Wayne and Ford
Page 1
Also by Nancy Schoenberger
Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood
WITH SAM KASHNER
Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century
Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady, and the Death of Superman
A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant
POETRY
Long Like a River
Girl on a White Porch
The Taxidermist’s Daughter
Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Schoenberger
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.nanatalese.com
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
All material quoted from the John Ford Papers courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.
All photographs courtesy of Photofest.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Cover photographs courtesy of the Everett Collection
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schoenberger, Nancy.
Title: Wayne and Ford : the films, the friendship, and the forging of an American hero / Nancy Schoenberger.
Description: First edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese Doubleday, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016057903 | ISBN 9780385534857 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780385534864 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ford, John, 1894–1973—Criticism and interpretation. | Wayne, John, 1907–1979—Criticism and interpretation. | Western films—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.F65 S36 2017 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057903
Ebook ISBN 9780385534864
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Nancy Schoenberger
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Why Westerns Still Matter
Part One: The Reluctant Hero
Chapter 1: Birth of the Western Hero
Chapter 2: The Good Bad Man
Chapter 3: Soldier’s Joy: The Cavalry Trilogy
Chapter 4: The Avenging Loner: The Searchers
Part Two: A Lust for Dignity
Chapter 5: Love and Politics
Chapter 6: Lost Battles
Chapter 7: Journey to Manhood: Teaching the Next Generation
Chapter 8: Going West: Twilight of the Gods
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
A Note About the Author
For Lieutenant Commander Sigmund Bernard “Dutch” Schoenberger,
PILOT, FATHER, WESTERN FAN,
1923–2006
Prologue: Why Westerns Still Matter
John Ford and John Wayne taught us how to be men.
—JOHN MILIUS
I’ve played the kind of man I’d like to have been.
—JOHN WAYNE
Why do I love Westerns? Maybe I like to see men trying to do the right thing, often against tremendous odds and often for the protection of women and children, who are frequently as tough and feisty as the men who do the actual fighting. Though mostly written by men for men, the Western lays claim to anyone who loves storytelling because it is an inherently dramatic form—usually a quest narrative that follows the hero’s progression from innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge, shame to redemption, outcast to community. Sometimes the trajectory is reversed, a fall from grace. These are all human journeys. They transcend any one demographic.
As a fan of Westerns, I’m not alone among women. And despite historian Garry Wills’s observation that “It is easy to see why so few women are fans of John Wayne,” a handful of women writers have written encomiums to the stoic, sometimes bullying, sometimes tender archetypal hero embodied by Duke Wayne; writers such as Joan Didion, film critic Molly Haskell, and New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Alessandra Stanley have described their appreciation of Westerns and of one Western star in particular: John “Duke” Wayne, born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907.
“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams,” wrote Didion in 1965 after visiting the set of The Sons of Katie Elder, a Western starring Wayne directed by Henry Hathaway. Amazingly, it was Wayne’s 136th picture, and he would go on to make 17 more. In a piece titled “John Wayne, a Love Story” for the Saturday Evening Post, she recalled the first time she saw Wayne on-screen, in the summer of 1943: “Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’ ” That line of dialogue has haunted her, she writes, a bit wistfully; it is “still the line I wait to hear.”
In 1976, Molly Haskell visited the set of John Wayne’s last film, The Shootist, in which he plays an aging gunfighter, John Bernard Books, who is dying of cancer. As sometimes happens with actors who become icons in their own time, the movie’s universe merged with reality: in 1964, cancer had claimed one of John Wayne’s lungs, and the strength and vitality for which he had been justly celebrated was noticeably diminished. In “Wayne, Westerns, and Women,” Haskell writes of her visit to the Burbank, California, set: “I am here because I consider Wayne one of the great movie actors of all time—a view not universally held among my fellow film critics.” She describes identifying with masculine movie heroes—instead of their wives or sweethearts—when she and her friends were tree-climbing tomboys: “We rode the range and slept under the stars and shot bad guys with the best of the men.” It was an unwelcome revelation as she matured that she was supposed to identify not with the male hero but with “the little woman” keeping the turf fires burning at home on the prairie—a revelation I shared as I entered my own teenage years.
For Haskell, Wayne evolved from role model in youth to, on one level, “the father figure who has come home to us, the father who will make, has made, the world safe for us so that we may explore and find ourselves.” Noting how audiences in the mid-1970s abandoned the Western, Haskell goes on to declare her appreciation of the Western hero as embodied by John Wayne:
[He] was paternal without being a patriarch; he was involved in an action cinema that concentrated on male friendships but he was not a symbol of machismo. If we didn’t desert him, it was because he didn’t desert us. He never seemed to be fleeing the grasp of a woman, the strings of domesticity. Often his quest was motivated by a woman, by some great love. And the fact that he wasn’t a ladies’ man, a womanizer who winked at every passing dame, made him more attractive.
