He was making Lincoln human for you.
That’s all, yeah. He knew—and it was perfectly true about me—the reason I didn’t want to play it was because Abraham Lincoln to me is next to God, Jesus, you know—he’s an image. And I didn’t think I could do justice to it, and he had to show me that it wasn’t the great emancipator, it wasn’t the image of the martyred President, it was a jack-leg lawyer in Springfield. He did, if you remember the picture, sort of give you intimations [of Lincoln’s future] in the last scene as Lincoln walks up the hill and the storm starts to come in and the music plays [“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”] … It was a great, great experience for me working with him and it’s still—he says—one of his favorite pictures. It’s still good, it still holds up. And it started this wonderful love affair, as far as I’m concerned, with Ford. I did three in a row. Nobody had ever done three back-to-back with Ford. Not even Duke or George [O’Brien]. And I had done all three inside a year, I think. Lincoln was in the spring, Drums Along the Mohawk was in the summer, and Grapes of Wrath was in the fall.
Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), the actor’s first picture with the director, who had to bully Fonda into playing the role.
You did that funny polka in several Ford pictures …
Well, I did that same dance in three pictures.
He thought you were funny doing that.
Oh, yes—he just loved it. I did it just joking the first time and he laughed it up and embroidered it …
For the same scene in Lincoln, where you’re first dancing with Mary Todd …
It wasn’t supposed to be good, of course. Because it’s easy to do this step—but to do it with a knee way up like that [holds leg up high], I’m not sure whether he told me to, or whether I did it joking, but in any case he just loved it.
[Talking of Ford’s well-known penchant for shooting in bad weather—rain or lightning storm—Fonda described a number of incidents he had observed on Ford films; summing up:]
And he’s so right. I’ve used it myself. Sidney Lumet was in Central Park on his second picture [Stage Struck], and [Christopher] Plummer and I had a dialogue scene on a park bench. We had been working outside the park and then broke at lunch—I lived about eight blocks away—and I went home for lunch. When I came back, it had started to snow—one of those great big-flake lazy things so that in an hour the snow was this deep [knee-high gesture] and it was still snowing. When I got back, they were all standing around, the unit manager and everybody saying, “Jesus Christ, what do we do now?” I said, “What do you do now? Shoot it! You haven’t committed the scene. You haven’t started that scene!” Lumet had already in his script imagined like seven setups. I said, “Put it on a tripod and get the whole goddamn thing fast. If you don’t get it, at least you got the establishing …” Well, he did it and, of course, that was it—that’s the scene. It wasn’t a good picture—but that scene was good because you could see the snowflakes come down and hit your eyelash and melt. But that’s what you learn with Ford.
Your first distant location work with Ford was on Drums Along the Mohawk.
It was in Utah. It was way up—nine, ten thousand feet altitude—in a valley that was high above the cedar breaks. I don’t remember any town. You drove forever up past the breaks, then when you got on top drove forever—like hours to get to this area where they set up a camp. It wasn’t near any kind of civilization. We were there three weeks. Which meant that you can get rock-happy, to use an army expression, in that kind of isolation. Nothing to do at night. So Ford set up things to do. And it was so typical. He’s always done something like this, never quite the same way. But the first day he had workmen and the crew get big logs and put these logs as seats, all the way around in a big circle in which would be a campfire. And every night there was a campfire. Every night there was some different kind of entertainment. I was made camp director. And it was kind of a joke, we called it “Camp Junalusca—Camp for Boys Between the Ages of Fourteen …” It was all with humor. Oh, we’d sing if somebody could play a guitar, and there would be somebody; and, of course, there was always Danny [Borzage] with the accordion for music. And Ward [Bond] and I, and maybe two or three other guys, worked up three-part harmony to some old barbershop-type songs. I’m not going to be able to remember specifics but there was always something. It got to be a thing that was so much fun. Anybody could have an idea and say, “Can I, tomorrow night? I got an idea!”—so you would. And they’d work up wardrobe. It was something you’d look forward to. And it always ended by … There was a bugler who, on a cue—and he was off in the woods someplace—would play taps. There’s usually some sort of group singing toward the end, and then taps coming from the woods.
