The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Young John Ford arrived in Hollywood in time to watch pioneering filmmakers like Griffith and DeMille create the foundations of modern cinema, and he learned the craft from the bottom up. He saw quickly that Westerns would be his ticket to success. Soon after he started working at Universal, he teamed up with a dark-eyed actor from the Bronx with a long, soulful face. Harry Carey was a law school graduate, semi-pro baseball player, actor, and writer who had come out to Hollywood from Long Island City with Griffith’s Biograph company in 1913. Carey was sixteen years older than Ford and knew his way around film sets, ranches, and horses. The two men ground out a series of low-budget, twenty-five-minute two-reelers, then defied their bosses by making Straight Shooting, a full-length feature, without prior permission. Carey plays Cheyenne Harry, a hired gun who starts out working for a corrupt cattle boss but changes sides to support a beleaguered farmer. Carey’s character is deliberate, solemn, measured, and thoughtful. There are no wasted gestures or actorly flourishes. He wears an unadorned dark shirt, crumpled hat, and rolled-up denims. Ford admired Carey’s naturalistic style—as did a strapping teenager named Marion Morrison growing up in nearby Glendale who, after watching Carey’s films, began to adopt it as his own.

  When Universal’s moneymen found out what Ford and Carey had done, they wanted to cut the film to two reels and fire both men. But Irving Thalberg, executive assistant to studio head Laemmle, intervened, and Straight Shooting became Ford and Carey’s first hit. The two men went on to make a total of twenty-three Westerns using classic dime-novel plots with titles like Three Mounted Men, The Phantom Riders, Hell Bent, and Roped. “They weren’t shoot-’em-ups, they were character stories,” Ford later recalled. “Carey was a great actor, and we didn’t dress him up like the cowboys you see on TV.”

  The partnership eventually fell apart over money, jealousy, and competition for recognition—recurring themes in many of Ford’s wrecked friendships. But his work with Carey established Ford as a dependable action film director, and his career flourished. When his contract with Universal expired, he moved to Fox, a bigger and more respectable studio.

  In 1920 he met and married a dark-haired Irish woman named Mary McBryde Smith, and they moved into an unassuming stucco house on Odin Street in the Majestic Heights section of Hollywood. They quickly had two children, Patrick, born in April 1921, and Barbara, in December 1922. Life seemed good. Ford worked steadily at Fox, grinding out feature-length Westerns according to a tried-and-true formula, including two films with cowboy star Tom Mix. By 1923 he was making almost $45,000 per year. But his restless ambition pushed him further. In 1924 he made The Iron Horse, an epic tale of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It set the story of a young man’s quest for revenge for the murder of his father against the backdrop of a great historical event that celebrated national pride and manifest destiny.

  Ford had found his future. The Iron Horse is pure entertainment, crammed with evocative compositions and action scenes, patriotic fervor and passionate hokum. It’s got buffalo herds, cattle drives, stampedes, drunken brawls, shootouts, crass humor, easy women, villainous businessmen, new towns springing out of the barren Plains, Buffalo Bill, and Abraham Lincoln. And it’s got Indians—brutal, treacherous, and picturesque symbols of a way of life being pushed inevitably toward extinction.

  Early on in The Iron Horse there is a harrowing scene in which the leader of a band of Cheyenne Indians cruelly murders a white man with an axe while the man’s young son watches from hiding. Ford stretches the moment for maximum terror, crosscutting between the smiling, sadistic killer swinging the axe in his hand, the cowering soon-to-be victim, and the horrified young onlooker. After the killer strikes, he rips off his victim’s scalp and the frenzied Cheyenne celebrate with an orgy of dancing and elation. It is one of the ugliest moments in early American cinema and one that seems calculated to make Indians seem at once both fiendish and pathetic. Their leader turns out to be a renegade white man who goads his Indian followers into acts of barbarism and serves the will of a villainous white entrepreneur seeking to sabotage the railroad project. The Indians are obstacles to progress and they are doomed. Ford used hundreds of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Pawnees for The Iron Horse, most of them outfitted in their own native garb. They are a breathtaking sight careening down the warpath to attack the railroad construction crew. Still, whatever reverence or respect Ford would later hold for Native Americans, something more malign is on display in The Iron Horse.

  After The Iron Horse, Ford continued to alternate studio potboilers and more ambitious works such as 3 Bad Men and Four Sons. By 1927 he had directed some sixty films, nearly three-quarters of them Westerns. He prided himself on his productivity and the iron control he wielded on his film sets. “When he walked on the set, he knew that he was God,” said director Andrew McLaglen, whose father Victor became one of Ford’s favorite actors.

  Many silent film directors found it difficult to adjust to the new era of sound, which inevitably changed the character of visual setups and the nature of film acting. Ford was only thirty-three when The Jazz Singer premiered in October 1927, but some of the studio bosses considered him washed up. He had a few more small hits, but he was developing a reputation as a serious drinker and a difficult man to work with. When Fox loaned him out to the Goldwyn Company in 1931 to shoot the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith, Ford got into a creative dispute with Sam Goldwyn, stormed off the set, and later showed up for work “bruised and battered, spoke incoherently, and couldn’t remember what had been said minutes before,” according to a Goldwyn Company memo. Goldwyn not only fired Ford, he forced Fox to refund $4,100 of the money he had paid for Ford’s services.

  John Ford needed a rescuer—and not for the first nor last time in his life, one appeared.

  MERIAN CALDWELL COOPER COULD BOAST of the kind of dashing, daredevil biography that Ford envied and wished for himself. Born in Georgia of southern aristocrats who were long on pedigree but short on cash, Cooper dropped out of the Naval Academy during his senior year to join the Merchant Marine. He served as an aerial observer during World War One, was shot down in a dogfight when his plane caught fire, and wound up in a German prisoner-of-war hospital. After the war, he joined the Polish Air Force and fought against the Red Army. Shot down again, he escaped after a year in prison and was decorated by the president of Poland. After a brief spell as a newspaper reporter in New York, he set out to explore the world with a motion-picture camera. Working with Ernest B. Schoedsack, a newsreel cameraman, Cooper made his first film, Grass (1925), a documentary about the summer migration of Bakhtiari tribesmen. Two years later they made Chang (1927), about a family living in the jungle in northern Siam. And in 1929 the two men made their first Hollywood feature, The Four Feathers, one of the last great silent films, set in colonial India in the 1850s.

  Affable, chatty, and impulsive, Cooper was a self-styled visionary and hard-charging self-promoter, a showman who claimed to have first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and an early pioneer of Technicolor, which he described with characteristic humility as “a panacea for all industrial ills.” He so hated to be unproductive that if he was reading a paperback book and had to go downtown on the subway, he would tear out enough pages to last him for the trip. He talked at a relentless machine-gun pace, spraying ideas and enthusiasm just like he sprayed tobacco leaves and ash from the pipe he was constantly relighting.

  Cooper went to work for David O. Selznick at RKO Studios in 1931 as an executive producer. Two years later Cooper made King Kong, an iconic adventure film that expanded the imaginative possibilities of what movies could be. That same year he listened as Winfield Sheehan at MGM complained that John Ford was a washed-up hack who couldn’t get the feel of talking pictures and drank too much. “That’s too bad,” said Cooper, who happened to believe that Ford was one of Hollywood’s greatest talents. He proceeded to invite Ford to RKO for a meeting at which the director arrived “with a chip on his shoulder which I immediately put at ea
se.” The two men hit it off. Cooper told Ford he could make any picture he wanted, provided he also made a second one chosen by Cooper. With Cooper at his side, Ford drank a little less, at least while working, and tried a little harder to please the studio bosses. Over time Cooper became the middleman between Ford and the studio system, freeing the director to do some of his best work.

  With Cooper’s help, Ford delivered The Lost Patrol (1934) and The Informer (1935). The latter was a major work—a dark drama of betrayal set in Dublin but filmed on an RKO soundstage in shadows and fog that reflected the style of the German Expressionists. It won Ford his first Academy Award for best director, plus Oscars for Best Actor (Victor McLaglen), Best Screenplay (Dudley Nichols), and Best Musical Score (Max Steiner).

