Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  Ford, who had already developed a reputation as a pitiless taskmaster given to bouts of cruelty, rode Duke without mercy during the first three weeks of filming. It had happened with other actors before. On the set of The Iron Horse, Ford physically attacked his older brother, Eddie O’Fearna, whom he’d employed as his second assistant on the picture. Later, he punched Henry Fonda, one of his favorite actors, on the set of Mister Roberts, which ended their working relationship. Dobe Carey described the day John Ford knelt on his back and broke one of his ribs on the set of Two Rode Together, angry that Dobe had shown up hungover. Despite his own heavy drinking, Ford kept a no-alcohol-while-filming rule for everyone involved in the picture—a necessity in order for Ford to even undertake the job.

  If Ford had “a happy childhood,” as he claimed, did his penchant for cruelty derive from some unresolved conflict within himself? Like many tough men, he could be sentimental, and indeed his films have been faulted, and also celebrated, for their sentimentality. But it’s almost as if the tough side and the sensitive side could not meet. He was a football hero in high school, which he trumpeted to hide his “sensitive side,” the part of him that loved to draw, that read history and fiction. He would make cruel fun of the heavy-featured Ward Bond, even sketching caricatures of the rugged actor as a gorilla, but later he would disparage his own appearance, saying, “I myself am a pretty ugly fellow—no one would pay to see me onscreen.”

  Given his preference for and celebration of male camaraderie, both in life and on film, it seems Ford worked extra hard at dispelling any suggestion of homosexuality—a career killer—which might have motivated his autocratic, often cruel behavior toward his actors. And then there was alcohol. Ford never touched a drop when he was making a picture, but between pictures he was a binge drinker, given to blackouts. When he wasn’t drinking, he could charm the birds from the trees. He flourished in an era when alcohol flowed freely in Hollywood—even during Prohibition—and was not considered a potential poison. Indeed, the prevailing attitude among Ford and his circle was never to trust a man who didn’t drink. Being able to hold one’s liquor, and to drink prodigiously, was another way to earn one’s masculine bona fides.

  Ford’s wife, Mary, recalled the Hollywood parties Ford would throw at their home at 6860 Odin Street. “They were all hard drinkers,” Mary once said in an interview, and Ford encouraged everyone at his parties to kick back and imbibe. During Prohibition, Ford had a secret drinking room hidden by a sliding door where he kept his cache of liquor.

  Ford’s sobriety at work didn’t blunt his innate penchant for cruelty. On the set of Stagecoach, he made a special point of belittling Duke, who was already insecure in the presence of his more experienced fellow actors. At one point he grabbed Duke’s chin and asked, “Why are you moving your mouth so much? Don’t you know that you don’t act with your mouth in pictures? You act with your eyes!” He repeatedly called Duke “a big oaf” and “a dumb bastard,” at one point yelling at him, “Can’t you walk, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?” That insult might have been pure projection, because Olive Carey had once described John Ford as having a distinctly effeminate walk, and Duke himself has often said that he learned that graceful, slow-rolling gait from Ford. In Ford’s world, to call someone a “fairy” or a “pansy” was the greatest insult he could muster.

  But Wayne endured it. And he continued to look up to Ford and admire the older man’s abilities as a director, grateful that Ford had, at the last moment, opened the doors to a big career. He would later defend Ford’s mistreatment of him:

  When we first started Stagecoach, he rode me unmercifully; and it became quite obvious why he did. I was his friend, I was unknown in the business; he had top actors—[Thomas] Mitchell, [John] Carradine, Claire [Trevor], people who are well known in the business; and despite of the fact I’d been a star for 10 years in children’s pictures, you know, I wasn’t part of the colony. And he did not want them to resent me….[P]eople would start to say, “stop picking on him” so they tried to help me instead of resenting me. That’s the only time that I can ever remember him unmercifully riding me.

  But the abuse was so palpable the other actors asked Ford to lighten up on the newcomer. Duke endured it because he felt that Ford was forcing him to reach beyond himself and grow as an actor, the way a coach pushes his players to their limit; he was also keenly aware that “Jack Ford stood up for me on so many occasions” and that he owed his developing career to the pugnacious director.