When his character does pursue a woman, Wayne “doesn’t immediately see her in terms of her sexual possibilities, doesn’t force her into a romantic mold to satisfy male fantasy.” As Haskell notes, Wayne was usually paired with mature women, not starlets—Maureen O’Hara, Patricia Neal, Colleen Dewhurst, Katharine Hepburn. “He doesn’t need sweet young things to bolster his ego,” Haskell writes. “Wayne has had the most startlingly rich and sensual relationships with mature women.” Wayne is masculine but not macho, which she aptly defines as “sexual arrogance and preening, excesses of masculinity that come at a time when the real thing—functional masculinity that Wayne represents—is disappearing.”
Indeed, the scene in which Wayne first sees Ma
ureen O’Hara as Mary Kate Danaher strolling barefoot through a pasture in her red skirt and blue apron in John Ford’s The Quiet Man is a purely lyrical moment of romantic recognition. And in The Searchers, his doomed, unspoken love for his sister-in-law, Martha Edwards, adds a layer of pathos to the hero’s quest to find his niece, kidnapped by the Comanches.
John Wayne particularly resonates with me. You might call it my “John Wayne problem.” You see, I grew up with men like Ford and Wayne; not only did my father look like John Wayne, but as a career military officer and a test pilot he lived the code of masculinity that John Ford and John Wayne created and embodied throughout the films, especially the Westerns, they made together. We all know that code, because, for good or for ill, it shaped America’s ideal of masculinity, what it means to “be a man”: to bear adversity in silence, to show courage in the face of fear, to bond with other men, to put honor and country before self—in three words, “stoicism,” “courage,” “duty.” John Wayne came to embody those virtues on-screen, and men like my father embodied them in life.
When my father’s test pilot buddies came over to the house, it was an alcohol-fueled, machismo-fest of swaggering men who loved their work, their families, and each other. What men like my father knew of America, they learned, in part, from John Ford. What they knew about being men, they learned from John Wayne. I remember taking long, cross-country trips with my family—all six of us kids bundled into the backseat of a maroon Packard—traveling through “Ford Country”: the red plateaus and majestic rock formations of Monument Valley, the Navajo reservations of southern Utah. My father conveyed to us the idea that America’s vast landscapes were sacred, an idea conveyed to him, and made iconic for him, by John Ford Westerns.
Today, the idea of “traditional masculinity” may seem old-fashioned. After all, this is an era of gender fluidity, one that is finally removing age-old stigmas against LGBT culture. Wayne and Ford’s male archetype may seem trapped behind a nostalgia-tinted lens, and some argue it no longer even exists. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies,” feminist writer Camille Paglia said in a 2013 online interview for the Wall Street Journal. She pointed to the undervaluing of the military—traditionally an all-male enclave—and the decline of America’s industrial base as evidence that masculinity has become endangered in modern times. “There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now,” she argued, in part because men are left with “no models of manhood.”
But the idea of learning how to “be a man” still has relevance to all of us, born male or female. At their best, the qualities and attributes that make men men, at least in John Ford–John Wayne Westerns, are also qualities that define the finest of human behavior—what it means not just to “be a man” but to be an adult: to be peaceful but to be ready, to respect women, to be loyal to friends and family, to be willing and able to change your mind, to master yourself, to mentor the young, and to face the end with dignity. There’s also a darker side to this cultural legacy that continues to haunt us. In a 2015 New York Times article about disadvantaged boys in a low-income neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, Jeff Knoblich, a school counselor for the Astor School, said, “Boys get a message from a very young age to be a man, and to be a man means you’re strong and you don’t cry and you don’t show your emotions….I see boys suffering because of that, and a lot of that comes out in aggressive behaviors.” And in “The Darkest Side of John Wayne,” novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem asks, “What other American icon comes so overloaded with reflections of our national disasters of racism, sexual repression, violence and authority? Who else thrusts the difficult question of what it means to be a man in America so forcefully in our faces, daring us to meet his gaze?” Though Lethem begins by calling Wayne, with his “brute Republicanism,” a “laughable political ignoramus,” he quickly asserts that “John Wayne’s resonance cuts across the accidents of war and politics,” and he concludes, “Wayne is finally something other than either a man or a film star, but rather a kind of archetypal figure.”
The Western hero has remained an icon of masculinity, even if it belongs more to nostalgia than to current representations. But where did it begin? When did the Western cease being an afternoon matinee shoot-’em-up for mostly young boys and become a vehicle for mature themes, a retelling and a celebration of America’s expansionist history, and a paradigm for becoming a certain kind of grown-up American male? And when and why did the Western begin to disappear from the cultural landscape? These are the essential questions that the story of John Wayne and John Ford’s complicated, poignant, and iconic friendship can begin to answer.
