Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  Ford didn’t yet consider him leading role material. “I like[d] Duke’s style from the very first time I met him,” he later said. “I could see that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work.” So Ford wasn’t happy when Walsh poached Duke right from under his nose, and he was put out with Wayne for having defected, even if it meant a lead role in a major film. Ford considered it an act of betrayal. He had wanted to bring Wayne along slowly, and he felt the young man wasn’t ready. So he refused to even speak to the hopeful actor for two years, though Duke tried to re-ingratiate himself. While he didn’t blame Ford’s cold shoulder on his appearing in The Big Trail, he did recall,

  I remember he was evidently mad at me at one time…when I first started with him as an actor, and I quit working in production, and I said hello to him one morning and he didn’t answer me, and I thought, well, he had something else on his mind. Next day I said, “hi, Coach,” and it looked like a deliberate pass. Third day I got right in front of him and I said, “Pappy, hello.” And he didn’t speak to me! So, I didn’t bother him again, for two years.

  Nor did he appear in any other major film after The Big Trail for nearly a decade. His next film was Girls Demand Excitement for Fox in 1931, in which he played a college basketball player, again opposite Marguerite Churchill but in a cheaply produced film he knew was terrible. Even his old friends at USC razzed him about it when the film was released. He then played an architect in Three Girls Lost, also for Fox that same year, opposite Loretta Young. Duke had dated the actress’s younger sister Polly Ann in his first year at USC, so he knew Loretta and enjoyed working with her. But these performances were underwhelming, and the good reviews for his work in The Big Trail faded.

  IN THE WILDERNESS

  Duke had a strong work ethic and a genuine desire to excel—he hated what he considered his own mediocrity and worked mightily to transcend it—so he was nearly despondent at the apparent end of his burgeoning career in pictures. Pappy Ford was ignoring him, too, so there was no going back to that promising start.

  Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures, then a well-thought-of but smaller studio, was impressed enough with Duke to hire him to star in low-budget Westerns and action films that were “calculated to appeal to rural and small-town audiences.” Duke starred in Columbia’s Arizona in 1931, but things went badly for him at the studio when Cohn accused him of having an affair with a young actress he had his own sights on. “Keep your goddamn fly buttoned at my studio,” he barked at his young actor, humiliating him. Duke was further humiliated when Cohn next cast him to play the corpse in a low-budget thriller titled The Deceiver. It was a huge comedown. A fainter heart would have quit at that point, but Duke soldiered on. For six months he accepted Cohn’s punishment by appearing as a second-string actor in a series of low-budget oaters—horse operas—such as Maker of Men, Texas Cyclone, and Two-Fisted Law. It seemed his fate was set.

  Perhaps the example of John Ford, the first true artist Wayne recognized in his life, kept him going, despite their freeze-out. And there was also his intention to marry his college sweetheart, a socially prominent, Hispanic American Catholic named Josephine Saenz, whose family didn’t quite approve of young Duke Wayne, who seemed to be squandering his youth playing corpses and oafish cowboys in the still rather quasi-respectable motion picture business. Had he stayed with his plans to become a lawyer, it would have made him more acceptable to Josephine’s status-conscious family.

  Josephine was a haughty beauty, a devoted Catholic, whose Hispanic background made her all the more exotic and appealing to Duke. She had everything Duke’s childhood had lacked: social status, money, security, even glamour. From the age of seven, Duke had grown up on a hardscrabble farm in arid, rattlesnake-infested Antelope valley, north of Los Angeles, after his father, Clyde Morrison, had failed to make a decent living as a pharmacist’s clerk back in Winterset, Iowa. Duke’s engagement to Josephine dragged on, despite her parents’ misgivings, until he could find some measure of success and begin making money. He was floundering, but he was hardworking, smart, and ambitious.

