by C McGivern
Though Ford may have always intended to provide the dinner in the end, the budgeting for Stagecoach also meant it was essential for him to find a cheap star; which was exactly the same reason that Walsh had used him ten years earlier. Just as Ford was what Duke needed right then, so he was exactly what Ford needed, if Stagecoach was to be made at all. The director wanted a western actor, tall, handsome, able to ride a horse and carry a gun. He didn’t have to be too fussy in his choice. Duke would be ideal.
When Wayne arrived on location in spring 1938 to start work on only his second big film he was incredibly nervous but later told friends, “Monument Valley in 1938 was heaven. I was impressed by the scenery and felt at home there straight away.” He had arrived at the very spot he was meant to be. And then Ford turned up and it was immediately evident that Duke was going to be the whipping boy on the picture. Right from the first day Ford bullied and berated him in front of the cast and crew, never letting up on him or giving him any peace. Duke had entered the Valley feeling insecure and worried about working with a collection of well established stars. Another director may have handled him gently, seen his nervousness, but instead he was criticized from sun up to sun down. His speech was made fun of, “Chrissakes-stop slurring your lines, you dumb bastard. I can’t hear you.”
“Faster - faster.” His movement was pulled to pieces, “Can’t you even walk-don’t skip, you’re not a fairy. Put your feet down like you were a man.” Ford was hardest on him in the scenes he shared with leading lady Claire Trevor, “Can’t you even get mad? You look like a baked potato.”
Miss Trevor, who had a soft spot for Duke, said, “Ford was so tough with him. You never knew what he would do to poor Duke next. I felt so sorry for him. He wanted to succeed so badly and here was his big chance. He and Ford had been friends but Pappy’d grab Duke by the chin and shake his head about until he got the look he was after. He did it right in front of everyone and Duke took it all like a soldier. He continuously called Duke a dumb bastard in front of us all. John Ford, though a genius, was so hard. Once he started he went right on after him. One time he was yelling, “Can’t you even wash your fucking face? Don’t you ever wash at home? You’re dabbing at your face, you’re just splashing water on it.” He made Duke do the scene over and over until his poor face was raw from rubbing it. When Duke was having difficulty with a love scene, he frowned. He was really confused. It was exactly the expression Ford was looking for, but poor old Duke was a wreck at the end of filming that day. He was a much more complex person than he seemed and if you were his partner in anything, my God you had to be on the ball, really fast. I was always surprised, given his quick-fire nature, that he responded so well to Ford. I think perhaps he enjoyed the fact that you simply couldn’t predict Jack’s next move. That kept him alert. He might also have appreciated that no one got preferential treatment on a Ford set; Duke had no time for any of that nonsense and always liked to be one of the boys.”
But on location he could do nothing right. He was working even harder than usual, doing everything he could to please. Yakima Canutt was also working on the film and he hated watching him, head down, slouching around the room they shared at night. He hated what Ford was doing to his friend. Every night Yak rehearsed Duke’s lines and movements with him ready for the next day so he knew every part off by heart. It made no difference; the director was never satisfied.
