COURTSHIP AND SLAPSTICK
The Searchers wouldn’t be a John Ford film if it didn’t contain both broad comedy and ritual singing and dancing. We have both when one of the homesteaders, a young swain named Charlie McCorry (Ken Curtis), decides to court Laurie in Martin’s absence. With his intense blue eyes and fine features, he’s as handsome as Martin, and he sings a winning “Skip to My Lou” in his beautiful baritone in his attempt to woo Martin’s girl. But his thick hillbilly accent—a forerunner to Curtis’s sidekick role of Festus in TV’s Gunsmoke—makes him a comedic character, and his fancy clothes make him seem eastern and effete next to Martin, the natural man covered in dust from the trail. There should be no contest between the two suitors because Laurie has already told Martin, to his pleasant surprise, that she considers herself engaged to him since childhood. But with Martin gone for so long, and unable to express his love for Laurie, he’s left the field to his loquacious rival.
Martin’s long absence—seven years!—looking for Debbie has embittered Laurie. All that time she seeks some sign of his love, but the shy Martin has difficulty even writing her a letter that can convey his feelings from afar. Martin possesses all the qualities of a hero—bravery, grace under pressure, willingness to act, loyalty, the ability to take a beating and still get up—but he does not know how to court a girl, even one who has already pledged herself to him. So McCorry beats his time, wins Laurie through his attentive crooning, becomes engaged to her, and in a comic scene sets out to marry her in a festive wedding in the Jorgensen home, presided over by Reverend Clayton.
There is music and dancing, but just as we fear Martin has lost his girl, he arrives home and wins her back the only way he knows how: he fights for her. The two men roll in the mud and dust while the wedding goers urge them on, with Laurie relishing the scene of a contest over her. While their fisticuffs technically end in a draw, McCorry gives up the girl and exits the scene. And then, having won back his girl, Martin leaves again.
In many Ford Westerns, dance represents “community, tradition, ritual, and family feeling,” as Bogdanovich has observed. But in The Searchers, the big dance at Laurie’s wedding concludes in a comic fight. However, there is a more somber use of Fordian music earlier in the film, at the funeral of Aaron and Martha Edwards and their son, all killed by the Comanche war party. The homesteaders sing “Shall We Gather at the River” at graveside—Ford’s favorite song, according to Bogdanovich, and the tune Borzage would routinely play on his accordion to mark Ford’s appearance on the set. Here, the small community has come together to grieve, but the fragile group is quickly threatened by Ethan Edwards, who, with a posse of Texas Rangers and homesteaders, sets out to find Scar and kill him. Laurie’s mother, Mrs. Jorgensen, grabs Ethan and begs him, “Don’t let the boys waste their lives in vengeance.” That is the unbearable crux of the film: to sacrifice home and family in order to protect home and family.
THE MAN ALONE
In the film’s denouement, Ethan brings Debbie home to the Jorgensens’ neighboring homestead; no indication is given that she will fail to re-assimilate like her tragic historical prototype. Martin arrives at the homestead as well, welcomed by his fiancée, Laurie. In fact, all are welcomed across the threshold, in a shot that mirrors the opening scene. But Ethan hesitates at the welcoming doorway, holding his elbow in his right hand as he turns to head back into the wilderness. It’s a gesture typical of Harry Carey, to whom Ford dedicated The Searchers in a closing credit.
Filmmaker Curtis Hanson describes the last scene as one in which Ethan finds “peace and acceptance” by walking away. “John Wayne had the most beautiful walk in movies,” he said, and that certainly adds to the poignancy of the scene, but it’s a sense of necessary exclusion that lingers. The film carefully catalogs what “drives a man to wander” (in the lyrics of the opening and closing ballad), and the stark beauty of that final image transfigures the vengeful and racist Ethan Edwards, now redeemed, into a folk hero. It is an eerily beautiful image full of pathos, and it went far in defining the American hero as a loner, living on the outskirts of civilization, without family, friends, or love.
