The Searchers (42 page)

Ford commanded Nugent to write out biographical sketches for every character—in some cases a typewritten, single-spaced full page or more. Then Ford told him to throw them out and write the script. The two men worked closely together developing the draft, both in the office and aboard Ford's yacht, the
Araner
. Sometimes Ford was “
groping like a musician
who has a theme but doesn't quite know how to develop it,” Nugent recalled. “Then if I come up with the next notes and they're what he wanted, he beams and says that's right, that's what he was trying to get over.”

Despite his affable exterior, Nugent was a perfectionist when it came to writing, and he and Ford were frequently at odds. “
He used to fight your grandfather
tooth and nail,” the writer James Warner Bellah told Ford's grandson Dan. “Well, that was one of your grandfather's methods—make 'em mad and they'll work harder.”

Nugent understood he had struck a devil's bargain. In return for working with a master filmmaker, he paid a price in routine humiliation. “He can be rude and frequently insulting; he can also be affable, charming, genial, and generous in his praise (I prefer not to tell you
what the percentage is).” But once the script was finished, Nugent added, the writer had better stay out of Ford's way. Ford never invited Nugent to his film sets or to studio screenings—not even those to which stuntmen and crew were invited. “I don't profess to understand this,” Nugent ruefully confessed. Still, he wrote, it was “a small price to pay for the privilege of working with the best director in Hollywood.”

A chatty, affable man in public, Nugent concealed a darker set of emotions. In his personal diaries he revealed an acidic reservoir of contempt for himself and the women he met after he and his first wife separated. “I am full of bitterness, self-dislike, and dislike of others,” he wrote in a 1947 entry. “I want to lash out and wound as I have been hurt—even if most of my wounds are self-inflicted … It's as though my skin has been worn raw so that the least contrary breath stings and makes me strike out in my own pain and anger.”

Like the diaries, Nugent's best screenplays push deeply into the emotional danger zone between men and women. While critics often pummeled Ford for his lack of subtlety in depicting male-female relationships, Nugent created for the old man two exceptionally complex partnerships between wounded, estranged, yet inextricably bound husbands and wives in
Rio Grande
and
The Quiet Man
, played in both films by John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. He also tempered some of Ford's patriotic bombast and latent racism. Many critics have noted the jingoistic overlay of the Cavalry Trilogy, much of it attributable to the short stories on which they were based, written by James Bellah, a right-wing ideologue whose politics, according to his own son, “were
just a little right of Attila
. He was a fascist, a racist and a world-class bigot.” Yet Nugent's screenplays for
Fort Apache
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
showed respect and even admiration for some of their Indian characters. By contrast,
Rio Grande
, which Nugent did not work on, was riddled with racism.

Besides those first two screenplays, Nugent cowrote with Pat the script for
Wagon Master
(1950), a rocky collaboration at best. Nugent clearly resented having to share a writing credit with the director's son, and John Ford himself was slyly disparaging. “
I liked your script, boys
,” Ford told them afterward. “In fact, I actually shot a few pages of it.” Two years later, Nugent got a full screen credit and an Academy Award nomination for
The Quiet Man
, one of Ford's greatest films.

Ford refused to be impressed with Nugent's craft. “
There's no such thing as a good script
really,” he told Peter Bogdanovich. “Scripts are dialogue, and I don't like all that talk. I've always tried to get things
across visually. I don't like to do books or plays. I prefer to take a short story and expand it, rather than take a novel and try to condense it.”

Later in life, Ford professed disdain for Nugent, calling him
his favorite “body and fender man
.” He denied he was ever close to Nugent, whom he described as “a very unsophisticated person.” But he saved his most hurtful criticism for Nugent's writing. “He was always putting in cute little pieces of business which I always cut out,” the great man recalled. “Which annoyed him greatly.”

