American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (29 page)

At the last minute, Chata—who was jealous of all Wayne’s leading ladies, but especially O’Hara, who she believed wanted to steal Wayne away from her—decided to take herself and Wayne’s four kids, Michael, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda, to Ireland for the duration of the shoot. She knew he wouldn’t say no to her if his children came along (they appear in one scene sitting in a car during the Innisfree horse race). She was right, he couldn’t, but he was not at all happy about the situation.

The Quiet Man,
with all its boozy Irish sentimentality, was about aging. Ford was fifty-five when he made it; Wayne, forty-four. Both looked older than their years, prematurely aged by sailing in the sun, drink, the pressures of the film business, and difficult marriages.
The Quiet Man
was certainly Ford’s most personal, if not the best film of his career. Wayne’s character’s name is Sean Thornton (Sean is the Irish version of John). The action is set in the fictitious village of Innisfree, the name inspired by a Yeats poem.

The Quiet Man,
despite its comic fistfight climax, is not at all a violent film, or a somber one. It is, essentially, a love story between Sean, who has come home to the land where he was born, and Mary Kate (O’Hara), whom he falls in love with. Sean soon runs into trouble with her brother, Red Will (Victor McLaglen), when he refuses to pay his sister’s dowry. Mary Kate takes her anger out on Sean—no dowry means no lovemaking. Sean is humiliated by Kate’s refusal to let him sleep in her bed and the whole town knowing it, and that leads to the big fistfight, the “final shoot-out” that settles everything.

During production, it was widely rumored that Ford and O’Hara were continuing their supposed love affair that had begun during
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
and that when they had a lovers’ quarrel it interrupted shooting for a few days. O’Hara disputes this in her memoir, saying that Ford had lapsed into a depression during the film and that was the real reason the production stalled. Her version sounds truer. Ford stayed in bed during the halt, surrounded by O’Hara, Wayne, and Bond, begging them to not let him get drunk again.

She also denies another, more prevalent rumor that had spread throughout Hollywood, that despite the presence of his wife and children, she was having an affair with Wayne: “Duke and I were never involved romantically. We were never lovers . . . I never saw the Duke with his boots off . . . while we were shooting
The Quiet Man,
a story was released in the United States that Duke and I were fooling around on the set . . . the article said an anonymous source present on the set provided the details. I was furious and stormed into John Ford’s office, demanding to know, ‘Who would do such a terrible thing?’ The old man answered without a blink, ‘I did. It’ll sell more tickets.’ ”

AFTER A SLOW START, THE
film began to gather steam toward its two most famous love scenes, the first of which was shot in the rain in the cemetery. Thunder frightens Mary Kate and she runs under an arch. Sean takes off his coat and wraps it around her. Then they kiss, the most erotic scene in all of Wayne’s pictures. O’Hara: “I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne. Duke’s presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal hell and fire, it was exciting and thrilling . . . so during those moments of tenderness, when the lovemaking was about to begin, audiences saw for a half second that he had finally tamed me—but only for that half second.”

The second was the windblown embrace during which Wayne passionately kisses O’Hara after which she slaps him (it was actually filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood using two airplane propellers to create the dramatic wind that blows open the door).

When Ford delivered his final cut of 129 minutes, Yates blew a gasket. He had instructed Ford to keep it under two hours, to ensure two showings a night in theaters. At one of the first screenings of the film, just as the fistfight was about to begin, the screen went white. Yates jumped up and ran to the projection room to see what the problem was. No problem, Ford said, who was standing next to the projector with a pair of scissors. Ford told Yates he had cut the last twenty-nine minutes to bring the film down to the studio head’s limit.

The fight footage was restored, and the film released at 129 minutes.

BACK HOME, WAYNE TOOK CHATA
away for a quick vacation to Acapulco, but as soon as they unpacked their bags, they began to fight. Chata left before Wayne did, and when he returned to Los Angeles, Chata told him she wanted a divorce. An angry Wayne agreed to a first-step formal separation. They chose their sixth anniversary to make the announcement to the public. “We had a disagreement,” Wayne told reporters. “She consulted well-known divorce-attorney-to-the-stars Jerry Giesler, but after when I came home and talked to her, I thought everything would be straightened out. I still hope and believe that it will be.” A contrite Wayne added, “I blame myself for our troubles. I devoted too much time to business and not enough to making a home for Esperanza and me.”

