The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  If Stagecoach established Wayne as a star, Red River established him as an actor. Even John Ford was amazed. “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act,” he told Hawks.

  “I don’t think he ever really had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River,” Wayne once observed. “… Even then, I was never quite sure.”

  Inspired in part by what Hawks had captured on film, Ford proceeded to challenge his star with a more complex and nuanced role than any he had offered Wayne before. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was one of three Westerns filmed by Ford in the late 1940s and early ’50s, all starring Wayne and all focusing on the U.S. Cavalry in the Indian-fighting days after the Civil War. Although set in the past, they were Ford’s monument to his experiences in World War Two, as well as a parable for the Cold War struggle against communism that many Americans were processing through the same defenders-of-civilization-versus-barbarians prism through which they viewed the Indian wars. The films became known as the Cavalry Trilogy, and each of the three has a Kiplingesque sense of love for duty, honor, and empire and Ford’s trademark fondness for the imagined community of officers, enlisted men, and their families.

  Wayne plays Captain Nathan Brittles, a veteran commander pushing sixty and on the brink of retirement. Brittles is a fount of wisdom and experience who cares deeply for his men and tries to forestall a new Indian war, first by seeking a rapprochement with an old Indian ally and later by a ruse that allows him and his men to capture the warriors’ pony herd and force them to return to the reservation. Brittles’s men love him and yet he is alone—a widower with no children and no home except the cavalry he is being compelled to leave. It was one of Wayne’s favorite roles, the one that he believed finally proved to Pappy and anyone else who mattered that he truly could give a great performance.

  One of Wayne’s most memorable scenes comes toward the end at Brittles’s retirement ceremony, when his troopers give him a silver watch and chain. The awkward, moving speech he gives was not in the original screenplay but was improvised on the spot. “It was an emotional reaction rather than a studied response,” Wayne would recall. “Pappy was very conscious of each actor that he had, their sensitivity, he knew the paint he was using when he put me in that scene. So he knew my reaction would be simplistic and deeply moving, which I think it was.”

  Finally, there was Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), directed by Allan Dwan, in which Wayne plays Sergeant John Stryker, a tough-as-nails marine officer who gets the best out of his men even while humiliating and angering them. Stryker trains them with his superior know-how and his fists, leads them into battle, and wins their loyalty and admiration. He is a warrior of personal charisma and almost superhuman powers. He is also the moral compass that men heed and measure themselves against. His kind is necessary to win the war, but there is no place for him in the postwar world. In the end he is killed by a Japanese sniper just as victory is at hand. Wayne is hard to kill in movies, even when a storyline seems to proceed logically toward his death. He is simply too strong to perish. Sands of Iwo Jima is the exception that proves the rule.

  In Red River, Yellow Ribbon, and Sands, Wayne gives three contrasting performances. Sometimes he plays an older man, sometimes a younger one. In each he uses his body and voice differently. Yet he is always John Wayne, the melancholy authority figure—not the existential rebel like Bogart, Cagney, Gable, or Brando. No longer the outsider, he is now the charismatic leader of men, and yet somehow still solitary.

  As Wayne’s character grows into middle age, he becomes burdened with responsibilities and command. He has lost his wife or fiancé to death, divorce, or estrangement. The American West was a man’s world, in the view of the Wayne persona, with no time or psychic space for women. The John Wayne hero walks alone.

  John Ford’s Westerns are also male-dominated, yet there are subtle differences. Even in a male genre, Ford always seems to find room for strong women characters: Dallas in Stagecoach, Mrs. McKlennar in Drums Along the Mohawk, Mrs. Allshard in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Kathleen Yorke in Rio Grande. In retrospect, these characters are setting the stage for the women who are essential to the drama and meaning of The Searchers.

  In a 1952 cover story, Time magazine declared that Wayne was “not the world’s greatest actor—indeed, the only character he plays is John Wayne.” What Time’s cultural commissars failed to grasp was that the character known as John Wayne was a subtle and varied creature. He carried the predictable toolkit of manly virtues and the ability to resort to physical action. But Wayne delivered something much deeper. “There is enough unacknowledged sorrow in his broad features, and enough uncontrolled anger in that slow, hesitant phrasing, to make him seem dangerous, unpredictable: someone to watch,” wrote the New York Times critic A. O. Scott in 2006, with the benefit of a half century of further consideration. “He is never quite who you think he will be.”

