Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  Ford directing Duke on the set of Liberty Valance.

  This likely didn’t rile Duke, who was no longer an inexperienced actor, as he had been on Stagecoach and countless earlier films, nor did Ford need to shame Duke into turning out a good performance; as a well-seasoned and a highly successful actor, he knew exactly what he was doing. But Ford did cruelly needle the one wound that still stung: he insulted and humiliated Duke for not having fought in World War II, unfavorably comparing him with Jimmy Stewart, who had had a distinguished war record.

  Woody Strode recalled Ford asking Jimmy Stewart in front of Duke, “How many times did you risk your life over Germany, Jimmy?” and then asking Duke, “How rich did you get while Jimmy was risking his life?” Clothier was aware that Ford wasn’t happy about accepting Paramount’s strict terms of production, and he “was in a foul mood, creating tension on the set between actors, treating Duke worse than he ever did, just being a real son of a bitch.”

  As usual, Duke just took the abuse, although in Strode’s words Ford “rode Wayne so hard, I thought he was going to go over the edge.” Bogdanovich later commented that some of the abuse could be explained as Ford’s way of keeping control of the production, especially because Duke now had far more clout in the movie business than did Ford. “He beat up on Duke because Duke could take it,” he said, but it’s interesting to note that he did not pick on Lee Marvin, a former marine and as tough a man as the many characters he played on-screen.

  A NEW KIND OF HERO

  Liberty Valance begins with a train pulling in to the station, its billows of steam signaling power and grandeur. On board is Senator Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard played by Stewart, who arrives at the former frontier town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of his old friend Tom Doniphon, a tough rancher and gunman played by Duke. Shinbone is a far cry from the dusty backwater it used to be, bustling now with Model Ts and other newfangledness. The steam engine is a reminder that the laying of the great transcontinental railroad was the beginning of the end of the Wild West, bringing with it the end of the outlaw era. It also calls to mind Ford’s great early silent film The Iron Horse: the triumphal expansion of the railroad celebrated in that earlier film assumes a darker cast in Liberty Valance, ironic and wistful. This is one of the first Westerns to challenge the legend of the West, which, no matter how gloriously adhered to in print and in film, was often far from the cold truth of fact. Life on the frontier was often nasty, brutish, and short, a view not regularly explored until revisionist Westerns started to appear in the late 1960s. This trend toward historical realism continues today, finding its apotheosis in the cable television series Deadwood.

  Ford also pays tribute to Stagecoach, his first great Western of the sound era, when Stoddard, the lawyer turned senator, stops to admire the old stagecoach, now a museum relic, which had first brought him to the frontier town twenty-five years earlier. This brief moment of contemplation is significant; it triggers the flashback that tells the entire story. And Liberty Valance employs three of the same players who were in Stagecoach—Duke, John Carradine as Major Starbuckle, a rival candidate for the state delegation, and Andy Devine as the comic and cowardly town marshal Link Appleyard. With these nods to his first important Western, Ford consciously completes the full circle of his historical and mythological American frontier saga.

  In Stoddard’s flashback, he is freshly arrived out west to hang up his shingle as a young attorney, in an attempt to bring law and order to the unruly frontier town. He will also bring literacy to many of the townspeople, including Hallie, the love interest of both Stoddard and Doniphon, played by Vera Miles. He doesn’t carry a gun, and though Stoddard ultimately prevails, Ford feminizes him: after being stripped of all his worldly goods by Liberty Valance in a daring stagecoach robbery, Stoddard dons an apron for much of the picture as a lowly dishwasher in a local café.

  The sight of an aproned Jimmy Stewart, sweeping up and washing dishes to pay his board, amplifies the contrast between the lawyer and the older rancher and gunfighter played by Duke Wayne. Stoddard is of course the object of ridicule by Liberty and his nasty sidekicks, the menacing character actor Lee Van Cleef and the comically loquacious, southern-fried Strother Martin. But it doesn’t take long to discover that this feminized easterner who arrives not knowing how to shoot a gun is nonetheless feisty and full of courage. He stands up to Liberty Valance even while he’s being robbed and beaten by him. Ford reportedly whispered in the actor’s ear, “Jimmy, you are not a coward,” to give him the motivation for that scene. Stoddard’s weapons are moral indignation and an abiding belief in the law, but he’ll find that they don’t count for much in the frontier town of Shinbone when faced with armed psychopaths like Liberty Valance and his two depraved cohorts. However, courage does count, even without handiness with a gun.

