by Scott Eyman
Wayne brought his son Michael to the location, and the boy always remembered the otherworldly beauty of nights in Monument Valley. Occasionally the company assembled for a sing-along. Goulding’s Lodge, where the company was headquartered, was and is situated directly in front of a huge rock wall, and overlooks the valley. “Right down below us, like a quarter of a mile,” said Ben Johnson, “a fire would start up, and the Indians would start singing and dancing. The sound bounced off this rock wall and out into the valley. It was the eeriest sound.”
Then there were the primitive living conditions. Ford and Wayne had private cabins, but the rest of the cast had to double up and share toilets and showers. None of the units had bathrooms. As for the shower, Harry Carey Jr. said, “The shower was an old five-gallon oil tin with holes in the bottom. It hung from a wooden beam.” Since there was no hot water, morning showers tended to be abrupt, pro forma affairs.
Wayne’s feeling about locations with Ford were different than his crabby reminiscences of the harried productions of B westerns.
I don’t think we ever went out to make a classic. You went out to make the best picture you could with what you had to work with. John Ford developed characters as he went along. You never started a picture by saying “I’m going to be such-and-such a character with John Ford.” Your character changed with the mood of the players and the effect of the elements.
There were a great many days when it was fun, especially on the action shots, with the open air, the setting, the background. But the scenes were work, they were always work, because you couldn’t just walk in and read the farewell speech of Cardinal Wolsey. Ford might decide not to kill you.
The feeling of the men who worked on westerns was altogether different from the feeling on straight pictures. We lived in a tent city and at night we played cards. . . . Sometimes the Sons of the Pioneers were there, and they sang too. It was kind of captured companionship and we made the most of it. And most of it was delightful because it was different from the way we lived at home.
We’d put on entertainments for the kids. Actors who loved histrionics would do recitations. Victor McLaglen and I worked up an act in which we managed boxers, who were stunt men. We’d meet in the center of the ring and start punching, showing the things that they weren’t supposed to do. The thing became a free-for-all. I broke it up throwing a bucket of water on the fighters and another bucket, full of confetti, at the kids.
Locations with Ford in Monument Valley became the ideal motion picture experience for Wayne: a band of brothers and the occasional sister, a family—mostly happy, occasionally beset by tension provoked by the patriarch, but always, always productive.
Winton Hoch gave Ford color images that no other Hollywood cameraman could get near, but that didn’t mean he was exempt from Fordian traps. “He was always testing,” Hoch told the historian John Gallagher.
We came out one morning in Monument Valley and we were at Goulding’s Trading Post, right against a black cliff in a shadow and the sun was low out there and the view was beautiful. Monument Valley was just gorgeous.
It was cold and you could see your breath in front of your face. We just finished breakfast and we went out there all ready to go to work, and [Ford] turned around and said, “What direction you wanna shoot this morning?”
The answer’s very simple. If you start telling a director which direction to shoot, you’d better start telling him how to stage his action. I said, “Any direction you wanna shoot, Jack, is OK with me.” All I had to do was open my mouth and make a suggestion. I woulda been chewed up and spit out in little pieces.
Ford grounds the picture in the physical—the breath of horses in the chilly morning, the stiffness in the legs of a sixty-five-year-old man—which makes it easier to endure the stage Irishness, which dates the comic relief. Irving Pichel narrates, as he did for Ford’s How Green Was My Valley.
The film documents the last few weeks in the professional career of Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne), as well as the last three weeks in the career of Victor McLaglen’s Sergeant Quincannon. It is 1876, and Brittles is retiring from the cavalry, and none too soon—he walks like a man whose hips are starting to go. His objectives for his last three weeks of service are to finish with honor and not get anybody killed. But he’s also clearly worried about what comes next—there’s nothing else he wants to do, and he foresees a drift westward to nothing much.
Brittles visits the grave of his wife and two children, all of whom died in 1867 of causes that Ford leaves unexplained. Brittles fills her in on the latest news. “We had sad news today, Mary. George Custer was killed with his entire command. Miles Keough—you remember Miles? . . .”
