Devin McKinney's "The Man Who Saw A Ghost: The Life And Work Of Henry Fonda"...
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1Michael_Welch
There was a book at a Tempe independent I've been eyeing since last winter, "The Man Who Saw A Ghost: The Life And Work Of Henry Fonda" by Devin McKinney who has written about the Beatles and writes for tonier magazines like The Village Voice and Film Quarterly.
Every time I stopped to look around this book in its trade paperback form would be there but the price (for a poor man) was prohibitive but finally last week I got it with a discount card; it was as if it waited for me all those months, saying "I'm for YOU!"
It is. McKinney presents Fonda's life more or less chronologically but he "riffs" on its events and on Fonda's filmography somewhat in the way Norman Mailer would do in his "nonfiction" writing, plus there are great photos with some hilarious (to me) and revealing captions.
Fonda may be known today, if many non movie mavens do, by films such as "Young Mr Lincoln," "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Lady Eve," "The Ox Bow Incident," "Mister Roberts," "12 Angry Men," "Warlock," "Fail Safe" and "Once Upon a Time in the West." He was nominated for best actor several times but won only for his last picture, with his daughter Jane and Katharine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond" in 1981. He died shortly after.
Fonda's life was full of its own inner "dramas," even tragedies (two of his ex wives eventually committed suicide), and some absurdities but of course I became quite interested in the chapter dealing with his political attitudes.
With say his friend James Stewart, John Wayne (once a friend too), Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and some others you might name, Fonda was an "icon" of the "Americana" movie, not a super patriotic piece necessarily but an attempt to penetrate the essentials of the American character, its virtues and contradictions.
And all of the above were "Republicans" generally save Fonda, a liberal not a "leftist" but with lefty implications during the depression thirties. Fonda even supported Eisenhower for prez initially in 1952 but in the course of the campaign became dissatisfied with Ike's somewhat "indulgent" manner with Joe McCarthy and his ilk so switched to Adlai Stevenson mid campaign, along with other eminences like John Steinbeck, Edna Ferber and Oscar Hammerstein.
McKinney has this explanatory section re the politics of post WWII USA that I find particularly apt and I'll excerpt some of it (McKinney oft uses the present tense; it works):
"McCarthy is right: There are spies inside the US government. Definitive or at least credible cases have been made...{b}ut the powerful {communist} spy rings of the 1930s and 1940s are defunct well before the height of the red scare and many quondam communists, fellow travelers, weekend pinkos and all American rabble rousers are snagged in the net of the great McCarthy and HUAC {i. e., the House Committee on Un-American Activities, usually known as the "House Un-American Activities Committee," hence "HUAC"} fishing expeditions.
"Even Ronald Reagan will admit, long after his conservative conversion, that in these years 'many fine people were accused wrongly of being communists simply because they were liberals.'...
"In October 1947 HUAC...schedules hearings on communism in Hollywood. In support is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals led by John Wayne {and his often co star and best buddy actor Ward Bond}. Among the committee's 'friendly witnesses' is Reagan {also Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Ayn Rand, then a scriptwriter, and Jack Warner, scion of Warner Bros.}, head of the Screen Actors Guild and -- along with his then wife actress Jane Wyman -- an FBI informant on commie scuttlebutt.
"Meanwhile industry left leaners, branding themselves the Committee for the First Amendment, establish a presence at the Washington hearings in the form of a delegation led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and John Huston {but which does NOT include Henry Fonda}.
"The hearings are dominated by the testimony of the Hollywood Ten -- a group of screenwriters {and one director, Edward Dmytryk} hostile to HUAC. Among them is John Howard Lawson, one of the few openly communist writers in Hollywood and author of the Fonda-{produced by Walter}Wanger {film based upon the Spanish civil war} "Blockade"{1938}.
"Lawson's appearance while courageous is also arch and self righteous; refusing to answer questions, he lectures. Ultimately he is escorted from the dock by police. The next day's witness is Dalton Trumbo who is likewise charged with contempt and {eventually, like all the "Ten"} jailed.
"Trumbo explains the refusal of the screenwriters to answer questions: 'The accused men made their stand before the committee to reestablish their right to privacy, not only in law but in fact.' But many feel that such intransigence has only made HUAC's job easier. 'It was a sorry performance' says {director} John Huston of the Hollywood Ten testimony. 'They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle.'" (pp 221-222)...
