The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  “That I know of” is the tipoff: the phrase is at once cynical, irreverent, wary, and derogatory of his father and, perhaps, of his mother as well. Pat Ford, by his own testimony, did not feel loved.

  “He was a good American, that he was,” Pat concluded. Merian Cooper had used a similar phrase in praising Ford to Sonny Whitney, but Pat made it sound like a condemnation. “He was a lousy father, but he was a good movie director and a good American.”

  “Pat was an able guy, [but] he wanted to be John Ford,” Pat’s son Dan recalled. “And that kind of spoiled him. You know, he was so close to the golden ring and yet it wasn’t his ring. It was someone else’s. He was along for the ride. At one moment he wanted to be in the big picture … and the other he wanted to be his own man. And these were two conflicting things.”

  John Ford, in turn, could be withering about his son’s talent and manhood. Maureen O’Hara says he called Pat “that capon son of a bitch.” (A capon is a castrated cock.) “It was a horrible thing to call his own son,” she recalled.

  His conflicts with his father would eventually drive Pat from the family fold altogether. But at the time of The Searchers, he was a crucial if undervalued member of his father’s stock company of assistants, crew members, and players, entrusted both with helping his father and Frank Nugent develop the concepts and characters for the film’s screenplay, and with coming up with a workable plan for shooting an ambitious movie within a six-month time frame. His primary task was to eliminate as much of the risk as possible.

  Father and son, John Ford and Patrick Ford, in the late 1940s.

  Pat’s preproduction notes—addressed to his father, Cooper, Nugent, and Frank Beetson, the men’s wardrobe coordinator—read like a performance. They are full of insight, bombast, and contradiction. Yet they are the only written blueprint we have to the thought process behind the making of one of Hollywood’s greatest movies. John Ford said little about his work and wrote even less. Often what he did say was a lie or an exaggeration designed to throw his interrogator off the scent. Even with interviewers he admired—like his grandson Dan or the young Peter Bogdanovich, a film critic who was in the process of becoming a director—Ford could not help but falsify or conceal. He was a mythmaker whose greatest myth was John Ford.

  Pat thoroughly read through Alan LeMay’s novel and located guide-posts and themes to help translate a 230-page novel into a two-hour movie. “The novel is a narrative that organizes itself in the world, while the cinema is a world that organizes itself into a narrative,” wrote the French film critic Jean Mitry, and Pat’s role was to launch the process by which this mystical transformation was to occur.

  In memos in January 1955, Pat captures the sense of isolation that grips the frontier families in LeMay’s novel. “There is no communal life on this frontier. Each family holds tenaciously to its holdings … There is nothing pleasant about their lives, and they themselves could not tell you why they submit to such hardships.”

  Amos Edwards and Martin Pauley are the products of this grim milieu. “They are not nice people,” writes Pat. “They are only a shade less barbaric than the savages they follow.”

  Amos Edwards, Pat observes, is “relentless in his hatred of Indians, and of all things pertaining them.” He is “a silently bitter, hard-hating man,” cruel yet self-confident. “He would see every Comanche dead if he had his way.”

  Yet Pat grasps the paradox at the heart of Amos’s character. “There is much to dislike about Amos,” Pat continues. “Sometimes his treatment of Martin verges on the sadistic … A modern man would find much about him that is psychopathic. But there is greatness in him, too. His courage, relentlessness and frontier skill are magnificent. He achieves his goal where more stable men fail.”

  Pat also understands the strength of Martin’s character as only a long-underestimated son could. “In his own way he is as persistent as Amos,” he writes of Martin.

  As for the Comanches, Pat makes clear that he and his father have a singular goal in mind: “We hope to portray the Comanches with as much barbarism and savagery as possible.” Indeed, John Ford later uses the exact same sentence in his own brief story notes. Still, a touch of sympathy creeps in.

  “Their villages … are scenes of utter squalor,” Pat writes. “They were poor, filthy and smelled bad … The reservation should not be pictured as a place of barbaric beauty but should symbolize the degradation and hopelessness the Indians hoped to escape.”

