American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  It was during one of these assignments that Duke first met director John Ford. According to Pete Martin, “Ford was the founder and guru of a Hollywood cult of brawn. Like Frederick William I, who combed Europe for giants for his Potsdam guard, Ford liked to surround himself with non-runts.” Ford especially liked football players. “At that point everybody in the picture business had USC fever. Wayne fell to my lot [on-set] and I made him a fourth-assistant property man.”

  Wayne later remembered: “They sent me [on an assignment] to Lefty Hugg, assistant director to John Ford. Ford was shooting Mother Machree. The title loosely translates to ‘Mother of my Heart.’ ” The film is a sentimental journey of loss, journey, and redemption. A woman (Belle Bennett) is forced to leave Ireland after her husband is lost at sea. Her travels bring her to America, the circus, and trouble. The authorities take her son away. Broke and alone, she becomes a domestic. In the last reel they are finally reunited—the daughter of the wealthy family she works for has miraculously fallen in love with her long-lost son. The film has elements of Ford’s later family sagas and features one of his early “family” of players, Victor McLaglen, already a star earning $1,200 a week.8

  For his work on the film, Duke earned $35 a week. Mother Machree is notable for being the first time he was in directed by John Ford.9 Mother Machree wasn’t released until 1928. Caught in the transition to sound, the silent version was pulled twice by Fox, first to add a synchronized score and again to add synchronized sound optical track. “The Irish scenes were shot on a set that was supposed to be a small street in an Irish village. Ford wanted a flock of ducks and geese to add a touch of atmosphere . . . during a break in the shooting Ford suddenly called to me: ‘Hey, gooseherder!’ ” Duke’s first impression of the director was that he was “huge and strong, mentally as well as physically, a tough, sarcastic character.” Ford asked Duke if he was one of Jones’s bright college boys. “Yes, Mr. Ford.” The director asked if he played guard. Duke nodded. Ford then asked him to get down in position and show him. Duke got down on one knee. Ford scoffed. “You call yourself a guard? I bet you can’t even take me out.”

  “I’d like to try,” Duke said, softly but with conviction. Ford went twenty feet downfield and Duke took off after him. Ford attempted to fake a move to his left, but Duke anticipated it and hit him hard with a leg to the chest. Ford looked up and glared. A heavy pause followed, then he burst into laughter. It was a jolt-of-electricity moment for Duke. Ford’s challenge had been a test, a measure of Duke’s ability. He would remember it across his lifetime. Decades later, he described the events that day as “the beginning of the most profound relationship of my life—and I believe the greatest friendship.”

  Overlooked by Mix, Duke had discovered John Ford, or, more accurately, been discovered by him. As the director later recalled, “I could see that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work. Inside of a month or six weeks we were fast friends and I used to advise him and throw him a bit part now and then.” At the time Duke had no idea who Ford was, what other pictures he had made, just that he liked him, and he trusted him. Like a father.

  ALTHOUGH JOHN FORD WOULD GO on to become one of the titans of cinema, if his film career that began in 1917 had ended after 1928’s Mother Machree, he would still have left a mark in the history of American film. However, it would take several more years for Ford to be recognized as a “pantheon” filmmaker, a director of sharp intellectual insight, deep emotional compassion, and profound vision. In the early days of silent filmmaking, many young and ambitious men were drawn to Hollywood as much, if not more, for the easy money and beautiful women than the opportunity to express themselves making movies. Film itself wasn’t yet considered an art, just a novelty of the new electricity phenomenon, a pulpy, disposable entertainment, which is why so many films made in the first half century of moviemaking were thrown away without a thought that they might be worth anything more. Virtually no one in the business, except perhaps Charlie Chaplin, had any notion of the intrinsic value of what he or she was doing, or the foresight to preserve it. Films were disposable commodities, like the daily newspaper, and depended upon fresh material to keep the audiences buying tickets. Yesterday’s films were as useless as yesterday’s newspapers.

