Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  Jack and Mary were wed on July 3, 1920, soon after meeting, and set up household in a Beachwood Drive bungalow before settling into a stucco house on Odin Street, at the foot of the Hollywood Bowl. Though the house was relatively modest by Hollywood standards, they would live there for most of their married life, giving frequent parties that lasted until dawn. Their usual crowd was Ford’s collection of movie actors, writers, and stuntmen, including Hoot Gibson and that other cowboy star, Tom Mix. The handsome silent film star George O’Brien was a frequent visitor, and even Hollywood royalty like Rudolph Valentino showed up one night and made a spaghetti dinner for everyone.

  With their love of entertaining and Ford’s success and clout in the film industry (his pictures always made money), they should have been happy. But Ford apparently believed that Mary felt superior to him; she was a member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the American Confederacy, whereas Ford was keenly aware of—and usually proud of—his origins as the son of Irish immigrants and the son of a saloon keeper. And like Duke’s fiancée, Josephine, Mary was not especially interested in the motion picture business. To a woman of her class pretensions, there was something a little second-rate, even louche, about the trade; its moguls and big-shot directors were arrivistes. Ford asked his wife not to visit him on the sets of his pictures, and she had no problem complying with that request.

  The conflicts inherent in their marriage were exacerbated by alcohol—lots and lots of alcohol. Ford, wrote Davis, “buried himself in work. He became more inward and stubborn, mixed crossness with affection, turned on people to assert himself, and lashed out at those he loved.” Besides his obsession with work, his pleasure boat, the Araner, was an escape for him where he could devote himself to drink and male companionship, far from the blessings of civilization. It could get pretty debauched, however: Henry Fonda’s son, the actor Peter Fonda, recalled that “Duke describe[d] how Ford would hole up on the Araner and get so drunk he would defecate on himself. He’d call out to the men on the boat to come down into his cabin, but no one would go down there into the hold, because it stank.”

  Despite his own excesses, Ford, as a student of American history, was intrigued by the idea of the American hero, and he set out to embody a series of mythic figures in his own life: a hard-drinking, feisty Irishman; a take-no-prisoners, successful director; a naval officer; a war hero; a patriot—a man’s man. He did so in his dress, his speech, and his acts but, more important, through his movies and the heroes he helped bring to life on-screen: Harry Carey, George O’Brien, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, and—ultimately—John Wayne. Not only was he creating one of the greatest film legacies of the twentieth century; he was creating and re-creating himself, taking on the attributes of men he deeply admired. The burly actors Victor McLaglen and Ward Bond were, arguably, versions of his own blustery, outsized father.

  But this process of self-mythology didn’t lend itself to stability. After his fallout with Harry Carey, Ford bunked with Hoot Gibson for a while. He later bunked with the darkly handsome actor George O’Brien, whom he directed in the silent film The Iron Horse, one of the biggest moneymakers of the decade. These were intense relationships built on a kind of hero worship, involving mutually satisfying work, and then a bust-up followed by years of estrangement. He would repeat the pattern, on a smaller scale, with Duke Wayne after Duke defected to Raoul Walsh’s camp when he made The Big Trail. But at least in Duke’s case, Ford eventually rescued him from the period of obscure toil that followed his breakout role, and their professional and personal friendship flourished after that.

  After years of estrangement, one summer day in 1938 Ford spied his former third assistant property man fishing on the Long Beach Pier and invited him to come aboard the Araner, a ketch named after the Aran Islands. Soon after, Duke became a regular member of Ford’s crew of actors, writers, and stuntmen invited on board Ford’s beloved boat, spending weekends at Catalina Island. Ward Bond, Wayne’s former classmate and now a veteran of several of Ford’s films, was a frequent companion. Occasionally, they would drive down to San Pedro to drink and play poker. They often took fishing trips to Mexico, anchoring the Araner off the coast of Mazatlán, spending their evening drinking at the Hotel Belmar (“or one of the local whorehouses”). One New Year’s Eve they proceeded to get so drunk that the Mexican policía demanded that they leave. These were riotous and heady times for Duke, but he had no illusions that his friendship with Ford would lead him back to working with the great director. “I never expected anything from Jack,” Duke later said.

  By now, Duke had persuaded Josephine to marry him. His difficult and apparently chaste six-year engagement culminated in their June 24, 1933, wedding in Bel Air, at the home of the actress Loretta Young. Duke declined to be confirmed as a Catholic, which sowed the seeds for unhappiness in a long marriage that would produce four children. Duke later told his third wife, Pilar, that those four conceptions were the product of the only times he and Josephine had had sex. Duke’s long hours, usually from 5:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., strained the marriage further. He was often away for long periods on location shoots, and when he did come home at night, he was exhausted.

  As the convent-raised daughter of a successful physician, Josephine was still the socialite, involved in charities and fund-raisers, and she resented her husband’s unwillingness to share that part of her life. They quarreled often, and Josephine especially disliked the rough-and-tumble friends Duke liked to play poker with—stuntmen who were also cowboys, wranglers, and rodeo men, with dust on their clothes and mud on their boots. Their third child, Patrick, was born in 1939, but the marriage had devolved beyond rescuing, and only their children and Josephine’s Catholicism stood in the way of divorce. Duke was more than happy to spend time on Ford’s yacht, away from home and family, in the company of men.

  When Ford began looking around for a charismatic actor to play the cowboy hero in his new film, the first Western he would make as a talkie, it never occurred to Duke to even ask to be considered for the part. Duke was humbled by the fifty-eight movies and serials he made for mostly second-rate studios; he felt there was something inherently second-rate about him, and he continued to revere Ford as an artist of the first order—an artist out of his own league.

  But the role of the Ringo Kid in Ford’s new picture was perfect for John Wayne—a charismatic outlaw who becomes the moral center and hero of the story in the tradition of the “good bad man”—and it was the role that could rescue him from Monogram-Republic obscurity. On board the Araner one weekend in the summer of 1938, while fishing off Catalina Island, Ford teased the now seasoned young actor, asking him to recommend someone else for the part. “I’m having a hell of a time deciding whom to cast as the Ringo Kid,” he said. “You know a lot of young actors, Duke. See what you think.”

  He tossed the script over to Duke. Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht had adapted a 1937 Collier’s magazine story titled “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox, and Ford’s rather beleaguered son Patrick, who was then working as his father’s production assistant, brought it to Ford’s attention. The producer Walter Wanger wanted Gary Cooper for the sympathetic role of a young gunfighter who breaks out of jail after a dubious conviction in order to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. But Ford felt that Cooper was too old for the part, and too expensive for the half-million-dollar budget. It was the second time that the lanky actor, star of High Noon, was jettisoned to make way for John Wayne.

  Ever willing to please Ford, who seemed content just to have Duke as a drinking buddy on fishing trips, Duke offered up the actor Lloyd Nolan as a possibility. Ford seemed to mull over Duke’s suggestion and didn’t mention it again until they docked at San Pedro. He finally turned to Duke and said, “You idiot. Couldn’t you play it?”

  Ford later explained in a characteristic understatement, “When the time came for me to do ‘Stagecoach’ I thought about Duke. [Walter] Wanger was producing the picture, and h
e never interfered with my casting. We took a test of him in Western clothes, just to get an idea—not a moving test but a still camera test. He looked great. Wanger liked him to play the part. The rest is history. Duke went from there to bigger things.”

  STAGECOACHED

  The story of Stagecoach couldn’t be simpler: a society in microcosm barrels across the New Mexico Territory in 1885 in order to reach Lordsburg without being attacked by warring Apaches. It’s an ensemble piece in which characters are brought together in close quarters, where their best and worst selves are revealed. Each of the passengers in the stagecoach, driven by Andy Devine as Buck, with the marshal, Curly (George Bancroft), riding shotgun, has a compelling reason to take the dangerous trip. A disgraced, alcoholic doctor played by veteran character actor Thomas Mitchell, one of Ford’s favorite Irish American actors, rides cheek by jowl with a whiskey salesman, played by Donald Meek. Mitchell’s character is arguably a stand-in for John Ford himself—an Irish drunk who is able to pull himself together to deliver a baby, just as the heavy-drinking Ford pulled himself together again and again to deliver a movie, on time and on budget. Mitchell would win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.

