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The most disastrous moment of John Ford’s illustrious Hollywood career took place at the U.S. Navy base on Midway Island in the

Pacifi c Ocean in September 1954. The legendary fi lm director was start-ing work on Mister Roberts, the movie version of the fabulously success-ful Broadway play, starring his old friend Henry Fonda. It should have been a great project: directing a comedy about Ford’s beloved Navy with one of his favorite stars, surrounded by his informal stock com-pany of familiar supporting actors and fi lm crew members, with a script by his trusted screenwriter, Frank S. Nugent. What could go wrong?

Almost everything, as it turned out. The biggest problem, surpris-ingly, was Fonda. Ford had gone to bat for him against the studio ex-ecutives at Warner Brothers. They had wanted a younger, sexier, and more potent box offi ce attraction like Marlon Brando or William Holden for the title role of Doug Roberts, a young Navy offi cer consigned to a backwater cargo ship during World War Two and desperate to see com-bat before the war ends. But Ford had insisted that Fonda, despite being forty- nine, owned the part after playing it to great acclaim for four years on Broadway, and even Jack Warner felt compelled to agree. Fonda was grateful; in a “Dear Pappy” letter he expressed his appreciation that he was working again with the complicated genius who had directed him in Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, The Fugitive, and Fort Apache. “It’s so absolutely right that you are going to do the picture,” Fonda gushed.

Nonetheless, from the moment they got to the location, the two men clashed. Fonda didn’t like Nugent’s script, felt it was neither as funny nor as nuanced as the original play, and didn’t care for the excessive

INTRODUCTION

Pappy (Hollywood, 1954)

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physical comedy and coarse broad strokes of Ford’s direction. The Navy opened its gates to the fi lm company: no one in uniform dared to say no to retired admiral John Ford, a decorated World War Two veteran. But on the fi rst day of shooting at Midway, Fonda was disturbed by the way Ford rushed through the scenes and discomfi ted costar William Powell, who had trouble adjusting to Ford’s swift, one- take- and- let’s-move- on pace. Ford, who dominated his fi lm sets the way Louis XIV presided over the court at Versailles, could not help but notice Fonda’s worried expression.

At the end of the day, producer Leland Hayward arranged for a clear- the- air meeting in Ford’s room in the bachelor offi cers’ quarters. Ford was sprawled on a chaise longue with a tall drink in his hand. The con-versation was short.

“I understand you’re not happy with the work,” said Ford.Fonda tried to be diplomatic. “Pappy, you know I love you,” Fonda

began, and then went on to explain that the play had special meaning for him and Hayward. “It has a purity that we don’t like to see lost. And I’m confessing that I’m not happy with that fi rst scene with Powell.”

Ford had heard enough. Without warning, he sprang from the lounge chair, reared back, and punched Fonda in the face. The actor fell back-wards, knocking over a pitcher of water, got up, and fl ed the room in stunned silence. Fifteen minutes later, Ford knocked on Fonda’s door and stumbled through a tearful, abject apology. Fonda says he accepted on the spot, but things after that were never the same. Ford was a life-long alcoholic who prided himself on staying sober during a fi lm shoot, but now he started grimly working his way through a case of chilled beer each day on the set. Sometimes, when Ford was too wasted to go on, either Fonda or Ward Bond, another old Ford crony who had a minor role in the picture, fi nished up the day’s fi lming.

A few weeks later, soon after the fi lm company returned to Holly-wood, Ford was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery. Mervyn LeRoy took over and fi nished the picture. Mister Roberts was a box offi ce hit, and won three Academy Awards, in-cluding Jack Lemmon’s fi rst, for best supporting actor. But Ford and Fonda were both bitterly disappointed with the fi lm and with each other. They never worked together again.

