TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.60

Text File | 1992-08-31 | 22.3 KB | 417 lines

                                                                                Two Who Get It Right


November 16, 1981

"Now we're cooking!"  says she, and so they are

There could have been trumpets, a heavenly choir, an enveloping
cushion of fleece and lots of silver streamers--at least a few
moguls and a newsreel camera.  Someone important might have
been there to intoduce these two acting legends about to cross
paths for the first time.  "Alice Adams, meet Young Mr. Lincoln,
Mary of Scotland, this is Wyatt Earp, Tracy Lord, Tom Joad, Tess
Harding, Mister Roberts, Ethel Thayer, say hello to Norman
Thayer Jr., Katharine Hepburn. . .Henry Fonda."  But no:
Olympians are entitled to their privacy, and these are two very
private people.  So Fonda was alone in the basement of a 20th
Century-Fox sound stage in May 1980 when, as he recalls it,
"Kate just came in, smiled, looked directly at me, and said,
'It's about time.'"  On Golden Pond, which unites Hepburn, Fonda
and his daughter Jane in a warm familial embrace, is also about
time.  It is about the time, 46 years, that has soldered Norman
and Ethel Thayer to each other, with complementary quirks and
habits, tolerance and humor, love and concern.  The time it
takes to bind wounds the generations can inflict on each
other--Norman and his daughter, Henry and his Jane.  The time
Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn have taken to travel their
separate roads to this special union.  The time on the screen
that displays the deceptively easy effects of two actors, two
half-centuries committed to getting it right in the theater and
the movies.  It is about this time--now--when two careers that
might honorably have ended years ago have instead ascended to
proud new peaks.

In his 77th year, Fonda has published his autobiography (with
Howard Teichmann as his Boswell).  Though disabled by serious
heart desease, he still hopes to appear on Broadway next year
as F.D.R.'s confidant Harry Hopkins.  In her 75th year, Hepburn
is magnetizing the attention of Philadelphia theatergoers in The
West Side Waltz, prior to its Broadway opening next week.  The
play, written by On Golden Pond's Ernest Thompson, takes its own
sweet three-quarter time to penetrate the twilight life of a
Manhattan widow, but Hepburn triumphantly skirts sentimentality,
displaying her radiance even as her character limps, hobbles and
crawls toward accommodation with old age.  The next time they
meet, Hepburn might well say to Fonda what she exults at the end
of each scene of her new Broadway show:  "Now we're cooking!"

Like Ethel and Norman Thayer, Hepburn and Fonda are bound by
similarities and differences in background, career and
temperament.

Both their families were established in the colonies by the
18th century, and the pedigree shows in the two who took up
acting.  In the archetypal old-line American family,  Kate and
Hank might be twins; she the precocious one, the go-getter and
do-gooder, believing her way to success; he the shy gangler, the
late achiever, listing like Nebraska wheat on a windy summer
day, yet rock-stubborn when his pride or principles are
challenged.  She crackles, he drawls.  She pushes, he won't be
pushed.  She's an actor, he's a reactor.  In mind and body she
is an irresistible Circe storm:  he stands his ground, stoic and
solid.  And in the fusion between person and persona that the
movie public wishes upon its most enduring stars, Hepburn and
Fonda came to symbolize the generous spirit of American
liberalism.

Toward the end of a long career, every good thing a good actor
does becomes precious to the informed moviegoer.  Youthful
exuberance repens into heroic perseverance; the comically
awkward silhouette of an actor's apprenticeship lengthens as the
earth turns, and his shadow deepens and darkens the moviegoer's
response.  Sometimes, late at night, we flip through the TV
channels as we would through a family album; actors provide a
glamorized photo essay of our mortality and, captured on film,
they become immortal.

