The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (37 page)

Henry’s son and daughter are driven in the sixties toward the eternal goal of youth: the first expression of self. They take every chance that comes their way, and glory in the risk of going too far. By pushing limits, they tempt the disaster that lies behind the decade’s promises, and place themselves among those who will define its ending.

*   *   *

At Boston’s Colonial Theatre at the dawn of the decade—January 29, 1960—
There Was a Little Girl,
written by Daniel Taradash and directed by Joshua Logan, opens in previews. The girl is played by Jane Fonda, her father by the veteran actor Louis Jean Heydt. The curtain rises; first scene goes smoothly. Then Heydt exits—and drops dead. Heart attack. With an announcement to the audience, the show goes on, Heydt’s understudy filling in.

Consider the moment. Jane, only twenty-two and playing a daughter, loses her “father.” Josh Logan is a beloved uncle who has exploited familial anxiety to goad his protégée: “You’re going to fall behind your old man,” he tells Jane in rehearsals. “When the curtain goes up, there’ll be a ghost of your father sitting in the chair.” And Heydt, we note, is fifty-four when death finds him in the wings—exactly Henry’s age.

Jane spends the best part of her career working off of her father’s silent example, his ghost in the chair. He is present from the start, when Jane is seventeen and a graduate of the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. In June 1955, the Omaha Community Playhouse stages a week of benefit performances of Odets’s
The Country Girl
, starring Henry. Jane is suggested for the ingenue, a part requiring tears. Dad leaves daughter to find her own emotional motivation, and to do so, she pretends that her father is dead.

Her next guru is Lee Strasberg, whom she meets in the summer of 1958, when the Strasbergs and Fondas are neighbors on the Malibu shore. Guiding force of the Actors Studio, he espouses a variety of the Stanislavskian Method, which emphasizes the player’s personal experience. Actors fear his critique but adore him for elevating them to equality with directors and writers. Jane requests private lessons from the master and gets them, for one reason: “There was such a panic in the eyes,” Strasberg will later recall.

Jane is a docile girl who imagines herself a rebel, a beautiful girl who hates her looks, a daughter who worships her father but must erase him to create herself. She has spent a listless year at Vassar, forlorn months as an art student in Paris. Acting has been “a bit of a romp,” no more. But Strasberg gives her permission to take the romp seriously, and a vocabulary to define what her father refuses even to discuss.

He introduces her, for instance, to the idea of the “counter-need,” a secret desire contradicting each conscious motivation. He also informs her that the ability to understand any dramatic act is already contained in her personal store of buried dreams and dread wishes. As Jane explains it to Lillian Ross in 1962, you needn’t commit murder to understand how murder occurs, for “somewhere inside yourself, you will find some relevant experience.”

Like wishing your father was dead?

*   *   *

Peter is more closely shadowed, it seems, by his mother. He and Frances share queer bonds—beginning with the Johns Hopkins trip, mother undergoing hysterectomy as son is probed in another room. In the cold chambers of her last years, Peter is often the only witness, apart from medical professionals, to Frances’s decline. Her long fade and abrupt disappearance implant his lifelong sense that grown-ups can’t be trusted—that authority itself is a lie.

“Difficult and very sensitive,” Susan Blanchard describes him as a boy. He grows up with a tendency to illness, and an itch for dangerous games. That he doesn’t directly intend to burn his father’s acreage or shoot himself in the stomach does not mean the acts are unmotivated: No small boy plays with fire and guns because he is free of anger.

In his junior year at boarding school, Peter is involved in an incident: an instructor, referring to Henry, asserts that any man married so often must be “a no-good son of a bitch.” Peter attacks the man physically, not ceasing until pulled away by others, and the aftermath intensifies his certainty of adult conspiracy.

Withdrawn from school, sent back to Omaha and placed in the charge of his aunt Harriet, Peter declares himself “not part of this system.” He studies at the University of Omaha, connects with other misfits, and rehearses for life as a square peg. During family summers, Peter and Henry share private moments, but never enough of them.

The boy cannot but imagine himself a disappointing son. To prove himself in Dad’s arena, Peter ventures into acting. In 1961, he stars at the Omaha Community Playhouse, and does a summer apprenticeship at the Cecilwood Theatre in Fishkill, New York. By the end of the year he has secured his Broadway debut:
Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole,
a military comedy, earns Peter fair notices (“a rare combination of total self-assurance and appealing modesty,” says
Life
). Soon into the run, he marries twenty-year-old Susan Brewer, stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich, who has recently ended his tenure as Howard Hughes’s chief adviser.

