John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [71]
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JOHN WAYNE
O’Hara.” Curtis would become a member of Ford’s stock company.
Wayne brought twelve-year-old Patrick to the location and Ford gave him a small role and a few lines of dialogue to deliver. When I interviewed Patrick at Pinewood, where he was making The People That Time Forgot in 1976, he told me, “That was a special time for me. I was on location with my dad, and I had him all to myself because I was the only one of the four kids to be on location with him. John Ford was my godfather, and I was the apple of his eye.
Ford wasn’t so nice to my older brother Michael, but I could do no wrong.”
Rio Grande would, like Ford’s other cavalry pictures, become highly regarded as a classic, but it gave film historians and critics the wrong idea that Ford had planned a trilogy of cavalry films. Ford was not as enthusiastic about this project as he had been about the previous two cavalry pictures. Ben Johnson noted, “It seemed to me that Ford wasn’t taking the film as seriously as he normally did.
He seemed to be sort of easier to work with. Not much shouting and abuse. Except for one time when I made a comment to Dobe that there’d been a lot of shooting going on that day, but not many Indians had bitten the dust.
“Ford said, ‘What did you say?’
“I said, ‘I was just talking to Dobe, Mr. Ford.’
“He said, ‘I know that, but what did you say?’
“And again I said, ‘I was talking to Dobe.’
“Now he started to get nasty, and he said, ‘Hey, stupid, I asked you a question.’
“Well, I wasn’t taking that from anyone, not even from Ford, and I got up and left, and as I passed Ford, I whispered to him what he could do with his damn picture. I could see Duke and Maureen with their jaws dropping to the ground. It wasn’t too smart of me, I guess.
“Ford told Dobe to come and get me and bring me back, but I didn’t feel too happy about it. I thought I was in for a roasting, but Ford didn’t mention the incident again. He even joked with me for the remainder of the filming, and I thought everything was okay between us. But it wasn’t. He didn’t use me again or talk to me for years after that. That was John Ford for you. Ken Curtis, a really great guy, kind of took my place. But I worked with Duke a lot.”
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WAYNE’S CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM
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Although it seemed a regular cavalry-and-Indians-type film, Rio Grande was actually a political statement, a fact I would have remained oblivious to had Wayne not enlightened me. “Rio Grande was written by James McGuiness as a metaphor for the invasion of South Korea by North Korean Communist forces. In Rio Grande it’s the Apaches who come across the border to make their attacks, and then go back over the border where the cavalry weren’t supposed to go. But Lieutenant Colonel York, the part I played, knew he had to lead his men across the border to save the lives of innocents. In Korea the Communists were making their raids into South Korea and then going back to the North. Well, I felt that our forces should have gone after them, and that’s what York did in Rio Grande—and it was the right thing to do.”
Wayne loved working with Maureen O’Hara. “She is a woman who speaks her mind,” said Wayne, “and that impressed me, despite my old-fashioned chauvinistic ways! She is feminine and beautiful, but there is something about her that makes her more like a man. It’s her stubbornness and her willingness to stand up to anyone—even Jack Ford.”
O’Hara and Wayne enjoyed a mutual respect and fondness for each other. Said Maureen O’Hara, “There was a chemistry between us that you don’t get very often. It comes along only now and again.
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn had it. So did William Powell and Myrna Loy. Duke was tall and strong, and I was tall and strong.
When we quarreled on screen, it was a battle between two equals, which is a rare thing between a leading man and