Jack Nicholson, 85, has finally done the unforgivable. He has gotten old. The photo in the montage below got widespread play about a month ago, but I have some things to say about him.

Mind you, I am fully aware that Nicholson is…well… kind of a lecher. After Geena Davis appeared in a pink bikini in Earth Girls Are Easy–here, an Alien Spacecraft bearing her soon-to-be real-life love, Jeff Goldblum, is about to land in her swimming pool—she got a phone call from Nicholson. “Well, Geena,” he said. “How about it?”

He was known for dating beautiful women, like Michelle Phillips, formerly a Mama, as in the Mamas and the Papas, and for maybe the only long relationship he ever sustained, with Anjelica Huston. I remember her best as Clara, an enormously attractive and powerful woman, deeply grounded, in Lonesome Dove. Hell’s bells, Jack: Robert Duvall’s Gus made a mistake not marrying Clara. Get a clue!

But, as to his films, there are two seemingly trivial things I remember about Nicholson and remember vividly: His wardrobe in Chinatown, including the vented tan suit he wears to Mulwray’s place on Santa Catalina and the dark pinstripe in the interview with Evelyn in the bar (it still stands in L.A.’s Koreatown.) It broke my heart to see J.J. Gittes’ suits get bloodied and rended by bullies—or to see that convertible coupe impale itself on an orange tree.

But—sorry to go all Boomer on you—this was the scene, from Easy Rider—that first knocked me and my Arroyo Grande High School friends out, when Nicholson’s alcoholic small-town lawyer meets bikers Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper:

And here’s the helmet:

It’s even more Boomerish to bring up Cuckoo’s Nest, but I have some reliability in this direction, having read Ken Kesey’s novels and, just as good, Tom Wolfe’s portrayal of Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I think Randle McMurphy and Jack Nicholson are pretty much the same person, and I like the man’s sand and the electricity of his interaction with Nurse Ratched. This scene is his mid-film act of rebellion. The patients see their reflection in the little television screen—that and Ratched’s face seal McMurphy’s victory.

And, since Sandy Koufax was my childhood hero, I remember the 1963 World Series.

The other segment that stuck with us was from director Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, where two sailors, lifers, escort a large and bumpkinlike eighteen-year-old sailor to the Portsmouth Naval Prison. (He’s made the mistake of stealing his base commander’s wife’s coin-collecting jar for, I think, the March of Dimes.)

Nicholson takes a liking to the young sailor, played by Randy Quaid, who is genuinely large and bumpkinlike,so he persuades his fellow Shore Patrolman, Mulhall, played with beautiful restraint by Otis Young, to take the kid out for a beer. (Just before Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner makes a brief appearance as the member of a chanting group that meets behind the inevitable 60s-70s curtain of strung glass beads.)

Here are the two Nicholson turns I still love, even if he is 85 years old, That’s not his damn fault:

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I waxed poetic in an earlier blog post about Terence Malick’s Day of Heaven, which even Richard Gere didn’t ruin (SEE: Gere’s victory dance in King David) It is not a great film, but it is beautiful. What I found interesting about it—I haven’t seen shots framed with this artistry since John Ford’s Monument Valley days—is the great ease in which Malick tells the story without dialogue. These scenes can go on for a long time (you start to get uncomfortable until somebody in Days, hopefully Sam Shepard, interrupts with a declarative sentence or two.)

I saw the same comfort in silence last night in watching Malick’s The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones novel. Like Days, it is a gorgeous film, but the exteriors aren’t North Texas, but the jungles, swamps and shoreline of Guadalcanal, one of the earliest and most decisive Pacific land battles of World War II.

Malick’s comfortable with us gazing for long stretches, in complete silence at faces of actors like Jim Caviezel or Adrien Brody or Sean Penn. Then he will dissolve to sawgrass or dense tree canopies or impossibly steep hillsides, again in silence, and then, when you just can’t take it anymore, because you know the enemy is hiding just behind the silence, a fusillade from a Japanese Nakajima machine gun or a series of explosions from the impact of a Marine 105-mm artillery barrage comes as a relief.

An even better silence breaker is Nick Nolte’s Lt. Col. Tall. Here, in my imagination, is Nolte’s script:

CAPT GAFF (John Cusack): My men need water, sir.
LT COL TALL: RANTS. FINISHES AFTER THE SIXTH “GODDAM.”

