Fonda stops, inarticulate when speaking of himself, and as himself. He shifts to the skin of his character, and, as he has always done, lets his character speak for him.
“Clarence Darrow says it in this play. He was brought up right.”
* * *
What Fonda never said, though he probably knew it, was that Will Brown’s was not the first lynching at the Douglas County Courthouse. In October 1891, a five-year-old white girl claimed she was molested by a black man named George Smith. A mob formed. The sheriff was abducted and restrained. Smith was removed from the jail, beaten, dragged, and hanged from a trolley wire at the corner of Seventeenth and Harney—at which point, a newspaper report claims, “a shout from ten thousand throats rent the air.”
The lynching of Will Brown twenty-eight years later, eerily similar in outline, was the return of a hell with which Omahans were familiar. William Fonda would have been a boy of twelve when George Smith was killed. Did he see it? Was he made to see it by his father? Might Grandpa Nike and young William even have been among the mob?
Such questions are pebbles down the deepest well: We let them fall without hope of hearing the answer. But something happened to make Henry’s father “a liberal Democrat in a hotbed of Republican reactionaries,” and we can be certain that William Fonda was thinking of the past as well as the present when he took Henry downtown, mounted dark stairs, unlocked an empty room, went to a window, and made his son witness the inevitable in silence.
* * *
It is important to understand, or at least imagine, how the Will Brown lynching affected Fonda. This is why it has been recounted in detail, and why we have avoided countenancing it until now. The event is a specific outrage, a unique obscenity, but it also implies—or seems to—much about the man whose life and work we have traced.
It suggests the seeds of so much sorrow, anger, and solitude in Fonda. It justifies his distrust of patriotic rhetoric, and his certainty that democracy was fearsome in the hands of mendacious men and bigoted mobs. It explains his projection of himself into lynching scenarios, whether as savior, victim, or finally villain, and his insistence on memories, ghosts, and obligations. It traces his own hiddenness to that of his father, and his own fine, deep, natural silence to the silence of a dark room, a night of fear, and an act of witnessing.
We may postulate at length about what the lynching symbolizes. But Will Brown was not a symbol, and against the facts of his murder, postulations matter very little. Yet we hope to take something when we go—if only an idea. Thus, the thought that the story of the lynching would explain not just how Will Brown died but how Henry Fonda lived. That, like fire in the night, it would illuminate men’s faces.
But here is the twist: It won’t. At most it is a context, a history, a memory. All we may claim is that it happened, and all we may justifiably imagine is that a boy witnessed it, remembered it, and carried it with him through all the years of a long, difficult, meaningful, magnificent American life—until he too was dead, his bones burned, his body released from all pain, all memory, ashes to ashes.
Epilogue
Douw Jellis Fonda’s tombstone. Caunawagha Cemetery, Fonda, New York.
History can be measured in many ways. Here are two:
Not long after this book was begun, Henry Fonda turned 100. The centenary was honored by the United States Postal Service, which made Fonda the subject of the eleventh stamp in its Legends of Hollywood series. A press release was issued, summing up the actor’s significance in terms that had for decades comprised his standard tribute.
Henry Fonda typically played thoughtful men of integrity, and was indelibly associated with the American characters he portrayed, among them young Abe Lincoln, lawyer Clarence Darrow, marshal Wyatt Earp and, in what many consider his finest performance, the dispossessed farmer Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. As an actor, Fonda was noted for his seeming naturalness and ease, an illusion he worked hard to convey, and his distinctively flat Midwestern accent.
Someone labored over that paragraph, trying to truthfully summarize a life and its meanings in a space too small to breathe in. The attempt has honor, if not elegance. Combine it with the stamp itself—a nice lifelike painting of Fonda circa 1941, looking right at you, as handsome as Hopsie in a blue suit and tie—and you have one measure of history: an official measure, declared in civil tongue and placed in the civic space. It is meant for the museum, the time capsule, the permanent record, and so is made with permanence in mind. It may be polite and evasive, but within its limits it is not false.
In upstate New York, where Fonda’s ancestors settled after fleeing Europe, there’s a cemetery in the small town that was named for the family. No sign heralds it; the town itself, one in a long line of off-thruway villages damaged by recession, can appear, on some days, all but empty. Yet the cemetery, dominated by trees taller than any in dreams, looks down from the top of a hill on mountain valleys to the south, farm fields to the west, and damned if it isn’t a living place.
Among the dozens of Fondas buried there is Douw Jellis, victim of Iroquois scalpers in 1780. His stone, so old that it looks primeval, can barely be read; its colors are those of earth and extreme age. To the touch, it feels like any organic thing planted in the same soil for hundreds of years: mossy and moist, cool and rough. The silence of the hilltop is absolute, the monumentality of the trees intimidating, the sense of being an interloper powerful and less than pleasant. The Fonda cemetery is a place one respects instantly, and is not unhappy to leave.
