By the end of his first eight-picture deal with Monogram, Wayne had established his basic screen persona—the lean, tough loner, impatient with small talk, keen for justice, protector of women and children—as well as the physical mannerisms to go with it. He walked and talked slowly and deliberately, pausing in mid-sentence. He believed the pause helped rivet the audience’s attention, making them wonder what he was thinking. It also added to a sense of vulnerability and tentativeness. But behind his smile was a hint of menace and unpredictability. This was a man who was dangerous to cross.
Wayne was developing into more than just a competent actor. He was becoming a movie star at a time when stars were emerging as magnets and plot points for filmgoers and as the organizing principle of films. Unlike onstage, where the audience maintained a physical distance from the performers that even the most powerful opera glasses could not overcome, the camera’s lens could move in for a close-up, creating the illusion of intimacy and identification between actor and viewer. Viewers became fans, and actors became stars. Filmgoers imitated, worshipped, and identified with stars—were in effect seduced by them.
Essential to the process was a feeling of authenticity. Movie stars, as opposed to theatrical performers, were supposed to be real. As Jeanine Basinger writes in her history of Hollywood star making, no one expects Laurence Olivier onstage as Hamlet to be accurately depicting the dilemmas and life choices of an indecisive young Danish nobleman. But they do expect the actor in a film—whether it’s Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones or John Wayne as Ethan Edwards—to somehow be the real thing. The actor and the role need to meet and overlap. Young John Wayne’s crowning achievement was to recognize intuitively this evolving truth and learn how to use it. His characters were largely representations of the man he thought himself to be, and he became the man whom other men wanted to emulate and identify with.
“I’ve found the character the average man wants himself, his brother or his kid to be,” Wayne explained. “It’s the same type of guy the average wife wants for her husband. Always walk with your head held high. Look everybody straight in the eye. Never double-cross a pal. This is the heart I have and the sentiment I feel. There’s too much knavery and underhanded stuff in the world without my adding to it. I refuse to play the heel.”
Because they were classic natural men, Wayne’s characters were often steeped in Indian lore and customs, but they usually treated Native Americans with deep suspicion and heightened vigilance. In the conquest of the American West, Indians were another obstacle to overcome. In real life as well, Wayne’s view of Native Americans reflected the manifest destiny vision of men like William T. Sherman and Teddy Roosevelt. “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them,” Wayne once told Playboy magazine. “… There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
Wayne went on to claim that, contrary to the opinion of certain liberals, his Westerns were actually too sympathetic to Indians. “We treated them as if they had the same moral code that the American people wish every American had,” he told another interviewer, “and we gave them a nobility that was worthy of a king, when actually we know that they were, you know, savage, treacherous, competent warriors with little or no pity or mercy …”
John Wayne, the man who played the Man Who Knew Indians, did not believe in one of the Western’s other most cherished myths, the Noble Savage.
But Indians were only bit players in the persona that the young man from Glendale was constructing for himself as an icon of American masculine power and integrity. John Wayne played the part so well that he was more than a star. He became in effect his own myth—something that was true, as Garry Wills later wrote, because people needed it to be true.
JOHN FORD TENDED TO TREAT people he was fond of with dry, mirthful derision, and he was slow at first to pick up on the transformation of his favorite young drinking buddy. “Christ, if you learned to act you’d get better parts,” Ford would tell Wayne in front of other people.
When Ford came up with the idea of making Stagecoach (1939), he toyed with Wayne for a while, asking him to name some actors he felt could play the role of the Ringo Kid. After Wayne made a few halfhearted suggestions, Ford barked, “You idiot, couldn’t you play it?” Which is what Ford had in mind all along.
Ford was so certain that Wayne was right for the role, he and Merian Cooper walked away from a potential deal with David O. Selznick, and Ford ended up making the film with the independent producer Walter Wanger. The Ringo Kid rescued Wayne from the B-Western movie factory, and he was eternally grateful to Ford for the chance. Still, the old man baited him mercilessly during the filming. “Can’t you wash your fucking face?” Ford demanded while filming one scene, making Wayne do it over and over again until his face was almost raw. Ford called him “a big oaf” and “dumb bastard.”
