The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (40 page)

Soon after, he is invited by the USO on a “handshake tour” of the war zone. For three weeks in April 1967, Fonda meets and poses for photos with hundreds of GIs. The same month, Gen. William Westmoreland tells President Johnson that the conflict is at a “crossover point,” and Martin Luther King, Jr., links the civil rights and antiwar movements in an address at New York’s Riverside Church.

Back home, Henry sounds less than steadfast. “I’m still a liberal,” he says. “[B]ut you can’t be there and come away and not at least feel, well, obviously we should be there and the job is being done and it’s a good job.” His diagnosis of the real problem—that continuous peace rallies and antiwar protests will only make the war last longer—seconds the logic of hawk pundits and war presidents.
*

By chance, another prominent American visits South Vietnam at the same time. On April 17, after returning, Richard Nixon says, “The irony is that marchers for peace prolong the war.” Politics make strange bedfellows, but has Henry “I’m still a liberal” Fonda ever imagined himself in this ménage à trois—Duke Wayne on one side, Tricky Dick on the other, himself in the middle, arm in arm on the road to Saigon?

*   *   *

Many circumstances converge to test Henry’s commitment to the American mission as now defined—chiefly, the newfound radicalism of his daughter.

Jane’s is one of the gutsiest public transformations of the era. She enters the fight after the bone-breaking battles of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Weathermen’s Days of Rage, and Ronald Reagan’s violent clampdown on the streets of Berkeley. The issues are neither few nor simple: Not just antiwar and Black Power protesters but also advocates for women’s liberation, the American Indian Movement, gay liberation, and other movements are jostling for space on the street and the front page.

Feeling the necessities of the moment, Jane Fonda takes her leap and risks career, comfort, safety, Dad’s last portion of patience. Why? She recalls a mosaic of formative moments: an encounter with hippie dropouts in Big Sur; an awareness, while in France, of student protest; a trip to India; an Alcatraz Indian woman on the cover of a New Left magazine; first meetings with Black Panthers and embittered young soldiers; her reading of Jonathan Schell’s
The Village of Ben Suc,
a nonfiction account of what happened there.

Her first radical act is to lie down in the provost’s office at the Fort Lewis military reservation near Tacoma, Washington, as part of an attempted Indian occupation. It is March 1970, and her first arrest. Upon their release, she and the other protesters agitate at nearby Fort Lawton, and are ejected; the next day, through her attorney, Warren Commission debunker Mark Lane, Jane files suit for civil rights infringement against Defense Secretary Melvin Laird.

Like many from privileged backgrounds, Jane finds that activism simplifies her life and clarifies her identity. She separates from Vadim, and replaces her gay French duds and luxe hairstylings with somber, androgynous outfits and a battle-ready shag cut. Throughout 1970, she crisscrosses the country, participating in strikes, exhorting and leafleting, getting arrested, and otherwise sculpting an identity as straight America’s latest pain in the ass.

On November 3, passing through Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport, Jane is detained by customs agents, who find a large volume of pills in her luggage. An agent attempts to place her under arrest, and there is a disturbance. The pills, it’s reported, comprise more than a hundred vials containing two thousand capsules of unknown content, in addition to prescription Dexedrine, Compazine, and Valium. Jane is charged with smuggling and assault, though she claims the mystery pills are vitamins. She pleads not guilty and requests a jury trial, Mark Lane again serving as her attorney; but charges are dropped when the drugs are found to be, indeed, vitamins. (Jane has obtained them, ironically, at her father’s behest, and through his physician.)

The accumulation of arrests and antagonisms finally breaks Henry’s self-control. He begins referring to Jane as “my alleged daughter,” and tells her privately that, should he suspect her of subversion, he will report her to the FBI. Interviewed in the wake of the Cleveland episode, Henry fills Earl Wilson’s newspaper column with blank lines in place of an obscene three-word phrase beginning with “crock”:

My daughter makes statements that she’s glad to have been in jail because so many wonderful people have been in jail! That’s a
^____
! That’s not my daughter’s opinion, it’s Mark Lane’s and he’s a
^____
!…

All of us that love her, Peter and I and everybody, hope she isn’t going to let herself be destroyed.

