Hey, Ben here, just a quick heads up. This episode has some offensive language. In the days and weeks after D-Day, John Ford was a wreck. Whatever he witnessed on that beach, close friends like John Wayne could see he came back a different man. There was a change in Jack because he liked to play soldier before the war. But after he'd been out there, you know, and then it was a different thing. John's behavior was even more erratic than usual. His drinking, already prolific, skyrocketed. Mark Armistead, Ford's assistant in the photo field unit, was with him during those dark days. He's the type of person who wonders too many in the thousands and mountain of. He's something that happens to stay with him the entire night. You simply have to stay with him day and night, Armistead said. John Ford watch with Armistead was Bill Clotheer, a cinematographer, one of Ford's friends. Clotheer agreed to let Ford recover at his house, but recuperation for John Ford looked more like relapse. Almost as soon as Ford arrived at Clotheer's house, he burrowed himself into a sleeping bag and stayed put, emerging only to get more alcohol. So out of his mind, wasn't even taking care of himself. And Bill was upset about him because he peed in the sleeping bag. That was the last straw for Bill Clotheer, author Mark Harris. He was so non-functional and soiled and disheveled that the guys in the house had to sort of contact his ship and say, get him out of here, come pick him up and take him away. Clotheer screamed into the phone, I don't give a shit if he's your commander, get him the hell out of here, he's throwing up all over my room. John Ford needed to find a way to get back on his feet. He needed an escape, but he didn't want to just go back to his usual Hollywood life, to the same old grind from Studio Bosses. I wanted to relieve, I was actually going to get away from the Hollywood, get out of the great open spaces, but not specifically, I'd like to get away from the whole background, probably particularly the studio head. So John Ford went to the desert, to a place that would become synonymous, not only with the movies of John Ford, but with the American West itself, a place where he could be what he most liked to be, in charge, untouchable, a place where he could be king. I'm Ben Mankiewicz and this is the plot thickens. This season we partnered with Novel for decoding John Ford, the most influential filmmaker of the last 100 years. In the next few episodes, we're going to dive deeper into the legacy of John Ford, how he worked offscreen as an artist and on set with cast and crew all around him. And we'll look at the ideas and myths he developed on screen, ideas that shaped the way the world still thinks about the West, about men, and about America. This is episode five, Monument Valley. Even if you've never seen a John Ford film, you know Monument Valley. This stretch of desert on the Arizona-Utah border is where Wiley Coyote chased the road runner, where Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda rode their Harleys into the sunset in Easy Rider, where the Griswold family spent their summer vacation, and where Forest Gump finally stopped running. I had run for three years, two months, 14 days and 16 hours. Monument Valley is the landscape most of us think of when we close our eyes and picture the American West. A huge expanse of empty desert, populated only by red sandstone pillars known as buttes rising off the valley floor, like monuments built by some alien civilization. And the reason we have that image in our minds is because of John Ford. Ford first visited Monument Valley just before he went to war, after a local rancher named Harry Goulding came out to Hollywood to lobby the studios to come and shoot there. Goulding ran a trading post in Monument Valley where ranchers and indigenous tribes bartered animal hides and rugs for dry goods. When the Depression hit, Goulding started looking for new ways to bring in money and jobs for the Navajo who lived there. Goulding wasn't in Hollywood long before he met up with John Ford and convinced him to check out the valley. I went up in the preliminary tour to Monument Valley the first couple of days around there was horrific winds storms. Even with the whipping wind, it was immediately clear this valley held something Ford loved most. Epic, beautiful scenery. There were big watercolors, choirs, giant cactus in the background there were the mountains and the butch, and then the resting setup. According to actor and Ford stuntman Ben Johnson, the place also had a sort of ghostliness to it. It felt magical. I'll never forget the first time we went into Goulding's land. We got in there just before dark and there's a sheer rock wall that runs along there for probably a quarter of a mile. We drove up in this car and got out and I heard someone holler way across. You could just barely hear them. And then immediately after the echo, there was one holler way back over here. Right down below us, like a quarter of a mile, these Indians started singing and dancing. And this sound bounced back against this rock wall and out into this valley and it was the most eerie sound. If I could have had a recording of that, it would have been priceless. It just makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. That's really something. Creature comforts were scarce in the desert, but that didn't deter Ford. In