  Back at Fox, Ford answered to Darryl F. Zanuck, the autocratic executive producer who controlled virtually every part of the filmmaking process. Under Zanuck’s guidance, Ford directed popular stars like Shirley Temple and Will Rogers, making films set in small-town America that celebrated the values and sensibilities of a simpler world that was already fading from view, if it ever indeed existed. This period culminated in one of his most classic works, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), his first picture starring Fonda. It was followed by a trio of films—The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941)—that most truly define Ford as a film artist. The films are brilliantly composed and lovingly photographed, and each one comes to a melancholy conclusion about the meaning of life and the demands of family, friendship, and community. Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath must separate himself from his family and become a fugitive. Driscoll in Long Voyage surrenders his freedom while protecting his comrades and dies a martyr to the cause of friendship. The Morgan family in Valley disintegrates, as does its Welsh coal-mining village, in the face of economic and social forces beyond its control.

  Ford nursed similarly painful passions in his own life. Even after he married Mary, he conducted a number of affairs with young actresses, the most intense of which was with Katharine Hepburn. As he grew older, his flirtations grew more and more pathetic—ostentatiously ogling young starlets and blurting out crude remarks. He also collected handsome young men, although here the sexual component was repressed. He nurtured his community of actors, stuntmen, and crew members whom he used in picture after picture—the John Ford Stock Company, as they informally dubbed themselves. It was his version of a rural Irish village, with himself as the stern but loving squireen. But when his mood turned dark, as it did at some point during nearly every picture he made, he could turn cruel and abusive, seeking easy targets for his wrath. “There was an essence of fear in every Ford camp,” said Frank Baker, a character actor who worked with him often in the early years. “He always picked on somebody at the beginning of a picture, and he’d let them have it … You couldn’t do anything right. And he just sat there with that flat voice, and he would attack you; he would humiliate you. He’d make you grovel.”

  Ford’s father had been a saloon manager, and alcohol seemed embedded in the family DNA. Ford, his wife, Mary, and both his children, Patrick and Barbara, were all heavy drinkers. He pledged never to drink while working on a film. But when a project ended, he would let loose. “Daddy is what we called in those days a periodic,” Barbara recalled. “He would come to my mother and say ‘I filmed the picture, I’ve cut the picture, music is okayed … it’s shipped for negative, now call the bootlegger. And here is $1,000 for you to do what you want,’ and then he got drunk. And he drank for three weeks.” The reason? Barbara, who herself struggled with alcoholism all her life, knew the answer: “Escape. Oblivion, you know. He had done his job.”

  As time went on, the drinking got worse. Mark Armistead, a Navy lieutenant commander on a PT boat who worked with Ford during World War Two, recalled that Ford would sometimes go on a bender for no particular reason. “One drink—he’s the type of person that one drink is one too many and a thousand is not enough.”

  Armistead, who recalled his time with Ford with great warmth laced with despair, described him as an easily distracted man who always needed to be looked after, especially when he traveled. “The only thing he carried in his pocket was the rabbit’s foot, a handkerchief and a pocket knife, never any money … Never give him a baggage check because in thirty seconds he would lose it.”

  He was, ultimately, a profoundly lonely man. Philip Dunne, one of his early screenwriters, told biographer Joseph McBride that Ford had no true friends. “They’d go on his yacht and drink and play cards, but there was a lack of intimacy,” said McBride. “I think Ford had serious problems with intimacy all his life.”

  The luminous young actress Maureen O’Hara thought she had become friends with Ford when he cast her in How Green Was My Valley in one of her first starring roles. They bonded over their shared Irish heritage: O’Hara had been born in Dublin and could dish out the blarney with a vigor that delighted Ford. She loved the conviviality of his family dinner table, although she noticed early on that he could be casually insulting to Mary. O’Hara described Ford on the Valley film set as a combination of tyrant and magician, slouched in his director’s chair as if on a troubled throne. Although he was only forty-seven, he looked older and unhealthy to O’Hara. His “thick eyeglasses protruded from under the rim of a weather-beaten hat, and his rumpled clothes looked as though they never made it to the cleaners … Commanding and demanding, his dictatorial manner was matched only by the ease of his competence.”

