring of 1927. Suffice it to say that Henry saw many shows in a short time.

*
Sullavan’s otologist, Dr. Julius Lempert, believed she had “deliberately developed for her work what I should call a cello voice, which was not her natural voice, because she could hear low tones better than high ones.” Sullavan’s donation of both her outer and middle ears for research, Lempert said, would be a great boon to science. See
New York Times
, January 9, 1960.

*
There had been, in 1921, the manslaughter trial of Fatty Arbuckle; in 1922, the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor; in 1923, the asylum death of drug-addicted action star Wallace Reid; in 1924, Charlie Chaplin’s marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl, and their sensational divorce trial three years later.

*
The official cause of Brokaw’s death was heart attack, but others believe he drowned, by intention or alcoholic accident, in the sanitarium’s pool. See
FML
, 119.

*
Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Although Henry Fonda is a pleasant actor with an engaging emotional sincerity, he is not the chap to pick a placid script out of the doldrums.” See
New York Times,
9/24/1937.

*
A vignette of Fonda at this juncture appears in Henry Somers’s 2004 novel
A Subway Ride to the Pacific,
about two New York buddies who enter the army in 1943. One of them is stunned to see, among the students in a Hawaii classroom, Henry Fonda.

“Some of the guys found it hard to believe that he was there, in person. They asked if he was really in the class or just visiting. ‘I’m just another student,’ Fonda replied, ‘and I don’t expect to be treated any different.’ … Here was Fonda. His shirt opened at the neck, sleeves rolled up and wearing wrinkled khakis. He was just another serviceman and that was the way he wanted it.” See Somers, 84.

*
Jane never uses Barbara Thompson’s name, but hers was the only paternity action ever brought against Fonda.

*
An effect memorable for its use in Tay Garnett’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, released earlier the same year.

*
After describing the fishing trip (including a whorehouse jaunt) in salacious detail in his autobiography, Fonda records, with some wonderment, that Frances had chosen not to go along—begging the question of why any wife
would
accompany her husband on what was clearly planned as an all-male spree. See
FML,
176–77;
Syracuse Herald
-
American
, 1/4/1948.

^†
In 1945, Hayward had sold the Hayward-Deverich Agency and its client list to Wasserman.

*
There is a 1958 teleplay version, starring Charlton Heston.

*
The first claim is certainly false (many, including Fonda, said Ford saw the play multiple times), and the second probably so, with the “homosexual” bit making us wonder again how repressed were Logan’s true desires: accuse your enemy, etc.

*
The show’s full title was
Henry Fonda Presents The Star and the Story
. Amazingly, given still-recent events, Dick Powell was among its coproducers. See
Fresno Bee,
7/20/1954.

*
Henry was among the celebrity clients of pioneering New York yoga instructor Blanche DeVries. See Robert Love,
The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
(New York: Viking, 2010), 339. See also
Lowell Sun
, 11/30/1950, and
NBN
, 51.

*
Gibson’s novel
The Cobweb
is set in a thinly veiled version of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, where both his wife and Knight had worked.

*
However, in these years Fonda was a prominent left-wing voice in radio. He played a scientist in “Rehearsal” (broadcast on Independence Day, 1946), an installment of
The Fifth Horseman,
a miniseries arguing for United Nations control of nuclear weapons.
A Man with a Cause
(aired May 17, 1948), with Fonda as a government official, concerns the plight of Holocaust victims and other European refugees seeking passage to the United States. Sponsored by the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons, it addressed the postwar rise in American xenophobia, particularly the prejudice against European Jewry so often implicit in anti-Communist rhetoric.

*
The bill was defeated by the southern congressional contingent, as it would be when Gahagan reintroduced it two years later.

*
“Perhaps I was wrong in McCarthy’s case,” Kennedy would admit later—in words narrated by Fonda in the 1966 NBC special
The Age of Kennedy.
“Perhaps we were not as sensitive as some and should have acted sooner. That is a reasonable indictment that falls on me as well.”

*
Stunned to find his name in Heller’s novel, Fonda talks to Richard Brooks, flagged in 1963 as most likely writer-director of the film version. “I’d like to be in your movie,” he tells Brooks, “but I guess the Henry Fonda part is the only one I could play.” What a pioneering meta-moment that would have made. See
Lowell Sunday Sun
, 10/20/1963.

*
In the fall of 1964, Fonda joined an “airborne political road show” for the Democrats, appearing at airport rallies throughout the western United States, and he narrates a syndicated TV special called “Sorry, Senator Goldwater … The Country Just Can’t Risk It,” which ran days before the election. See
Long Beach Independent,
10/21/1964;
The
(Madison)
Capital Times
, 10/30/1964.

*
“The subject of fat is almost an obsession with me,” Logan said in 1953. “I hate it to such a degree that it affects my attitude toward the world.” See
The New Yorker
, 4/4/1953, 38.

*
Offended by its gamut of sex scenes, from incest to lesbianism to rape, Bennett Cerf—chairman of Random House, and a friend of Henry—refused to publish the novel. Though the book’s narrative only distantly parallels the Fonda family saga, Henry was encouraged to consider suing for defamation; he declined, telling Cerf, “I don’t have time for nonsense like that.” See Henry Guthrie,
The Exhibitionist
(New York: Fawcett, 1968 [1967]);
Time,
10/27/1967 (available at
http://w.w.w.time.com/time/magazine/,article/0,9171,841150,00html
);
San Antonio Express-News
, 1/16/1972.

*
Nor is it coincidence that Henry narrated, around the same time, a TV documentary called
The Really Big Family,
about a week in the life of a middle-class Seattle couple with eighteen children.

*
As a screenwriter for hire, McCoy had cowritten two of Henry’s early vehicles—
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
and
Wild Geese Calling.

*
In his autobiography, Fonda says he was hesitant to accept the USO invitation because he didn’t agree with the war (
FML,
292–93); but at the time, his support of U.S. policy was quite clear.

*
Jane and Kerry knew each other from the Winter Soldier hearings, but a photo supposedly showing the two together at an early 1970s antiwar rally proved to be a fake.

*
During the filming, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Mickey Knox, who wrote the movie’s English dialogue, recalls Fonda’s “rare show of emotion” at the news—one way in which the outside world of political murder and social chaos contributed to the alchemy of this masterpiece. See Mickey Knox,
The Good, the Bad and the Dolce Vita
:
The
Adventures of an Actor in Hollywood, Paris, and Rome
(New York: Nation, 2004), 265.

*
Whitmore had already given Will Rogers the solo treatment, and William Windom would soon portray war correspondent Ernie Pyle in a one-man show.

*
There may also have been a genetic component: The younger of Henry’s two sisters, Herberta, died after two open-heart surgeries. See
Syracuse Herald-Journal,
9/5/1969.

*
TV comedy host Steve Allen, it was announced, would replace Fonda on the tour. Requests for refunds would be honored. See
Athens Messenger,
3/21/1976.