#981: Splitting Rails and Telling Tales
Question: What do actors Ralph Ince, Sam Drane, George Billings, Joseph Henabery, Francis Ford, Walter Houston, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, John Carradine, Bing Crosby, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards, Jr., Hal Holbrook, John Anderson, Sam Waterston, Kris Kristofferson, Brendon Fraser, Kevin Sorbo, and Daniel Day-Lewis (among many, many others) all have in common?
Henry Fonda in “Young Mr. Lincoln,” 1939, 20th Century Fox
Answer: They all, at one time or another, played Abraham Lincoln on the silver screen. Most film historians agree that ever since the turn of the century (4 score years after Honest Abe’s assassination) until today, there have be more films (at least 200) about America’s 16th President than any other person in human history. And of all the actors to portray Honest Abe on screen, only one - the British born and bred Daniel Day Lewis - took the Oscar for Best Actor.
(There are also more biographies about Lincoln than any other American, including G. Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Donald J. Trump - for which the pestilential predecessor is thoroughly pissed).
From both a cinematic and a literary point of view, Lincoln was - and continues to be - simply too good to be true - just what the doctor ordered: angular and self-taught; an American with a life straight out of Horatio Alger (who, by the way, would not publish his first “boy’s novel” - Paul Prescott's Charge: A Story for Boys - until 1865, the year of Lincoln’s tragic death); he was witty and wise, a great leader and a martyred prophet; a man of mythic proportion who is considered to be the greatest of all American presidents. And, to top it all off, at 6’4”, the tallest of all 46 of that illustrious group.
With his top hat on, Lincoln stood nearly 7’ tall
The mythology surrounding the life of Abraham Lincoln - the kid from Hardin County, Kentucky of a thoroughly undistinguished Virginia family who grew up splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois, who was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, read law and rode the circuit of courts for many years is pretty much the absolute truth. (He did, by the way, wind up being one of the most in-demand and highest-paid railroad attorneys in the country, who could afford to have his suits made by Brooks Brothers.)
His law partner said of him, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” It is utterly remarkable that the hagiography surrounding his early life should be so truthful. It reminds me of the John Cheever short story The Worm in the Apple, in which the narrator discovers that the Crutchmans, a family that seems too perfect to be real, must be hiding a proverbial “worm in their apple” are, in fact, just as good as they seem to be.
Yes, Abraham Lincoln did suffer tremendous emotional and psychological loss in the death of his true love, Anne Rutledge, and yes, his future wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was a difficult person - a harridan by all accounts - which led to her husband’s melancholy (manic depression); nonetheless, he went on to become a brilliant and utterly valorous leader. And oh, how he could spin a tale!
In 1890, a quarter century after Lincoln’s assassination, journalist Alexander McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times, and one of the founders of the Republican Party, published a large tome entitled Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories. The book contains hundreds of marvelous tales told by a master. Here’s one of my favorites, which still brings a loud guffaw. It’s entitled Done With the Bible. He never told a better one:
A country meeting-house, that was used once a month, was quite a distance from any other house.
The preacher, an old-line Baptist, was dressed in coarse linen pantaloons, and shirt of the same material. The pants, manufactured after the old fashion, with baggy legs, and a flap in the front, were made to attach to his frame without the aid of suspenders.
A single button held his shirt in position, and that was at the collar. He rose up in the pulpit, and with a loud voice announced his text thus: “I am the Christ whom I shall represent to-day.”
About this time a little blue lizard ran up his roomy pantaloons. The old preacher, not wishing to interrupt the steady flow of his sermon, slapped away on his leg, expecting to arrest the intruder, but his efforts were unavailing, and the little fellow kept on ascending higher and higher.
Continuing the sermon, the preacher loosened the central button which graced the waistband of his pantaloons, and with a kick off came that easy-fitting garment.
But, meanwhile, Mr. Lizard had passed the equatorial line of the waistband, and was calmly exploring that part of the preacher’s anatomy which lay underneath the back of his shirt.
Things were now growing interesting, but the sermon was still grinding on. The next movement on the preacher’s part was for the collar button, and with one sweep of his arm off came the tow linen shirt.
The congregation sat for an instant as if dazed; at length one old lady in the rear part of the room rose up, and, glancing at the excited object in the pulpit, shouted at the top of her voice: “If you represent Christ, then I’m done with the Bible.”
Sad to say, were Abraham Lincoln alive and running for the White House in 2024, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination of the party he founded, let alone getting elected. Why? Well, first and foremost, he had, what laughingly used to be known in Hollywood as “A face made only for radio.” If you think Donald Trump’s bird’s nest hairdo, tailored paunch, and ersatz tan have been the butt of every late-night TV host’s opening monologue, imagine what they would have done with Abe. Then too, there was the matter of his earnestness; he spoke from the heart and refused to slosh about in the political muck ‘n mire like a majority of today’s supposed leaders. He had big dreams and knew how to turn most of them into reality. But most importantly, the average modern American, like the narrator in Cheever’s marvelous short story, is simply too damned cynical, gullible, uninformed, and politically naïve to see what an absolute jewel this man was.
Back in 1938, the great director John Ford approached the young Henry Fonda to star in his next film, “Young Mr. Lincoln.” For an up-and-coming actor like Fonda to star in a film directed by Ford, Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, and penned by the preeminent screenwriter Lamar Trotti should have been a no-brainer. I mean we’re talking about John Ford here; a man who Fonda later described as “A son-of-bitch who happened to be a genius.” And yet, when first asked, Fonda turned Ford down flat.
“What are you,” Ford demanded. “Nuts? Don’t you realize how perfect you’d be for the part?”
“Sorry,” the 33-year-old Fonda replied. “Playing Abraham Lincoln . . . it’s like being asked to play Jesus! I just can’t do it.” Ford, not a man to beg, asked Fonda if he would at least pay a visit to the make-up and wardrobe departments and then do a very brief screen test. Fonda agreed . . . after all, who was he to deny the great Ford a small favor? Fonda went off and spent the better part of a day with makeup stylist Clay Campbell. costume director Sam Benson (who put 3-inch lifts in the 6’1” Fonda’s boots), and then filmed a two-minute scene. By the time Ford put his first in front of the camera lens (which was his custom instead of yelling “Cut!” or “Cease!,” Fonda wanted nothing more in the world than to play the young Lincoln.
And what a choice it turned out to be; the most honest of all American actors portraying the most honest of all American icons.
Do yourself a favor and get hold of a copy of this film; you’ll be glad you did. And who knows? Perhaps it might inspire you to be a bit less cynical, a bit less intolerant of human flaws in essentially good-hearted people who want to serve . . . to unite rather than divide, to split a rail and tell a tale.
Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone