TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82fonda

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 5.4 KB | 102 lines

                                                                                August 23, 1982 

A Palpable, Homespun Integrity 

Henry Fonda:  1905-1982

Tom Joad, the quintessential Okie, has just told his mother that
as long as he stands falsely accused of murder and has to run,
he intends to turn his time on the road to good use, as some
sort of farm-labor organizer. She cries out in anguish, "How'm
I gonna know 'bout you?  They might kill you and' I wouldn't
know. How'm I gonna know?"

The camera moves in on her son's face, his honest, decent,
heartbreakingly beautiful face, and he replies, "I'll be
ever'where-- wherever you look. Wherever there's a fight so
hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop
beatin' on a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell
when they're mad--an' I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're
hungry an' they know supper's ready."

The speech is ineffably corny, American transcendentalism
filtered through the pop leftist rhetoric of a 1930s bestseller,
brought to the screen in 1940. Yet four decades later this scene
from The Grapes of Wrath still shines as one of American film's
privileged moments. And the viewer's eyes still shine in
response to it, no matter how many times he has seen it.

For this is not just an appealing character speaking his own
epitaph; it is Henry Fonda's annunciation as an actor, that
moment when he began to shed the first impression he had made
in films like The Farmer Takes a Wife--that of a shy, likable
but lightweight piece of homespun--and take on the raiment of
authority. Looking back now, we see that there was no one else
who could have played Tom Joad, no one else who could do what
Fonda did--drain the sentiment and literariness out of that
speech with his drawling directness and, in the process,
encompass some of what is best in the American character.

That role was always on his list of personal favorites, along
with Mister Roberts, of course, the thoughtful juror in 12 Angry
Men and the troubled cowpoke who fails to stop a lynching in The
Ox-Bow Incident. All were projections of a humane, decent and
liberal- minded man trying to do the right thing in a world that
often thought wrong and behaved worse. But there was another
side to him. He said once that although he did not consider
himself neurotic, "You become an actor maybe because there are
these complexes about you that aren't average or normal, and
these aren't the easiest things to live with. You can be easily
upset, or short-tempered, or lack patience."

He was married five times ("and god-damned ashamed of it") and
had his problems with his children. Actress-Activist Jane and
Actor- Director Peter. But there was something almost palpable
about the man's integrity, symbolized by his lifelong insistence
on regularly abandoning the screen for the rigors of the stage.
That quality encouraged forgiveness of his occasional wasted
screen moments, a certain sympathy with his troubles. When his
last marriage, to his wife of the past 16 years, the former
Shirlee Adams, turned out happily, and he and his children
finally formed a mutual admiration society (though he continued
to grump about Jane's Method acting), one shared his obvious
pleasure and pride.

One also sensed that his lifelong workaholic tendencies were a
way of keeping his talent not just in shape but growing, so that
his final, Academy Award-winning appearance in On Golden Pond
turned out to be something few old actors manage:  a triumphant
valedictory rather than a sad farewell tour of remembered
glories. One sensed there, as elsewhere, that this paradoxically
shy man worked earnestly, without visible egotism, and often
with a hint of steeliness grounded in his conservative Nebraska
background, to turn his private turmoils to metaphorical account
in his roles. How else account for all the character portrayals
that turned out so well--victim  (The Wrong Man) and coward
(Welcome to Hard Times), stiff neck (Fort Apache) and klutz (The
Lady Eve), blackguard (One Upon a Time in the West) and sly
egotist (My Name is Nobody), raw presidential timer (Young Mr.
Lincoln) and polished (The Best Man).

He tended to dismiss the growing recognition that he had
quietly become one of the great actors of his generation,
perhaps of the past half-century. "I know people use words like
`national treasure' and such when they talk about me," he said,
"I don't pay any attention to that. It's embarrassing."  He
always preferred to confine craft discussion to simple and
simplifying definitions ("I don't believe one studies
acting--one feels it, knows it, plays it") and to almost
homiletic, determinedly unsubjective observations about what he
did ("Make the audience believe they are not seeing an actor
working, but a real person with feelings and hurts").

Believe we did, with increasing affection as the years wore on.
Maybe, after all, there was an actor's epitaph in part of Tom
Joad's speech. "Maybe a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but
on'y a piece of a big soul--the one big soul that belongs to
ever'body..."  By the time he died last week, at 77, after a
typically gallant, and underplayed, fight against heart disease
that had confined him almost completely to his bedroom for a
year, Henry Fonda had personified hundreds of pieces of that one
big soul and in the process had become rather a large part of
it himself.

--By Richard Schickel