The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (20 page)

Fonda knows it is coming apart. But most of his warmth goes into his performances, while wife and children are granted patterns of silence and selfishness. It must seem to him that his is a life of dire and depressing limits. So he escapes into a performance given for an appreciative director, a job that makes sense. His eye is out for specters—other people to be, other lives and deaths to imagine, ways to replace illness, alienation, and failure with the precisions of craft and the resolutions of drama.

He misses feeling free in the company of men. Making movies with Ford is as close as he can come. Nearly every man on the set is a veteran of one war or another, and the western locations are male domains where poker is played, guns are spun, and bullshit flies. That must be why Fonda shoots three Ford pictures in less than a year after returning home—not to mention the combination fishing trip/bacchanalia he enjoys in Mexico with Ford, Ward Bond, and John Wayne immediately after wrapping
The Fugitive
.
*
The other postwar jobs are less satisfying, just as their results are thinner. The movie career itself has become a set of shackles, a mere economic-legal imperative.

As a commodity, though, Henry sits prettier than ever. He’s a titan in a town where faint bells toll the death of the old order. The Zanuck contract expires in 1947, and Fonda has put Fox on notice that it will not be renewed, though he will continue to work with them on a per-picture basis. In fact, his new agent, Lew Wasserman—heir to Leland Hayward as the powerhouse deal maker of the next generation—has gotten Fox to increase his weekly salary to six thousand dollars, all on the promise of one movie a year.
^†

But success in the contract wars means—what? Perhaps what Fonda has dreaded, and his risk-taking ancestors avoided: a future of peace and security, sheltering trees and blue skies. Fonda feels that old need for a change of scene. Word goes out that he is interested in Broadway again.

The Tigertail farmer looks around at his citrus groves and scorched pasture and dying family. What will deliver him? It is the crisis an artist needs to stay alive.

*   *   *

What to say about the remaining pictures of this postwar interregnum? None is important; none is utterly without interest. In Anatole Litvak’s
The Long Night
(1947), Fonda is a steelworker driven to murder, who recalls the events of his ordeal while facing cops in an overnight standoff. This remake of Marcel Carné’s
Le Jour se Lève
(1939) labors to rebuild its French model virtually scene by scene; but where Carné directed the original in some kind of mystic trance, Litvak is a literalist whose gauge on rooms and props beats his feel for human behavior.

On Our Merry Way
(1948) is a star-studded omnibus, and less laborious than
Tales of Manhattan,
thanks to the slapstick inspirations Fonda finds with his partner, Jimmy Stewart. As jazz hipsters in a talent contest, Henry works gymnastic wonders with his long legs and a pair of diverging rowboats, and Stewart has a diabolically funny way of sucking a lemon.

More interesting is
Daisy Kenyon
(1947), which brings together some eccentric types for a drama that ranks as slightly more than a classy soap bubble. A vehicle for Joan Crawford in her Kabuki prime, it puts Henry and costar Dana Andrews back at Fox, under the dark eye of director Otto Preminger—at this point, not the puffed-up Prussian of later fame, but master of small, atmospheric “mellers” with perversity and punch.

Among
Daisy Kenyon
’s pleasures are an unusual number of thoughtful, unhurried scenes, and some piquant dialogue. (Fonda: “Were you ever carried over your own threshold before?” Crawford: “Not sober, darling.”) Henry plays in a style of wounded gravitas that contrasts profitably with Crawford’s lipsticky exertions and Andrews’s cool arrogance. It’s as if, swathed in Preminger’s shadows, he can expose a little more pain than usual; as if, placed in an unfamiliar genre under a domineering director and star, he can wear a new mask, while generating enough torment and sexiness to suggest that the mask is not something he was handed, but a face he brought with him.

*   *   *

Majesty and trash scrambled together: That is any good actor’s Hollywood career. But it’s too scattershot for Fonda. Moviemaking has gone dead for him, as dead as “the good life in California.” As much as pride or ego, it is the desire to dismantle the circumstances of his life that makes him seek independence as an actor, and test the leverage of his fame. His real goal is not to be happier in Hollywood, but to be rid of it.

