John Wayne: The Life and Legend (53 page)

This offer sent Charles Feldman into a tizzy and he advised Wayne to give it serious thought. Feldman told Wayne to talk to David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and Walt Disney. But Wayne didn’t feel comfortable with television. A few years later, he would turn down another lucrative TV offer from Allied Artists to host a
John Wayne Theater
—seventy-eight half hours. “I don’t think the price is right, nor that I have the time,” he grumbled.

Out of friendship for Arness, Wayne offered to introduce the first episode of
Gunsmoke
, and on September 10, 1955, he was as good as his word: “Good Evening. My name’s Wayne. Some of you may have seen me before. I hope so, I’ve been kicking around Hollywood a long time. I’ve made a lot of pictures out here—all kinds, and some of them have been westerns. And that’s what I’m here to tell you about tonight, a western. A new television show called
Gunsmoke
. No, I’m not in it—I wish I were though, because I think it’s the best thing of its kind that’s come along, and I hope you’ll agree with me. It’s honest, it’s adult, it’s realistic. Now when I first heard about the show
Gunsmoke
, I knew there was only one man to play it—James Arness. He’s a young fella and may be new to some of you, but I’ve worked with him and I predict he’ll be a big star. So you might as well get used to him, like you’ve had to get used to me. And now I’m proud to present my friend Jim Arness in
Gunsmoke
.”

It was a typically generous Wayne gesture for a friend, one that imparted added value to a series that had not yet earned a reputation. Arness played Sheriff Matt Dillon for the next twenty years. A month later, in October, Wayne shot a half hour TV episode, entitled “Rookie of the Year,” in five days, for a show called
The Screen Directors Playhouse.
He got $5,000 for the job, although he would undoubtedly have passed it up had anybody but John Ford been directing. Ward Bond and Patrick Wayne were also featured in the TV show, which Ford handled with his customary dispatch: ten to twenty setups a day, usually finishing between 2:30 and four in the afternoon.

“Rookie of the Year” was a straight favor for Pappy Ford, but for his next film with Ford,
The Searchers
, Wayne was getting a good payday. He received $250,000 plus 10 percent of the rentals after Warners recouped their negative cost.

Ford and screenwriter Frank Nugent made a full roster of changes in Alan Le May’s novel, many aimed at streamlining the cast and narrative. In the novel, Ethan’s name is Amos, there are two boys in the massacred family instead of one, the kidnapped Debbie falls in love with Marty, and it is not blinded Comanches who wander amongst the winds after death, but scalped Comanches. And one other thing: Amos dies in the end.

From the first day of production on
The Searchers
, Wayne assumed a different attitude. Normally, he was the most amiable of co-workers, but Ethan Edwards required him to access the darkest part of his character, and he couldn’t turn it on and off. “My father was able to become his character,” said his son Patrick, who played a small part in the picture. “During filming, I was in the presence of Ethan Edwards, not my father. When it was over, my father was back.” Likewise, Harry Carey Jr. remembered that Wayne “had a blanket over him in that film, a mood that was pretty strong and he carried it around with him 24/7. He didn’t joke around at all on
The Searchers
, and Duke had a good sense of humor.”

The picture had been shooting for a couple of weeks when Natalie Wood reported to the location in Monument Valley. She didn’t have any scenes scheduled for her first day, so she spent it sunbathing, appreciably darkening her color. When John Ford saw her, he was angry—he wanted to emphasize the lightness of her skin as a contrast with the Indians—and he let her know he was angry as only Ford could.

That he was arguably the greatest American director impressed the young—seventeen years—actress not at all. “Go shit in your hat!” she told him, just before storming off.

That night, there was a knock on her hotel room door.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Mr. Ford.”

The door opened slightly, just wide enough to admit a long arm, at the end of which was a hand holding Ford’s rumpled hat. He turned it upside down and shook it, just to show there was no shit in evidence. Ford and Wood patched up their differences, although she was never terribly enamored of him. Her experience with Wayne was considerably warmer. “She thought he was a very nice man,” said her husband, Robert Wagner.

