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

by Devin McKinney

  On either side of the play are family films that outdo it in duplicity. Spencer’s Mountain, a bucolic fancy about the travails of a Wyoming logging clan, is released in 1963, just before the revolt of white middle-class American youth becomes a matter of significance. Yet its views of character and context are retrieved from 1930s Hollywood, and even its star detests it for setting “the movie business back twenty years.”

  Showing none of the plain observation and character nuance of The Waltons, the successful TV series to which it will lead, the film offsets domestic verities with labored leers about burgeoning bosoms, sex practices between bull and cow, et cetera. We are repeatedly assured that the Spencer couple’s loins have not gone pruney with age, and one slam-bang comic moment has wicked Pa smacking feisty Ma’s upraised behind—a gesture more affectionate than anal rape, though almost equally distasteful.

  In Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), Fonda costars with Lucille Ball in a comedy based on the Beardsleys, minor media curiosities in the mid-1950s: A navy pilot with ten children meets a Navy nurse with eight, and the families merge into a megafamily. In the eyes of at least one of its stars, the picture is a corrective to the explicit subjects and styles of contemporary movies. “They’ve gone too far now,” Lucille Ball says, “and we are all so satiated with the extremes, with what they call reality. I refuse to admit this degradation is reality.” She adds, in those endearing tobaccinated tones, “I’m also getting tired of mini-skirted beauties running the world.”

  Far from guileless, the movie has an agenda—the assertion of megafamily values against the claims of the counterculture.* But Yours, Mine and Ours is less honest than the youth-oriented exploitation movies it means to counteract. We wonder why Lucy, opposing the miniskirt oligarchy, goes through the film wearing thickly painted lips and false lashes that curl over her eyes like fried spiders; we ask how traditional morals are advanced by a screenplay sprinkled with, in Renata Adler’s words, “all sorts of sleazy dirty lines, and coy bedroom scenes and smiley, hesitant conversations about puberty.”

  Henry has tried. But vehicles like these can only trivialize generational divides. Fonda has aligned himself with every lame comedian, reactionary pundit, and trendy academic laboring to reduce the debates of the day—over war, rights, family and society, the understanding of history—to terms so banal that the issues behind them might as well not exist.

  * * *

  Depressed at home, on the screen Jane vaults ahead of her peers—even though Hollywood cannot put her across as Vadim does. There’s more of her comic juice in one minute of La Ronde than in all of the excruciating Cat Ballou (1965); more of her sexiness in a frame of La Curée than in the feeble romps Sunday in New York (1963), Any Wednesday (1966), and Barefoot in the Park (1967). Jane cannot redeem these movies, but she batters their boundaries, straining upward from the waist as her narrow legs transport her efficiently from spot to spot, twisting or flapping her exasperated hands.

  In drama she is equally watchable, and equally wasted. She mostly just wanders intensely through Arthur Penn’s small-town sex opera The Chase (1966), while Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967) is memorable mostly for the scene of Jane kneeling before her impotent saxophone-playing husband and sensuously blowing his … horn. Sardonic wolf whistles are heard across the land.

  Back in France, Barbarella pushes Vadim’s boudoir aesthetic and the couple’s creative synergy to the final frontier. Sent on an interstellar mission by the French-accented President of the Universe—Jane’s father and husband in one?—the titular vixen braves monsters, revolutionaries, and bondage kink to triumph through sheer purity of spirit. The movie is bad, but Jane has such quick responses to the dangers and debauches around her—“such a panic in the eyes”—that she can embody innocence while mocking it: Her knack for the put-on leaves Vadim’s in the shade.

  Barbarella Jane becomes a popular poster image, erotic icon of pubertal bedrooms and Vietnam base camps. And radical Jane will have no choice, two years on, but to renounce her: Liberation ideology in its militant phase has no place for Barbarella’s zero-gravity striptease, her cosseted cleavage, or her sense of humor. Later, Jane will mellow on her alter ego, and allow that other, subtler kinds of liberation may thrive in an exploitation movie, even one with the sickly smell of pot fumes and poured plastic.

  But here in 1968, the picture is a dead end. To make it, Jane has refused two of the most significant female roles Hollywood has ever offered—Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary’s Baby. Her creative drift has been toward camp, and the thing she has had with Vadim is all but over. There will be just one more film between them—a segment of the 1968 Edgar Allan Poe omnibus Histoires extraordinaires, whose odd, atmospheric Vadim contribution has Jane engaging in crypto-incestuous horseplay with brother Peter.

  Vadim has reached the limits of his vision, whereas Jane feels her outer shell melting, and a hunger artist emerging. Already skinny, in slavery to diet and Dexedrine, she starves herself further to play Gloria, an end-of-tether loser in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It is a break from Vadim, from Europe, from her performing past: a rebirth.