  In 1932, Columbia Pictures, like Fox Studios before it, declined to pick up his option, and Duke was unemployed. Not only did Cohn drop Wayne, but he circulated rumors that he was “a drunk and a rebel.” Duke thought about giving up. “For a year I couldn’t get work,” he recalled, “and I was thinking of going into the fight racket, which I was too old for.” So when he was finally offered a role in one of the B Westerns churned out by Mascot Pictures, a Poverty Row studio run by the shrewd, cigar-chomping producer Nat Levine, he took the job. The money was terrible—roughly half his previous salary at Columbia Pictures—and the serials and action films were second-rate, strictly for the kids. This was his lot for the next nine years, his youthful beauty seemingly squandered, but the period would become a valuable apprenticeship as much as a purgatory. He was making a steady if modest living, and he was discovering—despite the grueling, physical toll it took on him—that he loved making movies.

  Duke secured the lead in three twelve-episode serials, beginning with 1932’s Shadow of the Eagle, a hackneyed story about a carnival stunt flier filmed, of all places, in Antelope valley, the same barren landscape Duke had hated as a boy. It was a grueling experience, working eighteen-hour days in the pitiless sun, but there was a major reward: Duke worked alongside the extraordinary stuntman Yakima “Yak” Canutt, who became a close friend and teacher. Yak doubled Duke Wayne in the difficult stunts, and because each of the twelve episodes ended on a cliff-hanger, there were many. Wayne biographer Ronald L. Davis described their bonding:

  Most of the company decided to spend the night on location rather than drive back to Los Angeles for only a few hours’ sleep. Some of the crew built a fire, and Wayne sat down in front of it and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Canutt sauntered over and knelt down beside him. Without saying anything, Duke handed Yak the bottle, and the stuntman uncorked it and took a long swig. Form that moment on, they were lifelong friends as well as professional colleagues. “Wayne,” the stuntman declared, “[was] a regular kind of guy.”

  With Canutt as his guide, Wayne mastered stunts such as the “crupper mount”—leaping up over the rear of a horse from a running start—and staged innovative fistfights. The two men discovered that a real fight looks staged from the camera’s vantage point but a staged fight looks real; their realistic but safe way to choreograph a fight changed the way such scenes were staged from there on out. Canutt later remarked, “Wayne got to be terrific. I used to think he’d put up a better picture fight than most of the stuntmen.” He was also learning the nuts and bolts of lighting and camera angles, and even took a turn as a “singing cowboy,” playing Singin’ Sandy Saunders in Riders of Destiny (1933) for Monogram. But the voice was dubbed in by a baritone actor while Wayne mouthed the words, making him feel like “a goddamn pansy.”

  Another innovation of Duke’s was to make the cowboy-hero more realistic, in an era when the good guy wore white, strummed a guitar, and didn’t drink or smoke; after all, the low-budget serials had to pass muster with kids’ parents. But Wayne had always revered the silent screen cowboy Harry Carey, who made twenty-six movies with John Ford in the 1920s and who taught young Ford much of what he knew about making movies.

  Although he was well educated and came from a distinguished family back east, Carey was craggy, rough-hewn, with dirt on his clothes and a scowl on his face. With Ford, he perfected the role of the “good bad man” as the outlaw Cheyenne Harry in twenty-three Westerns, beginning in 1917 and appearing in Ford’s first feature-length movie, Straight Shooting, also in 1917. Wayne would later say that Carey “projected a quality that we like to think of in men of the West. Ford and the great Western directors built on his authenticity.”

  As a lad in Glendale, Duke had loved Harry Carey’s movies, along with other Western stars like Hoot Gibson and Wi
lliam S. Hart, but Carey was his favorite. “I made up my mind I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability,” Wayne later said. “I knocked the stuffing out of the goody-goody Boy Scout cowboy hero and made him a believable guy. My dad told me that if I got into a fight, to win it.” In an attempt to distance himself from the singing cowboy of B Western pictures, he took Harry Carey as one of his models.

  When I started, I knew I was no actor, and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate and studied a projection as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint, and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. It was a hit-or-miss project for a while, but it began to develop….I even had to practice saying ain’t.

  PAPPY FORD

  While Duke was growing up watching Harry Carey on the big screen, young John Ford was learning the ropes of the movie business.