But everyone close to the couple knew the real reason the marriage was failing was the constant and, to Wayne, unbearable presence of Chata’s mother, who was once again living with them. He was once again fed up with having her around the house. Not long after they announced their separation, trying to reconcile, Wayne met with Chata and told her, “Choose between your mother and me.” Chata chose her mother.

A month later, Wayne announced that he and Chata had reconciled. It happened when Wayne had gone to San Francisco on business and injured his left ear. He claimed he had fallen off a chair. Wayne came home and into Chata’s bed. He forgave her, she forgave him, she cared for his ear, he nibbled hers, and all was peaceful again, but only for a few days. They erupted over something neither one could remember, and within days both consulted their lawyers.

That same week in January 1952, Wayne was again named as the most popular actor in movies.

ON MARCH 3, 1952,
TIME
magazine put him on the cover, in suit and tie, floating around his head drawings of cowboys, Monument Valley, and a giant cash register. The headline under Wayne’s image had a double meaning, the conservative weekly acknowledging Wayne’s abilities as an actor, and his reputation as a force behind the ongoing blacklist:
Let the bad ’uns beware.

Inside, the writing could not have been more effusive: “To millions of moviegoers and televiewers, in whose private lives good & evil often were dreary, inconclusive little wars, John Wayne is as reassuring as George Washington’s face on a series E bond . . .” To explain this, the magazine coyly critiqued what it was about Wayne that made him such a granite symbol of America by pointing out what he wasn’t: “Why does the U.S. public like him better than Betty Grable, Bing Crosby or Martin and Lewis? His legs are not as pretty as Betty’s; his voice is not as sweet as Bing’s; he is nowhere near as funny as Martin & Lewis. And he is not the best of Hollywood’s actors. In fact, it is an open question whether he can act at all.”

After, when asked about
Time
’s description of his abilities, Wayne repeated his familiar refrain: “How often do I gotta tell you guys that I don’t act at all—I re-act.” He insisted that was what always saved him: “If it’s a bad scene, the loudmouth gets the blame. I like basic emotion stuff. Nuances are out of my line. If I start acting phony on the screen, you start looking at me instead of feeling with me. When I do a scene, I want to react as John Wayne.” Later on, he added sincerity as a reason for his success as an actor: “I got nothin’ to sell but sincerity, and I been sellin’ it like the blazes ever since I started.”

THE QUIET MAN PREMIERED ON
July 21, 1952, to mixed reviews—the
New York Times
dismissed it as a “carefree fable of Irish charm and perversity.”
The New Yorker,
which had never had much use for Ford’s films, said it looked as if the director “had fallen into a vat of treacle”—and great box-office sales, grossing $3.2 million in its initial domestic release, and nearly twice that internationally. It undersored Wayne’s enduring popularity with the public and helped remove some but not all of the political tarnish that had settled on Ford’s once golden career.

THE 1952 ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY
was held March 19, 1953, at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood and at NBC’s Century Theatre in New York City, where part of the NBC telecast came from. Bob Hope was the host in Los Angeles, Conrad Nagel in New York.
The Quiet Man
was nominated for seven Oscars, including John Ford (Best Director), Best Picture—John Ford, Merian C. Cooper, and Republic, the first Best Picture nomination in Republic’s history—Hoch and Archie Stout for Best Cinematography, Victor McLaglen (Best Supporting Actor), Best Art Direction (Frank Hotaling, John McCarthy Jr., Charles S. Thompson), Best Sound (Republic Sound/Daniel Bloomberg), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Frank Nugent). Notably absent from the list were John Wayne for Best Actor and Maureen O’Hara for Best Actress.
¹⁰³

That made it an especially galling night for Wayne, who had agreed to accept either or both the awards for John Ford if he won, after he told Wayne he either didn’t feel well enough to attend (or simply couldn’t stand to sit through the ceremonies; he never liked the idea of competitive awards for films). Wayne had been incensed over the Best Actor nominations, not just because he wasn’t included in the list, but because Gary Cooper was, for
High Noon,
a film Wayne detested on every level—cinematic, political, script, story, theme, direction. What made it worse was that it was a role Wayne had turned down before it went to Cooper, the other tall, strong, good-looking, conservative Hollywood all-American screen hero who spoke softly in his movies and carried a big gun.

