ALAN LEMAY’S NOVEL was a spare, taut narrative that moved with speed and economy, with few extraneous characters and no subplots. Its opening scene—Aaron Edwards cautiously stepping off his porch to reconnoiter the area around his ranch house, fearful that Comanche raiders are gathering nearby—is near perfect. There is action, suspense, and a growing sense of dread as Aaron and his family come to realize they will soon be under attack.
After years of doing newspaper journalism and churning out screenplays for Ford, Nugent had boiled down narrative writing to certain firm principles. A story occurs when the status quo is upset. “There is a situation or a condition,” Nugent writes. “Something happens to upset it; the disturbance is the story; and the story ends when another status quo is attained.” The writer’s primary job, he adds, is simple: “To look long and hard at his story and see whether it can be reduced to terms of the upsetting of the status quo.”
With this in mind, Nugent and Ford discussed LeMay’s opening for several days, and although they both admired it, they decided to hold back the scene until later in the film. Instead, they chose to begin, as in many Ford pictures, with an arrival: a lone horseman riding up to the Edwards house. This was Ford’s way of starting out by introducing the new element rather than by establishing the existing situation. “It is no accident that most Ford pictures open with a figure in motion,” wrote Nugent: a stagecoach, or a train pulling into a station in The Quiet Man, or a bus dropping off a passenger at an Oklahoma crossroads in The Grapes of Wrath.
The opening scene that they devised is formal, almost silent, and highly ambiguous. The horseman is identified only as “Uncle Ethan” (they dropped the name “Amos” because of Amos ’n’ Andy, the radio and TV comedy show). It is not clear where he has come from, whether he is a highwayman or a soldier of fortune, or whether he is in love with his brother’s wife, Martha, or she with him. Nor do we know why he displays an instant dislike for Martin Pauley, the part-Cherokee seventeen-year-old who has been living as an adopted child at Aaron and Martha’s house after Martin’s own family had been slaughtered by Comanches.
“The picture never answered all the questions,” wrote Nugent. “We never meant that it should. But we drew a character of interest and speculation, and we met a family that was to be massacred or taken captive in the next reel or two.
“But when you look at it closely, you will see that we had been employing the time-honored technique; we had begun in motion, with an arrival, and we had established the status quo that soon was to be upset by a Comanche raid.”
There was, of course, another reason to change the opening: it didn’t feature the star attraction. The Searchers was first and foremost a John Wayne movie, and audiences expected to see him early and expected that the story would be built around him.
Nugent’s opening took full advantage of Wayne’s power and presence. His screenplay describes Ethan as “a man as hard as the country he is crossing. Ethan is in his forties, with a three-day stubble of beard. Dust is caked in the lines of his face and powders his clothing. He wears a long Confederate overcoat.”
Like a suit in need of major alterations, Ethan’s character had to be expanded and deepened to fit Wayne. Nugent had written for Wayne before, and understood his nuances and power. He believed that writing for Wayne was different than for any other star: it was almost a throwback to the old days of studio contract players, when “story problems were solved by writing for specific actors. Today this is true only to a degree. I know John Wayne is a certain type of man—terse, laconic and so physically capable that you hardly have to show it—and I use that as a prop.”
JOHN FORD HAD NOTED little things in Alan LeMay’s novel that he thought might give an added dash of drama and tension. In his personal copy of the book, he underlined the paragraph in which Aaron Edwards observes that the “bedded-down meadow lark sprang into the air, circled uncertainly, then drifted away … [A] covey of quail went up.” Knowing the birds have been disturbed by invaders, Aaron turns and runs for the house. Similarly, in the film birds fly up, giving Aaron a fright.
Ford underlined a quote from the novel that Ethan Edwards speaks word for word in the film about the chances of tracking down the Indians who have abducted Debbie even though they have a head start of several days: “Yes … we got a chance … An Indian will chase a thing until he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. So the same when he runs … He never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that might just keep coming on.”
