John Wayne: The Life and Legend (54 page)

My father, Harry Carey Sr., did that a lot in the movies when Duke was a kid in Glendale, California. It was Duke’s tribute. He’d spent many a dime just to see that. He stared at my mother for a

couple of beats, then turned, walking away into loneliness across the red sand. The Jorgensen cabin door slowly closes.

It’s a daring shot. As cinematographer Winton Hoch observed, “We had a vertical doorway and a horizontal frame. But here again, you’re bold and you gamble and it is a shot that Jack wanted. He had his reasons.” More subtly, Wayne’s walk is different in the last shot. He no longer moves with his purposeful, graceful stride; as the door closes, he’s almost staggering, aimless. For the first time, Ethan gives evidence of not knowing where he’s going.

Wayne always had a thrilling command of physical rhetoric—the one-handed cocking of the rifle in
Stagecoach
, walking malevolently through the longhorns at the climax of
Red River
. But his work in
The
Searchers
is even more expressive: when Ethan sees the burning cabin of his brother, Ford cuts to a low-angle shot of Ethan on his horse. Wayne unholsters his rifle by flinging it behind him, the scabbard flying off behind the horse, then brings the rifle back, all in one fluid motion. It’s a moment that takes longer to describe than it does to witness—the piercing beauty that movies were made for.

Some of these movements were Ford’s (lifting Debbie over his head); some were Wayne’s (holding his elbow and ambling away as the door closes). That Wayne was capable of carrying off these bravura moments is his actor’s glory—he had been what Brecht would call an “epic actor” before, and would be again, but the greatness of this performance is in going all the way with such a largely indefensible human being, who embodies what D. H. Lawrence referred to as the essential American soul: “harsh, isolate, stoic and a killer.”

Besides his rage, Ethan has intelligence, faith, unexpected flashes of generosity, loyalty, purpose, audacity, skill. That’s the way he’s written, but Wayne brings a touch of something else: the hope of redemption. And Ford and Wayne brilliantly suggest the stifled sexual desire at the core of his racist obsession.

In the past Wayne had gotten close to the power he summons here, but either the script or the director had let him down. But in
The Searchers,
his life as a man coalesces around his gifts as an actor: the residual bitterness he carried from growing up in a brooding, recriminatory household; the years of working in films he felt were degrading, that led to him being ignored, scorned, or condescended to, of being sloughed off by the industry he respected. And, perhaps, guilt over his own mistakes. Here he summons his rage and pours it into a vehicle that can contain it—barely.

Wayne never puts any comforting space between the character and the actor. He never asks for our sympathy. Wayne
understands
this distressed and distressing loner. Ethan has seen a lot of ugliness—in the breaking of the land, in the war, in the acts of the Indians, in himself. But he stops just short of the one unforgivable act, and in the final image, embodies resignation as well as a plaintive loneliness—the same towering power that brings Debbie home also makes a domestic connection impossible.

Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards personify the peculiarly American resistance to settling into the soft lap of family or community—in another time or place they might be outliers, living off the grid. But the genius of Wayne is that they don’t seem completely alien to us; rather, they’re part of us.

Here, at his best, Wayne is something rare: a fearless actor exposing wildly varied aspects of himself with skill and energy. That so many people persisted in their sneering dismissal of Wayne’s acting ability is their shame—had they no eyes? As the critic David Overbey once observed, the naive and romantic Ringo Kid of
Stagecoach
is a long way from the sentimental and socially integrated Captain Brittles of
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
; the existential exile of
Hondo
has little in common with the disillusioned Tom Doniphon of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
. Likewise, the bitter Tom Dunson of
Red River
is a long way from the life-embracing gusto of Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit
. All different men, with entirely different psychological foundations and behaviors.

There is always a sense with most commentators on Wayne, even the favorable ones, that his politics are regarded as an embarrassment in relation to the power of his acting. But Wayne’s acting is not a thing apart; it is, rather, constantly informed by his politics. Wayne’s personal stubbornness and the authority of his belief system are the foundations for the obstinance essential to Dunson, Edwards, and Doniphon.

