American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  Wayne downplayed the importance and power of the MPA and denied it was even a political group. This is how Wayne described his involvement with the MPA, in an interview with Playboy in 1971, what became one of his most controversial (and final) extended interviews. On the Motion Picture Alliance and his association with it: “Our organization was just a group of motion-picture people on the right side, not leftists and communists. There was no blacklist at that time, as some people said. That was a lot of horseshit. Later on, when Congress passed some laws making it possible to take a stand against these people, we were asked about Communists in the industry. So we gave them the facts as we knew them. That’s all. The only thing that our side did that was anywhere near blacklisting was just running a lot of people out of the business.”76

  The interview made some of his friends laugh, and others who had been blacklisted furious. “Hell,” one of them said, “Duke didn’t know anything about the menace of Communism! All he knew was that some of his friends were against them!”

  With the Cold War in full operational mode, and the “fall” of China, HUAC proceeded to throw out the civil rights of those who had at one time or another chosen to be a member of the Communist Party, and during its hearings, it denied those who testified as “unfriendly” witnesses their constitutional rights against self-incrimination.

  Eventually, in need of the best and the brightest that they had vanquished, the studios, old and tired and making mediocre films that reflected nothing so much as the fact that they had blacklisted some of their best talent, and although it took more than a decade, for reasons of necessity rather than policy were willing to forgive and forget.

  But not John Wayne. Being the head of the MPA restored the political-correctness credibility he had damaged by not serving in the military. Here is part of a 1947 speech he gave at a rally shortly after becoming president of the MPA: “The past ten years the disciples of dictatorship have had the most to say and said it louder and more often. All over the world they pour their mouthings into the ears of the people, wearing down their resistance by repeating hammerings of half-truths. That’s where our crusade for freedom comes in.”

  As a crusader for freedom, he loved beating up on bad guys. He was, after all, the king of the cowboys.

  Chapter 13

  By the end of the 1940s, right-wing conservative John Wayne’s film career began to soar into the stratosphere, even as the liberal/centrist John Ford’s began to decline. Wayne had become the most popular actor in Hollywood, while Ford’s career had taken a downturn from which it would never fully recover. Ford’s first film after They Were Expendable was 1946’s My Darling Clementine, a western he made the same year as Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives.

  After They Were Expendable’s relative failure at the box office, Ford decided to step back from making anything that had to do with the war, and chose instead to make movies drenched in the sentimentality and safety of the past, beginning with Clementine. It was the first western Ford had made since Stagecoach, seven years earlier, a reworking of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. A band of brothers, the Earps and Doc Holliday (the Allies), devote themselves to cleaning up Dodge and disarming Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury (the Fascists), who want the town to stay in their total and lawless control. If moviegoers looked hard enough, they might see a contemporary metaphor lurking in Ford’s retelling of the story, but he always denied it.

  My Darling Clementine starred Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp. Ford may have thought Wayne was better suited to play Earp, but he and Wayne had not gotten along all that well after the verbal (and nearly physical) beating Wayne had taken during the making of They Were Expendable. Like a parent putting his two sons through a tormented sibling rivalry, Ford went instead with Fonda, the actor’s first film after returning from his active duty in the navy. Fonda had served for three years as a quartermaster third class aboard the destroyer USS Satterlee, later as a lieutenant junior class for Air Combat Intelligence in the Pacific Theater, and was awarded the Naval Presidential Unit citation and the Bronze Star. Ford loved servicemen, especially those who did their service in the navy.

  And yet, a gray cloud hung over Fonda after the war for his lifelong liberalism, and his too-real and impassioned portrayal of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, who had agreed to distribute Clementine, objected to Ford’s choice of Fonda, claiming the actor had been away from films for too long, and instead wanted Wayne to play the role. That was, if Ford insisted on making a western at all rather than a war film. When Ford went ahead with Clementine and Fonda, an angry Zanuck recut the completed negative of Clementine to make it shorter, and, he insisted, more commercial.77 The film barely made back its production costs—lavish sets were built for it, including an entire western “town” on Fox’s back lot—grossing only two million dollars at the box office and marked the end of the Zanuck/Ford professional relationship. Ford still owed Zanuck one more movie, but it would be years before he would make it.