  A jaunty John Ford at the top of his game, 1939.

  With Stagecoach a critical and financial success, Duke realized he could have more say in his next picture, and he confided to Harry Carey’s wife, Olive, that he’d like to do something along the lines of The White Company, a novel set in the age of chivalry and knighthood. “You are a big, dumb son of a bitch,” she reportedly told him. “The people have told you how they like you. They’re your audience. You give them what they want, not what you want.”

  It didn’t matter. Despite his stellar turn in Stagecoach, Duke found himself back in the salt mines, toiling again for Republic in a series of mostly forgettable Westerns: The Night Riders, Three Texas Steers, Wyoming Outlaw, New Frontier, Allegheny Uprising (this one for RKO Pictures), and Dark Command, which reunited him with Raoul Walsh. Finally, Ford rescued him once again, in the 1940 film for United Artists The Long Voyage Home.

  In another drama of men without women, this time aboard a tramp steamer at the outset of World War II, Duke has a small supporting role as an innocent, young Norwegian sailor, with a creditable accent, aboard a steamer, with an ensemble cast headed, again, by Thomas Mitchell. It was a different kind of role for Duke, far from the mold of the Western hero he was becoming known for, but it drew on the openhearted innocence that Duke still possessed.

  3 GODFATHERS

  It’s not until Ford’s 1948 Western 3 Godfathers, made for Argosy Pictures/MGM nine years after Stagecoach, that Duke Wayne comes across the screen as the full-fledged, larger-than-life John Wayne of the popular imagination.

  In 3 Godfathers, Duke is now a mature man, heavy in the torso but still light on his feet, his youthful beauty hardened into a face of experience and resolve. The innocence is gone, and in its place is an unmistakable authority, a bracing masculine presence. This is a hero born to command, yet tempered by concern for those weaker than himself. As a bank robber on the lam who nonetheless acts honorably throughout the picture, he again embodies the “good bad man.”

  The story is an allegorical retelling of the biblical tale of the three wise men, set in the West, and adapted by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings from a novelette, 3 Godfathers, by Peter B. Kyne. The three godfathers are desperadoes, having just robbed a bank in the small desert town of Welcome, Arizona, and are now being chased through the unforgiving desert by the town’s sheriff, Perley “Buck” Sweet, played by the gruff and likable Ward Bond. As the outlaws, Robert “Bob” Hightower, William Kearney, a.k.a. the Abilene Kid, and Pedro, search for water in the desert, they come across a dying woman, who they later learn is the sheriff’s sister-in-law. Abandoned by her husband, she is about to give birth. They come to her aid—clumsily, abashedly—and she asks them to promise to take care of her infant, whom she names Robert William Pedro, after the three bank robbers. It’s nearly Christmas Eve, and as it happens, the nearest town is New Jerusalem, where they decide to bring the infant after the Abilene Kid stumbles across a Bible passage that seems to instruct them.

  The three outlaws rescue and protect an infant, discovering their feminine sides.

  Only John Ford could pull off a biblical allegory in the form of a Western.

  It’s clear that the Abilene Kid has received some kind of divine message—not just because he finds their direction in the Bible, but because Ford lights his face in such a way that his blue eyes take on an otherworldly illumination and he appears for a moment like a saint from a stained-glass window. It’s anything but subtle. But then
we have John Wayne as the scoffer, who says early that it will be a long time before he “gets religion” and whose gruff realism bracingly offsets the religious sentimentality. Pedro, the Mexican bandito played with gusto by Pedro Armendáriz, is the most macho of the three, and his frequent making of the sign of the cross also undercuts his machismo.

  Though the movie is at times mawkish and heavy-handed in its allegorical symbolism, it’s a satisfying and enjoyable picture, and a story that clearly moved Ford. He had filmed it once before, in 1919, as a silent film called Marked Men, starring his friend, mentor, and cowboy hero, Harry Carey. In fact, 3 Godfathers is dedicated to the memory of Ford’s onetime friend, who died the previous year, in 1947; and his son, Dobe Carey, appears as the Abilene Kid, the youngest of the three bank robbers. Duke Wayne as Bob Hightower, the leader of the desperadoes, comes across as a reincarnation of Harry Carey. He’s dressed like the silent film star, wearing a Union soldier shirt with an ever present neckerchief and “Texas” hat, his hair slicked down the same way; when resting, he leans back in a pose reminiscent of Carey.