fact, that was part of the charm. The location was almost a character in itself, says Ford biographer Scott Eiman. If you want to see a great location director, watch John Ford. The environment creates character. You don't need lines to explain their behavior, why they're living in this place. The landscape embodied something essential about Ford's ideal American man, the kind of man he put on screen again and again, the kind of man he aspired to be himself, rugged, remote, a little wild. So when Ford got a call from Daryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox with an idea for how to ease him back into civilian work after the war, it was an easy yes. Zanuck told him, listen John, we've both been through a lot over there in Europe. Things were a little tough. Once you do a nice easy western, you go back to your favorite spot in Monument Valley and I'll go into a story here called My Darling Clementine. I said, I'd like to do that. Forget about the war. I just go out there and enjoy western. So that's how I was decided. Ford had spent only a few days in Monument Valley shooting stagecoach in the late 1930s, but when he returned for My Darling Clementine, he settled in. Between 1946 and 1964, Ford made six films there. There was always a guy on horseback, usually John Wayne, riding off on some honorable mission and a pretty girl waiting back in town. After My Darling Clementine came for Apache. She wore a yellow ribbon. Never apologize, Mr. It's a sign of weakness. The searchers. That'll be the day. Sergeant Rutledge. I'm a prisoner dying. Bad trouble. And Cheyenne Autumn. The white man's words are lies. All of them westerns. All shot there in the middle of the desert, 650 miles from Hollywood. When Ford started shooting in Monument Valley, it was just Golding's little store and a bunch of tents set up for the cast and crew. An open desert stretching out in all directions. It was a pretty tough location. But Ford, he just, well, it was his spot. You know, it was the greatest place in the world for Ford. He was concerned. I worked hard, felt better, slept well, ate well. It was a very happy time in my life. Locations meant a lot to Ford. Not just the way of getting out of Hollywood, which was part of it, I'm sure. He liked being on location with a crew because he's like a camp director, you know? It's like a summer camp and he's running it. It really was, in a sense, summer camp. If summer camp were held in the desert and your fellow campers were some of the most famous people in the world. Each time Ford traveled out to Utah, he brought along a cast of regulars, names that would appear over and over again in the credits of Ford films. These regulars loosely became known as the John Ford Stock Company. Some were huge stars, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara. Some were lesser known character actors, Ward Bond, Victor McLaughlin, Mildred Natwick. People lined up for a chance to head to the desert with Ford to work on a movie in any capacity. I always feel it was like a badge of merit to be able to say I was in the John Ford Stock Company. English actress Anna Lee, she played both the pretty girl and the dignified woman in Ford Westerns. She says actors wanted in, even if they didn't always know what they were signing up for. You very rarely got to see a script. You were told you were going to do something in a picture and you didn't know whether it was going to be the leading role or two lines, but you could never say no to him. He wanted you in the picture and that was it. Henry Fonda was a veteran of Camp Ford. I've never had more fun in my life than on locations with Ford, whether it was playing pitch or with campfires or whatever. It might be hard to think of the volatile Moody John Ford as a good camp counselor, but in some ways he really was, in unexpected ways sometimes, like every afternoon at 4.30 sharp, shooting paused for tea. The cameraman and the principals and the actors that might be just the day people that day, and they were around a table that was set up with cookies and tea and you had tea and it was a social 15 minutes to a half hour that was so English and yet it was Ford's idea. I'm trying to picture disheveled, eye-patched and gruff John Ford sipping tea. Once shooting was done for the day, Ford gathered his campers in the mess hall. Full up there is great, home cooked, now we're all right together in a communal dining room. It's relaxed, forget them at today's work, if talking about something else. That was one of two strict rules at Camp Ford. We forbade sharp talk, we ran every brothel, had a drop of 50 cents into a kitty, unfortunately it grew to quite a sum. A priest came up from one of the neighboring towns, the very poor parish, and we gave him the money. Ford also forbade drinking of any kind at camp, even he didn't drink during shoots. If he smelled booze on your breath, you were out of the company. In the evenings, Ford liked to play cards for money, an old English game called pitch. Henry Fonda suspected Ford of casting people specifically for their pitch skills and if you didn't know how to play, Ford would come prepared to initiate you. He would come to the location with a bag of silver dollars, you'd give him the paper for the dollars, so that everybody had silver. Why silver? Because with paper money, Ford couldn't hear himself winning. You loved the sound of clinking