You may not be shocked to discover that it was Ford who had the effeminate walk. His grandson said that Ford was “aware of his own sensitivity and almost ashamed of it,” that he “surrounded himself with John Wayne, Ward Bond, and those people because they represented the way he wanted to be.” Ford’s biographer put it this way: “Without question he preferred the company of men, and male bonding reached inordinate proportions.” (Inordinate! Oh my.) It was left to Maureen O’Hara, one of Ford’s favorite actresses, to be more direct. In her 2004 memoir, she speculates that Ford was gay. (She claims she walked in on the director kissing a leading man.) It is painful to read, now, about men who struggled as Ford apparently did; about how he would get so drunk that he would soil himself; about how between shoots he let himself go, watching TV in bed, wearing pajamas all day, his hair and fingernails allowed to lengthen; about how ominously remote his marriage was.

Jimmy Stewart once said of Ford, “He hated the human voice.” He would pause filming and insist the actors had been adding words, and when he was shown they hadn’t, he’d cut some. “If you can’t tell your story up on the screen,” Stewart recalls him saying, “if you can’t tell the story visually, without depending on the spoken word, you aren’t using the medium correctly.” Ford started in silent pictures and made dozens of them—and even in his talking pictures, it was as if speech itself were inauthentic, a contamination of the possibilities of action, and therefore of virility. So he hired an actor for whom speaking was a burden. (“It would take him years to learn how to deliver a line with unstudied ease,” Schoenberger writes of Wayne.) Wayne was not alone in this. It’s obvious once you say it, but the film actors of the 1930s, the first full decade of synchronized sound, had to learn how to talk on-screen, and many made an unusual speech pattern integral to their performance. Bogart lisped; Stewart stammered; Fonda spoke beautifully, but by wrapping each word in silence.

To read Scott Eyman’s Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart (another Christmas present for Dad, and a very good one) is to relive the fate of the Greatest Generation as it moved through war, affluence, routine, boredom, and finally, well-earned retirement. At the same time, the book reveals how defined by reticence the lives and screen personas of both Fonda and Stewart were. Neither was inarticulate, not in the least. And yet, though their performances are invariably described as natural, they were emotionally disguised men, each opaque in his way. (“Cold. Cold. Cold” was Katharine Hepburn’s assessment of Fonda; Stewart was so aloof as to seem almost of another species.)

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Their naturalness is bound up in the default mode being, for both of them, silence. Speech is always earned. In Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, Fonda looks painfully underfed, and he’s done up to resemble the $5 bill, but the minute he speaks, the picture is set straight: “I presume y’all know who I am. I’m plain Abraham Lincoln.” It takes painstaking craft to appear natural on-screen, but that’s not quite right: It takes precision. In movie after movie, the great stars—Stewart and Fonda stand out—delivered taut, masterful, unembellished performances, suiting every gesture or modulation of voice to the purpose of the hero.