The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  He was born in New York and graduated from Yale. He invested early on in Cooper’s Technicolor concept in the late 1920s, took a stake in Selznick International Pictures in the 1930s (giving him a piece of Gone With the Wind that was still paying annual dividends to his widow, Marylou, in 2010), and lost in a landslide for the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1932 in a bluestocking Long Island district at the same time Franklin Delano Roosevelt was crushing Herbert Hoover at the top of the ticket. In the early 1950s, at Cooper’s behest, he agreed to invest $5 million in Cooper’s Cinerama project. Cooper and his backers believed that bigger, wider, deeper, and louder were the solution to declining movie ticket sales. Using a three-screen-wide visual presentation and seven-channel stereo sound, Cinerama sought to re-create the movie theater experience as spectacle in an attempt to hold television at bay. When the other directors of Cinerama refused to give Whitney a seat on the board, he and Cooper walked out. They formed a new film company, C. V. Whitney Productions, and announced a program of films celebrating America’s history.

  Like John Ford, Whitney saw himself as a mythmaker. His passion was the American dream as he himself defined it. Driven by Cold War fervor, he wanted to educate the masses in the glories of the American past in order to mobilize them to fight the Soviet empire. While the frontier was gone, Whitney argued, its values endured. But he lacked Ford’s artistry. All through the making of The Searchers he would bombard Ford with unsubtle, bombastic suggestions to turn the movie into an elaborate history lesson, all of which Ford dutifully ignored.

  Whitney was prepared to use his connections and his vast wealth get into the motion picture business—“not for self-aggrandizement, but because he believes he can help make a contribution to the motion picture and to better understanding of America abroad,” reported the New York Times, which seemed curiously eager to accept Whitney’s claims at face value.

  Whitney quickly compiled a to-do list of four American epics, including The Valiant Virginians; William Liberty, an unpublished manuscript by Frank Clemensen; a biography of test pilot Chuck Yeager; and a “human document of Americana” focusing on Midwest farming communities.

  Whitney was full of ambition and hyperbole. William Liberty, he confidently and erroneously predicted to the Times, “will do for the West what Gone With the Wind did for the South.”

  On January 29, 1955, Cooper declared to Whitney that “Jack Ford is back and raring to go. The Searchers will be a tough picture physically, but in my opinion can be a very fine one and a very profitable one. It is with that thought that I am going ahead fill tilt.” But Whitney already had reservations about the direction of the project. In a February telegram sent to Cooper from the Camelback Inn in Phoenix, he called for a special meeting of the staff in Brentwood for February 23. “Prior to this meeting I want no work done on script of Searchers” other than the planned Colorado winter sequence, Whitney commanded.

  What followed were a series of demands from Whitney to change the original concept, put his personal stamp on The Searchers, and turn it into something more grandiose. He followed up the meeting in Brentwood with a letter to Cooper outlining his thinking. The Searchers, Whitney decreed, was to become the first of a collection of films that he wanted to call the American Series. “I wish to again emphasize to you the importance which I place upon speed and urgency in the production of this series of pictures.”

  This was Whitney at his most imperious, issuing orders and making demands. When it came to dealing with Ford, however, Whitney was more diffident. He admired and envied Ford’s creativity, and was intimidated by Ford’s war record and string of Academy Awards. He knew he couldn’t push Ford around and respected him too much to try. “My husband admired Ford so much, just loved his pictures, loved the man,” recalled Marylou Whitney, who became Sonny’s fourth wife after he divorced Eleanor. “Sonny would never want to get into a fight with someone like Ford; he was so totally different than anybody [Sonny] had been brought up with. For a man who had relatively little education, he was unbelievably brilliant.”

  Still, Whitney was determined to tinker with the Searchers script, and he insisted on Ford’s attention. In a telegram dated February 21, Whitney warned Ford, HAVE BEEN WORKING INTENSIVELY HERE FOR TWO WEEKS ON PROBLEMS MY PIX COMPANY IT IS MOST IMPORTANT I DISCUSS THESE WITH YOU EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY AS CERTAIN TREATMENTS ON THE SEARCHERS WILL BE DIRECTLY AFFECTED.

