Henry Fonda

When I was a kid and coming into my own as a regular and frequent moviegoer and fan, I concluded that for male actors, there were three who were legends.  Two were BFFs and the third was a robust work friend who often made movies with the other two.  They were John Wayne, James Stewart and the senior member of the trio, Henry Fonda.

They were definitely legends to me.  No matter what one thought of their acting or personal lives or beliefs, they were towering men in a profession where people were eaten alive.  It's no coincidence that until now I haven't written about the three of them in a piece devoted solely to them instead of one of their films.  They deserve the best... hell, each could easily be four consecutive postings and so far I have avoided that and still want to.  So let's see where this goes.

Fonda's early years, on and off the stage and screen, were a study in innocence, diffidence, awkwardness and quietness.  Given this, it's always a curiosity when such people gravitate toward acting but Fonda perhaps gave the best reasoning behind it... acting provided a mask.  He could hide in other characters and he wanted to hide.  He would always remain a private public person.

The mask provided an outlet for him to display emotions which were difficult for him in real life as at least four of his five wives and his children would attest.  Fonda's knack for closing down and choosing not to be present for loved ones sent a few of them into therapy.  His father's approval meant everything to him and yet he found it difficult to react to that same need in his own children.  How sad is that?  Underneath that calm exterior was a ferocious temper.  To his credit he was an honest man and never shied away from the truth about his shortcomings.

He was born in 1905 in Grand Island, Nebraska, about 120 miles from Omaha, the city to which the family would move a year after his birth.  The senior Fonda was in the printing business and of course he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.  Young Henry helped his dad in that business and thought he might like to try journalism as a career.  He would one day enroll at the University of Minnesota with journalism in mind, but left shortly thereafter.  The family was religious and while young Henry did as he was told Sunday after Sunday, as an adult he was agnostic.

He had a series of unfulfilling jobs.  At age 20 he joined the Omaha Community Playhouse at the suggestion of his mother's friend, Dorothy Brando (yes, Marlon's mother), who taught there.  He stayed with the playhouse for three years learning and doing everything that was required to put on a production.  It was here that he learned about that mask he could wear while acting and knew he'd found his life's work.  He would always prefer stage acting to working in movies.

While at the Omaha Playhouse he met the teenage Dorothy McGuire who would costar with him in a play, ultimately marrying one of his  best pals and becoming lifelong friends.  I wished they'd worked together on the big screen.

In 1928 he made a decision that would change his life in a number of ways.  He arrived on Cape Cod and the Cape Playhouse.  He then joined the University Players where he would meet a lifelong friend, John Swope, future Life Magazine photographer and future husband of McGuire).  It's where he also met actress Margaret Sullavan who would become the first of Fonda's five wives.  He was with the Players for five summers and they did 10 plays a summer.  

The Fondas were divorced before they had their second anniversary and both ended up moving to New York.  Fonda roomed with two men who would also become lifelong friends, writer-director Joshua Logan and fledgling actor Jimmy Stewart.   In 1934 he would meet hotshot agent Leland Hayward who would help steer Fonda's career.

After Fonda closed in The Farmer's Daughter, Hayward told him

that it was going to be made into a film at 20th Century Fox and starring Janet Gaynor and he thought Fonda should do the movie.  Fonda followed Hayward's advice and the 1935 film became the first of his 85 films.  We will not discuss them all... really. Don't worry.

He was in the movies just shy of 50 years and some of the films and an affinity for becoming other people are why the man became a prominent actor.  He made some legendary films and he played some legendary characters... Tom Joad, Abraham Lincoln, Wyatt Earp, Mister Roberts, Juror 8, Norman Thayer and more.  His characters exemplified character, strength and integrity, doing the right thing.  They were honest and heroic, many of them common men, who fought against oppression and injustice.

After The Farmer's Daughter he made 10 films that were, as I handicap them, so-so.  One, interestingly, The Moon's Our Home in 1936, costarred ex-wife, Sullavan.  It was the same year she married her third husband, Fonda's good pal and agent, Leland Hayward.  For many years the Fondas and the Haywards were neighbors... on both coasts.  Sullavan made some of her best films with her ex-husband's best friend, Jimmy Stewart.  In 1960, married to her fourth husband, Sullavan committed suicide.  Two of her three children with Hayward also committed suicide.