This is another measure of history, one that renders us inarticulate and immobile, small and uncertain; one too great for that civic space that is the size of a postage stamp and the length of a press release. Where the first is about the usable image, the recognizable ideal, the other is about ghosts.
Somewhere in between the two is where we have found Henry Fonda, if we can say we have found him at all.
* * *
His place in the American pantheon is secure. For as long as we read, we will read Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, and Hemingway; and as long as the dreams of the movie screen exert any grip on us, Henry Fonda will be there, as keen and fixated a witness as they to our quest, our tumult, and our crimes.
Like those artists with whom he properly belongs, Fonda refused America’s cheapest promises and most destructive myths. He was a man who acted as though there was a certain kind of life he was obliged to live, some long-ago death he was bound to honor. He was an American another American could claim as one’s own, with greater pride because he was no saint or simpleton, but broad and deep, at once nobleman and son of a bitch. One would need to both defend and question his behavior, to take stock of the lives he damaged as well as those he strengthened, and wonder how much the bad finally mattered against the good; how much the private sins of one difficult man, whose motives were often a mystery even to himself, negated the great values to which he gave living expression.
Those values were an interwoven set of assumptions, stances, and skepticisms, and they belonged to an individualistic, fair-minded American, one who believed in the complexity of the ordinary; whose eyes told him that life was a terror and a tragedy; who felt arrogance was folly and power the weapon of bullies; who demanded an ethical accounting of his country, his fellows, himself. Who often failed, as man and artist, to meet that accounting, but who walked and talked so as to feel justified in the eyes of the dead—as if they were his true audience, his invisible watchers and unseen judges.
* * *
These were the values that for fifty years he acted out on the country’s movie screens, and that would remain alive, one hoped, somewhere on the screen of its memory—even in the first years of a new century, when it seemed more and more as if those values had been buried alive, existing as little but a nagging recollection, a despised and unfashionable form of patriotic conscience.
Watching him over the past decade, one has been stunned by the relevance of his critique of America, his persistence
in seeing the ghost—his own, and ours. In a time when the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, one has been moved by Fonda’s belief, and by his refusal. It’s been worth attending to him in these bad years, times when the values he turned into behaviors have been trumpeted to the skies, while lying so dead on the ground that it has been a daily struggle to remember, or conceive of, an America in which they might have existed at all.
But he’s still there: Look and listen. When we feel our memories weakening, our sense of the past dissolving, we may look at him. We may look at Henry Fonda and begin to remember, as he remembers.
Notes
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
For books included in the selected bibliography, publication information is found in that section. Dates in brackets refer to the year of original publication. The following abbreviations are used:
FML
Fonda: My Life
PB
Playboy interview
MLSF
My Life So Far
DTD
Don’t Tell Dad: A Memoir
NBN
Never Before Noon: An Autobiography
PROLOGUE
“majesty and trash”: John Berryman, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001 [1950]), xiii.
“I suppose”: Steinbeck, America and Americans, 224.
1. SPRINGFIELD, 1839
“This scene”: Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 115.
“A jack-legged young lawyer”: FML, 127; see also McBride, 302.
read most of the Lincoln books: FML, 125.
he was named in Hollywood columns: Sheboygan Press, 10/23/1935.
“It’s like playing Jesus”: Curtis Lee Hanson, “Henry Fonda: Reflections on Forty Years of Make-Believe,” in Playing to the Camera: Film Actors Discuss Their Craft, ed. Bert Cardullo et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 213.
“What the fuck”: FML, 127.
The film, shot mostly around Sacramento: See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032155/locations; Oakland Tribune, 4/16/1939.
“I first saw this film”: Eistenstein, 139–49.
“one of the most dramatic”: Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905), ii.
“Like writing history”: Village Voice Film Special, 11/30/1993.
The Birth of a Nation grossed: ibid.
Henry Brocj: The Crisis, June 1916, 87.
“If the people”: Oxford American 56 (2007): 119.
“would play Ku Klux Klan”: O’Hara, 109.
Appearing as one of Griffith’s Klan riders: McBride, 81.
Ford dissolves: Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 139.
Ann Rutledge: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 115–18.
“He mourned her loss”: Schurz, 58.
“A highly dubious business”: Vidal, United States, 666.
“symbolic significance”: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 125.
“I never seen a man”: ibid., 120.
“showed that in mourning”: Alvarez, 126.
“a gaze of cosmic reproaches”: Eisenstein, 149.
“is that of Lincoln as”: McBride, 303.
“preparing himself”: Graham Greene, Graham Greene on Movies: Collected Film Criticism 1935–1940, ed. John Russell Taylor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 242.
2. THE ELEPHANT AND THE BLACK DOG
“One of Mr. Fonda’s”: Springer, 54.
Fonda, from the Latin: http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm#Origins.
“was one of the leaders”: ibid.
Dutch reform movement: Newman, 573–85.
at around 1628: Ross and Ross, 83.
Douw Jellis: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=amfonda&id=ind00295.
