The Searchers

Introduction: Pappy (Hollywood, 1954)

I
Cynthia Ann

1. The Girl (Parker's Fort, 1836)

2. The Captives (Comancheria, 1836)

3. The Uncle (Texas, 1837–52)

4. The Rescue (Pease River, 1860)

5. The Prisoner (Texas, 1861–71)

II
Quanah

6. The Warrior (Comancheria, 1865–71)

7. The Surrender (Comancheria, 1874–75)

8. The Go-between (Fort Sill, 1875–86)

9. The Chief (Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1887–92)

10. Mother and Son (Cache, Oklahoma, 1892–1911)

11. The Legend (Oklahoma and Texas, 1911–52)

III
Alan Lemay

12. The Author (Hollywood, 1952)

13. The Novel (Pacific Palisades, California, 1953)

IV
Pappy and the Duke

14. The Director (Hollywood, 1954)

15. The Actor (Hollywood, 1954)

16. The Production (Hollywood, 1955)

17. The Valley, Part One (Monument Valley, June 1955)

18. The Valley, Part Two (Monument Valley, June–July 1955)

19. The Studio (Hollywood, July–August 1955)

20. The Movie (Hollywood, 1956)

21. The Legacy (Hollywood, 1956–2010)

Epilogue (Quanah, Texas, June 2011)

Acknowledgments

Photograph Credits

Note on Sources

Notes

Bibliography

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

For Betsyellen Yeager
Everyday

 

Myths are neither true nor untrue, but the product and process of man's yearning. As such, they're the most primal thing bonding us to other people. Yet the phenomenon is much more than a snake feeding on its own tail. Myths gather momentum because they provide hope.

—CYNTHIA BUCHANAN, “COME HOME, JOHN WAYNE, AND SPEAK FOR US”

The most disastrous moment of John Ford's illustrious Hollywood career took place at the U.S. Navy base on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean in September 1954. The legendary film director was starting work on
Mister Roberts
, the movie version of the fabulously successful Broadway play, starring his old friend Henry Fonda. It should have been a great project: directing a comedy about Ford's beloved Navy with one of his favorite stars, surrounded by his informal stock company of familiar supporting actors and film crew members, with a script by his trusted screenwriter, Frank S. Nugent. What could go wrong?

Almost everything, as it turned out. The biggest problem, surprisingly, was Fonda. Ford had gone to bat for him against the studio executives at Warner Brothers. They had wanted a younger, sexier, and more potent box office attraction like Marlon Brando or William Holden for the title role of Doug Roberts, a young Navy officer consigned to a backwater cargo ship during World War Two and desperate to see combat before the war ends. But Ford had insisted that Fonda, despite being forty-nine, owned the part after playing it to great acclaim for four years on Broadway, and even Jack Warner felt compelled to agree. Fonda was grateful; in a “Dear Pappy” letter he expressed his appreciation that he was working again with the complicated genius who had directed him in
Young Mr. Lincoln
,
Drums Along the Mohawk
,
The Grapes of Wrath
,
My Darling Clementine
,
The Fugitive
, and
Fort Apache
. “
It's so absolutely right
that you are going to do the picture,” Fonda gushed.

Nonetheless, from the moment they got to the location, the two men clashed. Fonda didn't like Nugent's script, felt it was neither as funny nor as nuanced as the original play, and didn't care for the excessive
physical comedy and coarse broad strokes of Ford's direction. The Navy opened its gates to the film company: no one in uniform dared to say no to retired admiral John Ford, a decorated World War Two veteran. But on the first day of shooting at Midway, Fonda was disturbed by the way Ford rushed through the scenes and discomfited costar William Powell, who had trouble adjusting to Ford's swift, one-take-and-let's-move-on pace. Ford, who dominated his film sets the way Louis XIV presided over the court at Versailles, could not help but notice Fonda's worried expression.

At the end of the day, producer Leland Hayward arranged for a clear-the-air meeting in Ford's room in the bachelor officers' quarters. Ford was sprawled on a chaise longue with a tall drink in his hand. The conversation was short.

“I understand you're not happy with the work,” said Ford.

Fonda tried to be diplomatic. “
Pappy, you know I love you
,” Fonda began, and then went on to explain that the play had special meaning for him and Hayward. “It has a purity that we don't like to see lost. And I'm confessing that I'm not happy with that first scene with Powell.”

