The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (33 page)

Fonda asks the manager to recommend him for another job. “You mean take it away from some other poor fellow?” Parks interrupts. “I promise you that when we get through publicizing your case, there won’t be a company in the United States willing to hire you.”

None of these people knows what is to come in the next ten years. But we do.

Fonda’s millionaire backs off. Before leaving, he turns his severance pay over to the employees’ fund.

Nine years later, Larry Parks will be subpoenaed by HUAC. In an emotional testimony, he’ll admit to having briefly been a member of the Communist party. He’ll name names, and, despite repenting, will find himself unemployable in Hollywood. As will Jeff Corey, who doesn’t cooperate with the committee, and who until his mid-1960s reemergence in supporting parts sustains himself as an acting teacher. As will Dalton Trumbo, who justified his refusal by exalting “the right of privacy, not only in law but in fact.” These men will be damned with the same phrases heard in
You Belong to Me,
their careers crippled by the same threats; but here and now, they endorse the language and logic of the blacklist.

It is a hard irony, at the least; at the most, a warning against dogma, and a suggestion of why a man like Henry spends most of his life closer to the political middle than to any extreme.

Jane Fonda will later criticize her father for not taking a public stand against the blacklist, without taking into account that many good men and women were in the same position. It’s true that in his postwar politics, he is usually supporter rather than activist. By the end of 1947, he is out of movies and in the theater, a zone of limited influence that doesn’t really interest the investigating committees.
*
Unlike other Hollywood liberals, such as Edward G. Robinson and Melvyn Douglas, Fonda will not suffer the fate of being graylisted in the 1950s, when stars must make the crucial transition from movies to television. He grows distant from old friends Ward Bond and John Wayne because of the Red scare but does not rescind the relationships entirely; he continues to socialize and work with those men and others who have complied with HUAC.

Maybe that is Henry’s compromise, and maybe he makes it because he knows how compromise works. He is no more a radical in his politics than in his art, but his politics, like his art, are honest and devout, and have much to do with remembering. He has a broad and a large view; he knows the landscape. So he pitches his tent in the middle ground. It’s only a fact: People usually last longer, living in the center.

*   *   *

Though he will become a bitter detractor of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry initially supports his 1952 presidential bid. In the late 1940s, the former Supreme Allied Commander is courted as a candidate by both parties; and his declaration as a Republican does not alter the general perception of him as a political moderate, and an alternative to the current chief executive. Isolationists are angered by Harry Truman’s infusions of American force and money into Europe through NATO; interventionists by his fumbling administration of the Korean War; liberals by his investment in hydrogen bomb testing and the mandating of federal loyalty oaths. The moment is felt to call for a cleansing.

It’s hard to say what liberals believe Eisenhower will offer them beyond the reflected glow of guts and glory, a mystique to which not only right-wingers are vulnerable. Opponents of blacklisting may hope Eisenhower’s military credibility will retard the trend toward the patriotism of fear. Fonda is sufficiently soured on Truman not just to endorse his opponent but also to narrate a long-playing record,
Ike from Abilene,
distributed by the GOP as a bonus for campaign donors.

But hopeful liberals don’t like Ike for long. Weeks before the election, a cluster of notables stages a public defection from Eisenhower to his Democratic rival, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson—a candidate they have seen up to now as unelectable. Fonda joins this mass defection, which includes John Steinbeck, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., Edna Ferber, John Jacob Astor, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Stevenson’s campaign manager reckons the disillusionment is “based on the compromise, the shifts of position, [and] the abandonment of principles” exhibited by Eisenhower, such as his failure to condemn Senators McCarthy of Wisconsin and Jenner of Indiana—the two biggest Red-baiters in Congress—and his devil’s pact with the ultraconservative Senator Taft of Ohio. “Eisenhower seems to have lost the ability to take any kind of stand on any subject,” Steinbeck writes.

Then, at the Republican National Convention in July, the candidate grips the hand of another man whom, like Taft and McCarthy, he needs but secretly despises. Richard Nixon is the Republican senator from California, a key member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and star prosecutor in the Alger Hiss espionage trial of 1948. Nixon is a rising star, a force; like a true believer with a talisman, he has gripped, stroked, and squeezed the postwar panic around communism. That prescience will make his career, and shape the next three decades of life in the United States.

