The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (9 page)

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Somewhere beneath the Hollywood palms waits an independent producer with the odd name of Walter Wanger—rhymes with
ranger
. Fonda, at Hayward’s insistence, meets him in the Beverly Hills Hotel in the summer of 1934.

Insulated by the theater, Henry has not heard of the producer. Rather than a cigar-chewing vulgarian, he encounters a high-talking New Dealer, a cravat-wearing, ideal-spouting archetype of the Hollywood liberal whose dogma is that movies should uplift and edify “the masses,” cleanse the great unwashed in wellsprings of knowledge and quality production design. Fonda refuses to be awestruck. But he listens to the deal, because Wanger has a history to go with his grandiloquence.

Born Walter Feuchtwanger, he’d been a stage producer at the dawn of the Little Theatre movement, then protégé to pioneer movie mogul Jesse L. Lasky, whose company, Famous Players–Lasky, formed with Samuel Goldwyn, was the forerunner of Paramount Pictures. In the silent era, Wanger had helped bring early classics like
The Sheik
(1921) and
Beau Geste
(1926) to the screen; later, he would lure to the movies many writers and directors whose careers had been made on the stage (Cukor, Sturges, Mamoulian). Wanger had gone on to work for both Harry Cohn at Columbia and Irving G. Thalberg at MGM; in the latter post, he was William Randolph Hearst’s studio liaison on properties starring Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. By 1933, when he struck out on his own, he’d become famous for infusing his productions with leftist political content.

As an independent, he would produce classics by Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, and Ophuls. He would marry actress Joan Bennett, and, in 1951, bestow a legend on Hollywood by shooting her lover, agent Jennings Lang, in the groin. After serving four months on an honor farm near Los Angeles, Wanger would seek out director Don Siegel to make the prison drama
Riot in Cell Block 11
(1954). The two would then collaborate on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
during which Wanger would introduce Siegel to an aspiring actor-writer named Sam Peckinpah, thus providing the latter with his entry into movies. Wanger’s main labor in late years would be hauling the disastrously expensive Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton remake of
Cleopatra
to the screen. He would die in 1968, his achievements little noted, an exile in the land he helped make.

But now it is the summer of 1934, and Wanger is a prince of Hollywood. Stars like Sylvia Sidney and Charles Boyer are in his stable; he’s conquered the industry on his way to becoming its resident champion of “problem films,” the man who is called “a fine and daring producer” (Fritz Lang), “a daring experimenter” (
Time
), and a purveyor of “one of the fanciest shell games even this industry has seen” (Otis Ferguson).

He has been tipped to Fonda by Hayward. Wanger comes from Broadway, and he still has spies reporting to him from Forty-second Street. (He is, in fact, a close friend of Fonda’s nemesis, Jed Harris.) Hollywood has fairly recently discovered sound, and the miraculous or mortifying effect of the human voice on the screen image. The movies are hungry for actors who can
talk,
and that means actors from the stage: already, erstwhile Broadway players like Fred Astaire, Edward G. Robinson, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the Marx Brothers are building movie careers that will far outclass their collected achievements in the theater.

In Fonda’s summary, Wanger’s deal is this: “I could go back to my beloved theatre in the winter and come out the next summer to do two pictures for one thousand dollars a week.” A remarkable offer, by any standard; it speaks of Wanger’s visionary eagerness to invest faith and dollars in the unknown. But Henry resists: “I turned to [Hayward] and said, ‘There’s something fishy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. And he laughed and laughed.”

Wanger is one of the half dozen key people in Fonda’s professional life. But Henry will not recall him warmly, seeming to blame him for the cornpone quality of his early parts. He’s being unfair. Wanger convinces Fox to cast the unknown stage actor in
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
though the executives desire Joel McCrea or Gary Cooper (both unavailable). Wanger takes half of Fonda’s five-thousand-dollar-a-week loan-out fee, but by far the greater profit, in the long run, is Henry’s. Wanger produces six of his first thirteen films, and lends him for the others, but part of Wanger’s contract is that the star gets approval on loan-outs. And if Fonda’s pickings are initially slim, they improve immensely once the producer places him in two key properties—
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
and
You Only Live Once
.