  Whitney insisted on accompanying Ford on location in Colorado for the winter sequences in March 1955. When he came back from the film shoot, he started peppering Ford and Cooper with new ideas for enhancing the film by loading it with overt patriotic themes. He pleaded with Ford to make the movie the first part of an American history trilogy. He also wanted to, as he put it, “dignify or broaden the story” by changing the title to The Searchers for Freedom and adding a prologue and epilogue to strengthen the theme. In essence, Whitney, too, wanted to become a mythmaker, using the story of Cynthia Ann Parker as his foundation stone. His purposes were no different from those of Alan LeMay, John Ford, and Frank Nugent—each of whom understood the mythic proportions of the material they were shaping—but Whitney’s sensibility was far less artistic or subtle. Rather than tell a story, he wanted to force-feed the audience with patriotic fervor.

  There is no record that Ford answered Whitney’s notes or honored any of his requests. None of which dissuaded Whitney from trying again, this time in a handwritten letter to Ford from his mansion in Old Westbury, Long Island. “It seems that the market is being flooded with ‘Westerns,’ “ Whitney told his director. “This continues to challenge me as to how we can raise Searchers above the rest.” Once again, Whitney pleaded with Ford to consider his ideas for a trilogy and an expansion of the theme. “Do I make myself clear?” he demanded at one point. Still, he stopped short of issuing an ultimatum to Ford. “Whether you take any of my ideas or not, I know you will make a fine picture, and I will also know that you gave the ideas consideration, and then acted according to your best judgment.”

  Once again Ford’s response, other than silence, has never been recorded. He made no mention of Whitney’s proposals in any surviving letter, memo, or note, and none of Whitney’s ideas ever appeared in the movie. It is as if they never happened. Still, Ford grew irritated.

  Sonny Whitney “could afford to be a very nice man … I mean, he doesn’t even know about money, it’s just this huge, giant corporation,” recalled Pat Ford. “And he’d come around, and he’d want certain things done on pictures, and Ford would just con him out of it, and resented it. Resented having to do it.”

  “C. V. Whitney was a guy that got $20 million as his twenty-first birthday present, and John Ford was a guy whom for his twenty-first birthday present got thrown out of the house and sent to the Navy. So how in hell are you going to compare the two—how are they going to be friends?”

  Yet somehow they managed. John Ford himself never disparaged Sonny Whitney in public. “A man with that many millions,” he told his grandson Dan, “can’t be an idiot.”

  Idiot or not, Ford understood that Whitney’s millions were the reason Ford could make The Searchers without having to worry about demands from Jack Warner and his studio boys. If the requirement was that he tolerate the flights of fancy of a spoiled rich man, it was a price John Ford was more than willing to pay.

  17.

  The Valley, Part One (Monument Valley, June 1955)

  Just as every storyteller needs characters and a plot, he also needs a setting. Dickens has London, Raymond Chandler’s knight-errant detective works out of Los Angeles, and Anne Tyler’s moody introverts haunt Baltimore. John Ford’s greatest Westerns purportedly took place all over the Southwest, but they were all filmed in one place. Like Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, Ford used one mythic setting for his stage.

  Tucked into the continental crease where southeast Utah rubs shoulders with northwest Arizona, Monument Valley is one of America’s most dramatic and remote locales. Its sandstone butt
es and mesas soar like cathedral spires into the vacant desert sky. It was ninety miles from the nearest paved road and reputed to be the farthest point in the continental United States from a railroad line. There was nothing cheap about this kind of location work. Film crews had to cart in their own generators, gasoline, groceries, and water tanks. But Ford was keen. He believed that Westerns filmed on a soundstage or in the near suburbs of Hollywood looked drab and artificial. He wanted to capture on film the dust, grit, and sweat of the real thing, and he wanted a dramatic backdrop that would thrill and entertain audiences. In his silent movie heyday, he’d shot The Iron Horse in the Sierra Nevadas of California and Nevada, and in Mexico and New Mexico, and he’d shot the Revolutionary War drama Drums Along the Mohawk outside Cedar City, Utah. But Monument Valley was even more of a challenge. It was a virtual no-man’s-land of little water and hot, reluctant sand, and no one outside of a handful of hardy Navajos lived there. Even livestock shunned it. But Ford loved it. His crews built towns, forts, ranch houses, and Indian villages. He made the valley his personal film set.

