John Wayne: The Life and Legend (69 page)

Every day after lunch, Curtiz would fall asleep in his chair. The crew would put up umbrellas to protect him from sunburn and place wet chamois cloths around his neck. Wayne would simply pick up directing where Curtiz had left off.

“Duke could see what was happening, took the reins and took over,” said Stuart Whitman. “That went on for a couple of days while Mike was there, then Mike disappeared to go into the hospital. Duke directed about half of the picture.”

Stuntman Dean Smith, who was doubling for Whitman, said, “Duke directed
more
than half of
The Comancheros
. During the final battle, I ran and scissor-jumped onto the back of the horse, spun him around and jumped him over the fence. Duke directed all of that battle, every damn bit. He was a really good action director.”

Ina Balin’s first scene was a small one with Wayne, where she tells him her father is a captive and Wayne says, “Let’s go.”

Wayne set the shot up and said “Let’s shoot it.”

“Excuse me,” said Balin, “but aren’t we going to rehearse first?”

“What’s to rehearse?” Wayne wanted to know. “You say, ‘They’ve got my father’ and I say ‘Let’s go.’ ”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m from the stage and I’m used to rehearsals.”

Wayne drew himself up to his full height, amplified by the two-inch heels on his boots. “Let me tell you something, little lady. I’ve worked with stage people before. I’ve worked with Miss Geraldine Page of the New York stage. Best goddamn part she ever had.
Hondo
.” He turned to Bill Clothier. “Shoot the rehearsal,” he ordered.

Balin said that her father was captured, Wayne said “Let’s go,” then paused and said, “Cut. Print. See how easy this is?”

Choreographing and shooting large-scale action sequences for a location western, balanced with ongoing money worries in the wake of
The Alamo
spurred Wayne’s nervous energy, not to mention his smoking. Dean Smith remembered looking at Wayne’s hand one day—the fingers were yellow from nicotine.

Smith believed that hiring Curtiz at the end of his career, and getting the old Republic hand George Sherman assigned as producer, was Wayne’s way of doing people favors. “That’s the way those guys were—loyal. If they liked you, they would go to bat for you, even if you hadn’t been doing all that well lately.”

William Clothier said that the situation was a trifle more complicated than that. “Duke and George Sherman grew up together working at Republic for $75 a week and all the horses you could ride. They were old friends. Duke didn’t understand old Mike Curtiz very well and I must say that he didn’t try very hard. On top of that, James Edward Grant, Duke’s favorite writer, wrote the story. Mike was just plain outnumbered and I felt sorry for him.”

“Duke was a terrific director as long as you did what he wanted you to do,” said Whitman. “Shooting with him was very easy, although Ina Balin worked from the Method, and that pissed him off. Before each shot, she’d dig down and get emotional and he was a little impatient. ‘Get the goddamn words out,’ he’d mutter to himself.”

Whitman found that you couldn’t help but talk politics with Wayne. The chess games went on between setups, but he didn’t play for money. “He was nice and easy to be with, and we got along great. In fact, he told John Ford, ‘You gotta use this guy.’ ” Ford never got the chance to use Whitman in a picture but the two men became friendly anyway. “I would go over and visit with him when he was sitting in bed watching baseball. His wife also liked baseball. She’d come in whenever someone got a hit.”

It was Wayne’s production to do with as he pleased, which meant it was tightly run. The crazy-eyed Jack Elam was playing one of the heavies, and won a pair of camera-trained vultures in a poker game with their handler. Elam promptly tried to up the price the vultures were being paid from $100 a day to $250.

Waiting in the hot sun for the vultures to be placed on the branch of a tree, Wayne was informed of the sudden hike—a threatened vulture no-show! He promptly strode over to Elam’s trailer and banged on the door.

“You get those goddamn birds up in that tree right now or one of their heads is gonna be sticking out of your mouth and the other head out of your asshole.”

Elam gulped. “Putting them in the tree right now, Duke, they’re moving even as we speak.”

Despite a meandering narrative,
The Comancheros
is enlivened by strong action scenes and a particularly malevolent Lee Marvin showing up half scalped. The picture is far better than most of Michael Curtiz’s late pictures, with typically splendid photography from William Clothier and propulsive music from Elmer Bernstein. The overall quality probably has to be ascribed to Wayne’s effective handling of the action sequences. (The film was partially remade a few years later as
Rio Conchos
, with Anthony Franciosa in the Stuart Whitman part and Whitman himself in the John Wayne part.)

The back-to-back western hits of
North to Alaska
and
The Comancheros
served as the matrix for the rest of Wayne’s career in the genre. With the occasional ambitious exception—
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, True Grit, The Shootist
—Wayne would focus on what the historian John McElwee calls “comfort westerns.” He would make them until he—and the genre—were on their last legs.

1961–1979

“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”

In March 1961, John Ford paid $7,500 for Dorothy Johnson’s short story “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” The story is identical in theme to the film Ford made, but differs in most particulars. For one thing, Johnson’s dialogue is much flatter—there’s no “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” here. Bert Barricune—renamed Tom Doniphon for the film—acts as a sort of fairy godfather to tenderfoot Ransom Stoddard, not only killing Liberty Valance for him, but goading him on to all his other accomplishments as well, so that Hallie, the woman who rejects Barricune for Stoddard, can be happy. Ford shifted the story so that Doniphon isn’t rejected, but instead hands off Hallie to Stoddard, because he’s a better match for her. Ford’s last great film once again involves Wayne’s character denying himself a relationship with a woman.

