The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (4 page)

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Fonda
, from the Latin, means “foundation” or “base.” It is also the name of a valley in the Apennines, near Genoa, where the family’s origins lie. There was at least one troublemaker back along the line: In the fourteenth century, the marquis de Fonda was chased out of Italy under ambiguous circumstances. In
Early American Families
(1916), the Reverend William Asbury Williams claimed the marquis “was one of the leaders of a revolution in Genoa, having for its object the overturning of the aristocratic government, and putting the election of the Doge [chief magistrate] and Senate, into the hands of the people at large.” The marquis is described as “an early republican.”

He and his family fled to Amsterdam. There they intermarried with the Dutch, and were assimilated into the Dutch Reformed Church. This Protestant branch, rooted in Calvinism, proclaimed humanity’s inherent depravity and placed salvation at the sole discretion of a capricious God, irrespective of any good works or repentant acts. A tense way to live, but for the Fondas it became ordinary life over several generations. Then, as the Dutch Reform movement grew in the wake of Luther’s challenge to Roman Catholic hegemony, its adherents were subject to all manner of papist persecution. Again, panic and flight.

This time, all the way to the New World. Jellis Douw Fonda was the first of his line to lay eyes on North America. Henry placed his forebear’s arrival in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York at around 1628—though it was probably closer to midcentury, since Jellis’s only son, Douw Jellis, is recorded as having been born in Amsterdam in 1641. This son fathered nine children and became the ancestor of all American Fondas.

In 1751, Jellis’s great-grandson, Douw Jellis (stingy with names, these people) decamped from Schenectady to settle at a site called Caughnawaga—Iroquois for “on the rapids”—between the Mohawk River and the foot of the Adirondacks. He purchased many acres and grew very wealthy. Several children were raised, two wives loved, lost, and mourned. Douw settled in for his twilight years as a squire, respected and comfortable.

But by then the Revolution had begun, and war found Douw in his rural fastness. Sir John Johnson, British Loyalist and son of the superintendent of Indian Affairs, commanded a brigade of Crown-serving Iroquois. In May 1780, as Johnson’s armies campaigned to regain the Mohawk Valley for George III, immigrants, colonists, and Indians friendly to either side were massacred, and the land torched. Among the dead lay Douw Fonda—mutilated, according to accounts, by a Mohawk named One-Armed Peter. It is remarked by one source that “venerable old David [
sic
] Fonda was killed and scalped by an Indian party … [and] cut in several parts of his head with a tomahawk.”

A Fonda family historian records that Douw’s “house was plundered and burned,” and that although he “had always been on good terms with the Indians … his life was taken as ‘heartlessly’ as though he were an active enemy. He was seventy-nine years old.” He was buried in a local graveyard, with other casualties of the War of Independence. Caughnawaga was later renamed Fonda in Douw’s honor.

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Some eight decades hence, shots were fired on Fort Sumter, and a new war was on. Henry’s grandfather, Ten Eyck Hilton Fonda—born in his family’s namesake village in 1838, and nicknamed “Nike”—volunteered for the Union army and was made a telegrapher. In this capacity, he helped turn the course of history. “At midnight June 30, 1863,” ran a newspaper report fifty years later, Ten Eyck “personally delivered the telegram transcription from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to General George Meade of the Union Army warning him of the advancing Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee toward Gettysburg and commanding Meade to assume the offensive. Fonda is credited with delivering this important warning, which allowed the Union armies to prepare for the approaching Confederates.”

In a letter to his brother, scribbled on telegraph blanks on the Independence Day after his ride, Henry’s grandfather wrote, “I had orders to spare nothing, horseflesh and money was of no account if I would only deliver the message. I tell you I made the old horse get.”

How does a man go from that to being a ticket agent on the New York Central Railroad? We can guess that, like many a veteran, Ten Eyck sought in the hole-punching regularity of his unvarying job an escape from violence. Imagine a man who has sped through the night, confident that his failure to do his job means thousands on his own side dead. Imagine his special peace when the victory is, in small and secret part, his alone. He must breathe every breath feeling justified; must feel he can take the rest of his life slowly.

