Wayne and Ford

Chapter 2 - The Good Bad Man

"Dammit. The son of a bitch looked like a man."—Raoul Walsh on John Wayne

"To live outside the law you must be honest."—Bob Dylan

THE BIG BREAK

Director John Ford—born John Martin Feeney and known as Sean O’Fearna (in the Gaelic), Pappy, Coach, or Jack Ford—elevated John Wayne from property boy, bit actor, and occasional stuntman to leading man in his classic 1939 film Stagecoach, launching the strapping actor on a career that would eventually make him the number one movie star in the world. But it wasn’t Ford who gave John “Duke” Wayne his first starring role in pictures. It was Raoul Walsh, in a Western epic released in 1930 called The Big Trail. Wayne was well suited to play the new Adam, a frontiersman confronting an untamed, unspoiled wilderness with courage and optimism. He wore his essential goodness on his sleeve, and the characters around him often sought to exploit it. More significantly, the audience responded to it. In The Big Trail, he didn’t need to wear the signature white hat, a staple of the early Hollywood Western for children, to show he was the good guy. His innocence, his courage, his resolve, his loyalty to a slain friend, and his tenderness to a feisty young woman on the wagon train he is guiding through the wilderness immediately signal a hero to root for. The fact that he has to be persuaded to take on the task also helps define him: the true hero is a reluctant hero.

That “remarkable quality of innocence,” as film director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has noted, defined John Wayne right from the start and immediately made him a charismatic, and sympathetic, presence on-screen despite his lack of theatrical experience and film technique. His performance got Ford’s attention and made him think that the handsome, well-mannered, oversized, somewhat shy property boy—good mostly for moving scenery and occasional stunt work—might turn out to be an actor after all. But it would take another nine years before Ford gave John Wayne a chance by casting him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. When later asked why he waited so long before offering Wayne a leading role, Ford said that he had kept his eye on Duke all along but had waited because he felt that “Duke wasn’t ready. He had to develop his skills as an actor. . . . I wanted some pain written on his face to offset the innocence.”

*

Marion Morrison’s football coach at USC, Howard Jones, had gotten several of his athletes summer jobs moving scenery andprops at Fox and, later, working as extras in John Ford’s Salute, about an Army-Navy football game at Annapolis. Morrison roundedup his fellow football players, including future sometime rival Ward Bond, who would become a memorable character actor and a reliable member of the John Ford Stock Company, as well as a longtime friend of both Ford’s and Wayne’s. But Ford first met Duke Morrison when Duke showed up to work on the Fox Studios lot in the summer of 1928, herding a flock of geese on the set of Ford’s silent picture Mother Machree, a sentimental paean to Irish immigrants. The director was a tall, pipe-smoking, redheaded, heavy-featured man in spectacles who was surprisingly graceful on his feet. At thirty-three years of age, he would win his first Best Director Academy Award in 1936 for The Informer, a haunting, shadows-and-fog drama about a hapless man, played by the larger-than-life, barrel-chested Victor McLaglen, who informs against his friend in the Irish Republican Army. Ford had directed over sixty silent films by the time he met Duke—learning everything he could from, and finally surpassing, his mentors: his older brother Frank Ford and the silent Western star Harry Carey—and he had established a reputation as a crusty, quick-tempered Irishman inspiring fear and adoration in equal measure. Six feet tall and a former high school football player himself, Ford was not a man to be crossed. He took one look at the even larger—six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound—callow youth who stood off camera shyly corralling his flock of geese and instantly sized him up.

In romantic comedies, the hero and heroine “meet cute” and usually start out as adversaries. In male-bonding movies, the two buddies usually begin with a fight, testing each other’s mettle, before becoming friends. So it happened with Ford and Wayne. Upon learning that Wayne was a USC football player, Ford tackled him to the ground. But Wayne got up and repositioned himself, taking Ford crashing down to the ground in one sudden move. The entire crew held its breath, waiting for the explosion of wrath. Surprisingly, it didn’t come. Instead, Ford got up and calmly walked away. Duke—still Marion Morrison—had made an impression. Ford ended up casting Duke as an uncredited extra in Mother Machree and as an uncredited officer in another 1928 silent film, Four Sons, before returning him to the status of third assistant property man.

Years later, Ford recalled, "I met Duke—he was very bright and energetic and I realized at the time he was hooked on movies. . . . I got him a job as third assistant prop man . . . [he’s] the man who does the manual labor. And he was good; I remember one incident. I was doing a picture called Four Sons and there’s a scene where a woman receives word about her son, it’s a very dramatic scene. She’s sitting alone in this room; in the back there’s a big open door. We tried a couple of times, the third time she was great. In the back[ground] there’s this big gangling Wayne sweeping the leaves off the floor; halfway through he looked in, gave a gasp of horror, dropped his broom and started running for the gate. . . . I said, that’s a natural mistake, I know you’re new to the business. Forget it! We’ll dothe scene again and it’ll be better. He was very chagrined."

