Haycox’s story was a taut narrative about a handful of disparate stagecoach passengers forced to travel together on a tense journey through hostile Apache territory. Ford saw its possibilities as a thrilling action movie as well as a comedy of manners and social commentary pitting two young iconoclasts—an outlaw and a prostitute—against their purported elders and betters. Ford hoped to film it on an authentic location somewhere away from Hollywood. He set to work with Dudley Nichols, his favorite screenwriter.
Merian Cooper loved the idea of shooting an exciting Western on location, and he arranged a dinner meeting between Ford and David O. Selznick, Cooper’s boss at RKO. At first, Selznick was adamantly opposed to Ford’s wasting his time and talent on what Selznick called “just another Western.” But as Ford and Cooper talked about the project, Selznick slowly began to melt. By the end of the evening, Cooper believed that they had won Selznick’s approval.
“I went into Dave’s office at Pathé [next morning], thinking everything on Stagecoach was just fine,” Cooper recalled thirty years later. “It wasn’t.”
Selznick’s ultimate objection wasn’t to the story but to the cast. He insisted that the picture would fail to “get its print costs back unless we put stars into the two leads.” Selznick suggested Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, both at the height of their careers. Cooper would play the young outlaw, seeking revenge for a brother gunned down by bad men, and Dietrich the kindhearted prostitute who falls in love with him. Both were a little old for their roles, but Selznick was quite certain they would ensure box-office success. John Ford was a great director, Selznick conceded, maybe the greatest, but he didn’t know how to pick the most commercially viable material or package it the right way.
But Ford had already committed to two lesser-known actors. The female lead, Claire Trevor, was a well-respected character actress with impressive credits but hardly the draw that Dietrich could have been. As for the male lead, Ford was proposing to jump off an even higher cliff by choosing a strapping young B-movie actor who was a virtual unknown in the mainstream studios and whose only starring role in a major motion picture, nine years earlier, had proved to be a certified box-office disaster.
Selznick was adamantly opposed. John Wayne, he insisted, could never carry a feature-length film.
15.
The Actor (Hollywood, 1954)
By the late 1930s, improved technology was breathing new life into the oldest of American genres. Better motion picture cameras; crisper, more realistic sound; fresh vistas; and a nostalgic sense of longing by filmgoers for simpler times and a sepia-toned America that had never quite existed all helped feed the Western movie’s comeback. Emerging from the Great Depression and facing a global challenge that was inevitably pulling them into another world war, Americans were rediscovering their own history and reimagining it as a glorious and patriotic enterprise. John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lincoln were part of this nascent movement, as was Stagecoach. All three were released in 1939.
But the key to rebuilding the myth of the American frontier was the character. Popular culture had always latched onto the rugged male hero—whether backwoodsmen or gunslingers or lawmen or outlaws—as the focus of its collective fantasy.
Many of the early Western stars, such as Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and Ken Maynard, were showmen who rode fancy horses, dressed flamboyantly, and twirled their pistols like batons. Their elaborate clothing never got dirty and their bodies never broke a sweat. They were entertaining performers but they lacked the grit and authenticity that the new technology could capture and that audiences demanded. Gary Cooper, whose breakthrough as a film star was in the title role of The Virginian in 1929, had the necessary attributes of stoicism, modesty, and intensity, but meaty parts in good Westerns were few in the 1930s.
Throughout the decade, an amiable, slow-moving, tall young actor named John Wayne searched for a foothold, churning out a steady flow of cheap, disposable B Westerns that occupied the bottom halves of double bills and Saturday morning matinees for children. He took an early and misguided turn as Singin’ Sandy Saunders in Riders of Destiny (1933), crooning from the back of a white horse while pretending to strum a guitar, and he later played Stony Brook, one of The Three Mesquiteers, in a series of memorably forgettable movies. With a wife and four children to support, Wayne needed a steady income, and he made dozens of two-reelers, running under sixty minutes, for $500 each.