  “Pappy was full of bullshit, but it was a delightful sort of bullshit,” Henry Fonda once said about John Ford, with whom he made nine films. “He likes to claim that he was just a lace-curtain Irishman from the State of Maine who had come out here to do stunts for his brother, and they had made him a director because he could yell loud.”

  Ford rarely gave straight answers to questions about himself, especially about his personal life, because he projected an identity of his own creation; to him, the facts of the past were useful only as the seeds of myth. “The truth about my life is nobody’s damn business but my own,” he growled to his interlocutors. Woe to any journalist or would-be apprentice who showed up on a John Ford set hoping for an in-depth interview. As film scholar Lem Kitaj comments in Nick Redman’s documentary Becoming John Ford, “Ford’s famous act was to pretend to know nothing, when he actually knew everything; he pretended not to care when he actually cared very much…he was this cantankerous, grumpy guy who wouldn’t engage.”

  1938 portrait of John Ford: brilliant, sensitive, artistic—and a merciless taskmaster.

  Ford was born John Martin Feeney, the youngest of thirteen children, seven of whom died in infancy. For fourteen years, the Feeneys lived over a saloon on Center Street in Portland, Maine, before moving to a rambling farmhouse on a two-hundred-acre farm on Cape Elizabeth, where John—called Jack by his family—was born on February 1, 1894. Feeney ran his farm but also managed a saloon in the nearby town of Two Lights. What Ford remembered from those early years was a happy childhood in proximity to the sea, engendering a lifelong love of maritime adventures. In 1897, Feeney moved his large family—his wife and his six surviving children, Patrick, Mary, Frank, Edward, Josephine, and John—back to Portland, this time to Danforth Street. There, he opened a bar and restaurant in Gorham’s Corner, a somewhat seedy neighborhood near the waterfront. The saloons were the heart of the city for hardworking Irish immigrants, and in Gorham’s Corner, Saturday night brawls and rivalries between ancient clans often broke out among men escaping the harshness of their lives in the new country. Raised in a rowdy household with three older brothers and a tempestuous saloon-keeping father, Ford would later seek to re-create the sense of male camaraderie, fueled by liquor, he’d grown up with.

  In the years before Prohibition, Feeney’s saloon prospered (though his wife and oldest son, Patrick, were disapproving teetotalers), and the family moved to the more respectable Monument Street and then to a triplex on Sheridan Street that they shared with two other Irish families, the Mahoneys and the Meyers. They had finally arrived as “lace-curtain Irish,” though Ford’s sympathies would always be with “the shanty Irish.” As a director, he would be drawn, again and again, to sagas of the struggling poor, sometimes presenting the buffoonery of hard-drinking men but ultimately insisting on their dignity, notably in The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, with the Welsh standing in for the Irish. “I am of the proletariat. My people were peasants,” Ford once said, tersely, with subdued pride. “They came here, were educated, and served this country well.”

  Producer and actor Charles FitzSimons, brother of the Irish actress Maureen O’Hara, believed that John Ford’s “one great emotional tragedy” in his life was that

  he hadn’t been born in Ireland. He wanted to be as Irish as anybody could be, so he wore an Irish tweed jacket with the collar turned up….If he wore a hat, it would have the brim turned down all around, and he would often tie his slacks up around his ankles. The reason for that was that he was trying to be a native Irishman. In Ireland the grass is long and wet, and we will very often tie up the legs of our pants to save them from getting wet. Of course we wear Irish tweed jackets and always wear the brim of our hat down and the collar of our coat up, so the rain runs off….Ford didn’t really know that, but he was adopting what he thought was native Irish garb. He was a deliberately self-directed character, determined to make himself a native Irishman.

  Ford pays tribute to the Irish in film after film, from The Iron Horse to The Informer, which won him his first Best Director Academy Award, and most famously in The Quiet Man, starring Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne. The Irish were, for Ford, loquacious prototypes of another kind of western hero: hard drinking, quick to fight, loyal, antiestablishment, and suspicious of authority. Additionally, Ireland was a mythic place that represented home, and he would idealize “home” as a warm, safe haven presided over by a tough but loving matriarch in many of his films. In his adult life, however, that kind of home eluded him.