Ford had heard enough. Without warning, he sprang from the lounge chair, reared back, and punched Fonda in the face. The actor fell backwards, knocking over a pitcher of water, got up, and fled the room in stunned silence. Fifteen minutes later, Ford knocked on Fonda's door and stumbled through a tearful, abject apology. Fonda says he accepted on the spot, but things after that were never the same. Ford was a lifelong alcoholic who prided himself on staying sober during a film shoot, but now he started grimly working his way through a case of chilled beer each day on the set.
Sometimes, when Ford was too wasted
to go on, either Fonda or Ward Bond, another old Ford crony who had a minor role in the picture, finished up the day's filming.

A few weeks later, soon after the film company returned to Hollywood, Ford was rushed to St. Vincent's Hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery. Mervyn LeRoy took over and finished the picture.
Mister Roberts
was a box office hit, and won three Academy Awards, including Jack Lemmon's first, for best supporting actor. But Ford and Fonda were both bitterly disappointed with the film and with each other. They never worked together again.

John Ford emerged from the
Roberts
debacle weakened physically and emotionally. He was sixty, a smoker and a drinker, and in poor health.
He had had cataract surgery
on both eyes a year before, feared he was going blind, and now wore a black patch over his blurred left eye. His
beloved older brother Francis was dying of cancer, and the modest but comfortable house on Odin Street where Ford and his wife, Mary, had lived for thirty years and raised their two children was about to be demolished under a city order to help create a parking lot for the new Hollywood Bowl. Even before
Mister Roberts
, his most recent films had proven to be unsatisfying ventures for him. Even
Mogambo
(1953), a box-office hit starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, left him worn-out and frustrated with the studio, the actors, and his own flagging health. Ford's world—which he had carefully organized to serve his immense personal needs and protect him from those outside forces he could not control—seemed to be caving in. “It was clear,” wrote Maureen O'Hara, another of the recurring cast of actors who both worshipped and feared him, “that
John Ford was going through changes
and that they were terrible ones.”

Still, Ford wasn't finished. As he tried to put back together the pieces of his damaged career following the humiliation of
Mister Roberts
, he turned to what he knew and loved best.

The Western had been John Ford's favorite movie genre ever since he first arrived in Hollywood forty years earlier in the formative days of moving pictures, and he had made nearly fifty Westerns during the course of his career. There was something about a man riding a horse through the rugged landscape, Ford liked to say, that made it the most natural subject for a movie camera. He loved telling stories of cowboys and Indians and cavalrymen, and he loved taking his company of actors, cameramen, wranglers, and stuntmen on location to Monument Valley along the Utah-Arizona border, famous for its scenic beauty and its utter remoteness, far from the reach of the studio money men and their regiments of sycophantic retainers. There he would harangue and abuse his loyal crew, bend them to his will, and inspire them to do their finest work. And he loved working with John Wayne, his favorite actor and occasional whipping boy. Under Ford's demanding and meticulous direction, Wayne had become America's most iconic Western star: the solitary, taciturn man on horseback, true to his own code and adept with his fists and his guns. They were like father and son, wise old mentor and humble pupil, with Wayne in the subordinate role even after he became the country's top box-office attraction.

John Ford at Monument Valley, June 1955, during
The Searchers
film shoot.

No surprise, then, that Ford once introduced himself to a roomful of fellow directors by declaring, “
My name is John Ford
and I make Westerns.” The genre was at the core of his identity.

And now, at the moment of Ford's greatest need, his longtime friend and business partner, Merian C. Cooper, came up with the idea for a Western he thought John Ford would find irresistible.

THE SEARCHERS
, a new novel by the author and screenwriter Alan LeMay, was a captivity narrative set in Texas during pioneer days, and it was rich with strong characters, dramatic scenes, and an undercurrent of sexual obsession. It was based in part on a true story: the abduction of a nine-year-old girl in eastern Texas in 1836 by Comanche raiders who slaughtered her father, grandfather, and uncle, and kidnapped her and four other young people. Cynthia Ann Parker had been raised by her captors and became the wife of a Comanche warrior and mother of three. James Parker, her uncle, a backwoodsman and devout Baptist who possessed a dubious set of morals and an abiding hatred for Indians, searched eight years for her and her fellow captives—one of them his own daughter Rachel—and helped recover four of the missing.