Witnessing the clammy grip of compromise at the convention, Fonda must utter curses. He remembers Nixon. Not just from the Hollywood-HUAC hearings, from which the California senator, after questioning Jack L. Warner and delivering the committee’s mission statement on opening day, largely absented himself, and not just from the Hiss trial. No, Fonda remembers him most keenly from the 1950 California Senate race, which pitted Nixon against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, representative since 1944 of Los Angeles’s highly liberal Fourteenth District.

A former opera star and actress, Gahagan had her spotlight moment as Queen Hash-a-Motep in the 1935 camp epic
She
. Married to actor Melvyn Douglas, Gahagan went into politics. Fonda was a friend, but he’d have found common ground with Gahagan if they’d been strangers: In terms of her beliefs, she was Henry Fonda in a dress. During the 1930s, she was a Popular Fronter and proponent of the New Deal; as a Democratic party novice, she made her name advocating for labor and small farmers.

In the House, Gahagan was a staunch liberal, but no pinko. As Stephen E. Ambrose would later note, “she had spurned Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in the 1948 election, which was a litmus test for fellow travelers.” She was less than completely predictable on foreign policy, challenging both Communist dictatorships and the Truman Doctrine of unilateral aid to Communist-besieged Greece and Turkey. Significantly for Fonda, she sponsored an antilynching bill in 1947, just as hangings of black men in the Carolinas were making headlines.
*

Henry always had a thing for nervy, chance-taking women. He must have appreciated the fact that, to run against Nixon, Gahagan had to buck her own Democratic leadership. Assured of party support if she would wait until 1952, when incumbent Sheridan H. Downey had pledged to retire, Gahagan refused. Withdrawing, Downey threw the party’s weight behind Manchester Boddy, the only other Democrat; and when Gahagan edged out Boddy, Downey became a prominent supporter of Nixon. By splitting their own vote, the Democrats—not least Gahagan—had already cleared much of Nixon’s path for him.

A tight team of Republican schemers did the rest. In a symphony of smear orchestrated by campaign manager Murray Chotiner but played to the hilt by a possessed Nixon, Gahagan was dubbed the “Pink Lady.” Anti-Gahagan flyers were printed on pink paper; voters received anonymous phone calls whispering of un-American associations. The campaign was an innovation in character assassination, the linking of vagaries in a chain of fear connecting the voting booth to the chambers of foreign power.

Nixon defeated Gahagan, and the 1950 race made history. It was not the first political contest to pivot on the threat of cultural war between the liberal powers of Hollywood and the interests of the American majority; nor was it the first race to be won on charges of disloyalty. But it took these stances, and the tactics they entailed, to new levels of audacity—Nixon’s passion as he shouted the slanders, his leveraging of lofty progressive ideals as weapons against themselves, his persona combining the attack dog and the aggrieved mutt.

The maw of conservative backlash opened to vomit up a new age of malice. Nixon’s aura would overhang, underlie, and finally enshroud every other movement of the postwar period: Every important American development seemed to react against or quail beneath the darkness released in these early years of HUAC and Helen Gahagan. It is the defeated Pink Lady who tagged Nixon with his most enduring nickname: “Tricky Dick.”

Come 1952 and Nixon’s placement on the Eisenhower ticket, many have forgotten the California smears—if they ever heard about them to begin with. But others remember. As Herbert S. Parmet observes, “Long after Watergate and the evidence of abuse of power, long after the passions over Vietnam subsided, middle-aged liberals invariably explained their hatred toward Nixon by citing ‘what he did to Helen Gahagan Douglas.’”

This was true for elderly liberals, too. In his last interview, Henry Fonda will say he has hated Nixon ever since his annihilation of Helen Gahagan Douglas. “Such fuckin’ lies,” Fonda mutters, as if disbelieving still the phenomenon of a man like Nixon.

*   *   *

The two of them make an unlikely pairing. Differences are obvious: Where one is melancholy, the other is brooding. Where one is stoic, the other is self-pitying. One is a liberal Democrat, the other a conservative Republican. One is a friend of Gahagan, the other her destroyer.