At the core of this archetype is a fear that men are most prized—and perhaps only prized—for their ability to protect and avenge, that they cannot function well in the wholly different kinds of dramas involved in family. For some men, being a silent protector is a refuge from the demands of domesticity and emotional relationships. But when exactly did this become a masculine ideal? Ford’s early heroes worked within a community, or a family, or comrades, or a military corps, or with the help and encouragement of a girlfriend or wife; consider George O’Brien in The Iron Horse or Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine and Guns Along the Mohawk. If anything, Ford’s pictures celebrate male community, especially in his Cavalry Trilogy and even in Stagecoach, where the cowboy hero is part of a group of desperate travelers and a woman accompanies his bid to outrun the “blessings of civilization.”
So why does Ford’s greatest Western, The Searchers, change that dynamic? Even though Ethan Edwards is not a sympathetic character, the stunning image of him at the end of the picture, framed against the doorway of the prairie home he is leaving, the unknowable wilderness before him, is an enduring cultural touchstone. Since then, the cowboy hero—indeed, the hero writ large—has become the loner, the drifter, the figure set apart from society. TV Westerns embraced this model, and lone, often avenging, cowboys played by Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, Hang ’Em High, and The Man with No Name marked its apotheosis. It spread into other action hero films, too, such as the Death Wish franchise, in which Charles Bronson becomes a lone vigilante after his wife and daughter are brutally murdered.
The iconic image of Duke Wayne’s Ethan Edwards as the outcast loner. His pose pays homage to his cowboy hero Harry Carey, the man who launched Ford’s career as a director of Westerns.
Ford might have been influenced by an earlier film, George Stevens’s 1953 movie, Shane, starring Alan Ladd as the eponymous gunslinger. Shane romanticizes the figure of the lone Western hero who saves the day, in stark contrast to the weakened, vulnerable family man and homesteader, Joe Starrett, played by Van Heflin. Brandon de Wilde as Starrett’s young son, Joey, has a classic line at the end, plaintively crying, “Shane! Come back!” as if to say, “Come back and teach us how to be men!”
But Ford’s final image of Ethan’s walking away is far more iconic than Shane’s riding off into the sunset, in part because of its stark beauty. Shane is heroic, yes, but he is one-dimensional in ways that Ethan Edwards is not. Ethan gives a glimpse of his ability to love a woman and perhaps a child, so what he forsakes by returning to the wilderness is clear. While Martin takes Ethan’s place as the new head of the family, presumably to marry his sweetheart and continue the homesteader’s life, Ethan must walk away from his last chance at familial love. He’s already on his way to becoming an outlaw legend, and no one comes running after him to bring him back into the golden firelit circle.
The film’s conclusion is purely Ford’s invention: he abandoned the shooting script’s original reconciliation scene. Ethan is “the eternal outsider in that picture,” observes Bogdanovich. “He’ll never be part of the family. He wasn’t at the beginning of the movie; he wasn’t with the woman he loved.” For Ford, who adored his mother and cherished the memory of growing up in a lively home of roughhousing brothers, it is a bitter ending, a darkening of his vision of the West and of the Western hero.
Part Two
A LUST FOR DIGNITY
5
Love and Politics
I was dancing barefoot by firelight, wearing a low-cut gypsy costume.
—PILAR WAYNE
Like many fine artists…[Ford’s] true feeling was for the man-man or man-men relationship.
—DUDLEY NICHOLS
The Searchers was the apotheosis of John Ford and John Wayne’s artistic collaboration, the most mature expression of the Western hero they had been pursuing toge
ther for over a decade. But by 1957 the lives of the two men had been drawing apart for some time, a split that would be most clearly felt in 1960 with The Alamo. The roots of this rupture stretched back to Ford’s happiest days during World War II—a period that was anything but happy for John Wayne.
Duke was thirty-four in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war. He was beyond the age of being drafted, and he had a family to support—he was still married, unhappily, to Josephine Saenz—yet the same could be said for his fellow actors Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, and Ronald Reagan, not to mention Ford, who was even older and in poor health. All of these Hollywood icons served, Ford and Jimmy Stewart with particular distinction.
