The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (26 page)

Soon after Logan’s axing, Louella Parsons makes it known that Hayward and Warner Bros. want Brando. But Brando’s involvement is complicated by the lawsuit threatened by Twentieth Century–Fox for his refusal to appear for work on a Michael Curtiz picture,
The Egyptian.
Meanwhile Fonda, “who has aged considerably since he starred in
Mister Roberts
on Broadway,” will shoot a screen test for the lead, Parsons reports. “However, there’s a possibility he will play the role of the doctor instead of the younger man.” What ignominy for Henry, to move up an age bracket and down a billing level in a property for whose popularity he is chiefly responsible.

But John Ford speaks: “Bullshit! That’s Fonda’s part.” He even makes his own participation contingent on Fonda’s hiring. Within days, Parsons will announce that Hayward and Jack Warner have decided, in closed conference, to give Fonda the role. Two eminences of an earlier Hollywood, James Cagney and William Powell, are cast as the Captain and Doc; hot young Jack Lemmon will play Pulver.

When his
Court-Martial
contract expires at the end of May and Hayward sends notice that
Roberts
location shooting is set for September 1, Fonda chooses to depart the play and grab the movie. His return to the screen after seven years is an important story, both publicly—it gets the cover of
Life
—and personally. To fuse his two acting selves in the consummate realization of the role that has arguably meant the most to him is a rare chance. To avoid jinxing it, he denies having meant to abandon the movies, or disliking Hollywood: “I had no intention of quitting Hollywood when I left. Three great plays … just kept me away. I never intended to pull up stakes.”

Much publicity attends initial filming on Midway Island, where Ford shot his great battle documentary more than a decade before, and not far from the vortex of Fonda’s own navy service. Sailing out, Henry poses with Susan and the kids against the blue waters off Hawaii. He retains all the charisma of the Hollywood star: Pearl Harbor looks like his private swimming pool.

*   *   *

Fonda’s command, so inseparable from his coldness, is impressive. He travels between the divergent worlds of theater and film stardom without any evident bump to the psyche; he resumes the movie star’s mask, and the stress it conceals, that easily. The gap between 1948 and 1955 might never have occurred, except that Fonda looks what he is—namely, seven years older. Taut, wiry, a most attractive middle-aged man, but one who is too old to be playing Mister Roberts.

On the set, though, he’s more the coiled snake than ever, where John Ford is, from the start of shooting, an angry boar flashing its teeth. The old man’s alcoholism is peaking, and his health is poor; even at his best he is, in Fonda’s phrase, “an Irish egomaniac.” Worst, Ford seems bent on making
Roberts
into, imagine this, a John Ford picture—broad comedy and ample slapstick, lusty men and busty women, a
Quiet Man
on the waves. With his screenwriters, Ford has reworked the elusive thing that haunted the Alvin stage into a thick-skulled service comedy about lugs on a tub. The tumultuous shore leave, for instance, is no longer suggested by the crew members’ shredded clothing and black eyes; now it is a full-scale disaster romp with rioting sailors, club-swinging MPs, and a motorcycle flying into the drink.

Immediately, Fonda sees the movie shaping up as dumb and unfunny. He has been investing ever more of his ego in controlling the shape and direction of his projects; here he finds the story and character he most prizes being wrested away. But because it is Ford, Henry doesn’t shout—as he has lately shouted at Logan, Potter, Powell, and Laughton. Instead he goes sullen. His scenes lack snap; his body is drawn and hostile; there is no bloom of youth on his Roberts. And his off-camera mode is passive-aggressive, even mutinous: According to Jack Lemmon, Fonda encourages the younger actor to “screw up” his scenes, which involve much of the farcical business Ford enjoys and Henry detests.

Finally it comes to a head. Stories vary, but most place the confrontation in the privacy of Ford’s room after hours. The director has requested a private conference. What’s eating you? he asks Fonda. Henry starts to explain—and Ford, unaccustomed to being answered by his actors, cuts him off with accusations of treachery. More words, getting hotter. And suddenly, Fonda feels a blow to his chin, coming from Ford’s aged but wrathful fist. Fonda is propelled backward over a table.

This is followed by tears and remorse. Ford appears at Henry’s door to apologize. But the subtle bond that distinguished the partnership has snapped.