In
Nixon at the Movies,
Mark Feeney writes that Fonda “can be seen as an almost metaphysical epitome of the anti-Nixon: light against dark, scruple against grasp, secular grace against secular sin.” Yet at the same time, he incarnates a Nixon essence in spite of himself. “What makes Fonda the supreme liberal icon of the screen isn’t the fineness of his intelligence, the finickiness of his bearing, or even the unique ineffability of that faraway gaze … No, it’s that he’s happiest, or at least more gratified, when his cause is lost. Nothing could be more Nixonian.”

Both Fonda and Nixon were raised in sectarian churches—Christian Science and Quakerism—that emphasized austerity, servitude, repression. Both served in the navy in World War II, stationed on Pacific vessels, working in tandem with the air force. (Feeney quotes a navy friend of Nixon’s: “If you ever saw Henry Fonda in
Mister Roberts,
you have a pretty good idea what Dick was like.”) Both are gifted with superhuman control yet are capable of flagrant and dramatic outbursts. Emotional chaos is suppressed, released indirectly and often destructively, as inner mechanisms work overtime to channel the psychic overload.

From there, though, the two fork as radically as lightning bolts. Out of Fonda’s darkness comes empathy. Even his loners and killers are men with the capacity and compulsion to feel others’ suffering; the drama lies in their transformation by this awareness. Out of Nixon’s darkness comes a vision of vengefulness, of others being made to suffer. Payback is the true drama of the great noir candidate; as John Erlichman (J. T. Walsh) says in Oliver Stone’s
Nixon,
at the apex of the Vietnam War: “We’ve got people dying because he didn’t make the varsity football team.”

Fonda’s insides are in disarray, however ordered his exterior. Nixon’s innards, though, bespeak another level of madness—a muck of resentment, self-pity, and incomprehension that pours forth in the breakdowns and alcoholic fugues of his administration’s final days. But because the consummation of Nixon’s personal grudge happens to coincide with the post-1968 shift from liberation to repression, he is appreciated as a “great American” precisely for his pathologies. It is a disastrous alignment of social and personal forces—that old black magic some call historical inevitability.

Nixon’s visionary move will be to turn the discontents of the white working and middle classes into a political weapon, the disregarded “silent majority” into the obstreperous power that will one day beat America’s radicals back to the margins. His boldness will be to embody his own paranoia so fully that America will spend several tragic years taking his image as its own, and years more paying the price.

With the Gahagan campaign, Nixon was teaching the underdogs that they had teeth, and that teeth were for biting. The New Deal was over.

*   *   *

Adlai Stevenson is a New Dealer, United Nations delegate, peacemonger, and (the word is invented for him) egghead. He is known to read books and worry over nuances. Nothing could be easier for the Republicans than to neutralize Stevenson by branding him “intellectual,” as Gahagan was branded “pink.” Ike, the war hero, wins soundly in 1952.

But four years later, Stevenson is again the Democratic nominee, and Fonda campaigns on his behalf, headlining rallies and delivering speeches. At a Students for Stevenson gathering at New York’s Barnard College, he says, “It is the sum of the little tiny selves which make a nation, and we must be mighty good to have made ours so good.” Often the words Fonda delivers are just that redolent of 1930s folk speech, that evocative of Tom Joad and the big soul—unsurprising, since John Steinbeck writes them.

When the Democrats stage a cross-country fund-raiser on October 20, 1956—twenty-nine banquet halls linked by closed-circuit television in a spectacular called “Seventeen Days to Victory”—Fonda is at the Hollywood gathering, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and many others. Recapping the affair, D.C. columnist George Dixon notes that the famed faces were not well-treated by the broadcast technology. “Henry Fonda looked more scary than the Phantom of the Opera.… I was informed on the way out that the screen was a personal contribution of Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall, and that Richard Nixon was operating the projection machine.”

It’s a microcosm of the Stevenson candidacy. Money, intellect, and liberal star power cannot prevent even a fund-raising gala from seeming a hapless colloquy of well-meaning losers. Elections are secured or surrendered on an accumulation of such perceptions. Eisenhower takes his second term more easily than the first.