money and when, if he won, he made you pay one at a time around the table. You wanted the sound of that silver coming in from him and he loved the sound of that money, particularly when he won. The clinks and the banter echoed across the valley buttes. And this dialogue from the pitch game would hit a butte and echo back and forth and if somebody says shit, it would hear it eight times and echoes. Like all gamblers, Ford liked to win. Lefty Huff, Ford's longtime prop man, says that if Ford was losing, he'd make you keep playing until he was ahead. When we were making my darling Clementine, I'd taken $150 silver dollars down there for the pitch game and I was not supposed to stay one day. So I'd get in the pitch game first night but I got more than half of those silver dollars and you won't allow me to go home. So you're not going to get to come home until I get those silver dollars. It took them three days to get it back. After pitch died down, the whole company would gather around the campfire for the evening entertainment. Once again, Henry Fonda. It was Pappy that arranged for the crew to get the long logs and they were logs, you know, 30 feet long in this big round and drag them into a big circle in a clearing by the camp and there wouldn't be the campfire in the center and it was a huge fire every day as big as this table every night. One would gather around the fire in a huge circle and Fonda would kick things off. It was my job to plan each night what was going to happen and Ugly Ward and I would work up songs in three-part harmony. There was a guitar player, it seemed to me or maybe it was a vanguille player and I got so that the company looked forward to it and it was their, their recreation. They worked all day, they came home and showered and cleaned up and had chow and then you went to the campfires. Eventually, late into the evening, things would die down and people would start to say goodnight. At the end of the entertainment and the end of the campfire, when it was time to go to bed, there was a bugler. On a cue, he would disappear into the wood and he would play taps. And this was typical, this is typical for, because he was sentimental and he made people sentimental and he showed people that would be sentimental, they were his closest friends. And I want you to know, they would sit around there with tears in their eyes at this haunting taps coming from the woods in the back of us. And just remembering it, I can get emotional about it. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, John Ford was building a community and it felt like belonging. But underneath that camaraderie, something else was simmering. John Ford was not just a summer camp director, he was also a benevolent dictator, more benevolent to some than others. I don't know how he had people to idolize him as much as they did when he was so damn obnoxious. He could be absolutely hideous to people, dreadful, very, very nasty and unpleasant. He always had to have some whipping boy. That's coming up after the break. Monument Valley gave Ford the freedom to make some of his best work. Out there, no one got in his way, no one checked his impulses, which is how Ford liked it. One time when he was on a shoot, a network suit tried to meddle in a scene. The old man wanted Stuart to be smoking cigars. Cinematographer Bill Clothier. And the prop man said, we can't use cigars, I can use cigarettes. The old man said, I want him using cigars. And he said, well, the producer says that you have to use cigarettes because a cigarette company may buy this. And the old man said, well, he's a fucking idiot. Ford ignored the producer and used cigars. The producer later confronted him. And he said, understand you called me an idiot. The old man said, if I'm going to be quoted, I want to be quoted correctly. I called you a fucking idiot. Ford was always provoking someone. As actress Constance Towers remembered, it seemed to be ingrained in his nature. He was Irish and he always stirred the pot. He always had somebody upset. And it seemed like Ford was doing it deliberately. Often, he would go after people where they were most vulnerable. Ford had that strange gift of knowing exactly where to insert the blade. Ford biographer Scott Eiman again. He never raised his voice. He never yelled at anybody. He would simply go for the weak spot, whatever your weak spot happened to be. If your weak spot was you were afraid of your father, then he would be the angry father, the unhappy father. If your weak spot was a drinking problem or you cheated on your wife, he would simply go for the weak spot, whatever it happened to be. For actors Walter Brennan and Grant Withers, that weak spot was horses. He rode Walter Brennan and I'll never really understand why. Brennan and Withers played the bad guys in Ford's 1946 western, My Darling Clementine. Howdy, howdy. My name's Clinton. This is my boy Ike. The two actors had to be on horseback for much of the film and neither was much of a rider. But Ford made them do their own stunts and then ridiculed them whenever they had trouble. Didn't you even mount a horse? Ford yelled at Brennan. He snapped back. No, but I got three Oscars for acting. The other actor, Grant Withers, was not just a bad rider. He was definitely afraid of horses and Ford seized on it, according to actress Joanne Drew. He knew that Grant was terrified of horses and in this