Wanger positions Fonda to come over as both a star and an actor. He helps him to cultivate an image appealing to both sexes, free of binding assumptions about social class or hypervirility, and applicable to a wider range of parts than is plausible for almost any other male star. Through Wanger, he’ll get into comedies, tearjerkers, social dramas, and even a Technicolor innovation or two. From 1935 to 1938, there is seldom a Fonda film on show that isn’t in some way special or topical, or that lacks some hook to lodge it in the public’s mind.

But the Fonda-Wanger partnership begins on a blank space—the movie that would have been Fonda’s first but wasn’t. On August 14, 1934, gossip queen Louella Parsons reports that Wanger has placed Fonda in a property called
The President Vanishes.
The producer’s notion of debuting Fonda in this politicized version of a Rex Stout mystery indicates that, from the start, Fonda’s handlers feel compelled to place him in proximity to politics, stand him next to flags.

The picture will be made without Fonda. He has either declined or been vetoed by the studio. Either way, Henry and Hollywood have not had the smoothest of meetings. He finds Hayward intimidating in his bluff assurance of every success, while Wanger is offering something suspiciously close to the moon and stars.

Henry returns to New York. What does he want? What does he not want? From the man comes a familiar shrug: “I had no ambition to be a movie actor.”
I had no ambition
—yet again. But we know by now that he does have ambition. We know, too, that his peculiar self-protecting tendency is to let himself be drawn along, lured into emotional and professional places he will not go on his own. We know that he needs men like Hayward and Wanger, as he has needed men and women before and will need them again, to push, convince, and inspire him to be himself.

We also know that
The President Vanishes
is scripted and shot, under Wanger’s production and William Wellman’s direction, in the fall of 1934; that it is released early the next year, to indifferent response; and that, at the time it is filming, Fonda is back in New York, onstage at the 46th Street Theatre, starring in his first Broadway lead, in a play titled
The Farmer Takes a Wife.

*   *   *

Distracted by the Wanger offer, Henry fulfills his summer obligation to the Westchester Playhouse. There, he is cast in a production of Molnár’s
The Swan,
alongside actor Geoffrey Kerr. Kerr is the husband of June Walker, then among the foremost ladies of the American stage, peer of Hayes and Bankhead, already on Broadway when Henry Fonda was shooting marbles in Omaha. Walker, in her turn, is set to star in a new play coauthored by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly—the latter, coauthor of
Merton of the Movies,
and Broadway’s chief nostalgia merchant since the enormous 1930–1931 success of his Deep South comedy
The Green Pastures
.

Walker goes to Westchester to see Kerr in
The Swan
, and takes notice of Fonda. Henry overhears her whisper, “Wouldn’t he be wonderful as the farmer?” Walker then passes his name to Connelly, who requests Fonda’s presence in his suite at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue. There, Henry learns that he is under consideration for the male lead.

The farmer of the play is Dan Harrow, a roughneck on the shipping barges that crawl the Erie Canal in 1853, after the canal had connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, and the eastern seaboard to the rest of America. Dan wants to get off the barges and onto a farm, and he tries to pull his feisty love interest, the cook Molly, with him. Thin stuff—though perhaps at the time, anything that hinted at the existence of blisters, sunburn, and labor was bound to give a whiff of realism.

The Gotham Hotel meeting goes happily. According to Connelly, who plans to direct the play, Fonda is awarded the hero’s role for his note-perfect reading of the boyish, calloused rough-and-ready hero: “He was patently ideal for the character, completely convincing, totally real.” According to Fonda, he is never asked to read a word. Rather, he gets the part because he has the good sense to compliment Connelly on
his
animated performance of the entire script.

After tryouts in Washington, D.C., the play returns to New York, where it opens October 30, 1934. Something about it connects; something in the mood of the Broadway audience is succored by the play’s return to simplicity. It is a prevailing American wish in late 1934, as at nearly every other time: Give us the simple of it. Stage our national past in a diorama of period costume and antique activity; show us a day when there were still dreams undiscovered, vistas unseen. Take us back; take us
away.