Wayne is the anti-Brando—the latter’s knack for the unconventional choice, and his welcoming of the potential chaos of the improvisational moment indicate his deeply antiauthoritarian bent as much as ten labored biographies. As early as
The
Big Trail,
Wayne’s character almost always has a sure and certain knowledge of the right thing to do, and is indifferent to or impatient with the squabbling that goes on all around him. Indeed, the central dramatic conflict of the last half of Wayne’s career was between his character’s rigid belief system and a society that rejects it.

“Wayne was never—despite the endlessly repeated words of his eulogists—a vision of what Americans dreamed themselves to be,” wrote the critic Terry Curtis Fox. “He was a vision of what Americans wished their past had been. He was a man who had no place in the modern, psychological world, and every bit of his performing presence told us that. He needed age for this conflict to become apparent.”

Wayne did all this without words. Indeed, words got in the way because they were too specific. There was always something going on behind Wayne’s assurance, something suggested by his physical grace, but it was never explicit. “He could
suggest
a past,” wrote Fox, “—through a glance, a turning of the head, a shying away of the body—but he would never
reveal
one.”

Years later, musing about Ethan Edwards, Wayne touchingly theorized that the film’s power derived from the point at which Ford chose to end it. He even speculated with optimism about what happened after the door closes: “I don’t see any reason why Ethan couldn’t have snapped out of it. . . . I’m sure that he went off and got on his horse and went into town and had a few belts, and somebody said, ‘That land your brother homesteaded is getting close to—you know where the old burned-out building is?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, the railroad is right close to there now and it’s worth some money. Why don’t you go out there and start growing some wheat or put up some corrals and make a siding there and buy cattle and sell them.’ Somehow or another a man as strong as that man . . . isn’t going to quit.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

The Searchers
is Wayne’s greatest acting achievement. If Brando’s triumphs were the external life of Stanley Kowalski and the internal lives of Terry Malloy and Vito Corleone, then Wayne combines all of them into Ethan Edwards. The sheer size of the part, and Wayne’s portrayal of it, also signaled a quantum change in his screen dynamic. Ethan Edwards is so implacable and menacing that he’s too large for any genre but the western at its most mythical.

In so many ways,
The Searchers
is a summation for its director, for its star, and for the western. The question hanging in the air for Wayne, as well as for the genre he represented, was simple: What now?

In November 1955, Wayne wrote Ford a particularly chatty letter. Pappy was relaxing in Hawaii after finishing the editing on
The Searchers,
and Wayne had just seen the picture for the first time, calling it “just plain wonderful,” although he wasn’t crazy about Max Steiner’s score. He thought the picture featured great performances and had a raw brutality but his character never became what he dreaded creeping into his portrayals—petty or mean.

Wayne had a great contractual opportunity at Warners, and another at RKO, but if he signed up with them he wouldn’t be able to do the picture Ford was planning at MGM about the aviator/screenwriter Frank Wead (
The Wings of Eagles
). “It’s more important for me to be in a picture with you, career-wise—for my health—and for my mental relief.”

Being a movie star was hard enough, but Wayne was also doing quality work as a producer. In later years, Batjac became essentially a service organization for John Wayne, but in the 1950s the company made quality pictures that didn’t star the owner.

Take, for instance,
Seven Men from Now
, a great little western directed by Budd Boetticher and written by Burt Kennedy, who was brought to Batjac by Paul Fix.

Seven Men from Now
was a far superior script to everything Wayne was making around the same time, with the single exception of
The Searchers
, but Wayne farmed it out anyway. He was just finishing the Ford picture and didn’t want to do another western about revenge.

Initially, the script went to Gary Cooper, but Cooper passed. At that point, Wayne developed a strange enthusiasm for Richard Egan, telling Jack Warner “this is the most manly guy I’ve seen on the screen since Gable.” Fox wanted $50,000 for Egan’s services, and Wayne felt it was a good deal, if only because in five years the picture could be rereleased when Egan was an even bigger star.

But Jack Warner had a better eye for leading men than Wayne and downplayed Egan. He thought that
Seven Men from Now
had the potential to be another
High Noon
“if you can get the right lead” and counseled a cool head until the right ingredients were assembled. The script was finally accepted by Randolph Scott.