He did the same with a quote eloquently characterizing the pioneers. “A Texan is nothing but a human man way out on a limb,” the Ethan Edwards character says in the book. “This year, and next year, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” But it’s much too philosophical a quote for a man of action and few words like John Wayne, and so Ford and Nugent transferred it instead to Mrs. Jorgensen, a pioneer wife.
In the novel, Amos Edwards’s love for Martha is a secret known only to himself. Ford and Nugent chose to make it achingly mutual, unspoken and kept from others, yet hidden in plain sight. After Ethan offers his brother a bag of freshly minted Yankee gold dollars, he turns to Martha and takes her hands gently in his own, remarking that she has cut one of her fingers. She tries to hide her hands from him and their eyes meet—“a world of sadness and hopelessness is in the look,” says Nugent’s screenplay. Afterward, she retreats to the bedroom as Ethan heads outside. He sits out on the porch and glances back to see Aaron closing the bedroom door. Martha may love Ethan, but she belongs to his brother.
This mutual but forbidden love is one of the ways that Ford and Nugent bring to the surface the hidden sexual context of LeMay’s story. In the novel, Scar, the warrior who leads the massacre of the Edwards family, later becomes a father figure to Debbie, who is just entering marriageable age as her uncle and adopted brother search for her. But in the movie Debbie becomes one of Scar’s wives—just as Cynthia Ann married Peta Nocona.
Some of the biggest changes in the script involve enhancing and darkening Ethan—and in the process molding him into a character strong enough yet complex enough for John Wayne. The moral center of gravity in the novel is Martin Pauley, the young adopted brother who grows in stature and experience as he searches for Debbie, his abducted sister. But in the film, Martin is eclipsed by his deeply troubled yet charismatic uncle. The narrative tension centers around Ethan’s divided personality and his motives in conducting his obsessive seven-year search for his niece. In the novel, Amos Edwards has no conscious desire or intent to kill Debbie; but Ethan in the film sees Debbie’s submission to Scar as her husband and lover, whether willing or not, as a stain on the family honor that can be redeemed only by her death.
The writer and the director also added a more overt racial element to the story. They changed Martin into “a breed”—part-Indian—which highlights Ethan’s racism and explains his instant dislike for the younger man when they first meet. The hostility begins at the dinner table on Ethan’s first night home at the Edwards ranch house when he says to Martin, “Fella could mistake you for a half-breed,” and it continues for much of the film.
“Come on, blankethead,” Ethan addresses Martin on the trail. Later when Martin insists on continuing the hunt for Debbie because she’s his sister, Ethan retorts, “She’s your nothin’. She’s no kin to you at all.”
It’s impossible to know who came up with the concept of changing Martin into part-Indian: LeMay notes in the novel that Martin’s skin is dark and that he had always felt alienated from his fair-skinned peers in the pioneer community. But Nugent and Ford concretize this sense of otherness and add resonance to the racial divide.
Finally, in the novel Amos dies, killed by a young Comanche woman whom he mistakes for Debbie in the climactic battle scene. But in the film, Ethan survives. He cannot be killed, if for no other reason than beca
use he is John Wayne, the indestructible force.
Midway through the script, Nugent constructs an elaborate narrative within the narrative to give a sense of time passing. Using a letter that Martin writes to Laurie, his fiancé, Nugent encapsulates two years of the search and narrates Martin’s growing doubts about Ethan’s sanity and his dawning realization that Ethan intends to kill Debbie when he finds her.
Ford and Nugent also inject a large dose of Ford’s trademark cornball humor to leaven the grimness of the main plot and theme. They turn some of the minor characters from the novel into comic figures and they add a young cavalry officer called Lieutenant Greenhill whose bumbling sincerity and awkward flourishing of his sword make him the butt of several jokes. And they use Martin for humor as well, most pointedly when he inadvertently trades goods for a Comanche wife he names Look, and again during the cantina scene when he and Ethan find a man who can lead them to the Indian camp where the now grown Debbie is living. Some of Martin’s scenes with Laurie are also played for laughs.
By the time Ford and Nugent finished their work, the outline of the story and some of the main characters of The Searchers remained the same as in LeMay’s novel, but the meaning and many of the details had decisively changed.
