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Fonda rides above them like a man on a gelding. Without missing a hoofbeat or a paycheck, he appears in westerns (Jesse James), biographies (The Story of Alexander Graham Bell), even comedies (The Mad Miss Manton). But it is not until 1940 that the man and his role fuse into the permanence of art. More than 20 years later, John Steinbeck unreels a print of The Grapes of Wrath.
"Times pass and we change; the urgency departs and this is called dating," Steinbeck says. "But I did thread the thing on my home projector and sat back to weather it out. Then a lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen, and he had me. I believed my own story again. It was fresh and happening and good."
The careers of most men up to 1941 are prologues to the war itself. For Fonda, the war is a prologue to his work. He climbs out of Navy blues and into Navy blues. An old friend from stock-company days, Joshua Logan, has collaborated with Thomas Heggen on an adaptation of Mr. Roberts. Leland Hayward is the play's producer. "It was like being in love," recalls Fonda. "You had this good feeling in the guts practically all the time."
Mr. Roberts opens to thunderous ovations. The career has been established, reestablished, entrenched, ensured. Henry and Frances have a house in Connecticut, two bright, eager children of their own, plus a third child by Mrs. Fonda's first marriage. He becomes a cautious, skilled Sunday painter—and even sculpts a clay model of Peter's head, which later cracks.
Josh Logan recalls the marriage: "Frances was not really interested in the theater, so she was always embarrassed to talk about it. She'd talk of children, operations, jewelry, the stock market. I often wondered what she and Henry talked about, because these are the only subjects Henry couldn't talk about." There are rumors of rift, there are reports that Frances has been institutionalized with unshakable fits of depression.
But no one, including Henry, is prepared for the lurid obituary of April 14, 1950: FONDA'S WIFE, ILL, COMMITS SUICIDE. At a "rest home," Frances has slashed her throat. Fonda plays in Mr. Roberts that night, recalls Logan, "to keep from going crazy."
Tear Along the Line
Frances' will pointedly includes the children and excludes Henry. What the world knows, the father hides. As far as the kids are concerned, their mother has died of a heart attack in the hospital. It is a year later that Jane, then 13, learns the truth from a friend who is thumbing through a movie magazine in art class. "It seemed easier on the kids not to tell the whole truth," Fonda says sadly. "But the bottom line of it all is: I wasn't telling the truth."
The kids tear along the bottom line.
"It seemed to be a normal life to me," Henry Fonda reminisces. But no child comes equipped with bifocal hindsight, least of all a Fonda. Almost from the start, the public roles and the private lives were at catastrophic odds. Steinbeck stated what the kids only felt: "Henry is a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict."