John Ford: The Man and His Films

659 Pages·1988·19.57 MB·English

by  Tag Gallagher

Tag Gallagher
John Ford: The Man and his Movies.
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In the annals of American film, no name shines
more brightly than that of John Ford. Director
and filmmaker for more than half a century, he
stands preeminent in his craft — not only as a
creator of individual films of surpassing
excellence, but as a master among those who
transformed the early motion pictures into a
compelling new art form that developed in
America and swept the world. As an interpreter
of the Nation’s heritage, he left his personal
stamp indelibly printed on the consciousness of
whole generations both here and abroad. In his
life and in his work, John Ford represents the
best in American films and the best in America.
—Commendation on the
presidential Medal of Freedom
given John Ford in 1973
3
John Ford's career — from 1914 to 1970 — spanned almost the entire
history of the motion picture industry, and for most of that time he was
recognized as America's finest moviemaker. His movies told good stories,
had vivid characters, provoked thought, kindled down-home charms; and his
own personality was apparent in them. His compositional eloquence made
dialogue virtually unnecessary — scarcely for dearth of scripted richness, but
because literary structure was only a single aspect of the intricate formal
beauty and intelligence of his cinema.
It is this immense intelligence that critics have largely ignored. Ford's
apologists laud his instincts and emotions, as though he were an artist
unconsciously, unintentionally. His detractors decry his sentiment and slap-
stick, label him racist, militarist and reactionary, ignoring the subtleties
between extremes, the double-leveled discourses, the oeuvre’s obsessive
plea for tolerance.
Fault for misapprehending Ford's intelligence lies partly with Ford himself,
who hid beneath masks; partly with Hollywood, whose facility is often
deceptive; but chiefly with our cultures disinclination to take movies as
seriously as books. To propose that John Ford was as major an artist as ever
produced by America is to invite ridicule, at least today.
Perhaps I, as author of the present study, am constitutionally prejudiced
in Ford's favor. I hope so. I can claim similar ethnic background, immense
empathy for these movies (seen dozens of times over half a century, and
thus by now experienced quite differently than by one viewing them for the
first time), and I have wished to be useful more toward increasing
appreciation and pleasure than toward revealing faults.

For assistance in obtaining prints and in research I am indebted to Joshua
Bagley (United Artists), Myron Bresnick and Bea Herrmann (Audio Brandon),
Kevin Brownlow, James Card, Hal Cranton (MCA-Universal), Paul Cremo,
Dennis Doph (Columbia Pictures), Dan Ford, David Grossman, Joseph Judice,
Kit Parker Films, Richard Koszarski, Miles Kreuger, Elaine MacDevitt (USIA),
Patrick Mclnroy, William Murdock(U.S. Department of Defense), Bill Murphy
(National Archives), Grafton Mimes, George Pratt, Adam Reilly, Patrick
Sheehan and Barbara Humphries (Library of Congress), Charles Silver
(Museum of Modern Art), Mort Slakoff (Viacom), Anthony Slide, John
Sonnebom, John Stone, Sandra Taylor and the staff of the Lilly Library,
Indiana University, and the staffs of the New York Public Library-Lincoln
Center, the Free Library of Philadelphia Theater Collection, the Czechoslovak
Film Archives, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. The
American Council of Learned Societies supplied a travel grant. Olive Carey,
Harry Carey, Jr., Ruth Clifford Cornelius, Cecil MeLean de Prida, Gabriel
Figueroa, Barbara Ford, Graham Greene, Anna Lee, George O’Brien, Leon
Selditz, and John Stafford kindly shared their memories with me. I am
especially grateful to the late Frank C. Baker.
Leo Brandy, John Fell, Brian Henderson, Bruce C. Kawin, William
Rothman, and Michael Wood contributed invaluable editorial assistance.
Gerald Mast persisted through many months of painstaking advice and en-
couragement: the book owes much to him. Ernest Callenbach, Marv
Lamprech, and Mary Anne Stewart, at the University of California Press, have
given the book’s original publication a precision and beauty it would
otherwise lack.
I have profited from the opportunity to rewrite much of my original text
and its photos. I have profited from the many new studies of Ford. And I
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have profited from my translator, Francisco Lopéz Martîn, than whom a
more inspiring (virtual) companion could not have been imagined.
This book is dedicated to my parents and my wife, Phoebe Erb, and to
William K. Everson, without whom much would be impossible.

1. Prologue:
Youth and Apprenticeship

. . . man’s unceasing search for something
he can never find. JOHN FORD

I shall almost always be wrong,, when I
conceive of a man’s character as being all
of one piece. STENDHAL

Because John Ford shrouded himself in mystery, his life and personality
remain inscrutable. His was a complex, perhaps multiple, individuality. Direct
and devious, charismatic and sardonic, amusing and caustic, he generally
dominated those around him, or at least retained his independence. He read
voraciously, history especially, surrounding himself with books; his memory
was virtually photographic, and he could get by in French, German, Gaelic,
Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Navaho. But he posed as
illiterate, hiding his erudition, as he hid his wealth under baggy clothes and
his sensitivity under a tough crust. He was a man of many masks, a joiner
who stayed an outsider, a man of action self-consciously reflective, a big
man, Irish and Catholic. There will probably never be an adequate biography
of John Ford, nor even an adequate character sketch, for there were as many
of him as there were people who knew him.

Beginnings
“A cruel, hard place,” a Ford character calls Ireland, and so it was for
Ford’s father, Sean, born in Spiddal, on the Galway coast, December 3,
1856.1 Years of famine, typhus, mass evictions, and suppressed revolts had

Abbreviations
Anderson Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1981).
Bogdanovich Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
Dan Ford Pappy: The Life of John Ford (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979).
Eyman Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
JFP The John Ford Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Includes
reminiscences undated, but presumably c. 1973.
McBride Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life. (New York: St.
Martin’s, 2001).
Parrish Robert Parrish, Growing Up in Hollywood (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976).
Sinclair Andrew Sinclair, John Ford: A Biography (New York: Dial, 1979).
Wilkinson James L. Wilkinson, An Introduction to the Career and Films of John
Ford, unpublished M.A. thesis, UCLA, August 1960 (microfilm copy in
Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York).
5
intensified the sufferings of a people already rendered destitute by a tiny
plutocracy alien in race, religion, and language. Hope lay in escape, and
Sean, after a visit to the harbor chapel, escaped to America in 1872,
sponsored by Michael Connelly, a cousin who, after escaping enslavement by
Blackfeet, deserting the Union Army, and laying track for the Union Pacific,
had established himself as a bootlegger in Portland, Maine, by marrying a
widow. Sean Americanized his name to John Augustine Feeney,2 became a
citizen in 1878, and eventually succeeded to Connelly’s business. His dingy
restaurant-saloons down near Portland’s wharves and warehouses were
natural gathering places for the Irish, and John Feeney became a ward
leader. He would greet new immigrants, help them settle and find jobs,
register them as citizens and voters, and so built himself a political base. (A
nephew, Joseph Connolly, rose to be a judge on Maine’s Supreme Court.)
On July 31, 1875, Sean married Barbara “Abby” Curran, a distant cousin.
Although Ford liked to say she came from the Aran Islands, like her
grandmother Margaret O’Flaherty, Abby had been born and raised on a farm
not far from her future husband -- whom, however, she had not met before
emigrating to Portland in 1872 a few days before Sean. Although Sean had
the equivalent of a highschool education, Abby was taught neither to read
nor write English (although she could write Gaelic) and her semi-illiteracy
perhaps contributed to her son’s ambivalence toward intellectuality.
In a season of prosperity, Feeney settled his family in Cape Elizabeth,
Maine, on 190 acres of land. And here in an old farmhouse on Charles E.
Jordan Road was born the future John Ford, youngest of six children surviv-
ing infancy. Although Ford went through his youth as John Augustine
Feeney, and later claimed even on passports that his name was Sean
Aloysius 0’Feeney, and although most references, including Ford himself, cite
the year as 1895, the town clerk registered him as John Martin Feeney, born
February 1, 1894, and this information appears also on his tombstone and
baptismal records. Feeney remained his legal name. John was baptized
March 13, 1894, at St. Dominic’s, 163 Danforth Street; Edward and Julia
Feeney were the sponsors. Aloysius was the name John chose at
Confirmation. As a boy he was called John, Johnny, or Jack, and as he grew
he acquired almost a dozen additional nicknames, while bestowing
nicknames of his own on all his friends.
“We were a comfortable, lower middle class family,” John Ford recalled.
“We ate better than we do now.”3 “Father,” said brother Frank, “was the
greatest actor who ever lived. When he told a story of the elves and
banshees and fairies, it was like a real experience.”4 Gaelic was often
spoken in the house, midst frequent spats over pronunciation. Ford’s mother,