Ford set the film up at Paramount, but because of star salaries the days when a Ford western could be knocked off relatively cheaply were long past, which must have galled him no end. Wayne was getting $750,000 and James Stewart $300,000 against 7.5 percent of the gross apiece. (Ford was paid a comparatively minor $150,000, but he had 25 percent of the profits.) The total budget was $3.2 million—a great deal of money for a black and white (at Ford’s insistence) western made almost entirely in the studio.

Once again, Wayne serves as the film’s core, making rage and disappointment palpable, another man surrounding a dark, isolated heart. Valance can be countered only by Doniphon; both men understand how fragile the rule of law really is, albeit from different sides of the equation—they’re opposing catalysts.

In a fury about his lost future, Doniphon burns down his house and very nearly himself. The house reveals how much Doniphon wants to get away from the self-sufficiency that everybody else admires—he yearns for domesticity.

He’s an authentically tragic figure—a man who does the right thing knowing that, for him, it is the wrong thing, but does it anyway—perhaps for the greater good, perhaps because Hallie would be destroyed if Stoddard dies. He does all this, then slides into the shadows, unremembered and unmourned—the man who actually shot Liberty Valance. (In this sense, the ending is eerily similar to
The Searchers
.)

With his secret revealed, the falsity of the town and of Rance Stoddard’s bonhomie is revealed—it’s all based on a lie. In
The Searchers
and
Liberty Valance
, the men needed to master the wilderness are the same men civilization must expel, and if society is to benefit from the sacrifice, then legend must take precedence over truth.

For the most part, gallantry had been a keynote quality of Ford’s westerns ever since the beginning, but in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
the prevailing mood is overwhelming sadness. In movies as disparate as
The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine
, and
The Searchers
, Ford had nudged his characters toward a final ascendance to myth. In
Liberty Valance
, he begins with myth and methodically dismantles it on the way to a mournful irony, utterly undercutting the newspaperman’s aphorism that has become so famous.

At the heart of all the characters is powerlessness. Tom Doniphon lets Stoddard have his woman, his town, his West, while Stoddard is helpless before the psychotic Valance and the strong Doniphon. The only true agent of power is time itself, and it does terrible things—the gap between the firmly idealistic young Stoddard and the bloviating windbag he becomes is heartbreaking. Stoddard, Hallie, and Link Appleyard are all haunted, and everything is changed, changed utterly—except for the desert.

Other than Doniphon, the characters get what they thought they wanted. The result is that Doniphon is dead and everybody else is profoundly unhappy. Welcome to the twentieth century.

Ford celebrates America’s history, rituals, and communal values, but he also articulates the contradictions. Like many Ford films,
Liberty Valance
focuses on the need to subordinate individual needs to a collective good; unlike other Ford films,
Liberty Valance
questions whether the sacrifice is justified.

What makes the film possible is Wayne’s emotional size, which corresponds to the way his athlete’s body could suggest finely shaded tonalities of character and loss. Not that he thought of it that way, or was comfortable with what Ford was asking of him.

Wayne’s idea of himself always involved action, movement. He complained to Peter Bogdanovich about Ford’s habit of throwing juicy acting moments to other actors.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
was worrisome because James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard is the fulcrum of the plot and, for 99 percent of the picture, is also the man who shot Liberty Valance.

“Hawks [also] does it all the time, he just says, ‘Oh, well, Duke will get by,’ and he gives everybody else everything to do. Well, Ford was doing that with me. Thank Christ, he thought of me kicking that steak out of the guy’s hand. And then he was going to cut out the scene at the end, of me coming back to Stewart and saying, ‘Get in there, you sonofabitch.’ He said, ‘The scene isn’t important, and then you’re walking out.’ And I said, ‘Oh God, Jack.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll ask Jimmy,’ and thank Christ he asked Jimmy and Jimmy said, ‘Oh, Jesus, Jack, he needs this scene.’ . . . I’m sure he knew that he had to do the scene. . . . The kicking the steak and the last scene gave me enough strength to carry him [Wayne’s character] through the picture.”

Actors don’t always know what’s good for them. Wayne’s obliviousness to his innate power is rather touching. So is the fact that, after having his cage rattled by John Ford for more than thirty years, he was still sincerely worried that Ford would cut one of the most important scenes in the picture.

Wayne’s discomfort derived from the fact that he was surrounded by actors who tended toward the florid—Andy Devine, John Carradine, Edmond O’Brien—and Wayne’s character didn’t have center stage, even though he’s unquestionably the hero of the story. As Dan Ford points out, “James Edward Grant wouldn’t have written
Liberty Valance
that way.” Which is perhaps why, for the only time in his career, Grant was called in on the next collaboration between Wayne and Ford—to make sure that Wayne’s character stayed center stage and didn’t have to risk Lee Marvin stealing two movies in a row.

Despite the film’s self-evident qualities, Ford had entered that stage of critical overfamiliarity where every film was regarded as inferior to the ones before it.
Variety
complained that
Liberty Valance
could lose twenty minutes. Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
called it “odd,” while Ernest Callenbach in
Film Quarterly
bewilderingly called it a “sinister little fable” with “crypto-fascist” tendencies.

One Mike Herr, writing in
The New Leader
, eagerly seized an opportunity to make a fool of himself. “Ford has been making bad pictures for so long that it makes me wonder if he has ever been better than he is now. . . . I have not liked a Ford picture since
My Darling Clementine
, and that was about 20 years ago . . . It is a thoroughly boring movie; a western with less feeling for the West than one finds in any given episode of
Gunsmoke
 . . . an actionless, colorless, humorless embarrassment that is atrociously acted.”