The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (45 page)

He leaves Lenox Hill on May 7, returning two weeks later for an adjustment of the device. On the twenty-second, he is sent home to Bel Air.
Darrow
’s scheduled engagements are postponed indefinitely.

We’ve entered the next phase of Henry’s life, and the first of his death.

*   *   *

Just weeks later, he is back playing Darrow at the Huntington Hartford Theatre in L.A. “The veteran of fifty years on stage and film showed no visible loss of strength, spirit, or imaginative genius,” writes one critic. “We cannot sit through Henry Fonda’s one-man triumph of dramatic craftsmanship in
Clarence Darrow
without being profoundly impressed by Darrow the man and Fonda the actor. Both were, and are, giants of our age.” Adela Rogers St. Johns—daughter of the attorney who defended Darrow in his 1912 bribery trial—writes, “A most incredible and soul-shaking thing has befallen me. I [have] seen—a spectre, an appearance as plain as ever Hamlet saw his father or Lady Macbeth saw Banquo. Moreover, it was a ghost of solid flesh…”

Henry spends two evenings in a New York studio taping the television version of
Darrow
. It cuts twenty-two minutes from the play and adds six feet to the length of the stage, but otherwise it is a direct transfer of the theater experience. “The only difference from doing it as a play,” Henry says, “was that I was vaguely aware there were four cameras somewhere in the darkness.” Directed by John Rich, presented by Norman Lear and IBM, the show airs on NBC on September 4.

Henry gets another checkup, and relaxes for the rest of the year. Then, the TV special having renewed interest in the play,
Darrow
returns to Broadway on March 3, 1975, this time at the Minskoff Theatre. Henry forgoes matinees, and his health continues to improve. Greeting a visitor to his town house, he runs up and down the stairs as proof of his stamina. Tour dates are lined up through mid-May.

The tour completed, Henry plays Adm. Chester Nimitz in the World War II epic
Midway
. In July, after just a few weeks off, he and Shirlee depart for London, where
Darrow
begins a ten-week stand at the Piccadilly Theatre. Opening night is a triumph, with multiple curtain calls; moved by the reception, Fonda tells the audience that to play the West End is “every American actor’s dream.” Though he’s reported to be incensed at the nine-dollar charge for top seats, his is the hottest ticket in town.

“An entertainment that uplifts the spirit in a darkening world,” says the
Daily Express.
“It takes one noble man to play another. Henry Fonda is that man.”

He’s making up for lost time. The pacemaker is a miraculous new tool in life extension, and Fonda is prominent among its success stories. Soon the American Heart Association will name him its Man of the Year.

*   *   *

In early 1976, X-rays show a tumor near Henry’s lung. He checks into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and on March 17 undergoes his second surgery in two years.

The operation lasts seven and a half hours. Thought at first to be beneath the right lung, the tumor is instead found to be growing from the right side of the diaphragm—some of which must be removed, though the lung is spared. Doctors will later report that the tumor in Fonda’s abdomen, though it is benign, “had grown to the size of two grapefruits within a four-month period.”

The surgery has meant the cancellation of
Darrow
’s projected college tour,
*
but Henry’s recovery looks promising. Then it goes sour. Perhaps other X-ray omens are found. His release is delayed, and more college dates go by the board. Finally, on April 13, he is sent home, though without a clean bill of health. He spends the next several weeks recuperating under clouds of uncertainty.

Whispers of cancer begin to circulate. They intensify after Fonda flies back to New York on June 14 for a scheduled checkup. In Hollywood, rumors of illness can be every bit as damaging to perception and career as illness itself. Henry is furious at the rumors, and unbowed by the physical setback.

“I’m not afraid,” he assures an interviewer. “I’m optimistic that I will lick this.”

But he will not say what “this” is.

*   *   *

Most of Fonda’s late pictures are of no importance to the man himself; most are not good and were probably not meant to be good. Projects as dumb or desiccated, cynical or saccharine as
The Serpent
and
Ash Wednesday
(both 1973) may be justified at least on the grounds that they keep our man active, his joints moving and his assets liquid.

