Though Duke bought a five-acre estate with a twenty-two-room farmhouse in Encino for Chata and her mother to live in, the marriage devolved into drunken fights, mutual accusations of infidelity—he with Gail Russell, she with hotel scion Nicky Hilton—and all-around misery.
On September 12, 1952, a few months after Duke met Pilar, he and Chata filed separate divorce suits, each of them charging “physical and mental cruelty.” He had moved out of their house in Encino and was living as a bachelor in an apartment on Longridge Avenue, dodging gossip hounds like Hearst’s syndicated columnist Louella Parsons. When Pilar arrived in Los Angeles to dub an English version of Green Hell, she and Duke began an affair, in secret, so as not to give Chata additional grounds for the high maintenance alimony she was seeking—$50,000 a year for six years. And when Pilar became pregnant, knowing she couldn’t be with Duke until his divorce was finalized, she sadly, reluctantly, had an abortion.
Duke’s marriage to Chata had lasted seven years, and again he was filled with guilt at his failed marriage, blaming himself. “It was an embarrassing ordeal to live through,” Duke later said of their all-too-public divorce, adding, “Maybe I’m still afraid of women. I am awed by their presence. I feel there is something beautiful about a fine woman….I’m not complaining. I’m living in a good country. I’m doing work I love.” Their divorce, finalized in October 1953, was as contentious as their marriage had been, with Chata claiming a $150,000 settlement plus the $50,000 annual maintenance, with Duke holding on to the Encino estate. They finally settled on a lump sum of $375,000.
The troubled Chata returned to Mexico City and allegedly drank herself to death at the age of thirty-eight, just thirteen months after the settlement. After his divorce from Josephine Saenz, Duke had remained close to his four children from that union—Michael, Antonia (Toni), Patrick, and Melinda—often bringing them to the sets of his movies and sometimes giving them production jobs and small roles in his pictures. His third marriage, by many accounts—especially Pilar’s!—was his most loving and most enduring, lasting twenty-five years. She bore him three children—Aissa, who played the child of one of the soldier’s wives in The Alamo; John Ethan, named after Wayne’s character in The Searchers; and Marisa. In The Alamo, when Aissa is introduced to Davy Crockett, the character Wayne somewhat reluctantly assigned to himself, the love that shines from his eyes almost constitutes a break in character.
That Duke Wayne married three women of Latin American descent fueled much speculation throughout his life; some thought he sought out compliant, dependent women to marry, when in reality all three were formidable in their own right, willing and able to challenge him, in their different ways. And Chata and Pilar were very different from his cold, unloving mother who had so clearly preferred his younger brother. Duke himself explained, “To me, [Hispanic women] seem more warm and direct and down-to-earth.”
Ford, meanwhile, had a similarly turbulent domestic life, although for different reasons. One cannot deny the fundamental ambiguity of his artistic output: he admired big blustery men of unquestioned masculinity—hard drinking, quick to fight, passionate—but he saw that a civilizing influence would come from more moderate men, and often from women. In fact his last film, 7 Women, employs a nearly all-woman cast. Ambiguity resided within Ford’s heart, and he struggled to accept not only his artistic nature but—possibly—his own conflicted sexuality. There is evidence in his work and from those who knew him best to suggest repressed attraction to men, despite his long marriage to Mary and his apparent love affair with Katharine Hepburn.
No wonder Jack Ford worshipped Katharine Hepburn, for her boyish beauty, her forthrightness, her total candor, her absolute courage. He even did the unthinkable, once, in allowing her to direct herself in a love scene in 1936’s Mary of Scotland, on a kind of dare. Unlike Mary, Hepburn relished Ford’s Irishness, and she called him by his Irish name, Sean, which of course he loved. She liked his Irish tweed jackets and flannel trousers rolled up at the ankles, though he would wear them “until they were ready to rot….His white tennis shoes were almost black; no one could remember seeing them fresh and new,” in Hepburn’s description. She understood his bohemianism, and she even took in stride the handkerchiefs he shredded, sucking and biting on them throughout a film shoot.