1. Biographical information throughout the book derives chiefly from Dan Ford,
Sinclair, Wilkinson (whose family tree I have revised), Joseph McBride, the John Ford
Papers, and interviews with Cecil McLean de Prida, Harry Carey, Jr., and George
O’Brien. Ford’s birth certificate is reproduced in Wilkinson and in the Film Study
Center at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Baptismal information was obtained
by Grafton Nunes.
2. The Gaelic had various spellings: Ó Fianna, Ó Fidhne, Ó Fiannaidhe, Feinne
(Andrew Sinclair, John Ford: A Biography [New York: Dial, 1979], p.3).
3. Philip Jenkinson, unreleased filmed interview with Ford, 1969.
4. Quoted in Wilkinson, p. 17, from his interview with Francis Ford, January 21,
1951.
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called Nana, ruled the home with an easy, quiet, but iron authority,
undiminished even in her sons’ manhood. She held the purse, too, and when
her husband went to the races she would dole out one dollar per race—and
collect the winnings, if there were any. Her sons kissed her when they
entered the house and when they left; more effective than any whipping was
her refusal of their kiss when she was displeased. Jack was her sweetheart.
He looked like her and held her in awe, and in later years, when the two
were a continent apart, claimed a psychic bond. “She would send me
messages. There were quite a few instances of that.”5 Probably from her,
and as the youngest, he acquired the religious fervor of his childhood. Often
he would rise before six and brave twenty-below weather to serve Mass.
They also shared a love for movies. “As a kid I was fascinated by the
nickelodeons of that period. Any time I got a nickel or a dime I would go to
the movies.”6
Feeney family fortunes tended to fluctuate with Maine’s dry laws. In
1897, they were obliged to sell the farm and, after a succession of
residences, take a large third-floor apartment at 23 Sheridan Street,
Portland.

EDWARD FEENEY m. BARBARA MORRIS NICHOLAS CURRAN m. MARGARET O’FLAHERTY
b. Ireland (of Killanin barony) b. Ireland b. Ireland

PATRICK FEENEY m. MARY CURRAN FRANCIS CURRAN m. BRIDGET McLAUGHLIN
b. Ireland b. Ireland b. Ireland b. Ireland

JOHN AUGUSTINE FEENEY = m. c.7.3.75 = BARBARA (ABBY) CURRAN
b. 12.3.1854 Spiddal Portland b. 1856 Spiddal
d. 6.22.36 Portland d. 3.26.33 Portland

MARY AGNES (MAIME) = m. 4.9.00 Portland = John E.McLean b.c.1876
b. 6.15.76
Cecelia A.McLean (or McClain) = m. Lorenzo de Prida
Mary McLean

DELIA (DELLA)
b. 1878; d. 4.18.81 (measles)

PATRICK H. = m. 10.1.12 Portland = Katherine A.Devine
b. 12.24.79 b. 1879 Portland

Mary Feeney
Francis Feeney

FRANK T. = m. 1 = = = = = = Della Cole
b. 8.14.81 Portland
d. 9.6.53 Los Angeles Jon Phillips (Phil) b. 10.16.02 Portland. D. 1976 Los Angeles

= m. 2 = = = = = = Elsie Van Name

Robert Preston b. c. 1912
Francis Jr. (“Billy”) b.c. 1921

= m. 3 = = = = = = Mary Armstrong

5. Ford’s reminiscences, JFP.
6. Quoted in Walter Wagner, You Must Remember This (New York: Putnam’s, 1975),
p. 57.
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BRIDGET
b. 10.4.83 Portland. D. 9.2.84 Portland (cholera)

BARBARA (ABBY)
b. 2.4.88 d. infancy John E.Robinson m. Delia Malia
b. Portland b. Portland

EDWARD FRANCIS = m. 3.6.16 Portland = Mary T. Robinson b. 1896 Portland
b. 2.22.89 Cape Elizabeth
d. 1.15.69 Chuck
Sheila
5 others

JOSEPHINE CECILIA
b. 12.31.91 Cape Elizabeth

JOANNA (HANNAH) C.E.W.Smith m. Fannie Roper
b. 12.13.92. d. infancy b. S.Carolina b. N.Carolina

JOHN MARTIN = = m. 7.3.20 Los Angeles = = = = = = Mary McBride Smith
b. 2.1.95 Cape Elizabeth b. 9.4.93 Laurinburg, NC
d. 8.31.73 Palm Desert, CA (cancer) d. July 1979

PATRICK MICHAEL ROPER = m.1942 Jane Mulvany, b. 1921 Maine
b. 4.3.21 Hollywood
DANIEL d. 1985
b. 2.17.98. d. infancy Timothy John. b. 2.1.44
Daniel Sargent. B. 2.12.45

