Hank and Jim, page 17
Hank also began to circle a new passion, one that would accompany and enrich him for the rest of his days: painting, which eventually became a passionate pursuit with rewards comparable to acting. “Art became one of the things he could hide behind” was the way his son put it.
Peter remembered one of his father’s early works, a small porcelain plate that Fonda converted into a simulated ashtray by painting burnt matches, ashes, and stubbed-out cigarettes in tromp l’oeil style on the surface. Peter was in the living room one day when a maid grabbed the plate and swabbed it with a cloth dampened by ammonia, which smeared the painting.
When Hank came home, Peter was afraid he’d get blamed for the ruined piece, so he told his father what the maid had done. Fonda looked at his son, then looked at the plate. “With the ammonia cloth?” he asked. Peter nodded. A smile that grew into a delighted grin spread over Fonda’s face. His painting was so realistic it had fooled the maid. What artist could ask for more?
There was always time for more practical jokes. One time a group gathered at Tigertail in black tie before going out for the evening. Stewart was wearing a white dinner jacket and looked quite snappy. Hank began talking about a new pen he had discovered, whose smoothness was a source of endless pleasure. Nothing would do but that Hank demonstrate the new wonder pen. As he was demonstrating how to fill it, ink squirted all over Jim’s sparkling white dinner jacket.
As the group gasped in horror, Peter’s first instinct was to run—once again he figured that it was somehow his fault. Hank began apologizing profusely, while Jim did a slow burn. But something magical happened: within five minutes, the ink had completely disappeared, and the white dinner jacket was again pristine. Peter realized it had been a practical joke on his father’s part. Sixty-five years later, he realized that the white dinner jacket meant that Jim was in on it as well.
In that winter of 1945–1946, there were so many parties. The movie business was still thriving, although that would change soon enough. After the parties were over and the nights were quiet again, Hank and Jim would sit in the playhouse and listen to the records they brought home from their forays through the record shops of Los Angeles. “Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael and Nat King Cole used to come over and listen with us,” said Hank. “Nat Cole taught Peter to play boogie-woogie on the piano.”
Peter noticed that although Hank and Jim each proclaimed the other to be his best friend in word and deed, they didn’t talk all that much. Rather, they took what was obviously a deep, unspoken pleasure in simply being with each other. This was possible only because they were both loners, Fonda more obviously than Stewart. But, as Burgess Meredith observed, “Jimmy is a self-contained man. He can live totally within himself.”
This was emphasized over the years by Stewart’s invariably uninflected interviews, in which he studiously avoided the emotional connection he specialized in as an actor. There is little revelation, about him or anybody else. But he wasn’t hiding anything, wasn’t covering up the hidden harbors of a secret life. He simply wasn’t interested in letting the world know what was going on in his head; he was content within himself and with the silence that comes from being alone.
Fonda would talk about his war with a sense of disappointment verging on disgust, but Stewart almost never discussed the subject. His reminiscences were largely reserved for histories of the Eighth Air Force and the 453rd Bomb Group. Years later Stewart’s children would knew only that their father eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve. For him at least, that was enough.
Nine
When he sold his agency, Leland Hayward got an MCA vice presidency, a ten-year employment contract for $100,000 a year, plus half the commissions generated by former Hayward agency clients. Those clients included Myrna Loy, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney, Dorothy McGuire, Ginger Rogers, Clifton Webb, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Boris Karloff, David Niven, Irwin Shaw, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, Dashiell Hammett, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Josh Logan, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart.
Besides that, Hayward was part of the MCA bonus system on all future business. In short, he was guaranteed a yearly income north of $250,000 for sitting by the pool. That his theatrical productions quickly proved successful only added to the geyser of cash.
Hank and Jim were now guided by Lew Wasserman, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant men ever to toil in the Hollywood fields, who would eventually maneuver MCA into purchasing Universal Pictures.