*   *   *

In September 1967, Peter is autographing a still from
The Wild Angels,
showing himself and costar Bruce Dern standing before their bikes in silhouette. The figures speak to him with psychic precision: Blues and the Loser, the lost boy and his accomplice. And the larger vision: a modern Western, with motorcycles in place of horses.

Peter asks Dennis Hopper, a bit player in
The Trip,
to be his costar and director. The Kansas-born Method actor, a veteran of both mainstream Hollywood and fringe exploitation, has never directed a film. He and Peter develop a treatment, titled
The Losers,
about cocaine dealers biking to Florida. American International declines to finance it, but when superstar satirist Terry Southern lends it his name and counsel, independent producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider consent to seed a budget of $360,000 to make the retitled project—
Easy Rider.

Shooting begins in New Orleans in February, with an unfinished script, ragtag crew, and director zonked on power and substances; three months of location shooting follow. Revising scenes daily, Peter and Hopper find their characters: Wyatt, controlled, wounded; and Billy, pugnacious, pleasure-seeking. A third character emerges—an alcoholic lawyer and liberal redneck, played by Jack Nicholson, working for union scale. The narrative, a series of encounters between freaks and straights on American back roads, is suffused with Peter’s desolation and Hopper’s paranoia.

Easy Rider
is the hit of the May 1969 Cannes Film Festival, but no one is prepared for its impact upon reaching America the following month. Some observers invest its arrival with millennial weight, while others dismiss it as youth-stroking fantasy. Peter and Hopper are anointed oracles of youth; Nicholson gets an Oscar nod and a ticket to the stratosphere. The picture grosses forty million dollars and joins the small group of films that have expressed something essential about these difficult times.

Easy Rider
is full of grace notes and irreducible thrills: the bikers climbing an L.A. freeway with Steppenwolf on the track; razor-flicking flash-forwards to an indistinct near future; Peter asking “How’s your joint, George?” in such a friendly tone. Land and atmosphere are palpable, the feel of heat and dust, shade and water. Death runs through the rock score like the river of the final frames. Beneath everything is a legacy of direct violence and ambiguous meaning inherited from the Western. The filmmakers catch the breath of the frontier—that ghost country all around us—give it the snap of contemporary danger, and put it to a pop pulse.

Peter’s performance is passive bordering on posthumous, yet it bears comparison to his father’s work. Peter too is the soulful center of a Ford-like community of oddballs; his is the gaze around which an inspired director frames a vision. It is this still center that distinguishes
Easy Rider
from all youth cinema before it. Conceivably, the movie might exist without Henry Fonda in its genes, but it would be something else entirely—would be a glorified
Hell’s Angels on Wheels.

Peter explodes his own placid surface just once, when Wyatt experiences a death trip in a rainy New Orleans graveyard. Towering above Saint Louis Cemetery #1, a tight maze of crypts abutting a ghetto, is a tomb bequeathed to the city by its Italian Society: a sitting woman with her hand upraised. Reluctantly, Peter obeys his director’s command to climb the monument and sit in the woman’s lap. Hopper, retrieving his Method training through sheets of wine and speed, calls from below: She’s your mother. Talk to her.

Peter does, and soon breaks down, sobbing into the cold face and empty eyes. It is embarrassing and uncomfortable, a primal scene: The camera finds the lost boy in the arms of his dead mother, arms as cold as the grave, attempting his own rebirth.

It doesn’t happen—or at least we don’t witness it. Only the effort. But this is one gauge of the New Hollywood as
Easy Rider
and other films will define it: Scenes may happen without completing or culminating. Life flows past, the frame catching only pieces, and new movies will require of audiences a new openness to obscurity and chance. The magic will be in the catching, and resolutions may dangle out of reach, or suggest themselves as the ghosts of a thousand possibilities.

Or they may be cut off completely, as in life.
Easy Rider
’s money shot is the bikers’ execution on a country road—shotgun blast, cycle leaping over meadow like a riderless horse, and exploding. For Peter, it is the longed-for suicide pact and romantic gesture, the lost boy and his accomplice blasting through, together—after which they are simply gone, like Frances, like Bridget Hayward, like Stormy McDonald. The only residue lies in the burning wound, the perspective pulling back like the trailing off of memory, the goneness of life.