All the cast and crew felt deep sympathy and embarrassment for the young star and they often recoiled in horror as Ford started attacking him, sometimes physically, sometimes bringing tears to his eyes. At other times Coach changed his angle, and three weeks into shooting he mentioned casually that Duke looked good in the rushes. Rich praise indeed and Duke was amply rewarded. He believed Ford knew just when to turn the heat on him and how to get a performance out of him. He very rarely got mad with Coach whatever he did, but there were some memorable occasions in Monument Valley when he was heard muttering under his breath that he was, “Going to have to take the old bird down.” Sometimes only Yak could calm him down, taking him aside and reminding him that if he showed any sign of rebellion now, he would be finished in the industry. Yak was right and Duke rarely made any disparaging remark about the director in public. It was a mark of how much power Ford had in Hollywood that Duke always played safe after Yak’s warning. And for him the humiliation was worth it, “Sure he got me angry. He would turn me inside out. I would want to murder him. But he knew what he was doing. First-he made me feel emotion. He knew he wouldn’t get a job out of me unless he shook me up so damn hard I’d forget to worry about whether I fitted in. He knew how hard it was for me to be playing with the likes of Claire. I was ashamed of all those B-westerns in the company of those stars. He also had to be sure I turned in a performance. That wasn’t all there was to his tricks either. He also knew that when an unknown is put into a key role in a movie, well there’s resentment on the part of the veterans toward him. Now Mr Ford wanted those veterans rootin’ for me, rootin’ for the picture, not resenting me. By kicking me around he got the other actors on my side and hating him. Hell, they did everything they could to help me out after a few weeks of taking his abuse. Mr Ford only wanted to do one thing and that was to make good pictures, and to do this he would do anything, anything.”
In private he was more hurt than he chose to admit, but he was never going to say anything that might harm his career. It was well known in Hollywood that Ford required complete control of the people working for him, and the Ford stock company, the actors Pappy retained around him and used in film after film, knew better than to question him, or even make suggestions. Actors working for him kept quiet, or they got out and never worked for him again. Stagecoach launched Duke to stardom but it was a reward earned the hard way. Relationships between the old friends were strained during working hours, with Duke was not so much the favorite son he had been. Stresses appeared between them that hadn’t been there before, driving a wedge between them, creating tension that lingered many years.
Although he always paid fulsome homage to Ford, Duke had ambivalent feelings toward him from then on. He tolerated the abuse, was ever grateful for Stagecoach but he was also a proud and self-made man. He admired Ford and recognized, “probably the finest artist I’d ever known,” but privately acknowledged he wasn’t completely beholden to him! When he walked into the Valley in 1938 he’d already had ten years’ experience in the business. Certainly he was nervous, but he was also experienced, and probably knew more about Westerns then than Ford did. That didn’t stop Ford treating him like a novice, sometimes shouting at him with his face pressed up against his own, to act only with his eyes that he didn’t want to see his mouth moving. Ford later said he had always known that Duke’s personality would come shining through his eyes on screen; that he was confident they could reveal everything he wanted to show about the Ringo Kid. He had absolute knowledge of Duke’s vulnerability and his strength. Years later in a draft of an autobiography, My Kingdom, Duke wrote, “When you look at an actor’s eyes you’ve got to feel the cock-a-doodle strength coming at you.” He had learned his lesson the hard way at the hands of the master.
Things on location might have been tough but he was grateful to be allowed to do most of his own stunt work. Ford was sure it would help him attain a better sense of reality as he worked because that was the way he made his B-movies. But if star and director were happy about the possible danger, visiting producer Walter Wanger was horrified when he dropped by the set to see Duke climbing out of the moving stage and up onto its roof. Wanger blasted Ford, “Wayne isn’t being paid as a stuntman. Tell him he’s got to stop.”
“Tell him yourself,” Ford snapped back.
But when Wanger did tell Duke, he got a slow, considered drawl of a reply, “Now Mr.Wanger - there’s no need for you to worry. I can handle myself. I’ve been doin’ my own stunts for years. I’m not an actor; I’m just a stuntman who reacts.” He repeated, “I don’t act, I react”; a throw-away line heard ov
er and over throughout the rest of his career. If anyone ever got him talking about his acting, his films, his relationship with the great directors, it was sure to come into the conversation. “If you have a script where you’re the bystander, the reactor, you have a class A script. Because if you have all the dialogue, you’re telling the whole damn story. The best script to have is where you’re reacting to what other people are saying, doing. I was in so many quickie pictures that it had become obvious to me when I could use my own true reactions.”