  The contrast between Stoddard and Doniphon extends beyond their backgrounds and mentalities, eventually presenting every other character with a choice. In a touching subplot, Doniphon is building an extra room to his frontier ranch house so he can marry Hallie, his intended—another one of Ford’s tough-minded, outspoken women—and bring her home. But Stoddard has opened up new worlds to Hallie by teaching her to read and by showing her that there are other ways of securing justice besides brutal force. While keeping a soft spot in her heart for Doniphon, she will marry this new kind of hero.

  Just as Hallie has to choose between her two suitors, so must Shinbone decide between remaining an unfenced territory to satisfy the cattle barons, or voting for statehood to satisfy the townspeople. The requirements of civilization press hard, and the people ultimately vote for statehood, meaning they must select their delegate to Washington.

  Duke Wayne as the gunslinger and James Stewart as the frontier lawyer, signaling the end of the Wild West, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.

  But Stoddard, the new man, cannot simply stick around and wait to be chosen as the path forward for Shinbone. He must prove himself. As the sneering bully—played with churlish glee—continues to torment the aproned lawyer, it becomes clear that they will have to fight it out. Here Doniphon steps in and teaches Stoddard how to handle a gun, even though by now he’s realized that he’s losing Hallie to the young lawyer. It’s another mentoring role for John Wayne, teaching the inexperienced lawyer to aim true, but a more complex one due to their mutual interest in Hallie. When Doniphon plays a trick on Stoddard by having him shoot a can of paint that completely splatters him, Stoddard punches Doniphon in the jaw. Again, the smaller, apparently weaker man of law has stood up to the tougher gunman, winning Doniphon’s respect. While courage is necessary, it’s not sufficient to win the fight against Liberty Valance, and if Stoddard goes up against him, he will probably be killed.

  The evening of their shoot-out looks as if it will play out that way: Valance taunts Stoddard and easily shoots the gun out of his hand while townsfolk look on in dread. But Stoddard manages to retrieve his gun and apparently shoots Valance, killing him. The rest is history. As “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” Stoddard will stand for senator and win the election.

  Meanwhile, Doniphon, who witnessed the gunfight, watches as Hallie dresses Stoddard’s wounds. He knows now that Hallie will never marry him. In a drunken rage, he sets fire to his homestead and is rescued from the flames by his black ranch hand and friend, Pompey, played by the reliable and stalwart Woody Strode. Doniphon’s dreams are over. Returning to the present day, twenty-five years later, Pompey is the only other mourner at Doniphon’s funeral, aside from Senator Stoddard and his wife, Hallie. Pompey reveals that Doniphon’s last years were grim ones.

  As in The Searchers, Duke Wayne’s star power allows the audience to remain sympathetic to a character who loses the girl, loses his home, and loses his way, a sympathy that deepens with the suggestion that Hallie still cares for him—perhaps even loves him. But more important is the final revelation that it was Doniphon, not Stoddard, who killed Liberty Valance. In a mini flashback the scene is replay
ed, Doniphon standing in the shadows with his rifle, felling Valance before he can murder young Stoddard, who is outgunned and out of his league. Thus Doniphon—Duke Wayne—is restored to the stature of heroic savior but with the added pathos that his deed went unnoticed, unheralded, unsung.

  “HEROES DON’T BRAG”

  The mystery is why Doniphon—who might have a chance to win Hallie back—never sets the record straight. He allows her to go off with Stoddard, thinking him a hero for defeating Liberty Valance. Why has Doniphon admitted defeat so easily? Why does he let his rival prevail in all things? Perhaps his sneak attack on Liberty Valance would have led to a murder trial if made public. Or perhaps he recognizes that the old ways are indeed changing and that his way—keeping order at the business end of a gun—is going the way of the stagecoach. Ford doesn’t elaborate, but one thing we can be sure of is that Duke is the real hero of the picture—the hero who remains unsung—and Stoddard has to live with the knowledge that his reputation is based on a lie.