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Take it slowly, and see some of the country “out there.” In 1869, the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad was completed, connecting the markets of Chicago and Omaha on a route through southern Iowa. Ten Eyck moved his family from the New York valley the Fondas had helped settle more than two centuries before, and took a telegrapher’s job in Omaha. His fourth child, William Brace—Henry’s father—was born there in 1879.

William married a local girl, Herberta Lamphear Jaynes, in July 1903. They began to plan a family, and by the time evolution and event, travel and tumult had done their work to achieve the Fondas of Omaha, they were, as a friend called them, “ordinary American people.” Mainstreamers, with little or no Italian seasoning left, the harsh Calvinism as much a psychological disposition as a spiritual inheritance. Trade Dutch Reformed for Christian Science, Colonial buckles for sensible buttons, and the change was all but complete. Out of Europe, America; out of defiance, rectitude; out of many, one.

But nothing is really forgotten. Family fears come down through generations and settle in the minds of the young. Something of those ancestral troublemakers and frightened runners came down to Henry, even through centuries of migration and assimilation, of ethnic meltdown, of submission to snow and cold as the Fondas forged westward to their latest settling point, far on the plains of Nebraska.

Is the settler ever truly settled? Looking at Henry, we would have to say no.

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Fonda’s second picture,
Way Down East
(1935)—based on a play first filmed by D. W. Griffith in 1920—is situated, like
The Farmer Takes a Wife,
in a bucolic niche of mid-nineteenth-century New England countryside and is likewise a grand opera for Middle America: broad jokes, narrow rescues, happy harvests. Familiar players make a community of comic stereotypes, a heartland village set in the movie mind of another time.

Fonda is the community’s straight man, its spokesman for “human kindness” against “self-righteous bigotry” (his character uses those words). Everyone else flies over the top, leaving only Henry to speak slowly, act seemly, and plant his feet on the earth. He’s first spotted, as he was last seen in
The Farmer,
at one with the land—guiding a horse team and thresher across a picturesque piece of farmland. Even when interacting, he is a private person, with a slightly dissociated quality; even in his youth, he is graver than the old men around him.

And even in a paltry movie, he cuts an amazing image. He is an American out of frontier storybooks, worthy of paintings, who yet stands apart from the community that looks to him to find its ideal.

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Say “Nebraska,” and most Americans think of a rectangle somewhere in the middle of the map. In the early nineteenth century, when American Indians lived there, it was a vast prairie with unsettled borders. When California gold was found in the 1840s, wagons came through in such numbers as to carve ruts in the ground; upon these, the pioneer trails were established.

Nebraska was almost the precise midpoint of the continent, heart of the heart of the country, and the “great highway” of westward migration passed right through it. Its major arteries were the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails—collectively, the Great Platte River Road, a corridor running along either side of the Platte River through its namesake valley.
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The estimate is that some 350,000 passed through in the years between 1841 and 1866.

The adventurers suffered from hunger and the elements on their journey west, and there was no reason for them to come but one: the promised land. That meant California, Nevada, Utah. It didn’t mean Nebraska. Glory was found in the Far West; misery and death stayed in the heart of the country. Between 1842 and 1859, an estimated thirty thousand people died along the Platte River Road from exhaustion, malnutrition, cholera, wasting. At first, the departed were buried decently, with orations and prayers. Then deaths grew too common and burials too arduous. Some left the bodies of their dead in shallow graves; others “simply abandoned hopeless cases by the roadside.”

These immigrants took almost nothing from the land as they passed through, because the land had almost nothing to give to those unwilling to settle on it. If they left anything, it was their belongings, their bones, and the crosses marking their graves—ten graves, it’s believed, for each mile of the trail west.

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Not long after Henry Fonda was born, so was “the Middle West”—the term and the idea.

The myth of the Middle West was built upon those abandoned bones and lonesome crosses. The myth reaches back to the founding of the country, and something called “the pastoral ideal.” Thomas Jefferson had emphasized the agrarian above all sectors of society; “he believed deeply,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “that rural living and rural people are the wellspring of civic virtue and individual vitality, that farmers are the best social base of a democratic republic.” By “farmers,” Jefferson meant a landed elite, men who were educated and owned slaves. But he also meant farmers: men whose lives depended upon the dirt.