  John Ford Point, the director’s favorite spot in Monument Valley, his favorite locale for shooting Westerns, photographed in 2008 by Peter McBride.

  “My favorite location is Monument Valley,” Ford declared. “It has rivers, mountains, plains, desert, everything the land can offer. I feel at peace here. I have been all over the world, but I consider this the most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on earth.”

  The Searchers was Ford’s fifth Monument Valley production. He used the scenery like some modern directors use special effects—to create drama and stun the audience. For The Searchers, some of Ford’s most dramatic shots evoked the watercolors of Charles M. Russell, a turn-of-the-century painter who was particularly adept at capturing Native Americans and cowboys atop small hillocks as if they were on a pedestal against a vast natural backdrop. “I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land,” he said.

  IT HAD BEEN SEVENTEEN YEARS since Ford first discovered Monument Valley, and like everything else he deemed important in his life, he cloaked in myth the truth of how he first decided to shoot his Westerns there. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he himself had come across the area while driving through Arizona on his way to Santa Fe. But John Wayne said he had told Ford about the valley after working on a film nearby, while the actor George O’Brien claimed that he was the one who first mentioned it to Ford. Still, the story that Harry Goulding and his wife, Leone, told for many decades seems the most plausible.

  Harry was a sheepherder’s son from Colorado who first laid eyes on the valley in 1921 and never stopped marveling at its raw beauty. Geologists don’t know exactly how Monument Valley happened: some twenty million years ago the massive continental plate under most of western North America apparently overrode its neighbor farther to the west, which may have sunk or shifted east. Erosion went to work, hollowing out the soft spots and leaving hard granite towers of red sedimentary rock. Willa Cather wrote of the “incompleteness” of the West’s great mesas—“as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain.” Monument Valley, by her telling, was one of God’s unfinished construction sites.

  Its first known inhabitants were Anasazi tribesmen who left behind hollowed-out ruins and hundreds of petroglyphs to mark their time there. No one knows why they fled or where they went, but by the sixteenth century they were gone. Navajo tribesmen emerged to take their place.

  Captivated by what he had seen, Harry Goulding came back in 1923 with his new bride, Leone, a pretty young woman from Utah whom Harry nicknamed Mike because, he claimed, he could never remember how to spell her real name. For three years they operated a makeshift trading post from a large canvas tent, swapping coffee, flour, salt, sugar, and other staples with the Indians for rugs, skins, and old coins. The Navajos loved canned tomatoes: they would pry open the lid, sprinkle sugar on the top, eat the sweet, cold contents with a spoon, and pass around the can. They also loved candy and brightly colored soda pop in flavors like strawberry or orange—never Coke, which was too drab in color. Eventually the Gouldings built a two-story stone house in the shadow of Black Rock, one of the area’s most dramatic mesas. Then they managed to buy a 640-acre parcel of land from the state of Utah, despite the fact that this was tribal property and supposedly the sole domain of the Navajo people.

  Navajo territory comprised twenty-seven thousand square miles—the country’s largest Indian reservation—and forty thousand people spread across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Navajos had fought the Apaches, Paiutes, and Spanish to a standoff, but succumbed inevitably to the overwhelming firepower of American settlers and soldiers. After the main tribe surrendered to Kit Carson in the 1860s, a handful of Navajos fled to the valley and had maintained a foothold ever since.

  The Navajos had a well-honed suspicion of outsiders, and at first they viewed Harry and Mike as interlopers. “It was their lands,” Harry told Samuel Moon, his biographer, “and they had the atmosphere that they was wanting us to leave. They didn’t ask us to leave, they just wanted to know when we was going to leave.”