Every time I stopped to look around this book in its trade paperback form would be there but the price (for a poor man) was prohibitive but finally last week I got it with a discount card; it was as if it waited for me all those months, saying "I'm for YOU!"
It is. McKinney presents Fonda's life more or less chronologically but he "riffs" on its events and on Fonda's filmography somewhat in the way Norman Mailer would do in his "nonfiction" writing, plus there are great photos with some hilarious (to me) and revealing captions.
Fonda may be known today, if many non movie mavens do, by films such as "Young Mr Lincoln," "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Lady Eve," "The Ox Bow Incident," "Mister Roberts," "12 Angry Men," "Warlock," "Fail Safe" and "Once Upon a Time in the West." He was nominated for best actor several times but won only for his last picture, with his daughter Jane and Katharine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond" in 1981. He died shortly after.
Fonda's life was full of its own inner "dramas," even tragedies (two of his ex wives eventually committed suicide), and some absurdities but of course I became quite interested in the chapter dealing with his political attitudes.
With say his friend James Stewart, John Wayne (once a friend too), Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and some others you might name, Fonda was an "icon" of the "Americana" movie, not a super patriotic piece necessarily but an attempt to penetrate the essentials of the American character, its virtues and contradictions.
And all of the above were "Republicans" generally save Fonda, a liberal not a "leftist" but with lefty implications during the depression thirties. Fonda even supported Eisenhower for prez initially in 1952 but in the course of the campaign became dissatisfied with Ike's somewhat "indulgent" manner with Joe McCarthy and his ilk so switched to Adlai Stevenson mid campaign, along with other eminences like John Steinbeck, Edna Ferber and Oscar Hammerstein.
McKinney has this explanatory section re the politics of post WWII USA that I find particularly apt and I'll excerpt some of it (McKinney oft uses the present tense; it works):
"McCarthy is right: There are spies inside the US government. Definitive or at least credible cases have been made...{b}ut the powerful {communist} spy rings of the 1930s and 1940s are defunct well before the height of the red scare and many quondam communists, fellow travelers, weekend pinkos and all American rabble rousers are snagged in the net of the great McCarthy and HUAC {i. e., the House Committee on Un-American Activities, usually known as the "House Un-American Activities Committee," hence "HUAC"} fishing expeditions.
"Even Ronald Reagan will admit, long after his conservative conversion, that in these years 'many fine people were accused wrongly of being communists simply because they were liberals.'...
"In October 1947 HUAC...schedules hearings on communism in Hollywood. In support is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals led by John Wayne {and his often co star and best buddy actor Ward Bond}. Among the committee's 'friendly witnesses' is Reagan {also Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Ayn Rand, then a scriptwriter, and Jack Warner, scion of Warner Bros.}, head of the Screen Actors Guild and -- along with his then wife actress Jane Wyman -- an FBI informant on commie scuttlebutt.
"Meanwhile industry left leaners, branding themselves the Committee for the First Amendment, establish a presence at the Washington hearings in the form of a delegation led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and John Huston {but which does NOT include Henry Fonda}.
"The hearings are dominated by the testimony of the Hollywood Ten -- a group of screenwriters {and one director, Edward Dmytryk} hostile to HUAC. Among them is John Howard Lawson, one of the few openly communist writers in Hollywood and author of the Fonda-{produced by Walter}Wanger {film based upon the Spanish civil war} "Blockade"{1938}.
"Lawson's appearance while courageous is also arch and self righteous; refusing to answer questions, he lectures. Ultimately he is escorted from the dock by police. The next day's witness is Dalton Trumbo who is likewise charged with contempt and {eventually, like all the "Ten"} jailed.
"Trumbo explains the refusal of the screenwriters to answer questions: 'The accused men made their stand before the committee to reestablish their right to privacy, not only in law but in fact.' But many feel that such intransigence has only made HUAC's job easier. 'It was a sorry performance' says {director} John Huston of the Hollywood Ten testimony. 'They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle.'" (pp 221-222)...
2Michael_Welch
Another interesting point McKinney makes about Hollywood politics in that post war era has to do with the rise of Richard Nixon, initially a member of the house from southern California and made "famous" by his association with the most successful "anti communist" case, that of former FDR state department official Alger Hiss.
Hiss' testimony before HUAC was undermined by that of former admitted communist spy Whittaker Chambers in close association with Nixon; later Hiss was convicted not of espionage but of perjury in denying he ever knew Chambers.