Long ago, the ideal turned to myth, and like all myths it served a psychological necessity. James R. Shortridge describes this as “a general need for Americans to regionalize—that is, compartmentalize—national myths in order to avoid a confrontation with the contradictions inherent in these myths.” Though increasingly cracked by reality (urbanization in villages and industrialization in cities; decimation of the Indians; oppression of blacks and immigrants), the myth of rural purity thrived in the popular mind. As America entered the twentieth century, with much violence to be forgotten and much money to be made, it was in the national interest to preserve, by unspoken consensus, a locus of moral propriety, political conservatism, and natural bounty.

Thus was the Middle West born: a state of mind, a definition of patriotic character. “This is America uncontaminated,” John Gunther could write of the heartland as late as the mid-1940s. “Here sounds the most spontaneous natural note in the nation.” Or as Garry Wills has written more recently, “To curse a farm is like desecrating the flag.”

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As Dave Tolliver, upholder of a feud between Kentucky hill clans in
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
(1936), Fonda is a watcher, and a mean son of a bitch. A Louisville engineer (Fred MacMurray) has come to mark coal mines and plot railroad lines; from start to finish, Dave looks at the city slicker with nothing but hatred. Fonda puts his sharp profile to the camera, keeps his shoulders back, and pierces the screen with burning blue eyes.

Yet the film as a whole—the first ever to be shot outdoors in three-strip Technicolor—is of great pastel prettiness, and the odd scene will show unrepentant Dave Tolliver as a jovial, whistling country boy. Proving two things: that Henry goes vacant-faced and mechanical when asked to be jovial; and that the suicidal tribalism of our native communities is nothing a pretty piece of Americana can’t whistle away.

The term
Americana
describes works embodying a nostalgic sense of what the country once was, or ought to have been, in some pellucid past.
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
idealizes a rustic life while welcoming brutal machinery. Americana is another species of myth, directed at suppressing rather than expressing contradiction, and here the contradiction lies in all that will come with the coal company’s arrival: mining disasters, indentured economy, strikes, reprisals. It lies in the battles of “bloody Harlan,” shoot-outs between miners and thugs in Kentucky that had occurred just a few years before the film was made.

Of all its characters, only Dave Tolliver acts as though he knows such events lie in wait. Only his body resists; only his eyes burn as they see the future in Fred MacMurray’s unassuming form. But his is, finally, a small resistance. In this onward-and-upward proposition, there’s no suggestion that communities should doubt the good intentions of whatever corporation approaches with its glad hand out.
Progress comes at a price,
Hollywood says to all the Dave Tollivers in the land;
but the price is worth paying. See for yourself—the wonders of three-strip Technicolor!

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On Independence Day, 1854, the city of Omaha was established, and made the commercial heart of the Nebraska Territory. Like every great American city, it was founded on civic ideals and noble visions by pious, clean-minded businessmen—and by blackguards, scavengers, and bribe passers out to make a killing.

“Omaha was, from the very start,” historian David Bristow writes, “a scheme.” Specifically, a scheme conceived by a group of Council Bluffs, Iowa, businessmen to exploit the railroad they knew would be crossing the Missouri River on its way west. The town quickly became a vortex of vice, a crossroads of corruption. Lacking public works, it was also a bitter, disgusting place to live. In wet weather, streets turned to bogs of manure and mud, and in dry times, dust storms were blinding. Pedestrians were chased by packs of stray dogs, animal carcasses rotted in the streets, and water supplies were infected by runoff from private outhouses.

The Omaha encountered by Ten Eyck Fonda and his family, circa 1870, was post–frontier America in the raw. “On Saturday nights,” a historian wrote of Omaha as it was in that year, “the town was alive with open carriages occupied by questionable women, from the sixty-one houses of ill fame. Squaws and papooses begged for money and drinks on the streets. Strangers and fortune seekers swarmed in the hotels and grog shops.” Omaha was on its way to being, as John Gunther would call it, “a great place for aggressive hijinks on Saturday night [with] more night clubs, so-called, than any city between Chicago and San Francisco except, perhaps, Kansas City, Missouri.…