Duke badly wanted to enlist, but there were complications. First, he’d just signed a new contract with Republic Pictures that gave him a lucrative percentage of the profits from any film he made, and after being in the business for nearly fifteen years, for the first time Duke stood to make considerable money. According to Duke’s third wife, Pilar, when he told Republic’s studio chief, Herbert Yates, that he planned to enlist, Yates responded by threatening to sue him over breach of contract. “If you don’t live up to it, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got,” he reportedly said. “Hell, I’ll sue you for every penny you hope to make in the future. God damn it! Nobody walks out on me!”
In January 1944, Duke spent three months touring the southwest Pacific for the USO. He loved entertaining the troops and came to feel that this was his contribution to the war effort. “I was America to them,” he said. “They’d taken their sweetheart to the Saturday matinee as teenagers and held hands through a John Wayne Western….It was better that I go into the war zones on tour” than as a soldier, he believed, and indeed he was probably right. Had he enlisted, he would have been just one lowly GI, but his status as a celebrity symbol of masculinity helped raise morale throughout the service, and his face on a recruitment poster brought in more men than any other campaign. The screenwriter Edmund Hartmann related a conversation he’d had with a nun, who said, “You know, our most decorated soldier is John Wayne.” When Hartmann disagreed, tactfully pointing out that “Wayne was never in the army. He never fired a gun in earnest in his life….[He] never shot anybody who didn’t get up and go for coffee afterwards!” she didn’t believe him.
Meanwhile, the glow of Ford’s wartime experience lingered, and his first feature film after his Midway documentary, the 1945 World War II drama They Were Expendable, celebrated the camaraderie of PT boat commanders. The navy gave Ford permission to take a leave from active duty to make the film for MGM, based on a best seller by William L. White about the doomed heroism of a PT boat squadron executing General MacArthur’s order to evacuate the Philippines in 1942. It was filmed in Key Biscayne, Florida, with John Wayne and Robert Montgomery in the leading roles and Donna Reed playing Wayne’s love interest.
If Duke had looked up to Ford before the war, when Ford returned a hero, Duke’s admiration grew to outright worship. By this point Ford had adopted his trademark black eye patch, which he wore under his tinted glasses and flipped up in order to read anything. But he was in many ways still the same old John Ford, chewing one end of a ratty handkerchief to battle his cravings for alcohol while insisting on a sober cast and crew.
By 1945, John Wayne had a solid film reputation, but unlike Ford, the decorated war hero, Duke had not served, and Ford would never let him forget it. During the filming of They Were Expendable, Ford constantly insulted and picked on Duke, pointing out that he didn’t even know how to salute properly. One of the character actors on the film, Donald Curtis, recalled how Ford would “bully John Wayne and make a quivering pulp out of him. Ford had an honest affection for Duke, but Wayne was scared to death of him.” It got so bad that Robert Montgomery—whom Ford respected because the actor was a navy man who had served honorably in the war—took the director aside and threatened to walk off the picture if he didn’t let up on Duke. Ironically, when Ford injured his leg in a fall from a scaffold and Montgomery took over the task of directing for a week, Duke was upset. He didn’t like the way Montgomery leaned on Ward Bond, who was recovering from a broken leg he’d sustained in an automobile accident, and he waited eagerly for Pappy to return.
The film opened in December 1945, three months after Japan surrendered, and a war-weary public largely stayed away; the film was a financial disappointment, and Ford returned to a form for which he had an undisputed knack—the Western—with the first installment of the Cavalry Trilogy two years later. Still, They Were Expendable has aged well, and it marked John Wayne’s first appearance on the big screen as a war hero. Indeed, by the end of the war, given his heroics in They Were Expendable and Back to Bataan, also released in 1945, the fictional John Wayne, screen icon, and Duke Wayne, private man, had merged.
But not to Duke himself: though he likely made the right decision in terms of serving his country in the most beneficial way that he could, not enlisting was a source of shame that haunted him. “He would become a ‘super patriot’ for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying at home,” Pilar Wayne wrote in her affectionate memoir about her life with the Duke.
