The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (22 page)

Events make it inescapable that he will meet someone else while Frances is incapacitated. He is too much in demand; there are too many women casting their lashes and lusts his way—appraising his fine forty-four-year-old frame, his tanned jawline and nicely angled arm, perfect for clutching as flashbulbs pop.

The one whose gaze makes Henry look up, and look again, is Susan Blanchard. She is twenty-one years old and the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II, who, with partner Richard Rodgers, has most lately triumphed with
South Pacific
(coauthored and directed by Joshua Logan). Susan swims in the same splashy circles as Henry; the two wind up at the same parties, and discover rapport. She has done bits of stage acting, and even spent time under contract at Twentieth Century–Fox. She is familiar with the hype and whirl of the business, seems well adjusted to them.

Like Sullavan, she is small, even pixieish in appearance, with a face out of a locket. Her smile is a mischievous triangle and her eyes are hooded with intelligence, the suggestion of some ongoing inner dialogue. Amazingly for a woman of glamour in the 1950s, she wears black horn-rimmed glasses in public without self-consciousness. She has a sense of humor, and a lack of neurosis.

She has—no avoiding the word—youth. She is the opposite of what Frances has become: dreary, dolorous, old.

The two pursue an affair—at this point platonic, Henry swears. They stick to small, dark restaurants; only a few friends know. When Frances finds out, she will seem surprised. But some will claim she has known of the affair almost from the start, thanks to the grapevine of chatter and whispers running between New York and Greenwich.

Right now, though, she is still a patient at Austen Riggs, resting, recuperating, and receiving something she cannot get at home, from children, mother, girlfriends, or absent husband. But she must reemerge eventually: Unlike Henry, Frances cannot stand to be alone for long. To him, independence is life; to her, it is death.

*   *   *

The spiral, from this point, is only down. Small gestures at regeneration barely interrupt the process by which a mind is buried in an accumulation of sadnesses.

Frances ends her second stay at Riggs, and again seems fine on her return—whatever that means to others’ appraising eyes and smiling mouths. The Fondas move out of the Count Palenclar House into a sublet on Sherwood Lane, and Frances roughs out designs for the construction of a new home—Tigertail East, more or less. Around the same time, her daughter Pan—now seventeen and, thanks to Frances’s efforts to secure for her the bequest of her late father’s estate, one of the wealthiest heiresses in America—becomes engaged to Charles Abry of Philadelphia. He is also seventeen and, as heir to the S. H. Kress chain of five-and-dime stores, also splendidly wealthy.

Frances is excited by her daughter’s engagement, though Henry’s autobiography speculates she is equally disturbed by the approach of grandmotherhood.

But all plans are arrested when Frances is diagnosed with a kidney problem. It is sudden and serious. One biographer describes it as a “floating” kidney, or nephroptosis—quite simply, the unusual tendency of a person’s kidney to descend into her pelvis when she stands. The treatment of the day is surgery to stabilize the organ. Today, some “float” is considered normal, and surgery might not be indicated; but in 1949, the condition was assumed to be life-threatening.

Frances goes under the knife in April. Her attraction to hospitals is outweighed only by her dread of her own body and its ravaging by age and illness. Imagine her horror, on waking, to discover that the surgery has left a foot-long scar across her midsection.

*   *   *

Time will show that Henry is not as carefree as he seems. In these painful months, a few moments bear witnessing.

On May 19, 1949, the morning after
Mister Roberts
’s 522nd performance, Tom Heggen’s body is found in the bathtub of an apartment on East Sixty-second Street. Empty pill bottles are nearby; an unused razor blade lies at the bottom of the tub. The coroner rules it a “probable suicide,” but writer Alan Campbell, owner of the apartment, believes it was accidental. Josh Logan, too, will remain unconvinced: “I do know there was a time when Tom tried to die. But I’m sure that the time he didn’t try was when he did.”

