Maude Findlay, an independent-minded woman from Tuckahoe, NY, came up with the title for this film series 48 years ago. She may have been a fictional character with a sitcom named after her, but the man of her dreams and her choice for the 1976 US presidential election was the resolutely real Henry Fonda. Thus, Fonda, as himself, must visit her family home to give her the honest truth (by way of Herman Melville’s Bartleby): “I would prefer not to”. Maude’s campaign implodes and so do the fantasies of half the nation. The fun to be had in this TV episode turns slightly bitter not just because Maude falls into a depression as her dream is denied but also because Fonda and his old friend Norman Lear, the creator of Maude (1972-78), could only see their gambit as an ‘unrealistic’ joke. Today, the fictional Maude’s campaign for a Fonda presidential run belongs to the rubric of alternate history, but by the 1970s her kind of imagination had already become a real motor for electoral strategies, and a much lesser screen icon than Fonda would soon ride that engine straight into the White House. “Reagan is a major concern”, said Fonda, a year before his death on 12 August 1982, in his last interview with Lawrence Grobel. “I think we’re headed for disaster. I’m surprised there isn’t more opposition. He’s got us on a path now that we’re gonna be on for a long time. He says the things people want to hear. He says them very convincingly and with what sounds like sincerity and he’s talking a language that people haven’t heard for a long time and it impresses them. I listen to a Reagan speech and want to throw up!”.

Alexander Howarth