John Ford emerged from the Roberts debacle weakened physically and emotionally. He was sixty, a smoker and a drinker, and in poor health. He had had cataract surgery on both eyes a year before, feared he was going blind, and now wore a black patch over his blurred left eye. His

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beloved older brother Francis was dying of cancer, and the modest but comfortable house on Odin Street where Ford and his wife, Mary, had lived for thirty years and raised their two children was about to be de-molished under a city order to help create a parking lot for the new Hol-lywood Bowl. Even before Mister Roberts, his most recent fi lms had proven to be unsatisfying ventures for him. Even Mogambo (1953), a box- offi ce hit starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, left him worn- out and frustrated with the studio, the actors, and his own fl ag-ging health. Ford’s world— which he had carefully or ga nized to serve his im mense personal needs and protect him from those outside forces he could not control— seemed to be caving in. “It was clear,” wrote Maureen O’Hara, another of the recurring cast of actors who both wor-shipped and feared him, “that John Ford was going through changes and that they were terrible ones.”

Still, Ford wasn’t fi nished. As he tried to put back together the pieces of his damaged career following the humiliation of Mister Roberts, he turned to what he knew and loved best.

The Western had been John Ford’s favorite movie genre ever since he fi rst arrived in Hollywood forty years earlier in the formative days of moving pictures, and he had made nearly fi fty Westerns during the course of his career. There was something about a man riding a horse through the rugged landscape, Ford liked to say, that made it the most natural subject for a movie camera. He loved telling stories of cowboys

John Ford at Monument Valley, June 1955, during The Searchers fi lm shoot.

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and Indians and cavalrymen, and he loved taking his company of actors, cameramen, wranglers, and stuntmen on location to Monument Valley along the Utah- Arizona border, famous for its scenic beauty and its ut-ter remoteness, far from the reach of the studio money men and their regiments of sycophantic retainers. There he would harangue and abuse his loyal crew, bend them to his will, and inspire them to do their fi nest work. And he loved working with John Wayne, his favorite actor and occasional whipping boy. Under Ford’s demanding and meticulous di-rection, Wayne had become America’s most iconic Western star: the solitary, taciturn man on horse back, true to his own code and adept with his fi sts and his guns. They were like father and son, wise old men-tor and humble pupil, with Wayne in the subordinate role even after he became the country’s top box- offi ce attraction.

No surprise, then, that Ford once introduced himself to a roomful of fellow directors by declaring, “My name is John Ford and I make West-erns.” The genre was at the core of his identity.

And now, at the moment of Ford’s greatest need, his longtime friend and business partner, Merian C. Cooper, came up with the idea for a Western he thought John Ford would fi nd irresistible.

the searchers, a new novel by the author and screenwriter Alan Le-May, was a captivity narrative set in Texas during pioneer days, and it was rich with strong characters, dramatic scenes, and an undercurrent of sexual obsession. It was based in part on a true story: the abduction of a nine- year- old girl in eastern Texas in 1836 by Comanche raiders who slaughtered her father, grandfather, and uncle, and kidnapped her and four other young people. Cynthia Ann Parker had been raised by her captors and became the wife of a Comanche warrior and mother of three. James Parker, her uncle, a backwoodsman and devout Baptist who pos-sessed a dubious set of morals and an abiding hatred for Indians, searched eight years for her and her fellow captives— one of them his own daugh-ter Rachel— and helped recover four of the missing.

But not Cynthia Ann. She lived with the Comanches for twenty- four years, until she was recaptured in 1860 by the U.S. Cavalry and Texas Rangers in another murderous raid and restored to her white relatives. Kept apart from her Comanche family, she died in misery and obscu-rity. But her surviving son, Quanah, became one of the last great war-riors and later on an apostle of reconciliation, helping preserve the remnants of the Comanche nation and invoking the spirit of his dead

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mother to preach peace and understanding between whites and Native Americans. The two sides of the Parker family— one of them Texan, the other Comanche— still honored the legacy of their distant ancestors at family reunions and had even begun sending emissaries to each other’s events.