The character has reached that regrettable age when beautiful young women look at him as fatherly, and he embodies an ornery patience that comes from a lifetime of sorrows. His attitude directly contradicts his motto: “Never apologize, it’s a sign of weakness.”
It’s one of Ford’s loosely structured, balladlike films in which he sets up the plot and conflicts in the first reel, promptly drops them for three or four reels of pure character, then rounds back to the plot for the ending. Brittles navigates between the rocks of the Indian wars and the hard place of army politics and lovelorn troopers with the same ease that Wayne brings to the performance. It’s a film suffused with longing and remembrance, and a few flaming orange sunsets. It also has a lovely sense of lived life—the dogs that are forever hanging around the regiment.
As a visual achievement, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is unsurpassed, at least by anyone not named John Ford. But hidden in the loose structure is an unforgettable character study. By retiring, Brittles is letting go of the last thing he has left to love, and Ford can’t bear it. It’s as if he’s projecting himself into the character, imagining himself as a movie director grown old and unemployable, so he brings Brittles back as chief of civilian scouts. Brittles has lived with the army and will happily die with the army.1
Brittles represents the best part of the man playing him—a playful personality deeply attached to the earth, delighted at simple sights such as a herd of buffalo—a man more interested in preserving life than taking it. The film takes advantage of one of Wayne’s greatest gifts as an actor: his ability to suggest an essential nobility of character between the lines and beneath rough manners. In this case, it derives from moments such as Brittles’s deep emotion at being presented with a silver watch by his men—or the way the depleted old man slumps by his horse, but draws himself up to his full height to return a salute.
Wayne knew it was a virtuoso performance. As he put it, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon turned out to be, I think, the best acting job I’ve done. As a matter of fact, it’s about the only picture I’ve been in where I could play a character that was a little apart from the image that has developed for me over the years on the screen. I played a 65 year old man when I was 35 [actually, 42].”
Brittles embodies abstract qualities like honor and loyalty and Wayne makes them concrete with a total mastery of effect. It’s a film that could only have been made by two men who existed in a perfect state of silent communication, where words were basically unnecessary, as with the autographed picture of Ford that hung in Wayne’s house for decades: “To Duke from the Coach,” it said. “John Ford, Hollywood ’47.”
Red River was an immediate hit when it was released in September 1948. It returned domestic rentals to United Artists of $4.5 million, making it the third most popular film of the year, after the Hope-Crosby Road to Rio and the MGM musical Easter Parade. Another $2 million came in from the rest of the world.
Wayne’s guaranteed share of the profits was $75,000, but Hawks kept him, along with a long list of other creditors, waiting until 1952. Charles Feldman kept Wayne on the reservation by making interim loans to the actor. Over the years, Wayne ended up receiving about $375,000 in salary and profit sharing.
As for Coleen Gray, in the years to come she would occasionally see Wayne at events around town, an
d she always gently kicked him in the shins and said, “Duke, you should have taken me with you!”
“He’d throw back his head and laugh,” she remembered.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was released eight months later, in the summer of 1949 and proved a critical and commercial success. Wayne’s expert portrayals of three widely varied characters—an obstinate warrior, a good bad man, and the gentle Nathan Brittles—cemented his reputation as a skilled actor, at least for anybody who wasn’t predisposed toward disliking him.
Stagecoach began Wayne’s career as a star, but the twin smash hits of Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon capped his ascension to the top of the movie firmament. As the decade ended, Wayne was on a comparable level with Clark Gable and Gary Cooper—but he was making better movies.
* * *
1. Wayne’s opposite number is played by Chief John Big Tree, a Seneca Indian who had worked for Ford in The Iron Horse and Stagecoach, as well as a couple of films for DeMille. Big Tree was reputedly one of the Indian models for James Fraser when he designed the buffalo nickel.
