John Wayne: The Life and Legend (36 page)

While
Red River
was being reconstructed, John Ford saw the picture and realized that his pal had the chops of a character actor; in 1948 he gave Wayne two parts that demonstrated his range.

In May and June of 1948, Ford shot his remake of
Three Godfathers.
Harry Carey Sr. had starred in the original in 1916, and Chester Morris had done the first sound version in 1936. Ford’s
3 Godfathers
was shot in thirty-two days, mostly on the outskirts of Death Valley. This time, Ford concentrated his ire on Harry Carey Jr., who was getting his first big part. (The film is dedicated to Carey Sr., who had recently died.) Despite his own psychological pain, Carey noted how skilled Wayne was, often needing no more than one take to pull off complicated scenes.

Carey could never understand how Ford could be so unyielding in his refusal to praise Wayne, but there were actors who thought they understood. Eddie Albert worked for Ford as well as William Wyler, and he compared the two. “Willy would never, or very rarely, give you directions. He would just keep shooting until it looked right to him. He was always correct, but he drove a lot of actors crazy, including Olivier.

“That was the opposite of The Boss [Ford]. He would tell you pretty clearly what he wanted, and you very clearly learned not to fool around too much. The Boss gave directions in externals—‘cross over on that line,’ that sort of thing. He didn’t talk about the feelings of the characters. And when he worked with Duke, I think that was very helpful; Duke didn’t come from the stage, and it wasn’t natural for him to be studying things like motivation. Willy was doing films that were more cerebral than the Boss, whose films were mainly about
picture.
”

Corresponding to Albert’s memory, Harry Carey Jr. recounted how Ford instructed him to walk toward a big rock on his right, then veer toward a smaller rock on his left. Carey did as he was told, but Ford yelled “Cut,” then began hollering about how Carey had ignored his instructions. He concluded the tirade by pantomiming masturbation.

Wayne had been on the receiving end of this sort of thing, and had had enough. “He went right where you told him to,” he said loudly. Ford looked at him. “Ah-ha—I forgot. Mr. Wayne here once produced a picture. So now he’s decided to direct this one.” And then he let it go.

It was a tough shoot, from eight to eleven in the morning, a long lunch to avoid the hottest part of the day, then from three to six in the afternoon. In later years, Ward Bond enjoyed telling a story about how Ford had directed him to ride out on his horse and wait for a signal to come into camera range from a couple of hundred yards away. In Bond’s telling, Ford left him out there for three hours.

But the result was worth it—a sweet-natured Fordian parable about the Magi, here transmuted into forgiveness and regeneration involving Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz—whom the other characters address as “Pete,” his offscreen nickname—and Harry Carey Jr., all archetypal good-bad men. (Wayne treats Carey’s character as a younger brother, protectively telling him to be sure not to use his gun during a bank robbery.)

Chased into the desert by a posse, they come across a wagon with a dying woman (Mildred Natwick) who’s about to give birth. They deliver the baby, bury the woman, and resolve to take the baby back to the nearest town: New Jerusalem. The horses are lost in a sandstorm, Carey and Armendáriz die, but Wayne soldiers on, determined to keep his promise to a dying woman.

In the end, Wayne gets the baby to New Jerusalem. Because of the extenuating circumstances, he’s only sentenced to a year in jail for the bank robbery, during which time Bond and his wife—D. W. Griffith’s great star Mae Marsh—will raise the baby.

Now thoroughly absorbed into the community, Wayne wears the suspenders and turned-up jeans of
Stagecoach
. As he leaves on the train, he waves in impeccably composed farewell while the ladies of the town sing “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

3 Godfathers
is a studiously nonviolent picture: at one point, Ward Bond’s sheriff refuses to pursue the outlaws into the desert, saying “They ain’t paying me to kill folks.” It’s a reminder—as if you needed it—that Catholicism was a major component of John Ford’s life. The film is not really first-rate, but it has a benevolence that puts it near the top of the second-rate. It’s also a visual masterpiece—you can see the heat rising from the ground in some shots—that carries considerable spiritual emotion. Wayne’s performance seamlessly combines fortitude, determination, anger, grief, responsibility, and exhaustion.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
began production in October 1948, just after
Red River
went into release. It’s majestically photographed by Winton Hoch, who had first collaborated with Ford on
3 Godfathers
, where it became clear that the cameraman was, along with Jack Cardiff, one of a handful of masters of Technicolor photography.

John Agar confirmed the legend about Ford shooting in a real thunderstorm in Monument Valley. “There was lightning all around us, and there’s metal on bridles and saddles. The cinematographer was concerned and said, ‘That’s a wrap.’ The lightning was cracking. But Ford said, ‘No, we shoot.’ So we shot through the thing, and the cameraman won the Academy Award. It’s a true story—I was in the scene.”

Wayne brought his son Michael to the location, and the boy always remembered the otherworldly beauty of nights in Monument Valley. Occasionally the company assembled for a sing-along. Goulding’s Lodge, where the company was headquartered, was and is situated directly in front of a huge rock wall, and overlooks the valley. “Right down below us, like a quarter of a mile,” said Ben Johnson, “a fire would start up, and the Indians would start singing and dancing. The sound bounced off this rock wall and out into the valley. It was the eeriest sound.”

Then there were the primitive living conditions. Ford and Wayne had private cabins, but the rest of the cast had to double up and share toilets and showers. None of the units had bathrooms. As for the shower, Harry Carey Jr. said, “The shower was an old five-gallon oil tin with holes in the bottom. It hung from a wooden beam.” Since there was no hot water, morning showers tended to be abrupt, pro forma affairs.

