Authors: Glenn Frankel
The Searchers (57 page)
Dan Ford, grandson of the late director, granted me complete access to the John Ford Papers at Lilly Library at Indiana University and consented to interviews and countless email consultations. John Ford was a very private and difficult man, but he was so proud of his grandson's military service as an Army officer in Vietnam that he cooperated with Dan's book project,
Pappy
. The interviews Dan conducted in the 1970s with his grandfather, friends, and coworkers, along with the personal and professional papers Dan retrieved from his grandfather's attic, constitute the invaluable primary material for anyone researching John Ford's life and work.
Dan LeMay was generous in granting me an interview and access to his own research into his father's life and times, even accompanying me to review Alan LeMay's papers at the UCLA library. My thanks as well to Dan's wife Mary Ann and his younger sister Mollie. One of the highlights of my work was the day in June 2009 we spent journeying to the various LeMay homesteads in the Los Angeles area, culminating in a trip to the Toyopa Drive house in Pacific Palisades and the office where Alan LeMay wrote
The Searchers
.
The late Kevin Nugent, son of the screenplay writer Frank S. Nugent, shared memories of his father and devoted mother, including his father's unpublished diary, and lent me an obscure screenwriting book in which Frank Nugent discussed writing the opening to
The Searchers
. It has never been cited before.
Although we never met in person, I owe a great debt to Marylou Whitney and her husband, John Hendrickson, who granted me exclusive access to the papers of Marylou's late husband, C. V. Whitney. When I couldn't travel to Saratoga Springs, New York, Marylou and John arranged to have the papers shipped to me in Palo Alto. This was an extraordinary act of trust and generosity. Thanks, too, to Karrie Steuer of the Whitney staff and Barbara Lombardo, managing editor of the
Saratogian
.
Speaking of trust and generosity, Gregory E. Reed went through boxes of negatives of photos taken by his late father, Allen Reed, an extraordinarily talented freelance photographer who had complete access to the
Searchers
set in Monument Valley for a special issue of
Arizona Highways
. Allen's evocative photos dominated that issue, but Greg also discovered several wonderful shots that have never been published before.
Leith Adams, Harry Carey Jr. and his wife, Marilyn, Nick Redman, Pippa Scott, Charles Silver, and Patrick Wayne all shared their memories and insights. Ford biographer Scott Eyman generously shared his notes of interviews with Jean Nugent and Marylou Whitney; and Joseph McBride, author of the masterful
Searching for John Ford
, sat for two long interviews and corresponded with me over a three-year period. Kevin Stoehr at Boston University offered sources and encouragement.
The folks at Goulding's Lodge in Monument Valley maintain Ford's legacy there with great care and arranged for my travel around the Valley in 2008. Special thanks to the manager, Julie Viramontes, and her staff. David Rowell, deputy editor at the
Washington Post Magazine
, paid for the trip and introduced me to Peter McBride, whose fabulous photos also grace these pages.
Struggling authors need places to stay, and Karl Vick, Rick Levine and Janet Gold, Tom and Judy Wilson, and Donna Lindsay all provided guest beds. Fellow travelers Tom Frail, Bob Thompson, and Sharon Waxman offered good advice and moral support.
Margaret Edds, David Hoffman, Joseph McBride, and David Rowell read large parts of the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. But I bear full responsibility for the accuracy of the material herein.
My thanks to my agent, Gail Ross, of the Yoon Ross Literary Agency, once again for her careful and conscientious stewardship. Howard Yoon and my friend Steve Luxenberg helped me craft the book proposal. At Bloomsbury, Anton Mueller, Rachel Mannheimer, Patti Ratchford, Laura Phillips, Lisa Silverman, and David Chesanow were thoughtful collaborators and good shepherds.
I have had the great fortune of teaching journalism at two fine institutions of higher learning, both of which provided me with funding and wonderful research facilities during the five years I worked on this project. At Stanford University, my thanks to Professor James Fishkin and Barbara Kataoka of the Department of Communication for their funding and logistical support; to Charlotte Lau, my research assistant; to Jim Kent and Ben Stone at Green Library, and to Joel Brinkley, Jim Campbell, Ted Glasser and Fred Turner for their friendship and moral support.
At the University of Texas at Austin, my thanks to Professor Roderick Hart, Dean of the College of Communication; to researchers Elissa Nelson and Tamir Kalifa, and to Janice Henderson, Sonia Krempin-Reyes, and Phillip Salazar on the staff at the School of Journalism. UT has many superb libraries and archives, and I relied on two: the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, under the able leadership of Don Carlton; and the Harry Ransom Center under Tom Staley's inspired direction. My thanks to both of them and their dedicated staffs, especially Cynthia DuBois.
Finally, as always, to my family: my wonderful children, Abra and Paul Frankel and Margo Brush, and sons-in-law Matt Ipri and Danny Brush; my late father, Herbert Frankel, who encouraged my work even in the last months of his life; and most of all to my wife, Betsyellen Yeager, who accompanied me to Monument Valley, Hollywood, Texas and Oklahoma, watched more John Wayne movies than she ever thought possible, and gave me the moral and emotional support to see it through to a satisfying ending.
Allen Reed, courtesy Gregory Reed (originally appeared in
Arizona Highways
).
A. Zeese & Co., Prints and Photographs Collection, Briscoe Center, di_08021.
Joseph E. Taulman Collection, Briscoe Center, di_08019.
Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
William S. Soule Indian Photographs Collection, Briscoe Center, di_05437.
William S. Soule Indian Photographs Collection, Briscoe Center, di_08013.
Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Scotford, Kansas City, Joseph E. Taulman Collection, Briscoe Center, di_08018.
Edward Bates, Joseph E. Taulman Collection, Briscoe Center, di_08020u.
Courtesy the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
Courtesy Peter McBride (originally appeared in the
Washington Post Magazine
, Sept. 14, 2008).
Allen Reed, courtesy Gregory Reed.
Allen Reed, courtesy Gregory Reed.
Lilly Library and Warner Brothers.
Lilly Library and Warner Brothers.
This book uses a broad range of primary and secondary sources, including archives, interviews, newspaper articles, scholarly works, memoirs, Comanche oral tradition, and visits to historical sites. It covers events that span a century and three quarters and took place over a broad expanse of the southwestern United States, from Texas to Hollywood. Some of the research stops were to long-standing repositories of essential materialsâfor example, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which is home to the Joseph and Araminta Taulman Collection, the foremost archive of documents and photos for the Parker family. It includes many unpublished and unannotated documents, including the handwritten notebook and letters of Susan Parker St. John and similar treasures from Araminta Taulman. There is a web of museums, libraries, and archival collections in southwest Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle that also house a host of treasures, many of them overlapping thanks to the miracle of modern photocopying: the Fort Sill Museum and Archives and the Museum of the Great Plains, both in Lawton, Oklahoma; the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Oklahoma State Historical Society in Oklahoma City, and the University of Oklahoma Library in Norman. But virtually every public library in southwest Oklahoma and northern Texas, including the Panhandle, has a file of documents, letters, or photographs covering the years of Comanche-Texan wars and their aftermath. Bill Neeley's files, which he accumulated in researching his book
The Last Comanche Chief
, are an invaluable source of primary documents and are available at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
When it comes to Quanah Parker and the Comanches, the Kiowa Indian agency files, available on microfilm, are an invaluable source of official documents about life on the reservation. The National ArchivesâSouthwest Region in Fort Worth is a repository for these files. The Works Progress Administration Indian-Pioneer Papers were an ambitious and systematic attempt in the 1930s to interview everyone of
prominence or interest concerning the Indian agency and its residents. These, too, are available on microfilm in many locations, and the Western History Collection of the University of Oklahoma Library in Norman has a complete set. The Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society are also an excellent source of primary materials.
Chronicles of Oklahoma
is a tireless and thorough collection of articles, interviews, and memoirs of the state and its residents, all of it now available online.
Comanche oral tradition, as handed down from generation to generation by members of the extended Parker family, is neither more nor less accurate than many published accounts. It is a reliable gauge of the reverence for Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker that is such an important part of the spiritual life and identity of the Parker clan. Another excellent source of oral lore is
Comanche Ethnology
, a collection of the field notes of a team of anthropologists who interviewed eighteen Comanche elders in the 1930s. These field notes also contributed to two valuable anthropological studies:
Comanches: Lords of the South Plains
by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, and Thomas W. Kavanagh's
The Comanches: A History
.
Finally, two books that are required reading for anyone interested in Comanche history are
The Comanches: Destruction of a People
, T. R. Fehrenbach's magisterial and lyrical classic, now much criticized by modern historians for its imperial assumptions; and Pekka Hämäläinen's
The Comanche Empire
, a fresh interpretation of the meaning and the power of the Comanche nation, its allies and enemies.
Two writers who made essential contributions to
The Searchers
have been largely forgotten, but their lives and work can be traced in archives. The Alan LeMay Papers at UCLA contain twenty-three boxes of the novelist's research and letters, donated after his death by his widow, Arlene. His son Dan also has many important documents and letters, which he used for his own biography of his father's life, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has a file of correspondence between LeMay and his book editor, Evan Thomas. Screenwriter Frank S. Nugent's widow, Jean, donated his papers to Boston University. There is no archive for Patrick Ford, John Ford's only son and a key architect of the film. The only interview with him that I am aware of was conducted by James D'Arc at Brigham Young University in April 1979, and it is an invaluable source for anyone seeking to understand this somewhat tragic figure.
The
Searchers
has no dedicated archive, and John Ford was famously averse to committing his thoughts to paper. But the John Ford Papers at
the Lilly Library at Indiana University contain the film notes that John and Pat Ford prepared as they worked out the concepts and logistics of the movie. The notes are not comprehensiveâfor example, there no notes between John Ford and Frank Nugentâbut they are the best account we have of John Ford's creative process going into the film shoot.
The other essential collection is the C. V. Whitney papers, which are the property of the Whitney family and which I was privileged to be the first researcher to examine. They offer a road map to Whitney's thinking and ambitions, and his constant interventions with Merian C. Cooper in an effort to achieve the film he keenly wanted.
Other useful archival materials can be found in the Ronald L. Davis Collection at Southern Methodist University, which contains transcripts of the interviews Davis conducted with Ford's and Wayne's friends and colleagues for his thoroughly researched biographies of the two men; and in the Ransom Center's John Wayne Papers, which contain the files of author Maurice Zolotow for a Wayne autobiography,
My Kingdom Is a Horse
, that the two men worked on but never completed. Zolotow went on to write
Shooting Star
, his own biography of Wayne, using the material. There are also intriguing shards of documents about
The Searchers
in the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California and at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
