The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda

by Devin McKinney

  Still under contract, Jane follows Logan east to rehearse There Was a Little Girl. But when the play closes after only sixteen Broadway performances, and it’s clear that Tall Story is a nonevent, Logan decides to sell Jane’s contract to producer Ray Stark. She persuades him to let her buy it instead. She spends years working off the debt, and parsing the nightmare with her analyst.

  * * *

  In 1962, Warner Bros. tests Peter for the lead in PT 109, the story of John Kennedy’s World War II heroism. Future president, young Fonda—it’s a passing of the torch, a laundering of history, and a commercial hook. So Peter fumbles it as badly as he can. On the day of the heavily publicized test, he balks at speaking with the expected broad Boston accent. Finally he agrees, but the test is a catastrophe. Word goes out that young Fonda is a prima donna, and Jack Warner personally vetoes his casting.

  The picture flops, so Peter breaks even. But it’s a losing game. As a misfit trying to fit a system he despises, he inhabits the juvenile inanities of Tammy and the Doctor and the antiwar broodings of The Victors (both 1963) with equal vacancy. Even playing a role with psychic relevance, Peter doesn’t come across: As a suicide in Lilith (1964), he funnels a prissy performance through prop eyeglasses. Conceivably, he’s defeated in the latter film by the pressure of depicting an illness similar to the one that killed his mother; certainly, his technique is incapable of transmitting the fear the scenario raises in him.

  Despite it all, the Hollywood establishment is prepared to accept Peter Fonda as its own. And so it goes for a bit, as he works his way down from a princeling’s perch to the mediocre middle folds of show business. He fathers a girl, Bridget, in 1964, and a boy, Justin, two years later, works on his television résumé, and collects the perks of his profession (tennis court, swimming pool, cars, extra cars). So what if he gets into crashes, plays with guns, has untreated manic depression? If he holds steady, someday he’ll star in his own series as a dedicated teacher, or doctor, or detective, or lawyer. That will be canceled after two seasons, and he’ll graduate to being a guest murderer on Columbo. He’ll live.

  But he will not play his part in history. Hollywood is set to transform itself, for a brief stretch, from a dominion of aging hacks to a place where experiment and nerve are the currency; where fringe visions of American darkness and dislocation are entertained, and something like real people observed; where myths are rewritten and new kinds of horseshit patented: a transformation to be called—pompously, but not unreasonably—“the Hollywood Renaissance.”

  American film is primed for rebirth, with Henry Fonda’s son as its star-child.

  * * *

  Back at the Actors Studio, Jane finds her next Svengali in Greek-born actor-director Andréas Voutsinas—a gifted theater man, and, in Henry’s estimation, “a parasite.” He crafts her image and molds her moves for roughly three years, with spotty results: On Broadway, a respectable success (1960’s Invitation to a March) is followed by a perfect disaster (1962’s The Fun Couple, placed by Walter Kerr among “the five worst plays of all time”).

  As for Jane’s films in this period, none is a big hit, but a few are attention-getters. Save for the retro tearjerker In the Cool of the Day (1963), they are broadly comic, and Jane often overexerts in a Method eagerness to act out. But Jane Fonda is clearly her own creation, whatever the influence of her gurus. In Walk on the Wild Side (1962), she uses costar Laurence Harvey’s stiffness as a cat uses a scratching post; in The Chapman Report (1962), she overflows a shallow character by implying more life than it can hold. Better is Period of Adjustment (1962), a Tennessee Williams comedy in which she plays a hysterical southern bride close to parody, threatening to go too far—but threat, we now see, threat of the unexpected and of the too-much, is part of her magnetism.

  Singly, these early movies are pointless; together, they are a mosaic of something fresh and different. Jane recalls the beauties of classic screwball comedy, but her neurosis and toughness are up to the minute. She is a sexy jungle of mixed-up modern selfhood, and a new kind of woman on the screen.

  In early interviews, she credits psychoanalysis with showing her the truth about herself and her upbringing. She attributes her decision to enter her father’s profession not to talent but to her own “neurotic drive.” Actors, she says, are “more neurotic and selfish and insecure than the average person,” and “are not likely to be particularly good parents.”

