The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (46 page)

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The American Film Institute announces Henry Fonda as the recipient of its sixth annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Among those attending the ceremony in Beverly Hills on March 1, 1978, are friends from every phase of his career—Omaha, Falmouth, Hollywood, Broadway.

An edited version of the ceremony airs on CBS on March 15. It is a typical glitzy affair—canned intros, hacked-up clips, celebrities looking around to see who else is there—but there’s a richness of feeling, and a few affecting speakers. Jimmy Stewart admits that he voted Henry Best Actor for
The Grapes of Wrath
over himself, for
The Philadelphia Story;
but then, he’d also voted for Landon, Willkie, and Dewey. Richard Burton imagines Fonda taking a tour of Welsh valleys around 1925 and meeting Mother Burton, “a very beautiful woman.” John Wayne speaks briefly but movingly from a scratchy throat and chest filled with cancer: Tonight all rifts are mended.

But Henry is the highlight of his own evening. He has been sitting through tribute and testimonial, with broad smile and infinite patience, at a banquet table with Shirlee, his children, and his grandchildren. Now he takes the podium to give thanks and to deliver—eloquently, with great wit and restraint, without notes or teleprompter—a coherent summing up.

In these later years, William Brace Fonda has emerged as the hero of his son’s memories. Henry references him often in interviews, and identifies with Clarence Darrow’s veneration of his own father. William will be the phantom figurehead of Henry’s autobiography. At the AFI tribute, Henry admits that “Dad” wouldn’t have approved of all that his son has done, but guesses he would be proud tonight. He then relates a story we’ve heard before, though not from Henry’s own mouth.

Prompted by his friend, local actress Dorothy Brando, he began stooging and stagehanding at the Omaha Community Playhouse. It was the summer of 1925 and for a college dropout with plausible prospects in the dull but sustaining professions of the middle class, the theater was held to be a frivolity at best, an indecency at worst: a cut above the carnival circuit, perhaps. For Henry, it meant risking the esteem of his father, “a man I not only respected but whose approval I needed.” Yet the twenty-one-year-old was too dazzled and excited by this newfound world of creativity and chance to stay away, and throughout his first season at the Playhouse, he performed any and every task the stage managers would toss him—painting, pulling, hammering, hanging.

Meanwhile paying his dues to Dad and the daylight world, young Henry landed a job with the Retail Credit Company. Only then did Gregory Foley, Playhouse director and competing father figure, ask Henry to star in the season opener,
Merton of the Movies.

“When I announced this at home,” Fonda tells the AFI audience, “my dad was appalled, and he made it very clear that he felt that it was a lot of nonsense. I had a good job, it was a chance of advancement, and he wasn’t going to dream of letting me jeopardize this.”

A fierce argument ensued between father and son, ending only when Herberta Fonda stepped in, forcing the warriors to opposite corners. In defiance, Henry accepted the role and sealed his fate. Throughout the weeks of rehearsal, he and his father observed an icy distance, avoiding each other’s company and exchanging few words.

“When we did meet, he gave me the silent treatment. It was a
towering
silence. And the message was clear—that once I forgot this foolishness and concentrated on a business career, he would resume communication.”

But when opening night arrived, the Fondas were in full attendance. They watched Henry earn his first standing ovation, the first of so many to come. After, he went home to join his waiting family—uncertain of what his reception would be.

Dad was sitting in Dad’s chair, behind his newspaper. So I joined my mother and my sisters, who immediately tried to outdo each other with superlatives, until Harriet began to say something that sounded as though it
might
become a criticism.

And Dad’s paper came down. And he said, “Shut up, he was perfect.”

I guess … I guess that’s the best notice I ever got.

Over forty-years and innumerable telling, Henry has held close this moment of triumph, his memory polishing it like a precious stone. And here, close to the end, he knows the extent to which he is describing not just his father but also himself. His life, on one level, has been about defying his father’s wishes; on another, about the fulfillment of his example: the hiddenness, the damning silence, finally the love that would conceal itself for fear of being seen. He and the ghost are one.

