The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (14 page)

Tom’s farewell affects us because Fonda neither accedes to heroism nor resists it. He merely gives the words their less obvious meaning—that accepting one’s complicity in the fate of the whole race might be far more terrifying than exhilarating. We must, if we are to feel anything, feel the curse that has fallen on Tom, the burden he has decided to accept. So Fonda won’t smile serenely as he says “I’ll be there.” His eyes won’t mist over, nor his chest expand and sinews stretch as they reach for their moral purpose. Instead, he will suggest fear with the slope of his eyebrows, the downward curve of his mouth—as if the man inside were melting with dread at the choice he faces.

It’s easy to feel distance from the words Tom speaks because they sound so damnably literary. They are an idea, and people tend not to express themselves in terms of ideas. But this film is a product of a time when Americans were forced by calamity and hunger to reconfigure their lives and their ethics. One had either to commit to something new, reinvest thin hope in failed systems, or renounce the idea of community and drop out. One’s life had to become the expression of that choice, and therefore of an idea. Tom Joad’s last words are literary, but they are fair. They are even accurate. But they could so easily have been botched by a bad intonation, a moment’s puffery or tainting streak of ego. Fonda walks the line. He reads past the social moment that produces the words, to express the burden of a man trapped and transformed by American history.

Our last view of Tom is of a tiny figure walking away over a far hill in early morning, with “Red River Valley” sounding on a sad accordion. The figure could be anyone—Tom Joad, or another anonymous soul on the open road. To become someone, he has chosen to be no one. To enter America, he has chosen to disappear into it.

*   *   *

Is Tom Joad striding on ahead, leading us to glory, or is he only walking away, showing us his ass? Well—say he is doing both. Say both are part of a flow, a oneness. In doing both—refusing and committing, striding on and walking away—Tom has already become what Casy imagined. So has Fonda.

“The one big soul that belongs to everybody”: Much is contained in that line. “The big soul” means that community exists, that there is a group identity greater than the many single identities within it. But for anyone with Fonda’s suspicions of the crowd, it also means taking into account how easily, when people join in a mass, health turns into sickness, moral people into mere fingers of the lynch mob or fascist army.

“The big soul” means, too, that one person can leave a Henry Fonda film feeling affirmed in the rightness of things as they appear, while another leaves the same film convinced that Fonda has colored blood—that hidden relationships and murky continuities function in him. It means that those truths are fused in a body and a face, a pair of eyes, a mind and a memory; and that the contradictions of community and country flow, for one revelatory stretch of film, through one man.

Whether or not we believe in “the big soul,” Fonda shows that he believes in it. And we feel that his belief comes through layers of experience, empathy, and uncertainty that his own soul can ever begin to relinquish the cold strength of solitude. Somehow we know that Fonda has always believed in the big soul, and wondered of its claim on him long before Tom Joad appeared to give him the words he would have chosen for himself, were words and not action his manner of expressing his sorrow to the world:

“I remember all of it.”

5

Ways of Escape

The Lady Eve

“Death in the guise of the new life in California is not going to prevail over me,” says the main character in Walker Percy’s novel
The Second Coming.
“Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me.”

Family and domesticity are, for many, an irresistible lure, and a hook in the mouth. The lures are warmth, security, familiarity, legacy. The hook is a feeling of entrapment, that one’s own needs and desires are forever subordinate to those of others. As that hook pierces and digs deeper with every year, resentment grows.
Who are these people? Why do they believe they have the right to all that I am? Can’t they leave me alone?

Fear that in the bosom of the family hides the death of the individual may be irrational. It may be a sane person’s best defense against the crushing effects of mismatched parents and incomprehensible children. Or it may be a certain kind of person’s natural recoil from closeness and community.

Some who feel the resentment express it, while others hold it inside. They play at being spouse and parent, meeting what they feel are the reasonable requirements of an unwritten contract. Bad feelings collect near the surface of life, and fester there. Quiet and stoicism become an especially unpleasant form of aggression as the violent act is replaced by the roaring silence. The hook digs deeper, but the blood stays on the inside, flowing backward, down the throat.

*   *   *

Henry and Frances now have two children: Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda, born December 21, 1937, and Peter Henry Fonda, born February 23, 1940. Both are delivered in New York City by cesarean section.

Frances learns of her and Henry’s first conception not long after Ross Alexander’s suicide, and just as
You Only Live Once
is reaching theaters. The news makes her happy—she especially wants a boy—and Henry claims to be leaping with excitement. Then one day, like all fathers-to-be, he wakes up, blinks his eyes, and realizes the limits that are about to constrict him. At which point, like many fathers-to-be, he begins to spend as much time out of the house as he can manage.

Always a workhorse, he increases his pace, filming
That Certain Woman
with Bette Davis as Frances readies the nest. Henry then fancies a return to the stage—first at the Westchester Playhouse for a summer-stock rendition of
The Virginian,
then at the 46th Street Theatre, site of his Dan Harrow triumph, for Valentine Davies’s
Blow Ye Winds,
a romantic comedy with a seaside setting and, as critics see it, insufficient salt in the talk.
*
Why would Fonda choose this summer to return east—for the privilege of acting in two mediocre plays, or to evade the gathering realities of fatherhood?

Blow Ye Winds
wheezes to a close after only thirty-six performances. By this point, Frances has come to New York, first to oversee the auctioning of George Brokaw’s furniture, and, second, to have the baby delivered by her personal obstetrician at the exclusive Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side. Completing the missed connections of people who seem to be avoiding each other, Frances settles into her maternity bed just as Henry flies back to Hollywood to begin shooting
Jezebel
, the final film on his three-picture contract with Warner Bros.