Through Fonda’s press coverage in these months, we trace the confusions of a man uncertain of what image he wishes to project, certain only that he is in the wrong place. “I look forward to Sundays,” he’s quoted in October 1946, “when I can put on my khakis and get out and irrigate, and plow, and pull off the vines that creep up over the window screens.” The next January, a piece calls him “the Burbank of Brentwood” and claims he grows most of the food his family eats. Columnist Jimmie Fidler eavesdrops on Fonda’s interview with a magazine correspondent: “Deftly, she tried to turn the conversation to things glamorous; persistently, Fonda insisted on giving out about a new fertilizer he’s using.”

From promoting himself as the suburban farmer, Fonda goes in the opposite direction, insisting in September 1947 that he is “a city slicker, right off the sidewalks of Omaha,” and that he prefers the city: “Out in the country … the crickets bother me and the roosters crow too early in the morning.” Two months later, a story notes that Fonda “would like to do a stage play—and Broadway wants him back—but Hollywood has the hooks in for a long time to come.”

But something is happening, by chance, on the other coast.

Late in 1947, Fonda flies to New York to talk to Joshua Logan, his old friend from the University Players. Logan has had both better times and worse times since the group split, from Stanislavskian study to Hollywood failure and nervous breakdown. Now he is the most successful director on Broadway, a man whose magic touch makes killer hits. Among his war-era smashes are
Charley’s Aunt, By Jupiter, Annie Get Your Gun,
and
John Loves Mary.
Each has been an unceasing tap releasing cash to its backers. Logan’s shows don’t merely have legs; they have arms, breasts, and great rounded rumps. Brooks Atkinson, eminence gris of the
New York Times
drama desk, calls him “the wonderman of the musical stage.”

Physically and psychically, Logan has always been Fonda’s virtual opposite: tall and broad of frame yet given to softness and paunch, with ironic eyes, a delicate mustache, southern manners, and, above all, an emotionalism manifesting in frequent tantrums and collapses. Still, Henry has an idea for a film, and he hopes to interest Logan in directing it. But Josh demurs: his new play is just going into casting. Here it is, he says, and here’s Tom Heggen, who wrote it with me. As long as you’re here, too, why don’t you sit down and let us read it to you?

It’s a coy proposal, offered in a spirit of what the hell. But in fact, the coauthors have envisioned Fonda as their star all along—at least since they wrote the play’s last words, and lowered the curtain on the death of their hero.

*   *   *

The play is
Mister Roberts
; Logan and Heggen have adapted it from Heggen’s novel. It’s a comedy-drama set on the USS
Reluctant,
a supply ship in the Pacific near the end of World War II. Lt. (j.g.) Doug Roberts is beloved of the crewmen whom he defends against the tyrannies of the ship’s captain. Despite being befriended by medical officer Doc and hyperactive Ensign Pulver, he is lonesome and unhappy. His sole desire is to get into combat, a transfer the captain won’t allow; a bargain between the two alienates Roberts from the crew. After a forged signature secures the transfer, news arrives that Roberts has died in a kamikaze strike while awaiting transport to the war’s last battle zone.

Henry has never been in a major stage hit, but he knows one when it is read to him. Something in the impromptu performance of the fervent, melodramatic Logan and his chain-smoking, rather dissolute partner Heggen; something in the arc of the character this odd couple have constructed; something in the
whole
of the thing tells Fonda to jump on it.

Published in 1946, Heggen’s was among the earliest American novels of the war. Logan was alerted to it by Leland Hayward, then a fledgling Broadway producer; he and Heggen met, clicked, and wrote the play in a series of marathon sessions. The partnership was fraught—“I was a corpulent manic depressive,” Logan recalled, “and Heggen was a thin manic depressive”—but the coauthors’ complementary crazies preserved the downbeat in material that could easily have gone mawkish. The novel’s content is the raw business of service comedy, yet its pace is too grave for slapstick, its prose too precise for easy consumption; there is something spooky and mournful to it. The play catches that. Rich in grown-up laughs, with a judicious spray of low clowning, it is informed by the persistence of sadness as chronically sad people feel it.

