John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara were working their tails off, trying to earn something few in Hollywood ever received: a bit of praise from director John Ford.

The focus of the actors’ labors was a key scene in Ford’s 1952 drama The Quiet Man, in which Wayne’s Irish-American prizefighter drags O’Hara’s sharp-tongued Irish wildcat, kicking and screaming, across untold miles of green hill country to accept her dowry from her brother and make things right between her and the Duke. In their efforts to please the infamously cranky, hard-to-impress director, regular Ford stock company players Wayne and O’Hara choreographed the scene between themselves on location outside of Cong, Ireland, translating the screenplay’s minimal description of the action into a carefully blocked-out physical comedy routine.

“Duke and I talked about it and said, ‘What we are we going to do?’” O’Hara recalls almost 50 years later. “So we’d go behind the bushes and work out every little movement—where he pulled me from under the bush and I turned around and socked him in the jaw; where he turned me in a spin and kicked me in the rear end and I fell down and lost my shoe. We worked on it day in and day out.”

When the moment finally came for the two to perform the scene in front of the cameras, they hoped Ford would be impressed with all the advance preparation they’d done on the sly. As soon as they finished, however, the director one-upped them with one of the ego-crushing jabs that few who worked with him escaped.

“Pappy got up—that’s Mr. Ford—and we’re standing there like two fools waiting for him to say one kind word… ‘Thank you’ maybe, or ‘That was good,’ or ‘Brilliant,’” O’Hara remembers. But no such praise was forthcoming. “He stood and he turned to the crew and he said, ‘Now you see when something is totally spontaneous how wonderful it can be.’ The old SOB was watching us behind the bushes!”

The cantankerous temperament that drove Ford to bully his frequent stars Wayne and Ward Bond into submission—or tease O’Hara until her fiery Irish temper snapped spectacularly on screen—is as much a part of his legend as his films, the four Oscars he won for directing features and the Purple Heart he earned for shooting his documentary The Battle of Midway under enemy fire during World War II. Twenty-eight years after his death, that legend shows no sign of diminishing. More than ever, Ford’s image—patch over one eye, chewing on a pipe or an old handkerchief as he gazes at a shot—looms over the first half-century of Hollywood moviemaking like the craggy rock formations of Monument Valley, Utah, where so many of his most famous pictures were shot.

And then there’s his body of work itself, a monumental mass of more than 135 films that includes The Iron Horse, The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Mister Roberts, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Collectively, those pictures earned 23 Oscars, defined the quintessential American movie genre (the western), created from scratch one of the screen’s most enduring icons (Wayne) and gave seminal roles to some of Hollywood’s greatest stars, including Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Jack Lemmon.
Today, in what would have been Ford’s 105th year, interest in both the films and the difficult-to-fathom man who made them seems higher than ever. Two major biographies—Scott Eyman’s Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (Simon & Schuster) and Joseph McBride’s Searching For John Ford (St. Martin’s Press)—have been published in the last two years, while Nick Redman’s 1999 documentary A Turning of the Earth took advantage of vintage behind-the-scenes footage, to give viewers a fresh look at Ford and Wayne at work on the western some consider to be Ford’s greatest (if not the greatest of them all), 1956’s The Searchers.

In May, when the Directors Guild of America kicked off its “Marathon of the Masters” retrospective series in Hollywood, Ford was the helmer chosen to be spotlighted in the inaugural event. But while such rare treats as the first-ever U.S. screening of the original silent version of his 1928 World War I drama Four Sons and historic footage from the Ford family home movie collection were the delight of buffs, it was the director and his larger-than-life personality that were the focus when several veterans of his films got together for a panel discussion, hosted by biographer Eyman.

“He’d never say anything nice like, ‘That was good. Let’s print it,’” said Rod Taylor, the star of Young Cassidy, Ford’s 1965 film about Irish playwright Sean O’Casey.

On the other hand, Taylor told the DGA panel that he did receive “some backhanded praise” from the director while shooting Cassidy in Dublin. It was a point in the film when O’Casey takes a sentimental walk down to a hawthorn tree at the side of a little creek beloved by his late mother. Watched by Ford and numerous locals who had gathered around at the edges of the location, Taylor went to work.

“I took the tweed cap off me head and knelt by the tree and I had a little weep,” the actor said, slipping into the Irish accent he used in the film. “And I wept… and I wept… shuddered…” Taylor had expected Ford to yell “Cut!” by that point, and he was at something of a loss as to what he should do next. Finally, “I got up with me cap, I walked slowly until I knew the camera couldn’t follow me because of the kids, and I went up to him and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Jack—enough is enough!’ [Ford] got up, he kicked me in the shin, and he said, ‘You Australian son of a bitch, you made me cry! That’s a wrap!’ All these people and kids—there seemed to be hundreds—immediately laughed uproariously, because why else would a director with one eye kick an actor? The only solution could be the actor didn’t remember his bloody line!”

