The Searchers (44 page)

What followed were a series of demands from Whitney to change the original concept, put his personal stamp on
The Searchers
, and turn it into something more grandiose. He followed up the meeting in Brentwood with a letter to Cooper outlining his thinking.
The Searchers
, Whitney decreed, was to become the first of a collection of films that he wanted to call the American Series. “
I wish to again emphasize to you
the importance which I place upon speed and urgency in the production of this series of pictures.”

This was Whitney at his most imperious, issuing orders and making demands. When it came to dealing with Ford, however, Whitney was more diffident. He admired and envied Ford's creativity, and was intimidated by Ford's war record and string of Academy Awards. He knew he couldn't push Ford around and respected him too much to try. “
My husband admired Ford so much
, just loved his pictures, loved the man,” recalled Marylou Whitney, who became Sonny's fourth wife after he divorced Eleanor. “Sonny would never want to get into a fight with someone like Ford; he was so totally different than anybody [Sonny] had been brought up with. For a man who had relatively little education, he was unbelievably brilliant.”

Still, Whitney was determined to tinker with the
Searchers
script, and he insisted on Ford's attention. In a telegram dated February 21, Whitney warned Ford,
HAVE BEEN WORKING INTENSIVELY
HERE FOR TWO WEEKS ON PROBLEMS MY PIX COMPANY IT IS MOST IMPORTANT
I DISCUSS THESE WITH YOU EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY AS CERTAIN TREATMENTS ON THE SEARCHERS WILL BE DIRECTLY AFFECTED.

Whitney insisted on accompanying Ford on location in Colorado for the winter sequences in March 1955. When he came back from the film shoot, he started peppering Ford and Cooper with new ideas for enhancing the film by loading it with overt patriotic themes. He pleaded with Ford to make the movie the first part of an American history trilogy. He also wanted to, as he put it, “dignify or broaden the story” by changing the title to
The Searchers for Freedom
and adding a prologue and epilogue to strengthen the theme. In essence, Whitney, too, wanted to become a mythmaker, using the story of Cynthia Ann Parker as his foundation stone. His purposes were no different from those of Alan LeMay, John Ford, and Frank Nugent—each of whom understood the mythic proportions of the material they were shaping—but Whitney's sensibility was far less artistic or subtle. Rather than tell a story, he wanted to force-feed the audience with patriotic fervor.

There is no record that Ford answered Whitney's notes or honored any of his requests. None of which dissuaded Whitney from trying again, this time in a handwritten letter to Ford from his mansion in Old Westbury, Long Island. “
It seems that the market is being flooded
with ‘Westerns,' “ Whitney told his director. “This continues to challenge me as to how we can raise
Searchers
above the rest.” Once again, Whitney pleaded with Ford to consider his ideas for a trilogy and an expansion of the theme. “Do I make myself clear?” he demanded at one point. Still, he stopped short of issuing an ultimatum to Ford. “Whether you take any of my ideas or not, I know you will make a fine picture, and I will also know that you gave the ideas consideration, and then acted according to your best judgment.”

Once again Ford's response, other than silence, has never been recorded. He made no mention of Whitney's proposals in any surviving letter, memo, or note, and none of Whitney's ideas ever appeared in the movie. It is as if they never happened. Still, Ford grew irritated.

Sonny Whitney “could afford to be a very nice man
… I mean, he doesn't even know about money, it's just this huge, giant corporation,” recalled Pat Ford. “And he'd come around, and he'd want certain things done on pictures, and Ford would just con him out of it, and resented it. Resented having to do it.”

“C. V. Whitney was a guy that got $20 million as his twenty-first birthday present, and John Ford was a guy whom for his twenty-first birthday present got thrown out of the house and sent to the Navy. So
how in hell are you going to compare the two—how are they going to be friends?”

Yet somehow they managed. John Ford himself never disparaged Sonny Whitney in public. “
A man with that many millions
,” he told his grandson Dan, “can't be an idiot.”

Idiot or not, Ford understood that Whitney's millions were the reason Ford could make
The Searchers
without having to worry about demands from Jack Warner and his studio boys. If the requirement was that he tolerate the flights of fancy of a spoiled rich man, it was a price John Ford was more than willing to pay.

Just as every storyteller needs characters and a plot, he also needs a setting. Dickens has London, Raymond Chandler's knight-errant detective works out of Los Angeles, and Anne Tyler's moody introverts haunt Baltimore. John Ford's greatest Westerns purportedly took place all over the Southwest, but they were all filmed in one place. Like Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, Ford used one mythic setting for his stage.

Tucked into the continental crease where southeast Utah rubs shoulders with northwest Arizona, Monument Valley is one of America's most dramatic and remote locales. Its sandstone buttes and mesas soar like cathedral spires into the vacant desert sky. It was ninety miles from the nearest paved road and reputed to be the farthest point in the continental United States from a railroad line. There was nothing cheap about this kind of location work. Film crews had to cart in their own generators, gasoline, groceries, and water tanks. But Ford was keen. He believed that Westerns filmed on a soundstage or in the near suburbs of Hollywood looked drab and artificial. He wanted to capture on film the dust, grit, and sweat of the real thing, and he wanted a dramatic backdrop that would thrill and entertain audiences. In his silent movie heyday, he'd shot
The Iron Horse
in the Sierra Nevadas of California and Nevada, and in Mexico and New Mexico, and he'd shot the Revolutionary War drama
Drums Along the Mohawk
outside Cedar City, Utah. But Monument Valley was even more of a challenge. It was a virtual no-man's-land of little water and hot, reluctant sand, and no one outside of a handful of hardy Navajos lived there. Even livestock shunned it. But Ford loved it. His crews built towns, forts, ranch houses, and Indian villages. He made the valley his personal film set.