Still, even in the cheesiest of settings, Wayne was learning how to act, honing his craft, and carving out a persona. He was deep in the process, on and off the screen, of becoming John Wayne. There were times when he could be self-deprecating and cynical in describing the character he constructed. “When I started, I knew I was no actor, and I went to work on this Wayne thing,” he recalled in an unusually candid interview some thirty years later. “It was as deliberate and studied a project as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. It was a hit-or-miss project for a while but it began to develop.”
Our modern image of Wayne has been shaped and distorted by the final decade of his career, when he became the symbol and spokesman for a simplistic, militaristic, macho-driven vision of the United States amid the debacle of the Vietnam War. It was a decade when, working mostly with second-string directors and screenwriters, Wayne the actor was a bulky, plodding, toupee-wearing self-parody, repeating himself in role after role. But before he became John Wayne, Inc., Wayne was something more. Working with John Ford and Howard Hawks, two of Hollywood’s finest directors, Wayne created a range of distinctly American characters and a unique film persona of charm, menace, and physical grace. Contrary to popular belief, Wayne was more than just a passive lump of clay that Ford and Hawks sculpted. Wayne himself was a storyteller and a mythmaker. He did not invent the roles he played, but he did invent the man who played them. The story he told was about the settling of the American West, and the central character was a cowboy played by another character, a man named John Wayne.
WAYNE WAS BORN Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907. When he was six years old, his pharmacist father moved the family to Southern California in pursuit of ranchland and a bid for financial independence. The journey was an early-twentieth-century replay of the Parker family saga, minus the religious fervor and the hostile Indians—a pioneer family heading west in search of new opportunities in a promised land. But Clyde Morrison, an amiable but ineffectual man, failed to develop his small stake in the parched hills outside Bakersfield into a productive ranch. Eventually Clyde, his imperiously critical wife, Molly, and their two sons fled to Glendale, a distant suburb of Los Angeles, and Clyde wound up back behind a pharmacy counter working for other people for the rest of his life.
Young Duke Morrison—he always claimed he picked up the nickname from the family Airedale—grew up with a gnawing sense of grievance. He knew what it was like to try to scrape by in a family always ill at ease because of lack of money and an ever-simmering struggle between father and mother. He didn’t care for horses and had no great interest in ranching or cowboys. He was a good student and very much a charmer—tall, powerfully built, and instantly likable, with a shy smile and curly dark hair. His voice was high-pitched and thin, but he had an engagingly slow way of speaking that was friendly and vulnerable without seeming soft. All of which was enough to earn him a football scholarship to the University of Southern California.
He met John Ford in 1926 on the back lot at Twentieth Century-Fox, where Ford was directing and the strapping nineteen-year-old Morrison was working as a stagehand, thanks to USC’s powerful alumni corps. The two men bantered and, according to legend, egged each other on. Ford, who was thirteen years older, had been a football lineman in high school, and he challenged Morrison to tackle him. The younger man knocked him on his butt, a brave thing to do. Ford liked it. Thus, Wayne said later,
“the beginning of the finest relationship in my life.”
Ford gave Morrison various odd jobs on the set. The younger man quickly came to admire Ford and his work—the way he organized the set each day, and the way he handled people, getting the best out of every actor—and developed an interest in becoming a director himself. “I’d never seen a genius at work before,” Wayne later recalled, “but I knew I was seeing one now.” When Morrison injured his shoulder and was suspended from football, costing him his scholarship, he turned to Ford for advice.
“I poured out my troubles to him,” Duke later recalled. “He said, ‘Why don’t you stay out of school a year? Give the shoulder a chance to heal. Then maybe you can start playing again. You can come work for me when school lets out. I’ll find something for you to do—propping or acting.’ “
Duke was heartened by Ford’s offer. But when Duke reported for work, Ford said he had no movie in the works and wouldn’t be ready to start a new one for two months. It was as if he had never talked to Duke before. “I walked out of the gate feeling like the whole world was against me,” Wayne later recalled.