Ford also had no use for Wayne’s rolling way of walking. “Can’t you walk, for Chrissake, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?”
“Ford took Duke by the chin and shook him,” costar Claire Trevor recalled. “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.”
Wayne kept quiet at the time, although he later told an interviewer, “I was so fucking mad I wanted to kill him.” All the abuse, Wayne later would insist, was a calculated move by Ford designed to elicit sympathy and respect for Wayne from the other, more experienced actors in the cast, such as Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, and John Carradine. But it was a pattern that Ford repeated in every film the two men made together—and that Wayne generally suffered without complaint.
Still, the payoff for Wayne was enormous. The Ringo Kid doesn’t make his first appearance until around the ten-minute mark, but Ford made sure it was a memorable one. Wayne is atop a small hill, holding his saddle in one hand and waving his rifle with the other as the stagecoach pulls up. In one of Ford’s most striking cinematic flourishes, the camera moves toward Wayne, slips briefly out of focus, and comes back in as if suddenly seeing for the first time the magnetic young man standing before it. It is one of the classic introductions in American cinema, a visual announcement of a star being born.
Wayne put up with all of Ford’s abuse in part because of a sense of loyalty and deference to an older man who had taken an interest in him, and in part no doubt because Ford was the stern, demanding father that the easygoing but constantly thwarted Clyde Morrison had never been. But it was also because Wayne knew how good Ford was at making movies and constructing myths—and how good he was at making Wayne look good as well. Stagecoach helped revive the Western as a respectable—and box-office-worthy—film genre and won Ford his second Oscar for best director. But it also established John Wayne as their mutual project, Ford’s and Wayne’s.
John Ford, John Wayne, and a mutual friend during one of the annual Christmas parties at the Field Photo Farm in Reseda, Los Angeles, in the late 1940s.
Like Breck Coleman in The Big Trail, the Ringo Kid is another version of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, the untamed natural men of American legend. But this time Wayne has traded the moccasins and fringe leather blouse that he wore in The Big Trail for cowboy boots and Harry Carey’s unadorned dark shirt. He wears a crooked smile and a temperament that is calm, lighthearted, and benign, yet capable of quick, decisive action. As with all of Ford’s sympathetic characters in Stagecoach, Wayne’s eyes twinkle brightly throughout the film. Just like Humphrey Bogart, whose star began to rise at roughly the same time, Wayne had toiled for years in relative obscurity until the right role came along.
Stagecoach embraced all the Western clichés and reinvented them, both with its characters—the benevolent outlaw, the hooker with a heart of gold, the drunken sawbones doctor, the greedy, dishonest banker—and with its iconic moments: the Indian attack, the cavalry to the rescue, and the showdown with three bad guys. And pe
rhaps the ultimate cliché: the malevolent, threatening savages.
The Apaches of Stagecoach are murderers and rapists, and the movie subscribes to the notion that for a white woman to be captured by Indians is a Fate Worse than Death. In a grim early scene, the stagecoach and its passengers come across the site of a massacre, and one of the passengers, a former Confederate army officer named Hatfield, removes his cloak to cover the half-naked body of a murdered woman. It’s clear from the awkward way the body is draped over a wooden board that she has been raped. It is a stunning stab of visual realism—and a warning of the fate that awaits any white woman unlucky enough to fall into Indian hands. In a later scene, when the stagecoach is engulfed by attacking Apaches, Hatfield aims his gun at the head of a female passenger to spare her from being captured—a moment replayed from D. W. Griffith’s Battle at Elderbush Gulch—but is himself killed before he can shoot her.
Later the Indians will chase the stagecoach for several thundering minutes until the passengers are rescued by the cavalry. “One thing I can’t understand about it, Jack,” the film critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent once asked Ford. “In the chase, why didn’t the Indians just shoot the horses pulling the stagecoach?”