Even if Heggen didn’t mean to die that day, there is enough reason to suppose he meant to die. The themes of his writing up to and including
Mister Roberts
were death, isolation, and disappointment. “I don’t much like myself,” he’d written his wife during the war, before
Roberts
was even begun, “and I was no good to anybody.” Logan’s immersion in
South Pacific
had left Heggen feeling abandoned, and he’d been unable to develop a second novel. He was earning more than four thousand dollars a week from the play and other royalties; money was not his problem. His problem, if he was a suicide, was the depression that falls when the fear of failure sinks deep enough to edge out every option—most crucially, the option to fail, as Heggen probably would have, to duplicate the success of his first creation.

It may have amounted to a terror of boredom—one of the many names of death. Pointlessness yawns, swallowing the future, and the mind shrinks under the weight of so much empty time. Tom Heggen may have decided to meet that oblivion head-on, for staying alive without a reason is also death, as he knew. “The most terrible enemy,” Doug Roberts writes in his last letter to the
Reluctant
crew, is “the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a sort of suicide.”

A week and a half after Heggen’s death, on May 29, Henry is the guest star on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s NBC Radio show. In the first skit, the pair are excited by having finally scored tickets to
Mister Roberts.
As they sit in the audience, Fonda is heard performing part of a speech. “Gee,” Jerry gushes after the curtain, “Henry Fonda is really terrific, huh, Dean. That’s what I wanna be—a great actor.” He says
Roberts
has given him “the most vibrant, spine-tingling moments I’ve ever spent in the American theater.”

“Really spine-tingling, huh?”

“Yeah. I felt just like somebody’d dropped a live frog down inside my shirt.”

Convinced it is his destiny to quit comedy and become a serious actor, Jerry gets into Fonda’s dressing room and presses the star for a job in the
Roberts
cast. After much cajoling, Henry offers him the part of the goat.

There is a fantasy segment in which a down-home girl, Daisy Belle, wonders with whom she should attend the big barn dance—Hank or Jerry. Fonda provides a drawling parody of himself, circa 1935. But he seems flat in the skit, distracted.

The show ends with Martin, Lewis, and Fonda joining voices for a sprightly hate song to a lover who has overstayed her welcome:

Drop dead, little darlin’, drop dead

I need you like a hole in the head

Fonda moans the lyric far beneath Lewis’s monkey mewling and Martin’s lubricated lead, as if hoping to go unheard. He has been sluggish throughout the show; now he sings as if his stomach is full of rocks.

The day before the show airs, Frances writes to a friend about her kidney operation. “They just cut me in half,” she says.

*   *   *

In June, Frances, Henry, and Jane attend Pan’s graduation from her Baltimore boarding school. Soon thereafter, Pan and Abry are married, Henry giving away the bride. Frances accompanies the young couple on their European honeymoon. Before returning to New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
, she writes to Watson Webb, her children’s godfather, that “my better half will find me looking 100% better than when I left.”

Frances speaks as if she still has hope that Henry is not lost to her. And in fact, it’s around this time that the papers run photos of the two dancing and socializing at the Stork Club. They seem reasonably gay. Henry looks like what he is—esteemed, successful, the center of attention—while Frances is not worn or empty-looking at all, but beautiful, vital, proud. You would never know, from looking, that parts of both are already dead.

It is not long after this that Henry decides everyone—or at least he—has had enough. He inhales, sits Frances down in a quiet room, and asks her for a divorce. He says there is someone else.

“Well, all right, Hank,” Frances says—or Henry will say she said.

He will recall how well she took the news, the sympathy and “understanding” in her response. He suspects more than he tells. But he seems not to realize how little he ever understood his wife’s depression, or how cruel it is to interpret her final surrender as kindness and sympathy.

Frances has acquiesced to Henry’s leadership at every point. She has left her eastern element for an uncertain life in Hollywood; allowed her husband free rein to come or go, live and work in other worlds. She has gone along with his need to enlist, knowing how much she would be left to handle on her own. She has agreed to be transplanted again, to a cold, lonesome spot in the suburbs, and to endure gossip as her husband escorts a young lady around New York. Her response to each request has been some version of the refrain “Well, all right, Hank.”

If she can’t be happy, she will at least direct her own misery. Frances takes it all inside, smiling the martyr’s distant smile. And Henry believes, is willing to believe, that it is all right.