Ford eventually found odd jobs for Duke as a stagehand and stunt-man. The two men always described their budding friendship as the close relationship of a wise and generous mentor and an eager young acolyte. But the details Wayne divulged over the years suggest that Ford often exploited the goodwill and naïveté of his young friend. Like Ford himself when he worked for his brother Francis, Duke took on the most arduous and at times most dangerous tasks. For example, Ford promised Duke seventy-five dollars for every risky stunt dive he did during the filming of Men Without Women (1930), a submarine picture. After performing a half dozen, Duke figured he was owed a total of $450, but when the assistant director added only $7.50 to his regular paycheck of $35 a week, he kept quiet. “I should have complained to Ford but I didn’t,” Wayne recalled. “I was still a shy, timid person, always embarrassed about speaking up for my rights.”
Wayne always believed that Ford suggested his name to the director Raoul Walsh when Walsh was looking for a new talent to star in The Big Trail (1930), the epic Western that Fox was putting together. But Walsh claimed that Ford never mentioned Morrison. Instead, Walsh said, he came across Morrison by happenstance.
“We looked high and low and I was walking by the property department on Western [Avenue], this big warehouse building, and there’s a young guy carrying some furniture, it was one of those overstuffed chairs. He had a good height. He was bare breasted. It was a hot day. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was a good looking boy.” Walsh asked him, “Where did you get all that muscle?” Duke replied, “I used to play football at USC.”
Walsh said he liked the sound of Morrison’s voice and the way he moved. “He had a certain western hang to his shoulders. I know that does not make sense to you, maybe, but, a certain way of holding yourself and walking is typical of a real westerner and he had it.” Walsh screen-tested him, and liked what he saw. The studio gave the young man a new name. “They came up with John Wayne,” Duke recalled thirty-five years later. “I didn’t have any say in it, but I think it’s a great name … It took me a long time to get used to it, though. I still don’t recognize it when somebody calls me John.”
With The Big Trail, Wayne began shaping his persona as a mythic Western hero. Wayne’s character in the film, Breck Coleman, is a natural man who has lived among Indians and knows their lore, is dedicated to justice, and is a determined hunter of bad men. “I never quit a job in the middle,” Breck declares, and we believe him. Although not a slick ladies’ man, he’s alluring and irresistible to women. He’s honest, self-reliant, and friendly, and he adheres to a moral code. Physically, he looks graceful, thin, and almost angelic—clean, white, and glowing. He is an innocent young man, strong and fluid in his movements, with a classical controposto stance and posture—one leg relaxed, the other rigid—echoing Michelangelo’s statue of David.
Still, Breck Coleman is a work in progress and not yet the classic John Wayne character of later years. He comes across as a bit nervous, eager, and naïve, slumps on his horse, wears fancy leather clothes, uses a knife rather than a gun as his lethal weapon of choice, clenches his jaw as he waits to speak his lines, and walks tentatively. All were traits that Wayne later discarded or refined.
A flop at the box office, The Big Trail failed to propel Wayne into the ranks of movie stars. It also cost him for a time his friendship with John Ford, who didn’t speak to him for two years after the film was made. Wayne never knew whether Ford’s boycott stemmed from jealousy or from Ford’s sense that Wayne somehow had violated the rules of their friendship by going to work for a rival director. Forty years later, this treatment still rankled Wayne. “Instead of facing me with it and saying what the hell are you doing, he just quit talking to me, and so I quit talking to him,” Wayne told Ford’s grandson Dan.
The silence ended abruptly when Ford ran into Wayne at a bar called Christian’s Hut on Catalina Island. Ford sent his eleven-year-old daughter, Barbara, to summon Wayne to his table, then invited Wayne to dinner. Nothing more was ever said about the freeze-out.