But it was an earlier film, Badlands, that I now realize was the first Malick film to resonate with me. It featured Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as two crazy teenaged kids—Charlie Starkweather and Carol Fugate—were the real-life models for Sheen’s Kit and Spacek’s Holly—who go on a 1950s killing spree in the Great Plains, filmed, lovely and desolate, and so vast as to make the kids’ Cadillac seem tiny.

But there are no Great Plains in the closeness of this opening scene. Inchoate, restless Kit is riding his garbage truck in narrow small-town alleys, suggesting his need to break out into the open as the film widens the story. Holly, in her lonely baton twirling, needs to break out, too, from an oppressive household and into the short, violent journey of her sexuality.

Holly will spend a long time in the oppressive confines of prison; Kit’s liberation will come from the hangman and in the space between the killing chamber’s trap door and the dirt floor beneath his swaying feet.

The opening is made perfect, too, I think, because of Malick’s choice of the Carl Orff song “Gassenhauer,” (“Street Song.”) This was not a film we’d seen before, not in 1973, the year of The Last Detail.

Yup, they’re coming to the Fremont in SLO in July, but I made myself this video anyway.

And why it reminds me of Arroyo Grande history, as most things do.

Yes, I have a playlist called “Disco” on my MP4 player. So sue me. It got me through a pretty good session on the rowing machine this morning, though, and I just wanted to share three songs, whether you want me to or not. So there.

Gloria Gaynor evokes Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard in the way she vamps it up—even the piano rolls help— in this version of her wonderful song, “I Will Survive.” But she makes it the vamping work. And she’s not scary, like Gloria Swanson.

And this song is infectious. Even the orchestra gets happy. Me, too.

And, finally—hence the name of this blog post—we used to watch Soul Train open-mouthed on Saturday mornings (was it on after American Bandstand?) The dancers were amazing. And, as for Diana Ross, my Mom adored her when the Supremes appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s, so she became a part of family tradition. The dancers she invites onstage, in this video from an old Midnight Special, aren’t necessarily Soul Train caliber, but look how happy the young woman is. This moment will live with her forever. That’s a sweetness only music can provide.

Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, the supreme interpreter of his songs and of Hal David’s lyrics.

PBS was gunning for Baby Boomer cash last night, because their Sunday night pledge drive featured a Bert Bacharach concert, taped when the great man was in his last years, and it was pretty marvelous. We have no cash for them, with pensions and all being what they are and inflation being what it is. But the special made Elizabeth and me pretty happy.

If you are not a Baby Boomer, then may blessings flow over you and your life. I am a Boomer, too, and even though we are not dying nearly quick enough for a couple of younger generations whose time has come, we had a few things going for us. Before the Internet it was AM Radio that gave life to our lives and, like the internet, made our lives shared lives, albeit far less perniciously.

When I was your age. young people—pardon me, my dentures slipped— when I listened to KSLY in the 1960s, you would have a Beatles song, a Supremes song, a Stones Song, a Beach Boys song, a one-hit wonder (“Friday on My Mind,” by the Easybeats, remains one of my favorites; Mason Williams’s guitar-driven “Classical Gas” another. So sue me).

Then there would be a Bacharach/David song, almost always sung by Dionne Warwick, who should be on Mt. Rushmore, scowling at Thomas Jefferson, I think, for the way he treated Sally Hemings.

My parents were part of the Greatest Generation, the inheritors of the Great Depression and the Second World War, but they dropped the ball after all they’d gone through in the 30s and 40s. This is because my parents’ favorite 1960s-1970s musical program was The Lawrence Welk Show, which was dreck. Myron Floren was a featured musician, and he played polkas, grinning happily, on his accordion, which have their place, in Zydeco and Tex-Mex music, for example.

Not in my living room in the 1960s, however.

The Lennon Sisters—no relation to John—were another favorite, and their performances were enough to send the vulnerable into diabetic shock. Here’s what I mean:

Lawrence Welk was dreadful, a kind of musical War Criminal. We Boomers ran screaming from the room when his show came on, and, years later, when I discovered how wonderful my parents’ music really was (Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald), their love for Lawrence Welk bewildered me even more.

