American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  WAYNE’S NEXT ACTING JOB was Hatari! made for Paramount Pictures, and directed by Howard Hawks. Hatari! had been filmed in 1960, but not released until 1962. It was a purely action film, light on plot, heavy on action. According to Hawks, “Hatari! in a way was a Western . . . We never knew in the morning what we were going to do that day—we had three or four spotting airplanes, and just as dawn broke, they would go up and radio back to us. One would say, ‘I found a really good herd of rhino,’ and by that time we’d be on our way . . . we had fun.” The film was, ostensibly, about big game hunting in Africa, but really about the special joy of male bonding past the age of adolescence (or at the prime of an extended one). Much of it was filmed in Tanganyika and was long on macho and short on meaning; it was nonetheless highly entertaining, and upon its release well received by critics and audiences, and further helped replenish Wayne’s depleted coffers. Much of the dialogue was improvised, according to Bogdanovich: “ ‘Well,’ Hawks said, ‘you can’t sit in an office and write what a rhino is going to do . . . we had to make up scenes in an awful hurry.’ ” Wayne had flown to Africa in November, just weeks after completing North to Alaska.

  He next appeared in 1961’s The Comancheros, directed by Michael Curtiz at Fox (made after but released before Hatari!). At fifty-four, he had gotten too old to play a romantic hero and wisely let others be the lovers in his movies, here the younger, virile Stuart Whitman.

  Wayne wanted to be surrounded by families and friends while making the film. William Clothier, The Alamo’s brilliant cinematographer, was back behind the lens, and two of Wayne’s children had roles in the film, his son Patrick and his daughter Aissa. Pilar came along for the duration of the location shoot that took place in the part of the Mojave Desert that reached into the southern tip of Utah. In the film, Wayne plays a Texas Ranger trying to stop a gun-running band of renegade Comancheros.

  Curtiz was sick during filming, and Wayne directed most of the picture, unaccredited out of respect for Curtiz, who passed shortly after the film was finished and before its release.

  Not long after they returned home from Utah, Pilar announced she was pregnant again. If anyone thought it odd that Wayne was still having children at his age, he had the same answer for all questioners, should any have the nerve to ask: “The difference in our ages is not a problem! And if it ever gets to be one, I’ll just have to find a younger woman!”

  Pilar was excited about having another baby. One night late in her pregnancy, watching The Searchers together on TV, she suddenly turned to Wayne and asked if they could name their child Ethan if he was a boy. He happily said yes.

  An hour later, on the morning of February 22, 1962, she went into labor and an hour after that gave birth to John Ethan Wayne. Wayne had two grandchildren older than his new baby boy.

  Wayne was reenergized by this new round of fatherhood, and his productivity showed it. In the year that followed he made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, Donovan’s Reef, the long-delayed McLintock!, Circus World, and In Harm’s Way, an output of films ranging from awful—Circus World—to one of the finest films of his career, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  When Valance was released in 1962, it appeared to critics and whatever audiences who saw it as something of a throwback, a black-and-white western with three actors all too old for their roles—Jimmy Stewart as a young lawyer, Wayne as a gunfighter—and Andy Devine back in the Andy Devine comic-relief role. It also had one over-the-top villain, the title’s ironically named Liberty Valance (valiant liberty?), played with high-end menace by Lee Marvin, who had been a member of the Ford stock company for years without being able to land the right role to turn him into an A star. Although Valance didn’t do it, a few years later in Elliot Silverstein’s 1965 western spoof, Cat Ballou, he cleverly sent up his role of Valance and won a Best Actor Oscar for it, an award overdue, won, at least in part, to Wayne’s insistence to Ford that Marvin play the murderous villain in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  Bogdanovich once described Valance as “a deceptively simple Western which concludes, metaphorically, with a U.S. that has buried its heroes in legends that are false, that has built out of the wilderness an illusory garden and left us tragically longing for the open frontiers and ideals we have lost.” On a more tangible level, Valance is a hard-edged, bitterly ironic drama told against the backdrop of the decline of the Wild West and the displacement of the tough men who made it fit for decent people to live by the politicians, who take it over for profit and self-aggrandizement. In other words, as one character says in the film, when the truth becomes the legend, print the truth.