Wayne’s feeling about locations with Ford were different than his crabby reminiscences of the harried productions of B westerns.

I don’t think we ever went out to make a classic. You went out to make the best picture you could with what you had to work with. John Ford developed characters as he went along. You never started a picture by saying “I’m going to be such-and-such a character with John Ford.” Your character changed with the mood of the players and the effect of the elements.

There were a great many days when it was fun, especially on the action shots, with the open air, the setting, the background. But the scenes were work, they were always work, because you couldn’t just walk in and read the farewell speech of Cardinal Wolsey. Ford might decide not to kill you.

The feeling of the men who worked on westerns was altogether different from the feeling on straight pictures. We lived in a tent city and at night we played cards. . . . Sometimes the Sons of the Pioneers were there, and they sang too. It was kind of captured

companionship and we made the most of it. And most of it was delightful because it was different from the way we lived at home.

We’d put on entertainments for the kids. Actors who loved histrionics would do recitations.

Victor McLaglen and I worked up an act in which we managed boxers, who were stunt men. We’d meet in the center of the ring and start punching, showing the things that they weren’t supposed to do. The thing became a free-for-all. I broke it up throwing a bucket of water on the fighters and another bucket, full of confetti, at the kids.

Locations with Ford in Monument Valley became the ideal motion picture experience for Wayne: a band of brothers and the occasional sister, a family—mostly happy, occasionally beset by tension provoked by the patriarch, but always, always productive.

Winton Hoch gave Ford color images that no other Hollywood cameraman could get near, but that didn’t mean he was exempt from Fordian traps. “He was always testing,” Hoch told the historian John Gallagher.

We came out one morning in Monument Valley and we were at Goulding’s Trading Post, right against a black cliff in a shadow and the sun was low out there and the view was beautiful. Monument Valley was just gorgeous.

It was cold and you could see your breath in front of your face. We just finished breakfast and we went out there all ready to go to work, and [Ford] turned around and said, “What direction you wanna shoot this morning?”

The answer’s very simple. If you start telling a director which direction to shoot, you’d better start telling him how to stage his action. I said, “Any direction you wanna shoot, Jack, is OK with me.” All I had to do was open my mouth and make a suggestion. I woulda been chewed up and spit out in little pieces.

Ford grounds the picture in the physical—the breath of horses in the chilly morning, the stiffness in the legs of a sixty-five-year-old man—which makes it easier to endure the stage Irishness, which dates the comic relief. Irving Pichel narrates, as he did for Ford’s
How Green Was My Valley
.

The film documents the last few weeks in the professional career of Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne), as well as the last three weeks in the career of Victor McLaglen’s Sergeant Quincannon. It is 1876, and Brittles is retiring from the cavalry, and none too soon—he walks like a man whose hips are starting to go. His objectives for his last three weeks of service are to finish with honor and not get anybody killed. But he’s also clearly worried about what comes next—there’s nothing else he wants to do, and he foresees a drift westward to nothing much.

Brittles visits the grave of his wife and two children, all of whom died in 1867 of causes that Ford leaves unexplained. Brittles fills her in on the latest news. “We had sad news today, Mary. George Custer was killed with his entire command. Miles Keough—you remember Miles? . . .”

The character has reached that regrettable age when beautiful young women look at him as fatherly, and he embodies an ornery patience that comes from a lifetime of sorrows. His attitude directly contradicts his motto: “Never apologize, it’s a sign of weakness.”

It’s one of Ford’s loosely structured, balladlike films in which he sets up the plot and conflicts in the first reel, promptly drops them for three or four reels of pure character, then rounds back to the plot for the ending. Brittles navigates between the rocks of the Indian wars and the hard place of army politics and lovelorn troopers with the same ease that Wayne brings to the performance. It’s a film suffused with longing and remembrance, and a few flaming orange sunsets. It also has a lovely sense of lived life—the dogs that are forever hanging around the regiment.

As a visual achievement,
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
is unsurpassed, at least by anyone not named John Ford. But hidden in the loose structure is an unforgettable character study. By retiring, Brittles is letting go of the last thing he has left to love, and Ford can’t bear it. It’s as if he’s projecting himself into the character, imagining himself as a movie director grown old and unemployable, so he brings Brittles back as chief of civilian scouts. Brittles has lived with the army and will happily die with the army.
¹

Brittles represents the best part of the man playing him—a playful personality deeply attached to the earth, delighted at simple sights such as a herd of buffalo—a man more interested in preserving life than taking it. The film takes advantage of one of Wayne’s greatest gifts as an actor: his ability to suggest an essential nobility of character between the lines and beneath rough manners. In this case, it derives from moments such as Brittles’s deep emotion at being presented with a silver watch by his men—or the way the depleted old man slumps by his horse, but draws himself up to his full height to return a salute.

Wayne knew it was a virtuoso performance. As he put it, “
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
turned out to be, I think, the best acting job I’ve done. As a matter of fact, it’s about the only picture I’ve been in where I could play a character that was a little apart from the image that has developed for me over the years on the screen. I played a 65 year old man when I was 35 [actually, 42].”

Brittles embodies abstract qualities like honor and loyalty and Wayne makes them concrete with a total mastery of effect. It’s a film that could only have been made by two men who existed in a perfect state of silent communication, where words were basically unnecessary, as with the autographed picture of Ford that hung in Wayne’s house for decades: “To Duke from the Coach,” it said. “John Ford, Hollywood ’47.”