John Wayne: The Life and Legend (34 page)

“Howard, do you think we can get anything going between that kid and myself?” he asked Hawks with a perceptible concern.

“I think you can,” said the phlegmatic Hawks. After shooting a couple of scenes with Clift, Wayne told Hawks, “You’re right. He can hold his own, anyway, but I don’t think we can make a fight.”

A mutual doubt was about all that Wayne and Clift shared. While the company waited for the rain to stop in Arizona, Wayne took Clift and Hawks’s son David on a bear-hunting trip. “We never saw any bear, but we did get lost,” remembered David Hawks. “The guide admitted that he didn’t know the way back. So John Wayne took charge, and he really and truly led us back. One horse fell, lost its footing, and we had to shoot it.” Clift seems to have been appalled by the entire adventure, writing a friend, “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?”

They were two very different kinds of actors from two different generations, and Hawks had to figure out a middle ground that would accommodate them. Clift was introspective, a Method actor, and Wayne was purely instinctive.

“Wayne never read a script that I had,” said Hawks. “He’d say, ‘What am I supposed to do in this?’ and I’d say, ‘You’re supposed to give the impression of this and that.’ And he’d say ‘OK.’ He’d never learn lines before I talked to him, because he said that threw him off. He could memorize two pages of dialogue in three or four minutes, and then he just goes and does it. He’s the easiest person I ever worked with because he doesn’t discuss it and try to fine-tune it; he just goes and does it without squawking.”

Clift would tell a friend that Wayne and Hawks “laughed and drank and told dirty jokes and slapped each other on the back. They tried to draw me into their circle but I couldn’t go along with them. The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.”

Without knowing it, the actors were replicating the generational difference between Matthew Garth and Tom Dunson. Hawks’s film was about the passing of a torch from autocratic authority to a more humanistic style—it’s really Hawks’s version of a theme Ford would make his own in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
.

The script wasn’t set, the budget kept rising, but Clift just kept getting better, matching Wayne scene for scene. “Mr. Hawks took [Clift] aside and pointed out [stuntman, later actor] Richard Farnsworth,” remembered Danny Sands, another stuntman on the picture. “ ‘Montgomery, you walk along behind him and watch him carefully. If he scratches his butt, you scratch yours. He’s a real cowboy.’ And he did, by God. Farnsworth took him and tutored him and, damn, he made a cowboy out of a hell of an actor.”

But Clift’s Method affectations irritated Wayne, as did his awkwardness with guns. One day he barked at the young actor, “Christ, my goddamn kid can do it, for Christ’s sake and he’s 11 years old. You can’t do it? Do it!”

The trick to achieving competence at quick draws and twirls is to practice while kneeling on a bed. You’ll drop the gun three hundred times, but you won’t have to bend over three hundred times, which makes all the difference. Clift got up to speed very quickly, and even Wayne was eventually impressed with his dexterity.

“Monty drove him nuts,” remembered Harry Carey Jr., who worked on the picture for several weeks. “He didn’t like Monty as an actor. Years later, I said that I thought Monty was very effective in
Red River
, and Duke said, ‘He was a pain in the ass.’ But he didn’t deny that he was effective.”

Hawks’s gift for staging was never more evident than in the final fight. “Wayne was aware that there was a great physical disparity between him and Clift,” said William Self. “Wayne was a giant brute and, believe me, he could have killed Clift with one punch. Clift was very modestly built. The fact that Hawks could make those two fighting look at all realistic was remarkable.”

When Clift saw the completed picture, he hated it. He felt the script had been watered down, and like a great many people ever since, he hated the ending, “because Joanne Dru settles it and it makes the showdown between me and John Wayne a farce.”

With the unmotivated “you boys quit fighting” ending, Hawks shyed away from the ultimate implications of Dunson’s character, even though some ardent auteurists defend it—as if an Old Testament patriarch like Dunson is suddenly going to see the error of his ways and hand everything over to a New Testament character like Matt. “It’s true that Howard got up to that point without being ready for it,” admitted Wayne. “Maybe the fact that it was right at the end of the picture made it more obvious.”

By the time
Red River
was finished, it was a month over schedule and far over budget. Monterey Productions had to borrow an additional $200,000, then another $111,000, then still more—a whopping $639,000 overage in all. The film ended up costing $2.8 million, and the overage wiped out the profits that Hawks and Charles Feldman were counting on.

But Hawks hadn’t frittered away all that extra time and money. He used it to make an authentic epic—the size of the characters matches the size of their task: to drive a herd of longhorn cattle one thousand miles from Texas to Missouri. Hawks adopted an appropriately expansive, panoramic style that stops short of either the pompous or elegiac.

Ford had used Wayne as a sort of overgrown country boy—his characters in
Stagecoach, The Long Voyage Home
, and even
They Were Expendable
are manifestly decent men, almost submissive until they’re pushed too far. When Hawks gave Wayne the part of Tom Dunson, he gave him the missing arrow in his acting quiver—the freedom to play a domineering, wrongheaded son of a bitch. For the rest of his career, Wayne would shift between these two characters and, in definitive performances, combine them.

From the beginning, Dunson is unyielding. Although the luscious Fen tells him in unmistakable terms that “The sun only shines half the time; the other half is night,” Dunson refuses to take her with him. He promises to send for her, and she promises to come, despite the fact that “you’re wrong.”

When Dunson finds out that she has been killed, he barely flinches. It’s typical of the single-minded nature of a man who doesn’t need a backstory. As the critic Dave Kehr wrote, “Here was a man who could get you through the worst the world had to offer. Here was a man who could kill you without a second thought.”

