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without sleeping tablets. She said, “Duke had promised her he’d be with her all the time, but it was impossible for him to keep his promise because he had to work so much. During the first week she spent in Louisiana, she had hallucinations and was in just a terrible state because she was basically going cold turkey. She just went through hell. She got so bad she slashed her wrists with a razor blade. Duke’s secretary, Mary St. John, found her and called for an ambulance. That’s when Duke realized he couldn’t keep her on location and that she needed professional help. A doctor patched her wrists, and Duke hired two nurses and a plane to fly her back to Encino, where she went straight to the hospital and she was able to get proper treatment for her drug addiction.”

Clothier, who had become a confidant to Wayne, said, “Duke took it very hard to think that he couldn’t be there for her. He blamed himself for her addiction to sleeping pills and for her suicide attempt.

He blamed himself for all of it. He knew he had to get on with the film and he did, but I knew that he needed to be able to have a drink when he wanted, so I told him he could hide a bottle in my room.

Ford never knew.”

For most of the time, filming on The Horse Soldiers went well.

Holden told me, “I thought we were getting some good stuff on film.

I liked the edge Duke and I had to play. I was a doctor who hated war and blamed people like the character Wayne played for all the miseries war caused. And he was a soldier who hated doctors because they’d botched an operation on his wife and killed her. Wayne was criticized a lot because his voice wasn’t always expressive. But when you saw his eyes, they told you everything. That’s what impressed me about his performance in Red River and The Searchers, and I think he was better in those films than he was in Sands of Iwo Jima. But he never strayed too far away from the usual John Wayne persona in The Horse Soldiers because he knew that his audience wanted to see a John Wayne Western. But he got to show a bit of that dark side he’d had in The Searchers, and I think that some of that came from the distress that came from the problems he was having with Pilar, who was addicted to sleeping pills. He didn’t want her to be treated by doctors at first—until she tried to kill herself.

“As an actor, I’d say that if I was playing his role, I’d use those 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 200

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demons to work for me in the part, and I think that he may have been doing that. We never discussed it. Often with Duke, he just learned his lines, got in front of the camera, and he was usually so good in the first take he didn’t improve any with more takes. He didn’t need more takes. That’s what makes a good screen actor. I hated war, so it wasn’t difficult for me to believe what I was saying. People may say Duke wasn’t a method actor, but I’d say he had a method of his own.”

On the subject of acting, Wayne said, “People like Brando and Clift talked a lot about method acting. Hell, I’d been doing that for years. I just don’t make a point of explaining it to everyone. I just get on with it.”

As location shooting in Louisiana neared an end, a terrible tragedy occurred which affected not only the film, but also Ford’s state of mind. John Lee Mahin explained, “A guy called Fred Kennedy had a small part in the film. Ford used him in a lot of his pictures because he was also a stuntman. But he was almost fifty by this time, and he begged Ford to let him double for Bill Holden for a horse fall. Ford didn’t want him to do it, but Kennedy said he needed the extra money which stunt guys would get for each gag they did. So Ford let him do it. Kennedy came off the horse and lay there. He’d broken his neck and was barely struggling to breathe. He died on the way to the hospital.

“That just broke Ford. He couldn’t direct a thing after that, and we had a battle scene to shoot, and then there was supposed to be the scene where Wayne leads his men back home. Ford just wanted to get it over with and shot the battle on the bridge