Our rebel is on the rise, with solid neophyte credentials and high-ranking in-laws. If Peter never becomes his father’s equal, at least he may cease to be a disappointment.

*   *   *

Jane moves to New York in the fall of 1958 to continue with Strasberg. She models in town and works winter stock in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where an unknown Warren Beatty, at a rival theater, is prepping for Broadway. At the guru’s encouragement, she enters psychoanalysis.

Henry doesn’t get any of it. “I don’t know what the Method is,” he says in 1962, “and I don’t care what the Method is. Everybody’s got a method.” Some methods are less agreeable than others to a man of Henry’s limitations and background. Method actors, in Norman Mailer’s summary, “will
act out
; their technique is designed, like psychoanalysis itself, to release emotional lava.” But Fonda no more welcomes an actor’s lava than he does a wife’s tears or a child’s diarrhea. The neediness and gabbiness of the Method revolt him: “Analysis,” he says, “is a way of life for them.”

But Jane continues with her facial calisthenics and miming exercises, her analysis of ego and art—until sidetracked by Josh Logan, who offers her an exclusive contract for stage and movies. He wants to test her beside his other discovery, Warren Beatty, her fellow veteran of Fort Lee, in a soap opera. That script proves unconquerable, but Logan, still keen to mate his virginal beauties, adapts the play
Tall Story,
a college-basketball farce. Beatty drifts from the picture, and Anthony Perkins is substituted.

Making her first movie, Jane feels trapped inside what she will later call “a Kafkaesque nightmare.” She is horrified by her screen test: “I left the projection room in a state of shock, with a resolution to lose weight.” Logan suggests she have her jaw surgically fractured and chiseled, and her back teeth pulled to achieve the gaunt glamour cheeks of the moment. (More than likely, he is projecting his own body issues onto her.
*
) But Jane resists his advice and makes a fetching screen debut when
Tall Story
appears in early 1960. Strikingly physical, she is unvanquished by the stagnant air and ugly look of the film; her focus is total, and she even coaxes Perkins into his most convincing show of heterosexual arousal.

Still under contract, Jane follows Logan east to rehearse
There Was a Little Girl.
But when the play closes after only sixteen Broadway performances, and it’s clear that
Tall Story
is a nonevent, Logan decides to sell Jane’s contract to producer Ray Stark. She persuades him to let her buy it instead. She spends years working off the debt, and parsing the nightmare with her analyst.

*   *   *

In 1962, Warner Bros. tests Peter for the lead in
PT 109,
the story of John Kennedy’s World War II heroism. Future president, young Fonda—it’s a passing of the torch, a laundering of history, and a commercial hook. So Peter fumbles it as badly as he can. On the day of the heavily publicized test, he balks at speaking with the expected broad Boston accent. Finally he agrees, but the test is a catastrophe. Word goes out that young Fonda is a prima donna, and Jack Warner personally vetoes his casting.

The picture flops, so Peter breaks even. But it’s a losing game. As a misfit trying to fit a system he despises, he inhabits the juvenile inanities of
Tammy and the Doctor
and the antiwar broodings of
The Victors
(both 1963) with equal vacancy. Even playing a role with psychic relevance, Peter doesn’t come across: As a suicide in
Lilith
(1964), he funnels a prissy performance through prop eyeglasses. Conceivably, he’s defeated in the latter film by the pressure of depicting an illness similar to the one that killed his mother; certainly, his technique is incapable of transmitting the fear the scenario raises in him.

Despite it all, the Hollywood establishment is prepared to accept Peter Fonda as its own. And so it goes for a bit, as he works his way down from a princeling’s perch to the mediocre middle folds of show business. He fathers a girl, Bridget, in 1964, and a boy, Justin, two years later, works on his television résumé, and collects the perks of his profession (tennis court, swimming pool, cars, extra cars). So what if he gets into crashes, plays with guns, has untreated manic depression? If he holds steady, someday he’ll star in his own series as a dedicated teacher, or doctor, or detective, or lawyer. That will be canceled after two seasons, and he’ll graduate to being a guest murderer on
Columbo.
He’ll live.