So to see Henry Fonda as Norman Thayer, presiding with gruff
irony over his own disintegration, is a special privilege.  To
see Hepburn looking great in her straw hat and pink sundress,
a lady out of Gauguin, revives the spirit.  The fond, girlish
way she swings herself between his legs; the look of love and
respect she lavishes upon him; the tenderness with which an old
man peels back an aging lady's lapel, and bends to her, and
kisses her neck; these are moments that turn actors'
autobiographies into art.  The screenwriter, the director can
only allow them to happen.  The emotional intensity of these
special moments wells not from the demands of story and action
but from the accrued movie histories of Fonda and Hepburn, and
the viewer's belief in the idealized lives of the people he sees
on the screen.

In Hepburn's case art and life have blended to create an
actress and woman of spectacular integrity.  Passion and
intelligence were her birthright.  Her father was a surgeon in
Hartford, Conn., her mother a suffragist who stumped for birth
control.  "I was brought up in a generation where excuses were
not acceptable," she recalls.

"And I was taught to speak out.  My parents werlcomed debate.
My smell for reality comes from them."  Educated at home and
at Bryn Mawr, Kate learned her lessons well.  At 24, with her
debut film A Bill of Divorcement--co-starring John Barrymore,
and directed by George Cukor, who would guide her in nine more
movies over the next 50 years--she seemed to burst through the
screen.  Two dimensions couldn't hold her.  The angular form,
the tilted chin and cutting voice made her a secular Joan of
Arc.

Hers was a fervor that transcended sex; to a '30s movie
audience it may have looked threatening, even mannish.  She was
the most aggressive and patrician of the '30s liberated ladies,
and moviegoers wanted some extraordinary ordinary guy to sweep
her off her pedestal and bring her down to earth.  In the '30s
that man was Cary Grant, a spirit as blithe as Hepburn's and a
lot breezier. In the '40s and beyond, it was Spencer Tracy, the
stolid, sensitive man of whom Laurence Oliver said:  "I've
learned more about acting from watching Tracy than in any other
way."  Tracy and Hepburn may have seemed intractable
opposites--the anchor and the billowing sail--but a love of
their craft and an eye for home truths brought them together and
kept them there.  On-screen and off, he played her leading man
until his death in 1967.

What could the mature years hold for such a spectacularly
eccentric presence?  Two things, on the evidence of Hepburn's
films of the '50s and '60s:  the lonely triumph of spinsterhood
(Summertime, The African Queen, The Rainmaker), the sad decline
into dementia (Suddenly Last Summer, Long Day's Journey into
Night).  These later roles gave her the opportunity to soar, and
she played each lovely chance to the hilt, whether she was
getting morosely drunk over a lemonade in Pat and Mike (1952)
or losing herself in heroin and reverie as O'Neill's Mary
Tyrone.

Hepburn fashioned a career as distinctive as any in screen
acting, and if there are reservations to be stated about her
work, they must come from the source.  "With all the
opportunities I had," she says today, "I could have done more.
And if I had done more, I could have been quite remarkable."

Now this quite remarkable woman divides her free time between
her townhouse in Manhattan's exclusive Turtle Bay and the home
she shares with her younger brother secretary-companion in
Fenwick, Conn., on Long Island Sound.  Vigorous as ever, she
regularly bikes, swims, plays a fiercely competitive game of
tennis.  She talks easily about her life and her work.  The
Hepburn mind still functions dexterously.  The odd detail may
elude her, but her memory is radiant and rich with the large
patterns of life, its experience and meaning, its jokes and
ironies.  And all of it falls into Yankee perspective.

"The me I know is the person at Fenwick," she says.  "When I'm
talking about acting, I feel I'm talking about somebody else.
Acting is a nice childish profession--pretending you're someone
else, and at the same time selling your own self."  After a
hearty Fenwick dinner of meat, fresh vegetables and a homemade
pie, the company may retire to her brother-in-law's house to
watch one of Hepburn's old films.  The star herself is not
unduly impressed: "I don't feel any particular connection with
that poor creature up on the screen.  I'd rather watch the home
movies my father took of us as children.  They're hilarious.
You can see me trying to be a fascinator--before I was an
accepted fascination.  Just desperate!"