To judge by the critical response, Fonda understands and delivers on that wish. In the
New York Times,
Brooks Atkinson calls Fonda’s Dan Harrow “a manly, modest performance in a style of captivating simplicity.” For the
Brooklyn Eagle
reviewer, it is “an extraordinarily simple and lustrous characterization.” Another critic is sure Henry “will be transferred to the movie colony in jig time to become the newest of the leading men for Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett or Miriam Hopkins.”

The Farmer Takes a Wife
runs for over a hundred performances and is a success for all—another ruby in June Walker’s tiara, another divan in Connelly’s parlor, and Fonda’s second Broadway triumph in a row. Henry will gain more than anyone from the play. The other principals have already arrived at the summit of their fame; the unknown Fonda—so appealing and free of airs, presenting a new, sharp-lined, dark-haired definition of our country’s natural man—is seized on as the one whose star may rise on the Americana the production typifies and exploits.

*   *   *

The part of Dan Harrow gives Henry a chance to toss cargo, have a fistfight, leap, lunge. But it is his gentleness that audiences respond to—his combination of the physical and melancholy, the manly and phantasmal: the Fonda we see in the film version of
Farmer
.

Probably the stage performance is less controlled than its filmed counterpart. Shooting the movie in Hollywood, Fonda, performing his first scene, will be warned by director Victor Fleming that he needs to pull back a bit. Henry is horrified to realize he’s hurling his voice at a sensitive microphone, moving his body in ways that seem overscaled so close to the lens—that Cyclops that represents the eye of the nearest viewer. So he retracts the gesturing, reins in the voice, and internalizes forever the one major piece of direction he will ever require as a screen actor.

Even magnifying the film performance by several degrees, it’s not difficult to imagine Fonda’s appeal as Dan Harrow on the stage, his sweetness and sadness. It is also easy to imagine that the sadness is real. On October 5, 1934, after Henry has returned from Hollywood but before he opens in
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
his mother, Herberta Jaynes Fonda, dies in Omaha. She suffers a coronary thrombosis, brought on by a blood clot developed after breaking a leg. Christian Science is not able to save her, nor prayer sufficient to raise her from the dead.

Not for the last time, Henry goes onstage immediately after the death of a loved one and does his job. Embodies sweetness, simplicity, the manliness of an American man, and, along with those qualities, conceivably, something else not so easily named.

*   *   *

Our young man goes west—more or less for good—in March 1935, two months after
Farmer
closes. Though he will spend more years residing in Hollywood than anywhere else, something never quite gels between Fonda and the town that makes him a star. He is pulled there by a contract, but he insists it carry a clause releasing him for summers on Broadway.

However much Henry wants Hollywood, it’s clear that Hollywood in 1935 wants him—or, more exactly, wants the qualities embodied by those who represent the screen’s new wholesomeness. This trend to the nostalgic, chaste, and rural is indicative of a movie industry still in the process of recuperating its image—an image marred during the previous decade by a run of scandals appalling to both the newspapers’ ink-stained moralists and a public addicted to movie-star gossip.
*
By the early 1930s, Hollywood is losing money to this perception of sin and scandal, and to the Depression. Every business forms its own response to fear and crisis; if Hollywood is known as “the dream factory,” and if the factory is beset by blown fuses, defective belts, clogged lines, and leaky moldings, surely another dream—newer, happier, healthier—is the prescribed repair.

Rather than necessarily making better films in the mid-1930s, Hollywood will make
nicer
ones. It will scramble to regain virility, and shake off the taint of decadence. And that is where Henry Fonda fits. He is fresh, boyish, “simple.” His true blood—along with that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and a clutch of others—will cleanse Hollywood. He will become one of the town’s favored sons, a spearhead in his industry’s move toward respectability and higher purpose.

*   *   *

He eases himself into his contract, and into the monotonous flow of publicity. Glossies are taken, and interviews awarded to columnists eager to print a studio’s PR. Many quotes are dispensed, and juicy items planted about handsome Henry vis-à-vis some starlet with equal need of exposure. Fonda tests out his interview mien—eagerly unexciting, candidly unrevealing—and begins accumulating his store of personal anecdotes, highlights of his career and development, to be honed over many years and many tellings.