But he will not play his part in history. Hollywood is set to transform itself, for a brief stretch, from a dominion of aging hacks to a place where experiment and nerve are the currency; where fringe visions of American darkness and dislocation are entertained, and something like real people observed; where myths are rewritten and new kinds of horseshit patented: a transformation to be called—pompously, but not unreasonably—“the Hollywood Renaissance.”

American film is primed for rebirth, with Henry Fonda’s son as its star-child.

*   *   *

Back at the Actors Studio, Jane finds her next Svengali in Greek-born actor-director Andréas Voutsinas—a gifted theater man, and, in Henry’s estimation, “a parasite.” He crafts her image and molds her moves for roughly three years, with spotty results: On Broadway, a respectable success (1960’s
Invitation to a March
) is followed by a perfect disaster (1962’s
The Fun Couple,
placed by Walter Kerr among “the five worst plays of all time”).

As for Jane’s films in this period, none is a big hit, but a few are attention-getters. Save for the retro tearjerker
In the Cool of the Day
(1963), they are broadly comic, and Jane often overexerts in a Method eagerness to
act out.
But Jane Fonda is clearly her own creation, whatever the influence of her gurus. In
Walk on the Wild Side
(1962), she uses costar Laurence Harvey’s stiffness as a cat uses a scratching post; in
The Chapman Report
(1962), she overflows a shallow character by implying more life than it can hold. Better is
Period of Adjustment
(1962), a Tennessee Williams comedy in which she plays a hysterical southern bride close to parody, threatening to go too far—but threat, we now see, threat of the unexpected and of the too-much, is part of her magnetism.

Singly, these early movies are pointless; together, they are a mosaic of something fresh and different. Jane recalls the beauties of classic screwball comedy, but her neurosis and toughness are up to the minute. She is a sexy jungle of mixed-up modern selfhood, and a new kind of woman on the screen.

In early interviews, she credits psychoanalysis with showing her the truth about herself and her upbringing. She attributes her decision to enter her father’s profession not to talent but to her own “neurotic drive.” Actors, she says, are “more neurotic and selfish and insecure than the average person,” and “are not likely to be particularly good parents.”

Anticipating the art and politics of the new decade, Jane is attempting to expose the fiction, strip the stage. Henry appears unaffected by her criticisms, but those who know him know he buckles with each blow. “It breaks his heart,” says Susan Blanchard, remarried now, but still close to the kids. “When she makes remarks about him as a father, he dies, he dies.”

*   *   *

The range of Henry’s films in the middle and late 1960s gives the appearance of diversity, but it is really surrender—to virtually any project that will pay him to show his face. He’ll say his agents are to blame, but Henry would rather make a bad movie than no movie at all. So his marginal works multiply, the follies and trivia of an actor still major enough to command salary and billing, yet shoehorned by necessity into the lucrative genre of the instant—sex romp, comic Western, crime drama, spy thriller, battle spectacular, family frolic.

Sex.
The 1964
Sex and the Single Girl
is chiefly about Tony Curtis seducing Natalie Wood with a series of fatuous deceptions, and secondarily about Fonda, as a panty-hose mogul, repeatedly fighting and reuniting with Lauren Bacall. Coscenarist Joseph Heller recalls, “Natalie Wood didn’t want to do the picture, but she owed it to Warner Bros. on a three-film deal. And Tony Curtis needed the money to settle a divorce. That’s what I like best about the movie industry: the art and idealism.”

Western.
As an aging cowpuncher in 1965’s
The Rounders,
Henry has a nice drunk scene, and shows a talent for rising sleepily from a bunk, crossing to a table, picking up a rooster, and tossing it out a door. The movie lacks subtlety or beauty, but it has a soul, and deserves better from MGM than to become the bottom of a double bill with
Get Yourself a College Girl,
starring Mary Ann Mobley and Chad Everett.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady
(1966) is an Old West poker showdown with a passel of old-time actors and a plot twist as unforeseeable as the Rocky Mountains. Also in this class of fossil goes a later dried bone,
The Cheyenne Social Club
(1970), which reunites Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. Stewart inherits a whorehouse, and the two mangy cowboys must clean up and become businessmen. The stars will not rouse themselves to states of excitation, but why should they? “It’s like working with the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument,” says director Gene Kelly—meaning it as a compliment.