With
The Searchers
, Nugent broadened the novel by increasing the number of characters and weaving comedy into the tragic framework. Nugent's son Kevin says his father's special gift was his feel for people. “
The difference between his Westerns
and other Westerns was such an intense character establishment,” said Kevin Nugent. “One of the reasons I thought
The Searchers
didn't do so well at the time was because it was way too much character, too much John Wayne really feeling revenge and stuff, when gee, we went to see John Wayne shoot the Indians.”

Frank Nugent said he learned a lot from John Ford. “
Character is not shown so much
by what is said as by what is done,” Nugent wrote when he first started working with Ford. “Characters must make decisions.”

“
Ford never has formally surrendered
to the talkies. His writers are under standing orders to keep dialogue to an ‘irreducible minimum'. Ford usually manages to trim the ‘irreducible' still more. He always works with his writers on a script, but never lets them forget who holds the whip hand.”

“Ford detests exposition,” Nugent concluded. It was a trait—a gift, really—Ford would demonstrate over and over again in making
The Searchers
.

ALAN LEMAY'S NOVEL was a spare, taut narrative that moved with speed and economy, with few extraneous characters and no subplots. Its opening scene—Aaron Edwards cautiously stepping off his porch to reconnoiter the area around his ranch house, fearful that Comanche raiders are gathering nearby—is near perfect. There is action, suspense, and a growing sense of dread as Aaron and his family come to realize they will soon be under attack.

After years of doing newspaper journalism and churning out screenplays for Ford, Nugent had boiled down narrative writing to certain firm principles. A story occurs when the status quo is upset. “
There is a situation or a condition
,” Nugent writes. “Something happens to upset
it; the disturbance is the story; and the story ends when another status quo is attained.” The writer's primary job, he adds, is simple: “To look long and hard at his story and see whether it can be reduced to terms of the upsetting of the status quo.”

With this in mind, Nugent and Ford discussed LeMay's opening for several days, and although they both admired it, they decided to hold back the scene until later in the film. Instead, they chose to begin, as in many Ford pictures, with an arrival: a lone horseman riding up to the Edwards house. This was Ford's way of starting out by introducing the new element rather than by establishing the existing situation. “
It is no accident
that most Ford pictures open with a figure in motion,” wrote Nugent: a stagecoach, or a train pulling into a station in
The Quiet Man
, or a bus dropping off a passenger at an Oklahoma crossroads in
The Grapes of Wrath
.

The opening scene that they devised is formal, almost silent, and highly ambiguous. The horseman is identified only as “Uncle Ethan” (they dropped the name “Amos” because of
Amos 'n' Andy
, the radio and TV comedy show). It is not clear where he has come from, whether he is a highwayman or a soldier of fortune, or whether he is in love with his brother's wife, Martha, or she with him. Nor do we know why he displays an instant dislike for Martin Pauley, the part-Cherokee seventeen-year-old who has been living as an adopted child at Aaron and Martha's house after Martin's own family had been slaughtered by Comanches.

“The picture never answered all the questions,” wrote Nugent. “We never meant that it should. But we drew a character of interest and speculation, and we met a family that was to be massacred or taken captive in the next reel or two.

“But when you look at it closely, you will see that we had been employing the time-honored technique; we had begun in motion, with an arrival, and we had established the status quo that soon was to be upset by a Comanche raid.”

There was, of course, another reason to change the opening: it didn't feature the star attraction.
The Searchers
was first and foremost a John Wayne movie, and audiences expected to see him early and expected that the story would be built around him.

Nugent's opening took full advantage of Wayne's power and presence. His screenplay describes Ethan as “a man as hard as the country he is crossing. Ethan is in his forties, with a three-day stubble of beard. Dust is caked in the lines of his face and powders his clothing. He wears a long Confederate overcoat.”

Like a suit in need of major alterations, Ethan's character had to be expanded and deepened to fit Wayne. Nugent had written for Wayne before, and understood his nuances and power. He believed that writing for Wayne was different than for any other star: it was almost a throwback to the old days of studio contract players, when “story problems were solved by writing for specific actors. Today this is true only to a degree.
I know John Wayne is a certain type of man
—terse, laconic and so physically capable that you hardly have to show it—and I use that as a prop.”