So the PBS Bert Bacharach special was a comfort. Whatever else you say about my generation, and we deserve it, our music was wonderful. (I started teaching at Mission Prep in the 1980s, and I thought that generation’s music was, too. I can’t figure out how to insert it here, but I refer you to MTV Unplugged and Aha’s “Take on Me.” Incredible.)

But the program led me to another thought. Bert Bacharach is light-years better than Lawrence Welk. The concert tape was a little unnerving, because he was so very old and obviously so close to leaving us, but he still played a piano, a synthesizer, and sang, which might’ve been a mistake. In general, the younger singers were not a mistake. They were wonderful, except for the Opera Guy, who destroyed his song, and for a lovely British girl in a miniskirt, whose voice was simply too light and delicate for a Bacharach/David song.

I will borrow a phrase from a woman teaching colleague of mine: Even if you’re a female-type Human Being, you have to have Balls the Size of Church Bells to sing a Bacharach/David song. They are complex, the tempo shifts without warning and you have to learn the difference, often in the same song, when the narrative is softer, like the descriptive passage in a novel, and then it’s interrupted by a direct quote, often urgent or triumphant and sometimes even angry.

That is why Dionne Warwick was perfect for these songs. But thinking that led me down another rabbit-hole: Which singers, other than Dionne Warwick, are my favorite interpreters of the great man’s songs?

I still want Dionne on Mt. Rushmore, mind you.

Here is what I mean about Ball the Size of Church Bells. Nobody knows who Cilla Black is today. Not that many Americans knew who she was in 1964, when she was videotaped performing one of my favorite Bacharach songs, “Anybody Who Had a Heart.” She owns this song, which is also one of the most difficult of his songs to sing. (A quick cultural reference: I suspect that the woman lighting up a cigarette in the background near the song’s end is lighting up a Virginia Slim, a 100-mm cigarette aimed specifically at women. Big Tobacco was egalitarian in its intent to kill both genders and anybody in between.)

So it goes.

Anyway, here’s Cilla. That haircut, by the way, was a big deal in 1965. Two of my AGHS classmates, MaryJane Allen and Prisila Dalessi, both stunning young women, had similar haircuts.

I didn’t hear this performance until about six months ago. It made me happy.

So did the second non-Dionne singer I chose for interpreting Bacharach, and that’s Jackie DeShannon (born and raised in Kentucky and Illinois, as was Lincoln) and her interpretation of “What the World Needs Now.” I guess it’s even more relevant today, as obvious as it is for me to say it, than it was in 1965. Bacharach loved horns, too, especially trumpets, and they are lovely in this song. DeShannon always delivered the song this way, with the the Julie Andrew-esque Sound of Music gestures and turns because, I think, she was on a mission.

I think it’s important to remember this song’s context: It was released two years before the Summer of Love in San Francisco—there were no Hippies in 1965—and three years before the Tet Offensive. There were no Peaceniks in 1965, either, except for at Cal, perhaps, and their focus was on nuclear annihilation, which seemed pretty imminent. DeShannon’s gentle interpretation of Hal David’s lyrics is more powerful than it might seem. She’s pulling us back, in her way, from the brink. (Another popular song with a different message that year was “Eve of Destruction,” sung by Barry McGuire, which assured us that we were all going to die, and real darn soon.)

Last one.

Everyone knew the context of “Say A Little Prayer.” It was a Vietnam song, and everyone knew someone over there—In Country—who needed a little prayer to bring them home. Thirty-four young San Luis Obispo County men came home in flag-draped steel caskets, so there’s a deep emotional undercurrent that goes with this song; it’s the freight my generation carries, heavier than a C-130 cargo plane with thirty steel caskets as ballast.

I’ve played this version of Aretha’s song, surrendered to her by Bacharach and David, I am sure, over and over, but just for me.

I played it again with the earplugs in after the PBS special and my eyes welled up with tears. This incredible woman owns this incredible song, just as Cilla owned hers. If Aretha isn’t in Heaven, I ain’t a-goin.’ I’m joking, of course: God made her with His own hands just to remind us, I think, of how much He loves us. That’s what brought the tears.

