A Palpable, Homespun Integrity

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Henry Fonda: 1905-1982

Tom Joad, that 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 an' 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 goddamned 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 (Once Upon a Time in the West) and sly egotist (My Name Is Nobody), raw presidential timber (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

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