MONUMENT VALLEY
“The real star of my Westerns has always been the land,” Ford once said, and his feelings for Monument Valley were profound. “When I come back from making a Western on location, I feel a better man for it,” said Ford. “I like to get in the desert and smell the fresh clean air. You get up early in the morning and go out on location and work hard all day and then you get home and you go to bed early. It’s a great life.”
Monument Valley’s stark, unrelenting grandeur affected many of the actors and crew as well. John Wayne’s young son Michael stayed with his father on location at Goulding’s ranch during filming, bunking with the crew and actors. It was crowded and uncomfortable, made worse by Ford’s bullying. “That’s how he kept people on their toes,” Michael Wayne later said. “They didn’t know when he was going to snap the trap. That’s the way he controlled; I think he was sadistic.” Nonetheless, Michael remembers nights in Monument Valley as eerily beautiful, a sentiment shared by many of the actors. The ever-present accordion music of Danny Borzage—a musician and a small-part actor in the John Ford stock company—played a large role in romanticizing the landscape. Music on the set was a technique Ford had used when he made silent films, to help create the mood he needed for his actors.
“Ford would have Danny Borzage play the accordion or someone would sing, maybe with no accompaniment,” recalled Michael. “You’d be sitting out there listening, and there’d be lightning flashing. There you were with just a bunch of cowboys and Indians, and far off you’d hear [real] Indians. If somebody was sick, they might be doing a sing.” He felt the same way on location for Rio Grande, in Moab, Utah. In the evenings, when the hard work was over, Ken Curtis or Maureen O’Hara would often sing. “Here [we] were in the middle of the West,” Michael remembered, “with bolts of lightning coming out of the sky, or beautiful cloud formations lit by the moon. It was absolutely fabulous.”
But Ford’s poor treatment of his actors continued, despite the beauty of a landscape infused with music and transcendent light. Besides browbeating his actors to outperform themselves, and beyond just getting the trains to run on time on a tight budget and tighter shooting schedule, Ford wanted to be more like the men he surrounded himself with. Dobe Carey, who had gone through a tough initiation at Ford’s hands, once said,
Duke used to talk about how much Ford wanted to be one of the guys. There’d be a circle of guys on the set—Ben Johnson, John Wayne, some of the stuntmen—and Ford would see them laughing and having a good time, and he’d want to be part of that. But when he’d join them, the fun would stop; everybody would start watching what they said because he was the boss. I felt that he missed the camaraderie, for there was a lot of camaraderie in a John Ford company.
Ben Johnson in particular, who played Sergeant Tyree in Yellow Ribbon and owed his acting career to Ford, felt mistreated by him. He agreed with Carey that “Ford was the type of person who wanted to be part of whatever was going on, and he didn’t have the capacity to express himself….I think that was one of the reasons he was so cantankerous around us.” Ford’s grandson, Dan Ford, thought that his grandfather was “aware of his own sensitivity and almost ashamed of it. He was a very guarded man, but I think he surrounded himself with John Wayne, Ward Bond, and those people because they represented the way he wanted to be.” Ben Johnson felt that Ford projected himself into the macho images he created on-screen. “Ford liked to watch me ride a horse. He looked like a sack of walnuts on a horse, but he’d set the camera up and have me ride by. All of those guys were better actors than I was, but I could beat them riding a horse. We did those chases over some pretty rough terrain; you had to be tough to survive.”
DIVIDED LOYALTY: RIO GRANDE
The third film in what became the Cavalry Trilogy got under way when Herbert J. Yates, head of Republic Pictures, promised Ford he would produce the director’s long-held dream project of bringing The Quiet Man to the screen—in color and filmed in Ireland—if Ford and Wayne would first make another black-and-white Western for Republic. It was John Wayne who had brought the project to Yates at Republic, the studio where Duke had toiled for so many years making B Westerns. It was a comedown for Ford, but he couldn’t interest any other studio in making what seemed like a vanity project about a retired Irish American boxer who returns to his ancestral home and takes a fiery Irish girl as his wife.