“Frank worked awfully hard on that movie,” his wife, Jean Nugent, recalled to Ford biographer Scott Eyman.
“He’d come home at night exhausted and grumpy,” Nugent’s son Kevin told me. “They were making art and it was contentious.”
Like many of his contemporaries, including Ford and Wayne, Frank Nugent smoked—at least two packs of Kents a day, according to his son—and drank steadily, although without Ford’s self-destructive conviction. He suffered a heart attack in the late 1950s and another one two years later, and he died in 1965 at age fifty-seven from congestive heart failure. Jean Nugent blamed Ford for working her husband to death and, perhaps worse, for a profound lack of gratitude for Nugent’s contribution to some of his greatest films. “When [Ford] and Cooper sold out, they didn’t give Frank a bottle of scotch,” she told Eyman. “That’s the kind of guy Jack Ford was.”
It’s a harsh verdict. But by Nugent’s own account, he found working with Ford demanding yet rewarding. The price was high, but the result was worth it.
* * *
MOST FILM PRODUCTIONS USED a casting director to line up candidates for roles and help determine which actor would be best in a given part. Not Ford. He insisted on controlling the entire process. Rather than send out a casting call, he simply put out the word among friends and employees and waited for the usual crew to report for duty. No one dared ask Ford directly for a part. Instead, they engaged in an elaborate and oftentimes humiliating ritual. “What you did was simple, once you caught on,” Harry Carey Jr. recalled. “When word got out that the Old Man was going to start a picture, you simply went over to the office for a visit, and he’d tell you whether you were in it or not.”
Ford set himself up in a suite of offices at the Warner Brothers studio. Actors arrived to the smell of freshly brewed coffee from a large urn in the front office. One by one, the old regulars showed up: Carey, Hank Worden, John Qualen, Jack Pennick, Mae Marsh, Ruth Clifford, plus the stuntmen and the wranglers whom Ford loved to work with, led by Cliff Lyons. “There was absolutely no chain of command with John Ford,” said Carey. “There was him, and there was us.”
Ford was smart enough to know he couldn’t get by simply with the old stalwarts. He needed fresh and attractive actors to draw younger moviegoers. He had two plum parts for young actresses: Laurie Jorgensen (Ford changed the name from Mathison in the novel) and Debbie Edwards. With Cooper’s help, he chose carefully. For Laurie they picked twenty-five-year-old Vera Miles, a relative unknown whose latest and largest role was the love interest (not named Jane) in Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle. “I was dropped by the best studios in town,” she later recalled with pride. Miles was pretty but not impossibly beautiful, rail-thin, and spunky—perfect for Laurie, Martin Pauley’s fiancé, an attractive tomboy who grows into an angry, impatient, full-blooded woman as the plot progresses.
For Debbie they chose Natalie Wood, who was under contract with Warner Brothers and easy to requisition for the role. A veteran child actress now about to turn seventeen, she had just completed performing the lead female role in Rebel Without a Cause, which would win her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Natalie’s mother consented after Ford agreed to take Natalie’s nine-year-old sister, Lana, to play the young Debbie in the film’s early scenes.
But the key supporting role was that of Martin Pauley, and it was heavily sought after. Fess Parker, fresh off his performance as Davy Crockett in a three-part TV series for Walt Disney Studios that began broadcasting in December 1954, was eager for the part. Ford put Parker through a bizarre kind of screen test at a dinner party one evening at the apartment of Olive Carey, Harry’s widow. On the buffet line, Ford swiped several forkfuls of food from Parker’s plate, then twice elbowed the young actor hard in the ribs. Parker just walked away. The response seemed to have worked.
“They wanted you for that [role],” Walt Disney later told Parker. But Disney refused to lend him out. “I wasn’t consulted,” Parker recalled bitterly. He always regretted not getting the part. It would have been “a badge of honor to work with the old man,” he said.