  The three outlaws, toting their infant charge, struggle to make it to New Jerusalem through punishing desert sands and salt flats while running out of water and jettisoning their horses and saddles. Two of them don’t make it. The Abilene Kid succumbs to an injury, having been shot in the shoulder during their escape, and Pedro breaks his leg and is left with a pistol to finish himself off—we hear the lone gunshot in the distance. Only the strongest of the three, Duke’s Bob Hightower, makes it to New Jerusalem, where the infant is rescued. Hightower, though, is arrested by Sheriff Sweet, whose posse has been trailing him through the desert.

  Next we see two men enjoying a game of chess in Hightower’s prison cell. The sheriff and his wife are so grateful that he’s saved their infant nephew that all is forgiven. Sheriff Sweet has always liked Bob—“The more I think about that big fella in the Texas hat,” he says early in the film, “the more I admire him.” He’s impressed by Hightower’s cleverness during the escape, and of course he’s moved by the outlaw’s vow to take care of the infant to honor its mother’s last wish. Bob is sentenced to one year and one day in jail for bank robbery, a reduced sentence to reward his refusal to renege on his promise to the infant’s mother. As Hightower, handcuffed to a deputy whom he practically drags behind him, is put on the train to prison, the town organizes a fond send-off. The local beauty, who happens to be the bank president’s daughter, makes a promise on behalf of the townspeople to welcome him back. Clearly, all is forgiven, because this is a man who risked his life and freedom to keep a sacred promise.

  Unlike in The Big Trail and Stagecoach, however, Duke Wayne does not get the girl in 3 Godfathers. Though there’s a hint of a possible future romance, the real emotional bond is between the three desperadoes, who carry out their mission with loyalty and cooperation. Then there’s the relationship between Robert Hightower and Sheriff Sweet, a burly guy whose feminine name produces guffaws from the three outlaws, as does Bob Hightower’s fancy, effeminate middle name, Marmaduke. Playing chess in the local jail, then being served dinner by the sheriff’s wife, the two men are downright cozy. So the cowboy hero, as shaped by John Ford, begins to evolve from an outlaw with innate goodness who woos and wins the girl to one tough hombre, true to his word, who will find his greatest satisfaction in the company of other men.

  Duke Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., and Pedro Armendáriz as desperadoes in 3 Godfathers, 1948.

  3 Godfathers is not the first or last film in which Ford softens the toughness of his Western hero by having him perform maternal duties, albeit with clumsiness and resistance. The scene in which Duke Wayne greases down the newborn in axle grease, following the dictates of a nineteenth-century baby book they’ve found among the dead mother’s belongings, is funny but weirdly unsettling. As Wayne applies thick yellow goo to the baby’s bare bottom, Ford lavishes a lot of attention on the scene. It’s as if to say that the masculine hero doesn’t need the help of a woman; he can get the job done himself, no matter how ham-handedly. It’s also Ford’s way of combining two opposing realms: the coziness of domesticity and the wild open spaces of the masculine Western. Domesticity when practiced by men is comic but comforting. When practiced by women, however, it can be a shackle on the spirit of their men: when he’s home with his wife, Sheriff Sweet is pruning roses. He only achieves a masculine presence when he reveals his sheriff’s badge and commands a posse in search of the three bank robbers.

  Despite the comic, almost cringe-worthy baby-greasing scene, in 3 Godfathers we have all the elements that make up the archetypal American hero, circa 1948. There’s toughness as Duke and his comrades survive a sandstorm and the trek through the desert with scant water; protectiveness toward the weak when Duke carries the infant or makes sure the Abilene Kid, barely out of his teens, doesn’t do any of the shooting during the robbery and gets most of the dwindling water in the canteen; the keeping of promises when Duke would rather go to prison than break his word to the infant’s dying mother. All are embodied by John Wayne, no matter that he plays an unrepentant bank robber. These were also the hallmarks of America’s self-image, carried through its foreign policy, throughout the World War II era: toughness, protectiveness, and the keeping of promises. Ford would explore these themes further in three important Westerns, a trilogy of films about the Seventh Cavalry.