“In actual fact that’s probably what did happen, Frank,” Ford replied, “but if they had, it would have been the end of the picture, wouldn’t it?” Ford was never inclined to let reality interfere with a thrilling narrative.
Nugent, who later became Ford’s trusted screenwriter, got the idea. “Mr. Ford is not one of your subtle directors,” he wrote in the New York Times when Stagecoach premiered. “When his Redskins bite the dust, he expects to hear the thud and see the dirt spurt up. Above all, he likes to have things happen out in the open, where his camera can keep them in view.”
EVEN AFTER STAGECOACH, John Wayne’s ascendancy to stardom was bumpy. There were occasional hits such as Dark Command and Reap the Wild Wind, but also more B Westerns for Republic over the next year. Ford, meanwhile, made three of his very best films, including The Long Voyage Home, which costarred Wayne.
Then came the war. Ford, who was forty-seven on Pearl Harbor Day, first served in an informal capacity as a spy for U.S. naval intelligence monitoring Japanese infiltration along the Pacific coast south of the Mexican border, then became commander of the Field Photographic Branch. While officially a member of the navy, Ford was assigned to work for Wild Bill Donovan’s office, which later became the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA. Ford personally filmed the B-24 bombers taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Tokyo. A few weeks later he got to Midway Island in time to witness and film the war’s most pivotal naval battle. When Japanese planes attacked the airfield he was visiting, he grabbed a camera, climbed atop an exposed water tower, and started shooting. At one point a fragmentation bomb exploded nearby, driving steel shards into Ford’s arm. The camera jumps. Ford keeps filming.
Robert Parrish, a Hollywood film editor who served in the unit, described how Ford showed up at the Washington headquarters after the battle, unshaven, his left arm still bandaged, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week. He was carrying eight cans of 16mm color film that he had managed to smuggle past the navy censors. He ordered Parrish to hand-deliver the film to Hollywood, entreated Dudley Nichols and James Kevin McGuinness to write a script, got Henry Fonda and actress Jane Darwell among others to do the narration, and put together a twenty-minute documentary within a few days. When Parrish asked Ford what he should do if navy officers demanded the film be returned, Ford replied, “It’s against the law for an enlisted man to even handle top-secret material … [Y]our best bet is to tell ’em to fuck off and not open the door.”
In effect, Ford had cast himself as his own Western hero: a lone wolf, fearless, dedicated, and defiant of authority yet committed to the cause. He was, in other words, playing the John Wayne role. He was never happier than during his time in the military. The war gave him a sense of purpose that Hollywood filmmaking never had.
When Ford showed the finished product at the White House a few weeks later, it made Eleanor Roosevelt cry. “I want every mother in America to see this picture,” her husband declared. The Battle of Midway won the navy an Oscar as best documentary short subject of 1942. The following year, the navy won another for December 7th, Ford’s docudrama about Pearl Harbor.
While Ford was filming the real war, John Wayne was waging his own battles on the screen, becoming America’s new cinematic war hero. Wayne, who was thirty-four when the war began, insisted that he wanted to serve in the military, but he had four kids and a troubled marriage and was keen to make money while his newfound stardom lasted. The hits kept coming: Flying Tigers (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1944), and Back to Bataan (1945) all cemented his status as a rising star and put him in the forefront of the celluloid war effort. Ford was unimpressed: he wanted Wayne to serve in the real thing. Ford sought to arrange for the OSS to take in Wayne. The office sent Wayne a letter saying they were running out of places and urging him to sign on without delay, but Wayne claimed that Josephine, his estranged first wife, hid it from him. “I never got it,” he later told Dan Ford. Wayne also blamed Herbert Yates, head of Republic pictures, who he said had threatened to sue him if he didn’t fulfill his contractual obligations—although it’s hard to imagine any Hollywood studio being foolish enough to sue a star for enlisting during World War Two. Wayne also claimed to be hindered by old football injuries to his back and shoulders.