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During the AFI tribute, there are a few seconds of video from a performance of
First Monday in October
—Henry’s latest play, recently closed after ten weeks at the Eisenhower Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Jerome Lawrence–Robert E. Lee comedy has Fonda as a Supreme Court justice and old-line liberal modeled on William O. Douglas, and Jane Alexander (daughter of Thomas “Bart” Quigley, a childhood friend and Falmouth colleague of Henry’s) as a newly appointed, more conservative justice. The two wrangle on points of law and social policy, pornography and free speech, and shout and jostle each other into romantic positions. Deep into the play, the Fonda character is stricken with a heart attack.

The play’s reviews are only tepid, but Henry—doubtless drafting a bit on the gust of the Darrow triumph—is again crowned king of the American theater, and upholder of the democratic liberalism that seems, ever more these days, a piece of nostalgia prized mostly by playwrights and theater critics. But those moments of vagrant video indeed show a Henry Fonda still in command of the theater, that ancient space and darkness. His voice is clear, his body active. Fonda onstage, even at this late hour, is a man alive, a physical force.

There is standing room only at the Eisenhower. On October 3, 1978, the play reopens on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre; after five weeks, it moves to the ANTA Playhouse, where it closes on December 9. Again, critics belittle the play while extolling the actor. The UPI reviewer feels that even at seventy-three, Fonda “looks twenty years too young for the part. He moves beautifully onstage and, if his vocal range is limited, he does wonders with it.”

“There he is,” Walter Kerr writes, “rock-solid, instinctively and irremediably erect, a shaft of steel holding the stage in place—and the audience magnetized—while the bits and pieces of [the play] threaten to drift into the orchestra pit.… And his fortitude doesn’t simply come from the fact that this time he’s playing a man who prides himself on his mulish stubbornness. We at last realize, as we watch him stand his ground, that he has always played this man, that he is in fact this man.”

Fonda’s various illnesses are in remission, but the adrenaline of performance gives a false impression of his overall health. “I’m in good shape,” he says during the Majestic run, “though I have to take it easy physically. I’m not allowed even to do isometric exercises. I can’t carry anything heavy. I keep getting skinnier.”

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In March,
First Monday
begins a month’s residence at the Huntington Hartford, Henry tending his bees, gardens, and fruit trees between performances. On March 29, he takes the play to the Blackstone Theatre in Chicago, with Eva Marie Saint replacing Jane Alexander. The run is slated for seven weeks.

A week and a half in, Fonda is lying in bed. He has been limping sporadically for weeks. Now he stretches, and feels his hip joint pop loose. He tries to rise; his body will not let him.

Doctors at Michael Reese Hospital diagnose him with inflammatory arthritis of the left leg. He is admitted for a week’s observation. The Chicago run is finished.

Five days later, Henry checks back into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. Two separate operations are performed, the first to relieve the inflammation in his hip, the second to remove an obstruction in his prostate. The latter, it’s found, is a tumor. Cancerous.

Good catch: The tumor is removed, and the prostate is otherwise clean. Within a day, Henry is ambulatory and “in excellent spirits.” He leaves the hospital two days later, with rest and recuperation ordered. Further engagements of
First Monday
are canceled.

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Since 1974, one of the stories of Henry Fonda’s life has been the story of his cancellations. But sick as he has been, he cannot bear to be unproductive. Since he began this career, productivity has been his mode and his compulsion. Now more than ever it is his ally against uselessness, his palliative against pain, the diversion that allows him to claim he doesn’t mind growing old: “I don’t have much time to think about it.”

There is still so much left to produce.

There are the light duties, the little paychecks and why nots. He adds cameos to disaster movies, and another to
Fedora,
Billy Wilder’s inscrutable revisitation to the themes of
Sunset Blvd.
: As “President of the Academy,” Fonda confers an Oscar on an aging actress and gives a creepy, smiling, unlifelike rendition of himself. In 1978, an album of his readings from
The Grapes of Wrath
is released; another, based on
The Ox-Bow Incident,
follows the next year. In late 1979, he tapes brief video intros for a PBS series,
The American Short Story.