  Instead, Ford revived his dormant production company, the Argosy Corporation (now Argosy Pictures), with his partner Merian C. Cooper, and six of their former navy colleagues as investors.78 The new Argosy’s initial foray was Ford’s 1947 The Fugitive, based on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a curious art film starring Henry Fonda and Delores Del Rio, about a Jesus-like priest who takes on the Specter Hanging Over Europe. It was well received by critics but flopped at the box office. As Andrew Sarris later correctly observed, “The Fugitive marked the last occasion on which the great majority of American critics made the slightest effort to confront Ford as a contemporary artist. After . . . he was widely regarded as a voice from the past, as an eccentric antique dealer with a good eye for vintage Americana.”

  In 1948, Ford made Fort Apache, set safely in the past and the first of what would come to be known as his cavalry trilogy, three films that take place in the years following the Civil War when the quest to settle the West was at its peak. The uneasy wisdom of the three films, beginning with Fort Apache, powerfully mirror through the reflection of time American audiences’ uneasiness following World War II. Fort Apache remains a milestone for both Ford and the film’s star, John Wayne, the story’s true hero, and reunited the two, while Fonda played the film’s fatally flawed Martinet, Colonel Owen Thursday. After the commercial failure of The Fugitive, at first, Argosy Pictures would not get a decent distribution deal and completion funding to make Fort Apache from its new studio, RKO, if Fonda was the star, Howard Hughes, the new head of the studio, insisted. Hughes pressured Ford to use Wayne instead. The director was eventually able to reach a compromise with Hughes and use both—Fonda playing the villain, Wayne playing as the hero. The film signaled the start of Fonda’s sharp decline from cinematic superstardom.79

  The film Fort Apache, written by Frank Nugent, was adapted from James Warner Bellah’s Saturday Evening Post short story, which was (very) loosely based on the infamous 1876 defeat of George Custer by Sitting Bull’s Lakota tribe, better known as Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Little Bighorn. It was shot mostly in Monument Valley, on the Valley Navajo Indian reservations, with interiors done at Selznick Studios in Culver City, and in Simi Valley, California, where an entire fort was built for it at Corriganville.80 Production lasted seven weeks in the desertlike heat, with six-day workweeks and eighteen-hour workdays. Nugent always tried to write to Wayne’s strength, not as an emotional actor but as a physical giant. “Having Wayne put his arm on your shoulder,” he once remarked good-naturedly, “is like having somebody dump a telephone pole on you.”

  In the film, John Wayne plays Captain York, a wizened, if grizzled, telephone pole of a commander of the fort, who has come to know and respect the Navajo reservation, as he has been stationed there to help defeat them. York favors peace and, if possible, reconciliation with the people he has had a hand in conquering. Into the fort rides the martinet Colonel Thursday, with his daugh
ter, a grown-up Shirley Temple, who is soon romanced by a West Point–educated officer, Michael Shannon O’Rouke (played by John Agar, making his film debut; he was Temple’s real-life husband, a clever piece of casting by Ford, who had worked with Temple when she was a child-star sensation), the son of one of the enlisted men at the fort (Ward Bond). Henry Fonda plays not just a bad man but an evil one. Nonetheless his performance was so strikingly good, so fearsomely believable it actually turned audiences against Fonda and may have further damaged his career.81

  Colonel Thursday has been sent from the East to Arizona to help fight the war against the Indians. He is bitter and out for blood, having been demoted after the end of the Civil War, and is looking to reestablish his glory and his rank by pulling off a massacre against the Indians. The tension in the film comes from the clash of the experienced and wise York and the ambitious and bloodthirsty Thursday.

  Thursday sets up a meeting with the Apaches, who are distrustful of the Americans because so many previous treaties have been broken or ignored. The Indian chief agrees to lead his tribe back to the reservation, knowing it is a trap set up by Thursday. The film’s tremendous climax, the confrontation of the cavalry and the Apaches, ends with only a few surviving soldiers, one of them York, as he was assigned to the rear guard by Thursday, humiliation for his insubordination when he tried to convince Thursday not to go through with the ambush.

