Authors: Glenn Frankel
Finally, in the novel Amos dies, killed by a young Comanche woman whom he mistakes for Debbie in the climactic battle scene. But in the
film, Ethan survives. He cannot be killed, if for no other reason than because he is John Wayne, the indestructible force.
Midway through the script, Nugent constructs an elaborate narrative within the narrative to give a sense of time passing.
Using a letter that Martin writes to Laurie
, his fiancé, Nugent encapsulates two years of the search and narrates Martin's growing doubts about Ethan's sanity and his dawning realization that Ethan intends to kill Debbie when he finds her.
Ford and Nugent also inject a large dose of Ford's trademark cornball humor to leaven the grimness of the main plot and theme. They turn some of the minor characters from the novel into comic figures and they add a young cavalry officer called Lieutenant Greenhill whose bumbling sincerity and awkward flourishing of his sword make him the butt of several jokes. And they use Martin for humor as well, most pointedly when he inadvertently trades goods for a Comanche wife he names Look, and again during the cantina scene when he and Ethan find a man who can lead them to the Indian camp where the now grown Debbie is living. Some of Martin's scenes with Laurie are also played for laughs.
By the time Ford and Nugent finished their work, the outline of the story and some of the main characters of
The Searchers
remained the same as in LeMay's novel, but the meaning and many of the details had decisively changed.
“
Frank worked awfully hard
on that movie,” his wife, Jean Nugent, recalled to Ford biographer Scott Eyman.
“
He'd come home at night exhausted
and grumpy,” Nugent's son Kevin told me. “They were making art and it was contentious.”
Like many of his contemporaries, including Ford and Wayne, Frank Nugent smokedâat least two packs of Kents a day, according to his sonâand drank steadily, although without Ford's self-destructive conviction. He suffered a heart attack in the late 1950s and another one two years later, and he died in 1965 at age fifty-seven from congestive heart failure. Jean Nugent blamed Ford for working her husband to death and, perhaps worse, for a profound lack of gratitude for Nugent's contribution to some of his greatest films. “When [Ford] and Cooper sold out, they didn't give Frank a bottle of scotch,” she told Eyman. “That's the kind of guy Jack Ford was.”
It's a harsh verdict. But by Nugent's own account, he found working with Ford demanding yet rewarding. The price was high, but the result was worth it.
* * *
MOST FILM PRODUCTIONS USED a casting director to line up candidates for roles and help determine which actor would be best in a given part. Not Ford. He insisted on controlling the entire process. Rather than send out a casting call, he simply put out the word among friends and employees and waited for the usual crew to report for duty. No one dared ask Ford directly for a part. Instead, they engaged in an elaborate and oftentimes humiliating ritual. “
What you did was simple
, once you caught on,” Harry Carey Jr. recalled. “When word got out that the Old Man was going to start a picture, you simply went over to the office for a visit, and he'd tell you whether you were in it or not.”
Ford set himself up in a suite of offices at the Warner Brothers studio. Actors arrived to the smell of freshly brewed coffee from a large urn in the front office. One by one, the old regulars showed up: Carey, Hank Worden, John Qualen, Jack Pennick, Mae Marsh, Ruth Clifford, plus the stuntmen and the wranglers whom Ford loved to work with, led by Cliff Lyons. “
There was absolutely no chain of command
with John Ford,” said Carey. “There was him, and there was us.”
Ford was smart enough to know he couldn't get by simply with the old stalwarts. He needed fresh and attractive actors to draw younger moviegoers. He had two plum parts for young actresses: Laurie Jorgensen (Ford changed the name from Mathison in the novel) and Debbie Edwards. With Cooper's help, he chose carefully. For Laurie they picked twenty-five-year-old Vera Miles, a relative unknown whose latest and largest role was the love interest (not named Jane) in
Tarzan's Hidden Jungle
. “
I was dropped by the best studios
in town,” she later recalled with pride. Miles was pretty but not impossibly beautiful, rail-thin, and spunkyâperfect for Laurie, Martin Pauley's fiancé, an attractive tomboy who grows into an angry, impatient, full-blooded woman as the plot progresses.
