John Wayne

New book: Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, by Nancy Schoenberger. Review in WSJ by Scott Stossel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-wayne-and-ford-co-creating-masculinity-1513368844

Nancy Schoenberger’s timing is fortuitous. As pungent effusions of “toxic masculinity” waft across America, with revelations of men behaving badly proliferating, Ms. Schoenberger, a professor of English at the College of William & Mary, has published a paean to the masculine virtues—toughness, loyalty, honesty, duty and sexual probity, among others—embodied by John Wayne. More precisely, it’s a paean to the celluloid ideal of “John Wayne,” the legendary figure created jointly by the real, corporeal John Wayne and his longtime collaborator and tormentor, the film director John Ford.

“I think some of the confusion today about masculinity stems from the fact that we no longer grow up watching Westerns,” she writes in “Wayne and Ford”; American men, she quotes Camille Paglia as saying, have been left with “no models of manhood.” Maybe so. But the reality is more complicated, and more interesting, than that.

For starters, there never was a “real” John Wayne—nor, for that matter, was there a real John Ford. Rather, there was Marion Morrison, born in 1907, a farm boy from a struggling family in Glendale, Calif., who was rechristened “John Wayne” by a Hollywood filmmaker; and there was John Martin Feeney, from Portland, Maine, who adopted “Jack Ford” as a professional name while working in film production for his brother Francis during World War I.

Ford discovered Morrison in 1928, when Morrison’s football coach at USC got him a summer job moving props for Fox Studios. Ford caught sight of the burly offensive tackle herding a flock of geese and cast him as an uncredited extra in two silent films. In 1930 Ford promoted him from prop man to stuntman for his film about life on a submarine, “Men Without Women”—which, come to think of it, could have been the title of Ms. Schoenberger’s book.

After promising to pay $75 for every dangerous stunt, the director stiffed him, issuing only $7.50. “I should have complained,” Morrison said later, but “I was still a shy, timid person, always embarrassed about speaking up for my rights.” What a delectable, cognitively dissonant notion: John Wayne—even if not yet officially John Wayne—a “shy, timid person”!

Fortunately for the bashful Morrison, the director Raoul Walsh noticed him one day carrying an overstuffed chair over his hefty right shoulder on a set at Fox Studios, shirtless in the heat. “He had a certain western hang to his shoulders,” Walsh recalled. Assigning Morrison his new moniker, Walsh cast him as the lead character in “The Big Trail” when Gary Cooper was not available, and John Wayne, movie star, was born. Or rather, as it seemed at the time, stillborn. “The Big Trail” bombed, nearly bankrupting Fox—and Ford, resentful of having had his protégé stolen by Walsh, refused to speak to Wayne for two years. This was standard operating procedure for Ford, who was forever breaking with friends and collaborators for years, even decades, before eventually making up and working with them again.

For the next nine years, Wayne toiled in “purgatory,” as Ms. Schoenberger puts it, making 58 (!) B-movies—low-budget “horse operas” aimed at young boys attending Saturday matinees. Wayne used the time to cultivate a new persona. “When I started, I knew I was no actor, and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate and studied a projection as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint, and a way of moving”—the “most beautiful walk in movies,” as director Curtis Hanson once put it.

In 1938, Ford ran into his estranged stuntman fishing off Long Beach Pier and invited him onto his boat; reconciled, the two became drinking buddies. That summer, as Ford prepared to film “Stagecoach,” his first western “talkie,” a producer proposed Gary Cooper for the lead role. But Ford worried that Cooper was too old and expensive, so he screen-tested his old prop boy, who he believed had aged out of callowness and acquired a certain physical gravitas. For the second time, Wayne ended up taking a role that could have gone to Cooper.

Released in 1939, “Stagecoach” was the first of Ford’s films to be shot in what came to be his signature location, Monument Valley, stippled with imposing rock formations along the border of Arizona and Utah. “Stagecoach” was also the beginning of a 23-film collaboration between Ford and Wayne that included, by Ms. Schoenberger’s reckoning, seven canonical westerns: “Stagecoach,” “Fort Apache” (1948), “3 Godfathers” (1948), “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949), “Rio Grande” (1950), “The Searchers” (1956) and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). These films established the genre, for a time, as the paradigmatic expression of the ideal of American masculinity.

Ms. Schoenberger identifies in each of the seven canonical films, as well as in several others, key elements of that ideal. In “Stagecoach,” Wayne’s Ringo Kid is the “good bad man,” the outlaw who protects a prostitute (and then falls in love with, and marries, her) and avenges his family’s honor by killing the men who murdered them. Ford invokes the genre’s classic dialectic between the constraints of “civilization” and the freedom that lies beyond it. The director’s sympathies, at this point, lie with the forces that civilization cannot contain: The most attractive characters are an outlaw and a prostitute, while the fussy Ladies’ Temperance Society is an object of ridicule and the superficially gallant Southern gentleman Hatfield, a Confederate veteran played by John Carradine, is a creepy cad who once shot a man in the back. “Stagecoach” ends with Ringo and his girlfriend heading off to Mexico for their projected happily ever after. But in subsequent Wayne-Ford films, women recede from the foreground, as romance gives way to homosocial bonding.

Joanne Dru, the co-star of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” said that in real life Ford “really didn’t relate to women. I’ve often thought that [Ford] had tremendous insecurities—never regarding his talent, but as a man. He surrounded himself with these big, strong bruisers.” Ford’s grandson Dan Ford observed that “he was a man’s man—hard drinking, carousing—and he enjoyed the company of men over women. That’s the way men were supposed to be in his day.” True enough. But Ford may have also preferred the company of men for other reasons, too. In her 2004 memoir, actress Maureen O’Hara, Wayne’s frequent co-star, recounted walking in on the director in an intimate embrace with a male actor.

Ford tortured Wayne. During the filming of the 1945 war film “They Were Expendable,” according to the author, “Ford constantly insulted and picked on Duke, pointing out he didn’t even know how to salute properly.” Another actor who worked on that film recalled that Ford’s bullying made “a quivering pulp” out of Wayne. Yet out of this stew of sadism, closeted homosexuality and antediluvian notions of machismo came some great art. “The Searchers,” released in 1956, has been ranked by the American Film Institute as the greatest western ever and is reckoned by many to be one of the top 10 or 20 movies of all time. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards has deeper, and darker, depths than any character he had played previously.

To my mind, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” may be his the finest Western Ford made. Wayne delivers a sadness-tinged performance as the rancher and gunman Tom Doniphon—despite being relentlessly abused by Ford during the making of the film. Pouring salt on a suppurating wound, Ford would say to the Air Force veteran Jimmy Stewart, within earshot of Wayne, “How many times did you risk your life over Germany, Jimmy?” and then turn to Wayne, who had not fought in World War II, and ask: “How rich did you get while Jimmy was risking his life?”

As everyone who has seen the film knows (spoiler alert!), the man who shot and killed the evil Liberty Valance was not the man who became famous for it—Sen. Ranse Stoddard (Stewart)—but rather Doniphon, who saved Stoddard’s life despite having lost his beloved Hallie ( Vera Miles ) to Stoddard. Stewart’s character represents a less macho and arguably more enlightened form of masculinity than Doniphon, but Stoddard comes to be plagued by the knowledge that his reputation is based on a lie. Years later, he confesses the entire story to a reporter for the local newspaper, and the editor declines to publish it—saying, in one of American film’s most famous lines, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

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