  Valance begins with the arrival of so-called civilization, in the guise of Jimmy Stewart, pushing sixty in real life, heavily made up to play young Ransom “Rance” Stoddard, an eastern tenderfoot lawyer come to the western town of Shinbone to start his practice. Even before his stagecoach arrives, it is held up and he is brutally beaten and robbed by Valance and his gang. Stoddard barely makes it to town and takes a job in a kitchen to try to earn enough money to open his own law practice. One night while serving a steak to Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a horse-trader, he is tripped by Valance, who then tries to make Stoddard pick up the steak. At that point, Doniphon intervenes, stands up to Valance, and humiliates him with a display of genuine toughness that sets up their eventual showdown. In the interim, Stoddard falls in love with Hallie, played by the beautiful Vera Miles, and without knowing it, he steals her away from Doniphon, who was building a house for himself and Hallie to live in after their marriage. She leaves the past behind to find her future. Stoddard’s presence marks the end of Doniphon’s time, and the Wild West he helped conquer.

  At this point, politics enters the film, via the free press, which Valance detests. One night in a rage he burns down the town’s only newspaper. He then sets up a shoot-out with Stoddard. Stoddard, shaking with fear, takes pistol lessons from Doniphon, and when the final confrontation takes place, a trembling Stoddard somehow kills the drunken Valance and then uses his newfound celebrity as the basis to jump-start a political career that will take him all the way to the Senate. The film is told in flashback, as Hallie and Rance Stoddard return to Shinbone to pay their last respects to Doniphon, after they learn of his passing. Rance, known by everyone as the man who shot Liberty Valance on the train, finally tells Hallie the true story of what really happened that night. We watch that story as Stoddard tells it to Hallie.

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was made five years after The Searchers, and it was a disappointing flop when it opened, written off by most critics as just another John Wayne western, the most memorable thing about it being Wayne’s use of the word pilgrim to describe Rance. It became an overnight touchstone for every Vegas impersonator, added to their stock Wayne imitation of the pigeon-toed walk and the choppy monotone speech pattern. Today the film is regarded as among the greatest westerns ever made, a bizarre antithetical dialectic to The Searchers. Each film clarifies the other.

  Ford first became interested in Valance in 1960 when he’d come across a 1949 short story in Cosmopolitan magazine, written by Dorothy M. Johnson, a journalism professor at the University of Montana. Having secured the rights, Ford approached Wayne about being in it. Wayne couldn’t say no to Ford, especially with the Old Man’s health so fragile. Every film they made together now could be the last. Ford also cast the immensely popular Jimmy Stewart. Stewart had recently made Two Rode Together for Ford, costarring Wayne’s old enemy Richard Widmark. Ford hired James Warner Bellah and Willis Gorbeck to write the script, with Gorbeck also coproducing, and took the whole package to Paramount, knowing they had just made a new ten-picture, $6 million deal with Wayne (one picture a year at six hundred thousand dollars per) and wouldn’t want to do anything that might upset their new star by turning down a film he wanted to do. They offered Ford a modest deal, $3.2 million to make the movie, with his new company, Ford Productions company having to put up half of
it. Ford managed to raise the money, and the film was officially green-lighted.

  Whereas The Searchers was shot on location at Monument Valley, in beautiful Technicolor and Todd-AO, with the expansive visuals forming part of the thematic ambiguity of the film—the sky the ultimate existential backdrop—Valance was shot in black-and-white, almost entirely on the interiors of Paramount’s back lot. It has always been thought that Ford did that out of necessity, that there simply wasn’t enough money to make the movie in Monument Valley, and even if there were, he wouldn’t have been able to withstand the physical endurance. However, a closer look at Valance suggests Ford’s choices were deliberate, to make this an inverted version of The Searchers. Valance’s stagy unreality is an essential part of its mise-en-scène. The night of the big shoot-out, we discover—that is, Ford allows us to discover—what really happened, that Doniphon was hiding down the street and killed Valance with his gun and then let Stoddard take all the glory. By simply moving the camera to another placement, Ford made a powerful statement about how cinematic truth depends not just on visual information but also point of view, and that the camera is an instrument of revelatory truth. In Valance, it reveals a secret only Doniphon and the director know, until we learn it when Stoddard reveals it to Hallie in his confession.