You really got to be like a kid is at camp: having a loyalty toward your camp and a loyalty toward your tent and this kind of thing—keep your own tent clean. You really got to feeling like you did when you were youngsters at camp. Or games of Pitch [a card game]—always the loudest, most raucous games, and most fun. I never had more fun in my life than on locations with Ford. Whether it was playing Pitch or the campfires or whatever. But that was always at night. During the day it was making the picture, you weren’t horsing around.
How did you get the role of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath?
I don’t know whether it was Ford’s idea or not, but I know that [20th Century–Fox studio head Darryl F.] Zanuck had been after me to sign for a long-term contract, from the time I did Jesse James [1939]—which is the first picture I did for him—and I wouldn’t. I was happy being a freelance until The Grapes of Wrath and he held that out as bait. I remember having scenes with Zanuck in his office where he’d pace up and down and hit himself with a small mallet that he carried around. He’d whack his leg with it and curse and say, “I don’t want to put you in a big fuckin’ part like this and then have you go over to M-G-M and play something with Joan Crawford.” He had to protect his investment. And, of course, first thing after the war, I did a picture for him with Joan Crawford, right at 20th Century [Daisy Kenyon, 1947; directed by Otto Preminger].
Anyway, he held Grapes of Wrath out for bait. He said, “You know, I can’t put you in this picture if I can’t control you. I’ve got big plans for you.” And, of course, it was a lot of shit because once I signed, I did a whole mess of them and the only good picture that I like to remember was Ox-Bow Incident [1943; directed by William Wellman], which Zanuck had nothing to do with.
How did you come to play that Spanish priest in Ford’s The Fugitive?
I was on one of our junkets down in the Mexican waters on the Araner [Ford’s yacht] and it was during this time that Ford read the Graham Greene book The Labyrinthine Ways [a.k.a. The Power and the Glory], and gave it to me. “Read it,” he said. “Oh, God, wouldn’t this make a hell of a picture?” and talked a lot about it when we were fishing down on the Araner. And I read it and liked it but I said, “You’re out of your mind. I can’t play that part. It’s just not fair to ask me to.” And I just used Robert Montgomery—who in those days was an image, a recognizable face, an American man—or Gary Cooper: “You shouldn’t ask us to play this Mexican Indian priest. It’s putting too much of a burden on the audience.” We argued about it. And then the war came along and we were away for four years and when we’d come back, by God, he hasn’t forgotten. He’s going to do it and he wants me. And we had the argument again—argument meaning it was friendly. I just didn’t agree with him.
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, with father (Russell Simpson) and uncle (Frank Darien), a family of Okies pushed off their land in the Dust Bowl of the thirties, for John Ford’s version of the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940), among the darkest studio pictures ever made, superlatively photographed by Gregg Toland.
You thought you were too American.