In 1936 Fonda also remarried.  A divorced socialite, Frances Seymour, became the second Mrs. Fonda.  She had never seen her husband act.  She brought her child, Pan, with her and Fonda raised her as his own.  In 1937 daughter Jane was born followed three years later by son Peter.  You know, I could not write about a single one of Fonda's movies, concentrating just on his life as a husband to five women and father to four children (yes, four... hold on) and it would be a fascinating read, I promise.   If you want to know the largely sad story, check out Fonda's bio, Fonda: My Life or Jane's yummy autobiography, My Life So Far, or Peter's intriguingly-titled memoir, Don't Tell Dad. 

In 1938 an old friend, Bette Davis, who had known Fonda since they performed in summer stock years earlier and who starred with him in one of those early so-so dramas, That Certain Woman, now requested him for Jezebel.  I liked the film and thought Davis was mesmerizing but Fonda and George Brent and the other males left me cold because none of them were the powerful force that was Davis.

Many of us have heard that 1939 was the best year in movies.  The output was truly amazing.  Equally impressive is that Fonda is featured in four of the big ones.  It is really the collective nature of these movies that sent his popularity soaring.  His appearances in these four films all involved Fox.  To a degree he was lucky to get them all since he was not a contracted player.

The first of the 1939 films is The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.  It was enormously popular biographical fluff.  As the Bells, Don Ameche and Loretta Young are the stars with Fonda as the trusted Watson, playing him in a light, humorous way.  You can amaze your opponents at your next Movie Trivia party (not anytime soon, mind you) that it is the only movie to feature Young and her three acting sisters playing... what else?... sisters.

Next came Jesse James with Fox star Tyrone Power at the height of his beauty in the title role.  It was as colorful, entertaining and fictional as could be and oddly enough Fonda, as brother Frank, wound up with the better role, certainly the better-written role.  The following year he would score again in a sequel, The Return of Frank James (with Gene Tierney in her screen debut).

The James Boys

Without a doubt, the third entry, Young Mr. Lincoln, became his best movie to date.  It was also the first of seven times he would be directed by John Ford.  Originally neither Ford nor Fonda wanted to do it.  Fonda, an avid reader of Lincoln bios, thought he was physically all wrong for the part until he saw himself in makeup.  

The story concerning Lincoln's early life and his most famous court case in those days is heavy fiction but the film was a certifiable hit with critics and the public alike.

I have seen Drums Along the Mohawk a number of times and enjoyed it as much the last time as I did the first.  The Revolutionary War has always been a time in U.S. history that particularly interested me and it's never escaped my notice that there have been few films focusing on this time.  It was Fonda's second outing with Ford.  

I don't think it was a great experience for anyone except, perhaps, character actress Edna May Oliver who got and deserved all the great acting notices.  The film is mentioned only in passing in Henry Fonda: My Life, and he and Claudette Colbert (whom Ford detested) had little chemistry.  The fact that Fondas settled in the Mohawk Valley when they first came to America did capture the actor's attention.

It was a shame that studio head Darryl Zanuck didn't like Fonda, calling him a lousy actor.  The truth is the actor wasn't nuts about Zanuck either or his studio.  The two men were polar opposites... it would be hard to imagine them seeing eye-to-eye on much of anything.  Perhaps it was largely about a difference of style.

Regardless, Fonda wanted to freelance and hated the idea of being under contract to any studio.  It wouldn't have happened either had his agent, Leland Hayward, not lured him with the role of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.  It seems that Fonda had already read the novel and fancied himself in the lead.  Hayward agreed but Fonda had to have a chat with Zanuck at his request (ok, insistence).  Zanuck said, too, that he thought Fonda would be ideal in the role but he would have to sign a seven-year contract to make it all come true.  Fonda was furious as he signed on the dotted line.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) provided an Oscar nomination to Fonda as Tom Joad, a role that is probably his masterpiece and as a result he would forever stand as the archetypical, grass roots American trying to stand up for the common man.  The story of farmers who are driven out of Oklahoma by dust storms during the Great Depression, making their way to California, beset with problems, struck a chord with the public and brought a lump to their throats.  

It is one of America's classic films, beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Directed again by Ford, I think the movie put a spotlight on the open, honest acting of Fonda's that would be associated with him forever more.  He was soft-spoken, emotional and heartbreaking all at the same time.  It is an unforgettable performance and a superior film.

One of my favorite Fonda films is The Lady Eve (1941), the second and by far the best of his three films with Barbara Stanwyck.  They became life-long friends.  While I associate them more with dramas,  comedy is a delightful gift from both of them to us.