  Anticipating the art and politics of the new decade, Jane is attempting to expose the fiction, strip the stage. Henry appears unaffected by her criticisms, but those who know him know he buckles with each blow. “It breaks his heart,” says Susan Blanchard, remarried now, but still close to the kids. “When she makes remarks about him as a father, he dies, he dies.”

  * * *

  The range of Henry’s films in the middle and late 1960s gives the appearance of diversity, but it is really surrender—to virtually any project that will pay him to show his face. He’ll say his agents are to blame, but Henry would rather make a bad movie than no movie at all. So his marginal works multiply, the follies and trivia of an actor still major enough to command salary and billing, yet shoehorned by necessity into the lucrative genre of the instant—sex romp, comic Western, crime drama, spy thriller, battle spectacular, family frolic.

  Sex. The 1964 Sex and the Single Girl is chiefly about Tony Curtis seducing Natalie Wood with a series of fatuous deceptions, and secondarily about Fonda, as a panty-hose mogul, repeatedly fighting and reuniting with Lauren Bacall. Coscenarist Joseph Heller recalls, “Natalie Wood didn’t want to do the picture, but she owed it to Warner Bros. on a three-film deal. And Tony Curtis needed the money to settle a divorce. That’s what I like best about the movie industry: the art and idealism.”

  Western. As an aging cowpuncher in 1965’s The Rounders, Henry has a nice drunk scene, and shows a talent for rising sleepily from a bunk, crossing to a table, picking up a rooster, and tossing it out a door. The movie lacks subtlety or beauty, but it has a soul, and deserves better from MGM than to become the bottom of a double bill with Get Yourself a College Girl, starring Mary Ann Mobley and Chad Everett.

  A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966) is an Old West poker showdown with a passel of old-time actors and a plot twist as unforeseeable as the Rocky Mountains. Also in this class of fossil goes a later dried bone, The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), which reunites Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. Stewart inherits a whorehouse, and the two mangy cowboys must clean up and become businessmen. The stars will not rouse themselves to states of excitation, but why should they? “It’s like working with the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument,” says director Gene Kelly—meaning it as a compliment.

  Cop. As an owlish academic turned lawman, coordinating the hunt in, and for, The Boston Strangler (1968), Fonda is less a man than a fusty bookish vapor emanating from a brown suit. It’s conceivably his dullest performance. Somewhat more vigorous as the New York Police commissioner in Don Siegel’s Madigan, released later in 1968, he is stranded by a script that shifts emphasis from the hero of Richard Dougherty’s fine novel The Commissioner to the detective Madigan (Richard Widmark). Fonda admires the novel, but the film’s switch from character study to crime drama leaves his star turn as impressively empty as a bank vault.

  Spy. In The Dirty Game (1965)—an anthology-style espionage thriller—he is a double agent trying to stay alive in a “safe” room. Mordant in the fashionable manner of le Carré, the segment features an unconvincing though agonized performance from Fonda. The whole seedy package is smuggled into heartland drive-ins with something called Macabro, “a camera-viewing of strange festivals and fetishes around the world.”

  War. Like a tank, the big-budget war movie heaves into the 1960s, spewing oil and crushing the tender buds of art. A claque of financiers assembles a spectacular, Battle of the Bulge, about the last great German offensive of World War II, and familiar faces situate it among macho endurance tests from The Longest Day and The Great Escape to The
Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. Rendered odd by a bad dye job and remote by his own dullness, Fonda resents both the assignment and himself for fitting it. But money is on the table and the agents natter and Henry sighs, Ah, what the hell: It’s all the same indignity—Sex and the Single Girl with testes instead of tits.

  In contrast, Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965), about the navy’s response to Pearl Harbor, is military melodrama done with clarity and feeling. Fonda’s admiral is a fleeting figure brought on at intervals to scold John Wayne’s incorrigible captain, and their scenes are strangely touching. Wayne is visibly pained (he is soon to lose a lung to the cancer that will one day kill him), and the gaze of the crisp, healthy Fonda upon the Duke’s ailing bulk bespeaks the rugged love that exists between old campaigners.

  Years before, their friendship had broken over the blacklist. Now their interactions are enriched by admiration, acceptance, age, regret, with the ethic of manliness honored and mortality evoked without pity or poetry. Fonda’s smiles at Wayne, stifled manfully and recessed in the jaw, are as dry and sincere as unwept tears.