Ford more than anyone else was responsible for Wayne’s belief that he was not an actor. It wasn’t a fair summary of a man who could certainly act, as his best films amply demonstrate. It was said John Ford understood the souls of his actors, maybe he didn’t treat them well, but he understood them, and his direction often took on the quality of a movie itself. The rituals of his work were carefully designed to make each set significant, to make each day’s work meaningful to cast and crew. It was his way of establishing a total involvement in the film they were doing together. He knew the terrible boredom that most actors suffered from, the debilitating effects of sitting around for hours between takes, so he shouted, got each of them boiling mad, and no-one was ever bored on a Ford set. And for Duke, every time he finished work on a Ford film he was already looking forward to the next, no matter what he thought about him as a human being. Each film he made with him was a significant moment in his life, “There has never been enough credit given to Mr. Ford as to how far he goes to make an actor feel comfortable- oh, sometimes he will get you so mad. He has gotten me so goddam mad so many times- but I love him. He knows what he is doing. He always knew who to pick on, and when.” During the filming of Stagecoach he took it in turns to humiliate each of the actors. As he began to wind things up he realized he had not been tough enough on Andy Devine, and also it was Duke’s turn again! He asked Duke to watch the rushes with him and asked him what he thought about Devine’s performance.
“Fine… but he holds the reins too loosely.”
“Hold it Duke. I want everyone to hear this.”
He called the cast together, “I want you all to know that our new star here thinks the picture’s great, that we’re all doing one hell of a job-but Devine stinks.”
Duke stood rooted to the spot in embarrassment, unable to say a word in his defense, knowing to speak out would make things worse. Fortunately Devine had been around Ford long enough to know the game and he winked at the mortified “new star.”
Under the great man’s direction Duke became Ringo with his first appearance, late in the film, in what is acknowledged as one of the most stunning entrances in cinema history. It had a mythical quality about it. One out of focus shot of Duke’s face, slowly sharpening, a longer shot revealing Ringo carrying a bedroll and twirling his rifle in an action already recognizably his alone. The scene established in seconds the role he would play.
His opening speech was long and delivered with all the mastery picked up during his apprenticeship in the B-movies. The spectacular entrance, and the power of that first speech, instantly, and as if by magic, took him into the hearts and minds of movie-goers everywhere. He had spent ten years wading through quickie Westerns, building up a base of loyal and faithful fans, now, in an instant of motion picture history he entered the imagination of the general public. He was to remain firmly fixed there for the next forty years. Suddenly he was a celebrity, his life changed forever. Ford had shown him the stars.
Everything about the symbolic love story emphasized Wayne’s natural ease of movement and shy vulnerability that suggested the Western outsider, it also reflected Duke as he was at that time. Both he and Ringo were naturally withdrawn and shy, perhaps only really comfortable in the company of men, or when involved in manly activity. Ringo is portrayed as better than the system and better than those who misjudged him. And John Wayne often felt the same way, believing he was misrepresented, misquoted and ultimately misjudged. He gave to Ringo the violent changes of pace that characterized his own life, the slow burn of trapped energy that he understood so well. Both Duke himself and Ringo were full of conflicting extremes, brutality and gentleness, hate and love, protectiveness and vengefulness, care for the community and individualism, they were one and the same person.
Stagecoach was full of standard B-Western characters, lifted by Ford’s direction and the brilliance of the actors into a masterpiece, but for all the fabulous performances Duke knew that he stood out head and shoulders above the rest. Ford’s vision of the American West had miraculously become his movie. He knew it, understanding the effort it had taken to produce what he had always known he had inside him. Unfortunately he also believed it was only the skill of Ford that released it. And that was exactly what Coach wanted him to think.