One of Hepburn’s biographers, Barbara Leaming, writes that Ford proposed marriage to the actress as early as 1936, though he declined to sleep with her until Mary granted him a divorce. (Mary was a divorcée when he met her, thus they had not married in the Catholic Church.) Hepburn even wrote a personal letter to Mary offering her $150,000 if she would divorce Ford and let him keep custody of Barbara, the daughter to whom he was particularly close.
Mary refused.
There’s plenty of testimony that his marriage was not a happy one. “His family life was terrible,” Harry Carey Jr. told Bogdanovich, “yet it was marvelous in the movies.” It wasn’t that he didn’t love Mary McBride Ford, his wife of many years; his letters home reveal a genuine tenderness:
Well, Ma, I sure fell in love with you more than ever when you spoke to me on the ’phone—you’ve plenty of guts, Ma, the right kind—your Aloha to a sailor going to sea was swell—I’m proud as hell of you. I’m going away feeling better than ever….I pray to God it will soon be over so we can live our life together with our children + grandchildren + our “Araner”—Catalina would look good now—God bless + love you my darling—I’m tough to live with—heaven’s knows + Hollywood didn’t help—Irish + genius don’t mix well but you do know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved—God bless m’darling
from
daddy
John Ford wrote this letter to his wife, Mary, from “somewhere in Hoboken,” on Office of Strategic Services letterhead when he was about to be deployed to the Pacific theater as head of the Field Photographic Branch. His letters to Mary, from Honolulu, Washington, and Panama, are full of affection: “The only things I miss are you and Barbara—it seems strange not to see you on the beach with sun-tan oil—or Babs running around in shorts in a terrible hurry to grab a sandwich or go to a movie—I guess I must love you all very much.”
Their marriage lasted, but it was increasingly described as a rather passionless and remote relationship. They ended up with separate bedrooms and rather separate lives. Leaming notes that Mary tended to belittle Ford throughout their long marriage, complaining that he should leave Hollywood and “find a manlier occupation” (she certainly knew how to best insult him!). She looked down on Ford’s “shanty Irish” background and interpreted his artistic sensitivity as weakness—one of Ford’s great fears—and she was able to use his tendency toward Catholic guilt as a way to manipulate him. Leaming writes, “Abuse poured constantly from Mary’s lips. She accused her husband of being weak and unmanly….She bemoaned his failure to leave Hollywood and seek a proper job.” She also reports that Ford seemed to be “a little frightened of Mary” and even “rough-and-tumble fellows like John Wayne tiptoed around her.” Though Mary Ford had grown up poor in New Jersey, she put on the airs of a southern aristocrat, lording it over her husband that she could trace her lineage to Sir Thomas More. She reportedly used her sense of social superiority to hold on to her husband, and “the more successful he became in Hollywood, the more necessary it was to remind him of his inferiority,” writes Leaming, though she continued to turn up her nose at the motion picture business.
What seemed to hold the marriage together, besides their two children and Ford’s Catholicism, which, for him, made divorce untenable, was their deep, mutual, unquenchable thirst. In the early years of their marriage, it was Mary who made bootleg gin in the bathtub—“three drops of juniper juice to a pint of water”—and who loved to entertain her high-spirited navy pals. They were both alcoholics, which created an indissoluble bond.
Rumors of homosexuality cropped up around Ford as early as his friendship with Harry Carey, enough so that some of Ford’s biographers have felt compelled to address it in va
rious ways. Ronald L. Davis first speculated in his 1995 biography, John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master:
Fearful of intimacy, mistrustful of love, ashamed of sex, Ford was most comfortable with a celibate life….In a different age Ford might have turned to homosexuality, but had he done so in the first half of this century, guilt would have overwhelmed him. Without question he preferred the company of men, and male bonding reached inordinate proportions. He may have been physically attracted to men on occasion, but there is no indication that he gratified his appetites homosexually.