JOHN FORD HAD NOTED little things in Alan LeMay's novel that he thought might give an added dash of drama and tension. In his personal copy of the book, he underlined the paragraph in which Aaron Edwards observes that the “
bedded-down meadow lark
sprang into the air, circled uncertainly, then drifted away … [A] covey of quail went up.” Knowing the birds have been disturbed by invaders, Aaron turns and runs for the house. Similarly, in the film birds fly up, giving Aaron a fright.

Ford underlined a quote from the novel that Ethan Edwards speaks word for word in the film about the chances of tracking down the Indians who have abducted Debbie even though they have a head start of several days: “
Yes … we got a chance
… An Indian will chase a thing until he thinks he's chased it enough. Then he quits. So the same when he runs … He never learns there's such a thing as a critter that might just keep coming on.”

He did the same with a quote eloquently characterizing the pioneers. “
A Texan is nothing but a human man
way out on a limb,” the Ethan Edwards character says in the book. “This year, and next year, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” But it's much too philosophical a quote for a man of action and few words like John Wayne, and so Ford and Nugent transferred it instead to Mrs. Jorgensen, a pioneer wife.

In the novel, Amos Edwards's love for Martha is a secret known only to himself. Ford and Nugent chose to make it achingly mutual, unspoken and kept from others, yet hidden in plain sight. After Ethan offers his brother a bag of freshly minted Yankee gold dollars, he turns to Martha and takes her hands gently in his own, remarking that she has cut one of her fingers. She tries to hide her hands from him and their eyes meet—“
a world of sadness and hopelessness
is in the look,” says
Nugent's screenplay. Afterward, she retreats to the bedroom as Ethan heads outside. He sits out on the porch and glances back to see Aaron closing the bedroom door. Martha may love Ethan, but she belongs to his brother.

This mutual but forbidden love is one of the ways that Ford and Nugent bring to the surface the hidden sexual context of LeMay's story. In the novel, Scar, the warrior who leads the massacre of the Edwards family, later becomes a father figure to Debbie, who is just entering marriageable age as her uncle and adopted brother search for her. But in the movie Debbie becomes one of Scar's wives—just as Cynthia Ann married Peta Nocona.

Some of the biggest changes in the script involve enhancing and darkening Ethan—and in the process molding him into a character strong enough yet complex enough for John Wayne. The moral center of gravity in the novel is Martin Pauley, the young adopted brother who grows in stature and experience as he searches for Debbie, his abducted sister. But in the film, Martin is eclipsed by his deeply troubled yet charismatic uncle. The narrative tension centers around Ethan's divided personality and his motives in conducting his obsessive seven-year search for his niece. In the novel, Amos Edwards has no conscious desire or intent to kill Debbie; but Ethan in the film sees Debbie's submission to Scar as her husband and lover, whether willing or not, as a stain on the family honor that can be redeemed only by her death.

The writer and the director also added a more overt racial element to the story. They changed Martin into “a breed”—part-Indian—which highlights Ethan's racism and explains his instant dislike for the younger man when they first meet. The hostility begins at the dinner table on Ethan's first night home at the Edwards ranch house when he says to Martin, “
Fella could mistake you for a half-breed
,” and it continues for much of the film.

“Come on, blankethead,” Ethan addresses Martin on the trail. Later when Martin insists on continuing the hunt for Debbie because she's his sister, Ethan retorts, “
She's your
nothin'
. She's no kin to you at all.”

It's impossible to know who came up with the concept of changing Martin into part-Indian: LeMay notes in the novel that Martin's skin is dark and that he had always felt alienated from his fair-skinned peers in the pioneer community. But Nugent and Ford concretize this sense of otherness and add resonance to the racial divide.