It’s the most dismal episode in either man’s professional life. The two will have clipped and sarcastic exchanges on the
Roberts
set, and speak only occasionally in the years following. But in 1971, Fonda will contribute an affectionate anecdote to Peter Bogdanovich’s valedictory chronicle,
Directed by John Ford;
and to the end, he will speak of “Pappy” as one of the greats.

In an interview conducted in 1973, Ford’s grandson Dan asks him his feelings about Fonda. “Just a great actor, a real professional,” the director says, gruff and phlegmy, his voice full of tobacco, whiskey, history. “All in all, just a fine man.”

He offers a tall tale or two about their virgin encounters on
Young Mr. Lincoln.
There is a pause. Though he has been reminiscing about the first time he and Fonda worked together, Ford may be more keenly recalling the last time. It’s as if a chasm of nearly twenty years is being mulled in the gap between sentences. For when he speaks again, Ford notes that Fonda had “a fine war record. He never advertised the fact, but … I’m very proud of him. He was in the Navy.”

Those are Ford’s last recorded words on Fonda; he will die a few months later.

*   *   *

After the apology, Ford begins boozing in earnest. Somehow, he survives the remainder of the Midway shoot, further locations in Hawaii, and a few working days in Hollywood, as the production nears a state of chaos. (Leland Hayward remembers Ward Bond, a supporting player—and no moderate drinker himself—serving as uncredited director during Ford’s spells of alcoholic unconsciousness.) Finally, Ford is overtaken by gall bladder distress and removed from the filming: an honorable, if painful, out for everyone.

The rest of the scenes are shot by Mervyn LeRoy, a decent-minded hack with the pictorial gifts of a warehouse foreman. And in a final irony, the film’s presumptive first director, Josh Logan, is called upon to contribute several bridging scenes and dialogue inserts, and even to reshoot some slapstick—most of it so corny and clanking it matches seamlessly with Ford at his crocked Irish worst.

Released in the summer of 1955,
Mister Roberts
gets celebratory reviews and becomes one of the top moneymakers of its year. It is still considered a beloved film today; although, as with many works so designated, it is rarely mentioned, for the simple reason that it is an embarrassment. A story that calls for a poet’s sad touch is covered with Ford’s fumbling thumbprints; the skeletal play becomes a wide-screen whale spouting gouts of buffoonery and sentimentality.

Mister Roberts
had, in no small sense, saved Fonda. He has done the role on stage, radio, television, now film; and after seven years, a thousand-plus performances, and miles beyond number, he consecrates to history a hollow Leviathan. The picture will be a hit—but then, so will the likes of
Operation Petticoat
(1959) and
The Wackiest Ship in the
Army
(1960), lubricious and witless co-optations of the
Roberts
model. It will even be taken for a classic. But Fonda knows it is crap.

“I despised that film,” he says of
Mister Roberts.
At least he has the memory of what was.

*   *   *

Come the 1950s, television presents itself as the ideal screen for Fonda’s blander aspect. The new entertainment appliance, which by 1953 sits in half of all American homes, will be blamed for much ill-defined social evil; it will plug straight into every American tendency to complacency, conformity, and imaginative sloth. So it’s not in the happiest sense that Fonda seems made for it—as do numerous other, less talented members of his acting generation, from Robert Cummings to Robert Young. Henry’s thinness and pallor blend with the transmission fuzz of early broadcasts; his darkness is diminished and his dullness magnified by the unsubtle camera, the gray-and-white image.

Fonda will have been on television for years by the time it ceases to be called a fad. His first appearance is in April 1948, on a show called
Tonight on Broadway
—two weeks into the run of
Roberts,
he is interviewed live from the Alvin Theatre. In October 1950, he performs a
Roberts
scene on ABC’s
Showtime USA
, and in July 1953, he plays his first original TV part—the title character in
The Decision at Arrowsmith
, an adaptation from Sinclair Lewis.

In 1954, Henry is offered a substantial sum to front his own show.
The Star and the Story
is a half-hour anthology series guest-starring the requisite supply of second- and third-echelon movie veterans. The show’s subject matter, judging by the episode listing, displays a curious dependence on the short stories of Somerset Maugham.
*
Fonda’s contribution is his name, a brief introduction to each story, and two product endorsements per episode, delivered straight to the camera. The show is not unsuccessful (thirty-nine episodes are broadcast between January 1955 and April 1956), but it’s the commercials—Fonda hoisting a glass of Rheingold to extol it as “the largest-selling lager beer in the East”—that get the most attention.

