The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (3 page)

“Gentlemen—and fellow citizens … I presume y’all know who I am.”

It’s dizzying. How often does myth take flesh before our eyes? Seldom have movies achieved, through makeup or miracle, so arresting a combination of attributes as this, so bizarre and fixating a meld of physical actor and imaginative essence. The face is Lincoln’s; the voice is Fonda’s. The body moves with the proper languid resolve, looking just as Lincoln’s would have, had it ever been caught on moving film.

We witness a fusing of faces, and of fates. Lincoln starts to speak; Fonda starts to exist. The one steps into destiny, the other into movie myth. And to both we can only say, Yes, this is how it was supposed to be.

*   *   *

Part of the magic of Fonda’s portrayal is that at the same time he speaks for Lincoln, he asks Lincoln to speak for him. Each uses the other to express his own sadness and conflict; two spirits war within the imperturbable costume that to us appears filled out by one integrated body.

What is the sadness? What is the conflict? Primal scenes are both inadequate and irresistible; myth couldn’t do without them. So the Lamar Trotti screenplay founds itself on not just one primal scene, but two—the near lynching on the prison stairs, and a young woman’s death.

That woman was Ann Rutledge, Abe’s first love, whom he met upon moving to New Salem, Illinois, in 1831. Her father, a tavern owner, was young Lincoln’s employer; one of her forefathers had signed the Declaration of Independence. Ann had ambitions beyond New Salem, and planned to attend a women’s college. She saw Lincoln’s potential and encouraged him toward the law. Abe was besotted with her, and they were engaged. Then, in August of 1835, she took sick and died from what was called “brain fever” but was probably typhoid.

The story was first embellished by Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and first important biographer, and has been a wrangling point of historians. “He mourned her loss with such intensity of grief that his friends feared for his reason,” Carl Schurz wrote in 1905. “A highly dubious business,” Gore Vidal called the story some eighty years later. Melodramatics aside, there is sufficient evidence that Ann’s death left a deep void in Lincoln. He was already given to long despondencies, not surprising given the poverty of his childhood and the deaths he’d witnessed, starting with both parents and an older sister.

In
Young Mr. Lincoln,
Abe and Ann have just one scene together. Fonda presents Lincoln as a serious young man, though callow in his coonskin cap, and Ann is Ford’s model of supportive American womanhood. The two stroll beside the flowing Sangamon, nearly bursting with anticipation of the future and each other, but the exchange is infused with sadness. Already we have the sense of things too fine and fleeting to last.

Abe tosses a stone in the river. A dissolve turns the concentric ripples of springtime water into jagged pieces of ice dragging past the Sangamon’s banks in deepest winter. Ann Rutledge is dead—gone, just that fast—and Abe lays flowers at her grave. From the natural world of springtime, we go to a studio set of simulated winter. The transition from love, youth, and yearning to chill, death, and snowy ground is pure instinctive mysticism. It’s what religion tries to make sense of, and what art, in its highest moments, may capture.

Douglas L. Wilson writes of the “symbolic significance” that Ann’s sudden death had for Lincoln. That symbol was the grave. A Lincoln neighbor told Herndon, “I never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did for her he made a remark one day when it was raining that he could not bare the idea of its raining on her Grave that was the time the community said he was crazy he was not crazy but he was very disponding a long time.” Wilson finds this convincing evidence of “Lincoln’s emotional fixation on Ann’s grave.”

Not just the grave but also what it represents: the obligations left by the dead upon the living. In
Young Mr. Lincoln,
Abe stands a stick on the frozen ground over Ann’s grave and offers a proposition. He will let the stick fall, and if in falling it points to the grave, he will fulfill Ann’s dream of his destiny and become a lawyer. If it points away, he will stay a shop clerk.

Abe wonders, when the stick points to the grave, if it was more he or Ann who influenced its direction. It doesn’t matter: The stick has two ends, and Abe knows that if one points at the grave, the other points back at him. He and the ghost are one.