  The cast is rounded out by John Carradine as a southern gambler named Hatfield whose gallantry in escorting Lucy Mallory, a young cavalry officer’s pregnant wife played by Louise Platt, nearly redeems his shady past as a gunfighter who once shot a man in the back. An outwardly respectable banker named Gatewood, played by Berton Churchill, turns out to be a thief absconding with funds, in part to escape his overbearing wife. The very presence of the town prostitute, Dallas, played by Claire Trevor, is a thumb in the eye of more “respectable” travelers, except for the Ringo Kid—John Wayne—an honest outlaw as natural and noble as the wind-carved landscape through which their stagecoach rolls. He falls in love with her.

  Released in 1939, Stagecoach is widely considered the first Western made for adult entertainment. It is also Ford’s first movie to be partly filmed in the starkly beautiful Monument Valley along the southwestern border of Arizona and Utah, a locale he would often return to and that gave his Westerns a grandeur and austerity unseen in Westerns before Ford and influencing how Westerns would be filmed thereafter. In Stagecoach, Ford introduces—or reintroduces—Duke to the public with a flourish. As a young outlaw who has escaped prison to hunt down the men who killed his father and brother, he is the embodiment of the “good bad man,” an outlaw whose basic goodness shines forth from his open countenance and whose straightforwardness and courtesy extend even to Dallas, the shunned prostitute aboard the stagecoach.

  Ringo hails the stagecoach halfway to Lordsburg because his horse has gone lame, and Ford practically stops the film to register his presence. The camera frames him in a long shot, slightly out of focus as if to tease the viewer, then zooms in to capture his handsome Scotch-Irish face and admire his torso, languidly posed against the vast background landscape. We see that Duke’s face is no longer young—certainly not young enough to still be considered “the Kid”—but his innocent friendliness gives him youth. He’s immediately greeted by Buck, the driver, happy to see his old friend, who shouts, “Hey, it’s Ringo!” Once Ringo has boarded the stagecoach, Buck tells the marshal, “Ain’t Ringo a fine boy!” The marshal, who has just confiscated Ringo’s rifle and virtually put him under arrest for his unlawful escape, says a bit grudgingly, “I think so.” Right away we know that Ringo is a good man regardless of the law’s opinion.

  Stagecoach, 1939: A stagecoach barrels through majestic Monument Valley. “The real star of my Westerns has always been the land,” Ford once said.

  This goodness derives, in part, from the very fact that he is an outlaw, someone isolated from the stultifying strictures of civilization represented by the Law and Order League, scolding women who have driven Dallas out of town. In his private life, Ford lampooned such reform-minded leagues, calling his cadre of drinking buddies on board the Araner the “Young Men’s Purity, Total Abstinence, and Snooker Pool Club.” It’s worth noting that reform-minded women of the era devoted themselves to, among other things, the prohibition of alcohol, prostitution, and gambling—three vices that loom large in all Westerns in the form of the frontier saloon. The townswomen are portrayed as pinched harridans and hags, in marked contrast to Dallas’s youth and beauty. She is Ringo’s counterpart as the good “bad” woman, the whore with the heart of gold.

  A family-loving man, Ringo is out to avenge his father and brother. He is righteous in his devotion not just to family honor but to restoring justice more broadly, attested to by his willingness to return to prison and serve out the rest of his sentence once the deed is done. As the feminist film critic Joan Mellen has pointed out, “What already counts for the Wayne character is principle, never personal comfort.” Facets of the later John Wayne persona emerge from his “sweet and open” face—a steely hardness when he describes the murder of his father and brother and what he intends to do about it. And, though shackled, he leads the weaker men aboard the stagecoach, intervening in a fight between the gambler Hatfield and the drunken doctor and heroically fending off attacking Apaches from the top of the stagecoach. Later, when Dallas urges him to make his escape, Ringo refuses because “there are some things a man can’t run away from.” That statement foreshadows the John Wayne hero who will capture audiences in many films to come.