= m. 2 = Carroll Anderson

Mary Blue 1961

BARBARA NUGENT = m.1. 7.8.48 = Robert Walker
b. 12.16.22 Hollywood div, 1948
d. 6/1985.
= m.2. 5.31.52 = Ken Curtis
div. 7.23.64

Feeney family fortunes tended to fluctuate with Maine’s dry laws. In
1897, they were obliged to sell the farm and, after a succession of
residences, take a large third-floor apartment at 23 Sheridan Street,
Portland.
8
Sister Mary (“Maime”), eighteen years older than Jack, moved in with her
two children when her husband died, and undertook most of the daily chores
of raising Jack. With the Myer and Mahoney families who shared the
building, there were sixteen children, and dinner at the Feeneys was open to
anyone. Harbor and bay could be glimpsed from the housetop, and Jack
would spend hours at a nearby observatory tower, gazing out to sea. He
loved the sea. “Ever since I was about four years old, I owned a boat.
Some old wreck came up, and we caulked it with tar and everything, and I
took that, and as I got old, I got a different boat.”7 Summers were spent
sailing off Peaks Island, where Jack’s father’s sister had a house. Peaks
Island was the home Jack would return to for the rest of his life.
An attack of diphtheria at twelve required a lengthy convalescence, and
delayed Jack a year at Emerson Grammar School, but it gave him in return a
sensitivity and love for books. “Everytime you’d see him he’d have a book in
hand,” a highschool classmate recalled. 8 * Now it was sister Maime who
read Treasure Island to bedridden Johnny, just as Bronwyn would read it to
bedridden Huw in How Green Was My Valley, with both boys separated from
their mothers.
Nonetheless, Jack was an indifferent student at the Emerson School in
Munjoy Hill, never opening his schoolbooks at home, and getting by through
listening in class and a retentive memory; his 1906 report card graded him
“fair” or “poor” in almost every subject. But he loved his drawing classes,
which were uncommonly emphasized at Emerson - the principal was also the
art teacher. 9* His intense feelings for scenery, he said in old age, were
awoken on a voyage to Ireland with his father, when he was eleven or
twelve. He went to school in Ireland for several months; instruction was in
Gaelic and all the boys except Jack wore long red petticoats. Jack’s father,
or Gramps as he was called, took frequent trips there, whereas Nana, who
had endured a terrible crossing in steerage when she first came to America,
was never willing to return. Nostalgia for the auld country, as handed down
from Gramps to Jack, was not the norm among Irish immigrants, most of
whom were glad to escape and did not want to look back.
Gramps was six feet two and vaguely resembled C. Aubrey Smith. “When
the flag passes, take off your cap,” he instructed his son at a Fourth of July
parade. “But I don’t have a cap on.” “Then cross yourself, damnit!”
Gramps, despite his saloons, was a regimented drinker. He never drank
during the day, only at dinner and breakfast. Abby did not drink at all. Jack
was fond of relating the breakfast ceremony that would occur aboard ship
when he took his father to Ireland in the 1930s. The crew would gather at
the portholes to watch as Gramps ordered. “‘I would like a glass of orange
juice. I live part of the year in California and I want California orange juice.
I want oatmeal, four eggs fried, and a double order of bacon and while you’re
at it put in a slice of ham.’ The waiter would hesitate and wait, and he’d say,
‘And bring me a drink of Irish whiskey. Bring the bottle.’ He’d take a sip of
the orange juice, then he’d pour himself a tumbler full of Irish whiskey, then
another sip of the orange juice. He’d take that glass of Irish whiskey and
down it in one gulp. Then he’d consume the whole meal. That’s the only
drink he’d have until supper time.”10