  Enterprising, restless, and bright, the Cape Cod–born and –raised young John Ford drifted west, to where he believed his best chance was to make money; to do that, he learned how to make movies. There is nothing in Ford’s background that suggests he had a preternatural calling to film, or for that matter, any of the arts. His first love was fishing, something he hoped he could make a living at, and when he realized he couldn’t, he decided to head west to join his brother, Francis, twelve years his senior, whose deep-set eyes, thick, dark wavy hair, and handsome face had helped him become a successful silent film actor. Years later, when the always-reticent John Ford was asked how he first came to Hollywood, the director replied, “By train.” He adopted the same last name his older brother had when he entered the film business.10 John Ford had always claimed he was born Sean Aloysius John O’Feeney (his real birth name was the less floral John Martin Feeney).

  Ford was the tenth of eleven children born to immigrant Irish parents, of which only six lived into adulthood. Upon graduating from high school, after failing to gain an appointment to Annapolis, in the fall of 1914, he enrolled in the University of Maine, but his heart wasn’t in it, especially when part of his chores included kitchen service, which he detested. Early on, he got into a fight with a junior, who called him a shanty and he threw a plate of food in the student’s face. He was called before the dean and, afterward, he left the campus and never returned.11

  Three weeks after he dropped out, he wrote to his brother asking if he could help find a job for him at Universal. Francis, known to the public as Frank Ford, specialized in Civil War adventures (he portrayed Abraham Lincoln in several films) and westerns, or “oaters” as they were sometimes called (the term was first coined by Variety, Hollywood’s daily industry publication). Francis wrote back, telling his brother to come out, that there was lots of work he could do behind the scenes.

  John arrived at Universal in the fall of 1914 and soon had steady work as Francis’s stand-in, with a small part thrown in here and there in the prodigious output of films he starred in.

  He first learned how to operate a camera while serving as assistant director on several of his brother’s films. To pick up some additional pocket change, John donned a white sheet and played a faceless racist in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Ford was mesmerized by Griffith’s masterful direction of his epic. He studied his techniques and became friendly with the director, and he later claimed Griffith as one of the major influences of his own style of filmmaking. In 1917, “John Ford” directed his first film, a western called Tornado; westerns would comprise fully one-fourth of his total output. (Tornado no longer exists. Almost all the films Ford made between 1917 and 1921 are lost.) He soon overshadowed his brother, who became bitterly jealous of his younger brother’s success, and he soon left the bright lights of Hollywood for the natural sunshine of the South Seas.

  Also in 1917, Ford directed The Soul Herder (western slang for a preacher). It too is lost but is remembered today as the first of twenty-four movies he would direct that starred Harry Carey. Carey was a Bronx-born law school graduate who had wanted to be a baseball player before D. W. Griffith brought him to Los Angeles, when the director relocated his operation from Queens to Hollywood. Carey became one of Hollywood’s primal stoics, whose hard, unsmiling American face became his trademark. His acting style was purely external, reflecting the cowboys he played rather than opening a window to offer a glimpse of his real self. Ford loved Carey because he so perfectly projected the director’s image of himself. They fed creatively off each other; Ford learned how to use Carey’s stoicism as the foundation for a dir
ectorial style that was becoming more expansive without being grandiose, and Carey learned how doing less could reveal more in front of a camera.

  Despite Ford’s having made him a star, their four-year collaboration ended over Carey’s resentment of other members of Ford’s growing company of players getting what he felt was more attention. Ford, meanwhile, had wearied of Carey’s inflating ego. Ford had made Carey a major star who earned $2,250 a week, to Ford’s own $150 salary at Universal. Audiences tired of Carey as well, and he blamed his director for that. In 1921, when Ford got an offer to move to Fox, which offered him higher budgets and a starting salary of $600 a week, it ended the Ford/Carey collaboration of twenty-six westerns and left the director in search of his next great projected screen other.

  Ford’s first western for Fox was The Big Punch (1921). It starred Charles “Buck” Jones, a Hollywood actor who, in Ford’s view, didn’t have what it took to be the next Harry Carey. He kept looking. A few years and several pictures later, a new, unknown, tall, strong, and handsome stagehand literally stumbled into Ford’s world. His name was Marion Morrison.

