The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  After the scene was shot, recalled Terry Wilson, one the wranglers, Sonny “came riding up and he was proud, and the Old Man looked at him and Jesus Christ he really blew his stack.” Ford told Whitney, “God damn, don’t ever do that again, you could get killed out there. I know you ride polo ponies and all that but this is a different ballgame.”

  Whitney acted suitably chastened, but in fact he was so proud of his escapade that he leaked the story to Cholly Knickerbocker’s Smart Set column in the New York Journal-American, which was always happy to slobber over a wealthy patron. “That Sonny knows all there is to know about horses, plus the fact that he’s backing the flicker for half a million, makes him the most important extra a movie ever had,” the column dutifully reported.

  Pat Ford, as usual, had a more cynical take. “We were scared to death he was going to break his check-writing arm.”

  JOHN FORD DID NOT LET Sonny Whitney’s shenanigans divert his focus. Summer had come early to the valley: the gray-green sage and purple-spotted patches of grass and weeds had already been burned off, leaving no vegetation to hold down the sand once the thick red winds began to blow. Ford liked to use the wind and dust as tempestuous backdrops to add an extra layer of sweat and grit to the outdoor scenes. “Two things make Western pictures—horse manure and dust,” Ford told Bill Clothier, who recalled how Ford almost fired a crew member who innocently sprayed water on the ground one day. He was only trying to tamp down the dust, the man explained. “Hell, that’s why I came out here,” Ford replied. “I want the dust.”

  Still, Ford struggled in the blazing sun to push himself and his crew through the long, arid days. Insect bites and sunstroke were common, and people were fainting in the heat. Two stuntmen went down on one fraught day, one with a seizure and the other with cracked vertebrae after falling off a horse, and both had to be flown out on a private plane. Ford himself began to falter physically.

  “I don’t think he was terribly well,” recalled Pippa Scott. “His eye was running particularly badly out there in the desert heat and the wind that blew. We always had lunch covered in red sand. The wind would kick up by noon and it was hot as hell. But the evenings were gorgeous and cooled down quickly and the mornings were exquisite. We were up very early before the dawn and everything was beautiful. Earlier was better on the horses too.”

  The benign glow of Ford’s first days back in the valley soon faded, and he reverted to the more familiar role of a demanding despot who could be as harsh as the noon sun. He found plenty of subjects for his wrath. Henry Brandon, who played Scar, became a favorite target. Ford forced Brandon to report to the set almost every day in full Comanche outfit and makeup, even though on most days there was nothing for Brandon to do. “He liked to push people to see how far they would go,” Brandon recalled. Ford particularly liked to single out Ward Bond for ridicule. After Bond kept blowing his lines in one scene, Ford turned to Brandon, a native of Germany, and blurted out in German, “He isn’t an actor, he’s a pants shitter.”

  Even Ford’s beloved stuntmen felt his wrath. Frank McGrath loyally reported to the set for work even though he had just spent eight months in a plaster cast after fracturing vertebrae while working on a previous film. McGrath was a heavy drinker who liked to stash gin bottles in various nooks and crannies of the tent he shared with five other wranglers and stuntmen. When Pappy heard that McGrath had broken the rule against drinking on the set, he entered the tent while McGrath wasn’t there and asked the others which bunk belonged to McGrath. Ford pulled back the covers and urinated long and loud on the mattress—“as matter of fact as if he had been out for a stroll in his garden and had stopped to water the petunias,” Roberson recalled—then made up the cot again. “If the man can drink it, he can lie in it,” Ford told them.

  NO ONE FIELDED and deflected more abuse from the Old Man than his star performer. The Searchers was Wayne and Ford’s twelfth picture together, and by now the two men knew each other intimately. Yet Ford still took great pleasure in humiliating his star. During one scene when Wayne rode up awkwardly with his hand resting on his saddle horn, Ford screamed at him, “When will you learn to ride a horse?”

  “Ah now, Pappy,” was Wayne’s embarrassed reply.

  “Duke loved the Old Man,” recalled Chuck Roberson, who witnessed the scene. “When the Old Man said ‘Jump,’ Duke found a trampoline.”