Throughout the shoot, Ford streamlined Frank Nugent’s script, trimming exposition, cutting dialogue, eliminating explanations. In the novel, the center of the story is Martin Pawley; Amos Edwards has no particular desire or even intention to kill his niece, but Ford and Nugent introduced racial rage as the central motivation of the search, and they also made Martin a “half-breed” so as to make Ethan’s unease with miscegenation central in the narrative.

The Searchers
was previewed in San Francisco on December 3, 1955, on a double bill with
Rebel Without a Cause
(there were giants in those days . . . ). Jack Warner’s assistant Walter MacEwen thought that the picture, although “brutal in spots to the point of being daring,” was a great success and reported back to his boss how it went:

is a very big picture and was previewed to an enthusiastic audience. . . . I don’t believe we lost more than 2 or 3 people who probably just had to go . . . the picture has a great pictorial beauty which came through with great clarity on a very big screen, no doubt aided by the fact that it was photographed on the double-size negative of VistaVision. . . .

Wayne has never been better, in a rugged, sometimes cruel role, and the audience is with him all the way from his opening shots. . . . Wayne’s name on the main title got a tremendous hand.

The whole picture has a real feeling of bigness and honesty, as if you were actually witnessing how the pioneers lived on the frontier. . . . I do not believe that there are any major deletions to be made.

The initial reviews would be respectful but not overly enthusiastic.
Variety
wrote that
The Searchers
was “an exciting western on the grand scale” but also complained that “there is a feeling that
The Searchers
could have been so much more. It appears overlong and repetitious at 119 minutes.” There was one exception to the prevailing response. William Weaver, the critic for the
Motion Picture Herald
, wrote, “
The Searchers
is one of the great ones—one of the greatest of the great pictures of the American West,” and went on to compare it to
The Covered Wagon
and
Shane
and said that Ethan Edwards was “possibly the best all-around Wayne role he’s ever had.”

Wayne went on the road to sell
The Searchers
. He spent two and a half frantic days in Chicago, humping it from 7:45 in the morning until eleven at night, doing everything from radio shows to luncheons for the movie editors at the four Chicago dailies, to accepting the first poppy of the annual Poppy Day Association from the Rojieck triplets.

The Searchers
went on to considerable financial success, earning $6.9 million (as of 1959) against a cost of $2.5 million. But 1959’s profits have paled as the film has gone on to become a perennial, revered by critics and audiences alike for its vast formal beauty, its uncompromising treatment of a main character ravaged by racism, and the fearless intimacy between actor and character.

Ethan Edwards is a mysterious figure. He’s carrying a lot of money, which is never explained, and the Reverend (Ward Bond) says of him somewhat obliquely that Ethan “fits a lot of descriptions.” Mainly, Ethan identifies with the thing he hates: Comanches.

The conflict in the movie, which is far more important than the actual plot, in which Ethan figures as an agent of disruption as well as reconciliation, is not between Ethan and society, but between Ethan and Ethan. Ethan has to be respected, but he can never be understood. His fury is not exactly unmotivated, but it is irrational. You can, as Garry Wills does, point to Ethan’s loss of the woman he loves to his brother, loss in the war, loss of his comrades, loss of the woman he loves to an Indian he hates. Yet none of that quite explains the blast furnace of rage and guilt that Wayne unleashes—unafraid, unapologetic.

Ethan is a racist, openly contemptuous of Martin Pawley for being part Cherokee. Not only that, he’s a murderous racist, committed to killing his own niece because she has become the squaw of the Indian chief Scar, who killed Debbie’s father and mother—the woman Ethan clearly loved.

Yet the roots of Ethan’s racism are unexplained. It’s clear that he hated Indians long before things became personal. Ethan just
is
. This mystery at the heart of the character’s darkness forces the audience to sit up and wonder, to make its own best guess about what comes next, and about just what Ethan is capable of.

In his malevolent determination to kill his niece because she has become a contaminated creature, as well as in the fury that Wayne expresses, largely without dialogue, the actor goes further than he ever had before or ever would again, and in the process he brings something new to his persona.