For the first time in their careers, Wayne was in a position to help his mentor; Wayne’s own box office draw made him a more commercially viable property than the auteur long considered one of Hollywood’s greatest and most reliable film directors. In terms of their professional relationship, the tide had begun to turn.
Rio Grande was also significant as the first on-screen pairing of John Wayne—reprising his Fort Apache role of an older, more duty-bound Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke—with Maureen O’Hara, who played Kathleen Yorke, his long-estranged wife. Wayne and O’Hara would go on to make four more films together, becoming a legendary on-screen couple, so physically and temperamentally suited to each other that it’s hard to recall any other actresses Wayne wooed—and battled—in the movies. Wayne seldom appeared as a romantic hero, but his romantic engagements with O’Hara are iconic. Dobe Carey later said that Wayne loved working with O’Hara because she made and kept “great eye contact” with him, important for Wayne as an actor whose greatest strength, besides physical grace and power, was his emotional reactions to those around him. “I learned to react, not to act,” he famously said. Short on technique, he needed that stimulus, and he certainly took to heart Ford’s dictum that actors act not with their mouths but with their eyes. Wayne and O’Hara’s long thwarted love affair and marriage in Rio Grande was a preview of the volatile, passionate romance in their next film together, The Quiet Man. In the Dublin-born Maureen O’Hara, John Wayne had met his match.
Duke Wayne and his favorite co-star, Maureen O’Hara, in Rio Grande, 1950. “She’s the greatest guy I ever knew,” he once said of the Irish actress.
O’Hara—a robust, beautiful woman with flaming hair and green eyes—was tall, sturdy, and strong, commanding enough to pair with John Wayne. And with her tough Irish temperament—and temper—she could stand up to anyone. Cast and crew called her “Big Red.” She would remain Wayne’s favorite leading actress throughout his life; he once called her “the greatest guy I ever knew.”
In Rio Grande, John Wayne’s most memorable scenes are with O’Hara, when Kirby Yorke is not speaking but reacting to the mood of the scene and to the beautiful Kathleen. In one such scene, the Western singing group the Sons of the Pioneers serenade the couple, who have come together after fifteen years of estrangement. While Ken Curtis sings a love song titled “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in his beautiful baritone, no words are exchanged between Yorke and Kathleen, yet the pull of fifteen years of loneliness and Wayne’s unabated love for the formidable woman at his side are palpable. This is John Wayne as a great film actor, conveying deep but conflicting emotions with his eyes and his posture. Yorke would make the same choice again—fidelity to duty over wife and son—if he had to. But it would pain him mightily. Understanding this, Kathleen says bitterly, “What makes soldiers great is hateful to me.”
We learn that Kathleen, a southerner, has already lost her ancestral home, the plantation Bridesdale, which was burned down by order of General Sheridan. Her own husband carried out those orders, and the “arsonist” Quincannon lit the house personally. (The incident is based on the alleged burning of the ancestral home of Ford’s wife.) It’s another reason for their estranged marriage—York’s sense of duty to his commanding officer trumping fealty to his wife. Having lost so much, Kathleen now fears she will lose her son down the same path that claimed her husband. But we know that her ministrations and her attempt to force her son to leave the cavalry would humiliate him. So husband and wife, brought briefly together, are irrevocably divided.
When Wayne tries to explain, “I’ve seen things that make my sens
e of duty important,” she answers, “I’m sorry your sense of duty destroyed two beautiful things—Bridesdale and us.” And later, “My only rival is the U.S. Cavalry.” Because she is so strong a presence and so commanding as an actress, Ford manages to balance the agonizing pull between duty and love.
Ford, too, was smitten with Maureen O’Hara. They had a strong connection due to their Irish heritage, and in fact Ford delighted in speaking some limited Gaelic with her on the set of The Quiet Man. But as he often did, Ford expressed his admiration—perhaps even love—through cruelty, which extended beyond the movie set. In her memoir ’Tis Herself, O’Hara describes a harrowing incident that took place at one of John and Mary Ford’s parties in December 1944 at the director’s home.