  In Valance, Doniphon’s is an open book, ambitious—he raises horses—in proper love with Hallie, with a sense of honor and entitlement. He is two-fisted tough, knows how to use a gun, and will never start a fight but will always finish one. He is the living fiber of the frontier, a veteran of all the wars that expansionism brought, but has no future, no place in the new West. In The Searchers, Ethan is swathed in mystery. He and Scar represent the past, they battle in the present, they too have no future. They are remnants of a time of the law of the gun. In Valance, when Doniphon realizes that Hallie is no longer in love with him, that he has been left behind (in his dying world), he goes to the home he had been building for them and burns it down (an act that further connects the film to The Searchers and Scar’s fiery attack on Ethan’s brother’s house). For both Scar and Doniphon, the burning of houses represents an external expression of their fires inside. Scar hurts others by burning down their house; Doniphon hurts himself by burning his. Both Ethan and Doniphon (and Scar and Valance) will not be welcomed in the new West. Each in his way helps explain why the others won’t.

  Production on the film was not easy, with Ford determined to tell the story the way he wanted, often not bothering to explain to his actors why he told them how to play a scene. Lee Marvin later remembered how and why Wayne always acquiesced to whatever Ford wanted: “Ford would talk to him all the time while directing him. He directed Duke and I think Duke relied on him very much to direct him. I don’t think Duke ever forgot what Jack, Coach, Pop, Pappy, whatever they called him, had done for his career. Ford would say, ‘Oh, don’t do that Duke!,” and Duke would do what he told him to instead and it was just brilliant. I think Ford was tremendously responsible for Wayne’s persona.”

  And Hawks: “The relationship between Wayne and Ford was very interesting. Ford still treated him as a beginner. And Wayne would do anything that Coach, or ‘Pappy’ as he called him, asked him to do.” It didn’t happen right away. Jimmy Stewart was an easier fit for Ford, and Marvin could play a character like Valance in his sleep; his naturally muscular build and facial snarl were perfect for the part. Wayne was the only one in Valance who was not really clear about his character. Years later he complained to Dan Ford that “Pappy had Jimmy Stewart for the shitkicker role, he had Edmund O’Brien for the quick-wit intellect, and Andy Devine for the clumsy humor. Add Lee Marvin for a flamboyant heavy, and shit, I’ve got to walk through the entire picture.” Wayne was totally at a total loss as to why Doniphon would let a character like Jimmy Stewart steal his woman (there is no evidence in the film that Hattie has any real intention to marry Doniphon, and there are no romantic scenes between them). And why would he burn his own house down? Or not take credit for killing Valance? If he had done that, he might have at least had a shot at Hattie.

  Nonetheless, Wayne’s performance is no less dramatic, if one level less profound then the one he gave as Ethan, and in the end, it was probably better that he didn’t fully understand what was going on. It gave his character a sense of distance that kept him apart from the others, which made the film even more of a shock when he saves Stoddard’s life by killing Valance. The film reaffirms John Ford’s eternal place in the pantheon.

  THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY Valance began production the first week of September 1961 and ended the first week in November. Except for a very few outdoor sequences at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, California, the entire film was shot at the studio. Wayne received a $750,000 guarantee against 7.5 percent of the gross receipts. Stewart received $300,000 and the same percentage. Shooting was contentious, with Ford saving most of his vitriol for Wayne, who always seemed to do better work under Ford’s directorial birch. Marvin was too oblivious to feel the lash, and Stewart too sensitive for Ford to use it on. And Vera Miles brought out Ford’s courtliness, such as it was, tempered by age and a general lack of interest in her sexual charms.