particular scene he said, oh, Grant, I hate to do this to you. He said that you're going to have to ride your own horse. He said because a very critical shot, the Indians are coming from here and as you come down the hill, your face goes right past camera. He says, OK, man, mount up. Go to the top of the hill. Blah, blah, blah. Withers got on the horse and rode to the top of the hill. So you know, as all the actor sees, he does, action and Jesus, the horses came galloping down past camera. Dust every place. People falling off horses and he'll cut. And he says, I'm sorry, man. He says, I think we're going to have to do this one more time. Something went wrong with the film. Grant just stood there shaking. He was just shaking from head to toe. He says, OK, Withers, come on. We've got to get the shot. Losing the sun. He said, which one is your horse? Are you sad? The one with the shit in the saddle. On every Ford said, there was always at least one person in the barrel singled out for abuse. And if you weren't on his shit list, it was only a matter of time before you were. As Jimmy Stewart discovered on the set of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And do came up to me one day. He said, how's it come that you've gone through this whole thing and you've never been at the bottom of the list? What is it? Is it an apple in the old man? Or what? What's the idea? And I said, I don't know. And I didn't know. But I say I got a little smog about it. Maybe someone passed this on to Ford. Who knows? But before filming stopped, Stewart was shooting a scene with Woody Strode, a black actor Ford worked with on four movies. And for some reason, he does this quite often. But I think this is a part of the tension and a part of Ford. He came up to me and he said, before we did the scene, he said, what do you think of Woody's costume? Woody was dressed in blue overhauls and blue workshirt, lend boots. And now why I said this, I'll never know. What possessed me to say what I did? I'll never know. I, I, and it just came out. And I said, well, it looks a little Uncle Remus-y, doesn't it? And he froze and walked away. Uncle Remus is a fictional black character who embodies all of the worst stereotypes. Remus was cozy with his white enslavers and acted as a sort of apologist for slavery. A few minutes after Stewart's remark, Ford brought his cast and crew together. He said, everybody, Woody plays some guy around. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we have an actor here who objects to the costume on Woody Strode. He says that it's too Uncle Remus-y. Now, I don't know if this is a sort of a prejudice on Mr. Stewart's part. I don't know whether he's anti-needro. I don't know what it is, but I just wanted to point this out to the whole cast. I wanted to shoot myself. I wanted to crawl into a mouse hole. And Ford said, well, that's all. That's all. And everybody's smitten. And I looked at Duke Wayne and he was beaming like a cat that is just eating the mouse. And Duke came over and said, well, welcome to the club. I'm glad you made it. This wasn't the only time he did this kind of thing to Jimmy Stewart. Ford was constantly pitting people against each other. Sometimes it seemed for his own amusement. And sometimes he seemed to think the hostility would help the actors with their performances. When Jimmy Stewart worked with Ford on Two Road Together, he played a washed out drunk who clashes with an aristocratic West Point grad played by Richard Widmark. Now you listen to me. Now you listen to me for a change. Now you coming along peaceably or do I have to get rough? Before filming started, Ford took Stewart aside. He said, now just between you and me, this Widmark is a pretty good kind of a country actor. As a matter of fact, he's awful good. So just keep an eye on him and just keep awake at all times or you'll pull the rug right out from under you. Well, I had never worked with Dick Wayne. We became very good friends and everything and everything worked fine. But at the end of the picture, I told him about this. And Dick said, well, he came up and said the same thing to me about you. Ford seemed to be trying to provoke tension between the two men to help make the antagonism between their characters more authentic. It may have worked on screen, but on his sets, it must have felt like John Ford laid a minefield and then asked you to crawl through it. Coming up on the plot thickens, there weren't many lines Ford wouldn't cross to get the performances he wanted. I mean, the horrible racist things he said to Woody Strode. As he did in many of his relationships, Ford bounced between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Woody Strode. He was on the one hand quite tender and on the other hand quite miserable and it just depended if you could get past the one to see the other. That's after the break on the plot thickens. Ford returned to Monument Valley in 1959 to film Sergeant Rutledge. The movie itself was, for its time, quite progressive. One of the first big Hollywood movies to look at racism straight on. This is really one of the first films in which a black actor is cast in a leading role in a western film directed by John Ford, right? The grand poobah of western filmmaking. That was a watershed moment. That's Mia Maske, a film professor at Vassar College, who's written a book about black westerns. This is an era when you're