John Agar, the ex-husband of Shirley Temple, who had appeared in significant roles in two parts of the Cavalry Trilogy, lobbied Ford unsuccessfully for the part. So did Robert Wagner, who had costarred in Ford’s version of What Price Glory in 1952. Tall, handsome, and pleasant to his elders, Wagner was one of Hollywood’s young princes. Ford could have cared less, and Wagner knew it. Still, Wagner swallowed his pride after he read Frank Nugent’s script and went to Ford’s office.
“You’d like to play the part, wouldn’t you?” Ford asked Wagner.
“Yes, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, you’re not going to.”
Wagner got up and headed for the door.
“Boob? You really want to play the part?”
“Very much, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, you’re still not going to.”
In fact, Ford had already chosen his Martin Pauley: one of Wagner’s best friends, another impossibly handsome young actor named Jeffrey Hunter, who was under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox. Hunter was born Henry Herman McKinnies Jr. in New Orleans in 1926 and grew up in Milwaukee, the only child of a sales engineer and his wife. He served in the navy just after World War Two—a military stint that surely must have endeared him to retired admiral John Ford—got a bachelor’s degree in speech at Northwestern University on the GI Bill, and then headed west to UCLA seeking a master’s in radio broadcasting. With his piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, easy smile, and taut, muscular physique, Hunter was far too pretty to hide behind a radio microphone. He was quickly spotted by a Hollywood talent scout in a school production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and signed by Fox. His first mainstream film appearance was a small part in Fourteen Hours (1951), which was also Grace Kelly’s first picture.
When Hunter found out through his agent about The Searchers, Ford told him over the phone he was “nowhere near the type” to play Martin. But Hunter refused to take no for an answer. He showed up at Ford’s office the next day with his hair slicked back to make it appear darker and an open-necked sports shirt that displayed a deep-brown suntan. Ford, he recalled later, was puffing on a large cigar when he arrived.
“He stared at me for what seemed an endless time, then grunted, ‘Take your shirt off!’ “
Hunter complied. After another long stare, Ford grunted again. “I’ll let you know,” he said.
Hunter was certain it was just another brush-off, but Ford added, “Don’t cut your hair until you hear from me.” Hunter felt then he was in.
Ford also made sure all of his favorite stock company members got parts. He expanded the role of Texas Ranger leader Sam Clayton from the novel to accommodate his old drinki
ng buddy Ward Bond. Clayton in the screenplay became both a Ranger captain and a preacher, a dual role that neatly encapsulates the duality of the American frontier project—gun in one hand, Bible in the other.
WHILE FORD WAS PUTTING TOGETHER the cast and crew, Merian Cooper was nursing the moneyman. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney was one of those improbable men of vast wealth who occasionally make their way to the film industry attracted by the glamour and the sycophancy and the chance to add to their fame and their importance. Sometimes they bed a starlet or two or ten along the way. Like a skilled con artist, Hollywood flatters, humors, and cajoles them for a while, relieves them of their wallets, and then moves on to the next improbable man. Whitney possessed a huge fortune inherited from two of America’s wealthiest dynasties, the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys, a proven record of business success, a high opinion of his own financial acumen, and a roaring furnace of patriotic fervor. He longed to get into films; he had developed elaborate plans for an American history trilogy, based upon a Saturday Evening Post serial called “The Valiant Virginians” by James Warner Bellah, who had written the short stories Ford had used for his Cavalry Trilogy in the late 1940s. Who better to direct such an ambitious project than John Ford, the director who had made American history his prime subject? But before Whitney placed such a large and expensive triple bet, Cooper wanted to ease him into the motion picture business with a sure thing.
Whitney, Cooper’s old army pal, was a cofounder of Pan American Airways and had served as chairman of the board during the era when Pan Am grew from a small commuter line to the world’s largest commercial transport system. Tall and lean, with dark, curly hair and sky-blue eyes, Whitney could be affable and informal, yet he was never quite comfortable around ordinary people and seemed insecure about his money and his place in the world. His vast wealth opened doors to new worlds for him yet barred him from ever fully entering those worlds. Despite his achievements, Whitney was typecast as a dabbler and a dilettante; he was not always taken seriously, but his money was.
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