Not only American, but an American face, that to be asked to put dark makeup on and the wardrobe and be accepted as a Mexican Indian particularly, not just Mexican
—I thought it was too much to ask an audience. At least that’s the way I felt. If I was producing, I wouldn’t cast it that way. Anyway, we were having this discussion about it and in trying to talk about who should do it—to make my point, I said, “A guy like Joe [José] Ferrer. He’s a hell of an actor, he happens to have the kind of a face that could be—he is Spanish. But mostly, the audiences don’t know him, they’re not going to have any burden to change identity, lose an image and so forth.” And by chance, Joe Ferrer was out here at that time looking for a Roxanne for [a New York City stage production of Edmond Rostand’s] Cyrano [de Bergerac]. I’m an old friend of Joe’s and I called him and I said, “I want you to come with me.” And I took Joe over to Ford’s office and introduced them and they sat and had a conversation. At the end of that meeting, Ford bought him and Joe was going to do it. But he had to go back [to New York] to do Cyrano first. He didn’t dream that Cyrano was going to have any kind of a run … After Joe had gone back and rehearsed it for the four weeks and tried it out and then opened in New York—this was several months later—Ford is getting close to production, and Cyrano was doing well enough that Joe couldn’t afford to close it. It wasn’t fair to his backers; he had to keep it going as long as it was making a buck. So Ford was ready to go and Joe couldn’t. So Ford turned to me and it went like that, and there wasn’t anything more I could do. I went into it not thinking I should have played it. But we went down there and, as you know, it was an all-Mexican location and studio—did the whole thing down there with Gabby the cameraman [Gabriel Figueroa], who was an artist … I didn’t fit and belong in this one, and it may be for that reason that there were arguments. They were friendly arguments. But for the first time in however many movies I had done with him, I found myself in dissension sometimes about how to do a scene …
You went with Ford quite often down to Mazatlán on his yacht—[Jimmy] Stewart told me something about a boa constrictor …
Well, Ford stayed on the boat that night. He could still ambulate but he didn’t come up to shore that particular night. Duke and I came ashore and went to the Hotel Central in Mazatlán and we had some drinks at the bar. Later, we were sitting in an area of small tables for four people, and there was a young American couple on their honeymoon. Everybody else was Mexican so you could spot them as Americans, and we were Americans, so eventually we got together—we invited them, or Duke did—to sit at our table and we were talking to them. And at this point somebody brought in a boa constrictor. Now, I didn’t know about it and I don’t think Duke did then, but this was a house pet at the hotel. And it was tremendous. I mean, it was about that big around [gestures two feet wide], and probably twelve feet long. It was a pet, like a house cat, and it would go through the lobby, any place; it caught rats and it was harmless. Well, either it crawled in or somebody brought it in. Anyway, my back was toward where it came in but Duke saw it.
I’m getting a little ahead of my story because what had happened was that I was getting drunk—we’d been drinking for three or four days—and Duke, as you know by now, is a very forceful, dynamic guy. Dirty words, “shit” and “fuck” would come out of him, and now we’ve got this young married couple with us, and he’s telling a story of some kind and he said “fuck” or something, and he heard himself say it and he said, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” Well, that was too much for me. I just collapsed laughing and I was close enough to being ready to pass out—or at least so tired or drunk—that I laughed myself, not sick, but into like a pass-out. There was another empty chair there and I laughed until I was weak and I collapsed, and just let myself stay collapsed for a while. And I was like that when the snake appeared and Duke got this idea. He went to the guy who knew about the snake, and the guy was paid, and he came in and draped the snake over me while I was down in this position. Of course, I felt something happen and I got up and here’s this snake. And instead of leaping—’cause I’m not afraid of snakes and Duke didn’t know this—I said, “Duke, look what I got.” And I had my arms on it and I got up like this [standing] and Duke got up and ran through the lobby clear outside. He didn’t want any part of it.
That’s really the end of the story, except the next day when we went back to the Araner, we told the story to Pappy [Ford] and he came in with us about noontime and I wanted to find the snake to show Pappy. And I looked all over the hotel and finally went into the kitchen and I found it curled up in back of the stove. There was about that much space [gestures very little] between the back of the stove and the wall and it got back there—which was its favorite spot because it was warm evidently—and there was just a loop of it sticking out just beyond the edge of the stove. And I got my hands in this loop and I’m tugging, trying to get it out, and I was having a hell of a time. Finally, one of the Mexican cooks came and said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” In other words, it may be a pet but it doesn’t like to be jerked around.
Colonel Thursday, your character in Fort Apache, is basically a heavy, yet he’s very sympathetic in a certain way. Did you and Ford work for that?
No. He wasn’t written to be unsympathetic. It wasn’t something that I had to do. It was in the part.
As the square ale-heir scientist, Fonda is quite literally overwhelmed by the slickness of cardsharp–con artist Barbara Stanwyck in Preston Sturges’ surpassingly brilliant screwball comedy The Lady Eve (1941); Fonda’s only real foray into slapstick, he seemed to the manner born.