Elizabeth was supposed to leave earlier than she did to write her finals for St. Joe, but Born Yesterday (1950) was on Turner Classic Movies this morning and I turned to it and that messed up her schedule.

The reason it messed up her schedule was the lead actress, Judy Holliday.

You have to give Holliday a chance. I couldn’t stand her when I was younger; her voice–she plays a retired chorus girl–is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

She is also spectacularly dumb. Until the screenwriter, the legendary Garson Kanin, who wrote the original play, starts to drop little breadcrumbs. She is Broderick Crawford’s “kept woman,” and when the two play gin rummy, she cleans him out three times in a row with the first hand she’s dealt.

“GIN!”

Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden

Crawford hires William Holden to give Holliday’s character a smattering of education so that she can more or less hold her own in Washington D.C. while Crawford tries to bribe his way into a government contract.

Well, wouldn’t you know? Holliday, it turns out, with Holden as her teacher, loves to learn. Her eagerness to better herself reminded me of one the most powerful experiences I had in over thirty years of teaching, when I taught an adult woman to read. She was miraculous. The experience made me realize that learning to read is miraculous, too. (I realized, in my first day of school at the two-room 1888 Branch Elementary in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, that Mom had already taught me how to read, because I could decode the names of my classmates as Mrs. Brown wrote them on the blackboard. My Mom was kind of miraculous, too.)

And Holliday’s character, Billie, is as excited as I was that day in 1958 when Holden teaches her about American history and government in their tours of D.C. monuments.

The film takes a moment to admit that Washington has crooked legislators and that our democracy isn’t perfect. Our democracy, you might have noticed, has been under attack lately, and Holden’s character—this is 1950, mind you—delivers a brief but stunning monologue about fascism, which, you might have noticed, has been fashionable lately. It’s a startling moment in a film that’s older than I am. The Washington D.C. scenes are, in their way, as affirming of our democratic traditions as those in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

There’s not enough time in the screenplay to smooth out all her rough edges, but, of course, by the end, Holden has fallen in love with her and she’s gained enough self-respect to love him right back.

Holden is one of my favorite actors–he’s my Linked In avatar (my brother chose Clark Gable)–and he’s generous enough in this film to play his character quietly. He’s letting Holliday steal the show.

Which she deserved. She won the Academy Award that year–beating out, among others, Bette Davis and, good Lord, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Holden was Swanson’s co-star in that film, too—her kept man— and I now realize he did the same thing that he did with Holliday: he let the actress do the heavy lifting because Swanson, once a silent star, deserved it. (The final scene on the staircase—as Holden’s character floats face-down in the swimming pool just outside—“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille,” is, I think, one of the most indelible moments in American film. And it still scares the hell out of me, and I’m seventy-one now.)

Holden was a problematic man; stalked throughout his life by the alcoholism that would finally kill him, in a fall. I also wished he’d married Audrey Hepburn, a Hollywood love story that rivals Fairbanks and Pickford or Bogart and Bacall. He didn’t, alas.

Holden and Hepburn on Wall Street for Sabrina (1954) and ten years later for Paris When It Sizzles.

He loved animals–was a wildlife preservationist–which goes a long way in our house.

His characters are as problematic as Holden was. The one thread that marks them all, in films like Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Bridge Over the River Kwai or Network, is integrity, the kind that often leads to a moment of self-disgust, when Holden’s character realizes that he was meant to be a better man than he is. But there’s a lie in that common thread, because communicating integrity was not a stretch for Bill Holden, not even when his characters were, in the same order as the films I cited, two cynics, a coward and an alcoholic television news executive who kept telling the same stories from his glory days as a reporter on live television in the 1950s.

(The film, now nearly fifty years old, was as prescient as was Holden’s outraged comment on fascism in Born Yesterday; screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky envisioned a time when television news would leave its Walter Cronkites behind for its Tucker Carlsons.)

Faye Dunaway and Holden in Network.

Maybe Holden never had a moment of insight that would’ve taught him that he was a better man than the counterfeit his self-destructiveness and his self-doubt had made him. But what remains, for me, is what I love in his acting: his integrity and generosity. Despite his flaws, and maybe because of them, that’s why I love the man, too.

Two father portrayals in recent films I’ve watched inspired me. Coincidentally, both fathers were Mexican American, both children were daughters. In both cases, they did what fathers are supposed to do best: they replaced fear and doubt with faith.

