The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney
Book: The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney
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Authors: Devin McKinney
Tags: Reference, Humor & Entertainment, Biographies, Biographies & Memoirs, Movies, Arts & Literature, Actors & Entertainers, Actors & Actresses
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muscle, Fonda is next cast as a brainless boxer in a sporting comedy, Is Zat So? At this, he does better: Young Henry is gifted at embodying subverbal man-beasts. In improvisation with Logan, he even transforms himself into ten-year-old Elmer, a small boy who mimics fish and birds.
Henry is also in touch with his darker aspects. Though popular and convivial, he shows an innate seriousness and a tendency to stormy moods. In Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound, he incarnates a dead man adrift in the afterlife. “Several years ago in a New York theatre,” writes the Falmouth reviewer, “when Alfred Lunt found himself aboard a ghost ship outward bound for heaven or hell, he cast over his audience an eerie spell which we thought could never be repeated. But Henry Fonda repeated that experience for us in his excellent interpretation of the same role in the same play.”
A key lesson in Fonda’s creative education comes when he reprises his hometown success, Merton of the Movies . “[N]ow he was aware,” stage manager and set designer Norris Houghton writes, “of the presence of the audience and its response to him, of which he had had no consciousness in Omaha.” As Fonda is less Merton, he is more himself embodying Merton in a self-aware process—mastering the actor’s ability to distance himself from the action so as to achieve control over character and affect, while each time believing in the act sufficiently to appear spontaneous. Fonda was “learning the technique of acting without realizing it … learning for himself such elements of what is known in the ‘Stanislavsky System of acting’ as ‘emotion memory.’”
For these summer months, Fonda eats well, sleeps well, lives and laughs in camaraderie. The rest of the year is hard. There are jobs here and there. Charlie Leatherbee, in the off-season a stage manager for the prestigious Theatre Guild, gets Fonda a bit in Romain Rolland’s The Game of Love and Death, filling space behind stars Claude Rains and Alice Brady. The show, which opens November 25, 1929, is, in hindsight, an event of some moment—Henry Fonda’s Broadway debut—but its run is short.
He spends the winter months of 1928–1929 and 1930–1931 in Washington, D.C., as a dance pantomimist with the National Junior Theatre, a troupe that performs for children. In March 1930, he returns to Omaha to star in a Community Playhouse production of A Kiss for Cinderella . This is the young actor’s life—rejection, retrenchment, scrambling for lines and bits; winters in the cold mazes of Manhattan, sleeping on other people’s divans, haunting casting offices and coffee shops.
He leaves Famouth, finally, in early 1932. The company has one more summer of repertory, after which it will cease to exist in its original form. It will mutate into something called the Theatre Unit, then into Stage Associates, a cooperative of producers and actors whose aim, as of January 1935, is to bring to Broadway “stimulating plays in the most professionally competent manner and with the most efficiency.” Among the Stage Associates are Falmouth veterans Fonda, Logan, Houghton, and Leatherbee, as well as James Stewart, Mildred Natwick, Burgess Meredith, and Aleta Freel, wife of Fonda’s close friend, actor Ross Alexander.
But Stage Associates is another sweet ideal in a time full of them. Leading light Charlie Leatherbee will die later in 1935, at the age of twenty-seven. A year after that, fire will destroy the theater he, Logan, Fonda, and the others built.
By then, Henry is in Hollywood, nearly a star. But the Falmouth years are the most constructive of his theatrical life—a workshop, with himself as the project. He hammers sets and constructs the frame of an identity; makes lifelong friends, tastes freedoms, tries the limits of his voice and body. Seasoning himself in the safety of a community, he stocks memories of great nights on the boards, love in the dunes, theater in the sun.
* * *
And a
Henry is also in touch with his darker aspects. Though popular and convivial, he shows an innate seriousness and a tendency to stormy moods. In Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound, he incarnates a dead man adrift in the afterlife. “Several years ago in a New York theatre,” writes the Falmouth reviewer, “when Alfred Lunt found himself aboard a ghost ship outward bound for heaven or hell, he cast over his audience an eerie spell which we thought could never be repeated. But Henry Fonda repeated that experience for us in his excellent interpretation of the same role in the same play.”
A key lesson in Fonda’s creative education comes when he reprises his hometown success, Merton of the Movies . “[N]ow he was aware,” stage manager and set designer Norris Houghton writes, “of the presence of the audience and its response to him, of which he had had no consciousness in Omaha.” As Fonda is less Merton, he is more himself embodying Merton in a self-aware process—mastering the actor’s ability to distance himself from the action so as to achieve control over character and affect, while each time believing in the act sufficiently to appear spontaneous. Fonda was “learning the technique of acting without realizing it … learning for himself such elements of what is known in the ‘Stanislavsky System of acting’ as ‘emotion memory.’”
For these summer months, Fonda eats well, sleeps well, lives and laughs in camaraderie. The rest of the year is hard. There are jobs here and there. Charlie Leatherbee, in the off-season a stage manager for the prestigious Theatre Guild, gets Fonda a bit in Romain Rolland’s The Game of Love and Death, filling space behind stars Claude Rains and Alice Brady. The show, which opens November 25, 1929, is, in hindsight, an event of some moment—Henry Fonda’s Broadway debut—but its run is short.
He spends the winter months of 1928–1929 and 1930–1931 in Washington, D.C., as a dance pantomimist with the National Junior Theatre, a troupe that performs for children. In March 1930, he returns to Omaha to star in a Community Playhouse production of A Kiss for Cinderella . This is the young actor’s life—rejection, retrenchment, scrambling for lines and bits; winters in the cold mazes of Manhattan, sleeping on other people’s divans, haunting casting offices and coffee shops.
He leaves Famouth, finally, in early 1932. The company has one more summer of repertory, after which it will cease to exist in its original form. It will mutate into something called the Theatre Unit, then into Stage Associates, a cooperative of producers and actors whose aim, as of January 1935, is to bring to Broadway “stimulating plays in the most professionally competent manner and with the most efficiency.” Among the Stage Associates are Falmouth veterans Fonda, Logan, Houghton, and Leatherbee, as well as James Stewart, Mildred Natwick, Burgess Meredith, and Aleta Freel, wife of Fonda’s close friend, actor Ross Alexander.
But Stage Associates is another sweet ideal in a time full of them. Leading light Charlie Leatherbee will die later in 1935, at the age of twenty-seven. A year after that, fire will destroy the theater he, Logan, Fonda, and the others built.
By then, Henry is in Hollywood, nearly a star. But the Falmouth years are the most constructive of his theatrical life—a workshop, with himself as the project. He hammers sets and constructs the frame of an identity; makes lifelong friends, tastes freedoms, tries the limits of his voice and body. Seasoning himself in the safety of a community, he stocks memories of great nights on the boards, love in the dunes, theater in the sun.
* * *
And a
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