His true fans would fondly remember Fonda's 1942 output with three very different films, a comedy, a contemporary drama and a big western.  Those comedy chops were again front and center for The Male Animal.  He is an English professor who gets involved in a free-speech debate at the same time as a big football game is to commence.  Attending the game will be the school's All-American alumnus, a former beau of the professor's wife who wants to rekindle their romance.  Olivia De Havilland, Joan Leslie and Jack Carson round out the energized cast.

While I cannot deny that I liked The Big Street, I always find it a hard film to watch.  Fonda plays a shy, timid busboy who is sick in love with a mean-spirited, cruel torch singer, played by Lucille Ball.  Then he more or less becomes her lapdog when her gangster-boyfriend pushes her down a flight of stairs and she becomes crippled and dependent on Fonda.  Despite wincing at her wickedness, it is ultimately quite touching.  Ball said it was her favorite role and she, too, became lifelong friends with Fonda.

Nobody wanted to make The Ox-Bow Incident except Fonda.  The story of mob violence concerning the need to quickly hang three men suspected of murdering a farmer and stealing his cattle deeply touched Fonda because he had witnessed a lynching in his youth.  He plays a reluctant posse member and gives  

one of his great movie speeches.  With that beautiful voice, I could listen to him say anything.  

Fonda would always hold The Ox-Bow Incident near and dear in his canon of films.  But he would always regard 20th Century Fox and Zanuck as the enemy and thought they gave him crappy films to do in the 1940s.  That may have had something to do with his decision, despite having a family at home, to go into the service.  After all, his buddy Jimmy and every actor in Hollywood had signed up and his strong sense of patriotism wouldn't have allowed him to do anything else.  He joined the Navy, originally as a quartermaster and then as a lieutenant, jg and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Navy Presidential Unit Citation.

My Darling Clementine (1946) was his first film after the war, reuniting him with Ford in a gorgeously-filmed black and white production of the story of the gunfight at the O. K. Corral.  Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, Victor Mature, an unusual but exciting choice to play Doc Holliday, and lusty Linda Darnell as the barmaid Chihuahua all gave crusty old Ford everything he wanted.  I have never understood why this title was used.  Oh sure, it was a popular western song and even has a character named that who appears at the end, but so what?  Still, a minor gripe for a very good movie.

The happy Fonda finished out his Fox contract by working for director Otto Preminger for the first of three times in Daisy Kenyon (1947).  Joan Crawford inhabits the title role of a commercial artist in romances with two men, Fonda and Dana Andrews.  Since the time when Fonda was billed above Andrews in Ox-Bow, good things had happened to Andrews, namely Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives, and he was billed over Fonda here.  

The Fonda-Ford relationship had unraveled a bit.  They had difficulties on their last film, The Fugitive (1947) and it was not a success.  Now it was time for Fort Apache (1948) and neither man was in a very good mood.  Fonda could use his foul mood to play a    hard-nosed colonel who goes toe-to-toe with his subordinate, John Wayne, over the cavalry's treatment of Indians.  It was a rare role for a man who usually played sympathetic heroes.

Fort Apache would be the most screen time the two acting legends would have in their three films together.  While they were never great friends, they buddied up on this film and now and then in their lives.  It usually involved booze because that's what one did in the company of Wayne.  But it's surprising since they were from opposite ends of the political spectrum and could have been rivals in the eyes of Ford.  Fort Apache would be Fonda's last film for seven years.

Cards at the Fonda home with John Wayne, John Ford, Ward Bond

Fonda was offered the title role in the naval comedy-drama Mister Roberts on the Broadway stage in 1948.  His friend, Hayward, was instrumental in securing him the role and another friend, Logan, would be directing.  Fonda decided it would be best if the family moved east so Frances packed up the kids and off they went.  Soon the Haywards also moved to Connecticut, once again quite near the Fondas.  

He would appear in over 1,000 performances of the play and would nab a well-deserved Tony.  Most everyone found him fascinating in the role but at home he wasn't so fascinating.  His moody, cold, almost mute approach to his personal life still rankled the family although in many respects they were used to it.  His easy manner on the screen hid the fact that Fonda actually had a hair-trigger that was a challenge to witness.  A play like Roberts was a tense experience for him but perhaps not as tense as it was to live with him.

The Fonda marriage was suffering.  They were not seeing eye-to-eye on much of anything and had not lived as husband and wife for some time.  Fonda claimed that he did not want a divorce despite knowing the marriage would never improve.  He claimed his divorce from Sullavan was so vexing that he didn't ever want to go through that again.  Frances was in and out of sanitariums to help with her longtime mental illness.