CHAPTER TEN
In early 1949, John Ford set up a theatrical production of What Price Glory? as a fundraiser for the Order of the Purple Heart. Ford put together a spectacular cast—Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Gregory Peck, Ward Bond (as Captain Flagg), Pat O’Brien (as Sergeant Quirt), Forrest Tucker, Ed Begley, Wallace Ford, Robert Armstrong, Harry Carey Jr., Larry Blake, James Lydon. Everybody worked for free, the sets were designed and built for free, and Western Costume donated the show’s clothes.
For the part of the innkeeper, Ford originally cast Luis Alberni, but he turned out to have a case of stage fright amplified by alcoholism, so he was replaced by Oliver Hardy, who responded with a performance that James Cagney said was “the funniest thing I think I have ever seen. Roland Winters and I had to hang onto each other, we were laughing so much.”
Ford supervised, Ralph Murphy directed, and the rehearsals were held at the Masquers Club in Hollywood, which was also the site of the dress rehearsal on February 21, 1949. Variety was there, and paid tribute to the excellence of the two leading men, and the “provocative, sultry” performance of Maureen O’Hara as Charmaine. Wayne was lumped in with Gregory Peck and Harry Carey Jr. for the “well-handled” smaller parts.
The next night What Price Glory? began its six-city, six-night tour in Long Beach. “The audience would just applaud when Ward [Bond] and [Pat] O’Brien came on stage,” remembered Harry Carey Jr. “When Wayne made an entrance, they’d just gasp. . . . With Greg Peck, it was like Frank Sinatra. He was such a heartthrob, the girls would just start squealing when he came on stage.”
Wayne was playing Lieutenant Cunningham—a small part, but it was the first time he’d been onstage since high school so his nerves were unsettled. “Duke and I dressed with Oliver Hardy, and it was a ball,” remembered James Lydon. “Wayne was a little nervous at first, because he was unaccustomed to the theater, but I was raised in it, and Babe Hardy had toured all over the world. Babe and I were in the first act, and Duke worked at the end of the second act, and then the three of us would sit around until curtain calls.
“Duke and I would sit there as total acolytes, listening to Babe’s stories. He was a great raconteur, and Duke was very much in awe of the great Oliver Hardy. It showed a side of Duke that very few people knew: he was a student of show business. He was always echoing his master, John Ford, and saying things like, ‘I’m not an actor, I’m a reactor,’ and other things he wasn’t really sure of. Anything Ford said was gospel. But Duke loved Babe Hardy.”
By the second performance, Wayne’s nervousness had subsided. Lydon remembered that some of the actors suggested that Wayne go out drinking with them, but he said, “No. If the Old Man smells booze, he’ll kill me.”
The troupe traveled to San Francisco by train, with Hardy sitting in the club car with four or five cast members gathered around him. Reliably, Wayne was always one of them, drinking in the stories—of Laurel and Hardy meeting Harry Lauder in Scotland and a very ahistorical account of how Laurel and Hardy formed their partnership.
The show’s final performance was at Grauman’s Chinese on March 2, 1949, after which the business manager absconded with $82,000 in profits. Ford made the money up out of his own pocket.
Although the blacklist had landed with a menacing crash, and the Motion Picture Alliance was at the height of their influence, Lydon never heard Wayne say anything about politics at all. “Duke was just a private citizen and he kept his beliefs private. Now, Ward Bond was a thickheaded loudmouth. He was a good friend of Duke’s, and he was the one screaming all sorts of things that nobody else cared about. But in my presence, Duke never said a word about any of that.”
Ford used Lydon in a movie he shot shortly after the run of What Price Glory? called When Willie Comes Marching Home. Even though Lydon was a cousin—Ford’s mother was Lydon’s grandmother’s sister—he ran into the same buzzsaw as Wayne, as every other actor.
He had done a long shot of Dan Dailey’s family waiting for the train to come in. Then we started work on a tracking shot that ran past the family while they waited. We’re rehearsing and the camera is pulling past and Ford says, “Stop.”
He gets off the dolly and says, “Jim, was your hair like that? And the tie?”
“Yes, Mr. Ford.”
“You look too damn comfortable.” And then he ran his hand through my hair and yanked the tie down and said, “That’s better.”