The first is an espionage thriller with many snaky hisses on the sound track and many dour spooks walking endless corridors; Fonda plays the director of the CIA, and though he is physically there, he really could care less.
Ash Wednesday
is a soap opera with Elizabeth Taylor as a woman undergoing plastic surgery, and Henry as her tycoon husband. Otherwise trashy and ghoulish, it contains a fine Fonda portrait of a wealthy stud gone to seed, whose response to his wife’s stunning new face combines romantic regret, clinical admiration, and bemusement at her naïve faith that mere cosmetics could ever touch his cold mind or selfish heart.

Fonda is an august presence in several World War II movies. As Cardinal Schuster in a film about Mussolini,
The Last Four Days
(1974), his nonplussed expression and sepulchral outline hold firm against Rod Steiger’s gross overacting. He reveals creditable emotion as a military man with two sons in action in the international production
The Biggest Battle
(1978), but the film is unworthy of him.
Midway
(1976) is a war spectacular in the long tradition, more coherent and exciting than usual, though unwittingly racist: The American actors savor their salty dialogue and esprit de corps, while the Japanese players, including the great Toshiro Mifune, are like robots exchanging binary code.

Elsewhere, Henry settles into the inevitability of playing men aware of their age, whereby he may convey on-screen the fear of death he will never quite admit in life.
My Name Is Nobody
(1973) is a spoof on the spaghetti Western genre, which has by now peaked. (Sergio Leone is the film’s executive producer, as well as prime target of its parody.) As a famed gunslinger brought out of retirement by an overzealous young gun, Fonda is dignified—too dignified: Either he isn’t in on the movie’s joke or he doesn’t think it’s funny.

He’s far looser in
The Great Smokey Roadblock
(1977), despite its having been shot in the wake of his tumor surgery and cancer scare—and the fitting of an earpiece that compensates for an estimated 40 percent hearing loss. Fonda is Elegant John, an independent trucker who escapes from a hospital ward, hijacks his rig, and transports a crew of prostitutes cross-country. Affectionate and sloppy, the movie has a mid-seventies vibe of being an agreeable shambles. “There’s a bit of
Easy Rider
in it,” Henry says, accurately.

Encountering a subculture of longhaired freaks and dropouts, no judgment or superiority in his style, Fonda gives perhaps the liveliest, warmest performance of his last decade. He convincingly throws a much younger, stronger man across a room, and looks on his leading lady with pleasure. But the scenes that stick longest are John’s nightmares of loss and wandering, from which he wakes to bodily torment. In one scene, he stumbles, clutching his burning chest, into the woods to splash water on his face. He sags to his knees, sobbing in the moonlight reflecting off the stream. We think of Eddie’s long-ago death in a haunted wood.

*   *   *

If his film work is increasingly tangential, Henry’s presence on TV is inescapable. In 1973, he and Maureen O’Hara star in a remake of Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony,
which sparks debate when its graphic footage of a foal’s birth is censored by NBC. The same year, he headlines ABC’s
The Alpha Caper,
a drab leeching on the fads for heist pictures and lovable crooks, and consents to figurehead
The Henry Fonda Special,
a “unique blend” of music, comedy, and sports with Lee Trevino, Leslie Uggams, Sammy Davis, Jr., Don Knotts, Foster Brooks, and other guests.

In return for Norman Lear’s production of the
Darrow
special, Henry plays himself in
Maude,
and hosts an anthology of
All in the Family
clips. Incarnating Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War docudrama
Collision Course
(1976), he gives a straightforward reading of a man who “represented everything I don’t stand for.” He walks through haughty patrician roles in two period miniseries,
Captains and the Kings
(1976) and
Roots: The Next Generation
(1979). He turns up in PSAs for hearing aids and the Boy Scouts.

When narration is needed for anything from an FDR documentary to
The World of the Beaver,
Henry is there. When old friends are feted at American Film Institute galas and Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, he is there. When Hollywood throws a party on the anniversary of the Jewish homeland (
The Stars Salute Israel at 30
), he is there.