“on the rapids”: Sherman Williams, Stories from Early New York History (New York: Scribner’s, 1906), 299.
“venerable old David”: Bonney, 83.
“house was plundered”: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=amfonda&id=ind00295.
“At midnight June 30, 1863”: http://www.fonda.org/stories.htm#Ten Eyck.
“I had orders to spare nothing”: ibid.
the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad: www.kancoll.org/books/andreas_ne/railroad/railroad-p4.html#BMRR.
William… was born there in 1879: http://www.fonda.org/notables.htm.
William married: http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/henry-jaynes-fonda/4hmquk6fx4gu/14#.
“ordinary American people”: Brough, 21.
“great highway” of westward migration: Mattes, 23.
At first, the departed: ibid., 87.
crosses marking their graves: ibid., 82.
“he believed deeply”: Hofstadter, 36.
“a general need for Americans”: Shortridge, 9.
“This is America”: Gunther, 274.
“To curse a farm”: Wills, 308.
the city of Omaha: Bristow, 1, 83–92.
“On Saturday nights”: Walker D. Wyman, “Omaha: Frontier Depot and Prodigy of Council Bluffs,” Nebraska History Magazine 17 (1936): 143–54.
“a great place for aggressive hijinks”: Gunther, 255.
“Dr. Roeder reports”: http://www.stuhrmuseum.org/virtualtour/fonda.htm.
“ornamental shade trees”: J. Sterling Morton and Albert Watkins, History of Nebraska; From the Earliest Explorations of the Trans-Mississippi Region (Lincoln, NE: Western Publishing and Engraving Co., 1918); available at http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/topic/resources/OLLibrary/MWHNE/mwhne000.htm.
nickelodeon: High Point Enterprise, 10/30/1976.
Orpheum Theatre: William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 81; Nebraska State Historical Society (http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/timeline/astaire_fred.htm). Later in life, Henry claimed to have been pulled up on stage once as Houdini’s assistant. See: Kingsport Times-News, 2/23/1975.
Minnie Stout: U.S. Census Report, Omaha, Douglas County, NB, 1910; available at www.ancestry.com.
“To have seen the elephant”: Albert Barrére, ed., A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (London: Ballantyne Press, 1889), 344.
“the popular symbol”: Mattes, 61.
The Fondas were Christian Scientists: FML, 21; PB, 106.
Mark Twain attacked: Mark Twain, Christian Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1907]). Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993 [1909]).
“as if they were caused”: DTD, 64, 116.
“an angelic woman”: Brough, 8.
“Everything he did was”: Anita Summer, “Famous Men Remember: ‘The Little Things’ About My Father’s Greatness,” Family Circle, 6/15/1975, 6.
“I was always trying to find out”: Norman, 87.
“biological vulnerability”: MLSF, 35.
“black dog”: Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
“I had no ambition to be”: Ross and Ross, 85.
“It was a nightmare”: ibid.
“I didn’t dare look up”: ibid.
the Retail Credit Company: ibid.
“writers, various kinds of activists”: Chansky, 2.
“To raise the drama”: http://www.omahaplayhouse.com/history.aspx.
“Like other reform activities”: Chansky, 3.
“Most Little Theatre workers”: ibid.
“Shut up”: Cole and Farrell, 10.
3. A TIME OF LIVING VIOLENTLY
“I pride myself”: Waterloo Evening Courier, 2/24/1926.
He sees, by his account: FML, 35; PB, 104.
Bette Davis: FML, 35–36. Davis relates the incident in Charlotte Chandler, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 117–19, though curiously not in her autobiography, The Lonely Life (New York: Putnam, 1962).
The Barker: Ross and Ross, 86.
“a high, strangulated sob”: Logan, 21.
“some odd human animal”: ibid.
Elmer: ibid., 27–28.
“Several years ago”: Houghton, 109.
“[Now] he was aware”: ibid., 120.
He spends the winter months: Sweeney, 169–74; FML, 54–55, 58–59.
“stimulating plays”: New York Times, 1/8/1935.
“She intrigued me”: Hayward, 185. See also Houghton, 84.
The Devil in the Cheese: Hayward, 185–86.
“By the time I am thirty-five”: Collier, 31.
“cream”: FML, 91.
“Hank was much in love”: Houghton, 161.
“Fonda”: Brough, 43.
marriage license: Brooke Hayward Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Fonda initially objects: Houghton, 240.
“They fought so terribly”: Brough, 37.
the two marry: rector’s receipt, Brooke Hayward Papers.
Jed Harris: Martin Gottfried, Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 145–46.
divorce proceedings: unedited transcript of HF’s 1975 interview with Brooke Hayward (hereafter given as Hayward interview transcript), Brooke Hayward Papers.
stranger in a Christian Science reading room: FML, 66–67.
“unable to give the role”: New York Times, 1/2/1960.
Death comes: ibid.
She dies only nine months: New York Times, 10/19/1960.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 37