Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of nowhere, had no past, so that even the names we know them by were mostly not ones bestowed on them by their parents and the registrar? An old college football star (John Wayne), a virtual tramp who had served time on a chain gang (Robert Mitchum), circus acrobats (Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster)— each had served no professional apprenticeship, but had become more famous than men had ever been, their subsequent careers a source of wonder not just to the world but to themselves. They were the Hollywood film stars of the mid- 20th century, not actors — actors will come again — but stars. These men never will.
Burt Lancaster, who liked explaining things, once tried to explain the difference between the two to me:
“There is something about the star, his appearance or his personality: you just want to see him again. An actor may have the skill, but not the presence. It’s so much more important in a film where your face is nine feet across in close-up. So people like myself might be schlepps as actors....
He spread his hands like Elmer Gantry, and continued:
“I never saw Barrymore as Hamlet, I saw John Gielgud and he was extraordinary. But I don’t think you’d have cast him as Wyatt Earp.
But then these last were actors; the stars were the gods. They did not shout like Burton and Olivier, or any of the actors of the English stage; they just were, heroic and beautiful, where now there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, except Brad Pitt. And Tom Cruise. And Leonardo di Caprio.
Those stars had included Henry Fonda, grander and more decent than any of the many American presidents he played, even Lincoln, more dignified than any Justice of the Supreme Court, with more nobility than Clarence Darrow, with more stillness and coiled menace than Wyatt Earp. When he played Darrow on the London stage, surely, marvelled the Daily Express, this was the real Fonda:‘It takes one noble man to play another. Henry Fonda is that man.’ And it didn’t matter that he had gone on to fight killer bees and a giant octopus as his career wound down, for Henry in the course of it had embodied the values of what America would like to have been.
In John Ford’s 18th-century Drums Along the Mohawk he had run for his life. As his biographer puts it:
“Pursued by three Mohawks through the night, across a bewildering variety of terrain, [he] might be running the breadth of the continent — from flatland to forest, through streams and stands of pine, the sky changing from black and purple to blue and white.
In The Young Mr Lincoln and as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine he had danced, but not as Astaire and Gene Kelly had danced. You find yourself wishing he would never stop:
“Henry is a stiff, inhibited dancer, but he knows how he looks, and from stiffness comes style. He’s so bad, he’s charming: directors persist in making him dance. John Ford’s dancing scenes in particular are ways of making democracy itself dynamic and physical.
But where had that authority, that quiet come from? Devin McKinney, responsible for those two insights, rummages in Henry’s past to find the answers and fails, just as Henry’s own daughter Jane failed when she tried to talk to him about his art and found he had nothing to say. He was so reserved, she wrote, so emotionally distant. His own middle-class Christian Science father — who had disapproved of his choice of career, and had taken him at the age of 14 to see a lynching — when he finally saw his boy act, said only: ‘He was perfect.’ It was as much of a mystery to him as to everyone else.
For behind the dignity of the roles he played there was the wreckage of his private life, the five wives, one an Italian aristocrat, the adultery, the asylums, the depression and the suicide of his second wife. The decent, kindly liberal we know, or think we know, would never have played the private Henry on screen, which just adds to the mystery.
McKinney writes throughout in the present tense. This can be irritating, for it means he overwrites, something the present tense encourages. Against this you have to put the odd flashes of insight. Of Henry as Wyatt Earp, balancing on a chair, dancing his feet on a post while Linda Darnell taunts him from behind, McKinney remarks: ‘But just as nice is the grin Fonda tosses to the side after Darnell has left: so subtle, this flash of private humour from a man most alive within himself.’
When Henry Fonda died there was at his request no funeral service, but he left those light blue eyes to the Manhattan Eye Bank.