  But the Gouldings had no intention of going away, and eventually they won the grudging respect of many of the Indians. Harry and Mike witnessed the hard times that the Navajos suffered during the Depression and, most especially, during the federal government’s brutal livestock reduction program in the 1930s, when bureaucrats sought to kill off what they saw as an unsustainable surplus of Navajo cattle and other animals. Harry and Mike also watched as well-meaning government officials forced Navajo parents to send their children to federally run boarding schools where the students were encouraged to discard their culture and punished if they were caught speaking their native tongue. It was the same misguided philosophy that Quanah Parker’s children had faced at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania three decades earlier.

  In 1938, Harry heard that a Hollywood movie company was exploring the area around Flagstaff for a new Western. He and Mike extracted $80 from their meager savings and drove their old pickup truck 650 miles to Los Angeles. Harry forced his way into John Ford’s office at United Artists and showed him a set of stunning photographs taken by the German photographer Joseph G. Muench, a frequent visitor to the valley. Harry “just wandered in, a big old guy with a great rube act,” recalled Pat Ford, himself a professional skeptic. “And he wasn’t near the rube he pretended to be but he sure could play it … He was a likable guy, we all liked Harry. We said ‘Harry, you’ve got the best shit-kicking act going.’ “

  Pat’s father was entranced by the photos—and also by Harry’s claim that there were hundreds of Navajos available to work cheaply as crew members, carpenters, and film extras. To Harry’s amazement, John Ford chartered a plane and flew out to visit the site the next day, then came back, had producer Walter Wanger cut a check for $5,000, and sent Harry back to Monument Valley to line up provisions, food, and tents for the crew. Goulding had no way to cash the check until he got back to Flagstaff; a filling station owner along the way gave him a fill-up on credit and even loaned him a twenty-dollar bill.

  During that first outing to the valley, Ford and his crew shot for only seven days and he wound up using only about ninety seconds of the footage in Stagecoach. Ford and his crew stayed not at the Gouldings’ but at the inn and trading post run by John Wetherill and his wife in Kayenta, twenty five miles to the south. But when Ford came back after World War Two to make My Darling Clementine, he stayed in the guest room on the second floor above Goulding’s trading post, and later still Harry and Mike built Ford a cabin of his own. By 1955 they had added a small motor lodge with nine rooms along the ledge above the valley, and they gave number nine to Ford. It had a double bed and a small refrigerator that they stocked with fruit juices at his instruction—no beer this time. For the duration of the film shoot,
John Ford was officially on the wagon and Monument Valley was his personal rehab center.

  “It gives me a chance to get away from the smog, to get away from this town, to get away from people who would like to tell me how to make pictures,” Ford told fellow director Burt Kennedy. “You’re working with nice people—cowboys, stuntmen, that kind of person. You get up early in the morning and go out on location and work hard all day and then you get home and you go to bed early. It’s a great life—just like a paid vacation.”

  FORD AND HIS CAST AND CREW BOARDED the famed Santa Fe Super Chief at Union Station in Los Angeles early Tuesday afternoon, June 14, 1955, for the seventeen-hour, all-night train ride to Flagstaff, Arizona. Already they were behind schedule: bad weather in Arizona had delayed their departure by a day. Ford was so anxious, he couldn’t sleep that night aboard the train.

  Flagship of the Santa Fe line, the Super Chief was the appropriate vessel for Ford’s new venture: the gleaming, stainless-steel face of its diesel locomotive was painted crimson red, with trailing yellow and black trim, in the style of an Indian war bonnet. Its elegant interior featured Navajo patterns and motifs in turquoise and copper. Ford held court in the dining car most of the evening. Henry Brandon, the German-born, Stanford University–educated actor hired to play Scar, the Comanche war chief who abducts the young Debbie Edwards, recalled finding Ford there late in the night poring over Frank Nugent’s final shooting script.

  As soon as they arrived at 6:45 on Wednesday morning, Ford and his son Pat boarded a small plane for Monument Valley. When the plane touched down, he wasted no time. Harry Goulding met him at the airstrip in an ancient station wagon. Ford and Pat hopped in and off they went, navigating the bone-rattling dirt roads and dried creek beds, scouting locations for the opening day’s shoot. John Wayne arrived later in his own private plane, while most of the other crew members endured the six-hour drive from Flagstaff on largely unpaved roads.