Jack Valenti was later recruited by Wasserman from Lyndon Johnson’s White House to head the Motion Picture Association of America, and his opinion of Wasserman was succinct: “Lew was one of the smartest guys I ever met,” said Valenti. “He also had a sense of prophecy—he saw TV as one of the great marketplaces for movies long before anyone else did. He had a prodigious memory; he could grasp large chunks of diverse material and could call up things faster than a computer. He never wrote a memo. And he surrounded himself with an air of mystery, which made him even more dominant.”
Valenti told Wasserman that he needed to supervise all negotiations with unions and guilds, because he, Valenti, didn’t have the skill or the time.
I remember at one dinner, I said to this burly union guy sitting next to me, “What’s it like to negotiate with Wasserman?” And he said, “He’s the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. But he’s fair. And when Lew Wasserman shakes your hand at the end of a negotiation, you don’t need twenty lawyers and a deal memo. What he told you you’ll get is what you get.”
And that was my experience exactly. Whenever Lew Wasserman made a promise he kept it; whenever he offered a pledge, he redeemed it. He never lied. For over fifty years he had the respect of some of the toughest union bosses in the world.
This was the man who would make James Stewart one of the richest actors in Hollywood. He could have done the same thing for Hank too, but Fonda’s professional priorities were shifting.
• • •
Besides the residual effects of the war, and his professional indecision, Stewart was also in an unfinished state about his emotional life. Olivia de Havilland’s instincts about Margaret Sullavan had been correct—Sullavan would call Jim, and his demeanor would immediately soften, as would his voice. “She really manipulated him, even long-distance,” said Myrna Dell, one of Jim’s postwar girlfriends. “I got the feeling that she’d call him whenever she was in need of a little adoration.”
At Tigertail Road, Fonda again started to grow most of the family’s food. Frances Fonda would wring the neck of a chicken, and the kids learned never to make a pet of a rabbit because sooner or later the rabbit would end up in a pot.
In most respects, Fonda’s culinary tastes were simple. For breakfast, he would fix himself two raw eggs and a can of hash. For the rest of his diet, he tended toward the path of least resistance—steaks and fish. If he was in the mood to cook, he did an excellent job. He could bake ham and turkey perfectly, and carve it perfectly as well.
One weekend, Stewart, John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Ward Bond came to Tigertail Road to help Hank clear out some brush. The men piled up the overgrown grass between the corral and the barn and burned it. Peter watched his father bring out some Idaho potatoes and throw them into the fire. “He knew to the second when to take them out of the fire. Then he peeled the skins off and gave us each one of the potatoes. They were great!”
Sometimes the same group, with the addition of John Ford, would come by the house to play pitch, a cowboy variation on poker. Peter was struck by the extent to which each man was a class act, even Ward Bond, whom Hank called a “beer drunk.”
Fonda had a full complement of orange and apple trees on the property, and would make all manner of juices. Ward Bond would drink a big glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and afterward let out a long gasp of “Aaaahhhhhh!” Peter thought it was a very manly thing to do, and adopted the same trait.
When Peter visited his first film set it was Fort Apache, starring his dad and John Wayne. He remembered the occasion all his life because Wayne personally drove him to the set in his cream-colored convertible with red leather upholstery.
When Fonda drank, which, apart from time on the Araner, wasn’t often—Peter saw his father drunk only once in his life—it was Scotch on the rocks. Like many men of his generation, he seemed to use alcohol to settle his nerves; years later, when he had to tell his son that Margaret Sullavan’s daughter Bridget had committed suicide, he sat Peter down and before he told him said, “Do you want something to drink? I really think you should have something to drink.” He had never said that to his son before, so Peter knew something terrible had happened.
There is a sense that both Fonda and Stewart were biding their time, occupying their minds by trying to recapture the innocent lives they had led before the war. And waiting. Waiting for something to happen, something transformative that would launch them into the next act. But until that happened, there were movies to make.