  Behind Wayne’s iron façade was a well of vulnerability, within his certainty a deep pocket of something far less certain. This was the heart of Wayne’s art. He came on direct, angry, and unbending, daring you to test him and prepared to deposit your ass on the ground with a punch to the jaw. Yet there was a certain sadness to the whole enterprise. Wayne’s character seemed to be constantly looking back, searching for something—a way of life, a code of honor—that had ceased to exist.

  Unlike Wayne, who thoroughly enjoyed his box-office stature, Ford kept his distance from the Hollywood crowd, expressing profound disdain for banquets, balls, and black-tie affairs. Still, he wanted it both ways—to remain an outsider to the film community while commanding its respect.

  That same ambivalence was evident in his politics. Ford called himself “a rock-ribbed Republican from the state of Maine,” yet he supported Franklin Roosevelt and directed The Grapes of Wrath, one of the most pro-socialist films ever made in Hollywood. At the same time, Ford associated with Wayne and Bond, two ardent right-wingers who helped lead the witch hunt against purported Communists and fellow travelers during the McCarthy era.

  Wayne took credit for helping expose alleged Hollywood Communists such as writer and producer Carl Foreman and director Edward Dmytryk. In 1948, Wayne became president of the stridently right-wing Motion Picture Alliance, succeeding Bond. In the harsh judgment of author Garry Wills, Wayne avoided combat in the ideological struggle between Communists and anti-Communists until the battle had been won, just as he had avoided genuine combat in World War Two. “His role, finally, was to emerge after the battle and shoot the wounded,” writes Wills.

  Ford’s own signature moment came in October 1950 when Cecil B. DeMille, one of the enforcers of Hollywood’s blacklist of suspected Communists, called a special meeting of the Directors Guild, held in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, to seek to oust Joseph Mankiewicz as president because of Mankiewicz’s supposed leftist leanings. Ford sat quietly through several hours of discussion. He finally rose and introduced himself. “My name is John Ford,” he declared. “I am a director of Westerns.”

  First he praised DeMille as a filmmaker. “I don’t think there’s anyone in this room who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. DeMille—and he certainly knows how to give it to them.” Then Ford turned and looked directly at DeMille. “But I don’t like you, C.B.,” he said, “and I don’t like what you’ve been saying here tonight.” He proceeded to blast DeMille’s proposal: “I don’t think we should put ourselves in a position of putting out derogatory information about a director, whether he is a Communist, beats his mother-in-law, or beats dogs …

  “Now I move we give Joe a vote of confidence,” Ford concluded, “and let’s all go home and get some sleep.”

  The vote in favor of Mankiewicz was decisive. John Ford, casting himself as the unassuming, solitary hero, had gunned down Cecil B. DeMille.

  THE 1952 TIME MAGAZINE story officially validated John Wayne’s iconic status. “The Wages of Virtue” portrays Wayne as an ironfisted businessman “who probably exe
rcises a tighter control over the films he appears in than any other top star in Hollywood. He insists on simple stories, sympathetic parts that fit his personality, and dialogue that he can speak convincingly.”

  Chata Wayne, his second wife, ruefully describes her husband to Time as “one of the few persons who is always interested in his business. He talks of it constantly. When he reads, it’s scripts. Our dinner guests always talk business. And he spends all his time working, discussing work, or planning work.”

  Wayne, who had become a producer at Republic Pictures, would pace the floor, temper boiling over, then apologize for his periodic outbursts. “He has acquired that final badge of executive success,” reported Time, “a gastric ulcer.”

  One person remained a constant in his life. “John Ford still treats him as a clumsy sophomore and bawls him out unmercifully when they work together. Wayne takes it like a scolded schoolboy and murmurs, ‘Sorry, Coach,’ with abject hero-worship.”