  Pippa Scott was surprised by Ford’s habit of insulting Wayne in front of her and other cast members. “The whole relationship was something you wanted to stay away from. I have to say the other guys in the company were very supportive of Wayne. They felt very bad for him … It was mean, but it was daunting for everybody, it was scary. Everybody was walking on eggshells.”

  Still, Wayne took it without complaint. He lit one Camel after another all day long between takes and kept plugging away at his role. He saw Ethan Edwards as his most serious acting challenge, and he approached the part with a singular intensity. “My father would say that everything he had done on film to this time was building to this role,” said Patrick Wayne.

  In an early scene when the posse comes across the corpse of a prize bull killed by Comanches, Wayne demonstrated to Harry Carey Jr. that he meant business. “When I looked up at him in rehearsal, it was into the meanest, coldest eyes I had ever seen,” Carey recalled. After the day’s film shoot was finished, Wayne was Ethan at dinner time as well. “He didn’t kid around on The Searchers as he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes.”

  An amiable man who knew his place as a role player, Carey was fond of both Ford and Wayne, but he had learned from hard experience to keep an emotional distance from both of them. Each was a complex character, he concluded, who could turn on a friend without warning. Carey spent only two weeks on location in the valley but his uncle Jack taunted him almost daily because he knew Carey was committed to finishing his role in time to get back to Hollywood for a part in “Spin and Marty,” a new Disney serial. Still, on The Searchers he felt that both Ford and Wayne were at the top of their craft.

  Carey’s most memorable moment came in the scene—directly from LeMay’s novel—where an excited Brad Jorgensen races back from scouting the Comanche raiding party’s encampment to report he’s spotted Lucy, his abducted fiancée. Ethan proceeds reluctantly to tell Brad that what he’s seen is a Comanche wearing Lucy’s dress: Ethan had found Lucy’s naked corpse earlier in the day on a side trail in a canyon where she’d been taken by three warriors and killed, but had kept it from Brad.

  “Was she … ? Did they … ?” a distraught Brad asks.

  Ethan erupts. “What do you want me to do—draw you a picture? … Spell it out? … Don’t ever ask me! … Long as you live don’t ever ask me more!”

  They did the scene in one take, only to discover the camera had not been turned on. Legend has it that the famously oblivious Ward Bond had pulled the plug from a socket while looking for a place to plug in his electric razor. They did the take again and did it perfectly. Carey, a veteran performer of more than ninety films, believed it was his finest scene as an actor, and one of Wayne’s as well. A half century later, sitting in his living room in Santa Barbara, Carey at age eighty-seven could still recite from memory every line, both his and Wayne’s.

  After Ford turned off the camera, Wayne put his hand on Carey’s shoulder. “He didn’t say a word,” Carey recalled. “He didn’t have to. Those are the great moments for an actor.”

  WHILE FORD RAINED ABUSE on Wayne and the usual cast of characters, he worked gently and with great warmth with the younger actors, putting them at ease and building their confidence. Although her role was small, Pippa Scott found him charming, solicitous, and always in control. “He was very sweet with me,” she recalled. “… If he played games I wasn’t aware of it. He was very tender and praised us when we did what he approved of.”

  Patrick Wayne also enjoyed a close relationship with Ford on the set. “I was his godson. Plain and simple. But that was no guarantee that
I wouldn’t feel the barb at some point. So you always stay a little tense, waiting for the shoe to drop and hope it doesn’t knock you down.” At one point Ford caught Patrick purposely losing at gin rummy and banished him from the playing table. “From now on, you should just play with small children or Ward Bond!” Ford commanded.

  Early on, Ford took Jeffrey Hunter aside to talk over the scene where Martin and Ethan race back to the burning remains of the Edwards ranch house after the Comanche raid. What Hunter recalled was the quiet and careful way Ford spoke to him. “He used no technical terms at all. He just discussed [it] in a very simple and touching way … I began to get the feel of a man who discovers that those he loves have been taken from him forever. Ford wasn’t talking to Jeffrey Hunter, the actor, but to Henry H. McKinnies Jr., the man. He wanted emotion, not elocution.”