  Both Pat and his father express great aspirations for authenticity in their depiction of the Comanches. “It is our hope to portray the Western Plains Indians as they really were, and as they have seldom been pictured on the screen,” writes Pat. “They were a hard-riding, hard-fighting race of mixed blood—White, Mexican, Kiowa, Comanche, and Jicarilla Apache, all intermixed with southern Cheyennes to form a fierce coalition known as the Comanche.”

  Everyone involved shared the conceit that The Searchers would somehow offer an accurate and evenhanded portrait of the Comanches. “The Indians were to be treated fairly for a change,” said Sonny Whitney’s wife, Eleanor Searle Whitney, echoing the mind-set of her husband, Cooper, and Ford.

  But Pat Ford makes clear that the real goal is not authenticity or fairness—just the appearance of them for the sake of the story. When it comes to horsemanship, for example, Pat writes, “Though they were famous bareback riders, we know from past experience that few modern Indians, or even stunt men, can perform adequately for the camera without saddles. Our Indians will have saddles.”

  The same goes for Indian outfits. Rather than authentic Comanche outfits, Pat calls for Navajo-Apache-style boot moccasins and blanket leggings tied at the waist to “heighten the barbaric effect we hope to achieve.”

  “It is important that the costumes of the Comanches be not exactly authentic.”

  AFTER PAT HELPED shape the story, he devised a plan to shoot at different locations in different seasons, varying from dry summer heat to intense winter snow. Pat, who served as the film’s associate producer, took his father, Sonny Whitney, and a small film crew to Gunnison, Colorado, to film the winter scenes, using the stuntmen Terry Wilson and Chuck Hayward as doubles for the actors playing Amos and Martin.

  Pat traveled to Gunnison first to set up the shoot, including a scene of the ruins of an Indian village after a raid by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. “If we’re in luck, we hope a new snow fall has partially obliterated the camp and the wreckage,” Pat wrote. “If it hasn’t we’ll have to use the wind machines.”

  John Ford began shooting on March 1, 1955. For four days he shot in below-freezing temperatures scenes of the destroyed village, prisoners being herded into a fort, a troop of cavalrymen crossing a freezing stream, and Amos and Martin trekking through snow country. Ford knew what he wanted. He described the winter sequence at the fort as “rough … rugged … cold … frozen … [I]f possible let’s try to get the horses blowing vapor from their nostrils.”

  Three weeks later, Pat took a small crew up to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to shoot footage of a buffalo herd in winter. He filmed a stampede in classic John Ford style, with one camera in a pit dug in the frozen ground to capture the buffalo as they thundered above it, and the second on a truck running parallel to the frenzied herd.

  Pat’s shooting scheme allowed his father to get sweeping winter shots into the can before setting out for Monument Valley for the main film shoot in June. It also allowed Whitney’s production company to boast grandiosely that The Searchers covered a wider range of geography and temperatures than any previous movie: 1,500 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Monument Valley, and more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit from the below-zero frozen tundra of Canada to the blistering hot temperatures of summer in the valley. Sonny Whitney, after all, had made himself clear: he didn’t want just a movie; he wanted an epic.

  THE OTHER KEY CREATIVE MEMBER of Ford’s inner circle was his screenwriter—a Screen Writers Guild card–carrying member of a breed that Ford always claimed to abh
or. Frank Stanley Nugent was an affable, voluble, nearsighted former journalist with a chunky torso, ruddy complexion, graying curly hair, and the owlish, wire-rimmed glasses of a scholar. “He was just a little early in the style of Donald O’Connor dressed up as Ethel Merman’s secretary in Call Me Madam,” recalled Katherine Cliffton, Ford’s story and research editor at Argosy. Nugent had few pretensions and lacked the well-tended ego and pomposity of many of his peers in Hollywood—a place where, as one observer noted, the $1,000-per-week writers refused to socialize with the $500-per-week ones. “Nugent was a very knowable man,” Cliffton added. “… I hate to use the word pal, but if you were working with him, you got the feeling we were all in this together.”