One day a buddy who worked on Roberts introduced Fonda to Susan Blanchard, some 20 years younger than he, and he fell head over heels in love with her and asked Frances for a divorce.  She gave him no guff about it and returned to the sanitarium.  In April of 1950, she slashed her throat.  The children were not told the truth about how she died.

Later in the year Fonda married Blanchard and the union lasted until she could no longer stand it, about six years.  They adopted a daughter, Amy.  He had once been pretty gaga (in his style) about Susan but in the end she was feeling ignored.  That was the culprit.  She put it primarily on his work and his slavish devotion to it but perhaps his love of painting disrupted what one-on-one time she expected of him at home.  Of course there was the emotional deprivation... Fonda just couldn't be there for people who needed him to be.  Three husbands later Susan would become the second wife of Fonda's five-time co-star Richard Widmark.  

Fonda was surprised that he was offered the lead in the film version of Mister Roberts (1955).  He thought he was too old and so did some critics.  He was also surprised that Josh Logan wasn't going to direct but Warner Bros wanted the name value of John Ford who also happened to be a big cheerleader for the Navy.  It would be the seventh and last collaboration of actor and director.

Ford had been an alcoholic for years but he had never had a drop on a Fonda film... until this one.  He knew what the project meant to Fonda and he knew he wasn't up to his usual standards.  Neither man was in a good mood when Fonda was summoned to Ford's room in Hawaii.  Very little was said when Ford hit Fonda, knocking over the actor.  Things were iffy from then on but after the company returned to the studio, Ford had to be hospitalized and he was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy.  

The men on The Reluctant... Lemmon, Cagney, Fonda, Powell

Mister Roberts was the movie where Fonda and I clicked.  I noticed how handsome he was.  I noticed he walked with the grace of a panther.  I can close my eyes and see him walking toward those stairs that would take him to another confrontation with the captain.  I'd noticed that voice before but it never charmed me as it had here.  And it is a film full of emotion.  I thank them all for a good cry.

It is my favorite of all of Henry Fonda's films.  He didn't think much of the film but said that he understood why people who saw only the film (and not the Broadway play) would think highly of it.  I've seen it so many times over the years that I have lost count.  I love that it touched my heart as few others have done.  It's a tribute to loyalty and honor, male bonding and standing up for what's right.  It had great scenes but my favorite is when Mister Roberts confronts the captain over the cancellation of the crew's liberty.  And Fonda is aided by a lively James Cagney performance, a wise and warm William Powell (his final film) and a young Jack Lemmon (who won an Oscar) and an energetic supporting cast is almost more than any diehard movie fan could stand. 

Despite the presence of Fonda and Vera Miles, the direction of  Hitchcock and its noirish tendencies, I never particularly warmed to The Wrong Man (1956).  I thought the story of a man falsely accused of being an armed robber was sad and dreary and it couldn't hold my interest.  Maybe I should try it again.

What a great photo... what a great face

In 1957 Fonda married for the fourth time.  He referred to it as a rebound marriage.  He entered his Italian period when he married 

Afdera Franchetti.  He likely expected la dolce vita but they had little in common.  Some said she was a flamboyant social climber although likeable and engaging.  The union lasted nearly four years.  She was a little too lively for him.

Fonda's favorite film and the only one he ever produced was 12 Angry Men (1957).   This is Ox-Bow Incident in the jury room.  He is juror 8, the sole holdout who attempts to prevent a miscarriage of justice by trying to get his jury members to reconsider the evidence against a man accused of killing his father.  This was director Sidney Lumet's first movie and one of his masterpieces and it contains acting that thrills and words that inspire.  

I also regard 12 Angry Men as one of the last of the actor's great films.  He always said he looked for substance in his projects and he certainly found it here.  Oh there were a few more that were classics or at least special gems but largely the golden career was going the way of Hollywood's Golden Age.  There were clues.

One is that he did a short-lived TV series, The Deputy (1959-61).  Ten years later he would star in another, The Smith Family, which limped along for one season.

Another clue to fading superstardom is that Fonda lent his name and talent over the years to a gaggle of those all-star epics, many of them war films, including Advise & Consent, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, In Harm's Way, Battle of the Bulge, Midway, The Biggest Battle, the ultra dreadful The Swarm and Meteor.  None of them did a single thing for his career despite the fact that some of them were very good pictures.  They were all so gargantuan that the attention went to the stories rather than those playing in them.