Hepburn does not disdain the actor's craft; she puts it in
perspective.  She is happy to talk about some of her favorite
leading men, Spencer Tracy (nine films with Hepburn, from Woman
of the Year in 1942, to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967):
"Spence was a magic actor, funny and quick."  Cary Grant
(Sylvia Scarlett, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Philadelphia
Story):  "He was great fun.  He had a wonderful sense of
comedy."  John Wayne (Rooster Cogburn):  "He wasn't as clever
as Spence, but a brilliant actor nonetheless, bigger than life
in her performance--and often when he didn't have to be."  Peter
O'Toole (The Lion in Winter): "He can do anything.  A bit
cuckoo, but sweet and terribly funny." Humphrey Bogart (The
African Queen):  "Bogart was like Fonda--proud and happy to be
an actor."

Like Tracy and Fonda, Hepburn has little patience for actors
who surrender to the tortuous introspection of the Method.
"Spence and Hank felt the same way I do," she says.  "The camera
sees through the performance.  We were brought up in the school
that teaches: You do what the script tells you.  Deliver the
goods without comment.  Live it--do it--or shut up.  After all,
the writer is what's important.  If the script is good and you
don't get in its way, it will come off O.K.  I never discussed
a script with Spence; we just did it.  The same with Hank in On
Golden Pond.  Naturally and unconsciously, we joined into what
I call a musical necessity--the chemistry that brings out the
essence of the characters and the work."

For Hepburn, the old couple on Golden Pond mark less a career
departure than a return to the themes of her strongest films,
to her most tenaciously held beliefs.  "Ethel and Norman
represent the kind of couple I admire very much.  They've put
up with a lot.  They're not quitters.  There's no self-pity.
They've been in love all these years, and she is satisfied to
let him be the star of the marriage.  Now, that may seem
old-fashioned to some, but I'm part of a generation, an era of
women who saw to it that their men were not alone, who backed
up their husbands against growing old and afraid, and who never
lost their sense of humor.  You lose your sense of humor and you
might as well cut your throat.  That's Ethel:  a woman of deep
common sense, who finds joy in life and in the beautiful things
around her.  She's an authentic human spirit.

She also makes me laugh."  And the smile in Hepburn's voice
breaks into the chime of an unselfconscious laugh--for, surely,
the woman being described is not only Ethel Thayer but
Katharine Houghton Hepburn.

The man she describes might not be just Norman Thayer Jr., but
Spencer Tracy.  Or Henry Fonda.  One of this film's reverberant
pleasures comes from watching Fonda play what might have been
a Tracy role if Spencer had lived a dozen or so more years.
Norman, after all possesses the hearty irascibility that Tracy
seemed born with, and that Fonda achieved only in the making of
On Golden Pond. At the beginning of the film, as Fonda lumbers
about in gusts of frail menace, he angles toward playing a New
England Lear with overcareful pungency.  One gets the sense of
Fonda's working hard both to convince the viewer that Norman is
one ornery old sumbitch and to distance the character from the
person we believe we have come to know as Henry Fonda.  But
coming as it does just after Fonda's autobiography, his
performance in On Golden Pond ultimately become a courageous act
of revelation from one of the shiest men in a very public art.

In 1966 Critic Manny Farber wrote that Fonda "seems to be
vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny
blips. . . Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking
backward, slanting himself away from the public eye."  Playing
almost any character early in his career, Fonda seemed
profoundly ill at ease. It amounted to a compact with the movie
audience that he was one of them:  callow, inarticulate,
salt-of-the-earth, or if need be, soul-of-the-nation.  This
social squirm served him well, in comic or dramatic roles.  His
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) was all elbows and ideals, winning
debates by making fun of his opponent's eloquence. In Jesse
James (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Fonda is virtually
cornered into renegade political activism; a corrupt System
flays him, but under the vulnerable Midwestern skin is a species
of American hero.  In his best comedy, The Lady Eve (1941),
Fonda is the perfect patsy for a con woman, Barbara
Stanwyck--so perfect that she falls in love with the sap.
Watching Fonda writhe under Stanwyck's bogus endearments remains
one of the high delights of screwball farce.