There is a play by Preston Jones,
The Oldest Living Graduate,
that comes in the mail; its producers want Henry to star as a World War I veteran and graduate of a Texas military academy. Henry says why not, and on April 7, 1980, he performs in a live telecast from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Once the wearisome staginess of the piece is accepted, Fonda is quite hilarious, and his energy jumps in exchange with first-rate actors like Cloris Leachman, George Grizzard, and Harry Dean Stanton. The play then runs briefly at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills; Jane and Peter attend a performance on Henry’s seventy-fifth birthday.

There is one big movie left—ample budget, full crew, location shoot—the one big movie his doctors will allow him lately. In August and September, he is on Big Squam Lake, in New Hampshire, shooting
On Golden Pond,
from a play by Ernest Thompson; Jane has purchased it for them to make together. Opposite Henry is Katharine Hepburn, his iconic equal, and an actress he has never had occasion to meet until now.

There are many pictures to paint. In early 1973, a painting called
Ripening
—two tomatoes on a flaking windowsill in the sun—is bought by industrialist Norton Simon for $23,000 at Shirlee’s “Neighbors of Watts” auction. Dealers take note, and in October 1974, Henry is the subject of a solo exhibit at L.A.’s Windsor Gallery. His canvases multiply in these convalescent years, and they soon grace celebrity foyers across Hollywood: It is homespun chic to own a Fonda. His paintings are compared to Andrew Wyeth’s—detailed yet plain, very American and seemingly literal, but sensual and intense: Stare long enough, and the plainness vibrates.

There is always honey to be drained from the hives—Henry’s bee count is up to 400,000. There are the acres to see to, the gardens and trees that have always yielded so bountifully to his patient hands and organic compost. From the garden at Chalon Road come corn, zucchini, lettuce, string beans; Henry hand-delivers his surplus to neighbors like Jimmy Stewart. He has also done well with apple trees, “apples so tart,” he says proudly, “they make your eyes pucker.”

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“My father loved to farm,” Henry recalls in May 1980. “We had chickens at home, and I guess that’s where I’ve gotten that from. It seems to be part of the Midwestern way that I’ve never been able to shake from me.”

He’s been sitting with a writer lately, talking into a tape recorder for a book about his life. He’s been remembering things like that—the chickens, his father, Omaha.

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He is admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai on December 8 for tests involving a new pacemaker medication. He remains there almost two weeks.

The hospital announces on the nineteenth that he will leave in a few days. But something changes, and Henry, despite being listed in fair to satisfactory condition, is held for further observation.

Eventually he feels better, and on Christmas, after sixteen days in the hospital, he returns home. “I’m not going down the chimney yet,” Henry promises. But it will be, he allows, “a quiet Christmas.”

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The feeble, bony-legged bastard will not quit. A few days into January, he begins rehearsals for yet another new play, Lanny Flaherty’s
Showdown at the Adobe Motel,
about the reunion of two elderly rodeo stunt riders in a run-down lodge off a Dallas highway. Between days, he flies to Omaha for a celebration in his honor at the Community Playhouse. Perhaps he tells his friends there he’ll see them again.

Showdown
opens at the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 10. Henry is almost never offstage. The
New York Times
’s Frank Rich finds poignancy in Henry’s playing his true age onstage: “He walks in a stooped posture, leaning heavily on a cane”; his voice resembles “a distant radio signal.”

The cane works as a prop, but the stoop is for real. As are the ebbing, quavering tones, and the deliberation with which Henry must manipulate his limbs. Many in the audience and backstage are distracted from the performance by their own fear that Fonda will collapse; indeed, a doctor warns Shirlee that if Henry isn’t taken home, he might die on the stage.

The play ends with the star alone, in a chair, looking at the baby he holds in his arms. From out in the hushed dark, Rich sees Fonda’s face change from the ravaged, spotted countenance of an old man into “a peaceful, childlike death mask.”

Henry struggles through twenty-four performances. On March 1, 1981, he takes his last bow and leaves his last stage. Bent, agonized, and on his feet.

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