Endorsements are not new for Henry—since 1936, he’s been hired to sell shirts and shoes, razor blades and self-sealing envelopes, Schaefer beer and Camel cigarettes—but they’ve always been in print; some onlookers question the propriety of a great actor pitching products via the tube, as opposed to in the pages of
Collier’s
. TV critic Hal Humphrey, while admitting the power of $150,000 as an inducement, finds it “appalling to see an actor of this stature going so commercial and mediocre.” The star is more of a realist. “I am an actor and this is part of acting,” Henry says. “Yes, I am being very commercial, and for commercial reasons. I am getting more money for this than I would for a movie.”

Clearly Fonda has a pragmatic relationship to the medium that will keep his name current and his face familiar to the end of his life. He doesn’t condescend to TV, but he exploits it, with exceeding deftness, as a ready source of cash, publicity, exposure; as a place to assert his independence as an artist-entrepreneur; and as a medium with the power to transmit fine touches and delicate strokes to millions, amid what FCC chairman Newton Minow will call a “vast wasteland” of pap programming.

Also in 1954, Fonda becomes infatuated with
Clown,
the autobiography of circus performer Emmett Kelly, whose silent hobo Weary Willie has recently been featured in Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Greatest Show on Earth.
Circus movies are in vogue just now—following DeMille’s will be
Carnival Story, Trapeze,
and
La Strada
—and Henry believes there is a feature film in Kelly’s book. Hollywood doubts it.
Clown
is no account of a tortured artist, but the story of a well-adjusted entertainer who finds a successful niche. Where’s the drama?

Henry has had a “secret ambition,” he says, to play Kelly ever since seeing him perform in the mid-1930s. He buys the book, commissions a teleplay, assembles a deal; after wrapping
Roberts,
he learns basic trapeze moves and studies Willie’s style in counsel with Kelly himself. His idea is that the presentation—filmed, not live—will serve as a dry run for the movie version. “I want to do the picture,” he says, “and that’s the only reason why I’m doing the TV show.” The half-hour production accrues a budget of nearly eighty thousand dollars, making it the most expensive film yet made for television.

Despite good ratings and reviews,
Clown
, which premieres on the
General Electric Theater
of March 27, 1955—introduced by host Ronald Reagan, sponsored by the company that promises “a better America through chemistry”—vindicates Hollywood’s judgment, not Henry’s. More concerned with manufacturing drama than with being dramatic, the show is stilted and grudging.

That is, until the climax, when the clown’s lachrymose ballet wows the crowd, and we finally understand what Fonda sees in the material. He is engaged both by Willie’s isolation—so poetically mute that it risks ickiness—and by Emmett’s desire to disappear behind the mask and mummery of this sweet, alien creature. As Emmett, Fonda is tight-faced, unappealing; reborn as the clown, he is miraculous. For five or six organic minutes, this stiff and serious man stages a dance in slow motion.
*
Whether cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer or sweeping his spotlight under a canvas flap, Fonda moves dolefully, sensually, in a perfect stylization of melancholy and vanishing.

Just two months later, he is pursuing similar quarry—but this time with words, words, words. On May 30, NBC’s blue-ribbon drama slot,
Producers’ Showcase,
airs
The Petrified Forest,
Robert E. Sherwood’s theatrical chestnut about a motley assortment of people held hostage in an Arizona diner by a gangster, and about a writer who sacrifices his life to free a forlorn waitress. Humphrey Bogart stars as the gangster, Duke Mantee, the part that made him famous on Broadway in 1935 and in the following year’s film version; Lauren Bacall is Gabby, the waitress; and Fonda plays Alan Squier, the writer who walks out of the desert sweating pathos and poetry.

Squier is a bitter romantic and gaseous failure who references the modernist shibboleths of Eliot and Jung, and bemoans belonging to “a vanishing race—the intellectuals.” Fonda isn’t a disgrace in the role, but intellectualism sits on him like an expensive hat on a pretentious woman, and he overappreciates Sherwood’s fancy-pants dialogue.