Fonda: My Life [Hardcover]

Henry Fonda (Author), Howard Teichmann (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 372 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First edition (November 10, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0453004024
• ISBN-13: 978-0453004022
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ONLY Henry Fonda Biography Worth Reading!!, August 27, 2006

By 

Allessandra Montgomery Parrish "It is, but a ... - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fonda: My life (Unbound)

This book is pure pleasure from beginning to end. It feels like returning home to a wonderful, favourite place after a long time away, to find the hearth fires lighted and the lovely, familiar house redolent with the aroma of the evening meal. The musical sound of loved one's voices can be heard in the next room as the fire crackles...This is a warm, intimate visit with Henry Fonda, beginning long before he was famous. It is written by Howard Teichmann, as the stories were shared with him by Henry Fonda. Henry Fonda had always refused requests in past to authourise a biography, but he came to like and trust Mr. Teichmann and they created a beautiful tableau together.

Their collaboration took place during the last two years of Henry Fonda's life. This time period was before, during and following the filming of "On Golden Pond." It covers the early years in New York City, where he shared quarters with Jimmy Stewart and many more people of the same era. It follows him through his career and his personal life and it is an incredibly authentic treatise. It pulls no punches and if you like Henry Fonda before reading his life story, you will never forget him after you read this book!

This is the quintessential biography for Henry Fonda, although, technically it is an autobiography. Whatever name you give it, it is one of my favourite books. There is not another book regarding him that comes close. This is a Winner!!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Authobiography of Henry Fonda ever, September 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Fonda: My life (Unbound)

Since Henry Fonda resisted almost all his life to share his private life with the public, this book of Howard Teichman is probably the one and only book, that helps you getting to know Henry Fonda. You know him from screen and stage, but who is the man behind the actor ? This book tells you not only how he started acting on stage and in movies. It also shows his private life , family life, his personality and how he saw the world. It is simply not to understand, why this book is out of print.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Whets the appetite for more but provides insufficient details, June 25, 2010

By 

Steven Spenser (real name) (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fonda: My Life (Signet) (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a good introduction to Henry Fonda's life, and, since it's told by Fonda, it obviously must be considered the definitive biography. Fonda was nothing like the characters he played, however--a point the actor stresses--and much of this book is devoted to providing an unflinching portrait of a man who was emotionally stunted for much of his life. He was supremely unsuccessful in marriage until his fifth and final wife, and after he became a father, he was cold and distant with Peter and Jane for many years. The book successfully captures Fonda's natural terseness and Midwestern reserve, and therein lies its chief shortcoming. We learn a little about various of Fonda's films, and more about various plays, but most of the book's personal revelations are about Fonda's relationships--with his friends, his wives and his children. Perhaps because Fonda was an intensely private man, the book hardly dishes about his costars and directors (other than John Ford), so this is by no means a traditional Hollywood biography.

You're left wishing for more detail, but Teichmann doesn't provide it. He includes only a single foto of Fonda's third wife Susan, and only one showing the face of his fourth wife Afdera. Curiously for a book about a movie star, this volume contains no filmography--a serious oversight. Some films aren't mentioned at all: Drums Along the Mohawk; The Male Animal; Hitchcock's The Wrong Man; Advise & Consent; Fail-Safe; The Best Man; The Battle of the Bulge; A Big Hand for the Little Lady; There Was a Crooked Man... (with Kirk Douglas); My Name is Nobody; and Midway. Despite Fonda's admiration for John Steinbeck (whose Grapes of Wrath provided Fonda his first Oscar nomination), altho' other Steinbeck works that Fonda played are mentioned, The Red Pony--which earned Fonda an Emmy nomination--isn't. But the biggest failing is that, although Fonda's 1980 Honorary Oscar is mentioned, his winning Best Actor for On Golden Pond in 1981 is not. Given that On Golden Pond occupies much of the book's final chapters, you'd think the publisher would have interrupted the press run to include this natural conclusion to Fonda's story and Teichmann's book.

Fonda died in 1982, nine months after the book came out (and a week after the paperback edition was published), but apparently sales were not strong enough to publish a second edition with details of his last years and his death. Knowing that he didn't outlive the book by very much, we're left hanging, wishing for a proper conclusion.