  Back at the fort, York defends the late Thursday as having been a great soldier, declares him a hero, and hangs his picture on the wall, a lifeless portrait that at once celebrates a lie and glorifies a myth. This is a theme that would be repeated again and again by Ford, nowhere better than in 1961’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  Fort Apache was the film that marks Wayne’s move into cinematic middle age. In the film, Wayne does not lead the climactic battle, defeat the “bad guys,” or win the heart of the leading lady, but he manages to steal the picture from Fonda.

  His performance ranks among his best and he should have been nominated for an Academy Award for it. However, despite money reviews—the New York Times’ film critic Bosley Crowther raved about the film: “A rootin’, tootin’ Wild West show, full of Indians and the United States Calvary . . . Henry Fonda is withering as the colonel, fiercely stubborn and stiff with gallantry, and John Wayne is powerful as his captain, forthright and exquisitely brave”; and Howard Barnes at the New York Herald Tribune did as well: “Fort Apache is a visually absorbing celebration of violent deeds. John Wayne is excellent as a captain who escapes the slaughter and protects his superior’s name for the sake of the service”—at Oscar time, Wayne, Fonda, and Ford and the film were all ignored. The winners that year were Laurence Olivier’s star turn in his self-directed Hamlet, Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit, a star showcase for Olivia de Havilland, John Huston’s glorious The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which showed off Bogart at his darkest and Huston at his cleverest, and Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda, starring Jane Wyman and her real-live lover, Lew Ayres, for whom she had left her first husband, Ronald Reagan.

  HE THEN RETURNED TO FINISH Howard Hawks’s monumental Red River, which had begun production before Fort Apache but had been delayed several times because Hawks’s independent production company, Monterey Productions, had continued to have trouble over financing with its distributor, United Artists (Red River was Monterey’s only production before it was dissolved).

  It was Wayne’s first film for Howard Hawks, Ford’s cinematic antithesis, whose films had no room for teary sentimentalism. Hawks’s pacing was too fast and his camera too objective to allow for expressive emotionalism in his mise-en-scène. Whereas Ford’s films dwell in the soulful melancholia of the American past, Hawks’s films speed forward unafraid of anything that might get in the way of the fast lane. In Hawks’s world, men romance strong, modern, and racy women, while Ford’s prudent affectations offer visions of chaste love. Hawks’s films are energized by the physical movement of its characters through space, while Ford’s are enriched by their emotional passage through time.

  What Hawks’s and Ford’s films share is a fondness for heroes who are “real men,” two-fisted tough guys not afraid to stand up for what they believe in. Ironically, it was Red River that gave Wayne the opportunity to play a deeper, more complex version of that character than he ever had with Ford. It is arguably Hawks’s greatest film and certainly his best western, as it explores the Freudian nature of conflict and competition between father and son without the restrictive safety of orderly civilization.

  There is little doubt that Hawks had Ford in mind when he made Red River. He admired Ford’s expansive view of the West, and Hawks wanted to get that into his film. Ford had helped elevate westerns to a higher level of acceptance with Stagecoach, and Hawks wanted to make a film at least as good as that one. When he was asked one time to name his three favorite directors by film critic and historian Richard Schickel, Hawks unhesitatingly answered, “John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.”

  Hawks’s Monterey Pictures had purchased the rights to Borden Chase’s novel The Chisholm Trail, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in late 1946 and early 1947. The director then hired Charles Schnee to write the picture screenplay. Hawks had originally wanted Gary Cooper to play the story’s dark lead, Tom Dunson. Cooper had won an Oscar in 1941 for his performance in Hawks’s Sergeant York, for which Hawks was nominated as Best Director, and was nominated twice more for Best Actor in each of following years, although he didn’t win either (Sam Wood’s 1942 Pride of the Yankees and Wood’s 1943 For Whom the Bells Toll). He was eager to work with Hawks again, but when the director offered him the role of Dunson, Cooper turned it down, believing the character was too dark and it might hurt his all-American good-guy image, especially after his recent and odd turn in For Whom the Bells Toll.