Carroll Baker, who starred in two of Ford’s ’60s westerns, How the West Was Won and Cheyenne Autumn, said the director’s legendary irascible nature wasn’t apparent when she first met him. Once filming began on the former picture, however, the intimidated young actress had to contend with the withering full force of his displeasure. “When we made How the West Was Won, I was so in awe of Mr. Ford, and I thought he was being terribly nice to me, because I had heard that he wasn’t necessarily all that nice to actors. So my confidence, you see, had built up—and that was the mistake,” Baker told the DGA panel.

She first experienced one of the director’s famous outbursts in a scene in which her character seeks solace at her father’s grave at the onset of the Civil War. Ford called out, “‘Action, camera!’ and I began to walk. He said, ‘Stop! What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Mr. Ford, I’m not doing anything.’ And he said, ‘That’s right. You’re not doing anything! Don’t know that this is called a motion picture? That means that things are in motion, so you never just walk! Drag your scarf, and then you’ll be in motion!’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

Few actors got to know Ford’s temperamental nature better than O’Hara, who met “Pappy” while still in her teens and went on to star in five of his pictures from 1941’s How Green Was My Valley to 1957’s The Wings of Eagles. As well as becoming the definitive Ford heroine, with her flaming red hair and indomitable will, O’Hara also was a close personal friend who often stayed with Ford and his family on their yacht, Araner, taking notes in shorthand as the director dictated his ideas about whatever project he was developing. One of the countless arguments Ford had with his leading lady occurred while they were shooting the famous horse race scene in The Quiet Man.

“He shot a close-up, and he put the wind machines behind my back so he could blow all my hair forward, instead of doing what any other cameraman or director would have done—put the wind machine in front of you and blow your hair back,” O’Hara explained. “And my hair then was thick, thick, wiry hair, and it was lashing across my eyeballs, and it hurt. And so I was squinting, and he started in: ‘Do you have to squint? Can’t you open your so-and-so eyes?’ He’d been nagging me all day long, and I reached the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I put my two hands on the side of the cart and I yelled at him. I said, ‘What would a bald-headed old son of a bitch like you know about hair lashing across your eyeballs?’”

A moment of stunned silence passed, and O’Hara realized she’d done something no one ever, ever did: challenge Ford directly on his set. “I almost had a heart attack,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘My God, why didn’t I shut my big mouth? What have I done? He’s gonna kill me.’ I watched him—and this is the John Ford you’ve got to know.” O’Hara eyed Ford nervously as he looked around and “cased every face on the set—the guys up above, the people on the floor—and they’re all [open-mouthed]. Everybody’s breath was held. And he made his decision whether to kill me or to laugh. And he decided, thank God, to laugh. All the employees on the set started screaming with laughter because it was such a relief, because they thought I was going to be killed. And that’s John Ford.”

O’Hara recalled a phenomenon particular to Ford sets: the possibility that an actor might show up for work only to find that he or she was “in the barrel,” to use the term regulars had for whoever Ford had chosen to be that day’s special scapegoat. “Every day—Duke, Ward Bond, whoever it was—we’d say, ‘Who’s in the barrel today?’ Because he picked on one person every day and he made their life totally miserable, and that was called ‘being in the barrel.’ But the crew knew and the crew was on your side, and they’d do everything to calm things down and to help you. It was that camaraderie between all of the actors and actresses and all of the crew, that desire to help each other.

“Now, did he do that on purpose?” O’Hara mused. “I don’t know. But knowing the old devil, I’d say it’s very suspicious. Probably he did that to get his crew all together.”

“He always enjoyed that people thought he was angry at them,” Taylor agreed. “He enjoyed it. Loved it. But he was like a wired-haired old doggy. He’d snarl and growl and bark, but he’d never bite anybody.” While Ford apparently did all he could to keep up his reputation as a bad-tempered curmudgeon, other anecdotes hint at the soft-hearted man many believe was hidden beneath the crusty exterior.

“He was always nice to me,” said Darryl Hickman, who at age seven played one of the Joad children in Ford’s classic 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. “I remember [co-star Shirley Mills] and I would be in school at tea time... And they would bring in cakes and cookies and all this good stuff, and Shirley and I would be in the schoolroom and not able to go and be with the cast and the crew. And Mr. Ford came every day with the best cookies and the best cakes for Shirley and me. How can you hate a man like that? I looked up to him—but then I was seven years old and I looked up to everybody.”