  Doniphon’s self-effacing decision is rooted in the heroic archetype Ford and Wayne built together. Simply put, heroes don’t brag. It would have been unsporting for Doniphon to seize Stoddard’s glory, no matter the truth of the situation. His mentorship of the younger man also comes into play: at great personal cost, he’s willing to let Stoddard take the glory that should have gone to him.

  This truth isn’t made public until the end of the film, when Stoddard gives an interview to a young newspaperman, describing what really happened. About to rush out to print the true story, his editor tells him not to. “When the legend becomes fact,” he famously says, “print the legend.”

  For all of its lasting recognition, that line’s meaning is not beyond dispute. Peter Bogdanovich has gone on record to say that the phrase is widely misunderstood because it’s meant ironically. “It’s one of the most ironic lines in the history of movies,” he says. “If he had meant that, he wouldn’t have made the movie! He made it very clear what the truth was” and that history is full of such moments.

  Bogdanovich once asked the old master if his sympathy was with John Wayne and the Old West in Liberty Valance or with Stoddard, the new kind of hero. Ford’s answer was typically evasive: “Well, Wayne was the central character, the motivator of the whole thing,” though Stewart has more screen time. But if the hero doesn’t win and the winner isn’t heroic, then we have the first truly ambiguous Western—revisionist really—in which the very idea of heroism is called into question. In a sense, each of the two lead characters is half a man, and their two approaches are incomplete without the other: guns alone won’t win the peace, and the law needs to be backed up by force. “It’s his last word on the West. Men of law cannot succeed without the backup of force,” Bogdanovich explained. “John Ford saw that in the war.” It’s John Ford’s farewell to the myth of complete self-sufficiency backed by gun prowess—the endlessly played-out drama of who’s faster on the draw in legions of mid-century Westerns. With Liberty Valance, Ford ushers in a period of profound change for the genre he helped create.

  “It’s a haunted film, haunted by the past,” says film critic Richard Schickel. “John Wayne’s character is lost in history. It’s anti-mythic—that’s the sadness of the movie.” At the end, Doniphon is a lost soul without his beloved Hallie, without the homestead he built by hand and then destroyed, without the glory of having killed a notorious outlaw. But Stoddard at the end of the film realizes that he’s a fraud, propelled to success on the back of a lie.

  Even though “the hero doesn’t win, the winner isn’t heroic,” in Ford’s words, Liberty Valance is the director’s last great Western, considered “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Its revisionist view of the frontier hero, and its recognition of the end of that era, add to the complexity and ambiguity of Ford’s oeuvre and to the Western genre itself.

  7

  Journey to Manhood: Teaching the Next Generation

  He could never forgive himself for not being superhuman.

  —PILAR WAYNE

  If you give me the chance, I’ll do my best work.

  —JOHN WAYNE

  In a 2015 New York Times op-ed column on wolves, animal behaviorist Carl Safina described new research that showed alpha males to be a wolf pack’s chief nurturers of pups, often singling out the weakest ones for special attention. He described the actions of a specific alpha male, “21”—known as a “super wolf” for his fierceness—being tracked in Yellowstone National Park. What wolf 21 seemed to enjoy most within his own family was to “wrestle with the little pups,” noted Safina. “And what he really loved to do was to pretend to lose.” Wolf 21 was also observed looking out for the sickliest pup in the pack and spending time with him. “Strength impresses us,” he writes, “[but] kindness is what we remember best.”

  Safina quotes veteran wolf researcher Rick McIntyre, who observed that the main characteristic of an alpha male wolf “is a quiet confidence….You lead by example.” And Doug Smith, project leader for the Yellowstone Gray Wolf Restoration Project, noted that females “do most of the decision making….It’s the alpha female who really runs the show.” But he went on to remark that “men can learn a thing or two from real wolves: less snarl, more quiet confidence, leading by example, faithful devotion in the care and defense of families, respect for females and a sharing of responsibilities.”