But Henry is a decent man as well as a selfish one: He has had a provision written into his
Jezebel
contract that requires director William Wyler to release him from the production when the baby’s birth becomes imminent. When Jane arrives, Henry is at Frances’s bedside. After a brief visit, he returns to Hollywood; it is another two weeks before Frances follows him, Jane in her arms.

Henry goes almost directly from the set of
Jezebel
to the set of his next movie,
Blockade,
while Frances arranges the family’s move to a new house on Monaco Drive in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. (Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward—Henry’s ex-wife and his agent, now married and starting their own family—move in a few doors away.) There’s much crisscrossing activity in these weeks; the couple continue to be conspicuously separated.

“Dad was so emotionally distant,” Jane says, “with a coldness Mother was not equipped to breach.” Contrasted to that are what she calls his “Protestant rages.” Henry is absent much of the time, work being his chief concern: He has the male intentness on production and utility, and family exhausts his patience for nonsense. If the silence is a passive withdrawal from the burden of others’ emotional needs, the rage runs deeper—too deep to be considered anything but a basic component of Henry’s character. “We were all afraid of Jane’s father in those days,” says a friend. “We always felt he was a time bomb ready to explode.”

Frances has her own preoccupations, which Joshua Logan identifies as “children, operations, jewelry, [and] the stock market.” She is a hypochondriac, and visitors note that she seems excessively fearful that germs will get at the baby. Henry will later complain that he is not allowed to be as affectionate with his daughter as he wishes—that baby Jane is effectively “quarantined,” and that Frances makes him wear a mask when nuzzling her.

Frances lavishes her attentions on Peter, who will grow into a sickly, neurotic child, a melancholy charge of private schools and relatives, with a destructive streak and penchant for violent games. There is also a half sibling in the house—Pan, Frances’s daughter by Brokaw, six years older than Jane. There is gender ambiguity: Jane plays the tomboy to ape the masculinity of her adored father, and to be the son her mother wanted; while sensitive Peter is a constant source of perplexity to manly Dad.

In 1938, soon after Jane’s birth, the Fondas move to a large family cottage on South Chadbourne Avenue in Brentwood. (Again, the Haywards follow them to a nearby house on Evanston Street.) Then, in early 1940, Henry and Frances discover a nine-acre property at 600 Tigertail Road in Beverly Hills, overlooking the Pacific, with views of the Santa Monica Mountains. Though the land is costly, this verdant suburb is not yet the exclusive domain of the Hollywood elite. In Henry’s recollection, the landholder, Bell Telephone, is uncertain whether to sell or retain the thousands of acres. Selling would mean installing many miles of wire for phone service and utilities, and no one knows if such investment is justified. But by liquidating some of Henry’s holdings and pooling them with her own, Frances is able to purchase the property for $27,000. Peter remembers the family moving there “in increments” between 1942 and 1944.

Tigertail is at first, Henry says, “a bare hill. Not even trees.” With his own hands, he plants groves of citrus and pine. The wilds of Beverly Hills in the predevelopment 1940s are unspoiled but treacherous. “In those days,” Brooke Hayward writes, “the sky belonged to patrols of turkey buzzards circling it leisurely, the hills swarmed with jackrabbits and deer, and at night packs of coyotes gathered on our lawn to howl at the moon.” The tall grasses are alive with king snakes and rattlers.

The Fondas design and build a main house, with a number of outbuildings dotting the property. “Probably the most carefully planned home in these United States,” it’s called in a 1948
House Beautiful
pictorial. “Before even the cement was mixed, trees were moved and transplanted on the grounds, flower beds were set out, a citrus grove was planted, and gardens were mapped.” There are Mohawk Valley touches in the styling of the house, with its artificially distressed shingling and colonial furnishings.

For the kids, Tigertail is a pastoral wonderland, with horse stables, a two-story playhouse, and unlimited space. Brother and sister remember these as the happiest days of their childhood. In retrospect, they will understand their parents’ unhappiness, signs missed or ignored at the time; but for now, there are sufficient sun, grass, and animals to divert them from the mysterious doings of the adults.

Henry works steadily during the construction, either at Twentieth Century–Fox—to which he is now contracted—or on the land. Frances’s task and distraction is to take over the household finances, including the buying and selling of stocks and real estate. She grows more withdrawn, eats less, and begins to hoard pills.

At the same time, she multiplies her own money, while losing a good deal of Henry’s in a series of bad investments. The implications are plain: As Henry withdraws attention and affection from Frances, so she withdraws a portion of his solvency and independence. The emotional constriction of the situation, the time-bomb silences and secret retributions, mean that Frances’s manner and habits grow more institutional, as of one living in a prison, with herself as both inmate and jailer: She carries a ring around, with keys to every lock in Tigertail.

Or maybe she simply misses the hospital—any hospital. In 1940, suffering headaches and weight loss, she retreats for three weeks to the Scripps Clinic near La Jolla. It is her first confinement for nervous symptoms.

*   *   *

Like many harried young husbands, Henry has stress at the office, and a boss he despises. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century–Fox, is also from Nebraska—little Wahoo is a mere thirty miles west of Omaha. Zanuck is only three years older, and, like Fonda, he left his virginity in one of Omaha’s many brothels. We don’t know if the two ever compared notes on their first sexual experiences, or, indeed, if they might have chanced to share the same initiator.

But their common ground ends there. Unlike Fonda, Zanuck is a braggart who believes his own publicity. He is also an executive of raw brilliance who not only shepherds many daring projects to estimable ends but also manages to do little enough damage to others in the process. He becomes Henry’s necessary antagonist during his finest decade on the screen, enabling or obstructing some of his most important films.