Ringo was the most fully developed of the characters traveling on the stage. His philosophy “There’s some things a man just can’t run away from” was central to Duke’s performance, and was what made a man, as far as Ringo, Duke and John Ford were all concerned. When Duke was shown some of the early rushes, Ford asked him what he thought of Ringo, “Well-hell- I’m playing you, so you know what that is.” No one, least of all Duke, had expected Ringo to be Ford’s alter ego; the rugged loner, the warrior on horseback, the individualist always set outside society, but that was exactly what he was. Ringo was also the same character Duke had created ten years earlier, Ford had simply refined it, “Anytime there was a chance for a reaction he took the reaction from me, so I’d be part of every scene … I knew he liked Ringo and liked me. I think Ringo was what he thought a young man should be.” Ford hadn’t needed anyone special to play Ringo, he didn’t even give him many lines; all he needed was presence. What Duke unexpectedly gave him was presence so powerful it seemed to explode from the screen. Neither foresaw it happening, it occurred as if decreed by a preordained force greater than either of them. Ringo, Ford and Wayne were part of a fascinating, complex tapestry; Ford, the artist, who was at the same time intrigued with machismo, wanted to be like Duke was on screen, a two-fisted, brawling, heavy drinker. He had always admired and envied Duke’s physique, and he used it for Ringo, creating on screen the man he wanted to be himself. Physically Duke was completely overpowering, now Ford unexpectedly discovered that no one else came close to reproducing his screen power. He found himself tied to him and he used the image over and over again through the coming years. Whenever Duke was asked what made him different from other stars, he smiled knowingly, before saying two words, “John Ford.” And he was tied to Ford.
Stagecoach was previewed in the grand manner at Fox Westwood Theater, Los Angeles, on 2nd February, 1939. On the morning of the screening Duke called into his office at Republic, as he always did. He was too nervous to sit around at home. Typist Mary St John was well used to his restlessness and she handed him a coffee. She tried to calm him down, but he was edgy and she noticed that his huge hand shook as he took the mug. He had invited some of his Republic bosses to the preview, and he asked if she was going along with them. When she assured him that nothing could keep her away, he smiled his relief. He had never understood why he found her such a comfort, but now he tried to explain the tension he felt welling up inside, “Once this movie comes out… well, everything’s going to change… nothing’s going to be the same for me again… it’s kinda scary… ”, he hesitated, as he often did and she waited, but actually she did know; he hadn’t wanted to be an actor maybe, but once he had made his first film he was completely hooked. He had striven every day for ten years to make it. Most people would have accepted defeat long before. He had been unable to accept it, and now he was either on the edge of stardom, the reward for his work over those years, or on the precipice of failure. He was about to reach the heady heights of celebrity or he was finally finished. Either way, his life was certainly going to change for ever.
Mary guessed he hadn’t slept for some time; he looked exhausted, and so tense that the muscles along his jaw stood out sharply. As usual she wi
shed she could do something for him, but he never let anyone in, and didn’t like talking about the things that troubled him most. She began chatting about nothing in particular, the kind of things that she might talk about to her girlfriends; and he soon got the message, as ever quick on the uptake, and he rewarded her with the crooked grin. “What you wearing tonight?” he asked, always interested in her appearance.
“Oh, Mr Wayne, you’ll have to wait and see… but it’s not pink…”
When Mary got to the theatre that night it was to find a hall full of college kids, it was a tough place to preview a western. The film started, and as each character was introduced the kids settled back, seeming to enjoy what they saw. But at Ringo’s astounding entrance they actually cheered. Duke told her later that he felt like a college kid himself, “They stomped, they screamed, they… goddamn, nobody ever enjoyed a film like they did tonight. They were quiet in the right places. Jesus, it was like watching and knowing that this guy had them by the… Well, they were just mesmerized by the picture weren’t they?”
He was overjoyed at the reaction, he hadn’t expected it, but now he was carried away on the tide of their enthusiasm, and Mary was delighted for him, delighted at last to see a smile on the haggard face. His bosses were less than mesmerized however, and they appeared to be completely unimpressed by the whole thing. They crept out at the end of the performance and none of them even bothered to speak to him the next day at the studio. He waited a few days and, finally, when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer, he plucked up the courage to ask what they thought of the film.