In Fonda's bio Spencer's Mountain (1963) is another only mentioned in passing.  No matter, I found the Delmer Daves's production of Earl Hamner's Wyoming family to be colorful and entertaining.  It didn't hurt that Maureen O'Hara played Fonda's wife and the mother of a large brood in a story that would give birth to TV's The Waltons.

The Best Man (1964), written by Gore Vidal, concerns two presidential candidates, one principled and educated and the other ruthless and undisciplined.  (Don't get me started.)  Fonda must have busted his buttons getting to speak the liberal text he was given.  Cliff Robertson was no less impressive as his competition.

The cold war classic Fail Safe (1964) was the second Fonda-Lumet teaming.  It is one of those edge-of-your-seat thrillers that finds a squadron of American bombers, via computer and human errors, on their way to nuke Moscow and a U.S. President (Fonda) who sends the Strategic Air Command to stop them. 

A third clue of the lessening of the drawing power is that Fonda, like many others, began appearing in westerns.  Sadly, he never much cared for horses.  A number of his oaters were more or less entertaining, a couple were good and some pretty run-of-the-mill.  Perhaps you remember The Rounders, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, Welcome to Hard Times, Firecreek, The Cheyenne Social Club and There Was a Crooked Man.  He usually supported another actor, deemed a bigger name.  In two of them he was second-billed to his friend Jimmy Stewart.

BFFs since 1932

Also in the 60s he made what I consider two horrible movies, both of which were far below his talents.  I can only consider he very much needed the money.  The first, Sex and the Single Girl (1964) is such a cheesy movie, an inept comedy with Fonda, Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis and Lauren Bacall all looking so uncomfortable.  Migawd what possessed them?

In 1965 he married Shirlee Adams, a former flight attendant, 27 years his junior, and the wife to whom he was married the longest.  He was embarrassed by his marital record and told her they would not marry but Adams was pretty irresistible.  She also found her new husband to be the same.  Perhaps he had mellowed.  Virtually everyone who knew Fonda thought she was the best thing that ever happened to him.  

The second horrible Fonda movie is also one of my all-time hates (period!), Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).  To my dying day (which I hoped would come while I sat through nearly three hours of this) I will never understand its acclaim.  And it does have acclaim.  It seemed like the first 15 minutes was about a fly on Jack Elam's scary face and it went downhill after.  This thing had spaghetti all over it... Spain and Mexico standing in for Utah, sloooow pacing, overly dramatic, loud music and annoying symbolism around every mountain.  

Charles Bronson and Jason Robards join forces to protect Claudia Cardinale from an assassin, Henry Fonda.  Truly the man has never played such a mean villain.  Loved the cast... hated the movie.  And let's not forget, I love westerns.

The old liberal was not having an easy time of it for several years in the late 60s to mid 70s when his by now very famous daughter became one of the premier faces and voices of the counterculture.  He wasn't sure what to make of her during these times and he was often embarrassed by her activism.  One can only imagine what Duke Wayne and his old buddy Stewart said to him.  Hank, do something about her.  

The Boston Strangler (1968) is a good but unpleasant true-life crime story with a dynamic Tony Curtis as serial killer Albert DeSalvo and Fonda as the lead investigator.  I very much liked the family logging drama Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Fonda's cantankerous role in it.  And it's the only movie he made in the entire decade that is worth mentioning.

For much of the 1970s he worked on television.  In 1981 the Academy honored him with a special Oscar for his years of glorious performances.  It was actually long overdue.  It is astonishing that he'd never won an Oscar and more perplexing why he had only been nominated twice (The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men).

The following year all that changed.  Thanks to the loving intervention of two remarkable women and an old, sick man's wily determination, Fonda brought it home for On Golden Pond (1981).  He won his first Oscar and his onscreen spouse, Katharine Hepburn, won her fourth.  Both were richly deserved.  Jane made it all happen, partly because she wanted to make a movie with her legendary father.  Their special moment by the dock always chokes me up.  It wasn't a movie scene.  It was their lives playing out.

He said he was glad he lived long enough to play Norman Thayer.  He was too ill to attend the Oscar ceremonies and died several months later in 1982 of a heart attack.  He was 77 years old.

Henry Fonda was a major Broadway star and we should just mention of few of the plays we have not already mentioned... Point of No Return, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Two for the Seesaw, Generation, Our Town,  the one-man show Clarence Darrow and The First Monday in October.

Finally, let's say goodbye to Henry Fonda with his 13-minute 1978 acceptance speech at the American Film Institute's annual honors.  I just love this clip.

Next posting:

A popular 1960s detective flick