The Searchers (38 page)

Still, despite his friendship with Ford, Wayne was an outlier in Hollywood, a proletarian among the cinematic aristocracy. For most of the 1930s, he rarely worked at the upscale studios like MGM, Paramount, or Twentieth Century-Fox, making his living at smaller shops like Monogram, RKO, and Republic—known collectively as “Poverty Row”—grinding out dozens of cheap, forgettable features while laboring to master his craft.

An eager student and a quick study, Wayne had the best of mentors. He started by modeling himself after the Western star Harry Carey, Ford's former movie partner. Wayne admired Carey's slow, soulful manner: the audience could see Carey in the act of thinking before he sprang into action. Wayne got to know Carey and his wife, Olive, through Ford and other members of Hollywood's “cowboy posse” of Western actors, stuntmen, and wranglers in the 1930s, and Carey was a generous teacher.

The Gower Gulch cowboys
were named for the corner of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, where they gathered early in the morning while waiting for film studio work. Those who could afford it ate breakfast and drank coffee at the lunch counter of the local drugstore dressed in their cowboy denims. These were hard men who knew how to ride a horse, rope a steer, and fall off an animal in full flight without breaking a serious limb—essential abilities in a genre whose most enduring dramatic elements were horse riding and gun violence. Wayne was never one of these men; he preferred golf to horseback riding and tailored suits to cowboy duds. But he respected what they did and studied them and their moves with utmost care.

The one he watched most was Yakima Canutt, a well-known stuntman and occasional actor. A native of the Snake River hills in southwest Washington State, Canutt had arrived in Hollywood in 1919 after winning every major prize as a bronco buster on the Western rodeo circuit. He wasn't much of an actor, but he was the real thing as a cowboy. “
I studied him for many weeks
, the way he walked and talked and rode a horse and pulled a gun,” Wayne recalled. “I noted that the angrier he got, the more he lowered his voice and slowed up his delivery. I guess unconscious, even today, I try to say my lines slow and strong the way Yak did.”

The two men worked together in a dozen or more B Westerns, with Canutt usually cast as the bad guy. Together they developed an innovative approach to the fistfight, a classic moment in every B Western. “
Before I came along
it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean,” Wayne recalled. “The heavy was allowed to hit the hero on the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win.”

From watching Carey and Canutt and listening to Ford, Wayne learned the basic lesson that appearing natural on-screen is in fact an artifice. He slowed his cadence and deepened his voice. He picked up little physical and verbal clues from the wranglers and stuntmen he met—not only how they talked but how they walked.

The character actor Paul Fix, whose daughter Marilyn married Carey's son, helped Wayne work it through.
Paul “coached him, he taught him
how to walk,” Harry Carey Jr. recalled. “Wayne became very graceful because he worked at it so hard. In those early movies you can see he looks cumbersome. Wayne said he couldn't stand to watch himself on the screen. So Paul said ‘point your toes into the ground when you walk, and swivel your hips.' “

“Duke's basic problem
was coordinating himself physically to his part—getting his body in gear with his motions and with the lines he had to speak,” said Fix. “Acting natural the way Duke can act does not come naturally. He had to work hard to learn to look as natural as he does. And he was anxious to improve himself and very smart. So he kept getting better all the time …”

By the end of his first eight-picture deal with Monogram, Wayne had established his basic screen persona—the lean, tough loner, impatient with small talk, keen for justice, protector of women and children—as well as the physical mannerisms to go with it. He walked and talked slowly and deliberately, pausing in mid-sentence.
He believed the pause helped rivet the audience
's attention, making them wonder what he was thinking. It also added to a sense of vulnerability and tentativeness. But behind his smile was a hint of menace and unpredictability. This was a man who was dangerous to cross.

Wayne was developing into more than just a competent actor. He was becoming a movie star at a time when stars were emerging as magnets and plot points for filmgoers and as the organizing principle of films. Unlike onstage, where the audience maintained a physical distance from
the performers that even the most powerful opera glasses could not overcome, the camera's lens could move in for a close-up, creating the illusion of intimacy and identification between actor and viewer. Viewers became fans, and actors became stars. Filmgoers imitated, worshipped, and identified with stars—were in effect seduced by them.

Essential to the process was a feeling of authenticity. Movie stars, as opposed to theatrical performers, were supposed to be
real
. As Jeanine Basinger writes in her history of Hollywood star making,
no one expects Laurence Olivier
onstage as Hamlet to be accurately depicting the dilemmas and life choices of an indecisive young Danish nobleman. But they do expect the actor in a film—whether it's Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones or John Wayne as Ethan Edwards—to somehow be the real thing. The actor and the role need to meet and overlap. Young John Wayne's crowning achievement was to recognize intuitively this evolving truth and learn how to use it. His characters were largely representations of the man he thought himself to be, and he became the man whom other men wanted to emulate and identify with.

“
I've found the character
the average man wants himself, his brother or his kid to be,” Wayne explained. “It's the same type of guy the average wife wants for her husband. Always walk with your head held high. Look everybody straight in the eye. Never double-cross a pal. This is the heart I have and the sentiment I feel. There's too much knavery and underhanded stuff in the world without my adding to it. I refuse to play the heel.”

