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

miscarriage was due to a Brokaw beating.
    Frances was just twenty-two when they met, Brokaw nearly three decades older. She was working on Wall Street, fresh from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston—renowned as a training camp for ambitious girls seeking wealthy husbands—and she went after Brokaw with the same focus she would apply to Henry Fonda a few years later. A childhood of fear and genteel poverty had given her a strong will and a mercenary survival instinct; her chief ambition, she told a friend, was to “descend on Wall Street and marry a millionaire.” The relevant anecdote has an impatient Frances suggesting to Brokaw that it’s time he propose—whereupon the bully-bully type, caught off guard, accedes, meekly asking the future Mrs. Brokaw when the wedding will be.
    So, in January 1931, Frances, with every calculation, married a man much like her father, whose notoriety as a husband was despicable. Whether her pursuit of Brokaw suggests a malformed kind of love, a cold-eyed acquisition of capital, the need to be chained to a violent master, or all of these, may be debated. What is agreed is that George Tuttle Brokaw spent his last year in a sanitarium, the Hartford Retreat in Connecticut; that sometime in the overnight hours of May 28, 1935, he died; and that he left a cash bequest of approximately one million dollars to his wife, and to his four-year-old daughter, a yearly income in excess of $31,000 and property worth more than five million dollars. *
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    This, in harsh outline, has been the course of Frances’s twenty-eight years. She has been dominated and often terrorized by men. Incredibly strong and incredibly fearful, she knows what she wants, and what she wants is the worst thing for her. When she spots Fonda at Denham Studios under placid English skies, something clicks in her mind, and she decides that he will be her next husband.
    Like Henry’s, Frances’s self-presentation conceals a complex set of strengths and weaknesses. She overwhelms a goal once it is set; it’s her talent to place things in order, balance credits and debits, and act upon desire in the most deliberate way. That applies to money and to men. “When a woman really wants a man,” she is supposed to have said, “she should be the one who pursues and gets him.” Daughter Jane quotes her even more frankly: “I’ve always gotten every man I’ve ever wanted.”
    First, a potential rival must be dealt with. Henry is rumored to be involved with his costar, the provocative, fun-loving Annabella. But Frances satisfies herself that it is only gossip, and soon she and Henry are socializing in glamour spots along the Thames. Frances is gay and charming, yet her aura of control is a universe removed from Margaret Sullavan’s unpredictability. In fact, she seems an escape from drama and tempest: She evinces no particular interest in movies, and claims never to have seen Fonda on-screen.
    Henry, for his part, is still involved with Sullavan. They have only recently finished The Moon’s Our Home ; the reunion has led to renewed romance and Hollywood house hunting. The day before shooting begins on Wings of the Morning, Hank writes “Dearest Peggy” a letter from the Savoy, extolling the English crew and “charming” Annabella, and noting it has been six years since he last wrote Sullavan a letter. Signing off, he expresses doubt that Peggy will visit him in England—evidently, she has hinted she might—along with hopefulness that she will.
    But very soon after, Henry meets Frances, and she makes quick work of him. We can imagine he is tugged by her assurance, dazzled by her command, refreshed by her alienness. But more vengeful motives may also be at work. He recalls Sullavan’s betrayal—hasn’t his suffering earned him the right to a fling?
    For Frances, though, it is no fling. She invites Henry to join her on the remaining stops of her European journey. He accepts the invitation. Wings of the