  Ford did find a kind of surrogate home with Harry Carey and his wife, Olive, the silent screen actress. After Ford’s older brother and first mentor, silent film actor and producer Frank Ford, brought Jack Feeney to Hollywood, gave him his start in the industry, and gave him his new name, Ford was taken under the wing of Harry Carey. It was Olive who’d first introduced Jack Ford to her husband; she’d met the young director on a Universal movie set when she was just sixteen. Harry persuaded Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios, to hire Ford to direct his next Western.

  Ford moved out to Carey’s thousand-acre ranch north of Saugus, California—rugged country, though only thirty-five miles from Los Angeles—where Harry and Olive homesteaded their rustic ranch. Ford was a frequent live-in guest while learning his craft during the day making two-reeler Westerns for Universal. For Jack Ford, it was ideal.

  “Pop was responsible for Ford being a director,” wrote Carey’s son, Harry “Dobe” Carey Jr., who would grow up to be a member of Ford’s stock acting company. Dobe, nicknamed for the adobe-brick color of his hair, was born on the ranch in 1921 and spent his childhood there, which he remembered warmly: “Roaming the mountains and flatlands were coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, and all the small game they hunted….It was a place my father never wanted to leave. He always threw a fit when my mom told him he had to go to town.” But of Jack Ford he was less nostalgic. “He scared the hell out of me,” he wrote. “There was a cockiness about him that reminded me of the kids I’d wind up getting into fights with at school.”

  Apparently, the friendship soured between Ford and Carey, as Dobe later recalled: “He and my father were not working together anymore. I remember Pop being very happy about that.” They made twenty-six movies together, splitting up in 1921 after making their final film, Desperate Trails, for Universal, but the years they had worked together were so important to them that Olive would refer to time “before Ford” and time “after Ford.” Later, Ford described Harry Carey as “natural and rugged, but he had an innate modesty. He was a great, great actor, maybe the best Westerner ever,” and declared that “Harry helped me immeasurably.” But except for a small role in Ford’s Prisoner of Shark Island, Carey never worked in a Ford film after 1921—even when the actor needed the work. When Dobe once asked his father why he never worked for Ford again, his father took a long drag on his cigarette and answered cryptically, “He won’t ask me.”

  In many ways, though, the four years Ford spent as a young man making movies with Harry Carey a
nd bunking down at his canyon mountain ranch were the happiest of his life. Whatever broke up that friendship, it started a pattern that would follow Ford professionally and personally from then on. Some biographers blame the split on Ford’s resentment of Carey’s higher salary; Dobe hints there was trouble on a more personal level. Whatever the reason, Ford was about to move from Universal to Fox Film Corporation, where he would eventually begin a long and rewarding—though sometimes contentious—relationship with the brilliant Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox Films. He’d learned a lot from Carey about visual storytelling, and he would try to re-create the magic he’d had with Carey with his next leading actor, another cowboy star, Hoot Gibson, but the magic couldn’t be re-created.

  Ford’s personal life was equally rocky, a fact that his biographer Ronald Davis attributes, in part, to the class discrepancy between himself and his wife, Mary McBride Smith. Ford met Mary, suitably, at a St. Patrick’s Day dance in 1920 at the Hollywood Hotel. Having moved on from Harry Carey, Ford was now making Westerns at Universal with his friend Hoot Gibson, with whom he was also sharing rooms. Mary was a Scotch-Irish Protestant from North Carolina, and apart from her youth and delicate beauty Ford was attracted to her pedigree. Her family had a naval background, which struck a chord with Ford’s lifelong maritime obsession. Being turned down by the U.S. Naval Academy as a young man, probably for poor eyesight, failed to diminish his romantic attachment. More thrilling, perhaps, was the fact that Mary’s grandfathers had been officers for the Confederacy, and she claimed that her family home had been burned down during Sherman’s March. The sea and the military, especially the navy, dominated Ford’s creative thinking, and making pictures was a way to satisfy those callings.