*   *   *

Fonda knows he’s not impersonating Lincoln, but collaborating with a specter. His eyes are sunken and haunted, as if Abe were half man and already half spirit. He lives in two worlds—a sunlit world of elections and baking contests and political calculations, and another of stark elements, apprehensions, omens. The icy river running past Ann’s graveyard; the forest clearing where a stabbing occurs; the rainy hilltop where Lincoln sees his country’s future. Light and dark, day and night; material world and ghost world.

A. Alvarez describes how Freud “showed that in mourning and its pathological equivalent, melancholia, the ego tries to restore to life whatever has been lost by identifying with it, and then incorporating, or introjecting, the lost object in itself.”
Young Mr. Lincoln
shows the steps by which Abe absorbs Ann’s ghost and becomes a different man. He feels humble, special, responsible; he thinks and speaks with uncommon deliberation. This is the weight we sense in people who seem to have more than the usual portions of sadness, gravity, and modesty. It’s the sense Lincoln carried that the dead required something of him, that the stick pointed at the grave and at him, and that there was a ghostly determinant to human events.

It’s a sense he never shook, and died trying to fulfill.

*   *   *

Back on the prison steps, Lincoln addresses the lynching party: “We do things together that we’d be mighty ashamed to do by ourselves.”

His words go right to the heart of democracy. In the film, Lincoln is always suspicious of that brutal togetherness: He is a thoughtful watcher, where his neighbors are impulsive doers; a loner, where they are joiners. Often—as when the townspeople besiege the Clay brothers in the clearing, or when Mary Todd coquettishly lavishes attention on Lincoln’s rival—Abe stands back, observing the display from a shadow or an upper floor. Eisenstein sensed Lincoln’s sunken watchfulness structuring the film, calling it “a gaze of cosmic reproaches to worldly vanities.”

But Fonda’s Lincoln doesn’t just observe democracy; he participates in it, jokes and dances with it. Henry is a stiff, inhibited dancer, but he
knows
how he looks, and from stiffness comes style. He’s so bad, he’s charming: Directors persist in making him dance. Ford’s dancing scenes in particular are ways of making democracy itself dynamic and physical. Springfield’s town dance is the daylight counterpart to its after-dark lynching party, the community showing its best face and allowing Abe to relinquish all his tragic suspicions of his neighbors, if only for the moments it takes him to reel about the square with Mary Todd and incarnate the great man as deadpan physical comedian.

As a lawyer, Abe is master of the folksy shim-sham, and Ford and Fonda plant and detonate some of the biggest courtroom laughs since
The Pickwick Papers.
But throughout, the mob is a testy presence. So easily excited, so stupidly passionate, it is as ready to tear down a building as it is to roar with laughter. Abe is right not to trust it. And, with the guilty man finally exposed, he knows when to step out of its way. Having affirmed law and order, probity and logic, Lincoln replaces his hat as if restoring the lid to democracy’s boiling pot, while offscreen, the mob howls again, as it had at the prison steps.

During the trial, Fonda sits to hear a witness. Ford poses him in shadow and profile, so that Abe looms upon the scene as a spirit in the foreground, a history-book silhouette. The film has such somberness and weight that the image, while contrived, doesn’t register as anything less than justified and true. At that moment—and at Ann’s graveside, and at the march of the war veterans, and at the prison steps—
Young Mr. Lincoln
’s countermyth is redeemed. The revisioning of history comes emotionally alive, and rings with a profound clarity of conception and belief. Again and again, the film achieves this pure sense, not just of a national ideal expressed in composed and harmonious drama but also of the sadness and fear such an ideal would conceal.

Fear of what? Of people and their prejudices, as implacable, seemingly, as mountains and rivers; of the violent mass; of America itself.
Young Mr. Lincoln
—in its deep night, its grave, its noose, its observant Lincoln certain the worst is to come—is rich with that fear. Ford and Fonda know it and feel it. They will offer a mythology of purity, an idealized imagining of the American past, but their fantasy will tremble with the falling of night.