“The usual gang was there,” she wrote, “and after mingling with the guests downstairs for a bit, I went upstairs and found Pappy on a chaise longue in the middle of telling a story to some friends.” She slipped into the room and took a seat next to him as he recounted one of “his favorite lies” about riding with Pancho Villa. When one of the guests asked O’Hara a question and she answered, suddenly Ford turned on her and socked her in the jaw. “I felt my head snap back and heard the gasps of everyone there as each of them stared at me in disbelief and shock. I don’t know why he hit me, and to this day, I still don’t have a clue.”
In a 2012 interview, the actress, then ninety-two and still strong and clear-minded, repeated the refrain oft sung about the irascible Ford—that he was brutal but somehow it was all worth it:
There were times when you wanted to die because he could be so tough and so cruel and so mean. He was mean to everybody! Not just John Wayne. He was with me, with Harry Carey [Jr.]. And they all said to Ford, “Yes, sir, yes, sir! Where? Now?” And yet when you did something good, and he told you it was good, why, you were floating up the sky! You’d want to kill him, and five minutes later you could’ve thanked him or hugged him…because you knew your day’s work was good.
Though he considered Rio Grande “a throwaway” to satisfy the demands of Republic Pictures, Ford knew it still had to be good. Some film critics consider it the weakest of the trilogy, but in retrospect it may be the most beautiful and most compelling. This time Ford filmed in Moab, Utah, in a landscape that Dobe Carey described as “a miniature Monument Valley—the monuments are just smaller.” Ford had filmed in Moab earlier that year when he made Wagon Master, about a wagon train of Mormons making their perilous way westward, so he knew how well it could suit his needs. The Colorado River ran through the area, which doubled as the Rio Grande bordering Mexico—Río Bravo to the Mexicans—which the U.S. Cavalry is forbidden to cross even in pursuit of marauding Apaches who have been conducting raids across the river. J. Carrol Naish plays Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan, and he reminds Yorke that “soldiers don’t make policy” when Yorke wants to illegally cross into Mexico to root out the Apaches. Both men know it’s against orders, and both chafe at that, but—for a time—they bow to it.
The opening of the film is stirring. We see exhausted cavalrymen returning after an engagement with the Apaches from the point of view of women and children living on the cavalry outpost. There is no dialogue, just a silent search along the line for returning husbands and fathers. This is what it meant, to Ford, to be a military wife—to wait, to support, to search among faces for the loved one’s return. As a silent film director, he knew the power of the camera without words, and it sets the tone of sacrifice and hardship among the cavalrymen and their women. It’s an archetypal scene, reminiscent of the ragtag women following Foreign Legion soldiers at the beginning and ending of the 1930 Marlene Dietrich–Gary Cooper movie, Morocco.
While the opening is indeed a somber one, this would not be a Ford Western if it didn’t also have broad comedy, and again the reliable Victor McLaglen provides it, reprising his role of Quincannon. By way of explaining this recurring character, Ford said, “A lot of the Irish went west after the Civil War; I’m quite enthused about [this] as a bit of Americana.” Though McLaglen began his career with Ford in The Informer, a decidedly non-comedic role, his transformation from tragedy to comedy was complete by the time he appeared in the Cavalry Trilogy.
In the intervening years since the setting of Fort Apache, Kirby Yorke, the top commander of the fort, has taken on some of the qualities of the hard-liner Colonel Thursday. His sixteen-year-old son, Jefferson, played by Claude Jarman Jr., has just flunked out of West Point and enlisted in the cavalry, and Yorke tells him to expect not glory in the military but hardship, suffering, and “fidelity to duty.” He will not even publicly acknowledge that Jeff is his son, in part because they have been estranged for most of the boy’s life.
Though Yorke will not sign the papers allowing Kathleen to buy Jefferson out of the cavalry because the boy “needs to learn to stand by his word,” he defers to her by having his son accompany the women and children to Fort Bliss, out of harm’s way. “You hate it, but I love you for it,” Kathleen says. Ironically, the Apaches attack this supposedly safe passage, and it is Ben Johnson—as Trooper Travis Tyree—who saves the day.