  Peopled by castoffs of the Hollywood dream, Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel had used the dance marathon as a Depression-era metaphor for life, and telegraphed the message: It’s all fixed. (Much like certain protonoirs of that period, a few starring Henry Fonda.*) The movie, directed by Sydney Pollack, is keyed to a different kind of American depression, with the novel’s despair inflated to hysteria. But it is something rare—a large, powerful popular entertainment founded in real darkness and turmoil, a film that will not cop out to affirmation: an avatar of New Hollywood.

  It belongs to Jane. She dives deep and comes up yet again as a new kind of female star, haggard yet glamorous, burned-out yet lividly sensitive. She has never been more in command of every muscle and flutter; her character’s extremes are paced and apportioned by technique. Muffled at first, the panic in her eyes comes alive as the marathon drags on and death draws near.

  The new depth of Jane’s acting seems inseparable from what the part finally asks of her—to act out a suicide. Frances’s ghost cannot be far away. Gloria gazes off the Santa Monica pier and says she wants out. Beside her is a failed screenwriter, young and dim but good-hearted (Michael Sarrazin). Gloria presses a gun on the boy, and Jane goes for broke. Gloria begs to be killed, and Jane drops the last defense separating her, and us, from the character’s humiliation and defeat.

  And then, the virtually unprecedented in an American movie: The girl gets her death wish. The gun goes off and Jane’s head tilts delicately, all cynicism and contempt expelled, in her eyes a wondering. And this, the new Hollywood movie says, is our happy ending, our best shot at rebirth. Bang.

  For a while after Horses, Jane vanishes. Reappearing in late 1969 to promote the picture, she is equally eager to discuss herself, and to set some things straight. “My father is a fantastic man,” she says. “As you grow older you understand how difficult it is to be a parent. In spite of all that has been written, I never hated my father. I was fighting for my own identity.”

  * * *

  Roger Corman, king of American International Pictures—skid row studio, exploitation factory, and the unlikely garden containing seeds of Hollywood’s renaissance—wants to test the motorcycle market. He has a bare-bones script in which a Hell’s Angel, the Loser, is shot by cops. “Busted out” of the hospital by his buddies, the Loser dies, and his funeral at a country church becomes an orgy of desecration, complete with Nazi flag and gang rape on the altar. At the end, leader Blues has an epiphany of emptiness: “I blew it all for the Loser.” Blues digs his buddy’s grave as the cops close in.

  There’s not much to it—except for straightforward style, moral neutrality, and great timing. The Wild Angels costs $360,000, and within a year earns $6 million, to become AIP’s most profitable production ever.

  Angels is key for tapping into the nihilism that is the shadow of sixties affirmation. An engine-age West
ern shot from the side of the marauding gang rather than the besieged town, it finds a new audience, one that wants cheap thrills, fast machines, and violent defiance of authority—that wants to feel power, and the thrill of righteous wreckage. Peter’s sullenness expresses both the waste and the lure of this pop nihilism; his own defiance finds focus in the romance of failure.

  Blues is trapped in the moment, and doubt, like the Loser’s grave, is a void that has only just opened. The Wild Angels drops a hint, one that Peter pockets and preserves, even if the audience misses it entirely: “I blew it all for the Loser.”

  * * *

  Henry is also working on a new kind of Western—minimal, grubby, defeatist. Thanks to the 1960s, the revisionist Western is viable as a minor investment for major studios, and Fonda, alone among the erstwhile cowboy icons, fits the cut of the new variant.

  As John Wayne’s Western roles grow more colorful and fantastic, Henry’s shrink to something smaller than life-sized. Welcome to Hard Times, Stranger on the Run (both 1967), and Firecreek (1968) offer him the chance to do unlikely, uningratiating work at the margins of attention; they cast him as, in turn, coward, outcast, and criminal; and they assert a claim on existential relevance at a time when veneration is deadening his nerves, killing his desire to care.

  As leader of a criminal gang in Firecreek, Henry limns a fine sadness and a jaded ease, but the other actors showboat and the director declares his allegiance to formula. In Don Siegel’s no-frills Stranger on the Run, Fonda’s alcoholic drifter, fingered for a killing, is pursued, beaten, bounced about like a figure in a shooting arcade. Henry has never appeared more wretched or pitiable: Silently screaming from a shot of whiskey, his limbs protesting their every exertion, this most elegant of actors makes a marvel of his character’s ability to remain upright. But while the concept is gutsy, the product is only so much prop plywood around Fonda’s trembling center. Simply that these films are notable does not make them very good: Like the men who make them, they are grizzled and sardonic and have false teeth.

  In Welcome to Hard Times, adapted by writer-director Burt Kennedy from E. L. Doctorow’s novel, a frontier town is invaded by a mute psychopath who lays waste to everything, leaving a few scarred survivors to rebuild. “Well I have seen the elephant,” someone in the novel says as the climax nears; and Fonda’s Will Blue—a horrified witness turned reluctant sheriff—looks as though he sees that great ghost around every corner. Moving like an older, slower Wyatt Earp, but without the skill or cunning, he feels his way through a timid man’s desperate efforts to remain among the living.