Duke recalled, however, that he was dragged back to Ford, who “bent me over and kicked me in the ass.” Despite being embarrassed by his experiences on Four Sons and Mother Machree, Wayne developed a keen admiration of the director that would last his entire life. He recalled, “I had no ambition to be an actor, I had no desire for it.” What he wanted was “to be like Jack Ford! My whole set up was that he was my mentor and my ideal! I think that deep down inside, he’s one of the greatest human beings that I have ever known. And I’ve known quite a few people in my life. And as a consequence I took more interest in the business.”

By that time, his interest in pursuing a law career, his course of study at USC, had waned considerably. Wayne recalled that just being around Pappy Ford made him think seriously about his future: "When I went back to school that year, I looked around, and the kids that I knew who were going to take Law aroundthe time that I would be taking it, I’d see one, and I’d think, well his father has a law firm, another one, his uncle has one . . . and whether or not I’m brighter, I’ll end up writing their briefs for them! I’ll be in the back room for ten years before I can even get started in the business, or else I’ll have to hang up a shingle and take the kind of legal work I wouldn’t be interested in. So for this reason, it really started preying on me."

It was just as well, because an injury derailed his football career and scholarship, and neither he nor his struggling family had the funds to cover his USC tuition.

Still not convinced that he wanted to be an actor, Duke realized he could make a contribution to Ford’s movies beyond being a third assistant propman. He had the strength and athletic ability to do stunt work, and his opportunity came quickly on Ford’s 1930 film Men Without Women, a tale of male camaraderie and danger that takes place entirely aboard a submarine, combining, incidentally, two of Ford’s lifelong interests: the sea, and the fraternity of men living and working with other men, which would become a major theme in Ford’s oeuvre. Duke Wayne recalled the challenge of doing stunt work on the picture: "We were between San Diego and Catalina, and I was up on the midship deck, and I had on a blue sweater and a watch cap. We were using a mine sweeper for a camera ship. . . . It was a gray day, and [Ford] was shooting into backlight, and two destroyers went by belching that black smoke, and it was just a beautiful scene. . . . There were big swells and steely gray water. . . . It was scary looking water. . . . [T]he navy boat is a big boat and they don’t handle quite as easy."

Ford had reportedly promised Duke $75 for every dangerous stunt he performed, such as diving into those steely gray waters off Catalina, which he did repeatedly. But Ford never made good his offer; instead of the $450 he expected in addition to his salary of $35 per week, Duke was only given an additional $7.50 for risking his life. Duke later said, “I should have complained . . . [but] I was still a shy, timid person, always embarrassed about speaking up for my rights.” So any ambitions Wayne had for acting took second place behind his stunt work, until The Big Trail that same year.

*

Like John Ford, the director Raoul Walsh was the son of Irish immigrants from back east whose fifty-year career in Hollywood began as an actor and assistant director in silent films. His acting career ended after a freak road accident when a jackrabbit crashed into his windshield on location in Arizona, taking out his left eye. When the doctors offered him a glass eye, he turned it down, grousing that he’d just lose it in a poker game and opting for a rakish black eye patch instead. Ford, plagued by weak eyesight, also adopted a black eye patch later in life—possibly in imitation of Walsh—which might have then influenced John Wayne’s Academy Award–winning role as Rooster Cogburn in Henry Hathaway’s True Grit. Charles Portis’s brilliant, comedic novel simply describes Cogburn as having an empty eye socket, unadorned by any eye patch, black or otherwise, suggesting that the touch was an homage of Wayne’s devising.

The disfigurement ruled Walsh out of appearing in pictures but focused his mind on directing them. Also like Ford, Walsh was tough, prolific, and brilliant, directing sixty films including the classics The Big Trail, High Sierra, and White Heat. In 1929, Walsh set out to find a lead actor to replace studio favorite Gary Cooper, who wasn’t available for The Big Trail, his ambitious, wide-screen Western epic. He happened to notice a strapping, fresh-faced, good-looking young man moving props at Fox Studios. He was struck by the youth’s broad frame and the ease with which he carried an overstuffed chair hoisted lightly over one shoulder.

By the time Raoul Walsh laid eyes on Duke Morrison, the only on-screen experience Morrison had was as a bit player and stuntman in a handful of Ford’s movies; his real value to the Ford Stock Company was still his brawn behind the scenes. When Walsh saw Morrison easily hoisting that chair above his head, he grasped the young man’s potential, giving him a lead role in The Big Trail as Breck Coleman, a trapper out to avenge the murder of a friend who becomes a scout for a wagon train heading west on what would become the Oregon Trail. Walsh later recalled, “He had a good height. He was bare breasted. It was a hot day. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was a good looking boy. . . . He had a certain western hang to his shoulders. . . . [A] certain way of holding yourself and walking is typical of a real westerner and he had it.” His youth and relative inexperience suited him well for the role of the reluctant hero who agrees to undertake the quest on behalf of his murdered friend, instead of seeking glory for himself.