  Besides his other commitments, wrote Time, “Wayne has an unwritten agreement with Producer-Director John Ford to star in any movie for which Ford may want him.”

  By 1954, John Wayne had been on the list of the top ten film stars in the Quigley Poll for five consecutive years—on his way to a record twenty-five out of twenty-six years. His latest hit movie was The High and the Mighty, the story of a crowded commercial airliner that limps home to safety despite two damaged engines, a star-laden vehicle that anticipated the disaster films of the 1970s. Wayne was making more than $100,000 per film, plus a percentage of the profits. He had his own independent production company, a string of employees, and a mob of sycophantic admirers. It could be said that he owed nothing to anyone. Yet there was one man who could pick up the phone and summon Wayne for any project he so desired. Whether the assignment was to stage a Christmas pageant for a favorite charity or to star in a major motion picture, John Ford still had John Wayne’s number.

  Most stars at the height of their careers are unwilling to tinker with their screen personas, and Wayne was no different: in the hands of second-string directors he often took control of the set and insisted on operating within a narrow range of character and emotion. But despite the verbal abuse he was compelled to endure, Wayne trusted Ford and was willing to do whatever Ford demanded of him as an actor.

  Wayne was forty-eight now, and it showed. The years of good living had fattened his cheeks and put a beer gut below his barrel chest. His hair had thinned to the point where he wore a hairpiece for every role. The three to six packs of cigarettes he ravenously burned through each day had scorched his voice into a raspy growl. He could barely catch his breath—which slowed down his speech even more and put deep punctuation marks between his thoughts and his phrases. But his physical grace remained intact. He still could move like a panther, spin a revolver like a baton twirler, and pivot on his toes like a ballet dancer.

  Most of all, Wayne still trusted his “Coach” to take him somewhere deep and not betray him. He was willing to go wherever Ford directed him to, even to the darkest of places, where a hero could resolve to slaughter an innocent maiden, and an uncle could seek to kill his own niece.

  Wayne had already fulfilled his debt to Ford by starring in The Quiet Man. For that matter, Ford could have found someone else to star in The Searchers: Kirk Douglas, then coming into his prime, lobbied hard for the role. But from the beginning John Ford wanted only Wayne—and John Wayne reported for duty.

  “My dad had tremendous loyalty to Ford,” said Patrick Wayne. “He also had an overwhelming respect for Ford’s talents … I can’t say whether my father wanted to do the film or not. Basically, when Ford asked, my father said yes.”

  16.

  The Production (Hollywood, 1955)

  Merian Cooper was correct in figuring that once he had lined up John Ford’s talent, John Wayne’s charisma, and Sonny Whitney’s money, selling a big film studio on The Searchers was a sure thing. By 1954 the Western had become Hollywood’s most reliably bankable genre—the one product C. V. Whitney Productions could offer that no savvy studio could turn down. Two years earlier, High Noon had grossed $18 million worldwide and won four Oscars, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper. The following year, Shane grossed $20 million in the United States alone. By one estimate, Westerns by the mid-1950s accounted for one-third of the output of the major studios and half the output of the smaller independents. Besides Wayne, several name-brand movie stars had made or revived their careers by making Westerns, including Cooper, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Robert Taylor, James Stewart, and Alan Ladd. The Western was starting to dominate the young medium of television as well, bringing forth a fresh crop of young actors such as James Garner, Steve McQueen, Richard Boone, Clint Eastwood, Robert Culp, and Michael Landon. Anytime someone in Hollywood moaned at the prospect of financing yet another Western, the rejoinder was simple economics: “No Western picture has ever lost money.” Western novels were also an unassailable product. Of the 300 million paperbacks sold in 1956, one-third were Westerns.

  Scholars have turned millions of trees into paper seeking to explain why the Western was such a popular postwar phenomenon. It surely filled the need for what the cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls an “informing mythology”: at a time of rising Cold War tensions and thermonuclear anxiety, the Western offered a comforting pseudohistorical narrative of America as an exceptional and triumphant nation, built on a foundation of frontier values of rugged independence, rough justice, and moral certitude. And in the hands of skillful writers, directors, and actors, it also proved to be rousing and very profitable entertainment.