Fonda is willing to give up almost everything to do
Mister Roberts.
His commitment to it is an act of hope, will, nerve, and barreling brutality to the family that will be uprooted by his decision. Most important for Fonda, though, it is an
act—
a move away from decay and illness toward growth and health. He has been waiting for the thing that will enter his life with the force and suddenness of a Sullavan or a Ford, a Lincoln or a Joad: the thing that will take him from safety to a new frontier of freedom.

Most look at
Roberts
and see a hit. Fonda sees his deliverance.

*   *   *

He has already signed the contract on his next picture, but contracts can be voided: That’s why God created agents like Lew Wasserman. Henry returns to California with roughly a month to learn his part; then comes a lightning round of rehearsals back east, followed by out-of-town previews. Things fall into place with incredible speed. These are men with jobs to do, war veterans in a military mind-set, and matters like family will not be allowed to slow the boat.

Henry will take an apartment in New York until
Roberts
is on its feet; only then will the family join him. If divorce is on his mind, he doesn’t press the point. Frances, typically for her, is acquiescent, even helping her husband run his lines. Maybe she is excited by his excitement; maybe she feels there is nothing else she can do; maybe, like Henry, she is biding her time.

Mister Roberts
previews at the Shubert Theater in New Haven in early January 1948, and then has practice runs in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Fonda can only be elated at getting back to the theater. The work of a unified company toward a presentation in live time is what Henry has been missing in movies; his instincts snap to life under white lights and dark watchers. He even experiences some of the fun of old theater days. In Philadelphia, a goat led up the
Reluctant
gangway in one scene makes an unscheduled deposit on the stage—and Henry may just recall the urinating monkey of Falmouth.

The show comes together as a winner, and preview audiences reel before it. Just before the Broadway opening at the Alvin Theatre on February 18, Walter Winchell writes that
Roberts
appears to be “a gilt-edged investment. It is being hounded by censors in the stix [
sic
] and serenaded by reviewers, a surefire combination.”

No one projects a small, respectable success. The expectation is that audiences will stagger out sore from laughter, choked with sobs; that theater history will be made. In a period that has seen the innovative pageantry of
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
, and the new drama of
The Glass Menagerie
and
All My Sons—
with others like
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
Death of a Salesman,
and
South Pacific
soon to arrive—
Mister Roberts
must make its claim for Broadway event of the decade.

It does. From the cheer that greets Fonda’s first stage appearance in more than a decade to the burst of sorrow and joy that erupts at the final curtain, opening night is a sustained thunderclap. The ensuing ovation lasts hours, it seems. “There were too many curtain calls to count,” says Logan, deprived of his onstage bow by the neurotic Heggen, who refuses to leave the wings. The audience, Henry will recall, were “standing on their seats, hollering, whistling.” Called out to speak, he offers to do the play again from the beginning. “And they went into convulsions all over again.”

The next day’s critical acclaim is universal, or near enough to dwarf any doubters. The
Post
’s Earl Wilson calls
Roberts
“one of the greatest plays of the decade.” In the
New York Times,
Atkinson thanks Logan and Heggen for “a royal good time.” “Noel Coward sat next to me and weeped [
sic
] in turn from the laughter and pathos,” writes Jack O’Brian of the Associated Press, extolling the show’s “brilliant detail, its deep human insight.” “Pretty wonderful,” John Lardner of
The New Yorker
writes. Logan and Heggen “have written the best comedy, the best war play—to come right down to it, the best new play of any kind—that has been seen this season.”

Roberts
is a smash of rare proportions, a cultural happening. The play’s hero becomes a household name, and its creators achieve new levels of eminence: Heggen will be featured in the
Saturday Review of Literature,
Logan will be given a spread in
Life,
and Fonda will radiate heroism from the cover of
Newsweek.
Henry in particular is the man of the moment. For the next year, he will race between theater, radio studio, and TV soundstage, performing scenes and transmitting the Roberts mystique.