  * * *

  Jane met Roger Vadim in Paris in late 1957. She was not yet twenty; he was a decade older, notorious as filmmaker and rake. And God Created Woman, his succes de scandale of a year before, had made Brigitte Bardot into the sex goddess of the decade. Director and star were married, but theirs was an open arrangement, and Vadim lived in the opening. Jane was running with a fast crowd; the director materialized as one would-be seducer among many, and she found him “perverse” and “hateful.”

  In the fall of 1963, Jane returns to France to work with director René Clément on Les Félins, a flashy, murky pulp thriller. Vadim has meanwhile made more films, and consolidated something like a style: gauzy, coy, a boudoir aesthetic framed around his wife or mistress of the moment. The films have taste, design, and dessicated wit, but tend to be empty-headed and emotionally shallow.

  He and Jane meet again, but as different people, with new, chic credentials. Deferring marriage in favor of a shack-up, they go on to produce some of the funniest, sexiest twaddle to come from Europe in this decade. La Ronde (1964), a remake of Max Ophüls’s comédie d’amour, is as fragrant and inviting as bedsheets in a fancy bordello, and more fun than any previous Vadim film. Is Jane—though just one of the numerous players—the key that unlocks and admits warmth into his voyeuristic frame? La Curée (1965) follows, a melodrama about a woman’s affair with her stepson; in the last shots of Jane’s mascara-stained face, she again draws from Vadim a new species of feeling.

  Moving with Vadim into a country house outside Paris, Jane finds she must adjust to his code of marital conduct. Accustomed to being bent by men into unnatural poses, she swings along with her husband’s request for threesomes, while in the press evincing blissful satisfaction with her new life. Asked how Vadim has changed her, Jane says, “I’m much more relaxed now.” How is the analysis progressing? “Oh, I gave that up—I was traveling so much that I didn’t have time. And when I did have time, I found I didn’t need it anymore.”

  In August 1965, they marry (partly, Jane confesses, to soothe her father’s sense of propriety) and become a celebrity couple, envied and chastised. Though rumors circulate of their “sophisticated” ways, their self-presentation is candid, playful, and far from depraved. While Jane removes her clothes for Vadim’s camera, she will not allow them to be removed for her: Displayed bare-bottomed on a Times Square billboard for La Ronde, she moves to have the necessary undergarment painted on. Likewise, when Playboy publishes nude photos taken surreptitiously on the set of La Curée, she sues the Bunny empire for $17.5 million.

  A daughter, Vanessa, is born in 1968. A novel called The Exhibitionist—a Valley of the Dolls knockoff written by a pseudonymous Newsweek journalist—becomes a best-seller, teasing airport idlers with its story of promiscuous starlet Merry Houseman, daughter of a manly, melancholy, many-times-married Hollywood idol.* Soon after the baby arrives, Vadim directs Jane in Barbarella, their most notorious collaboration. Wearing space drag and plashing platinum wig, her breasts encased in plastic, Jane lands on the covers of both Life (“Fonda’s Little Girl”) and Penthouse (“The Kinkiest Film of the Year”).

  Daring yet wholesome, Jane is one of those few to whom this breathtaking zeitgeist seems to organically belong. But—surprise—it is mostly illusion. Bulimic, insecure, she has little sense of what she is. Like Frances, she strains to justify her husband’s selfish absences, while growing more depressed and body-fixated. As the sweet life starts to pall, she finds Henry haunting her regrets. “I’d so much wanted to do better than my dad at marriage,” Jane will later say.

  * * *

  Hitting his changes fast and rough, Peter scores his first transformation in the summer of 1966. After being off the big screen for a year and a half, he breaks out in The Wild Angels, a high-octane “wheeler” from a low-rent studio, inspired by the Hell’s Angels motorcycle cult.

  It is no great shakes as art, nor is Peter’s performance as gang leader Heavenly Blues a masterwork of depth. But the movie is raw and right just now, and Peter as its main face glows with mystique. Though denounced as trash, the movie makes millions, defines a new audience, and glamorizes modern outlaw style, with a star disturbingly suggestive of the young Henry Fonda reincarnated as a lissome thug in Beatle mop and Nazi cross.