Like any great actor, Wayne communicates with his body. During the scene when he tells Matt that he’s going to kill him, Dunson’s posture contradicts his words—he’s leaning against his horse; the relaxed slant of his body belying the rigor of the threat. Dunson is close to being played out, but not so much that Matt or the others can relax. Dunson means to do what he says, and, as ragged as he is, he just might be able to do it. Contrasting with Wayne’s indomitable Dunson is the tensile strength of Clift’s Matthew Garth—a wiry watcher.

For the first time, Wayne plays an implacable force, and he’s completely believable.
Red River
begins the transition of John Wayne from man to mountain. That the movie is about the great stakes involved in the tide of empire makes the character’s ruthlessness viable.

Tom Dunson is Wayne’s first comprehensive portrayal of the deeply ambivalent core of American manhood. Dunson embodies the allure of the authoritarian—the possibility of violence, the shying away from women and home—what Jonathan Lethem called “the dark pleasure of soured romanticism—all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means to be a man in America.”

Red River
was more than two years old by the time it was released late in 1948, after a frantic legal tussle between Howard Hughes and Hawks over what Hughes felt were untoward similarities between
Red River
and Hughes’s bizarre
The Outlaw.
Hughes’s ire stemmed from the climax, in which Dunson takes a series of shots at Matt that are meant to goad him into fighting, with one bullet creasing his cheek.

Hughes felt the entire scene was stolen from the end of
The Outlaw,
where Doc Holliday tries to force Billy the Kid to draw by nicking his earlobes. (Hawks had started directing
The Outlaw
in 1943 before walking off/getting fired.) Hughes wanted the entire four-minute confrontation taken out, an absurd demand, but one that came only a week or two before September 1, 1948, when the film was scheduled to open in 350 theaters in Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma, where Wayne was a particularly potent box office draw. Hughes was threatening an injunction that could tie up the film for months.

“He’s serious, Eddie,” said Hughes’s attorney Loyd Wright to Edward Small, who was a major investor in the film. “I tell you Howard’s serious. He means it.”

Under ordinary circumstances, this sort of problem could have been negotiated, but Small and the rest of the investors were loath to endure any more delay in getting their money back. Small had worked with Hughes before and knew that “from his viewpoint, procrastination was to be employed to gain his ends.”

Small had a meeting with Hughes in a projection room as they ran and reran the sequence. Hughes refused to alter his demand to remove the sequence, which would have left the picture with an abrupt cut and Montgomery Clift with an unexplained wound on his face. Finally, Small, Hawks, and Hughes had a meeting at one of Hughes’s aircraft plants near Inglewood.

The conversation began in rancor, then got worse. “Both men were tall and lean, and I felt like the referee between two animated redwood trees,” remembered Small. Finally, Small suggested that Hughes edit the sequence to suggest what Hawks, Feldman, and Small should do. Hughes made a few cuts, eliminating about twenty-four seconds, including a shot where Dunson’s bullet creases Matt’s cheek. Also removed were nine words of Wayne’s dialogue: “Draw. Go on, draw. Well, then, I’ll make you.” As Small realized, “If I had made the same infinitesimal alterations, he probably wouldn’t have accepted them.”

The prints for
Red River
had already been manufactured, so editors fanned out across the Southwest to insert the revised sequence in the prints that had already been shipped to the exchanges. (Since the original negative remained untouched, the face-creasing shot has remained in the film as far as posterity is concerned.)

Critics thought that Wayne’s performance was remarkable; the trades praised both the picture (“a milestone in western film production,” said
The Hollywood Reporter
) and Wayne. Even Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
said that “this consistently able portrayer of two-fisted, two-gunned men surpasses himself in this picture.”

Wayne always believed the film was crucial in his career. As he put it, “
Stagecoach
established me as a star;
Red River
established me as an actor.”

While
Red River
slowly wound its way toward release, in the summer of 1947 Wayne trooped off to Monument Valley to make John Ford’s
Fort Apache
. The writer and artist Stephen Longstreet was on the location for a week and was startled to hear good jazz playing on the Monument Valley PA system. John Huston, a classmate of Longstreet’s in the 1920s—“John was already a lanky oddball,” Longstreet remembered—visited the set, and Huston and Ford fell into a conversation about Joyce’s
Dubliners
, with Ford quoting lines from memory.

Longstreet found Ford “a surly bastard, but I think it began as an act to hide behind and it became a habit. Ford had a love/hate affair with the universe. Inside he was a mushy romantic.
Read
his films—the beauty of his camera setups. But the world didn’t live up to [his] idea of what it was going to be. . . . Ford was
the
great director of his era, but sour about the lost hopes of the world.”

Longstreet noted a trait that some writers have mistakenly chosen to define as repressed homoeroticism: “He fell in love with his leading actors. So, I noted, did DeMille when I wrote the dialogue for
The Greatest Show on Earth
. Both Ford and DeMille would have been shocked if you called them gay, but they favored macho men, to near-adoring them.” In both cases, the motivation was not sexual, but an idealized projection of their masculine selves—neither Ford nor DeMille had recessive egos.

Ford’s target on the set of
Fort Apache
was the inexperienced John Agar, who he generally referred to as “Mr. Temple.” (At the time, Agar was married to Shirley Temple.) Wayne had been there many times and tried to calm the young man. “I was petrified,” remembered Agar, “and I was working with people who I had grown up watching and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. All those guys were so helpful to me. They kept patting me on the back, saying, ‘You’re doing great kid, you’re doing great.’ Duke did that with me in every movie I made with him. He was always saying, ‘Right in there, kid, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine.’

“And when you have somebody like John Wayne saying that to you, it takes you up, boy, makes you feel like you’re worthwhile. I had lost my dad when I was a little boy and I kinda looked up to him as like a Dad.”