Finally, like any recalcitrant movie star, Wayne blamed the military itself for not offering him a big enough role. He later explained to Dan Ford that he was told he could enlist in the OSS but only as a private. “Well Jesus, I’m forty years old and of fair standing and I didn’t feel I could go in as a private, I felt I could do more good going around on tours and things …” It was the young guys in the front lines, Wayne insisted, whom he was thinking of. “I was America to them. They had taken their sweethearts to that Saturday matinee and held hands over a Wayne Western. So I wore a big hat and I thought it was better. And it was better than to take just any kind of position.”
Even General Douglas MacArthur agreed. “You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself,” he declared in a speech to an American Legion convention, suggesting that the mythic figure created by Wayne was more valid than the real thing. More than three decades later Congress would agree by authorizing a John Wayne Congressional Gold Medal, honoring this lifelong civilian as “the embodiment of American military virtue,” in the words of the cultural historian Richard Slotkin. Wayne effectively made the transition from the guy who didn’t enlist in the war to the guy who won it.
The gap between reality and legend was too much even for John Ford, the ultimate legend maker. He was scathing about Wayne’s dodging of the war effort and he took it out on his star on the set of They Were Expendable, the war film they teamed up to make in 1945. Ford berated Wayne at every turn. “Duke, can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford demanded. The abuse got so bad that costar Robert Montgomery, who had earned his hero’s status during the war as a PT boat commander, walked over to the director’s chair one day and rebuked Ford. “Don’t ever talk to Duke like that,” he told Ford. “You ought to be ashamed.” Ford broke down in tears. But Expendable became one of Ford’s greatest films—a melancholy meditation on victory, defeat, and personal sacrifice.
AFTER THEY RAN AGROUND with David O. Selznick over Stagecoach, John Ford and Merian C. Cooper decided to form their own independent production company in the hope they would no longer have to answer to anyone but themselves. They called it Argosy Pictures, with Cooper as president and Ford as chairman of the board. It became a forerunner of modern Hollywood, where anyone with stature seeks their own production company.
Argosy, which was partly bankrolled by former OSS chief Donovan and friends, snagged a four-picture distribution deal with
RKO in 1946 that gave the company full creative control and ownership of its films. Ford chose to start with The Fugitive (1947), a story of the betrayal of a Catholic priest, based on The Power and the Glory, one of Graham Greene’s greatest novels. It was far too dark and idiosyncratic to do much at the box office. Chastened and chagrined, Ford turned to a sure thing: a John Wayne Western.
Wayne was already a box-office draw, but his true breakthrough years—both as an actor and as a star—were the late 1940s. They began with Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), in which Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, a Texas ranch owner and trail boss determined to get his cattle herd to market no matter the cost. Like Breck Coleman and the Ringo Kid, Dunson is a force of nature, but he’s an older, more troubled, and more damaged version. Wayne looks weighed down and inert. As his character ages in the course of the film, Wayne slows down his tempo even more, magnifying his strength. For the first time with Wayne, the audience sees and hears the weight of experience, the voice of authority and of history. When Dunson’s adopted son, Matt, played by Montgomery Clift, crosses him and takes away the herd for his own good, Dunson declares, “I’m gonna kill you.” Wayne delivers this line as a statement of fact more than a threat, all the more powerful because it is so low-key.
In Red River, Wayne is starting to become larger-than-life on the screen. He’s a very dangerous man, one who doesn’t fall even when shot, and he deals out his own personal brand of justice to other men, often unfairly. Yet he’s not a villain but a figure of tragedy. In the final showdown, he storms across the screen, pushing his way through man and beast until he reaches the son he means to kill. The ending is silly: Dunson and Matt trade punches until the woman who cares for each of them pulls a gun and forces them to realize how much they love each other. But it doesn’t detract from the Oedipus-in-reverse power of what precedes it.
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