Rumor says he is mulling over a regular show based on
The Red Pony.
A Clarence Darrow series is likewise proposed. Most alarming, though, is a concept called
O. W. Street,
projected as a Movie of the Week and series pilot. It would star Fonda as a Texas sheriff and criminology professor hired as captain of detectives in a large California city. “Sounds like a tossed salad of Barnaby Jones, Hec Ramsey and Cannon,” one observer concludes. The star is reportedly on board, but the show never materializes, and America is spared the weekly experience of Henry Fonda stealing Buddy Ebsen’s thunder.

*   *   *

Disaster movies are a backlash phenomenon. Alienated from the dark visions and small defeats of post–
Easy Rider
Hollywood, the mass audience looks again to spectacle and star, and surrenders to the engineering of movies as thrill rides. It also seeks a popular genre to mock its fear of widespread collapse—economic, environmental, social: Films like
The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake,
and
The Towering Inferno
are delirious wastes of money and resource in a time of inflation, pollution, and shortage.

Henry Fonda spends the late 1970s hip-deep in disaster. His first forays come in 1977, with
Tentacles
, an Italian-made
Jaws
rip-off (octopus in place of shark); and
Rollercoaster,
which at least has sense enough to literalize the disaster movie as a clanking contraption run amok. In 1979 come
Meteor
and
City on Fire,
Henry cashing in as president and fire chief, respectively.

Biggest and baddest of all is
The Swarm
, Irwin Allen’s 1978 follow-up to
Poseidon
and
Inferno.
Exploiting fears of African killer-bee migration, the picture is a harvest of shame. Playing an entomologist, Fonda is confined, for no reason, to a squeaky wheelchair. After much brow furrowing in the lab, he injects himself with an experimental antisting serum; it fails. Fonda suffers a long, sweaty cardiac arrest and, at the moment of death, hallucinates, ludicrously, a godlike killer bee.

Is this any way for a man to die—or for Henry to relive his own heart attack?

*   *   *

Among the dead—that is, unmade—projects of this period, three have unusual potential.
A House Divided
is a family saga set during the American Revolution; it is intended to star all three Fondas, and to appear in time for the bicentennial. Screenplay drafts come and go, and so does the bicentennial. In December 1979, a columnist reports Henry’s claim that Jane is negotiating with Hallmark to produce it as a TV miniseries. As a result, the greeting-card company is inundated with angry letters from Jane’s detractors, and the company’s president issues a hurried clarification: Hallmark does have a Revolutionary War drama in development, but it is not the Fondas’, and he doesn’t know who gave Henry that impression. Coup de grâce.

A story about black fighter pilots in World War II,
Com-TAC 303
is announced in June 1977 as forthcoming from Pinnacle Productions, starring Billy Dee Williams, Greg Morris, and Chad Everett, with Henry in a cameo as an air force general. Shooting begins in the Mojave Desert, but is shut down after two and a half weeks when Gulf + Western, owners of Paramount Pictures, withdraws financing. At that point the project, according to a spokesman, is inactive; though the other stars may return if filming resumes, it’s known that Fonda is “involved with other commitments and is not now available.”

The Journey of Simon McKeever
is a 1949 novel by Albert Maltz about an elderly man, mangled by arthritis, who hitchhikes from Sacramento to Glendale seeking a cure. Previous attempts have been made to film it, first with Walter Huston, later with Spencer Tracy. A revival of the property, starring Fonda, is announced in April 1978. But progress stalls, the star is sidetracked and falls ill, and the chance passes.

It’s a loss, because McKeever could have been a great Fonda character. Simon is seventy-three and lives meagerly in a nursing home; his wife and child are long dead. He is a workingman with a vivid imaginative life, his hike an often hair-raising picaresque through post–New Deal itinerant America. Like
Appointment in Samarra
—that other phantom film—
Simon McKeever
offers Henry Fonda a gift of story and understanding, a narrative key to his contemporary fears. Yet the visions are so different: O’Hara’s novel is about a young man’s surrender to hopelessness, Maltz’s about an old man’s resistance to it:

It was not the sheer fact of growing old that McKeever ever had minded. There was a rhyme and a reason to that, like night and day.… The only thing he did fear [was] the horror of having to lie twisted and helpless in bed, endlessly, day and night, without function or purpose, while life passed him by. When a man was like that he was nothing, he was … garbage.