Women may be less likely to seek out hero figures on whom they will model their identity and base their self-worth, but that paradigm fascinates me, both in art and in life. It’s fortunate, then, though not coincidental, that this pattern lies at the heart of both John Ford’s and John Wayne’s personal stories. Both men began as seekers, modeling their lives on the examples of older, more experienced men, and both men ended, in their own realms, as celebrated icons—heroes to their fans and to much of America. But both men—John Ford especially—were flawed heroes, and both paid a price in their private lives.
No other director and actor created the ideal of the American hero more than Ford and Wayne, an ideal that evolved in seven major Westerns they made together. John Wayne’s The Alamo—which he produced, starred in, and directed—and three late films Wayne made with other directors—Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys, and Don Siegel’s The Shootist—helped to deepen, and even rescue, Wayne’s persona, which had begun to devolve into self-parody. Examining these films, and a handful of movies John Wayne appeared in made by other directors, such as The Big Trail and Red River, will help us discern what two of Hollywood’s most influential and iconic figures had to say about what it meant to be a certain kind of American man.
Part One
THE RELUCTANT HERO
1
Birth of the Western Hero
Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.
—JOHN WAYNE
When I pass on, I want to be remembered as a guy who made Westerns.
—JOHN FORD
John Wayne as a symbol of America’s strength at the height of the American century—from World War II throughout the Cold War era—was honed and brought to perfection by the great, irascible John Ford. Even if Ford did not become an archetypal figure himself, which he would have loathed, he is one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of American cinema. Martin Scorsese once said that Ford was “the essence of classical American cinema, and any serious person making films today, whether they know it or not, is affected by Ford.”
John Ford’s Westerns are compelling and beautiful. Brought up on silent movies, where visual images and music evoked emotions and told the story, John Ford carried his keen visual eye and love of indigenous music into talking pictures. “I had an eye for composition; that’s all I had,” he once said modestly, in one of his few serious comments about filmmaking. Film critic Lem Kitaj observed that “Ford’s movies are visual ballads—they’re sagas, they’re poems. Just look at the film’s titles,” which often drew on army songs and traditional American ballads, such as “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “My Darling Clementine.” Ford’s film composers transposed into their Western soundtracks traditional ballads and gospels, such as “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Streets of Laredo,” and “We Shall Gather at the River,” underlying the sense of authenticity and often evoking a wistful melancholy. One could remove all the dialogue from many of Ford’s Westerns and still follow the story and be moved by the images and the music alone.
As the documentarian Nick Redman observed, “He wasn’t portraying America’s reality but America’s mythology,” recognizing in the western expansion one of America’s most enduring creation myths: how a unified nation stretched from sea to sea, bringing the dubious blessin
gs of civilization to what it considered lawless territory. But he also explored much of America’s actual experience: his Westerns are peopled with immigrants from many nations—the Irish, the Italians, the Swedes, the Chinese; his films both vilify Native Americans and pay homage to their bravery and to their tragic fate; in Sergeant Rutledge he dramatizes the perilous place of a black cavalryman wrongly accused of raping a white woman; and The Searchers, America’s greatest Western and arguably one of the best films made in the twentieth century, recognizes the ugly fact of racial hatred woven into the American fabric, even in the heart of our most revered hero.
Artistry aside, the power of Ford’s legacy owes no small part to the wide popularity of the Western genre. As feminist critic Jane Tompkins has noted, “From roughly 1900 to 1975 a significant portion of the adolescent male population spent every Saturday afternoon at the movies. What they saw there were Westerns. Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy.”
Saturday serials gave way to more sophisticated, grown-up Westerns in theaters—in no small part due to Ford’s influence—such as High Noon and Shane in the 1950s, but it was television in the mid-1950s and the 1960s where the Western truly flourished, with twenty-six Westerns running on prime-time television in the peak year of 1959. Gunsmoke—the longest-running Western in television history—and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp ushered in Westerns for grown-up audiences in 1955, and the genre flourished with high-quality Westerns after that: shows such as Maverick, introducing James Garner; The Rifleman, with an über-masculine Chuck Connors; Wanted: Dead or Alive, with a young Steve McQueen making a charismatic television series debut; Laramie; Have Gun, Will Travel, with another über-masculine star, Richard Boone; Bonanza, featuring an all-male household; The Virginian; Wagon Train, showcasing Ward Bond, briefly; The Big Valley, with Barbara Stanwyck; and Warner Bros.’ Sugarfoot, Bronco, and Cheyenne. Rawhide—which introduced Clint Eastwood to the world—ran from 1959 to 1965. After 1969, no new TV Westerns were introduced to the public. Death Valley Days, narrated by Ronald Reagan before his political career, and Gunsmoke both ended in 1970. In the 1950s, thirty-one studio-made pictures were Westerns; by the 1990s, that number had dwindled to seven.