• • •
By the time the two men were ready to go back to work, Fonda had been off the screen for three years, Stewart for four, a lifetime in a business always focused on the trending, the new. Their initial forays were erratic; Fonda clearly wanted to return to a place and a personality where he felt comfortable: John Ford.
His first movie after the war was in Ford’s take on Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. My Darling Clementine was photographed with Ford’s usual attentive eye for beauty and repose and it happened to be a masterpiece. The film feels as if it was directed by one of its characters—Ford’s rhythm is as laconic as the dialogue. Ford was never so alert to acting subtext, to the pleasures of a physical movement. He constructed shots just to observe Fonda’s walk, which film critic David Thomson described as “like a tranquil hobo used to getting no rides.”
My Darling Clementine contains one of Fonda’s loveliest moments as an actor. Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday is reciting from Hamlet. Fonda is observing Mature out of the corner of his eye with a look that doesn’t seem to be acting, but rather professional interest; he seems genuinely concerned about whether or not Mature will get through the speech. As it happens, Mature does quite well.
The scene where Fonda’s Wyatt Earp leans back in his chair and does a little dosey-do on a post is the ten seconds that everybody remembers about the movie—one of those little moments of actorly grace and movement that get excerpted for documentaries. It was suggested by Ford “in the moment,” said Fonda, slipping into actor’s lingo to talk about the director’s gift for the improvisational gesture. Ford just plucked it out of the air. “As obstinate and perverse as he was, there wasn’t anybody like him,” said Fonda. “He was unique, as a director and as a person.”
My Darling Clementine made a little money and was a critical success as well; Fonda must have felt some kind of confidence about his place in the postwar filmmaking, but then came Ford’s disastrous adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, retitled The Fugitive. Fonda had range, but a Mexican whiskey priest wasn’t in his wheelhouse. The film lost a lot of money, which Ford attempted to recoup by launching into a series of westerns, the first of which, Fort Apache, also featured Fonda and John Wayne.
Ford had an unnerring ability to reveal the internals of his actors, and in Fort Apache he had the audacity to emphasize Fonda’s tightness and lack of emotional resilience. Fonda’s Colonel Owen Thursday is an angry military man who feels he’s been overlooked and underutilized; he gets himself and his command slaughtered for no reason other than ego. It’s a brave performance in a fine film, and it made money, although not enough to make up the losses of The Fugitive.
Flush or broke, Ford was tough. Fort Apache was filmed in Monument Valley, and when they arrived on location, Ford’s production manager looked at the payroll and told Wayne’s and Fonda’s stand-ins that they weren’t making enough money; the normal rate was more than they were down for. He suggested that they go to the stars and have them ask Ford for a raise that would give them parity.
Sid Davis, Wayne’s stand-in, asked Wayne about it, and the star turned pale. He was terrified of Ford and wasn’t about to say or do anything that might irritate the irascible director. Wayne told Davis he’d make up the difference out of his own pocket. Charles Bidwell, Fonda’s stand-in, asked Fonda if he would talk to Ford about a raise. “No dice,” he said.
Bidwell had gotten to know Mary Ford through her work running the kitchen at the Hollywood Canteen during the war, so he went to see her when they got back to Hollywood. The next working day, Ford came on the set, walked past Bidwell, then stopped and turned. “You’ve got your raise,” he said.
Fort Apache can be viewed as Ford’s comparative analysis of his two favorite leading men. Wayne’s Kirby York is of a piece with his other performances in Ford’s films: earthy, somewhat touchy, a brawler by instinct tempered only by discipline, capable of a gentle love as well as rage. Fonda’s Owen Thursday burns with a cold fire—there is strength there, but it is removed, abstracted, rather asexual, deriving from the actor’s instinctive austerity.
Thursday is doomed, not so much because he loathes Apaches, but because he doesn’t listen, because he arrogantly attempts to impose his version of reality on an intransigent natural world far removed from his Eastern verities. Ford heroes played by Wayne are never so vain as to attempt to bend the world to their will, preferring either an easy, mutual understanding or a proud exile—a function of Wayne’s expansive spirit and underlying humor.