“The shock of Hank wanting to remarry,” Frances writes to Watson Webb in the fall of 1949, after Fonda has removed himself from the Greenwich house to the top floor of a brownstone on East Sixth-seventh Street, “was almost too much for me—and too soon after my immense operation.… Since he has told me he hasn’t been happy during our thirteen years of marriage all I can say is I wish him great happiness in this
new marriage.”

The emphasis is Frances’s, and it undercuts the sympathy Henry has found so wonderful.

Frances has been nursing her pathos for a long time, and now it is handed to her on a plate. She is forty-one, and soon she will be alone. What does she imagine for herself? Her visions of the future may resemble those recorded by other depressives—Tom Heggen’s fear of surrender to the suicide of boredom, or the featureless void described by Sylvia Plath in
The Bell Jar
: “I could see day after day after day glaring at me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”

Now Frances will move between planning a future and shrinking from it. First, on October 18, she has a new will written, apportioning her holdings between her children and mother, and excising Henry. It is a good move forward, a healthy act of spite. But around Thanksgiving, her lapses into psychosis become more extreme. Staying in Manhattan with her friend Eulalia Chapin, she speaks openly of suicide, and weighs insanity as a ploy to prevent Henry’s remarriage. According to Jane, Frances hacks off her hair, and wanders her friend’s Manhattan neighborhood in nightclothes. Chapin awakens in her apartment, to find Frances looming over her in the dark, examining her neck, curious to find the precise location of the jugular vein.

She is taken by her mother back to Austen Riggs.

More agony. On December 9, Pan gives birth to a premature infant at Hahneman Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania. According to reports, she and Abry have been vacationing in the Pocono Mountains, Frances accompanying them, presumably on furlough from Riggs. Frances writes to a friend, in fragments: “Pan lost her baby last Friday—premature—a girl who lived two hours—a difficult time.”

Peter remembers that his mother spent Christmas week of 1949 at home, and “seemed all right.”

It is just after Christmas that Dorothy Kilgallen, entertainment columnist for the
New York Journal American
, publicly breaks the story of the Fondas’ divorce agreement, and Henry’s desire to wed Susan Blanchard “as soon as it is legally possible.” “Miss Blanchard is in her twenties, Fonda in his forties,” Kilgallen tut-tuts. “It is understood Mrs. Fonda will take custody of the children without opposition from the actor, and also will be given an extremely large financial settlement.” The tone of disapproval is not surprising: Some say Kilgallen has gotten the scoop directly from Frances.

In late January 1950, Frances is back at Riggs, and Henry meets with Dr. Knight to discuss her condition. Knight has little hope to offer. There has been further breakdown, more talk of suicide, decreasing contact with reality. Knight fears Frances will attempt the worst, and that Riggs is no longer equipped to secure her. He recommends she be moved to the Craig House sanitarium in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, New York, forty miles from Manhattan. Craig is another exclusive, expensive refuge for the rich and self-destructive—Zelda Fitzgerald had been there in the 1930s—but it is designed for maximum watchfulness over those inmates who might be inclined to hurt themselves.

Frances is admitted to her last hospital on February 3.

*   *   *

Having studied the void that is her future, the character in
The Bell Jar
speaks of being seized by a need for controlled action, directed toward finality: “I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

In March, Frances’s caretaker at Craig House, Dr. Courtney Bennett, reports improvements in her condition. She seems less depressed, more aware of the people around her; she plays a skillful game of bridge. The fog may be lifting. Too early to tell, though, what it is revealing.

Accompanied by a nurse, Frances takes a day trip home to visit Sophie, Jane, and Peter. At one point, she excuses herself and goes upstairs to her bedroom. The nurse peeks in to check on her; Frances, startled, drops a box. The box is replaced and the nurse thinks nothing of it. But Frances has taken from it a small razor, which she hides somewhere in her clothing. That night, she smuggles it into Craig House. The date, Peter remembers, is April 7.

Exactly a week later, at 6:50 in the morning, night nurse Amy Gray brings juice to Frances’s room and finds a note affixed to the bathroom door. It reads “Do not enter—call Dr. Bennett.” The nurse alerts the doctor, who enters the bathroom, to find Frances on the floor, bleeding from a deep gash in her throat.