He was quite ambiguous.
He was a martinet son-of-a-bitch that had some human moments. At least when you got to know him. The idea was he was supposed to be Custer, and there were probably men who knew Custer who liked him. I’m not a student of Custer and I don’t know how close it is to him.
Ford implicitly says in the final scene that Colonel Thursday’s errors—and we’ve seen he was terribly in error—were not as important as the tradition of the army. That seems to be one of the major points of the picture.
I’d forgotten that, and you know that’s the point of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, the play? And people took exception to that play’s epilogue. But that was the reason why Herman Wouk wrote the play—that epilogue in which the character of Greenwald [Fonda’s stage role] makes the point that it was the Queegs who saved the country … By the way, I’ll be curious as to how people react to the Leone movie [Once Upon a Time in the West, not yet released] because I’m an all-out, flat-out sadistic son-of-a-bitch in that. Even in Firecreek [with Stewart], he [Fonda’s character] had some humanity—a little bit—he was a heavy but not like the guy in Leone’s picture.
From a transcript of the tape, my immediate response to Fonda on the Leone film might seem presumptuous: “I probably won’t like that. I only like you when you’re a nice guy.” But it was said with a smile and I could see that Hank took it the way I had meant it, as a compliment on his own personality—which is how he always was with me—terribly nice. A trifle distant, but that was his natural reserve; yet he could reach out, which made those moments all the more meaningful. He gave me a compliment I’ve always treasured, coming as it did after I’d directed only a few plays and one picture, none of them especially successful. We were shooting the 35mm Ford documentary in the beautifully sun-dappled backyard of Fonda’s modest Spanish-style home in Bel Air. When he had first told me the above story of his initial office meeting with Ford, Fonda had leapt to his feet to demonstrate how he had stood in fear, virtually at attention, in front of Ford’s desk. So I had some dolly tracks laid down and told him that when he got to that part of the story—if he wanted to stand up as he impulsively had when telling me—he could; and the camera would dolly back to accommodate him. His face lit up and he said, “I’ll do that!” Then he leaned in a little, tapped my hand on the table once and said with a smile and slight surprise in his tone, “You’re a good director.” He was about sixty-four by then and I was just thirty—what a kind and encouraging gesture it was!
During our filmed interview, I noticed that Fonda was not as
confident of himself as Wayne or Stewart were in the same circumstances. As a storyteller, he tended to repeat himself more often, the right words eluding him; of the three, he was the only one to betray a kind of insecurity in just being himself, a vulnerability that was strangely touching. His screen persona, too, never became as firmly fixed in the audience’s mind as Wayne’s or Stewart’s, yet of the three he was the most versatile actor, if not the most charismatic. As a result, perhaps, his last decade on the screen was generally disappointing, certainly not memorable. As a whole, his postwar film career never quite lived up to the extraordinary promise of the years just before he entered the Navy for the duration of the war.
During the sixteen years I knew Fonda, we saw each other very little: the business, and life, took us in such different directions. But we almost worked together once in the early seventies when Larry McMurtry and I prepared a Western script that was to star Fonda, Wayne and Stewart. Of the three, Fonda was the first to commit and remained steadfast to the project, even after Wayne, and then Stewart, backed out. I talked over the phone with Hank a couple of times, and he loved his part and commented on McMurtry’s dialogue, characterizing it as “awfully damn good.” This was long before McMurtry’s dialogue or books had attracted the attention they have since received and always deserved. Eventually Larry created his best-selling novel, Lonesome Dove, based on parts of the script, and the even more popular television mini-series that followed starred Tommy Lee Jones in the “Wayne part,” Robert Duvall in the “Stewart part” and Robert Urich in the role originally conceived for Fonda: the loverboy gambler who became an accidental killer and wound up on the wrong side of a rope. Overall, the character—like Fonda—was the most ambiguous, the most difficult to neatly define.
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