As Mister Roberts (on stage 1948-51, on screen 1955) he could
still show surprise that the men of the U.S.S. Reluctant would
confer so much moral authority on him.  But from then on the
Fonda character was at ease with his place in American history,
whether as a lone righteous juror in 12 Angry Men, or as any
number of military men, government officials--and desperadoes.
Through age and exposure, The Wrong Man had become The Best
Man.  It was a role that life had carved in Fonda, the quiet son
of a pleasant, rigorous Christian Scientist family in Omaha in
the century's first decade.

This Fonda is the lad whose growing pains, according to his
autobiography, "forced him to walk across the street to avoid
saying hello to a girl," and whose most cherished childhood
memory is being awakened by his mother to see Halley's Comet
because "it comes around only once every 76 years."  He is the
young man taken by his father to see a black man lynched in the
center of town.  He is the aspiring actor who, briefly married
at 26 to the effervescent young actress Margaret Sullavan, would
stand in agony outside their Greenwich Village apartment as,
inside, Margaret made love to Producer Jed Harris.  He is the
star who never once spoke with his close friend Agent Leland
Hayward about the curious fact that they had both been married
to the same woman, Maggie Sullavan. He is the five-time husband
whose first two wives--Sullavan and Frances Brokaw, mother of
Jane and Peter--committed suicide.  He is the father who
effectively isolated himself from his children.  Peter finally
spanned this distance one night five years ago when he called
Henry and blurted, "I love you."  For Jane, the chance for
reconciliation came when the two met in July 1980 on New
Hampshire's Squam Lake--on Golden Pond.

By several standards of the film actor's profession, Jane is
the most successful Fonda.  She occupies a pantheon of
superstardom that Henry could never quite enter.  Her company
fashions movies to fit her, then tailors them into hits (Coming
Home, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five).  Jane has won two
Oscars for acting, in Klute and Coming Home; Henry was nominated
once--for The Grapes of Wrath--but did not win.  In the '70s,
Jane became a celebrity who earned headlines wearing khaki to
free the Army from the Viet Nam War or, later, sporting the
sensible shoes of feminism and aerobics.  Most important, Jane
is a ferociously talented actress who puts pain and passion into
every role--the image of her father, but with an intensity that
recalls. . . the young Katharine Hepburn.  The Golden Pond set
was likely to be a volatile one.

"We were both aware," says Henry Fonda, "that in certain
respects it was a reflection, sometimes uncannily so, of the
pain we'd known in real life as father and daughter.  In our big
scenes together, Jane became very emotional.  There's a moment
when she's groping to find the right relationship with her dad,
and I'm playing that I'm not sure what she's up to.  When it was
over, I could see Jane was proud.  She pointed to the film
crew--by that time everybody was crying--and whispered to me, 'I
guess they all had problems with their father.'"  He pauses a
moment--after two pacemakers and endless rounds of medication,
the words are not always easy to form--and says:  "I love Jane
very much."

"I've always thought of On Golden Pond as a present to my
father," says Jane, 43.  She and her partner, Producer Bruce
Gilbert, had been looking for a property in which the three
Fondas could star, Thompson's play--a critical success and
modest hit on Broadway, with Frances Sternhagen and Tom Aldridge
as the Thayers--almost filled the bill; it had everything but
a role for Peter.  "My dad isn't exactly Norman Thayer, but
there's a lot of Dad in the part.

And I guess there's a lot of Chelsea, Norman's daughter, in me.
Like Chelsea, I had to get over the desperate need I once had
for his approval, and to conquer my fear of him.  We've never
been intimate.  My dad simply is not an intimate person.  But
that doesn't mean there isn't love.  There's a lot of love.  And
I think you can see it on the screen.  On Golden Pond gave all
of us the chance to say out loud something you could admit to
yourself only at night.  I can't tell you how lucky I feel that
we actually got it done."

