Duke, O’Hara, and Ford

I finished Scott Eyman’s magnificent biography of John Wayne (John Wayne: The Life and Legend), and could not recommend it more highly. While the book deserves only praise for its delving into Wayne’s filmography, the true strength of the book lies with the fact that John Wayne emerges as a person that you feel like you know, by the end pages. (It is similar to what Peter Guralnick was able to pull off in his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley – Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, Presley being a similar “sui generis” figure, whose myth always loomed larger than the man. To make us feel like we know the guy is no small feat. It requires a great humanistic approach.) Eyman treats Wayne’s politics respectfully (unlike so many others, who seem to dislike Wayne’s acting based solely on his politics. Please.), but also provides context for where Wayne was coming from. His politics were extremely personal. He made some super bad calls, and history proved him wrong on some of them – but, I must say, the same is true for the liberals. So please. But Eyman talks about all of it, and then moves on, next movie, next whatever. The focus is not the politics. The focus is the totality of the man, and the majority of his life was his actor-self. Eyman does not sit on his high-and-mighty biographer’s chair, wagging his finger and calling Wayne to task for this or that. (Phone call for Peter Manso, whose every paragraph in his gigantic biography of Marlon Brando oozed with sneering resentment. I went off on that biography here.) Eyman is fair, and has compiled so many anecdotes that are so personal that Wayne literally leaps off the pages. You get a portrait of him, you understand his process – and the final chapter, describing Wayne’s last illness – was tremendously moving. I shed tears. It was a phenomenal piece of work, building on all that had come before in the rest of the book.

There’s more to say but I just want to share one comment from Maureen O’Hara (who wrote her own wonderful memoir (‘Tis Herself: An Autobiography), but Eyman interviewed her directly for his book, so we get a lot more from her.

O’Hara, of course, worked with Wayne a number of times. She swears they never had an affair. Others say they believe they did. Whatever. It’s irrelevant. The fact remains that they were good friends for their entire lives. She also had a great deal of fondness for John Ford, who had a reputation for being a tyrant, and impatient, and all that, but O’Hara tells Eyman:

He was the best, by God … If John Ford walked in the door right now, and said, “Let’s go” I would say “Yes, sir.” I’d jump and be there. In spite of everything. Because he was the best. … And every night you went home saying, “By God, I did a good day’s work today.” You knew it was work you were going to be proud of.

In her memoir, O’Hara describes Ford screaming at her during the filming of one closeup in The Quiet Man, and she lost her temper and screamed back. The cast and crew were stunned, everyone fell silent and quaked in their boots. Ford was stunned. He waited for a second, and then burst into laughter. Everyone relaxed. O’Hara was good friends with Ford also, for the entirety of his life. She gave as good as she got. She was a hot-tempered Irish lady, and both of them were brawlers with Irish roots, and loved her for it.

As Wayne lay dying, the family circled the wagons, restricting access to him. There were just too many people who wanted to visit. Only the beloved few, those closest to him, were allowed to visit and say goodbye. O’Hara was one of them.

Eyman asked O’Hara, a very old lady by now, if she missed John Wayne. Her slightly Howard-Hawks-ian reply made me laugh loud and hard (and I needed it, considering the sadness of those final pages):

Do I miss him? Oh God, yes. There are so many times I’d like to call Duke, or the old boy [Ford] to ask their advice, ask them what they think. But I had a wonderful life with them. Sometimes I wondered what they liked about me, and then I realized I was the only female man left in their lives.