The Permanent Star

85 films and 21 plays later, Henry Fonda is still working

He has been acting for 53 years. With a half-century's experience behind him it should seem natural for Henry Fonda to play an old man. But at 73 the old pro has to work at acting his age. He resolutely puts on a stoop and shuffle as he portrays an aged Supreme Court Justice in his 21st play, First Monday in October, which opens on Broadway this week. Yet the man's youthfulness is what lingers in the mind. In his comic turns, Fonda remains as lean and lithe as when he came to national attention in The Farmer Takes a Wife. Watching the star, audiences find it difficult to remember that Jane Fonda is 40, that Peter Fonda turned 38 this year. Some four decades after his film debut, Henry Fonda still cannot help suggesting younger men --like the young Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Roberts.

Not that Fonda consciously tries recreation. All the long parade of roles, he insists, are inescapable coincidences of physique and casting. "I've just got the Fonda bones," he says, "tall and skinny." Still, some of his most memorable characters were created when those bones played against type--the magnificently klutzy dope in The Lady Eve, the martinet in Fort Apache, the scruffy bandit leader in Once Upon the Time in the West. But, as he admits, the image that has sustained his career is of the man with strained conscience, like the reluctant hero of The Ox-Bow Incident or of 12 Angry Men. "I guess I go overboard to avoid taking credit for the image I have," says Fonda. "That way it's easier to live with myself. I don't feel I'm totally a man of integrity." He pauses thoughtfully, in the classic Fonda manner, and adds: "But if there is something in the eyes, a kind of honesty in the face, then I guess you could say that's the man I'd like to be, the man I want to be."

Actually, his self-definition turns out to be much simpler than that. Above all, he insists, "I'm an actor." The kind of actor, he omits to add, whose professional life is paralleled only by a handful of great British stars with full freedom to go where the roles are and no concern about the size of the part. "It's easier to move back and forth between the theater and films in England," Fonda feels, "where everything is in one place. Here film and theater are separated by the width of the continent, and it's not easy to uproot children from school, mothers and wives from homes to live in a hotel. I've done a lot of theater because I want to. If I'm away from it for a while I miss the audience contact, and even more the joy of creating something from start to finish. Film is still a director's medium."

Not that Fonda turns his back on his movie past. It is full of "moments," if not full roles, that he relishes. Director John Ford, for whom he worked seven times, was a major influence: "If there is a style that emerged from that group of actors who worked repeatedly with Ford, it was a certain spareness. You learned to rein in your emotions. If they're there, they are going to color your voice, show in your face, the way you move."

But it is the theater that still provides the true challenge: "I like to make it a new play every night, because if it becomes mechanical, then it ain't fair. You owe it to an audience; they should get the play they heard about, and they deserve to enjoy it like it was the first night. And besides, that's where the fun of it all lies. If it ever stops being fun, I'll go back to my garden and my bees and my painting." Judging from the radiance of his sunset years, it will be some time before Fonda and his fifth wife, Shirlee, settle down to Social Security and the apiary in Bel Air.

In fact, as the star tells it, all the years were good. Through all his professional years, Fonda can recall only one disappointment. His agents turned down Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without telling him that its lead role, written with Fonda in mind, had been offered. But the regret is small. "Isn't it wonderful to be this age and still get exciting things to do? Just to think that a man can get to be 70 and then open the mail one day and find a script called Clarence Darrow," he says, citing his last Broadway show. He shakes his head at the good fortune of it all.

In First Monday Fonda has a line "It's not how good you are, it's how long you last." But it really doesn't apply to him. In his case, goodness has everything to do with the length of his life in the theater--and it is a goodness that extends well beyond style and technique. It is stronger than talent, something that colors the voice and shows in the face, something the permanent star can now afford to acknowledge: integrity.

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