  That combination of fierceness, strength, nurturing, and looking out for the weak is well expressed in two of Duke Wayne’s post-Ford pictures: True Grit in 1969 and The Cowboys in 1972. Both roles were welcome departures from the usual John Wayne image: one was comedic and self-parodying, and the other portrayed Duke as an older man forced to recognize the limits of his strength as he passes on his knowledge to a passel of boys. But this wasn’t just a frank acknowledgment that his career was close to running its course. Events in Duke’s off-screen life had raised the possibility that he would never act again.

  THE BIG C

  Making The Alamo had left him exhausted, with a phlegmatic cough that sounded eerily like his father’s tubercular rasps, but he continued his five-pack-a-day cigarette habit. “His constant coughing,” recalled Pilar Wayne, “reawakened childhood memories of hearing his tubercular father cough in the stillness of a desert night. To be ill was torture for such a physical man. To have the illness remind him of such an unhappy period of his life seemed doubly cruel.”

  He was filming In Harm’s Way with Patricia Neal on location in Hawaii in 1964 when his coughing got so bad it interrupted filming. Duke kept insisting that everything was fine, but he went willingly to Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, with Pilar at his side; to ease his mind, she had agreed to take all the same tests he was undergoing. An X-ray revealed a spot on Duke’s left lung.

  “I knew Duke was very sick,” she wrote in her memoir. He tried to make light of the results, telling her that the doctor “thinks it’s just valley fever.” Pilar recalled, “Duke was a terrible liar. Choking back tears, I said, ‘What are they going to do?’ His voice was a hoarse monotone as he answered, ‘I’m scheduled for exploratory surgery in a few days, at Good Samaritan Hospital.’ ”

  She acknowledged that “neither of us was able to say the word ‘cancer’ because, back in 1964, a diagnosis of lung cancer was a virtual death sentence.” Not only that, Duke’s agent, Charlie Feldman, warned Duke that “you’ll never work again once the studios hear you’ve got cancer.” That was the real death sentence: Duke loved his family, but he lived to work. Pilar saw that “Duke wasn’t sure he’d want to go on living if he couldn’t go on working….He could live without the lung if he had to, but he couldn’t live without his work.” Professionally, he already felt trapped in the role of an undefeatable hero; if he survived the cancer, how could he live up to that daunting straitjacket of an image? As an act of rebellion, Duke began smoking even more heavily.

  Two weeks later, on September 17, Duke
underwent a six-hour operation at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, where a cancerous tumor the size of a golf ball was excised from his left lung. The surgeon had to remove two of Duke’s ribs as well as the upper lobe of his lung, leaving him dependent on the remaining right lung. To make matters worse, his stitches ripped open after a bout of intense coughing, his face and body swelled with edema, and he had to undergo a second surgery five days later, landing him in intensive care.

  Though his cancer had been removed, Duke was deeply depressed over his diagnosis and the possibility that he would no longer be able to support Pilar and their two young children, Aissa, then eight, and Ethan, two. And there was the added strain of trying to keep the cancer diagnosis from the reporters who hung around the hospital, trying to suss out the truth about Duke’s condition. He also wanted to keep the news from John Ford, who, at seventy, was in poor health himself and was disappointed over the failure of Donovan’s Reef, the final picture he had made with Duke, which was practically booed out of theaters the year before. He had intended this film to be one last rollicking comedy, a final tribute to male camaraderie and to his old commanding officer during World War II, “Wild” Bill Donovan, but in retrospect everything about it seemed an exercise in obsolescence. When Ford got word about Duke’s condition, he shook off his malaise and immediately flew in from Hawaii to visit Duke in the hospital.

  “He is like a son to me,” Duke’s old mentor—and tormentor—confided to Pilar, but Pilar felt his underlying sadness, his resignation to the fact that the glory days of the Ford stock acting company—and the great pictures that Duke had made with Pappy—were behind them. What neither Pilar nor Ford could know was that Duke still had a few great pictures in him, including one that would finally bring him an Academy Award.