Scott Eyman’s impressive 1999 biography, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, doesn’t give much attention to the question of Ford’s sexuality, except to note that Ford
was not, for instance, homophobic, although having been born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and brought up Roman Catholic, it might have been expected. He regularly employed a wardrobe man who was well known as a homosexual. Ford knew it and wouldn’t allow any of his stock company, some of whom were, shall we say, less than sensitive in these matters, to taunt the man.
Eyman also described Ford’s close friendship with Brian Desmond Hurst, the Belfast-born set designer and later a celebrated director, who was gay and whom Ford mentored, employing him first as a chauffeur and then as an assistant director.
Joseph McBride’s definitive work, Searching for John Ford (published in 2001), also raises the question, noting that Harry Carey “poked fun at Ford’s ‘infatuation with muscle’ and fondness for displaying those actors’ physiques,” but Harry’s son, Dobe, felt that his father was “not necessarily implying that Ford had homosexual tendencies.” Rather, Harry Carey Sr. might have resented his replacement as a leading man by “younger, brawnier, and more handsome actors such as [Tom] Mix, George O’Brien, and John Wayne” when his contract with Universal was dropped in 1921. But one of Harry and Ollie Carey’s ranch hands, Joe Harris, who had been a member of the Ford stock company and often played heavies in Ford’s silent films, spread stories with insinuations about Ford’s sexuality. McBride writes, “This may have been the first time, but it would not be the last, that such gossip was inspired by Ford’s sensitivity, his diffidence around women, and his admiration for good-looking he-men.”
Ollie Cary dismissed such talk as mere troublemaking, but she herself once described Jack Ford as having a very effeminate walk—like most directors, she was quick to add. McBride also notes that “the gossip about Jack’s masculinity was spread only after he finally, and somewhat precipitously, took the plunge into marriage.”
The most specific account comes from Maureen O’Hara, who, in her 2004 memoir, ’Tis Herself, describes walking in on Ford in the arms of an unnamed actor, most likely Tyrone Power. All three were on location in 1954 filming The Long Gray Line for Columbia Pictures, a movie celebrating the historical Marty Maher, an Irishman who started as a custodian at West Point, became a trainer of cadets, and ended up as commander of the military academy, starring Tyrone Power as Maher and O’Hara as his wife, Mary O’Donnell Maher. Incidentally, Duke Wayne was Ford’s first choice for Maher, but his work on another film prevented his taking the role. O’Hara writes,
I walked into his office without knocking and could hardly believe my eyes. Ford had his arms around another man and was kissing him. I was shocked and speechless. I quickly dropped the sketches on the floor, then knelt down to pick them up. I fumbled around slowly and kept my head down. I took my time so they could part and compose themselves. They were on opposite sides of the room in a flash. The gentleman Ford was with was one of the most famous leading men in the picture business. He addressed a few pleasantries to me, which were forced and awkward, then quickly left….Not a word was said, and I played it out as if I hadn’t seen a thing.
“Later,” she writes, “that actor approached me and asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me John Ford was a homosexual?’ I answered, ‘How could I tell you something I knew nothing about?’ ”
O’Hara later speculates that Ford struggled with homosexual feelings, and it gave her insight into the problems in his marriage: “the separate bedrooms, his insulting her, the periodic drinking, and the lack of outward affection they showed to each other. I now believe there was a conflict within Ford and that it caused him great pain and turmoil.”
It must be noted that O’Hara and Ford had always had a contentious relationship, though she was indeed one of his favorite actresses, co-starring in five of his films, and he seemed infatuated with her while making The Quiet Man in Ireland. O’Hara fulfilled his romantic notions of the feisty, independent-minded Irish. But she spoke up too often on the sets of his movies, challenging his authority, and found herself “in the barrel” on many occasions—that is, at the center of the Old Man’s wrath. And then there was that time he punched her in the jaw at one of his parties, as described earlier.
“It was the fourth picture I’d made with John Ford,” she writes, “and by far the most difficult. I knew the dos and don’ts. I knew about being in the barrel.” But she felt that something had changed in their relationship by the time they filmed The Long Gray Line: “There was anger toward me and it was revealing itself in all its ugliness.” He seemed determined to humiliate her in front of the cast and crew, and he greeted her each morning on the set by loudly asking, “Well, did Herself have a good shit this morning?” Between takes, he’d yell at her, “Come on! Move that big ass of yours!” She wondered if he was punishing her for, among other possibilities, her close friendship with Duke Wayne. In fact, when Wayne visited the set, Ford forbade her to speak a single word to him.