Crash (2004) is still before my inner jury, but this scene, with Michael Peña, was extraordinary. Danny is an upwardly-mobile locksmith and he’s just moved his family out of a bad L.A. neighborhood. When he comes home from work, he finds his daughter, Lara, underneath her bed.

This is the passage from the script. It’s extraordinary writing.

LARA I heard a bang.

DANIEL Like a truck bang?

LARA Like a gun.

DANIEL Huh. That’s funny. ‘Cause we moved outta that bad neighborhood, not too many guns ’round here.

LARA How far can bullets go?

DANIEL Oh, pretty far. But they usually get stuck in something and stop.

LARA  What if they don’t?

DANIEL You thinking about that one that came through your window?

Lara nods.

DANIEL Yeah, we never did find it, did we?

Lara shakes her head.

LARA I think it didn’t see me, ’cause I was under the covers.

DANIEL And you think it was that same bullet you heard tonight?

Lara shrugs, she thinks it is but doesn’t want to say it. Daniel settles in, as if only now realizing the enormity of this situation. He lies there thinking this problem through.

DANIEL Huh. You think maybe we should move again?

LARA I like it here.

DANIEL Yeah. Me, too. But if that bullet found out where we live … (realizes something) Hold on.

LARA What?

DANIEL I am so stupid. How could I forget this?

LARA What?

DANIEL Never mind, you’re not gonna believe me.

LARA Tell me.  

DANIEL Okay. When I was five, this fairy came into my room one night.

LARA (skeptical) Uh-huh.

DANIEL See, me. I told you wouldn’t believe Okay, you go to sleep now.

LARA No, tell me.

DANIEL Okay, so this fairy comes into my room. And I’m like, “yeah, .right, you’re a fairy.” Anyway, we’re talking, you know, and she’s flying around the room, knocking my posters down and stuff.

LARA She was flying?

DANIEL Yeah, she had these little stubby wings. But she coulda glued ’em on or something, right, I’m not gonna believe she’s a fairy. So, she· says, “I’ll prove it. 11 And she reaches into her backpack and pulls out this invisible cloak. And she ties it around my neck, and she tells me it’s impenetrable. You know what impenetrable means?

(Lara shakes her head)

It means nothing bad can get through it. Not bullets, nothing. And she says I should wear this cloak and nothing will ever hurt me. So, I did. And my whole life I never got shot, stabbed, nothing. I mean, how weird is that? Only she tells me I’m supposed to give it to my daughter on her sixth birthday. And I forgot.

LARA Can I touch it?

DANIEL Sure, go ahead. She touches his arm.

LARA I can’t feel it.

DANIEL Pretty cool, huh? If you want, I can take it off and tie it around your shoulders, ’cause she showed me how to do that. Unless you think it’s stupid.

LARA … Don’t you need it?

DANIEL Not anymore. So, what do you think? You want it?

Lara waits, then nods slightly.

Daniel reaches in and pulls her out. Daniel places her on the bed.

DANIEL Okay.

Daniel “unties” the invisible cloak and takes it off. He wraps it around her shoulders.

DANIEL Hold your chin up.

She does. He ties it around her neck.

DANIEL That too tight?

She shakes her head.

DANIEL You feel anything at all?

She shakes her head.

DANIEL Good. Then it’s just right.

He kisses her on the forehead. He pulls out her pillow and places it on the bed. She lies down and he covers her. He turns off her light.

LARA Do I take it off when I have a bath?

DANIEL No, you leave it on all the time. ‘Till you grow up and have a daughter, and she turns six. Then you give it to her. Okay?

LARA Okay.

And he walks toward the door. Lara strokes her shoulder, trying to feel it, then closes her eyes.

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In East Side Sushi (2013), Juana, a Mexican American single mother who lives in East Oakland, works in the back kitchen of a sushi restaurant. She is fascinated by Japanese food and is determined to become a sushi chef. She enters a sushi-making contest at a local public-access TV station and her father, along with her daughter, videotapes her as she prepares her “signature sushi.”

https://videopress.com/v/wHJG15A8?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Rodgrio Duarte Clark plays Juana’s father. Here, in a later scene, she’s just learned that she’s won a place in the sushi competition. Juana is terrified. Her Apa decides that this is instead a moment to be celebrated.