Ben Johnson is considered by many the best stuntman to ever act in pictures; he doubled Fonda in Fort Apache, and his ease and beauty on a horse, particularly in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, is poetry in motion. He often downplayed his abilities as an actor, but he’s winning in Rio Grande as a young Texan on the lam from a manslaughter charge, hoping to hide out in “this man’s army.”
This was Ben Johnson’s third role as a credited actor rather than a stuntman. He had grown up in Oklahoma and was a rodeo star before working in the film industry. “I’ve been able to ride a horse ever since I could walk,” he once said. “It’s second nature to me. Riding is like dancing; it’s all timing.” His charisma on-screen was also natural, and the combination of abilities would serve him well. Twenty-one years later, Peter Bogdanovich—who worshipped Ford—would cast Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, in homage to Ford as much as in recognition of Ben Johnson’s abilities as a fine actor as well as a horseman.
In Rio Grande, Johnson’s skills are proven in his first scene, when Sergeant Quincannon challenges his new cavalry recruits to ride “Roman style.” Tyree immediately leaps across the backs of two horses, grabs the reins, and stands upright astride the two racing beasts. He magnificently jumps a fence in this stance, a breathtaking feat. Dobe Carey then follows suit. Both men admitted that it took them three weeks to master the stunt, though each had grown up riding horses. Meanwhile, Jarman mastered the feat almost immediately, which Ben Johnson put down to his being too young to know how dangerous the stunt was.
In another particularly daring scene, Tyree escapes from three Apaches in hot pursuit by pulling his horse to the ground and using the animal as a shield. It’s not just any horse, but Colonel Yorke’s, which Tyree has stolen in an attempt to escape from the U.S. marshal intent on dragging him back to Texas to stand trial. It’s an amazing stunt—reprised, incidentally, in Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove.
Ben Johnson, the great horseman and character actor in 1949’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. He clashed badly with Ford during the making of Rio Grande.
Ben Johnson credits Ford with educating him in the motion picture business, but he didn’t come around to worshipping Ford for his ability to force or humiliate his actors into giving their best performances. It may be because Johnson didn’t start out to be an actor, nor did he consider it his main calling; he was as good as he needed to be, and his greatest contribution was his brilliant stunt work, which few others could provide. He had nothing to prove. Like McLaglen, who had won an Academy Award in Ford’s Informer and had been a heavyweight boxer, Johnson was secure in his masculinity and his abilities. He stood up to Ford’s bullying, but he long resented him for it.
An unfortunate incident while making Rio Grande would herald thirteen long years before the actor ever worked with John Ford again. At dinner one night, Ford took offense at a joke that John Wayne made
, but he mistakenly called Ben Johnson out for it. “Hey, stupid,” he yelled, and demanded that Ben repeat the joke. Ben got up and said to Ford, “Well, you can just shit in your hat.” He stomped out of the mess hall and did not return that night. Ford turned to Dobe Carey, telling him, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Dobe, go get him, for God’s sake, and bring him back.”
Dobe recalled, “He knew he’d been wrong. He’d made a mistake and let his temper and vanity overcome him.” Ford had banished George O’Brien and Harry Carey for murkier reasons. Ford would get mad at his actors and not use them “for long periods of time, to punish them for whatever he thought they had done wrong. He did that all his motion-picture life, starting with my dad [Harry Carey] in 1921. And any little thing could trigger it and get you on his ‘you’re a bad boy’ list.” Dobe himself would become a target for Ford’s temper after breaking one of Ford’s strictest commandments: no alcohol for the duration of a film shoot.
Joanne Dru, who played Olivia Dandridge in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, recalled that “Ford loved drunks. Who of that bunch wasn’t an alcoholic? If you didn’t drink, he looked at you with a jaundiced eye, but not during a picture. When the picture was over, you could go to his house and stumble all over the place and he didn’t care.” Perhaps that was why Ford constantly chewed on a handkerchief during those long, dry location shoots. “He’s always eatin’ on a handkerchief,” Ben Johnson said, probably to keep himself from drinking while satisfying an oral compulsion. He would throw anyone off the set if he smelled alcohol on his or her breath.
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