He turned around to go back to the dolly and that’s when I made a horrible mistake. I said, “It won’t match, Mr. Ford.” And there was dead silence. He stopped and turned around and glared at me for a full 30 seconds. Finally, he said, “Are you a cutter now?”
And he didn’t speak to me for two weeks. Not “Good Morning,” not anything.
Like everybody else, I was in awe of him.
Watching Oliver Hardy onstage made Wayne realize that there was no reason the great comedian couldn’t be working, so he offered Hardy a part in a film he was about to start at Republic called The Fighting Kentuckian—the second John Wayne Production. Hardy hesitated out of loyalty to his longtime screen partner Stan Laurel, who was inactive due to diabetes. Laurel told him to go ahead and make the picture, and Hardy proved to be a charming sidekick, with his Georgia accent proving particularly appropriate for a story taking place in the South of 1819.
Another creative infatuation of this period was between Wayne and Rex Ingram, the great director of such silent classics as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Scaramouche. Ingram was one of the great pictorialists of the movies’ early years, but he hadn’t made a picture since 1931 and had little interest in talkies.
Ingram didn’t need money, but he hovered around Wayne for a couple of years before his death in 1950. William Clothier, Wayne’s favorite cameraman, happened to be Ingram’s next-door neighbor and remembered that Wayne and Ingram spent a fair amount of time trying to find something to do together. This was part and parcel of Wayne’s great respect for directors who had earned their spurs in silent pictures, when Wayne fell under their spell—he had been a movie fan long before he had been an athlete or an actor.
For The Fighting Kentuckian, Wayne wanted a French leading lady: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Simon, perhaps Corinne Calvet. But Yates insisted that Wayne use Vera Hruba Ralston. “I don’t want to malign her,” Wayne said with a palpable weariness. “She didn’t have the experience. She talked with this heavy Czech accent [and] I was looking for a light Parisian type of speech. . . . It hurt the picture, because we now had to hire other Czech and Austrian actors to play French characters so her accent would be matched. . . . Yates was one of the smartest businessmen I ever met. But when it came to the woman he loved, his business brains just went flying out the window.” The film cost $1.3 million, earned domestic rentals of $1.75 million, and again Republic claimed a loss, this time $365,808.
Perhaps the most important by-product of The Fighting Kentuckian
was that it brought Chuck Roberson into Wayne’s circle, then into Ford’s circle. Roberson was a tall, handsome stuntman who would become Wayne’s primary double. (Yakima Canutt had gotten too old and too wide.) Roberson was also a competent actor and did a lot of double-dipping over the years, playing small parts as well as doubling Wayne so expertly that it’s hard to tell them apart at thirty feet—Roberson could faultlessly imitate Wayne’s straight-backed style of riding, as well as his pigeon-toed run. Ford named Roberson “Bad Chuck,” because of his way with women and to differentiate him from Chuck Hayward, another stuntman, who was known as “Good Chuck.”
Sands of Iwo Jima originated with Republic producer Edmund Grainger, who saw the line in a newspaper, and correctly figured that re-creating the backstory of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima would make an exciting war picture.
Grainger banged out a forty-page treatment about a tough drill instructor and the men he leads into combat, then hired Harry Brown, who had recently written the novel on which Lewis Milestone based his excellent A Walk in the Sun. Grainger was happy with Brown’s script, but those rare occasions when a good script showed up at Republic were always fraught—Herbert Yates might want it for Vera Hruba Ralston. “They handed me the script of Iwo Jima,” remembered Allan Dwan, “and I asked if there was a part in it for Yates’ girlfriend . . . because if there was, I wasn’t going to do the picture.”
At this point, the picture was supposed to cost around $250,000, with Forrest Tucker slated for the lead. “He [Yates] never mentioned Duke, because he wanted him for something else with Vera,” said Dwan, who thought Tucker was a terrible idea. “Tucker lacked that zing that Wayne had . . . it was like a bulldog underneath all that tranquility.” Dwan thought Wayne was the only man to star, as did Edmund Grainger, who was Michael Wayne’s godfather.