  The Searchers has all the elements of the classic Western. It begins with the slaughter of a family and the abduction of a white girl by hostile savages. Then a rugged hero and his young understudy leave what is left of their home to undertake a perilous journey, crossing borders, overcoming challenges, confronting the enemy and rescuing the loved one in a climactic gun battle, and returning home in triumph. Most of the stock characters and themes are here: the Man Who Knows Indians and the Indian Hater (rolled into one person, to be played by the strongest actor of them all); the evil war chief; the captivity narrative; and the Fate Worse than Death, with all of its psychosexual fears brought to the surface.

  Merian Cooper signed a five-year deal to become executive producer in C. V. Whitney Productions, Sonny’s newly formed film company. Then he approached various studios for a distribution deal. MGM offered a 50-50 split of the profits, while Columbia trumped its rival by offering a 65-35 split favorable to Whitney Productions. But Warner Brothers offered the same split along with an agreement to forgo some of its studio overhead charges. Whatever lingering grievances Jack Warner may have had over Mister Roberts, he was eager to get The Searchers. Warner also agreed to fund one-third of the projected $1.5 million budget, with Whitney supplying the rest. John Ford got a flat fee of $175,000 to direct.

  Ford had his gallbladder surgery in late October 1954. By December he felt well enough to visit Europe for the Christmas holidays with Mary, Barbara, and Barbara’s second husband, the handsome actor-singer Ken Curtis. (“Oh my God! That’s for me!” Barbara Ford had said when she first laid eyes on Curtis, ignoring the technical inconvenience that he was married to someone else at the time.) By January, Ford was back in the office, working on the new project.

  “We are busy working on the script of The Searchers,” he wrote his Irish friend Michael Killanin. “It is a tough, arduous job as I want it to be good. I’ve been longing to do a Western for quite some time. It’s good for my health, spirit and morale and also good for the physical health of my numerous Feeney Peasantry, of whom I am surrounded.”

  Ford had intended to make a film about Quanah Parker before World War Two, and had discussed a script with his longtime screenwriter Dudley Nichols and with Lamar Trotti, screenwriter of Young Mr. Lincoln, but the war intervened and Ford never returned to the project. Now he pored through Alan LeMay’s
novel, making a few quick notes in the margins. The fact that the story was set in Texas made no difference to him: from the beginning he planned to shoot the outdoor scenes in Monument Valley, his favorite location and one that Western fans identified with his work.

  “I go out to Arizona, I breathe fresh air, I get out of the smog and the fog and it gives you a different view on life,” he told an interviewer. “I can relax and I sleep better at night and I eat better. And that is why occasionally I like to do Westerns.”

  THE SEARCHERS would be the ultimate creative collaboration between John Ford and John Wayne, and the director and his star tower over the finished product like two of the hulking mesas that dominate the landscape at Monument Valley. But two other men, both long forgotten, were crucial to the film’s character and sensibility: Patrick Ford and Frank S. Nugent.

  Pat was John Ford’s eldest child and only son. He had worked for his father at Argosy for a decade as a screenwriter, production manager, and associate producer. Tall, talkative, and tightly wound, with a mop of dark curly hair and a thin frame, Pat inherited his father’s impatience, bitter sense of humor, and weakness for alcohol, but he lacked the creative spark that made John Ford a great artist. Pat trusted no one and had a gift for making enemies. He resented his famous father, yet could never escape John Ford’s cold, eternal shadow. Seven years after his father’s death, Pat expressed those resentments in his only known interview, with the Ford scholar James D’Arc. Pat described his father as “a very strange man. He was … a man with the ability to concentrate almost wholly on his profession, excluding a lot else. My conversations with him as his only son—that I know of—was ‘Yes Sir,’ until one day I said ‘No sir,’ and then I was no longer around. I mean, our relationship was … in fact our family life was pretty much like that of a shipmaster and his crew, or a wagon master and his people. He gave the orders, and we carried them out.”