  Born in New York City to an Irish father and Jewish mother, Nugent liked to talk even more than he liked to write. “ ’Tis not my talent to conceal my thoughts” was written below his name in the 1925 yearbook at Regis High School, along with the labels “class poet” and “ironic joke teller.” He graduated from the school of journalism at Columbia University and got a job as a cub reporter at the New York Times in 1929. Seven years later he was promoted to film critic and feature writer. He was known for his acerbic wit and poison-tipped pen, and even his news articles had verve and voice; his features were chatty, clever, and intimate, if occasionally smug. One of the few directors he admired was John Ford. Nugent’s reviews of Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath were extravagant in their praise. “The Grapes of Wrath,” he told readers of the Times, “is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn’t believe our eyes.”

  His review caught the eye of the film’s producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, czar of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, who offered him $400 a week—“a very exorbitant salary,” as Nugent himself put it—to defect from the ranks of the critics in 1940 and become a screenwriter. This was around the same time that another gifted storyteller, Alan LeMay, was starting work for Cecil B. DeMille.

  Nugent’s ensuing four years at Fox were a disaster. He didn’t earn a single screen credit. Zanuck used Nugent’s acerbic critical eye and ability to spot flaws in scripts as a weapon against his other writers, and Nugent naïvely embraced the role with heedless abandon. “My opinion of this script is unchanged,” he told Zanuck in a May 20, 1942, memo about a script called White-Collar Girl. “So far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with it that a waste basket can’t cure.”

  Nugent later acknowledged his mistake. “I stepped on everyone’s toes, and most writers avoided me like the plague,” he recalled.

  Zanuck let Nugent go in 1944 with a “Dear Frank” letter that bemoaned the writer’s “unfortunate break … I want you to know that I regret exceedingly the fact that you were never able to properly display your writing talents. I mean this sincerely.” He signed off, “Kindest regards, Darryl.” That was the way Hollywood worked: lots of warm and sentimental adverbs as they showed you to the door.

  Nugent was miserable and knew it. He had continued writing Hollywood profiles for the New York Times all through his time at Fox. He even tried unsuccessfully to convince the Times to send him overseas during the war as a foreign correspondent. Meanwhile, John Ford was looking for a new in-house screenwriter. His longtime partnership with Dudley Nichols was coming to its inevitable end. Nichols, a cerebral dramatist who aspired to the stature of Eugene O’Neill, had lost patience with Ford’s irascible mistreatment, while Ford wanted a writer more inclined to do whatever the hell Ford told him to do. Nugent, coming off his humiliating experience at Fox, was a more pliable and less demanding writing partner.

  Ford, who knew about Nugent’s favorable reviews of his films, first approached the writer in 1947 to work on the screenplay for Fort Apache, the first film in what became the Cavalry Trilogy. Nugent was flattered but surprised. He’d grown up riding the Staten Island Ferry, not horses, and he knew as much about the cavalry in post–Civil War Arizona as he did about thermonuclear physics. The loose informality of the West was alien to him; his son Kevin remembered Nugent keeping his tie on after he got home from work, even wearing it under his apron when he barbecued. Ford launched him on a tutorial, giving him dozens of books to read, then dispatched him to Apache country “to get the smell and feel of the land.” Nugent hired an anthropology student at the University of Arizona to show him around. When he reported back to Hollywood, he told Ford he felt he’d done enough research. “Good,” Ford told him. “Now, just forget everything you’ve read and we’ll start writing a movie.”

  Ford commanded Nugent to write out biographical sketches for every character—in some cases a typewritten, single-spaced full page or more. Then Ford told him to throw them out and write the script. The two men worked closely together developing the draft, both in the office and aboard Ford’s yacht, the Araner. Sometimes Ford was “groping like a musician who has a theme but doesn’t quite know how to develop it,” Nugent recalled. “Then if I come up with the next notes and they’re what he wanted, he beams and says that’s right, that’s what he was trying to get over.”

  Despite his affable exterior, Nugent was a perfectionist when it came to writing, and he and Ford were frequently at odds. “He used to fight your grandfather tooth and nail,” the writer James Warner Bellah told Ford’s grandson Dan. “Well, that was one of your grandfather’s methods—make ’em mad and they’ll work harder.”