John Ford Point, the director's favorite spot in Monument Valley, his favorite locale for shooting Westerns, photographed in 2008 by Peter McBride.

“
My favorite location is Monument Valley
,” Ford declared. “It has rivers, mountains, plains, desert, everything the land can offer. I feel at peace here. I have been all over the world, but I consider this the most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on earth.”

The Searchers
was Ford's fifth Monument Valley production. He used the scenery like some modern directors use special effects—to create drama and stun the audience. For
The Searchers
, some of Ford's most dramatic shots evoked the watercolors of Charles M. Russell, a turn-of-the-century painter who was particularly adept at capturing Native Americans and cowboys atop small hillocks as if they were on a pedestal against a vast natural backdrop. “I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land,” he said.

IT HAD BEEN SEVENTEEN YEARS since Ford first discovered Monument Valley, and like everything else he deemed important in his life, he cloaked in myth the truth of how he first decided to shoot his Westerns there. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he himself had come across the area while driving through Arizona on his way to Santa Fe. But John Wayne said he had told Ford about the valley after working on a film
nearby, while the actor George O'Brien claimed that he was the one who first mentioned it to Ford. Still, the story that Harry Goulding and his wife, Leone, told for many decades seems the most plausible.

Harry was a sheepherder's son from Colorado who first laid eyes on the valley in 1921 and never stopped marveling at its raw beauty.
Geologists don't know exactly
how Monument Valley happened: some twenty million years ago the massive continental plate under most of western North America apparently overrode its neighbor farther to the west, which may have sunk or shifted east. Erosion went to work, hollowing out the soft spots and leaving hard granite towers of red sedimentary rock.
Willa Cather wrote
of the “incompleteness” of the West's great mesas—“as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain.” Monument Valley, by her telling, was one of God's unfinished construction sites.

Its first known inhabitants were Anasazi tribesmen who left behind hollowed-out ruins and hundreds of petroglyphs to mark their time there. No one knows why they fled or where they went, but by the sixteenth century they were gone. Navajo tribesmen emerged to take their place.

Captivated by what he had seen, Harry Goulding came back in 1923 with his new bride, Leone, a pretty young woman from Utah whom Harry nicknamed Mike because, he claimed, he could never remember how to spell her real name. For three years they operated a makeshift trading post from a large canvas tent, swapping coffee, flour, salt, sugar, and other staples with the Indians for rugs, skins, and old coins.
The Navajos loved canned tomatoes
: they would pry open the lid, sprinkle sugar on the top, eat the sweet, cold contents with a spoon, and pass around the can. They also loved candy and brightly colored soda pop in flavors like strawberry or orange—never Coke, which was too drab in color. Eventually the Gouldings built a two-story stone house in the shadow of Black Rock, one of the area's most dramatic mesas. Then they managed to buy a 640-acre parcel of land from the state of Utah, despite the fact that this was tribal property and supposedly the sole domain of the Navajo people.

Navajo territory comprised twenty-seven thousand square miles—the country's largest Indian reservation—and forty thousand people spread across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Navajos had fought
the Apaches, Paiutes, and Spanish to a standoff, but succumbed inevitably to the overwhelming firepower of American settlers and soldiers. After the main tribe surrendered to Kit Carson in the 1860s, a handful of Navajos fled to the valley and had maintained a foothold ever since.

The Navajos had a well-honed suspicion of outsiders, and at first they viewed Harry and Mike as interlopers. “
It was their lands
,” Harry told Samuel Moon, his biographer, “and they had the atmosphere that they was wanting us to leave. They didn't
ask
us to leave, they just wanted to know
when
we was going to leave.”

But the Gouldings had no intention of going away, and eventually they won the grudging respect of many of the Indians. Harry and Mike witnessed the hard times that the Navajos suffered during the Depression and, most especially, during the federal government's brutal livestock reduction program in the 1930s, when bureaucrats sought to kill off what they saw as an unsustainable surplus of Navajo cattle and other animals. Harry and Mike also watched as well-meaning government officials forced Navajo parents to send their children to federally run boarding schools where the students were encouraged to discard their culture and punished if they were caught speaking their native tongue. It was the same misguided philosophy that Quanah Parker's children had faced at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania three decades earlier.

In 1938, Harry heard that a Hollywood movie company was exploring the area around Flagstaff for a new Western. He and Mike extracted $80 from their meager savings and drove their old pickup truck 650 miles to Los Angeles. Harry forced his way into John Ford's office at United Artists and showed him a set of stunning photographs taken by the German photographer Joseph G. Muench, a frequent visitor to the valley.
Harry “just wandered in
, a big old guy with a great rube act,” recalled Pat Ford, himself a professional skeptic. “And he wasn't near the rube he pretended to be but he sure could play it … He was a likable guy, we all liked Harry. We said ‘Harry, you've got the best shit-kicking act going.' “

Pat's father was entranced
by the photos—and also by Harry's claim that there were hundreds of Navajos available to work cheaply as crew members, carpenters, and film extras. To Harry's amazement, John Ford chartered a plane and flew out to visit the site the next day, then came back, had producer Walter Wanger cut a check for $5,000, and sent Harry back to Monument Valley to line up provisions, food, and tents for the crew. Goulding had no way to cash the check until he got back to
Flagstaff; a filling station owner along the way gave him a fill-up on credit and even loaned him a twenty-dollar bill.