O’Hara speculated, “His fantasies and crushes on women like me, Kate Hepburn, Anna Lee, and Murph Doyle—all of whom he professed love for at one time or another—were just balm for his wound. He hoped each of us could save him from these conflicted feelings, but was later forced to accept that none of us could. I believe this ultimately led to my punishment and his downward spiral into an increased reliance on alcohol.”
She believed that whereas Ford was accepting of homosexuality in others, he couldn’t admit it in himself, for a number of reasons—his image as a military hero and a man’s man, but also his Catholicism, which taught him that to act on those feelings was a grievous sin. She recalls a letter Ford once sent to her when she was in Australia, inexplicably including the following prayer:
Father—I love my man dearly
I love him above my own life
But, Father—my soul hurts me—
I’ve never been in the same bed with him—
And I want him heaven knows—
Father, dear—what shall I do—
Oh what shall I do?
Was Ford—consciously or unconsciously—reaching out to O’Hara, hoping to unburden himself or perhaps receive guidance from a fellow Irish Catholic?
In an interview with the author, Bogdanovich dismissed Maureen O’Hara’s story about finding Ford in the arms of a prominent actor. Bogdanovich believes that O’Hara was envious of Ford’s affection for Kate Hepburn, feeling that Hepburn had supplanted her in the director’s heart. The rumored love affair between Hepburn and Ford, he feels, belies the suggestion of Ford’s homosexuality or bisexuality. He remembers being present earlier, when Jack and Mary Ford were “still in Bel Air before he moved to the desert. When he wasn’t shooting, he was usually in bed—he liked to hang out in bed and watch TV.” Bogdanovich described the butler coming in to say, “Miss Hepburn’s on the phone.”
“I’ve never seen him look so young,” Bogdanovich recalls. “He suddenly said, ‘Kate?’ and he went into the other room to talk to her. I’ve never seen him so joyous.”
Despite her anger at being humiliated by Ford, Maureen O’Hara also loved him in her way: she was moved by him, and she valued his direction over the years, believing he had called forth some of her greatest performances. When interviewed on camera after Ford’s death in Directed by John Ford, she reads a eulogy to her old tormentor and fights
back tears.
Betsy Palmer, then a gamine, twenty-seven-year-old stage and television actress, also appeared in The Long Gray Line as Kitty Carter, a modern woman who marries a West Point cadet. Ford liked her, and he cast her as a navy nurse in Mister Roberts that same year. Palmer, who passed away in 2015, felt that Ford treated her “like a fella…as if I were one of the gang.” She recalled,
He likes women sort of on the boyish side. When I did Mister Roberts, I remember him directing me to get more boyish all the time, and at one point I said, “Mr. Ford, I’m gonna come across as a lesbian.”…[H]e’d bring in that little masculine side that makes it tomboyish. There are some of us women who are that way—we can climb ladders and do it comfortably. Hepburn is one, and Maureen is, in a wonderful Irish way.
But of course there are many different kinds of love. Perhaps Ford’s tragedy is that he lived in a time when to have come out as a gay man would have ruined his career, particularly as a man who explored and celebrated masculine heroism. But more important, he himself rejected that image of who he, arguably, feared to be. He wanted to be seen as a man’s man, and he gruffly sought to camouflage his artistic, sensitive side. It’s plausible that Ford’s personal struggle informed the bullying and cruelty in his public life—“an unquenchable need to dominate might be construed as a subconscious desire to ravish,” writes Davis—and the self-loathing and alcoholism in his private life.
But if true, it deepened his work.
Ford’s fellow Irishman the poet William Butler Yeats wrote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” It may be that Ford’s struggle to suppress his desires contributed to the beauty and artistry of his films. If John Wayne tended to make propaganda when he was at the helm of a picture, John Ford almost always made art.
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