  Things have changed, within him and without him. In his year of invisibility, Peter has had a series of experiences that take him to the lower layers of the decade’s glamour, where persistently he finds a face looking back at him. His own face: the face of the lost boy.

  Peter meets Eugene McDonald III, nicknamed “Stormy,” at the University of Omaha. Heir to a Zenith Radio fortune estimated at thirty million dollars, Stormy is handsome, sensitive, and frequently depressed, with one parent who is dead and the other absent: Peter’s mirror image. The two build an uncommonly close bond, what Peter calls “a complicity in music, humor, ideals, and principles.” Brothers in romance and rebellion, they even devise, only half in jest, the scenario for a suicide pact.

  On February 3, 1965, the mirror cracks. Stormy is found in a rented Tucson house with a bullet in the back of his head and his wrists slashed. There are oddities to the apparent suicide: No note is found, and forensics suggests the body has been moved before authorities arrived. An inquest is held, with a distraught Peter among the witnesses. Though the coroner’s jury finds that Stormy died in the presence of a person or persons unknown, no charges are brought. Peter feels he knows the truth: His mirror image has taken the same escape as his mother, and as Bridget Hayward. For a while, he feels more affinity with the dead than with the living.

  Soon after Stormy’s death, Peter experiments with LSD. The result is a sensory freak-out, leading to the same breakthrough soon to be claimed by many an acid initiate: cosmic consciousness. Having tripped, he says in 1967, “I know where I am on this planet.”

  He’s tripped several times by late August 1965, when through the intercession of the Byrds’ Jim McGuinn and David Crosby he meets the Beatles. Concluding their second American tour, the Fab Four are taking their rest in a hillside mansion on stilts in the wilds north of Beverly Hills. Music plays, pot smoke is on the breeze, and Playboy Bunnies offer relaxation in private rooms. As John Lennon will later recall, “The sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties.”

  But as the day lengthens and the sun goes burnt orange, things turn, in McGuinn’s words, “morbid and bizarre.” Acid comes out. Its takers loll in an empty sunken tub. After a while, George Harrison says he feels as though he’s dying. Peter flashes on his ten-year-old self—and perhaps on Stormy, gone just a few months. “I know what it’s like to be dead,” he whispers back.

  Lennon is nearby, growing paranoid. He is a bright, rebellious boy with a distant father and dead mother; Peter’s utterance takes him close to an edge he would rather avoid. “You’re making me feel like I’ve never
been born,” he moans. Those who would transform must first disintegrate: The mysteries and pains of the sixties might be summed up in this one exchange. Out of it, Lennon will write “She Said She Said,” a highlight of the Beatles’ 1966 Revolver album, with Peter as the spectral agitator “she” to Lennon’s bewildered “I.”

  By the time he resurfaces in The Wild Angels, then, our rebel has seen the fear that is at the basis of both suicide and rebirth; glimpsed the glories these times offer for ambitious young artists; and imbued the Beatles’ grooves with Fonda ghosts. In lysergic intimacy with the world’s foremost pop group, Peter has discovered, and handed on, a psychic connection between his generation’s mass odyssey and the lonesome road of the motherless child.

  * * *

  Henry tries. As his offspring bait him in the press, the drift of the day goes against many of his own inclinations, and millions of others his age hold to an increasingly bitter set of authoritarian faiths, Henry makes gestures across the generation gap.

  But an aspect of his creative stagnation is that the gestures are evasive and foolish. Generation, by novice playwright William Goodhart, offers Fonda as Jim Bolton, a Chicago adman with a drinking problem and an unhappy marriage, who visits his pregnant daughter and her beatnik husband in Greenwich Village. The daughter means to have a natural childbirth at home; Bolton conceives a series of clumsy schemes to redirect the birth into a sterile hospital.

  Opening in October 1965, the play runs well into the next spring. It lets the star flex comic muscles seldom used, and affords audiences the rare view of Fonda having fun onstage. Notices are above average, albeit in a dismal season, but the play is little more than a breakneck sitcom. Not that we should assume Fonda was after anything but a mildly topical hit. Generation is the paltriest piece of theater he has fronted since Blow Ye Winds, but it logs more performances than his last two shows combined, and on that level is a ringing success.