beginning to see more opportunity for African-American actors. You begin to have Poitiers, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge getting more opportunity, but these opportunities are still far in view between and it's just a select few individuals. Sergeant Rutledge was a meaty role. The character was a black army sergeant, falsely accused of killing his white commanding officer and raping his daughter. The studios really wanted John Ford to consider Poitiers, but John Ford felt that Poitiers wasn't tough enough, wasn't rugged enough to portray the character. Don't touch that gun, Lieutenant! I don't have to! You're gonna hand me that rifle butt end first. No, sir! Enter Woody Strode, a former football player just starting to act. In 1946, Strode and his former UCLA teammate Kenny Washington signed with the Los Angeles Rams, breaking the NFL's color barrier. That was one year before Jackie Robinson did the same for baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1959, Strode was new to Hollywood and he was malleable, which might have been part of what Ford liked about him. Sergeant Rutledge was a John Ford classic, probably one of my finest acting jobs in the beginning career. That's Woody Strode in an interview from 1971. It's never been heard before. He said Sergeant Rutledge was ahead of its time. John Ford thought he would do something graceful. Way before anybody started to march or decided to do anything, he just did it on his own. Sergeant Rutledge came out roughly five years into the Civil Rights Movement. Some historians call it Ford's Apology Western, a mea culpa for the way he portrayed people of color in his earlier films. The movie focused on a little known part of military history. Regiments of black cavalrymen who served in the West after the Civil War, many of whom former slaves. They were called Buffalo Soldiers, the same ones Bob Marley sang about 20 years later. He said, Woody, we would like to show what the black man did in American history that most of us don't know anything about. I knew my mother was born back in those days, but most of the people in it were not even the blacks. Even if John Ford was trying to make a progressive film, race relations in the real world, even on his own set, were dismal. Black actors couldn't stay in the same hotel as their white co-stars. John Ford, as luminous, as important, as respected as he was, would not have been able to have had the power to integrate every setting where he was shooting because of the nature of segregation during the 50s and 60s. It just would not have been possible, even for somebody with John Ford's cultural clout and power. Sergeant Rutledge undoubtedly opened doors for Woody Strode, but it was also likely an isolating experience making the movie. Strode was one of only a handful of black actors on set. A role like this in a film directed by someone as prominent as John Ford was a great opportunity for Woody Strode, but it would have been lonely. Woody Strode got educated quickly at the school of John Ford. Strode had a big monologue toward the end of the film, a powerful scene where his character explains why he decided to return to his unit as a wanted man. It required a moving performance from Strode. The scene on the stand where I refused to talk at her hollering and screaming and just hammered on me. At this moment, the sensitivity had to show and he had to get a real true emotion from me. The real man started persecuting. The afternoon before they shot, Ford invited Strode over to his son Pat's house for a drink, handed him the biggest mug of whiskey Strode had ever seen. Strode doesn't remember much of what happened after that. He just remembers waking up in the sitting room the next day and rushing over to the set. And remember, a John Ford set was strictly dry, no alcohol allowed. Ford walked over to Strode, smelled his breath, read him the riot act in front of the whole cast and crew, then rolled the camera. It was time for Woody Strode's monologue. Why did I come back? My answer to the prosecuting attorney was because a night cowboy looked my halt and my real freedom and my self-respect and the way I was running and the way I was deserting it. I wasn't nothing the first in a swamp running nigga. And I ain't that. Do you hear me? I'm a man. And I stood out and the water started and I got mad and of course I was embarrassed and I hit the seat and I broke the seat in the first seat. It was a hell of a performance, truly memorable. It was also a big deal for a novice actor like Strode being directed by John Ford, transformative even. And Strode clearly appreciated what he learned from Ford. But it's hard to get your mind around some of the tactics Ford used to elicit that performance. There were times when he was abused physically, when John Ford would hit him, step on his foot, told him bend over and hit him on the backside with the butt of a rifle and would really haze him. It's really unpleasant the kind of language that Ford would sometimes use to belittle Strode. During the production of Sergeant Rutledge, he repeatedly uses the N word, would he stop niggering up my production? On the set of Two Road Together, which also featured Woody Strode, Ford got angry with Strode for drinking with some of the Navajo. When the crew broke for lunch, Ford was sitting with the film's two white stars as Strode walked up to join