  By Sunday, July 3, Ford was ready to shoot the final scene of Debbie’s homecoming. The script ended with Ethan and Martin riding home toward the Jorgensen ranch with Debbie nestled asleep in Ethan’s arms, but Ford threw it away. Instead, he chose to end with Lars and Mrs. Jorgensen and their daughter Laurie standing in front of the house as the two searchers ride up with Debbie. Ethan dismounts, carries Debbie up to the porch, and hands her over to the Jorgensens. Then—echoing the opening shot in the film—Ford once again shoots from inside the house, looking out through the front door, as the Jorgensens escort a wary Debbie inside, followed by a reunited Martin and Laurie, who virtually race in together hand in hand. As Ethan watches from outside, he grasps his right arm with his left hand—a gesture that Wayne’s idol, Harry Carey Sr., used in many Westerns. Then Ethan turns, pivots, and walks away alone.

  “When I crossed my arm I did it the way Harry Carey used to do it, because his widow was on the other side of the door,” Wayne later recalled. “And he was the man, Pappy said, who taught him his trade.” Wayne, in other words, was honoring two men—Ford’s mentor and Ford himself—and Olive Carey as well.

  All of this was improvised on the set that afternoon. As Olive watched Wayne’s gesture from off camera, she burst into tears. “Everybody thinks I’m crazy, but I think Duke has the grace of Nureyev,” she said later. “He really is the most graceful man I’ve ever seen.”

  But Olive saved her most lavish praise for her old friend and nemesis John Ford. “He just moved you so that you could just turn it on,” she recalled. “… Even if it was only a shot of opening the door and going through the door and shutting the door, he made you feel it was one of the high spots of the movie, and I think he did that with everybody. I think that’s why he got such performances. You didn’t do it for yourself, you did it for him. It was almost hypnotic, the thing that he had.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, JULY FOURTH, they took a break. Frank and Lee Bradley, Ford’s Navajo interpreters, came to Harry Goulding and said they wanted to make a Ford an honorary member of the tribe.

  The film company staged a big rodeo-style celebration on the red-dirt airstrip below the lodge. Ford paid for three sides of beef and a truckload of watermelons. There were horse races in the morning, and then the Bradleys brought Ford down for the ceremony. They held the Old Man’s Foot Race, featuring Pappy himself. “On your mark! Get set!” Ford jumped the gun, his cigar clamped tightly in his mouth. “Go!”

  By the time the others started, Ford was already halfway to the finish line. He won easily.

  Then they presented Ford with a sacred deerskin. They dedicated it to Natani Nez—“Tall Soldier” in Navajo—and inscribed it “as a token of appreciation for the generosity and friendship he has extended to us in his many activities in our valley,” and added the following wish:

  In your travels may there be

  Beauty behind you

  Beauty on both sides of you

  And beauty ahead of you.

  John Ford with Eleanor and C. V. “Sonny” Whitney, at the July 4, 1955, festivities near Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley. Ford is wrapped in the Natani Nez deerskin presented to him by his Navajo crew members. A never-before-published photo by Allen Reed.

  Carey, who was there, says his Uncle Jack was deeply moved by the presentation. So far as he was concerned, John Ford later said, the dedication was one of the fondest memories of his career. Ford liked being the Tall Soldier, just as he liked being the Great White Father. “More than having received the Oscars, what counts for me is having been made a blood brother of different Redskin nations,” he later declared.

  Better even than winning an Academy Award, said the man who had won four.

  19.

  The Studio (Hollywood, July–August 1955)

  The RKO-Pathé Studio in Culver City was as much a part of Hollywood lore as the movies themselves. It was originally built in 1918 by Thomas Ince, an early pioneer of the Western. No stranger to the art of pretension, Ince had insisted on erecting a dignified two-story mansion with pillars, porticos, and a circular driveway as the administrative offices of the studio, which he tucked behind the stately façade. After his sudden and suspicious death aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in 1924, the studio went on the market. It was first bought by Cecil B. DeMille and later by Joseph P. Kennedy, who built a private bungalow on the site for his trysts with leading lady Gloria Swanson (who later discovered that the impecunious Kennedy had deducted money from her contract to pay for it). David O. Selznick occupied the studio for most of the 1930s, and its image can be seen at the beginning of Gone With the Wind as the symbol of David Selznick Film Productions. King Kong and Citizen Kane were also shot there—and, some forty years later, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

  By the time the Searchers crew arrived in July 1955, RKO and its various properties were in the process of being sold off by Howard Hughes, its latest owner, who ran the company into the ground but rented out the soundstages for cheap rates. Ford had shot here before and Merian C. Cooper, mindful of the need to economize, booked it again. For Ford it was a location as familiar in its way as Monument Valley.

