The ruthless director who drove Henry Fonda to tears: “He just turned and walked away”
Henry Fonda staked his career on playing paragons of integrity. From his Oscar-winning performance as Tom Joad in 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath to the least angry man in the landmark courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, his characters were softly spoken but always stood their ground for what was right. His image of decency was so ironclad that he even got to play Abraham Lincoln.
It’s hard to imagine anyone being cruel to an actor of Fonda’s standing and reputation, but director John Ford had no issues whatsoever with it. The trailblazing filmmaker behind such classics as Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers was known for being a tyrant on set. He might have single-handedly revolutionised the western genre and influenced generations of directors to come, but he extracted performances from his actors through bullying, belittling, and savagely precise needling. In one particularly well-targeted line of attack, he caused his most frequent star, John Wayne, to storm off the set of They Were Expendable when he taunted him about having avoided military service.
Fonda was not spared Ford’s famous cruelty either. During the production of 1948’s Fort Apache, the director brought the famously calm and collected actor to tears with his swearing and bullying. Ford even refused to discuss scenes with Fonda, abruptly changing the subject when the actor broached the topic or simply telling him to shut up. Wayne’s son Michael was on set for some of the production and witnessed the actor’s hurt feelings firsthand. “I literally saw tears coming out of Henry Fonda’s eyes on Fort Apache,” he remembered. “He just turned and walked away.”
The director’s treatment of the star paled in comparison to his treatment of newcomer John Agar. The young actor had just gotten married to former child star Shirley Temple and was making his feature debut in the film. In the eyes of the director, Agar could do nothing right. In front of the cast and crew, Ford berated him for everything from his line delivery to his horseback riding skills and even insisted on calling him “Mr. Temple”. Eventually, it was John Wayne who had to step in to smooth tensions.
The paradox of Ford’s infamous behaviour is that even though it regularly made actors flee from the set in humiliation and rage, many of them returned to work with him many times over. John Wayne, for example, made no fewer than 14 movies with the director, and Maureen O’Hara, Ford’s fellow Irish native and an actor who refused to cower under his cruelty, appeared in four of his films.
Not even Henry Fonda could deny the lure of the director’s movies. Fort Apache was their sixth collaboration following Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, and The Fugitive, and even his tear-inducing experience on their seventh movie did not deter him from appearing in Mister Roberts less than a decade later.
The eighth film proved to be the last straw, however. During an on-set altercation, Ford punched Fonda in the face, which, not surprisingly, was a bridge too far. The director was already suffering through a bout of creative doldrums and poor health, and he was eventually replaced in the film by Mervyn LeRoy. Fonda and Ford never worked together again, which was probably for the best.
