Eyman Scott - Hank and Jim: the fifty-year friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart

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For John Sacret Young, who got me into it.

And for Robert Osborne, who got me through it.

I n the end, as in the beginning, they didnt need words.

Hanks health broke first. The pacemaker had been implanted while he was playing Clarence Darrow in 1975, and that was followed by a tumor the size of a grapefruit in his diaphragm. The tumor was benign, but the surgery resulted in a troublesome staph infection.

Prostate cancer was diagnosed in 1979 when he was appearing in First Monday in October. The cancer had moved into the bone, but doses of estrogen sent the disease into remission. After that came various hip and back problems.

His frailty was obvious. In 1980, when he wanted to make Gideons Trumpet for television, the only way he could be insured was to pay part of the premiums himself, which he did without much complaint. Clarence Gideon was a good part, and a good part meant more to Hank Fonda than bread, than air.

Retire? I wouldnt know what to do, he said, dismissing the very idea.

Finally it rounded back to the heart again, which was descending into congestive failure. Before, he had always rallied, if only because dying was bound to interrupt acting. But this time the doctors and his family werent so confident.

He was in intensive care. His wife, Shirlee, remembers that things were looking grim until Jim Stewart came for a visit. Fonda had been in a deep sleep, but when he heard Jims unmistakable voice he began to stir.

Stewart, is that you? he said, his eyes still closed.

Assured that it was, Hank opened his eyes. It was definitely Jim standing there.

Wheres my root beer float? Fonda asked.

At that point, everyone in the room knew he was going to live for a while longer, because Henry Fonda took root beer floats very seriously. Another thing he took seriously was Jim Stewart, his best friend.

By the time Fonda won his ridiculously overdue Oscar for On Golden Pond he was in a wheelchair. He had acted right up until his body failed him. Between completing On Golden Pond and getting his award, he made a TV movie with Myrna Loy called Summer Solstice , then appeared in a play. He had to be carried onto the set and placed in position before the curtain rose, but he didnt care. Acting was not a job to Henry Fonda. It was, rather, his identity.

If I go, he told his wife, I go with my boots on.

By the early summer of 1982, he was clearly spiraling down. On May 16, he celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday. It had been precisely 139 days since his release from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he had resided for seven endless weeks. Shirlee had been keeping trackCedars had been his thirteenth hospitalization since their marriage in 1965. If anybody noticed the unlucky number they didnt mention it.

He hadnt left the house since his daughter, Jane, had brought him his Oscar right after the ceremony. Some days he didnt leave his bedroom. The skin around his face had begun to tighten and fade, which had the effect of making his startlingly blue eyes loom even larger. The rest of him had aged terribly, but his eyes remained radiant and fierce with life.

Every day Stewart would leave his house on North Roxbury in Beverly Hills and visit his friend up the hill in Bel-Air. Most days he would bring flowers in one hand and a bag of vegetables in the other, harvested that morning from the garden he and Gloria, his wife, had planted next to their house. If Fonda was awake and in the mood for conversation, they usually discussed gardening, and the pleasure it gave them.

When Jim wasnt around, Jane would sit by her fathers bed. Her hope was that he would talk, say something that might dispel the aura of silence and grudge that had plagued their relationship since she was a little girl. But in his dying, as in his living, Henry Fonda kept his own counsel, reserving his thoughts about death to himself.

When I die, put my ashes in the compost pile, he had told Shirlee. It was the sort of defiant, I-dont-give-a-good-goddamn statement people often make, but Fonda meant it. If theres anything an organic gardener understands, its the importance of quality fertilizer.

As Jim sat with Hank that long summer, they figured out that the fall of 1982 would mark fifty years since they had thrown in together, two starving young actors in New York City. Since then they had been inseparable, emotionally if not physically.

On the surface, their friendship was a match of opposing personalities. Henry Jaynes Fonda was an agnostic trending toward atheist who had been raised in a Christian Science household on the plains of Nebraska. James Maitland Stewart was a churchgoing Presbyterian from the archetypal Midwest town of Indiana, Pennsylvania. Hank was an ardent New Deal Democrat, Jim an equally serious conservative Republican. Hank had had five wivesa fact he found mortifyingand often difficult relationships with his children, while Jim had one wife and was adored by his children.

Stewart had been finishing his architecture degree at Princeton when he was diverted into the least likely career ever attempted by a citizen of Indiana, Pennsylvania. Fonda was introduced to the craft by Dorothy Brando, whom everybody called Doe, an Omaha wife and mother with a bad marriage and a drinking problem who also nudged her son, Marlon, into the profession.

Hank lived most of his life like a tightly wound spring, and his acting followed suit. As one critic noted, he tended to project anger over affirmation... he is almost always more convincing, attractive and memorable when at odds with somethingthe situation, the community, himself. He could relax only with a few select friendsfor a long time with John Ford and his roster of reprobates, always with Jim, Johnny Swope, or Leland Hayward.

Stewart was apparently comfortable in life or at work. One actress said that if you happened to turn your back and just listened to him talking, you couldnt tell if he was playing a scene or having a conversation with someone on the set. He was that natural, that at ease.

What set Stewart apart from the other leading men of his generation was his embrace of emotional extremespain connected to nothing less than unmediated agony.

Stewart was regarded with open affection by the communities of Hollywood and movie fans alike. He was practically a member of the extended family of man. Nobody called Fonda Hank except close friends, but millions of people who never met Stewart referred to him as Jimmy.

In spite of their many differences, these unusually tall, skinny, gifted young actors had bonded immediately over their shared passion for their work, and for an ethereal young actress named Margaret Sullavan. Both of them worked with her. Fonda loved her, married her, then lost her. Stewart pined for her.