  Hawks also thought about casting Cary Grant in the supporting role of cowhand Cherry Valance. Grant was one of Hawks’s favorite actors (he had used him in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings, and 1940’s His Girl Friday), but he, too, begged off because he had never made a western and also refused to play any role but the starring one. Valance’s role eventually went to John Ireland, a handsome tough-guy journeyman character actor.

  Only then did Hawks decide on Wayne for Dunson and, to get him, he smartly made Charles Feldman the film’s executive producer. Feldman would be instrumental in getting Wayne to agree to do the film. He was hesitant, at first, to accept the role, as he had just a played an older character in Fort Apache. Dunson is essentially a father figure in the film and ages during it to older than Wayne’s real-life forty-one years, and there was no real romantic interest for him in the script. The extent of Wayne’s reluctance is debatable, but he eventually agreed to take the role.82

  Despite gray in his hair and lines added to his face, at first Wayne still had trouble projecting the physical movement of an older man. To help him with his performance, Hawks assigned Walter Brennan, also in the film as Groot, Dunson’s sidekick, to teach Wayne how to “act older.” Also in the film was Harry Carey Sr., and his son, Harry Carey Jr. (Everyone called Carey Jr. Dobie so he wouldn’t be confused with his father, whom he strongly resembled. Carey Jr.’s hair was the color of the brick used to make adobe houses.)83 Red River was the senior Carey’s penultimate screen appearance. He died in 1947 of cancer at the age of sixty-nine, before the delayed 1948 release of the film, and shortly after appearing in a Walt Disney movie, Harold D. Schuster and Hamilton Lake’s part live-action, part animated So Dear to My Heart, a vehicle for Disney child star Bobby Driscoll. “God, it was a terrible day,” Carey Jr. recalled. Wayne was at the hospital when it happened. “Duke brought me a tumbler of whiskey. I think it was the first time I ever turned down a drink.”

  THE MOST INTERESTING TURN OF casting for Red River was Hawks’s choice of the young and diminutive Montgomery Clift in the role of Matt Garth. Clift had caused a sensation on Broadway
as one of the new “Method actors.” The notion of making a Hollywood movie, with John Wayne no less, was not something that interested him at all. Hawks, who could be both convincing and persistent, flew Clift out to L.A., wined and dined him, and further sweetened the pot by offering the young, inexperienced film actor a fee of $60,000. Clift asked for time to think it over, flew back to New York, and a few days later called Hawks to tell him he was accepting his offer.

  Not that Clift, who was gay, felt simpatico with Hawks or Wayne; he was an easterner through and through. He was from the New York theater community, where sensitivity reigned over machismo. In her biography of Clift, Patricia Bosworth described Clift’s uneasiness around these “real men”: “Clift respected Wayne’s and Hawks’ professional abilities but disliked them on a personal level. He told a friend about Duke and Hawks’ nightly card games. ‘They laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.’ ”

  Hawks set up an initial meeting between the two stars of his film. Wayne was a little bit surprised at how small Clift was and told at least one interviewer his initial reaction to the New York actor was that he was “a little queer . . .”84 Wayne was skeptical that someone as small and “sensitive” as Clift could make the film’s climactic fistfight look at all believable, but Hawks assured him of the young actor’s abilities. Wayne reluctantly agreed to try to work with the young Method actor.

  Hawks’s version of that first meeting is a little different: “When [Wayne] saw Clift for the first time, he said, ‘Howard, think we can get anything going between that kid and myself?’ I said, ‘I think you can.’ After two scenes, he said, ‘You’re right. He can hold his own anyway, but I don’t think we can make a fight.’ I said, ‘Duke, if you fall down and I kick you in the jaw, that could be quite a fight, don’t you think so?’ And that was all there was to it.” It eventually took three days to film the climactic fistfight, to make Clift look believable against Wayne. Hawks himself taught Clift how to throw a punch and move the way fistfighters did.