John Wayne: The Life and Legend (35 page)

Agar never got over his feeling of indebtedness, and for good reason. Wayne cast him as late as
Chisum
in 1970, long after Agar had stopped working in anything but Z-list science fiction films. Agar would call him every Christmas to wish him a happy holiday.

After production moved to the Selznick studio for interiors, Ford hosted lunches in his office. One day the group included Wayne, Robert Parrish—a member of Ford’s unit during the war—Merian Cooper, and Robert Wise, a friend of both Ford’s and Parrish’s. Ford dominated the conversation with tales of his and Parrish’s wartime exploits, which was a trifle embarrassing because neither Wayne nor Wise had served. It would not be the only time Ford would point out Wayne’s absence from combat.

Fort Apache
is the basic template for the cavalry western, mostly idealized until the end. It’s a fine, measured film, with some of the same respect for duty and responsibility as
They Were Expendable
, but with the addition of a dense sense of the social weave necessary for survival on an isolated outpost.

The film has provided difficulties for various critics for various reasons. John Gregory Dunne wrote eloquently about the cavalry westerns: “Ford was Irish, as I am, and among the Irish, sentimentality is often what passes for feelings, especially carnal feelings. Sex is so absent in Ford’s Monument Valley that his desert forts seem almost monastic, his troopers castrati without even a passing interest in autoeroticism. His was basically an army without women, an army without whores . . . an oxymoron.”

Passing over the impossibility of suggesting autoeroticism in a movie made in 1947, this is the sort of thing that can happen when people whose primary orientation is literary fiction write about the movies. Dunne’s point certainly isn’t true of
Fort Apache
—the soldiers’ wives are a part of the film’s emotional current—or
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, where Joanne Dru’s presence inflames the passions of Harry Carey Jr. and John Agar. And the driving motivation of
Rio Grande
is the curdled love between John Wayne and his wife, played by Maureen O’Hara.

What Dunne seems to have meant is that in
Fort Apache
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
there’s no sexual charge that needs to be taken seriously; the women are either spayed by domesticity or provoke easily dismissable crushes from manifestly immature brats. Dunne thought that all this was because Ford had been an officer in the Navy and had an overly romantic officer’s view of troops.

Dunne makes Ford sound much less complicated than he actually was. It was Ford’s intuitive genius to realize that despite their friendship, Henry Fonda and John Wayne were complete opposites—not just politically, but as actors and human beings. Fonda knew his own emotional limitations; he once told a friend that he didn’t understand stage fright at all. “I can’t wait to get on stage. I can’t wait to become somebody else.”

Ford utilized Fonda’s rigidity—which translated as integrity in
Young Mr. Lincoln,
as cold anger in
The Grapes of Wrath
—and made him a martinet in
Fort Apache
. And as was usually the case with Ford—always excepting
The Searchers
—he used Wayne’s gregariousness to make him an expansive earth father, comfortable with himself and his role in life.

Fonda’s Colonel Owen Thursday is an unthinking military ideologue, responding with predictable knee-jerk reaction to whatever stimuli present themselves. Wayne’s Kirby York is an adult, with an adult mind attuned to moral shades of gray. The film’s tensions—between duty and impulse, between knowledge and intuition, between peace and war, between fact and legend—are a function of men in a complex situation forced to make complex decisions. Black and white is the stuff of movies, not life, and
Fort Apache
is unusually true to life.

The climax of
Fort Apache
involves Thursday’s arrogance leading to the slaughter of him and his command. The film ends with the legendary binary scene where Ford acknowledges that the Army’s handling of the Indians was unjust, unfair, and dishonorable, while allowing Kirby York to assert that Thursday was a noble man, worthy of the tradition the cavalry embodies. The roots of glory may be tainted, but the celebration of Thursday’s faulty character and the men that followed him is presented with absolute sincerity.

This is more ambiguity than audiences—or most writers—are used to in the movies.

Years later, a writer asked Wayne if Kirby York completely believed the things he says about Thursday. “No, I think the character was saying that because the newspapermen were asking him things. Now he has to say something pleasant about this guy. He can’t say, ‘Why, the stupid son of a bitch . . . got all those guys killed and made a liar out of me to the Indians.’ He can’t say that because it would be bad for morale. It wouldn’t do anybody any good for me to belittle the guy. . . . It’s about the least provocative thing that he could say about that man, one way or the other.”

The dramatic and moral tension in
Fort Apache
works because of the equal but opposing poles of the film’s leading men. “Henry Fonda could do anything you asked him to do as an actor, but he was a cold, removed man,” said Mark Rydell, who directed both Fonda and Wayne. “He was not, for instance, a very good father. He had an access to his unconscious when he was acting that he didn’t have in day-to-day life. He executed anything professional without problems, but socially he was difficult. He didn’t want to reveal himself, didn’t want to expose who he really was. He came out of Omaha, the ultimate white-bread place, but I always felt his talent was Jewish. His personality and his heritage were WASP, but his talent was Jewish.”

Fonda’s participation in the Ford-Wayne cabal from the mid-1930s on was as close as he ever got to being one of the boys. Jane Fonda remembered that as a little girl she would occasionally come down for breakfast in the morning to find Wayne having a cup of coffee with his friend Hank.