For Debbie they chose Natalie Wood, who was under contract with Warner Brothers and easy to requisition for the role. A veteran child actress now about to turn seventeen, she had just completed performing the lead female role in
Rebel Without a Cause
, which would win her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.
Natalie's mother consented
after Ford agreed to take Natalie's nine-year-old sister, Lana, to play the young Debbie in the film's early scenes.
But the key supporting role was that of Martin Pauley, and it was heavily sought after. Fess Parker, fresh off his performance as Davy Crockett in a three-part TV series for Walt Disney Studios that began broadcasting in December 1954, was eager for the part. Ford put Parker
through a bizarre kind of screen test at a dinner party one evening at the apartment of Olive Carey, Harry's widow. On the buffet line, Ford swiped several forkfuls of food from Parker's plate, then twice elbowed the young actor hard in the ribs. Parker just walked away. The response seemed to have worked.
“
They wanted you for that
[role],” Walt Disney later told Parker. But Disney refused to lend him out. “I wasn't consulted,” Parker recalled bitterly. He always regretted not getting the part. It would have been “a badge of honor to work with the old man,” he said.
John Agar, the ex-husband of Shirley Temple, who had appeared in significant roles in two parts of the Cavalry Trilogy, lobbied Ford unsuccessfully for the part. So did Robert Wagner, who had costarred in Ford's version of
What Price Glory
in 1952. Tall, handsome, and pleasant to his elders, Wagner was one of Hollywood's young princes. Ford could have cared less, and Wagner knew it. Still, Wagner swallowed his pride after he read Frank Nugent's script and went to Ford's office.
“
You'd like to play the part
, wouldn't you?” Ford asked Wagner.
“Yes, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, you're not going to.”
Wagner got up and headed for the door.
“Boob? You
really
want to play the part?”
“Very much, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, you're still not going to.”
In fact, Ford had already chosen his Martin Pauley: one of Wagner's best friends,
another impossibly handsome young actor
named Jeffrey Hunter, who was under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox. Hunter was born Henry Herman McKinnies Jr. in New Orleans in 1926 and grew up in Milwaukee, the only child of a sales engineer and his wife. He served in the navy just after World War Twoâa military stint that surely must have endeared him to retired admiral John Fordâgot a bachelor's degree in speech at Northwestern University on the GI Bill, and then headed west to UCLA seeking a master's in radio broadcasting. With his piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, easy smile, and taut, muscular physique, Hunter was far too pretty to hide behind a radio microphone. He was quickly spotted by a Hollywood talent scout in a school production of Arthur Miller's
All My Sons
and signed by Fox. His first mainstream film appearance was a small part in
Fourteen Hours
(1951), which was also Grace Kelly's first picture.
When Hunter found out through his agent about
The Searchers
, Ford told him over the phone he was “
nowhere near the type
” to play Martin.
But Hunter refused to take no for an answer. He showed up at Ford's office the next day with his hair slicked back to make it appear darker and an open-necked sports shirt that displayed a deep-brown suntan. Ford, he recalled later, was puffing on a large cigar when he arrived.
“He stared at me for what seemed an endless time, then grunted, âTake your shirt off!' “
Hunter complied. After another long stare, Ford grunted again. “I'll let you know,” he said.
Hunter was certain it was just another brush-off, but Ford added, “Don't cut your hair until you hear from me.” Hunter felt then he was in.
Ford also made sure all of his favorite stock company members got parts. He expanded the role of Texas Ranger leader Sam Clayton from the novel to accommodate his old drinking buddy Ward Bond. Clayton in the screenplay became both a Ranger captain and a preacher, a dual role that neatly encapsulates the duality of the American frontier projectâgun in one hand, Bible in the other.
WHILE FORD WAS PUTTING TOGETHER the cast and crew, Merian Cooper was nursing the moneyman.
Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney was one of those improbable
men of vast wealth who occasionally make their way to the film industry attracted by the glamour and the sycophancy and the chance to add to their fame and their importance. Sometimes they bed a starlet or two or ten along the way. Like a skilled con artist, Hollywood flatters, humors, and cajoles them for a while, relieves them of their wallets, and then moves on to the next improbable man. Whitney possessed a huge fortune inherited from two of America's wealthiest dynasties, the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys, a proven record of business success, a high opinion of his own financial acumen, and a roaring furnace of patriotic fervor. He longed to get into films; he had developed elaborate plans for an American history trilogy, based upon a
Saturday Evening Post
serial called “The Valiant Virginians” by James Warner Bellah, who had written the short stories Ford had used for his Cavalry Trilogy in the late 1940s. Who better to direct such an ambitious project than John Ford, the director who had made American history his prime subject? But before Whitney placed such a large and expensive triple bet, Cooper wanted to ease him into the motion picture business with a sure thing.
Whitney, Cooper's old army pal, was a cofounder of Pan American
Airways and had served as chairman of the board during the era when Pan Am grew from a small commuter line to the world's largest commercial transport system. Tall and lean, with dark, curly hair and sky-blue eyes, Whitney could be affable and informal, yet he was never quite comfortable around ordinary people and seemed insecure about his money and his place in the world. His vast wealth opened doors to new worlds for him yet barred him from ever fully entering those worlds. Despite his achievements, Whitney was typecast as a dabbler and a dilettante; he was not always taken seriously, but his money was.
He was born in New York and graduated from Yale. He invested early on in Cooper's Technicolor concept in the late 1920s, took a stake in Selznick International Pictures in the 1930s (giving him a piece of
Gone With the Wind
that was still paying annual dividends to his widow, Marylou, in 2010), and lost in a landslide for the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1932 in a bluestocking Long Island district at the same time Franklin Delano Roosevelt was crushing Herbert Hoover at the top of the ticket. In the early 1950s, at Cooper's behest, he agreed to invest $5 million in Cooper's Cinerama project. Cooper and his backers believed that bigger, wider, deeper, and louder were the solution to declining movie ticket sales. Using a three-screen-wide visual presentation and seven-channel stereo sound, Cinerama sought to re-create the movie theater experience as spectacle in an attempt to hold television at bay. When the other directors of Cinerama refused to give Whitney a seat on the board, he and Cooper walked out.
They formed a new film company
, C. V. Whitney Productions, and announced a program of films celebrating America's history.
Like John Ford, Whitney saw himself as a mythmaker. His passion was the American dream as he himself defined it. Driven by Cold War fervor, he wanted to educate the masses in the glories of the American past in order to mobilize them to fight the Soviet empire. While the frontier was gone, Whitney argued, its values endured. But he lacked Ford's artistry. All through the making of
The Searchers
he would bombard Ford with unsubtle, bombastic suggestions to turn the movie into an elaborate history lesson, all of which Ford dutifully ignored.
Whitney was prepared to use his connections and his vast wealth get into the motion picture businessâ“
not for self-aggrandizement
, but because he believes he can help make a contribution to the motion picture and to better understanding of America abroad,” reported the
New York Times
, which seemed curiously eager to accept Whitney's claims at face value.
Whitney quickly compiled a to-do list of four American epics, including
The Valiant Virginians
;
William Liberty
, an unpublished manuscript by Frank Clemensen; a biography of test pilot Chuck Yeager; and a “human document of Americana” focusing on Midwest farming communities.
Whitney was full of ambition and hyperbole.
William Liberty
, he confidently and erroneously predicted to the
Times
, “will do for the West what
Gone With the Wind
did for the South.”
On January 29, 1955, Cooper declared to Whitney that “
Jack Ford is back and raring to go
.
The Searchers
will be a tough picture physically, but in my opinion can be a very fine one and a very profitable one. It is with that thought that I am going ahead fill tilt.” But Whitney already had reservations about the direction of the project. In a February telegram sent to Cooper from the Camelback Inn in Phoenix, he called for a special meeting of the staff in Brentwood for February 23. “Prior to this meeting I want no work done on script of
Searchers
” other than the planned Colorado winter sequence, Whitney commanded.