The story of Cynthia Ann Parker had been told and retold, altered and reimagined, by each generation to fi t its own needs and sensibility, until fact and fi ction had blended together to form a foundational American myth about the winning of the West. Cynthia Ann, in the version published and passed down by Texas historians, became a ro-mantic and tragic fi gure, rescued from savages but doomed to unhappi-ness because the barbarians had corrupted her soul by subjecting her to a fate worse than death: sexual relations with Indians. Her half- white son was the Noble Savage who led his childlike people down the path to civilization. There were other accounts, compiled mostly by female rela-tives, that paint a sadder and more complex portrait of mother and son. But those accounts were never published and remain scattered and un-annotated in the American History archives at the University of Texas at Austin.

The legend gave rise to a prairie opera, one- act plays, fanciful narra-tives, and fables— and in 1954 to Alan LeMay’s powerful novel, one of the best Westerns of its era. LeMay moved the original story forward some thirty years to the late 1860s, when Comanche power was waning, added elements from other captivity narratives he had compiled, and turned the focus from the female captive to two relatives— her uncle and her adopted brother— who spend seven years searching for her.

Ford, a voracious reader who was steeped in the history of the Amer-ican West, had once commissioned a screenplay about Quanah for a fi lm that never got made. Now he read LeMay’s novel and saw its cinematic possibilities. Ford had Cooper quickly arrange for Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, a scion of two massive family fortunes who was looking to get into the movie business, to acquire the screen rights on his behalf. Le-veraging Whitney’s money, Cooper made a deal with Warner Brothers for additional fi nancing and distribution rights, and Ford and his crew set out for Monument Valley.

The movie Ford sought to make had all the elements of the classic Western— a harsh and stunningly beautiful setting, hardy settlers, stoic pioneer women, brutal and rapacious Indians, and a hard, relentless pro-tagonist who stalks the frontier like an angry lion on a mission of ven-geance. It was, as the publicity posters proclaimed, “THE BIGGEST,

6 / INTRODUCTION

ROUGHEST, TOUGHEST . . . AND MOST BEAUTIFUL PIC-TURE EVER MADE!” But Ford also celebrated the frontier commu-nity and its rituals— its weddings, family meals, square dances, and funerals— the coming together of hardworking people to share their triumphs and humor and mourn their losses. The Searchers was not just an adventure story but a parable about the conquest of the American frontier.

But while The Searchers pays homage to the familiar themes of the classic Western, it also undermines them. Its central character possesses all of the manly virtues and dark charisma of the Western hero yet is tainted by racism and crazed by revenge, his quest fueled by hatred. His goal is not to restore his lost niece to the remnants of their broken fam-ily but to kill her, because she has grown into a young woman and has become a Comanche bride and, willingly or not, has had sex with Indi-ans. He is bent on enforcing sexual and racial purity by performing an honor killing as twisted and remorseless as any carried out in the medi-eval recesses of the Middle East.

Ford was a storyteller who loved to create and manipulate myths, and as he grew older and more complex, he loved to challenge them as well, reaffi rming the audience’s deepest conventional wisdom and then gen-tly shattering it. Despite all of his personal setbacks, he rose to the height of his creative powers in The Searchers. He is responsible for the fi lm’s visual poetry— its skill in moving from the intimacy of domestic interiors and family life to the terrible beauty of the gothic sandstone cathedrals and vast, obliterating plains of Monument Valley— as well as its deep and passionate emotions.

At the heart of The Searchers is John Wayne’s towering per for mance as Ethan Edwards. Despite his reputation for knowing how to play only the righ teous hero, Wayne had portrayed morally ambiguous men be-fore, most notably the autocratic trail boss in Red River (1948) and the brutish Marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). But in The Searchers he is darker, angrier, and more troubled than ever. This dark knight is determined to exterminate the damsel and anyone who stands in his way. He shoots the eyes out of a Comanche Indian corpse, scalps an-other dead Indian, disrupts a funeral ser vice, fi res at warriors collecting their dead and wounded from the battlefi eld, and slaughters a buffalo herd to deprive Comanche families of food for the winter. Still, because he is played by John Wayne, we identify with Ethan’s quest even as we recoil from his purpose. His charisma draws us in, making us complicit in his terrible vendetta.