COOPER’S NOMINATION WAS THE CULMINATION
of their longtime professional rivalry, which through the years had included women (Dietrich) and films (
The Virginian, The Big Trail,
and especially
High Noon
). Wayne was plainly furious that this film was so lauded by audiences and critics alike. Here is what Wayne said about
High Noon
(and
All the King’s Men
), two decades after the fact, the smoke still visible coming off his heated words: “I knew two fellas who really did things that were detrimental to our way of life. One of them was Carl Foreman, the guy who wrote the screenplay for
High Noon,
and the other was Robert Rossen, the one who made the picture about Huey Long,
All the King’s Men . . . High Noon
was even worse. Everybody says
High Noon
is a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. So it’s got everything going for it. In that picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to the church and asks for help and the guys go, ‘Oh well, oh gee.’ And the women stand up and say, ‘You’re rats. You’re rats.’ So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. That last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having helped run Foreman out of this country . . .”
¹⁰⁴

However, three years later, in 1974, in an interview he gave to BBC4, when asked about his participation in the blacklist, Wayne said this: “We were not blacklisting . . . we didn’t name anybody. We stayed completely out of it and said ‘We are Americans. If anybody wants to join us, that’s fine. We gave no names out to anybody at any time, ever . . . the radical Liberals were going to take over our industry . . . Larry Parks admitted to being a Commie and went on working.”

Either way, no one ever said
High Noon
was great only because of the Tiomkin score (which
was
great) and the catchy, compelling plotline theme song sung by Tex Ritter, the winner of the Oscar for Best Song, any more than they praised John Ford’s stylish use of American western folk music and the Sons of the Pioneers, who sang many of them in his films. The “guys” in the church don’t go “Oh well, oh gee.” What they do debate is whether or not a gunfight will be good for the town’s future, while the “folks up north” were watching. As for Cooper stepping on the badge, no one, including Wayne, objected when Clint Eastwood did it at the end of Don Siegel’s 1971
Dirty Harry
. Callahan was hailed as a hero for rejecting the hypocrisy of the system, essentially the same hypocrisy that prevents the town from helping Will Kane.

Wayne’s vision was clearly blinded as much by professional jealousy as personal politics. Besides, the two films shared several storytelling aspects with
Stagecoach
. Both the Ringo Kid and Kane are tall, lean, tough, and as soft-spoken. Both come up against ruthless villains to settle old debts. Both have women who try to stop them from going through with the showdown—Claire Trevor the reformed prostitute in
Stagecoach
, Grace Kelly the virginal Quaker in
High Noon
. And both end the movie on a horse and buggy to ride their way into a future made better by having settled the moral bills of their past. And, oddly enough, both Wayne and Cooper were real-life lovers of Marlene Dietrich (which might account for some of Wayne’s fury at losing to Cooper).

The differences between the two films are mostly stylistic. Ben Hecht and Dudley Nichols’s script is every bit as good as Carl Foreman’s, perhaps better, certainly with a greater scope. And Ford’s direction of Wayne charges the performance as he surrounds his actor with the grandeur of the Old West, often putting his camera at eye level or above Wayne, to place him in the context of the film’s mise-en-scène, and to underscore Ford’s invisible godlike superiority over his visible, mortal star. Ford’s camera looks down on Wayne, in a sense, diminishing him, keeping him human. Wayne’s youth is what makes his performance so poignant against the backdrop of the millennia of Monument Valley. Zinnemann shot Cooper mostly from below, to give him a stature that strengthens him and evens the playing field against the Miller gang. Youth is Ford’s strength in
Stagecoach
; age drives the tension in Zinnemann’s
High Noon
.