“Duke [gave] me a beautiful script called
Seven Men from Now
,” said Budd Boetticher. “I read 35 pages of it at lunch and I had never read anything this good. I walked back and John Ford and a very handsome young man and John Wayne were sitting on Mr. Ford’s couch. I was allowed to call [Ford] Jack; everybody else called him Jesus or Coach. Terrifying man. I walked on the set and said, ‘Duke this is the best thing I’ve read in my life. I want to do it.’

“He said, ‘Well, you couldn’t have read much of it in an hour for lunch.’ I said, ‘I read 35 pages, I don’t have to see another thing and I would give anything in the world to meet this author.’ He said, ‘Mr. Burt Kennedy, Mr. Budd Boetticher.’ ” It was the beginning of a superior group of westerns written by Kennedy, directed by Boetticher, and starring Scott. As Burt Kennedy remembered, “I wrote ’em for Duke, but Randy made ’em. They pretty much shot the scripts. Sometimes things would happen, someone would hit their head or do something by mistake and they’d leave it in and call it a director’s touch.”

For the leading lady, Wayne hired Gail Russell. She hadn’t worked in several years—there had been some arrests for drunk driving—although she still looked lovely. If Boetticher was initially resistant, he was soon won over. “I think [Wayne] was more fond of Gail Russell than any of them,” Boetticher said. “And I think Duke had a crush on her. I think she was the one leading lady that he really cared about in anything but a professional way.”

Russell behaved during production, but got terribly drunk at the wrap party and disappeared. Budd Boetticher believed that Andy McLaglen was in love with her; McLaglen spent three days traveling around Hollywood trying to find her. By the time she was located, Russell’s stomach was so swollen it looked like she’d swallowed a football.
Seven Men from Now
was Gail Russell’s last movie; she died in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, in an apartment surrounded by empty liquor bottles.

At Batjac, Burt Kennedy learned the business under the loose tutelage of Jimmy Grant, who was once again in Wayne’s good graces. “I stole so much from Jimmy that people thought he stole from me.” Kennedy started off at Batjac for close to nothing and rose to $1,000 a week. “After I had a few successes under my belt, Duke would loan me out to Warners and to Fox, and Duke and I would split the overage. It worked out fine.

“Duke . . . always said he cut his throat because he didn’t make [
Seven Men from Now
]. Despite the fact he gave Budd two big breaks, he and Budd weren’t buddies. If Duke liked you, he could be rough with you. If he didn’t like you, he’d dismiss you. He learned everything he knew from Ford. Duke spent his whole career getting even with directors as revenge for the tough times that Ford gave him.”

Boetticher and Kennedy remembered Randolph Scott as a tremendous gentleman with a dry sense of humor. And rich. Very rich. “One day at Lone Pine I walked out to get on horseback and exercise,” remembered Boetticher. “Randy had a rocking chair that he didn’t need. . . . He was rocking back and forth reading
The Wall Street Journal.
And I walked out and he said, ‘Budd, the most terrible thing happened to me.’ And I said, ‘What happened Randy?’ He said, ‘Three of my new oil wells blew out.’ I said, ‘How many came in?’ He said, ‘Eleven. But damn it, you shouldn’t lose an oil well with today’s technology.’ ”

Burt Kennedy said, “[Randolph Scott] was wonderful for Budd to work with because Randy liked the way he came off the screen in Budd’s pictures—as a tough guy, which he wasn’t.” The later Boetticher-Scott pictures were made for budgets of around $400,000 to $500,000. “They were fourteen-day pictures,” said Kennedy. “I wrote them to the money, for very few interiors because interiors cost money. You have to rent space and decorate the sets, and that was money we didn’t have.”

But
Seven Men from Now
was made under Batjac’s deal at Warners and they could spend more money. It cost $719,000 and amassed world rentals of $1.6 million—a decent profit-making venture. Around this time, Batjac also started up a subsidiary corporation called Romina that produced a couple of pictures for United Artists, among them
China Doll,
directed by Frank Borzage—another one of the great old-timers that clustered around Wayne hoping for a last hurrah. But Borzage hadn’t made a picture in ten years and
China Doll
was fairly expensive—$1.14 million for the negative, prints, and advertising, with world rentals of only $860,592. “Borzage had been hanging around the studio for a long time,” said Bill Clothier. “I think Duke had promised him something. It was a lousy picture, but it was a pleasure working with [Borzage].”