It was Walsh, not Ford, who changed Marion Morrison’s name to John Wayne, inspired in part by Revolutionary War hero “Mad” Anthony Wayne, though Duke apparently took the name “John” out of deference to John Ford, whom he hero-worshipped from the start. Many years later, when Ford’s grandson, Dan Ford, asked him if Wayne borrowed the name from him, Ford answered, “Yeah. He wanted a name sort of similar to mine. Which is flattering.”

Because John Wayne reached his greatest fame as a mature, hardened, barrel-chested man with thinning hair, it’s rather amazing to see him as the lithe, cheerful, and boyishly handsome twenty-three-year-old Breck Coleman in Walsh’s epic. Dressed in buckskins and wearing moccasins, he embodies America’s “natural man,” like Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans, or Huck Finn rafting down the Mississippi with the runaway slave Jim, or Davy Crockett in his iconic raccoon-tailed hat. Taught by Indians how to survive in the wilderness, Coleman even delivers a poetic soliloquy about the deep pleasures of sleeping in the open air under a radiant moon. He undertakes the arduous and dangerous journey not out of a need to prove himself or to seek glory but simply because he has to.

In his first major role, John Wayne played opposite a cast of seasoned stage actors, including Tyrone Power Sr., the beautiful Marguerite Churchill, and Ian Keith. Though he lacks technique and training, his naturalness on-screen outshines his fellow actors; the gracefulness of his large frame is already apparent, as are his effortless strength and, when called upon, a fierce resolve in his eyes. Yet he’s also a sweet and playful lover; in an early scene, in one swift motion he lifts a would-be sweetheart off a piano bench, twirls her in the air, and catches her in his arms, planting a playful kiss on her lips. His grace and economy of motion—his sheer joy of movement—are a pleasure to watch. And because The Big Trail is a sweeping saga of America’s western migration, filmed on location in stunning landscapes, John Wayne’s persona as a great American hero—indeed, an embodiment of America itself—begins with Raoul Walsh’s magnificent film.

Too bad it failed at the box office.

Fox’s expensive investment in Grandeur CinemaScope techniques, which required refitting theaters with special equipment, and its steep production costs including two thousand extras, location shoots in four states, and a legion of horses, oxen, and Conestoga wagons, came close to bankrupting the studio. The Big Trail was the Cleopatra, the Heaven’s Gate, of its day—a financial disaster wreaked by the weight of its own ambition. After a memorable debut in a leading role, the newly christened John Wayne—still known to his friends by his childhood nickname Duke—failed to have his contract picked up by Fox, and he was relegated to appearing in B Westerns for Poverty Row studios like Mascot, Monogram, and Republic, mechanically churned out for the “kiddie trade.” He’d hoped that his former mentor, John Ford, might use him in a real movie, for grown-ups, but that, so far, was not to be.

Ford didn’t yet consider him leading role material. “I like[d] Duke’s style from the very first time I met him,” he later said. “I could see that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work.” So Ford wasn’t happy when Walsh poached Duke right from under his nose, and he was put out with Wayne for having defected, even if it meant a lead role in a major film. Ford considered it an act of betrayal. He had wanted to bring Wayne along slowly, and he felt the young man wasn’t ready. So he refused to even speak to the hopeful actor for two years, though Duke tried to re-ingratiate himself. While he didn’t blame Ford’s cold shoulder on his appearing in The Big Trail, he did recall, "I remember he was evidently mad at me at one time . . . when I first started with him as an actor, and I quit working in production, and I said hello to him one morning and he didn’t answer me, and I thought, well, he had something else on his mind. Next day I said, 'hi, Coach,' and it looked like a deliberate pass. Third day I got right in front of him and I said, 'Pappy, hello.' And he didn’t speak to me! So, I didn’t bother him again, for two years."

Nor did he appear in any other major film after The Big Trail for nearly a decade. His next film was Girls Demand Excitement for Fox in 1931, in which he played a college basketball player, again opposite Marguerite Churchill but in a cheaply produced film he knew was terrible. Even his old friends at USC razzed him about it when the film was released. He then played an architect in Three Girls Lost, also for Fox that same year, opposite Loretta Young. Duke had dated the actress’s younger sister Polly Ann in his first year at USC, so he knew Loretta and enjoyed working with her. But these performances were underwhelming, and the good reviews for his work in The Big Trail faded.