John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [95]
To play Debbie, Ford had to choose two actresses, one for the younger Debbie in the early scenes, and one to play the older Debbie.
He decided to cast former child actress Natalie Wood, then aged just sixteen, to play the older Debbie. It just so happened that Natalie had a little sister, Lana, aged nine and perfect to play the younger Debbie, so Ford cast Lana as well.
After Wayne’s death, I was able to interview Natalie Wood who recalled for me her time making The Searchers. “We all had to live on location. There was me, my mother, and my sister Lana, and we all lived at a trading post outside Flagstaff. I had a room to myself and Lana and my mother shared another room.
“Every night we would hear the local Navajos singing, and I’d look out of my window and I’d see the campfires they’d built. When Lana heard the singing, she got scared and was convinced the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 178
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Indians were going to attack us. I kept explaining to her that that sort of thing didn’t happen anymore.
“We were smack in the middle of the desert with nothing but sand for miles. During the day it got extremely hot, and we would break for a long lunch and get under shade when the sun was at its height.
There were snakes and scorpions, and one day Ward Bond was bitten by a scorpion. I watched them draining the poison from the bite, and I actually felt faint at the sight of it. I was always on the lookout for scorpions after that.
“John Wayne was a giant to me, and when he picked me up in that scene near the end of the picture, he was able to lift me as though I were a doll. It was pretty frightening because he had this look of hatred and I thought that he could easily crush me. But then there would be an almost indefinable gentleness that would come over him as he cradled me and said, ‘Let’s go home.’ Everyone had always told me, ‘John Wayne’s no actor. He always plays the same part.’ I can tell you, Mr. Wayne was a very fine actor. He said to me, ‘When I pick you up, I may seem a little rough, but I’ll be as gentle as I can be.’ I said, ‘You must pick me up without worrying about that or you might not give the performance you need to portray.’ He smiled and said, ‘Well, little lady, you’re a real professional, that’s for sure.’
“There was one little Navajo child. A baby really, just two years old, I think. She came down with a serious case of pneumonia. They needed to get her to a hospital urgently. Duke had his own airplane on location, and he had his pilot fly the girl to the hospital. Otherwise she might have died. The Navajos gave him a new name for his deed.
They called him The Man with the Big Eagle.
“Duke’s son Patrick had a part in the film. He was really handsome. Didn’t look a lot like his father, I thought. Duke had a real rugged kind of handsomeness, but Patrick, who was the same age as me, had a really boyish face. Just my type. I had a deep crush on him.”
I had interviewed Pat Wayne in 1976, four years before I met Natalie Wood, so I had to guess who Pat was talking about when he said, “I had a friend who was my age on The Searchers. A very pretty girl, a really nice girl, so making the film was great fun for me during the day as well as at night.”
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The very last scene in the film was shot through an open door, looking out on the desert from inside the house where Debbie is delivered to family friends, played by Olive Carey and John Qualen.
They all enter the house, including Jeffrey Hunter as Martin, and only Wayne remains outside, which was Ford’s way of showing that Ethan had always been, and would always be, an outsider.
Wayne told me, “I wanted to end the film with something that would mean something to Olive Carey. Harry Carey used to have a way of reaching across his chest with his right hand and taking hold of his left arm by the elbow. So as I stood looking in through the door, I did just that, and I could see Olive standing out of camera, tears just rolling down