In 1950 Nixon decided to take advantage of his new notoriety to run for the senate. The main Democratic aspirant was Helen Gahagan Douglas, once an opera singer and movie actress married to Melvyn Douglas, a popular film actor of the time. She had represented the liberal 14th district since 1945.
California Democrats wanted her to wait until 1952 when the Democratic incumbent Sheridan Downey was scheduled to retire but she insisted on running in '50 and defeated in the primary the Demo establishment candidate, thereby alienating part of the Demo base and causing Downey to endorse Nixon.
McKinney:
"A tight team of Republican schemers did the rest. In a symphony of smear orchestrated by {Nixon} campaign manager Murray Chotiner but played to the hilt by Nixon, Gahagan was dubbed 'the Pink Lady.' Anti Gahagan flyers were printed on pink paper; voters received anonymous phone calls whispering of un-American associations. The campaign was an innovation in character assassination, the linking of vagaries in a chain of fear connecting the voting booth to the chambers of foreign power.
"Nixon defeated Gahagan and the 1950 race made history. It was not the first political contest to pivot on the threat of cultural war between the liberal powers of Hollywood and the interests of the American majority; nor was it the first race to be won on charges of disloyalty. But it took these stances and the tactics they entailed to new levels of audacity -- Nixon's passion as he shouted the slanders, his leveraging of lofty progressive ideals as weapons against themselves, his persona combining the attack dog and the grieving mutt.
"The maw of conservative backlash opened to vomit up a new age of malice. Nixon's aura would overhang, underlie and finally enshroud every other movement of the post war period: Every important American development seemed to react against or quail beneath the darkness released in those early years of HUAC and Helen Gahagan. It is the defeated 'Pink Lady' who tagged Nixon with his most enduring nickname: 'Tricky Dick.'...
"In his last interview Henry Fonda will say he has hated Nixon ever since the annihilation of Helen Gahagan Douglas. 'Such fuckin' lies' Fonda mutters as if disbelieving still the phenomena of a man like Nixon." (pp 227-228)...
Hiss' testimony before HUAC was undermined by that of former admitted communist spy Whittaker Chambers in close association with Nixon; later Hiss was convicted not of espionage but of perjury in denying he ever knew Chambers.
In 1950 Nixon decided to take advantage of his new notoriety to run for the senate. The main Democratic aspirant was Helen Gahagan Douglas, once an opera singer and movie actress married to Melvyn Douglas, a popular film actor of the time. She had represented the liberal 14th district since 1945.
California Democrats wanted her to wait until 1952 when the Democratic incumbent Sheridan Downey was scheduled to retire but she insisted on running in '50 and defeated in the primary the Demo establishment candidate, thereby alienating part of the Demo base and causing Downey to endorse Nixon.
McKinney:
"A tight team of Republican schemers did the rest. In a symphony of smear orchestrated by {Nixon} campaign manager Murray Chotiner but played to the hilt by Nixon, Gahagan was dubbed 'the Pink Lady.' Anti Gahagan flyers were printed on pink paper; voters received anonymous phone calls whispering of un-American associations. The campaign was an innovation in character assassination, the linking of vagaries in a chain of fear connecting the voting booth to the chambers of foreign power.
"Nixon defeated Gahagan and the 1950 race made history. It was not the first political contest to pivot on the threat of cultural war between the liberal powers of Hollywood and the interests of the American majority; nor was it the first race to be won on charges of disloyalty. But it took these stances and the tactics they entailed to new levels of audacity -- Nixon's passion as he shouted the slanders, his leveraging of lofty progressive ideals as weapons against themselves, his persona combining the attack dog and the grieving mutt.
"The maw of conservative backlash opened to vomit up a new age of malice. Nixon's aura would overhang, underlie and finally enshroud every other movement of the post war period: Every important American development seemed to react against or quail beneath the darkness released in those early years of HUAC and Helen Gahagan. It is the defeated 'Pink Lady' who tagged Nixon with his most enduring nickname: 'Tricky Dick.'...
"In his last interview Henry Fonda will say he has hated Nixon ever since the annihilation of Helen Gahagan Douglas. 'Such fuckin' lies' Fonda mutters as if disbelieving still the phenomena of a man like Nixon." (pp 227-228)...