  IN 1926, AFTER TWENTY YEARS of marriage, on May 1, Clyde and Mary legally separated. According to public records in the Superior Court of Los Angeles, almost immediately after, Molly filed for divorce. She took Robert and moved in with her parents, who had since relocated to Los Angeles to be near their daughter. Clyde quickly found himself a new girlfriend. Florence Buck, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old who worked in Glendale as a clerk at Webb’s department store, was divorced and had a young daughter named Nancy. They fell for each other quickly and lived together while waiting for Clyde’s divorce to become final. It would take nearly five years before the courts granted it, on February 20, 1930 (not an unusual amount of time in those days as divorce was discouraged by the California courts especially when there were children involved). Clyde then took Florence, Nancy, and his few possessions and rented a small house in Beverly Hills, not yet the movie star glamour spot it was soon to become, to be nearer to his son. He found work at a nearby electrical supply store, even as his health continued to fail. The asthma and tuberculosis that had caused him to move west had brought on heart disease, something he hid from his fellow employees when he applied for the job.

  And he married Florence.

  Duke couldn’t bear the thought of his father having a new woman and child in his life. When Clyde told Duke he could meet his new wife, he said no. Although he never completely forgave his father for leaving his mother, eventually he became close to Florence because of how well she took care of Clyde, and how encouraging and uncritical she was. She brought him a measure of peace, and that meant something to Duke.12

  He also had a new girlfriend of his own. He had first met the beautiful, dark-haired Spanish Josephine Saenz, from a prominent Catholic family in the Hispanic section of Los Angeles, at a dance in Balboa he went to with some of his frat brothers. Duke’s prearranged date for the evening was Josephine’s older sister, Carmen Saenz. After the dance, all the boys and girls went out for ice cream. Joining them was Josephine, whom Duke somehow got to sit next to; according to Maurice Zolotow, he “happened to look into Josephine’s eyes. He felt as though something had hit him and suddenly realized that, for the time in his life, he was in love . . . he remembered feeling so hypnotized by the girl that he doubts whether he spoke a dozen words all evening.”

  The following weekend, only a few days before practice was to resume at USC in preparation for the fall schedule, Duke drove to Balboa to spend some time with Josie, as he was now calling her. Because it was the summertime, he had let his hair grow longer than allowed at USC. It was a look he picked up from some of the other cowboy actors at the studio, who wore it that way for westerns.

  This Friday night, during which he was with her in a supper club, someone tried to pick Josie up right in front of him. As Wayne later remembered, “Some punk alongside pipes up, ‘Forget about him, lady; not with that long hair.’ So I sat her down and went over and explained very quietly to him that if he would step outside, I’d kick his fuckin’ teeth down his throat. That ended that.”

  Saturday during the day, and on Sunday after church, he took Josie to the beach. On his off days he had become a proficient bodysurfer, and wanted to show off for her. She watched from the sand as he had himself towed by speedboat out to the bigger waves. He caught one too late and was slammed all the way to the bottom of the ocean. When he bobbed to the surface, he felt severe pain in his upper body. He had separated his right shoulder and broken his collarbone. The next day he could barely use his right arm, and at practice, Coach Jones, unaware of his injuries, accused him of having no guts and demoted him off the first string. For the rest of that year, Duke had to wear a specially fitted harness that restricted his movements and made it difficult for him to play.13

  The next fall, he was dropped from the team and lost all his privileges, including team workout meals, which he had counted on to save on food money. He was ostracized for those meals by some of his fellow classmates who were not on football scholarships and resented his free ride. He spent his sophomore year trying to stay in school without being able to play football, but it was no use. In the spring, he quit USC, moved out of the garage apartment he’d shared with his friend, and found a small, run-down place in Beverly Hills, not far from where Clyde was now living.

