John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [74]
In the summer of 1951, Wayne was off to Ireland with John Ford and his company to make The Quiet Man. Included in that company was Maureen O’Hara, teamed with Wayne for the second time. She told me, “Pappy had had the story, which had been published in the Saturday Evening Post [in 1933], certainly since 1944 when he told Duke and myself that he wanted us to star in the picture.”
The original story had been written by Maurice Walsh, and turned 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 138
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into a screenplay by Richard Llewellyn, but the original draft proved to be too political, so Ford had Frank Nugent rewrite it as a love story. Wayne played Sean Thornton, a former boxer who returns from America to his homeland of Ireland to settle in the village of Innisfree. There he falls for the charms of fiery Mary Kate, played by Maureen O’Hara.
When they shot the scene when Sean first kisses Mary Kate, Maureen had to take a swipe at Wayne, and for some reason, Maureen felt she had good reason to really try to land one on Wayne’s chin. She said, “I got so mad at Duke that I felt ready to kill him, so I hauled off with all my strength and socked him in the jaw. He saw it coming and put his hand up, and my hand came off the tip of his fingers and made contact with his jaw and cracked a bone in my wrist. But I didn’t cry out. I just hid my hand in the red skirt I was wearing, but the pain was just dreadful. After we shot the scene, Duke said, ‘Let me see your hand. You nearly broke my jaw!’ I said, ‘That’s what I was trying to do.’ I had to go to the hospital, but it wasn’t too serious.
“It all became very competitive on the set, which I think was encouraged by Pappy because he really wanted the sparks to fly between Duke and myself. Duke had his gang like Ward Bond and John Ford, and I had my gang of Irish actors. We had that long scene where Duke had to drag me across the countryside, and we filmed part of it on the golf course of Ashford castle where the grass was kept short by sheep grazing on it. So the field was covered in sheep manure. There was Duke’s gang kicking more and more manure along the path he had to drag me, and my gang would go in and kick it out. But Duke’s gang won, and he dragged me on my stomach through that sheep manure, and it just stank!”
Wayne recalled, “Maureen and I rehearsed the whole of that scene without Pappy knowing because he wanted it all to be done spontaneously. But we planned the whole thing meticulously, so when we came to a bush, Maureen would lose a shoe, and at another spot she would go down on her butt and put the shoe back on. And then she’d get up and take a swing at me and I would turn and kick her in the rear end. It was all planned and rehearsed, and then after we filmed it, Pappy said, ‘When things aren’t rehearsed and they’re spontaneous, you see how wonderful they are?’
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“You know, The Quiet Man was a simple enough story, but that was a goddamn hard script for me. For the first nine reels I was playing straight man to all those wonderful characters that people like Ward Bond (as Father Lonergan), Barry Fitzgerald (Michaeleen Flynn), and Victor McLaglen (Will Danaher, Mary Kate’s brother) got to play, and that’s really hard.
“Ireland was just a beautiful place to be, and most evenings after work, I went fishing with Ward Bond. A little later we’d go up the river where there was a waterfall, and then I’d go back to Ashford castle where we were staying, and I’d play gin rummy with Pappy who’d been out walking up the river with Maureen and the other women. Victor would sit in a high-backed chair by the fire and fall asleep. It was like