Fonda’s stiff walk works against the flow of life around him. In Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, or My Darling Clementine, the walk translates as integrity; in Fort Apache, it translates as the tragic inhumanity of a martinet.
Two classics out of three attempts is a great average for any actor, but Fonda’s road back was undermined by other disappointments: Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon and Anatole Litvak’s terrible remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Lève, retitled The Long Night.
Stewart’s first film back was Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, beloved in retrospect, but a disappointment in 1946. “I’d had no job offers,” Stewart remembered. According to Stewart, he and Fonda had been malingering for seven months, and just about all they had to show for it was some model planes, some kites, and a lot of playtime with Peter and Jane. “I didn’t do anything . . . except go to parties, drink cold tea and talk big,” he told Louella Parsons.
Actually, Frank Capra had first contacted Stewart about the picture in October 1945, even though it didn’t start shooting until April 15 of the following year, or just about seven months after Stewart got back to Hollywood.
Capra invited Stewart to a meeting, and told him the plot: “The story starts in heaven. This guy’s having a hard time and decides to commit suicide. And an angel comes down and says, ‘Are you gonna jump off the bridge?’ The angel saves the man. The angel doesn’t have his wings yet.”
Capra paused. “This story doesn’t tell very well, does it?”
Capra’s notes of the meeting are harrowing: “Wasserman present in [Capra’s partner Sam] Briskin’s apartment. As I tell story, it evaporates into thin air. Tell Stewart to forget it. Wasserman dying . . .”
“I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” Stewart said “But he went on and on and it just grew on me.” Capra kept going and Stewart wasn’t discouraged. Finally he said, “Frank, if you want to make a movie about a fella who wants to commit suicide and an angel with no wings, I’m your boy!”
The only other actor Capra had actively considered for the part of George Bailey was Fonda, but Stewart was his first choice because of the great films they had made before the war. Stewart signed his contract on November 5, 1945.
Actor’s contracts are only occasionally interesting, but this one is different. For one thing, Stewart insisted on a clause specifying no publicity or exploitation of any kind about his war record. For another, there was the matter of profit participation.
The conventional narrative about Stewart’s career asserts that he was the first Hollywood star to earn a percentage of the profits when he signed to make Winchester ’73. But as documents in Capra’s papers prove, Lew Wasserman quickly proved his worth when he negotiated 10 percent of the “Producer’s Gross Receipts” of It’s a Wonderful Life for his client. Stewart’s base pay was set at $162,000. Since the picture ended up grossing approximately $4.40 million worldwide, after deducting RKO’s distribution fee, Stewart’s base salary, print and advertising costs, and some other minor expenses, Stewart received an additional $173,000 as his piece of the gross.
This deal was stunning in its implications for the future of Hollywood, simply because for what might well have been the first time in a movie for which the star had no production responsibilities, that star received a piece of the gross, not the net. Since net is by definition highly elastic, net percentages were as often illusion as reality. Stewart collected because the contractual definition was specific and airtight. Gross percentage meant that the star made money even if the picture failed commercially. (As of July 2, 1947, It’s a Wonderful Life had a net loss of about $392,000.)
Like millions of other returning veterans of the war, Stewart remembered that he was emotionally exhausted and professionally unsure. “I felt when I got back to pictures that I had lost all sense of judgment,” said Stewart. “I couldn’t tell if I was good or bad. I mean in a given scene. Usually, you can tell what is the right thing to do when you’re acting. But I couldn’t. I was uncertain.”
Capra couldn’t help but be aware of Stewart’s struggles; he had been away from Hollywood for four years himself. Jim told his director that “he thought maybe being an actor was not for decent people. That acting had become silly, unimportant next to what he’d seen [in the war]. He said he thought he’d do this picture and quit.”