  Despite mixed reviews, the film did moderately well, grossing $8 million in its initial domestic release, and placed seventeenth in the highest-grossing films of 1962.129 A. H. Weiler in the New York Times chose to review Wayne’s performance rather than the film: “Mr. Wayne again proves, if it is necessary at this late date, that he can sit a horse well, shoot from the hip and throw a haymaker with the best of them. And, fortunately, he is more laconic than most.” Variety called it “[a]n entertaining and emotionally involving western . . . yet it falls distinctly shy of its innate story potential . . . Stewart and Wayne do what comes naturally in an engagingly effortless manner.” The New York Daily News got closer to what the film was really all about: “Nostalgic, sour and powerful, it is one of the most memorable of all [Ford’s] westerns.” So did the New York Herald Tribune’s Paul V. Beckley: “John Ford, as usual, shows how to make a Western really western. What under many a director would be only a series of plot clichés, under his direction achieves character.”

  They were all good reviews, but it would take the new American auteurists to eventually put the film into its proper cinematic context, and to recognize it as the masterwork it was. Andrew Sarris: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a political Western, a psychological murder mystery and John Ford’s confrontation of the past—personal, professional and historical . . . [The film] achieves greatness as a unified work of art . . . [and] must be ranked along with (Max Ophuls’ 1958) Lola Montes and (Orson Welles’ 1942) The Magnificent Ambersons as one of the enduring masterpieces of that cinema which has chosen to focus on the mystical processes of time.”

  Peter Bogdanovich: “A Ford masterpiece, perhaps his final word on the West in the era when the gun was the law . . . Wayne, Stewart and Vera Miles are superb in their simplicity, and Ford’s direction is a masterpiece of understatement and economy . . . it is one of the saddest movies ever made, by a man who very well may be the American Cinema’s greatest director. Its reverberations echo through the years and shadows of his other work.”

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance will forever stand alongside the greatest westerns of all time. It proves, once and for all, that film is a director’s medium, and that Wayne was underrated as a two-dimensional, cardboard cowboy. Taken together, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance definitively reveal the beauty of his physical strength, the power of his verbal vernacular, and the veracity of his emotional depth.

  Chapter 23

  It was extremely gratifying to Wayne the day in 1962 when he picked up the phone and heard Darryl Zanuck’s voice on the other end, offering him $25,000 to make a two-day cameo appearance as Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort in the producer’s The Longest Day, a grand-scale re-creation of the Allied landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944. After several years in corporate exile in Europe,
Zanuck had retaken control of Twentieth Century–Fox from Skouras, who had nearly bankrupted the studio with its disastrous ongoing production of Cleopatra. Zanuck wanted to complete his World War II saga before Skouras’s Egyptian one, and, after paying Cornelius Ryan $125,000 for the rights to his bestselling book of the same name, looked to hire every big-name star in Hollywood to play cameos. John Wayne was the actor he sought most; no other American movie star was as closely identified with on-screen World War II–style heroics as Wayne. His presence, Zanuck knew, would give the film an added sense of validation. Zanuck had to swallow his pride over his “poor old man” remark and humble himself by personally calling Wayne to ask him to be in the film.

  Wayne took great delight in saying no.

  Zanuck called again four hours later and upped his offer to $50,000. Wayne again said no and hung up on the studio head. It wasn’t until Zanuck offered Wayne $250,000 that he finally agreed to do it. He then turned to Pilar and smiled, his lips tight, his eyebrows raised, his forehead wrinkled. He had shown the old bastard just how poor and old John Wayne was.

  THAT SAME YEAR HE REUNITED with Ford in the Civil War sequence for the Cinerama epic How the West Was Won, playing General William Tecumseh Sherman (a role he had played on an episode of Wagon Train Ford had helmed as a favor to Ward Bond not long before his untimely passing). The other two segment directors for How the West Was Won were Henry Hathaway and George Marshall. The film remains a curio in the technological history of cinema, and Wayne’s bit, as a cigar-chewing, drunken, and unkempt Sherman, is too brief to be memorable, but an interesting snapshot of his acting style in the first half of the 1960s as the studios struggled to find ever-larger venues and subjects to lure TV viewers back into theaters.