  Nugent understood he had struck a devil’s bargain. In return for working with a master filmmaker, he paid a price in routine humiliation. “He can be rude and frequently insulting; he can also be affable, charming, genial, and generous in his praise (I prefer not to tell you what the percentage is).” But once the script was finished, Nugent added, the writer had better stay out of Ford’s way. Ford never invited Nugent to his film sets or to studio screenings—not even those to which stuntmen and crew were invited. “I don’t profess to understand this,” Nugent ruefully confessed. Still, he wrote, it was “a small price to pay for the privilege of working with the best director in Hollywood.”

  A chatty, affable man in public, Nugent concealed a darker set of emotions. In his personal diaries he revealed an acidic reservoir of contempt for himself and the women he met after he and his first wife separated. “I am full of bitterness, self-dislike, and dislike of others,” he wrote in a 1947 entry. “I want to lash out and wound as I have been hurt—even if most of my wounds are self-inflicted … It’s as though my skin has been worn raw so that the least contrary breath stings and makes me strike out in my own pain and anger.”

  Like the diaries, Nugent’s best screenplays push deeply into the emotional danger zone between men and women. While critics often pummeled Ford for his lack of subtlety in depicting male-female relationships, Nugent created for the old man two exceptionally complex partnerships between wounded, estranged, yet inextricably bound husbands and wives in Rio Grande and The Quiet Man, played in both films by John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. He also tempered some of Ford’s patriotic bombast and latent racism. Many critics have noted the jingoistic overlay of the Cavalry Trilogy, much of it attributable to the short stories on which they were based, written by James Bellah, a right-wing ideologue whose politics, according to his own son, “were just a little right of Attila. He was a fascist, a racist and a world-class bigot.” Yet Nugent’s screenplays for Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon showed respect and even admiration for some of their Indian characters. By contrast, Rio Grande, which Nugent did not work on, was riddled with racism.

  Besides those first two screenplays, Nugent cowrote with Pat the script for Wagon Master (1950), a rocky collaboration at best. Nugent clearly resented having to share a writing credit with the director’s son, and John Ford himself was slyly disparaging. “I liked your script, boys,” Ford told them afterward. “In fact, I actually shot a few pages of it.” Two years later, Nugent got a full screen credit and an Academy Award nomination for The Quiet Man, one of Ford’s greatest films.

  Ford refused to be
impressed with Nugent’s craft. “There’s no such thing as a good script really,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. “Scripts are dialogue, and I don’t like all that talk. I’ve always tried to get things across visually. I don’t like to do books or plays. I prefer to take a short story and expand it, rather than take a novel and try to condense it.”

  Later in life, Ford professed disdain for Nugent, calling him his favorite “body and fender man.” He denied he was ever close to Nugent, whom he described as “a very unsophisticated person.” But he saved his most hurtful criticism for Nugent’s writing. “He was always putting in cute little pieces of business which I always cut out,” the great man recalled. “Which annoyed him greatly.”

  With The Searchers, Nugent broadened the novel by increasing the number of characters and weaving comedy into the tragic framework. Nugent’s son Kevin says his father’s special gift was his feel for people. “The difference between his Westerns and other Westerns was such an intense character establishment,” said Kevin Nugent. “One of the reasons I thought The Searchers didn’t do so well at the time was because it was way too much character, too much John Wayne really feeling revenge and stuff, when gee, we went to see John Wayne shoot the Indians.”

  Frank Nugent said he learned a lot from John Ford. “Character is not shown so much by what is said as by what is done,” Nugent wrote when he first started working with Ford. “Characters must make decisions.”

  “Ford never has formally surrendered to the talkies. His writers are under standing orders to keep dialogue to an ‘irreducible minimum’. Ford usually manages to trim the ‘irreducible’ still more. He always works with his writers on a script, but never lets them forget who holds the whip hand.”

  “Ford detests exposition,” Nugent concluded. It was a trait—a gift, really—Ford would demonstrate over and over again in making The Searchers.