After that, the two men were inseparable. They took saunas together at the Hollywood Athletic Club, played cards at least once a week, drank and dined together, spent weekends on Ford’s yacht, the Araner, and sailed to Mexico for fishing, beer, and the local cantinas. Wayne became part of Ford’s inner circle of cronies, along with fellow USC dropout Ward Bond, Henry Fonda, and the screenwriter Dudley Nichols. They called Ford “Pappy,” looked up to him, followed his lead, and obeyed his commands. According to Dan Ford, who wrote an intimate biographical memoir of his grandfather, John Ford “did not surround himself with his creative peers, but rather with sycophants who were willing to serve him and obey his every whim.” Wayne, who could hold his liquor under any circumstance, became the hard-drinking, hell-raising, hardworking son Ford had always wanted.
Still, despite his friendship with Ford, Wayne was an outlier in Hollywood, a proletarian among the cinematic aristocracy. For most of the 1930s, he rarely worked at the upscale studios like MGM, Paramount, or Twentieth Century-Fox, making his living at smaller shops like Monogram, RKO, and Republic—known collectively as “Poverty Row”—grinding out dozens of cheap, forgettable features while laboring to master his craft.
An eager student and a quick study, Wayne had the best of mentors. He started by modeling himself after the Western star Harry Carey, Ford’s former movie partner. Wayne admired Carey’s slow, soulful manner: the audience could see Carey in the act of thinking before he sprang into action. Wayne got to know Carey and his wife, Olive, through Ford and other members of Hollywood’s “cowboy posse” of Western actors, stuntmen, and wranglers in the 1930s, and Carey was a generous teacher.
The Gower Gulch cowboys were named for the corner of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, where they gathered early in the morning while waiting for film studio work. Those who could afford it ate breakfast and drank coffee at the lunch counter of the local drugstore dressed in their cowboy denims. These were hard men who knew how to ride a horse, rope a steer, and fall off an animal in full flight without breaking a serious limb—essential abilities in a genre whose most enduring dramatic elements were horse riding and gun violence. Wayne was never one of these men; he preferred golf to horseback riding and tailored suits to cowboy duds. But he respected what they did and studied them and their moves with utmost care.
The one he watched most was Yakima Canutt, a well-known stuntman and occasional actor. A native of the Snake River hills in southwest Washington State, Canutt had arrived in Hollywood in 1919 after winning every major prize as a bronco buster on the Western rodeo circuit. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he was the real thing as a cowboy. “I studied him for many weeks, the way he walked and talked and rode a horse and pulled a gun,” Wayne recalled. “I noted that the angrier he got, the more he lowered his voice and slowed up his delivery. I guess unconscious, even today, I tr
y to say my lines slow and strong the way Yak did.”
The two men worked together in a dozen or more B Westerns, with Canutt usually cast as the bad guy. Together they developed an innovative approach to the fistfight, a classic moment in every B Western. “Before I came along it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean,” Wayne recalled. “The heavy was allowed to hit the hero on the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win.”
From watching Carey and Canutt and listening to Ford, Wayne learned the basic lesson that appearing natural on-screen is in fact an artifice. He slowed his cadence and deepened his voice. He picked up little physical and verbal clues from the wranglers and stuntmen he met—not only how they talked but how they walked.
The character actor Paul Fix, whose daughter Marilyn married Carey’s son, helped Wayne work it through. Paul “coached him, he taught him how to walk,” Harry Carey Jr. recalled. “Wayne became very graceful because he worked at it so hard. In those early movies you can see he looks cumbersome. Wayne said he couldn’t stand to watch himself on the screen. So Paul said ‘point your toes into the ground when you walk, and swivel your hips.’ “
“Duke’s basic problem was coordinating himself physically to his part—getting his body in gear with his motions and with the lines he had to speak,” said Fix. “Acting natural the way Duke can act does not come naturally. He had to work hard to learn to look as natural as he does. And he was anxious to improve himself and very smart. So he kept getting better all the time …”
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