TRUE LOVE
Duke met the Peruvian actress and former flight attendant Pilar Pallete in the summer of 1952, when he was first scouting locations for The Alamo. She was then the estranged wife of an American adventurer and bush pilot named Richard Weldy, whom Duke had looked up when he arrived in Peru. Weldy took him to a remote location in Tingo María, where Pilar was filming a movie titled Green Hell. Later that night, cast and crew were invited to the Plaza Hotel for cocktails to meet their distinguished visitor. Pilar later recalled, “I was dancing barefoot by firelight, wearing a low-cut gypsy costume,” and Duke was instantly attracted. She wasn’t quite sure who Duke Wayne was—she mixed him up with Gary Cooper—but she was powerfully struck by his presence and easy authority. She described that night: “A great, pale jungle moon illuminated the night sky, candles glowed on the tables, and the soft murmur of a stream flowing a few feet away added to the atmosphere.” Duke was captivated not only by her youthful, dark-haired beauty—she was twenty-two years younger than he—but by her aristocratic bearing. As the daughter of a Peruvian senator, Pilar was cultivated and elegant—a far cry from his second wife, the sexy, volatile, and heavy-drinking Esperanza “Chata” Baur.
Duke’s marriage to Chata was, by many accounts, disastrous. Like Josephine and Pilar, Chata was Hispanic, an actress whom he’d met on a visit to Mexico in 1942, when he and his business manager, Bo Roos, had flown into Mexico City to scout a possible movie studio they were thinking of buying. Ward Bond, Ray Milland, and Fred MacMurray were all part of the expedition, and it was through Milland that Duke met the woman who would become his second wife.
Chata was a tempestuous beauty—a welcome change from the devout, disapproving Josephine—and by many accounts she liberated Duke sexually, but she was an alcoholic, which soon became a problem for the couple. Drinking was par for the course among Duke, Ford, and their cronies, but a woman who imbibed heavily was frowned upon and was not something Wayne knew how to handle. Pilar later wrote that Chata was “in fact…a high-class call girl who’d had a bit part in a Mexican film. Milland was one of her clients.” But Pilar had also felt sorry for her, describing Chata as “an illegitimate child [who] had been abused by her mother’s husband.”
At first, Duke was infatuated with her, especially given his unsatisfying marriage to Josephine, from whom he was estranged. In June 1943, Duke’s affair with Chata led Josephine to file for a legal separation. Duke wrote to John Ford about the demise of his marriage, “Anyway I don’t give a four letter word, [so long as] I can see my kids,” and he continued his affair with dark-haired, vivacious Chata. Later, when his divorce from Josephine was finalized, “Duke…walked away from the marriage with his clothes, his car, and an overwhelming feeling of guilt he never completely put beh
ind him,” Pilar later wrote. Josephine walked away with the couple’s house in upscale Hancock Park in Los Angeles and 35 percent of Duke’s annual earnings. And because she was a Catholic, she never considered herself divorced in the eyes of God, and she let her children know that she would always consider herself John Wayne’s only true wife—a situation that would, not surprisingly, create tension between Pilar and the children of his first marriage.
John Wayne with Pilar Pallete, who would become his third wife, at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood in 1949.
Chata and Duke married on January 17, 1946, in Long Beach, in a small ceremony, with Ward Bond as his best man. The couple moved into a small ranch house in Van Nuys, close to Republic studios, where Duke was producing and starring in Angel and the Badman, with twenty-three-year-old co-star Gail Russell. Chata, especially when drinking, became intensely jealous of the beautiful young actress, convinced that Duke was having an affair with her. She also resented the way his work consumed him. “My husband is one of the few persons who is always interested in his business. He talks of it constantly….[H]e spends all of his time working, discussing work, or planning work,” she reportedly said. When Chata brought her mother to live with them in an already volatile situation, it proved too much for Duke. The two women would drink together and sometimes fight, and Duke would spend as much time away from home as possible. Luckily, he was able to spend a month on location working on Fort Apache with John Ford.
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