Free The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney Page A

gesturing, Fonda was an instinctive artist of the body; and that as a dancer, he was either comical (when well used) or merely stiff (when not). We can only conceive of young Henry as a limited musical comedian, a gangly clown and piercing crooner, Ray Bolger crossed with Alfalfa.
    A lethal notion—but here, in nearly its last manifestation, is that raw youth who is lost to time. Henry the jackal, loose, limber, and laughing hysterically, partnered with the divinely silly Coca, convincing two men of high standards and great foresight—agent Leland Hayward and film producer Walter Wanger—not only of his star power but the wisdom of getting him under contract and allowing him to grow.
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    Hayward is an independent talent spotter with an impressive client list, a high-powered mentor in Myron Selznick—older brother of producer David, and first of the Hollywood superagents—and a job résumé that touches every scroungy corner of the publicity racket. Slightly older than Fonda, likewise a son of Nebraska, he is always on the hunt for clients. He and Henry, passing each other in the theatrical agencies, have a vague acquaintanceship. Henry introduces Hayward to Margaret Sullavan, who first becomes his client and later his wife, but Hayward expresses no interest in representing Fonda.
    That is, until he attends New Faces and sees Fonda doing whatever our lost Fonda does: lamenting his gutter princess, flapping his arms, popping his eyes at the pop-eyed Coca. (Long, tall Henry is having a backstage fling with his gamine costar, a light, jocular affair, and surely that translates into charm in the performance.) Hayward goes backstage and expresses his interest in obtaining Fonda as a client. Fonda informs Hayward of the offer already before him.
    The agent urinates, metaphorically, on the Wiman deal. One hundred a week is nothing; seven hundred and fifty! Hayward promises in thunder. (“Hayward has the agent’s habit of thinking about money in big figures,” according to a 1936 profile, “and encourages his clients to do the same, even when they are broke.”)
    When New Faces finishes its run, there is a telegram from Hayward, telling Henry to get on the next plane to Hollywood. Fonda—as he has a tendency to do—reacts as if trying to sidetrack his own success. He says no, he’d rather not: “It wasn’t my ambition,” he’ll say one day, “to be in the movies.” Nor had it been his ambition, back in Omaha, to be an actor; nor will it be his ambition, a few years from now, to play Lincoln. In Fonda, there is clearly a pressing, though no less absurd, desire to somehow go unnoticed as he practices his very public art.
    Fate, though, with strong hands steering—Do Brando’s, John Ford’s, Leland Hayward’s—holds its track. Hayward has seen something in Fonda’s silly routine: a magnetic apparition, an odd human animal, a rising star.
    But as the star rises, the animal recedes. The blackout ends, the revue rolls on, and that Fonda is gone.
    Good-bye, my fancy! Farewell, jackal.
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    Somewhere beneath the Hollywood palms waits an independent producer with the odd name of Walter Wanger—rhymes with ranger . Fonda, at Hayward’s insistence, meets him in the Beverly Hills Hotel in the summer of 1934.
    Insulated by the theater, Henry has not heard of the producer. Rather than a cigar-chewing vulgarian, he encounters a high-talking New Dealer, a cravat-wearing, ideal-spouting archetype of the Hollywood liberal whose dogma is that movies should uplift and edify “the masses,” cleanse the great unwashed in wellsprings of knowledge and quality production design. Fonda refuses to be awestruck. But he listens to the deal, because Wanger has a history to go with his grandiloquence.
    Born Walter Feuchtwanger, he’d been a stage producer at the dawn of the Little Theatre movement, then protégé to pioneer movie mogul Jesse L. Lasky, whose company, Famous Players–Lasky, formed with Samuel