7. Quoted in Sinclair, p. 11, from taped interview by Bogdanovich, JFP.
8. Oscar Vanirer, cited in Davis, p. 27.
9. McBride, p. 50.
10. Ford’s reminiscences, JFP.
9
Jack was reputed for drawing caricatures. “As a kid, I thought I was
going to be an artist; I used to sketch and paint a great deal and I think, for
a kid, I did pretty good work—at least I received a lot of compliments about
it.”11 He was able, one summer, to watch Winslow Homer painting.12
Joseph McBride remarks on his lifelong penchant to sketch picturesque
Indians in war bonnets and soldier heroes, and yet “his overriding concern as
an artist with both pencil and camera was always with people’s faces and the
way their expressions reflect their inner character.” 13 *
Toward girls he was shy; it took him days to get up nerve to ask for a
date. He was tall and lanky, with terrible eyesight and thick glasses, but
popular among his male companions. He engaged in track and baseball and
made honorable mention as fullback on the state football team (“Bull Feeney,
the human battering ram”—he broke his own nose and mangled his ear),
despite finding himself frequently ejected from games for such antics as
carrying a teammate across the scrimmage line. His team won the state
championship in 1913. At Portland High he took two years of Latin, three of
French, one of physics and biology; he did poorly in math— in fact he flunked
algebra twice and never in his life did he achieve ease with numbers or
possess any sense of chronology. But he drew honors in English and history,
wrote a parody of the school song, and sold a story he had written for $25.
His four-year average was 84.9. While he never discovered himself in high
school, he did have a reputation for brilliance and wit. Once a crowd
gathered to watch the baseball team play bloomer girls, and Jack was
spotted among the latter, in bloomers and wig.14
There was a feisty competitiveness among Portland’s immigrant cultures—
the Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews—and a spirit of mutual tolerance united
them in opposition to the Yankees. Jack picked up Yiddish from his friends
and would occasionally attend synagogue for the music. The Ku Klux Klan at
one point made an attempt to establish itself, but failed. There were only
about a dozen black families among Portland’s seventy thousand people. A
large tent the Klan erected was blown down in a fierce storm, and Gramps,
staring at it the next morning on his way home from church, huffed, “Well,
that wasn’t built on a rock!”15 The blacks. Ford recalled decades later, “lived
with us. They didn’t live in barrios. Our next-door neighbors were black.
There was no difference, no racial feeling, no prejudice. My sister Maime’s
closest friend was a Mrs. Johnson who was black A wonderful woman.”16
In contrast, Portland’s Protestant elites were hostile, and many a John
Ford movie would allude to their racism. Even in 1998 when the City erected
a statue of Ford - donated by a Louisianan, Linda Noe Laine - the Wasps on
the Portland Museum of Art wanted nothing to do with it: “Put it down in
Gorham’s Corner, where the Irish belong!”

11. Bogdanovich, p. 108.
12. On correspondences between Homer and Ford, cf., Fabio Troncarelli, Le maschere
della malinconia: John Ford tra Shakespeare e Hollywood (Bari: Dedalo, 1994).
13. McBride, p. 51.
14. Wilkinson, p. 23, from letter from boyhood friend Joseph D. McDonnell.
15. Josephine Feeney’s reminiscences, JFP.
16. Ford’s reminiscences, JFP.
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John Ford should be understood as the product of a ghettoized racial
minority which, during his lifetime, went from being the exploited sub-
proletariat to being the new hegemonic class: a process of interracial class
warfare reflected in The Last Hurrah (1958), Fort Apache (1948) and
Donovan’s Reef (1963).

Jack worked mornings for two hours before school driving a fish wagon—
the saloon was out of bounds—and later he worked as delivery boy and
publicist for a shoe company. Evenings he would usher in the balcony of the
Jefferson Theater or at Peaks’ Gem. Theater was a passion: he would come
home and act out the whole play for his family, every part, every voice. He
saw everything from Shakespeare to vaudeville. The great personalities of
the day came to Portland - George M. Cohan, Maude Adams, Douglas
Fairbanks, De Wolf Hopper, George Arliss, Alla Nazimova, Ethel Barrymore,
Sidney Toler. And Jack may have seen many of the actors who later
appeared in his own movies - Tex Cooper, Charles Winninger, Henrietta
Crosman, Charley Grapewin.17*
Jack graduated from high school on June 18, 1914. His ambitions to
enter Annapolis were thwarted when he failed the entrance examination, so
he looked into an athletic scholarship at the University of Maine, Orono,
school of agriculture. The curriculum was unattractive: he had had most of
the subjects in high school. In addition, besides slopping hogs, he had to
rise at 5:30 A.M. and wait tables at breakfast, and the third or fourth morn-
ing, jeered at with racial slurs, he threw a plate of stew at the tormentor’s
face, and got sent home. He sought the advice of his high school history
teacher, William B. Jack (whom he later claimed was the most influential
figure in his life after his father), and Nana unearthed from her green
keepchest an exciting proposition from California. On July 17 Jack headed
west —just for the summer.18 “I remember the last night on the train. I

17. McBride, p. 58.
18. Various sources, among them Portland newspapers, the information in the
Motion Picture Directory annuals from 1920 and 1921 (which Ford would have
supplied himself) and also Ford’s recollections of working on films shot that summer,
indicate that Ford was in California in July. But other sources suggest that the days
he spent at the University of Maine were in September. It has not been possible to
reconcile this contradiction. It is possible—although no evidence supports it — that