Show Business: The Permanent Star

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But it is the theater that still provides the true challenge: "I like to make it a new play every night, because if it becomes mechanical, then it ain't fair. You owe it to an audience; they should get the play they heard about, and they deserve to enjoy it like it was the first night. And besides, that's where the fun of it all lies. If it ever stops being fun, I'll go back to my garden and my bees and my painting." Judging from the radiance of his sunset years, it will be some time before Fonda and his fifth wife, Shirlee, settle down to Social Security and the apiary in Bel Air.

In fact, as the star tells it, all the years were good. Through all his professional years, Fonda can recall only one disappointment. His agents turned down Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without telling him that its lead role, written with Fonda in mind, had been offered. But the regret is small. "Isn't it wonderful to be this age and still get exciting things to do? Just to think that a man can get to be 70 and then open the mail one day and find a script called Clarence Darrow," he says, citing his last Broadway show. He shakes his head at the good fortune of it all.

In First Monday Fonda has a line "It's not how good you are, it's how long you last." But it really doesn't apply to him. In his case, goodness has everything to do with the length of his life in the theater—and it is a goodness that extends well beyond style and technique. It is stronger than talent, something that colors the voice and shows in the face, something the permanent star can now afford to acknowledge: integrity.