“We blew it,” Wyatt says in the frontier firelight, just before the end. Peter ad-libs the line, knowing it is cryptic but feeling right with it, and he fights Hopper to retain it as the film’s closest thing to a statement.

The words could fit any point in American history when the great goal had slipped away, after seeming close enough to touch. Like the day after Lincoln was killed; or the day someone first realized the 1960s had ended on the abortion of so many rebirths, that time had run out before culmination was reached and transformation achieved. A thousand possibilities were blown, and they blow now in the dust of a country that—in
Easy Rider
and in the films that follow from it—is suddenly more open, inexplicable, fast, and random than movies have ever allowed it to be.

*   *   *

Early in 1968, Henry receives an offer from an Italian director he has never heard of. The director’s name is Sergio Leone, and he has been after Fonda for years.

Between 1964 and 1966, Leone loosed on Europe three Westerns—
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More,
and
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
—that blew the genre open. They propose floridly Italian actors in Spanish locations as Americans in the Old West. Actors mug and sweat; guns go off like cannons; Ennio Morricone’s music suggests Wagner on the hoof. The photographic vistas are enormous, the humor broad and killings innumerable, the films explosive and altogether new.

After Leone’s “
Dollars
trilogy” mopped up at the Italian box office, United Artists secured American distribution and staged a staggered U.S. release. The bet paid off: White middle-aged American men were enraptured, and the little-known Clint Eastwood, as Leone’s unnamed hero, became a star.

Now the spaghetti Western rules, and Leone’s success earns him a deal with Paramount, an all-star cast, and the use of John Ford’s Monument Valley. A sheaf of scenes is assembled, something about a woman, a bandit, the railroad, revenge.… Well, what does story matter? Leone is a big-picture man. For casting, he is certain of just one thing—Fonda, on whom he has been fixated since the late 1940s, when Ford Westerns flickered on the flyspecked screens of cinema societies in postwar Rome.

In early 1964, Leone submitted the script of
A Fistful of Dollars
to Henry’s agents. The agents responded that their client would never consider such a role as this “Man with No Name.” (They gave him
The Rounders
instead.) The next year, Leone envisioned his elusive idol as the Man’s quick-drawing ally in
For a Few Dollars More.
Again, the answer was no. (
Battle of the Bulge
.) But now Leone is going Hollywood, and Henry’s (new) agents advise him to jump aboard the mad Italian’s money train.

Disliking the script, Fonda goes to Eli Wallach, a friend since
Mister Roberts.
As the Mexican bandit of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, Wallach has lately delivered the performance of a career, and he gives Henry the lowdown: Leone commands an invigorating, anarchic set; shoots “from sunup to sundown”; has “some kind of magical touch.” He urges Fonda to do the picture.

Doing it will mean weeks of shooting on Spanish plains and back in Monument Valley, endless mountings and dismountings of horses, eating dust and baking in the sun, all in service to a director who speaks no English and whose set is a noisy chaos. Henry is sixty-three. He hates chaos and distrusts horses.

After a genial meeting with Leone and a comprehensible script revision, Fonda watches the
Dollars
trilogy. The films win him over: “I thought they were funny and entertaining in every possible way.” At last Leone has his Fonda.

But what role will Henry play in this movie, so grandly titled
C’era una volta il West
(“Once upon a time, there was the West”)? Leone’s large belly tingles as he lays it out: Noble Fonda will be the villain and deadly king snake of the piece—a man called Frank, whose first act in the film is to kill a child.

Something inside Fonda tingles right back.

He reports to the Cinecittà set in Rome in March 1968 wearing a bushy mustache, heavy eyebrows, and dark contact lenses. Leone erupts: The Fonda face is what he has paid for—unwhiskered mouth and blue eyes. Thirty years before, John Ford had molded his star’s face into Lincoln’s; now, Leone desires the face that has been molded by those intervening decades. In a reverse of Fonda’s first great screen transformation, the director will strip the face to its sunburned surface. For the first time, we will see it in all its age, complexity, and beauty.