  Ford and his sunbaked crew returned to Los Angeles during the week of July 11 and reported for work on Stage 15 the following Monday. Here Ford went to work cutting and pasting bits of script, coaxing, cajoling, and bullying performances out of the actors. Ford was always more relaxed after a sojourn in Monument Valley. He cleaned himself up, put on fresh clothes, ate a few good meals, and got down to business. He summoned Frank Nugent, the screenwriter, for a bit of polish on some of the scenes. But mostly this was Ford himself, pushing his own vision, using the soundstage to fill in the gaps in the story he was telling. The Searchers is justly famous for the evocative landscape of Monument Valley, yet many of its most powerful moments were filmed on the RKO soundstage. What’s more astonishing, virtually none of them were in the original screenplay.

  Perhaps the most memorable is the breakfast scene that Ford shot on Wednesday, July 20. Ranger captain Samuel Clayton’s posse of volunteers has ridden up to the Edwards farmhouse early in the morning (their thunderous approach on horseback having been filmed in Monument Valley several weeks earlier). Clayton, who is also a reverend, has come to deputize Aaron Edwards and his adopted son, Martin Pauley, to join the hunt for rustlers who have stolen cattle from the neighboring Jorgensen ranch the night before. The scene is a classic Ford tableau: the camera watches quietly from a stationary spot in the front of the dining room as the women of the Edwards family scurry to and fro, serving coffee and doughnuts to the Rangers, while Clayton swears in Aaron and Martin, and his men chat amiably with one another and the Edwardses. It’s a domestic opera—lots of chatter and bustle. People are talking in clusters and moving around the room in a busy but balanced composition. Then from a back door Ethan Edwards enters the room and saunters forward. Ford’s camera watches for a moment, then moves slowly toward him. Wayne almost swaggers as he makes his way toward the dining room table. Ethan and Clayton exchange wary greetings. They are both former Confederate soldiers, ex-comrades who haven’t seen each other in the three years si
nce the Civil War ended. Nugent’s dialogue, spoken by Wayne and Bond, two old pros, is crisp and sardonic.

  “Captain, the Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton! … Mighty impressive,” declares Ethan mockingly.

  “Well, the prodigal brother,” Clayton retorts in Ward Bond’s trademark caustic, booming voice. “I haven’t seen you since the surrender. Come to think of it, I didn’t see you at the surrender.”

  “Don’t believe in surrenderin’,” Ethan responds. “I still got my saber, Reverend … didn’t beat it into no plowshare either.”

  Ethan immediately takes charge, ordering his brother Aaron to remain at the ranch because those alleged cattle rustlers might turn out to be Comanche raiders with more than thievery on their minds. Ethan says he’ll take Aaron’s place in the posse, although he refuses to be sworn in. “Wouldn’t be legal anyway,” he adds mysteriously.

  Clayton wants to know why. “You wanted for a crime, Ethan?”

  “You askin’ as a Reverend or a Captain, Sam?”

  “I’m askin’ as a Ranger of the sovereign state of Texas.”

  “Got a warrant?” Ethan demands.

  “You fit a lot of descriptions,” Clayton replies.

  It’s one of the film’s classic lines, capturing as it does the sense that Ethan is indeed many men—wrangler, scout, uncle, lover, outlaw, killer.

  “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time … I took mine to the Confederate States of America … So did you, Reverend.” Ethan spits out the last line like an accusation.

  An anxious Martha, worried that Ethan is pushing things too far, cuts through the escalating tension by offering more coffee and doughnuts, and the posse and family members head out the door, leaving Clayton to drain his cup in the foreground, facing forward toward the camera while behind him we see Martha fetching Ethan’s coat. She strokes it gently and hands it silently to Ethan, who kisses her chastely on the forehead and heads outside. The harpsichord music playing softly in the background is Martha’s theme, a Civil War–era ballad called “Lorena,” a tale of a thwarted, forbidden love affair. Clayton thoughtfully sips his coffee in the foreground, pretending not to see a thing. Then he slips out the door as well, passing close to Martha without a word. The posse rides off.