  3

  Soldier’s Joy: The Cavalry Trilogy

  To me he was sort of like Moses. But I feared him in a good way.

  —RODDY MCDOWALL ON JOHN FORD

  In the military, we love our legends.

  —LIEUTENANT GENERAL DANIEL P. BOLGER, U.S. ARMY, RETIRED

  Soldier’s Joy” is the title of an Appalachian fiddler’s tune, originally Scottish, dating from the 1760s. During the American Civil War, the melody gained lyrics, with “soldier’s joy” acting as a euphemism for the mix of whiskey, beer, and morphine given to grievously wounded soldiers: “Gimme some of that Soldier’s Joy, you know what I mean / I don’t want to hurt no more my leg is turnin’ green.” But when applied to John Ford’s movies, the phrase describes the joy of camaraderie and shared purpose and the pleasures of men living alongside men, close to the natural world—pleasures that Ford especially celebrates in his Cavalry Trilogy, filmed between 1947 and 1950, and that he sought to re-create on location with his stock company of actors, stuntmen, and crew in the expansive wildernesses of Monument Valley and Moab, Utah. Ford’s firsthand experience of these pleasures dated back to his wartime service, perhaps the most formative and influential period of his life.

  Despite significant success in the movie business, Ford had never overcome his youthful disappointment at not getting into the U.S. Naval Academy and joining the navy; life aboard the Araner was a kind of compensation, a chance to command a small ship at sea, crewed by his friends and drinking buddies. In 1939, with the stirrings of war threatening, Captain Ellis Zacharias, a chief intelligence officer of the Eleventh Naval District, asked Ford to use his fishing excursions to Mexico aboard the Araner to take note of the presence of Japanese fishing boats in the area and report back. Already a member of the U.S. Navy Reserve, Ford was thrilled at the covert assignment. He took his command seriously, spying on the fishing vessels and charting their locations, certain that the boats were not the innocent trawlers they appeared to be. He reported back to Zacharias, “The Japanese shrimp fleet was lying at anchor. It is my belief that the crews and officers of this shrimp fleet belong to the Imperial Navy or Reserve. The crews are not the same class of fishermen that I have seen so many times in Japan.”

  Ford had always longed for opportunities to prove his masculinity. With the coming war, he now had his chance to be a hero using the very thing he knew best and excelled at: making motion pictures. At the invitation of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the highly decorated head of the newly formed Office of the Coordinator of Information (precursor of the CIA), Ford deployed his skills making newsreels and short
films to boost navy morale. In 1940, Ford and Donovan created the wartime Field Photographic Division, recruiting cinematographer Gregg Toland, film editor Robert Parrish, and writers Budd Schulberg and Garson Kanin. Sensing that America would enter the fray, Ford planned to use the newly established unit to photograph frontline combat for newsreel coverage.

  With that in mind, the Photographic Division went into training, renting uniforms from Western Costume and borrowing props from 20th Century Fox. Ford was an expert in the pomp and ceremony of military units, which he would put to great use in his Cavalry Trilogy at the end of the 1940s, and organizing the uniforms, the drills, and the combat matériel gave him immense satisfaction. Ford’s Field Photographic Division was quickly given official status by the U.S. Navy and Washington, though its first assignment was a far cry from Ford’s heroic ideal. In one case he was asked to create a thirty-minute public service film called Sex Hygiene to warn military recruits of the perils of venereal disease.

  The film short was released in 1942 by 20th Century Fox, and by showing graphic images of the ravages of syphilis, it recommended abstinence as the best preventative. (In a curious footnote, one of the GIs cast in the film was the strapping actor George Reeves, who would go on to fame, and a tragic end, as television’s first Superman in Adventures of Superman.) The film’s editor, Gene Fowler Jr., recalled, “Ford just loved it! The army would send these guys up under guard for him to photograph, and I think he took a perverse pleasure in showing this shocking stuff.” When Sex Hygiene was shown to draftees at Fort MacArthur, “They had guys running out and throwing up.”