Because they were classic natural men, Wayne's characters were often steeped in Indian lore and customs, but they usually treated Native Americans with deep suspicion and heightened vigilance. In the conquest of the American West, Indians were another obstacle to overcome. In real life as well, Wayne's view of Native Americans reflected the manifest destiny vision of men like William T. Sherman and Teddy Roosevelt. “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them,” Wayne once told
Playboy
magazine. “… There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Wayne went on to claim that, contrary to the opinion of certain liberals, his Westerns were actually too sympathetic to Indians. “
We treated them as if they had the same moral code
that the American people wish every American had,” he told another interviewer, “and we gave them a nobility that was worthy of a king, when actually we know that they
were, you know, savage, treacherous, competent warriors with little or no pity or mercy …”

John Wayne, the man who played the Man Who Knew Indians, did not believe in one of the Western's other most cherished myths, the Noble Savage.

But Indians were only bit players in the persona that the young man from Glendale was constructing for himself as an icon of American masculine power and integrity. John Wayne played the part so well that he was more than a star. He became in effect his own myth—
something that was true
, as Garry Wills later wrote, because people needed it to be true.

JOHN FORD TENDED TO TREAT people he was fond of with dry, mirthful derision, and he was slow at first to pick up on the transformation of his favorite young drinking buddy. “
Christ, if you learned to act
you'd get better parts,” Ford would tell Wayne in front of other people.

When Ford came up with the idea of making
Stagecoach
(1939), he toyed with Wayne for a while, asking him to name some actors he felt could play the role of the Ringo Kid. After Wayne made a few halfhearted suggestions, Ford barked, “
You idiot, couldn't you play it
?” Which is what Ford had in mind all along.

Ford was so certain that Wayne was right for the role, he and Merian Cooper walked away from a potential deal with David O. Selznick, and Ford ended up making the film with the independent producer Walter Wanger. The Ringo Kid rescued Wayne from the B-Western movie factory, and he was eternally grateful to Ford for the chance. Still, the old man baited him mercilessly during the filming. “Can't you wash your fucking face?” Ford demanded while filming one scene, making Wayne do it over and over again until his face was almost raw. Ford called him “a big oaf” and “dumb bastard.”

Ford also had no use for Wayne's rolling way of walking. “
Can't you walk, for Chrissake
, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?”

“
Ford took Duke by the chin
and shook him,” costar Claire Trevor recalled. “Why are you moving your mouth so much? Don't you know that you don't act with your mouth in pictures? You act with your eyes.”

Wayne kept quiet at the time, although he later told an interviewer, “
I was so fucking mad
I wanted to kill him.” All the abuse, Wayne later would insist, was a calculated move by Ford designed to elicit sympathy and respect for Wayne from the other, more experienced actors in the
cast, such as Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, and John Carradine. But it was a pattern that Ford repeated in every film the two men made together—and that Wayne generally suffered without complaint.

Still, the payoff for Wayne was enormous. The Ringo Kid doesn't make his first appearance until around the ten-minute mark, but Ford made sure it was a memorable one. Wayne is atop a small hill, holding his saddle in one hand and waving his rifle with the other as the stagecoach pulls up. In one of Ford's most striking cinematic flourishes, the camera moves toward Wayne, slips briefly out of focus, and comes back in as if suddenly seeing for the first time the magnetic young man standing before it. It is one of the classic introductions in American cinema, a visual announcement of a star being born.

Wayne put up with all of Ford's abuse in part because of a sense of loyalty and deference to an older man who had taken an interest in him, and in part no doubt because Ford was the stern, demanding father that the easygoing but constantly thwarted Clyde Morrison had never been. But it was also because Wayne knew how good Ford was at making movies and constructing myths—and how good he was at making Wayne look good as well.
Stagecoach
helped revive the Western as a respectable—and box-office-worthy—film genre and won Ford his second Oscar for best director. But it also established John Wayne as their mutual project, Ford's and Wayne's.

John Ford, John Wayne, and a mutual friend during one of the annual Christmas parties at the Field Photo Farm in Reseda, Los Angeles, in the late 1940s.

Like Breck Coleman in
The Big Trail
, the Ringo Kid is another version of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, the untamed natural men of American legend. But this time Wayne has traded the moccasins and fringe leather blouse that he wore in
The Big Trail
for cowboy boots and Harry Carey's unadorned dark shirt. He wears a crooked smile and a temperament that is calm, lighthearted, and benign, yet capable of quick, decisive action. As with all of Ford's sympathetic characters in
Stagecoach
, Wayne's eyes twinkle brightly throughout the film.
Just like Humphrey Bogart
, whose star began to rise at roughly the same time, Wayne had toiled for years in relative obscurity until the right role came along.

Stagecoach
embraced all the Western clichés and reinvented them, both with its characters—the benevolent outlaw, the hooker with a heart of gold, the drunken sawbones doctor, the greedy, dishonest banker—and with its iconic moments: the Indian attack, the cavalry to the rescue, and the showdown with three bad guys. And perhaps the ultimate cliché: the malevolent, threatening savages.

The Apaches of
Stagecoach
are murderers and rapists, and the movie subscribes to the notion that for a white woman to be captured by Indians is a Fate Worse than Death. In a grim early scene, the stagecoach and its passengers come across the site of a massacre, and one of the passengers, a former Confederate army officer named Hatfield, removes his cloak to cover the half-naked body of a murdered woman. It's clear from the awkward way the body is draped over a wooden board that she has been raped. It is a stunning stab of visual realism—and a warning of the fate that awaits any white woman unlucky enough to fall into Indian hands. In a later scene, when the stagecoach is engulfed by attacking Apaches, Hatfield aims his gun at the head of a female passenger to spare her from being captured—a moment replayed from D. W. Griffith's
Battle at Elderbush Gulch
—but is himself killed before he can shoot her.