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“Wayne is plainly Ahab,” writes the cultural critic Greil Marcus. “He is the good American hero driving himself past all known limits and into madness, his commitment to honor and decency burned down to a core of vengeance.”

Largely overlooked in its time— it was not nominated for a single Academy Award—The Searchers has become recognized as one of the greatest of Hollywood movies. It was extraordinarily infl uential on a generation of modern American fi lmmakers— from Steven Spielberg to George Lucas to Martin Scorsese— imprinting itself on their psyches and their ambitions during their formative years. “It was a sacred feel-ing,” recalled Scorsese, who fi rst saw the fi lm at age thirteen, “seeing that movie on that big screen.” The fi lm was also the forerunner of the postmodern wave of introspective Westerns— from Ford’s own The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)— that dissect the values and assumptions of the genre even while honoring them. Just as Ernest Hemingway noted that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” fi lm critic Stuart Byron once declared, “in the same broad sense it can be said that all re-cent American cinema derives from John Ford’s The Searchers.”

Like Spielberg, Lucas, and Scorsese, I, too, was entranced by The Searchers as a boy coming of age in the 1960s. Everything about it thrilled and frightened me. Wayne’s command of the screen, his terrify-ing anger, and his unpredictable blend of affection and derision toward his young nephew and fellow Searcher, played by Jeffrey Hunter, at times reminded me of my own father. There was dust and grit in every scene, and even the gunshot sounds seemed sharper and more real than in other Westerns. And the climactic moment when the uncle chases down his niece and must decide whether to wreak his terrible revenge made me weep with fear and plea sure.

But what entranced me most were the Comanches. They make only a few appearances in the fi lm, yet they are the psychological terror in the night that haunts the white settlers, and they haunted me as well. Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one- dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists, and some critics have accused the fi lm of practicing the same racism it purports to condemn. Yet Ford also grants Indians their humanity: the evil war chief Scar justifi es his campaign of murder and abduction as revenge for the killing of his own two sons by whites. The aftermaths of two massacres are depicted in the fi lm, with the burning farm house where a pioneer family has been

8 / INTRODUCTION

slaughtered in the fi rst act of the story balanced later by a burning In-dian village strewn with the corpses of men, women, and children mowed down by soldiers. And even as a boy I could see that when Ethan Ed-wards fi nally confronts Scar, the two warriors share a mutual hatred that binds them in a fatal embrace.

I grew up to become a journalist, and my travels as foreign corre-spondent for the Washington Post took me to the Middle East and the Israeli- Palestinian confl ict. Like the Plains Indian wars, this, too, was an intimate war of populations in which women and children were both victims and participants. Each side saw the struggle, in Kipling’s impe-rial phrase, as a “Savage War of Peace” in which only one could triumph and the loser must be exterminated physically or culturally or both.

When I came home in 2006, I came back to The Searchers. It was the fi ftieth anniversary of the fi lm’s release and a time of critical acclaim and retrospection. Yet while critics celebrated Ford’s cinematic mastery, what struck me as an even greater achievement was his ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric.

As the movie ends, Ford pivots back to the young woman at the heart of the legend, played by the luminous sixteen- year- old Natalie Wood. We fi rst see her as a silent servant in the teepee of the war chief who ab-ducted her and butchered her family. Then she appears as a dark speck at the top of a golden sand dune, slowly moving toward us and her would- be rescuers as she plunges down the hill. At fi rst she insists she wants to stay with the Comanches who have raised her and who she says are now her people. Later, however, she passively accepts her rescue and the em-brace fi rst of her adopted brother and then of white civilization, even while her expression remains wary and uncertain.

In The Searchers she is the idealized passive damsel, dressed like a Hollywood Pocahontas in buckskins, beads and feathers. But the real Cynthia Ann Parker, abducted by Indians as a child on a sunny spring morning and recaptured by soldiers on a cold December morning twenty- four years later, was a frightened and bewildered victim of war who watched in horror as friends and relatives were slaughtered by both sides. The making of an American legend begins with her, on a small, fortifi ed farm in East Texas, where her pioneer family and an Indian raiding party meet in a primitive clash of civilizations.