  To O’Hara, Ford was a visual master who painstakingly composed every frame. She recalled how in an early scene he had a kitchen chair placed so that its shadow was bigger than the actors. “I looked at its enormity, its imposing presence, and thought, My God, look what’s he’s doing. It’s magnificent.”

  Over time O’Hara became close to Ford and his family. Then at a Christmas party at the Odin Street house, she let slip a casual remark that offended Ford—she could not even recall its content—and he leaned back and punched her in the jaw. “I felt my head snap back and heard the gasps of everyone there as each of them stared at me in disbelief and shock,” she recalled. No one said a word. She got up and silently left the house. The incident was never mentioned again. But it was one of several that convinced Maureen O’Hara that there was an ugly streak of anger lurking behind Pappy Ford’s front of benevolence. Ford, she concluded, “built walls of secrecy, lies, and aggression.”

  A decade later, O’Hara would claim, she walked into Ford’s office without knocking one day and found him kissing a man—“one of the most famous leading men in the picture business.” O’Hara does not name the actor, although it’s likely from the context that she was referring to Tyrone Power, who was making The Long Gray Line with Ford at the time.

  Harry Carey Jr., whom Ford often treated like a favorite nephew, experienced two sides of Uncle Jack. Ford could be a kind, gracious, and avuncular mentor. “I didn’t really feel I could act until I worked for John Ford,” said Carey. “I didn’t know I was capable of doing what he made me do.”

  At the same time, Ford instinctively smelled out weakness and ambivalence and pounced upon those too vulnerable to fight back. Periodically on a film set he would order Carey to bend over and then deliver a swift kick to Carey’s exposed rear end. On occasion he would insist that John Wayne mete out the kick—something that Wayne detested doing, yet performed on demand. “Ford was a bully, he loved to intimidate people,” Carey recalled. “… He was always testing me.” Yet, Carey added, “I couldn’t help but love him.”

  John Ford in the garden at the family home on Peak’s Island, Maine, ca. 1926.

  He was a man of big emotions, unspoken but not hard to see. After their estrangement, Ford still visited his old friend and film partner Harry Carey Sr. on occasion, but in twenty-five years he hired Carey only once for a part in one of his films. Yet when Carey was dying of cancer in 1948, Ford rushed to his bedside and was there when Carey died. “I remember Jack came out and he took a
hold of me and put his head on my breast and cried and the whole front of my sweater was sopping wet all the way down the front,” Carey’s wife, Olive, recalled. “He cried for at least fifteen or twenty minutes, just solid sobbing …”

  * * *

  JOHN FORD ALWAYS INSISTED his films were “a job of work,” nothing more, and throughout the 1930s he worked as a master craftsman laboring in the studio system. He made comedies, tragedies, costume dramas, historical pieces, and adventure stories. But the one genre he could not seem to return to was the one he loved best.

  The Western had fallen on hard times by the early 1930s. Part of the problem was the new technology of sound. Westerns looked stiff and artificial on studio soundstages, but authentic audio was hard to record in the great outdoors. In any event, location shooting was costly and complicated, as Ford had found out when he filmed large portions of The Iron Horse in the Sierra Nevadas. Westerns were exiled to the land of the B movie, where they grew undernourished on thin plots, thinner scripts, and actors who often looked ridiculous on horseback. For a while singing cowboys were the rage: Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers all became Western movie icons. Children may have squealed with delight, but few adults bothered to watch. The Western became a minor, cut-rate genre.

  Ford felt differently. He loved Westerns and was keen to make another. On a long cross-country train trip, his son Pat, then sixteen, read “Stage to Lordsburg,” a short story published in Collier’s magazine by the Western novelist Ernest Haycox. “Read this,” Pat told his father. “I think it’s a movie.”