I need to be careful with moments like these because these are movies and movie fathers seem to always know what to say. All too often, I never found the words I needed to say as a father. But moments like these make me wish that next time, I will know what to say, too.

I tried real hard not to watch Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables the other night, and I failed once again. It is 95% hooey—Sean Connery is no more convincing as an Irish cop than The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie, and the two most action-packed scenes, the shootout along the Canadian border and the second, far more graphic gun battle in Chicago’s Union Station—never happened.

Thank goodness. Those poor sailors.

The real Union Station shootout was in Kansas City’s Union Station between police and allies of Pretty Boy Floyd in June 1933. You can still see the marks left by bullets just as you can in the Louisiana State Capitol, where Huey Long was shot, or in Dublin’s neoclassic General Post Office, the site for the failed 1916 Easter Rising.

But The Untouchables’ cast is still compelling, despite Kevin Costner and the not-very-Irish Connery, whom I miss. Costner’s accent—is it San Fernando Valley? Maybe Topanga? Glendale?—is no more convincing and it grates even more in Dances with Wolves. I forgive Costner only because of Bull Durham.

Meanwhile, Charles Martin Smith’s nerdy IRS accountant is charming. His killing is horrific and heart- breaking. But to my mind, it’s Andy Garcia’s police recruit who almost steals the show.

The reason I keep going back to this film, though, is that Union Station scene. It is brilliant (it was parodied in one of the Naked Guns, which is high praise) and it’s homage, of course, to Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps scene, from The Battleship Potemkin (1925), set during the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsarist troops open fire on protestors. Here’s an excerpt:

I guess it’s pretty safe to say that Eisenstein was a pioneer. But dePalma’s staircase, with the blood now in color, is incredible, too:

And, if the scriptwriters and dePalma played fast and loose with history, they used history to get into our heads in a way I wasn’t aware of until the last time I watched the film. Below are two images: the baby in the carriage and the Lindbergh baby, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., murdered in 1932. I don’t think this was an accident. The Ness in Costner’s Wheatie-box portrayal was a cop, after all, but he helped the inept woman with her baby carriage, the trigger for the staircase scene, because being a father was just as important to him.

Henry Fonda was born in Nebraska on May 16, 1905.

I think I first became aware of him, and the integrity of his characters, with the 1964 film Fail-Safe, where he played the president (shortly after Kennedy’s assassination; I wanted Fonda to be my president now.) who tries to find some kind of moral order after the United States accidentally launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

(He never would’ve made the film, Fonda admitted, had he known Dr. Strangelove was coming out the same year.)

Both films were made shortly after aluminum strips, called chaff, fell on the Branch School playground, Designed to foil Soviet radar, they’d been dropped from American bombers high above us.

So Fonda impressed me. Later, I discovered him in John Ford films like My Darling Clementine.”Ford, and later Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West, seemed to be taken by Fonda’s impossibly long legs. In this excerpt, Fonda’s Wyatt Earp and Clementine celebrate a church-raising in Tombstone.

I did not realize until just a few years ago that he had a gift for physical comedy, with the radiant Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, in this scene, which I think is enormously sexy. Stanwyck is a card sharp, the erudite and fumbly Fonda is her pigeon and she, of course, falls in love with him.

Fonda was neurotic, complicated, closed, a distant father and husband and was only completely himself on the stage where, in his twenties, in a Brooklyn brownstone–in 1933, when the Depression was at its nadir–his roommate was another aspiring actor, James Stewart.

I would need about twenty more pages to tell you how much I love James Stewart, who was a far less complicated and far more straightforward man.

The two roommates, whose daily meal in their brownstone days might consist of a bag of roasted peanuts, remained friends until the ends of their lives.

Fonda, of course, was a passionate liberal. Stewart, the lifelong Air Force officer, was a devout conservative.

It was Fonda who helped to restore Stewart, deeply depressed from his combat experience as a bomber pilot during World War II, who would go on to make It’s A Wonderful Life.

It was Stewart who declined the role offered him for a film project, On Golden Pond, for which his friend Hank would win the Academy Award.

I’m pretty sure we Americans could learn something from a friendship like theirs.