them. Ford told him he couldn't sit down, but he didn't stop there. He threw a racial slur at Strode and told him he'd have to eat alone. He was hazing everybody, but he was hazing Woody Strode in a way that he couldn't haze everybody else. Manipulating his vulnerability as a raced subject. Having advantage of that vulnerability. This must have been very difficult, lonely, isolating moments for Strode on set because you're simultaneously part of the cast, part of the family, part of the unit, and yet you have John Ford reminding you, oh, you're not really like us. You're not one of us. So get over there. Woody Strode said John Ford split his personality with the way he directed him. W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the fact that African Americans are already split in some ways, two warring souls inside one body, being both American and African American having to walk that line. But I think what Woody Strode means is that John Ford kept coming at him in ways that were sometimes unpredictable, sometimes very emotional, sometimes violent, and hard to navigate. He's just said in one point in his biography, I wanted to hit the old man, you know, but on the other hand, he respected him and knew what he had done for him. John Ford really put Woody Strode on the map. Some of the people who defended Ford's methods are the very people he tormented, including Woody Strode. Many in Ford's stock company seem to feel this way. Morine O'Hara starred in five of his films. You'd be driving home and you had just spent a day working with him and your feelings as you drove home was, my God, I'm good. I'm magnificent. I'm going to be the biggest star in Hollywood because he might have been mad at you. He might have destroyed you and insulted you, but he also gave you great confidence in yourself. He gave me, I would rather work with the, pardon me, the old bastard than not. He was magnificent. Not everyone found Ford's manipulations charming. Constance Towers was the female lead in Sgt. Rutledge. She had a scene with a young black actor where she was supposed to comfort him. I was the Arch-type pristine young white woman and I was holding him in my arms and I was giving him water out of my canteen to try to help him when he was dying. Thank you, man. Towers noticed the actor seemed anxious beyond what the scene called for. And this young man was so shy of me and pulling back from me and I was trying so hard to be in the scene to be loving and helpful that I didn't understand it. Later a man came up to me and it was that actor and he said, you know, I always felt so bad because Mr. Ford told me that you didn't like black people. And I thought, oh, he did it to me. If here was a John Ford trick and he'd played it on me and I didn't get it. He set that up so I was uncomfortable. The boy was uncomfortable. It was exactly what he wanted. And I turned to him and said, you know, trust me as an actor. You know, if you don't think I can give you the emotion you want, he would always pick up his, you know, the patch he had on his eye and wink at me and then put the patch back and it was, you know, you had to go along with his tricks and his ways. Ford certainly wasn't alone in being tyrannical on set. Braminger, Kubrick, Wells, these guys were notorious for being merciless. They all made it seem like being a great director was almost synonymous with cruelty. It wasn't uncommon for these maverick directors to have these really unorthodox and sometimes bullying methods. Everybody knows the stories about Hitchcock and Tippi Hedrin and how he drove her to a literal emotional breakdown on the set of the birds. Alfred Hitchcock had assured Tippi Hedrin they would be using mechanical birds for filming the movie's climactic attack scene. At the last moment, Hitchcock substituted the fake birds with real ones. Hedrin had to endure five harrowing days being assaulted by actual angry birds. So John Ford wasn't the only one, but he definitely was one of the Hollywood men who helped shape the myth that abuse when it comes from a genius was a sign of affection. Here's Scott Eiman again. The thing about Ford is he was perverse, emotionally perverse. If he liked you, he gave you a hard time. If he didn't like you, you didn't exist. He'd look through you, he wouldn't talk to you, you simply weren't there. We talked today about this phrase toxic masculinity. You might say this was a kind of toxic directorial sensibility. You don't necessarily have to break somebody or make them feel so small or exploit their vulnerabilities to pull those performances out of them. But Ford seemed only to know one way. If you wanted to work with the most powerful director in Hollywood, you had to put up with it. So Ford did sometimes pay a price for how he treated people. His decades-long grudges pushed away some of his closest friends until it was too late. Harry Carey saw the best and the worst of Ford. He'd been John Ford's first friend in Hollywood, first roommate, first leading man. Their families were extremely close. Here's Harry Carey's son, Dobie. I've always felt related, blood related to John Ford. I know that John Ford loves me like a son and I love him like a father. I love him deeply. After they'd been friends for years, Ford heard that Dobie's father, Harry Carey, was gossiping, spreading rumors that maybe Ford was gay. It's worth noting that he wasn't the only one. Moreno