3Michael_Welch
Some ironies re "Nixon and Fonda" from McKinney:
"In 'Nixon at the Movies' Mark Feeney writes that Fonda 'can be seen as an almost metaphysical epitome of the anti Nixon: light against dark, scruple against grasp, secular grace against secular sin.' Yet at the same time he incarnates a Nixon stance in spite of himself. 'What makes Fonda the supreme liberal icon of the screen isn't the fineness of his intelligence, the finickiness of his bearing or even the unique ineffability of that faraway gaze.... No it's that he's happiest, or at least more gratified, when his cause is lost. Nothing could be more Nixonian.'
"Both Fonda and Nixon were raised in sectarian churches -- Christian Science {Fonda} and Quakerism {Nixon} -- that emphasized austerity, servitude, repression. Both served in the navy in World War II, stationed on Pacific vessels, working in tandem with the air force. (Feeney quotes a navy friend of Nixon's: 'If you ever saw Henry Fonda in "Mister Roberts" you have a pretty good idea what Dick was like.')
"Both are gifted with superhuman control yet are capable of flagrant and dramatic outbursts. Emotional chaos is suppressed, released indirectly and often destructively as inner mechanisms work overtime to channel the psychic overload.
"From there though the two fork as radically as lightning bolts. Out of Fonda's darkness comes empathy. Even his loners and killers are men with the capacity and compulsion to feel others' suffering; the drama lies in their transformation by this awareness. Out of Nixon's darkness comes a vision of vengefulness, of others being made to suffer. Payback is the true drama of the great noir candidate; as John Erlichman (J. T. Walsh) says in Oliver Stone's {film} 'Nixon,' at the apex of the Vietnam war: 'We've got people dying because he didn't make the varsity football team.'" (pp 228-229)...
"In 'Nixon at the Movies' Mark Feeney writes that Fonda 'can be seen as an almost metaphysical epitome of the anti Nixon: light against dark, scruple against grasp, secular grace against secular sin.' Yet at the same time he incarnates a Nixon stance in spite of himself. 'What makes Fonda the supreme liberal icon of the screen isn't the fineness of his intelligence, the finickiness of his bearing or even the unique ineffability of that faraway gaze.... No it's that he's happiest, or at least more gratified, when his cause is lost. Nothing could be more Nixonian.'
"Both Fonda and Nixon were raised in sectarian churches -- Christian Science {Fonda} and Quakerism {Nixon} -- that emphasized austerity, servitude, repression. Both served in the navy in World War II, stationed on Pacific vessels, working in tandem with the air force. (Feeney quotes a navy friend of Nixon's: 'If you ever saw Henry Fonda in "Mister Roberts" you have a pretty good idea what Dick was like.')
"Both are gifted with superhuman control yet are capable of flagrant and dramatic outbursts. Emotional chaos is suppressed, released indirectly and often destructively as inner mechanisms work overtime to channel the psychic overload.
"From there though the two fork as radically as lightning bolts. Out of Fonda's darkness comes empathy. Even his loners and killers are men with the capacity and compulsion to feel others' suffering; the drama lies in their transformation by this awareness. Out of Nixon's darkness comes a vision of vengefulness, of others being made to suffer. Payback is the true drama of the great noir candidate; as John Erlichman (J. T. Walsh) says in Oliver Stone's {film} 'Nixon,' at the apex of the Vietnam war: 'We've got people dying because he didn't make the varsity football team.'" (pp 228-229)...
5Michael_Welch
Thank you! I'm glad someone found it so!...
6RickHarsch
The problem here, Michael, is those who simply like what you do are mostly silent, I think. you know I always like your efforts.
7Michael_Welch
I appreciate that; as you probably discern "I write for myself" mainly (as I think you do) and of course am pleased if anyone else finds what I write interesting.
Naturally I like a response but I don't judge everyone by that -- after all Fonda is LONG AGO and FAR AWAY for many and even his daughter Jane is, except for pathological Vietnam vets its seems.
Me, I'd like to rename the "infamous" Phoenix VA hospital "The JANE FONDA Veterans' Hospital" -- how 'bout that?! (By the way I'm one -- of many apparently -- waiting for MY appointment...)
Naturally I like a response but I don't judge everyone by that -- after all Fonda is LONG AGO and FAR AWAY for many and even his daughter Jane is, except for pathological Vietnam vets its seems.
Me, I'd like to rename the "infamous" Phoenix VA hospital "The JANE FONDA Veterans' Hospital" -- how 'bout that?! (By the way I'm one -- of many apparently -- waiting for MY appointment...)