  His father was extremely disappointed when he found out, and Mary was furious. She believed USC was her son’s only chance to become a lawyer. And she had her hands full trying to bring up Robert by herself. The boy, as handsome as his older brother, was not nearly as ambitious. He wasn’t interested in studies, working, or anything except going to the beach. When he dropped out of high school at the end of the 1927 academic year, Molly blamed Marion for having set a bad example by leaving USC and insisted that he had to let Robert move in with him. She claimed she couldn’t take care of him anymore; he was too lazy and she was too tired, and Clyde too sick to take him in. Maybe living with his older brother would be good for the both of them.

  Duke reluctantly agreed even though he didn’t appreciate Robert tagging along wherever he went. He spent a lot of time talking with the boy, and he eventually convinced him to go back and finish high school, which he did. Robert later attended USC and played football for the team as a fullback, in 1932 earning the letter that his older brother never got. Nonetheless, Duke was happy for him.

  Despite Clyde’s and Mary’s continuing to separately try to convince Duke to return to school as well, he insisted his mind was made up. He had seen the last of USC, and it had seen the last of him. Dropping out also put an end to his relationship with Josephine. At first, he was too embarrassed to face her. When he finally did call her, she told him her parents, the diplomat Dr. Saenz and his wife, who were socially well set in their community, did not approve of his lack of social status and his association with the “dirty” film industry. Worst of all, he was Presbyterian, not Catholic. That sealed the deal for them. She said they forbid her to ever see him again.

  Morose and lonely, Duke drowned his sorrow in eighty-proof self-pity. All of it hurt like hell. As he later recalled, “They don’t tell you that love hurts. They never tell you how much it hurts. They don’t tell you it hurts from the start and I guess it never stops hurting . . . why don’t they tell you how much it hurts?”

  That May, still afflicted with lovesickness, he drifted up to San Francisco, and when he heard of a steamer about to leave for Honolulu, he decided to stow away and steal himself a free trip to Hawaii. Soon enough, with nothing to eat and unable to sleep, he turned himself in to the captain, in the hopes he would at least feed him. He did, after throwing him in the brig. A month later, when the ship returned to San Francisco, the captain handed Wayne over to the San Francisco Police Department. They declined to press criminal charges and put him on a train back to Los Angeles.

  Flat broke and despondent, Duke sought out John Ford at Fox, confided in him, and soug
ht comfort from the director as if he were his father.

  Ford felt sorry for him and let Duke hang around the studio and during downtimes on-set, taught him the card game “Pitch,” or, as what Pappy’s friends liked to call it, “Claiming Low,” an old New England game Ford had learned as a child, a version of “High/Low,” where each side bets, draws a card, and the high one wins.

  As Wayne later remembered, that wasn’t the only thing the director showed him. “In the years to come, Ford would teach me everything I knew about filmmaking.”

  Chapter 3

  For the next two years, Duke worked at Fox as a low-paid nonunion property man, putting in a lot of overtime to help his brother stay in school and send whatever was left over to his mother. Through hard work, and toughness, he gradually made himself a valuable team player, mostly under the supervision of “Pappy” John Ford, as good on a movie set as Coach Jones was on a football field. “In those days,” Wayne later remembered, “you could operate in every department of pictures. You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer [electrician], I rigged lights. I helped build sets, carried props, hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures . . . at the time I had no ambition beyond becoming the best property man on the Fox lot, [because] a chief property man was getting a hundred and fifty a week . . .”

  In 1928, not long after Mother Machree was released, Duke made his next appearance on-screen, as an unbilled walk-on in Ford’s Four Sons, a melodrama about the agonies suffered by the mother of four boys in Germany during World War I.14 Ford later remembered this incident that happened during one of the most important scenes in the film, an outdoor shot done within the confines of a Fox studio: “John Wayne was the second or third assistant prop man, and I remember we had one very dramatic scene in which the mother had just received notice that one of her sons had died, and she had to break down and cry. It was autumn; the leaves were falling, the woman sitting on a bench in the foreground—a very beautiful scene. We did it two or three times and finally we were getting the perfect take when suddenly in the background comes Wayne, sweeping the leaves up. After a moment, he stopped and looked up with horror. He saw the camera going, dropped the broom, and started running for the gate. We were laughing so damn hard—‘Go get him, bring him back.’