  Fonda the actor goes away disappointed, regretful that the attempt, which he’d hoped would yield another Ox-Bow Incident, “didn’t come off.” By which he means it didn’t go far enough. It remains for other films to draw lines and dare outrages in the coming years, to explicitly link the myths of the Old West to the realities of now. But these early anti-Westerns at least wonder about such salient matters as heroism, conquest, and community, and respond to a new mood of doubt in the mainstream audience.

  Henry is the mainstream: He believes in America. But he doubts it, too. And he has much to doubt just now, because he—like John Wayne, like Jimmy Stewart, like all of Old Hollywood—supports America’s war in Vietnam.

  * * *

  In 1966, Peter is involved in two incidents with police. In June, LAPD narcotics officers acting on a tip find several marijuana plants under cultivation at a house in the suburb of Tarzana. Peter Fonda’s signature is on the telephone contract; so he, along with three other men, is charged with possession. And on November 26, three days before the trial begins, he is briefly taken into police custody during the Sunset Strip riots, a series of weekend clashes between police and youngsters stemming from the city’s imposition of a curfew.

  During the trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, Henry, wearing stubble grown for Firecreek, takes the stand to testify on his son’s behalf. Conceivably, his appearance is what saves Peter from prison, given the strength of the circumstantial case. The jury fails to reach a verdict on his charge, though it convicts one of his codefendants; before releasing Peter, Judge Mark Brandler delivers a stern lecture: “Make the most of this opportunity by leading a useful and productive life so that your wife, children, and illustrious father will never again be ashamed or humiliated by you.”

  Such comeuppance could mean ruin for Peter—the new wild angel of shock cinema dressed down by a judge, defended by establishment Dad. But our rebel presses on. His next film, The Trip, again directed by Roger Corman (from a script by Jack Nicholson), attempts to recreate the totality of an LSD experience, with Peter chasing the lysergic in quest of revelation. The film brags on its authenticity, but it turns out that LSD perception closely resembles imagery drawn from a Fellini festival, painted in candy colors and punched up with bad jazz-pop.

  In February 1968, Esquire runs an article on Peter by Rex Reed. Taking the sun on his Beverly Hills patio, his bullet wound visible as a four-inch scar, Peter is full of anger, self-pity, and foolish schemes. There is much monologue about his loneliness growing up, and his mortification at adult hands. He voices his desire to make movies “without all the big-studio shit” and pitches two pornographic concepts, one based on a Beatles song, the other—to be directed by Vadim!—on the Fonda family.

  Prominent in the spray of verbiage are Peter’s stinging remarks about Henry. The themes, expectedly, are silence (“Nobody told me the truth about my mother.… My father won’t even talk to me about today, so he’s not gonna talk about yesterday. There are too many yesterdays for him to get into”) and absence (“My father was never around, he never speaks any fucking words to me, he never said a bloody goddam thing”). But even at his most bilious, Peter wants to forgive. “Now I know,” he says of his father, “that all in all he saved me.”

  The interview is a cathartic, Peter will tell Sheilah Graham soon after, and has the effect of improving communications between himself and his father. Something of this catharsis—and a mature acceptance that not all wisdom resides in the fancies of youth—may have worked itself into Peter’s new project. Presently filming on locations across the American South, it is neither the Beatle porn nor the Fonda porn, nor any porn at all.

  “It’s called Easy Rider,” Peter says. “It’s about what’s happening today, young and old.”

  * * *

  After World War II, Henry is a proponent of global disarmament and multilateralism. Then the line between principled restraint and imperial intervention is blurred by JFK, whose administration is fascinated with assassination and foreign adventure. Kennedy’s domino theory rationalizes the U.S. presence in Vietnam, and the liberal-intellectual establishment buys in.

  Doing his part, Henry hosts, in 1962, an installment of The Big Picture, a series of propaganda films about the army’s role in international conflict. His episode is a tribute to the Special Forces, aka the Green Berets, soon to be made famous in a hit single and a John Wayne movie. “Recent headlines have spotlighted such areas as Laos, Vietnam, and of course Cuba,” Fonda says. “We have to be able to meet this kind of threat, and to help others to meet it. And we intend to.”

  The picture is bigger, and the battle bloodier, by late 1966, when Henry narrates To Save a Soldier, an ABC-TV documentary about the evacuation and treatment of wounded troops. Overcome by the raw footage, he has difficulty recording his voice-overs: “The experience was that strong,” he says. “The camera moves right in on the soldier’s face before the operation begins … and this man looks like he’s going to die. The scene really tears you apart.” Perhaps this eyeful of patriotic gore fortifies his belief in the war; perhaps it inspires the first of his doubts.

  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.