On the set, however, Ford remained the patriarch: a lofty, God-like authority who rarely said anything positive about his actors’ work, but whose displeasure was all-too-evident if his famously keen single eye saw something it didn’t like. As long as things ran smoothly, he might say very little during the shooting of a scene. For example, when Gloria Stewart starred in Ford’s 1936 historical drama The Prisoner of Shark Island, his direction of her, offered during a scene in which the character of her husband is facing execution, added up to exactly one line.

“My husband is about to be hung, and [Ford] came up to me and said, ‘Uh, Gloria? A little less.’ So Miss Stoneface did a little less and that was it,” Stewart recalled at the DGA panel

For O’Hara, Ford’s laconic, loose way of directing his actors was liberating. “He never, ever did what some other directors do—stifle you, put chains around you, say to you, ‘Well, you walk in here, you look to the left, you look to the right, and I want you to raise your head and I want you to wiggle your little finger and I want you to turn your toes’—and you think, ‘Oh God, can’t we just do the scene?’” she said. “John Ford took the chains off. He let you do anything you wanted to do in the scene, but you were in tune with his thoughts. You watched the film progress, and you became part of it. And when you’d do the scene, you’d look to him and he’d say, ‘A little bit more, please—just a little more,’ and you’d do it once more. Or he’d say, ‘Uh-uh, cut it down, cut it down—you overdid it,’ and we’d cut it down. Then he would say, ‘Cut, next setup,’ and then you knew everything was fine. And we were thrilled that he accepted it and liked it and approved it. You only ever asked, ‘Did I do too much or did I do too little?’ You never went into details of how you moved or what did you did or the way you tucked your head—all of that rubbish.”

Similarly, those who spent time on Ford’s sets remember the almost unspoken understanding the director had with his crew. “I felt that he was always very close to his cameraman,” Stewart said. “They seemed to move as one person, think as one person. There was never an argument.”

O’Hara remembered the careful attention Ford would give to composing his shots. In particular, she recalled a scene between herself and Walter Pidgeon in How Green Was My Valley, which ended up earning the director one of his Oscars for direction.

“I was fascinated by listening to him and watching him work,” O’Hara said. “The scene was ready to go to camera and I said, ‘I’m ready.’ And he said, ‘Well, let me look at the camera,’ and he looked through and he said, ‘Drop it three notches, please,’ and he dropped it three notches. And he said, ‘Now, I want the shadow of the back of that chair’—an old-fashioned kitchen chair—‘to be three times its size on wall behind it.’ And I thought, ‘My God, he’s painting a picture.’”

Dan Ford, the director’s grandson and author of the biography Pappy: The Life of John Ford, recalled seeking advice about the art of making movies at a point when he aspired to follow in his famous grandfather’s footsteps professionally.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a director, and he would say, ‘Well, you need to start studying things,’” the younger Ford recalled at the DGA event. “We’d be in Honolulu, parked in a car at a red light, and he’d say, ‘See that guy walking across the street? What do you think he does for a living?’ I’d look at him—‘Well, I don’t know.’ He’d say, ‘Look at his shoes.’ He’d go through a whole litany of things. He’d say, ‘He’s probably a steward—look at his soft hands.’ He’d just pick out these details on people, and he’d say, ‘These are the details you have to start looking for.’”

As a family member, Dan Ford also had the opportunity to look behind the hard-bitten persona Ford cultivated at work. In particular, he remembered how his grandfather would stay up all night reading, devouring as much as a book or two a night while eating chocolate and vanilla ice cream—a very different image from the gruff, hard-drinking character Hollywood knew.

“He was always acting on the set,” Dan Ford said. “He was always playing John Ford. He could scale back pretty good, particularly on the Araner—and he didn’t need the booze to do it. I think the sea would calm him.”

Asked what he thinks the biggest misapprehension about his grandfather has been over the years, Dan Ford replied without hesitation: “Politics,” he replied. “That he was a right-winger. They misunderstand what he did in the McCarthy witch-hunt era. He was a New Deal democrat, and a little more conservative after the war, but he was always pretty much middle of the road—pretty much apolitical.”

For O’Hara, Ford was too complex a man to categorize with simple labels—political, artistic or personal. “Wise, kind, generous, wonderful, terribly lonesome, very insecure, a great director, a fabulous cameraman,” she said. “With John Ford, all you could do was accept him with all his faults and love him.”

What would Ford have thought about having his life and work analyzed in such detail at the DGA event? “He would pretend to be outraged, but he really, really would love it,” O’Hara said. “He’d pull out his old handkerchief and chew on it and he would pretend to be annoyed.”

Dan Ford had a shorter answer for the same question: “He would have said, ‘You should have charged.’” MM