  Duke Wayne as the Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor as Dallas in 1939’s Stagecoach. Whether or not Ringo knows Dallas is a prostitute, he loves her just the same.

  Ringo’s genuine courtesy toward the stagecoach passengers includes the outcast Dallas, a contrast to the phony, flowery courtesy of Hatfield, the southern gambler, who only shows respect to Lucy Mallory, the cavalry officer’s wife, with whom he is smitten and with whom he shares the lost cause of the Confederacy. When Hatfield offers Lucy a drink from a silver cup but refuses one to Dallas, Ringo rescues her from humiliation and gives her a drink from the only canteen of water. He offers water all around before taking a drink himself, a measure of his selflessness. And when they make their first stop at a roadside outpost, the Ringo Kid seeks the company of Dallas after the gambler and the officer’s wife have snubbed her by refusing to eat at the same table. Ringo insists that all the passengers treat Dallas with respect.

  That Ringo perceives her essential goodness evokes our sympathy. But does he recognize Dallas as the shamed woman she is, having missed seeing her run out of town? Played with Claire Trevor’s usual rueful wit, Dallas is surprised and touched by Ringo’s attentions to her. Noticing that the other passengers refuse to sit with her at the dining table, Ringo assumes it’s he who’s being shunned, because he is, after all, an outlaw just broken out of jail. Whether Ringo knows her social status or not is a question that Ford and Wayne don’t answer. All we know is that Ringo’s gallantry turns to love over the course of their journey, and Dallas, cynical and self-protective at first, eventually accepts that she is worthy of being loved. They run off together at the film’s end, to Ringo’s homestead in Mexico, a place of redemption beyond the dubious “blessings of civilization” and the vice and danger of the coach’s ironically named destination, Lordsburg. Only in the wildness of the territory beyond the border will Ringo and Dallas truly be free.

  The Western hero seeks freedom, to live life on his own terms, even if it means leaving civilization behind, as Ringo does. His Mexican homestead is a place “where a man can live—and a woman,” he tells Dallas. This early incarnation of the John Wayne hero possesses a blend of innocence and resolve, an ability to trust his instincts beyond the dictates of society, an ability to experience love for a woman and to act on that emotion—to protect but not to control. His line to Dallas evokes the lines from War of the Wildcats that Joan Didion remembered with such wistfulness: that he would build her a house “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.”

  But in later Ford-Wayne Westerns, as the masculine hero evolves, the woman will be
all but dropped from the equation.

  After almost ten years in the wilderness, before Stagecoach, Duke had considered himself nearly over-the-hill, more stuntman than actor. Now that he was back in a real, grown-up movie again, he felt he had a lot of catching up to do. Veteran character actor and friend Paul Fix, who would go on to play Marshal Micah Torrance in The Rifleman, agreed to coach him in the role. Though Duke’s delivery is still somewhat stilted compared with that of more experienced actors like Claire Trevor and Thomas Mitchell, Duke managed to turn his liabilities to his favor. It would take him years to learn how to deliver a line with unstudied ease, but from the outset he possessed a powerful and graceful physical presence. His embodiment of Ringo—the way he twirls the Winchester and then tosses it up, one-handed, to the marshal; the way he folds his tall, muscular frame into the cramped space of the stagecoach; the stunts he performs, created and sometimes doubled by his friend Yakima Canutt, whom Duke brought into the production—speaks to his easy strength. What he would discover, though, was that throughout his career, his lack of theatrical polish would only deepen his authenticity and his popularity, especially with audiences who are suspicious of artifice. His very stiffness as an actor would underline the notion that Duke really was the heroic character he played in the movie; in Duke’s world, to adopt the smooth, versatile delivery of the virtuoso was a bit suspect—let the easterners flaunt their technique.

  TASKMASTER

  With the two men united in their vision for the role of the Ringo Kid, and with Ford having lobbied to cast Duke in the part, filming should have been a pleasurable collaboration. Instead, it was hell.