Herra later wrote in her memoir that she'd seen Ford kissing another man. But when Ford heard what Harry Carey said, he iced him out professionally. If you got into an argument with the old man, he would blackball you from films until he was ready to forgive you or you were willing to apologize. Ford biographer scouted to Foya. But he would always pull up before he couldn't be forgiven because the one thing he could do to the stomach is the idea of people turning their backs on him. With Harry Carey, though, you get the sense Ford didn't pull up in time. Ford held a grudge after those rumors and they rarely worked together again. In the end, Ford paid a price for his stubbornness. Harry Carey got sick with lung cancer in 1947, 26 years into Ford blackballing him. Ford rushed to the bedside of his first Hollywood friend. Carey's wife, Olive, recounted what happened. He came down to the ranch and he and Harry got pissy ass drunk. Oh, Jesus. And I mean, pissy ass drunk. Crime in his face. And to Harry fast out, I got him to bed. So I go out in the kitchen and then Ford's sitting out there in the kitchen and he's got a crying jagged. He drew on all down his chin and crying and he died of that. The day Harry died, Jack arrived and he was alongside him on his knees when he died. And I went out into the patio and Jack came out and he took over me and put his head on my breast and cried. And the whole front of my sweater was sopping wet all the way down the front. He cried for at least 15 or 20 minutes, just solid, solid sobbing. It was dramatically airing wet for me. There is some tragic irony in Ford's behavior in the way he could treat people. It may well have kept him from the thing he seemed to want the most to be a real part of the family he was building. Here in the desert of Monument Valley. He always wanted to be one of the guys that would be a circle on the set, a group of people and he'd see them laughing and have a good time and he wanted to be part of that. But when he'd come into it, it would all stop and everybody would be watching what they said and he wanted very much to be a part of that but he never could be. You felt that he missed that camaraderie. Maybe the only version of camaraderie Ford could stomach was one where intimacy and male bonding had to come with a side of torment and abuse. And maybe these dual sides of Ford weren't actually contradictory at all. Maybe that's what happens sometimes when you feel the world won't accept your true nature. That was Catherine Hepburn's theory. Even when she told him so, Ford agreed. Life for you in actuality had been an extremely tough experience because you were sensitive to great many things that people would never suspect you of being sensitive about. That you were torn apart by a great number of things that you never could admit to being torn apart about. Is that correct? I think that's true, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So Ford hid his tenderness under spiked armor and military medals and he didn't just play out this volatile masculinity on set. He put that version of a man on screen and in doing so, he shaped the country, even the world's idea of what it means to be a man. Who knows what John Ford was up to or if it always was motivated from a place of artistic expression. He was also just kind of a mean guy, you know, with his own problems. That doesn't mean that we can't watch and enjoy and love some of his films. We have to talk about both. We have to take the good with the bad. Next time on the Plot Thickens, the searchers just kind of haunts me. When you're wrestling with Ford, you are basically wrestling with the searchers. We look at Ford's masterpiece, the most disturbing western in cinema history. I think Ethan is kind of an idealized projection of Ford's own damaged psyche. Living with comagis ain't being alive. Better she's alive and living with them. What a perplexing man and what a perplexing set of foams he has left us with. Angela Carone is our director of podcasts. Story editor is Karen Duffin. Yako Friedman is our senior producer. Script writing by Yako Friedman, Maya Croath and James Sheridan who also fact-checked every episode for us. Audio editing and sound design by Brandon Ardell, James Kim and Mike Volgaris. Mixing by Glenn Matullo. Research by Matt Goldberg. Production support from Liz Winter, Allison Fire, Matthew Ownby, Julie Baton, Emma Morris, Susan Beesack, Dory Stegman and Phil Richards. Thanks to our legal team, John Renaud and Kristen Hassel. And to the talents of TCM staffers, Taryn Jacobs, Katie Daniels, David Byrne, Diana Bosch, Caroline Wigmore, Michelle Height, Stephanie Thames and to our resident Ford scholar, Scott McGee. Our executive producer is Charlie Tavish. Special thanks to Dan Ford for sharing his family archive with us. And to the helpful team at Indiana University's Lilly Library. Special thanks to Prudence Doherty and Chris Burns from the Silver Specials Collections Library at the University of Vermont. From novel, thanks to producer, Philippa Goodrich, story editor Veronica Simmons, researcher Valeria Raca, assistant producer Nadia Meddy, production managers, Sherry Houston and Charlotte Wolfe, executive producer Max O'Brien and creative director Lard Foxton. Thomas Avery of Tune Welders composed our theme music. I'm your host Ben Mankiewicz. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