*   *   *

Joseph McBride believes the film’s central metaphor “is that of Lincoln as a symbolic reconciler of opposing forces in American life.” But we’re unable to view the events of Ford’s film without realizing the disjunctions between Lincoln’s aspiration and America’s reality. If McBride is correct, this Lincoln symbolizes nothing so much as failure—his, and ours.

But a great popular artwork yields metaphor as Midwestern soil produces food. So other metaphors present themselves, ones containing other parts of the truth. Two, to be exact: the noose and the grave. Abe at the prison, facing down the mob; and Abe at the graveside, talking to Ann’s ghost. The first symbolizes public fear; the second, private sorrow. Both symbolize loss, and a lifelong condition of yearning for the unattainable. Both imply that essential opposing forces—the man’s private life, the American’s public life—cannot be reconciled.

John Ford needs Henry Fonda to make these metaphors breathe. He knows Fonda will bring Abe down from the monument and make him a man. Fonda is the essential counterweight to the pro-American tone, both nostalgic and progressive, to which Ford aspires. He needs Fonda to step into the American story, to embody its tragedy and its memory.

Fonda knows enough about Lincoln, America, and himself to play Abe as a haunted man aware of what is in store for him, who moves and speaks carefully because of the burden such foreboding places on him, and who spends the film, in Graham Greene’s words, “preparing himself for his last defeat at the hands of a violent world.”

*   *   *

The ending gives us this: Lincoln has saved the innocent men from the mob, justice from the noose, democracy from itself. The Clay family’s wagon climbs a hill into thunderclouds, and Lincoln follows. He reaches the hill; pauses. Thunder, lightning, wind, rain. All elements converge on his lean outline. Lincoln, holding his hat, walks into the storm.

Historians have always fancied, following the man’s own writings, that Lincoln foresaw his destiny, and walked into the storm freely. So it is fair to interpret Lincoln symbolically, given that he lived that way; and fair to conclude of
Young Mr. Lincoln
that its judgment on both his character and our history is formed by the elements of destruction and loss, the noose and the grave.

If Fonda tells us anything about America, it’s important that
Young Mr. Lincoln
tells us something about Fonda. Like the young jackleg lawyer from Springfield, Fonda feared the closeness of the crowd even as he sought its soul. He was an artist of democracy and a man of sorrows. He knew about the noose, and about the grave. And like Lincoln, he acted as though there were a certain kind of life he was obliged to live: some long-ago death he was bound to honor.

2

The Elephant and the Black Dog

Henry Fonda, age 14

“Be ashamed, an old man like you.”

These are the first words Fonda speaks on film. The year is 1935. The picture is
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
the setting the main street of an Erie Canal town in the 1850s. A senior citizen is bursting with spunk and spoiling for a fight. Suddenly, a young man appears in the street like a luminescent totem pole; he holds the geezer back, makes the old man seem a boy.

Up to now, the film has been quaint and clattering, a cacophony of stage actors bellowing their lines at a wincing camera. Now it settles somewhat, and grows quiet around Fonda. His physical being is unusual, but the twang in his voice is like rust on a nail. The voice pierces the unearthliness of the body and pins it to reality.

There’s little else to recall about the film, which is defeated by cuteness and contrivance. The female lead, Janet Gaynor, has charm, and the director, Victor Fleming, gives a nice sun-blasted sense of the hot outdoors; but otherwise, Fonda’s first has minimal claim on history’s attention, or ours.

Finally there is only the man at the center of it—observant, radiant, sad.

And sincere. “One of Mr. Fonda’s most outstanding assets,” wrote Eileen Creelman of the New York
Sun,
reviewing
The Farmer Takes a Wife
in 1935, “is his appearance of sincerity.”