As Glenn Frankel wrote, “This was the heart of Wayne’s art. He came on direct, angry, and unbending, daring you to test him and prepared to deposit your ass on the ground with a punch to the jaw. Yet there was a certain sadness to the whole enterprise. Wayne’s character seemed to be constantly looking back, searching for something—a way of life, a code of honor—that had ceased to exist.”

And he also brought something new to the western, a genre that seamlessly encompasses all the great American themes—the trek west, the shifting balance between individual independence and communal alliance, and the challenges of technology: the stagecoach, the telegraph, the railroad. It’s a genre about ceaseless change.

Ford and Wayne introduce a particularly virulent racism into the equation, not as something to be vanquished (Delmer Daves’s
Broken Arrow
), but as something to be assimilated. They also access a profound truth: Ethan is an outsider who can never be anything but an outsider, the sort of hard man mandatory for the taming of a nation or the waging of a war, but who cannot live in the aftermath, in a calmed environment.

As one critic noted, “Ford goes very far with Ethan. . . . A central character who spews racist invective at every opportunity, who mutilates the bodies of the dead . . . and [scalps] an adversary, even though he did not ‘earn’ that warrior right by killing him himself, who slaughters buffalo in an insane rage just to deprive Indians of food, and who is out to murder a child?”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the hero.

Ford knew he could get away with it because Ethan was being played by John Wayne; he knew that Wayne had the strength to play profound psychological weakness—
The Searchers
is a Conradian tale in which an outward quest is really a metaphor for inner definition.

Ford and Wayne invite the audience to take Ethan as an extension of Hondo, as
the
John Wayne type—a completely competent loner of utter integrity, the only man capable of accomplishing the necessary task. As Randy Roberts and James Olson wrote of Ford’s landscapes and Ethan’s emotions, “Such landscapes and feelings trivialize religion, language and culture, because strength matters more than faith, action more than words, individual men more than women and families.” If it wasn’t such an insistent part of the fabric of the film, the audience could glide by the character’s murderous racism. But they can’t, because the dramatic movement of
The Searchers
is dictated by hate.

In the middle and latter stages of Wayne’s career, his characters’ fierce single-mindedness is often indicated by his refusal of the erotic: Tom Dunson holds himself aloof from emotional involvement in
Red River
, offering a woman a chance to bear his child only as a financial transaction; Ethan Edwards refuses to indulge his repressed passion for his brother’s wife in
The Searchers;
Tom Doniphon renounces the woman he loves in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
because another man is better for her. Among all the stars of his generation, only Wayne could consistently get away with this recurring motif of renunciation because only Wayne could believably play men who only needed themselves.

Ford emphasizes Ethan’s vehemence, his harshness, his inscrutability. At times, Ethan is like some creature from the id, a walking representation of the enormous cost of repression. And at the film’s conclusion, as Ethan lifts Debbie over his head—a moment not in Frank Nugent’s script—duplicating a gesture from the first moments of the film, he emphasizes the tidal pull of family. As he cradles her like a child, he murmurs, “Let’s go home, Debbie,” and the film moves toward reconciliation and toward its legendary ending.

Ethan’s symbolic aspect might be why Ford has the other characters move around Ethan in the film’s final scene as if he isn’t there—Ethan has become a ghost in a darkness he can’t dispel. No one thanks him, no one acknowledges his existence. Now that he’s completed the task only he could accomplish, now that the darkness is gone, so is Ethan, left to wander in the winds.

Harry Carey Jr. was on the set when Ford shot the ending.

The big man standing alone in the doorway, the red desert stretching out behind him. The other players in the scene, which included my mother, had passed by the camera, a joyous moment. Debbie was home at last, brought there in the arms of the man in the doorway. Uncle Jack told Duke that he was to look and then walk away, but just before he turned, he saw my mother, the widow of his all-time hero, standing behind the camera. It was natural as taking a breath. Duke raised his left hand, reached across his chest and grabbed his right arm at the elbow.