Fonda enjoyed recalling a vacation involving himself, Wayne, and a few others on the
Araner
where they all ended up in Mazatlán. They were drinking and spotted an American couple who turned out to be on their honeymoon. Wayne invited the couple to sit with them. “At this point, someone brought in a boa constrictor,” Fonda said, seemingly introducing a 180 degree bend in the story, but not really. The snake, it seems, was a pet of the hotel.

Wayne’s vocabulary was seldom leashed, and at that point he uttered the word “Fuck.” He then realized what he’d said in front of the young woman and tried to recoup by saying, “Shit, I’m sorry.” This struck Fonda as the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and he went into hysterics that led to him passing out.

At that point, Wayne paid someone to drape the boa constrictor over Fonda, who promptly woke up and discovered a huge snake wrapped around him. What Wayne and company didn’t know was that Fonda didn’t share their fear of snakes. “Duke, look what I got,” said Fonda as he stood up holding the snake out toward Wayne.

The last thing Fonda saw that night was Wayne disappearing across the lobby and into the street with amazing speed.

Fonda would edge away from Wayne over politics—Fonda was always an unreconstructed New Deal liberal—and he turned his back on Ford after a final collaboration on
Mister Roberts
that collapsed when Ford began drinking on the set. Fonda and Ford barely spoke for the rest of the director’s life, but Fonda and Wayne always maintained a mutual affection.

Coming back into the fold for
Fort Apache
was George O’Brien, who had been a great friend of Ford’s in the silent days at Fox. RKO dropped O’Brien before the war, and after the war his career stalled. Marguerite, O’Brien’s wife and Wayne’s leading lady in
The Big Trail
, called Ford as he was about to go into production on
Fort Apache
.

“Jack, you’ve got to do something for George.”

“I wouldn’t do anything for the son of a bitch,” replied Ford, who was still nursing his anger at O’Brien for leaving a drunken Ford behind during a 1931 trip to Manila.

She then played her ace: “Jack, if you don’t, it will be the ruination of a good Catholic family.”

It was a mark of her desperation, because Marguerite Churchill O’Brien loathed Ford (“A son of a bitch. Drunk, hateful, vicious.”). But then her son Darcy believed that the only person in Hollywood she had liked was Will Rogers.

Ford came through and offered O’Brien a nice supporting part. The two immediately fell back into their old relationship, which suited both men. “I spent two weeks with Wayne and his family at Catalina,” remembered Darcy. “Ford was there on his yacht, the
Araner
. Pedro Armendáriz and his kid were there. It may have been the happiest two weeks of my childhood. We dived for abalone, and the area was totally unspoiled. Wayne was great to me. It was idyllic. And the most idyllic evening was at our house in Brentwood, which had a six-foot-high fireplace. Wayne was there, Ford was there, Harry Carey Jr., Stan Jones, and a few others. Stan Jones sang ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky.’ I was eight or nine. It was my idea of heaven.”

1. Bruce Cabot, who played the heavy, asserted that “[Wayne] finally had to take over as director. He didn’t take the credit, but he did the directing.” Wayne would confirm Cabot’s story, but never on the record.

2. Lela Rogers had been given a job in story development at RKO to make her daughter happy. When that job was taken away from her, she called Hoover to say that “RKO people who handle the reviewing of stories and the selecting of vehicles for their stars are either Communist or fellow travelers and are allied in a common group against Ginger.”

3. Ford’s name would appear and disappear from the roster of the Alliance’s membership and management several times without apparent cause. So far as can be determined, he never spoke about his own political drift to the right from his mid- and late 1930s position as a New Deal Democrat. By 1950, he was regarded by both liberal and centrist peers in the Directors Guild as conservative, although nowhere near as extreme as DeMille and some others.

Although Wayne was riding high creatively as well as commercially, these were actually difficult years for him. Besides the nonstop turbulence of his marriage to Chata, he increasingly felt that Republic wasn’t being honest with him. Wayne was determined to make
The Alamo
—a project Herbert Yates regarded with profound misgivings. For one thing, it would be expensive; for another, Wayne wanted to direct the picture himself.

“I was never sick in my life,” Wayne remembered about this period. “But I had a six month bout with an ulcer. That was when I was a pawn in everybody’s hands, working for Yates at Republic Studio, and they were loaning me out to any studio for almost any kind of picture, and I was doing it just because they’d promised if I did, they’d produce and I could direct and star in
The Alamo
. Then they stalled.

“It was awful. Actors aren’t supposed to have a brain in their heads, but I had enough to know if I was going to stay in this business, I’d better start moving up the ladder. That’s when I got the ulcer. The doctors said to do what I was told and I’d be over it in six months. So I did everything they said—drank cream, ate baby food, brown-bagged it to work and finally, on the last day of the six months, I bought a couple of bottles of tequila and drank them. Then I knew I was cured.”

Wayne remembered the ulcer as taking place when he was in his early thirties, but the connection to
The Alamo
firmly places it in the late 1940s, when he was in his early forties.

The move into producing, the ambitions for directing, were all a conscious attempt to build a foundation that didn’t rely on acting. “I think I may be getting past it to keep playing the romantic lead,” he had told Anthony Quinn when they were making a terrible picture at RKO called
Tycoon.
“I’m losing my goddamned hair, and I’m the wrong side of 40 now.”

His only alternative was to venture deeper into production—the creative end of filmmaking.