The father-daughter bond can still show strain, and did on the
movie set.  Now, though, the differences were professional.
Like Hepburn, Fonda has the veteran's disdain of the Actors
Studio, where Jane studied two decades ago.  "Jane goes through
more crap to act," Fonda says, "instead of just doing it.  I
don't believe you study acting.  You feel it, know it, play it."
When Jane and Dabney Coleman, who played Chelsea's beau, would
take time to discuss motivation, Kate and Hank would have giggle
fits.  In one scene, Jane recalls, "we were setting up a light,
and I wanted it moved so I could see Dad better and he could see
me.  Dad said, 'I don't need to see you, I'm not that kind of
actor.' I felt humiliated:  I wanted to cry.  Kate understood.
She put her arm around me and said, 'Tracy did it to me all the
time.  That's just the way they are.'"

Throughout the shooting, Hepburn played the fond or firm parent
to Jane--so much so that Jane says, "I couldn't help fantasizing
what would have happened if she and my dad had become lovers 40
years ago, and Kate had been my mother."  It was Hepburn whose
daunting presence made Jane realize she would have to perform
a key scene--a difficult backflip into Golden Pond herself--
without a stunt woman.  Mama Kate's lesson:  "If a child never
learns to overcome its fears it will become soggy."

Hepburn had other, sterner lessons in store for two prominent
young men on the Squam Lake location.  One was Gilbert, who
produced the $7.5 million film.  "She was always testing me,"
recalls Gilbert, 33.  "Kate's an old-fashioned star who makes
demands of old-fashioned protocol--flowers, meetings, dinners--
and argues constantly in front of the crew.  Of course, I'd
make another film with her in a minute.  This time, though, I'd
give her a pair of boxing gloves."  Ernest Thompson, 31, who
adapted his play for the screen, calls himself "Kate's runaway
son.  Same stock, she's got more money.  She brings out the
fighter in me, because she's a fighter.  Kicked me off the set
the first day.  She said:  'I wasn't in the room when you wrote
the play--why should you be here when I start acting?'"

Two men on Golden Pond have nothing but praise for Hepburn.
Says Director Mark Rydell:  "The bravery was heroic.  Here was
Fonda, fading, dealing with death, playing a man afraid of what
he saw ahead.  And Hepburn was his support.  Their naked
emotions were real.  It was a privilege to be a part of it all."
And Henry Fonda offers his own testimony:  "It was a magical
summer for both of us. We worked together as though we'd been
doing it all our lives.  Kate is unique--in her looks, in the way
she plays, most of all in herself.  I love Kate for playing with
me in this film.  Other movies have had a lot of meaning for
me--Grapes of Wrath, The Ox Bow Incident, Mister Roberts, 12
Angry Men--but On Golden Pond is the ultimate role of my
career."

A memory alights, "It was just the second time Kate and I met,
that first morning on Squam Lake.  People kind of melted away
and there were just the two of us.  She had this thing clutched
in her hand and she held it out to me.  'For you,' she said,
'It was Spencer's favorite hat.'  I wore it in the first scene."
Fonda is a painter of delicate still lifes, and that night he
was inspired to start a painting--of the three hats he wore in
the film.  He made enough prints of the finished work to give
one to each member of the crew, suitably inscribed.  The
original is in the Turtle Bay town house.

And so Fonda turned himself into Norman Thayer, presiding with
gruff irony over the outrage of his own disintegration.  He
knows it, he feels it, he plays it.  Says his wife Shirlee:  "He
wants to live as much as we want him to.  He's promised me that
he'll live to see his 83rd birthday, and I have to believe he'll
keep that promise."  Stargazers of every stripe, take note:  In
Fonda's 82nd year, Halleys Comet is due to make another pass.

Hepburn, too, looks at life with few regrets or apprehensions.
"It's so endless to be old," she muses.  "It's too god-damned
bad that you're rotting away.  Really, it's a big bore for
anyone with half a brain.  But you have to face it and how you
do it is a challenge."  Then she holds her head up, looks you
straight in the eye, and lets that incandescent smile light up
the room.  "If there is a heaven," she announces, "and if that's
where I wind up--and if I'm a tennis champion--then I'll be
happy."

If there is a players' paradise, rest assured:  when Kate
Hepburn and Hank Fonda arrive, there will be trumpets, and
comets, and a celestial Wimbledon waiting for them.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York
and Los Angeles