The searcher

Poring over the John Ford Collection

There were moments when I was sure that I'd wandered into the gothic, entombed Thatcher Library of Citizen Kane, as the owl eyes of librarians kept watching to see whether I turned pages without messing up the precious manuscripts, or, God forbid, placed clippings back in folders not in the proper order.

Claustrophobic as I felt, I can't blame the Lilly Library at Indiana University, in Bloomington, for its vigilance. I'm editing a volume of interviews with the late great American filmmaker John Ford, who made The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Searchers, and several dozen other major works. I was holding in my shaky clutches yellowed, deteriorating newspaper articles, oral-history interviews with his actors and technicians, and invaluable one-of-a-kind letters to and from Ford.

"Someone told me the Ford family wanted to sell his papers, and we got a feeler: would you be interested in knowing about them?", Sandra Taylor, curator of manuscripts for the Lilly Library, explained about its extraordinary John Ford Collection. "They had me get in contact directly with his grandson, Dan Ford. We decided to make the purchase: correspondence, movie stills, scripts, financial records, set shots, letters, lots of photographs.

"Dan helped me to pack it up and ship the collection from California. Since, he's kept close contact, very pleased that an academic institution utilizes it. Although he has retained copyright to the collection, he hasn't denied anyone the use of it."

I had flown to Indiana to locate material for my book John Ford: Interviews (to be published next year by the University Press of Mississippi). But I found my scholarly attention wandering, and me digging for gossipy insider stories on favorite Ford movies. For instance: my best-loved film in the world, the 1956 John Wayne-starring Western The Searchers.

To begin with, I learned why Wayne's character had a name change from the Alan LeMay novel. Amos Edwards became Ethan Edwards so nobody would confuse the white marauder with the all-black television program Amos 'n' Andy. From oral histories with the cast conducted by Dan Ford, I found out hilarious things about Wagon Train TV star Ward Bond's appearance in The Searchers. Convinced that the ingenue of the movie, Vera Miles, had the hots for him, the foppish, 60ish Bond stripped down and paraded nude whenever she walked by. Apparently, Miles was totally unaware of his come-ons.

A second Ward Bond story: a dramatic, heartbreaking Searchers scene had to be shot over again because the camera wasn't going. The dizzy actor, who was shaving off screen, had pulled the camera's plug and inserted into the outlet the plug for his electric razor!

And on to the Ford collection of letters: I uncovered a note to producer Darryl F. Zanuck in which the filmmaker suggested that he could redo in Hollywood Jean Renoir's French classic Grand Illusion, with Victor McLaglen in the Jean Gabin blue-collar part and David Niven as the Erich von Stroheim aristocrat. A dumb idea? Zanuck thought so, memoing Ford: "I think it would be a criminal injustice to attempt to remake the picture in English."

I located an amazing fandom letter from Russia's Sergei Eisenstein, who in 1946 was arranging a conference in Moscow, and also a book, both totally dedicated to Ford's works. The maker of Potemkin wrote to Ford, in perfect English, "Hell knows what you think of my pictures, but I'm ranging among your most fervent admirers here. . . . For my own sake, please add anything available about your work on Young Mr. Lincoln. . . . [T]his is one of the films I like most of all ever seen."

And Ford's personal life? A Catholic who didn't believe in divorce, he was wed in 1920 to Mary McBride Smith, and they remained married, though not always happily, until his death, in 1973. In the Indiana collection, there are many letters between them, mostly of the newsy sort. Few approach the ardor of Mary's epistle to her husband in 1921, a year into their marriage. "Really Jack, I have a wild, fiendish, terrible crush on you, and I miss you, so it hurts awfully. . . . I surely do love you more each day."

In the 1930s, "Jack" Ford had someone else who adored him: young Katharine Hepburn, his star of Mary of Scotland.

It was positively thrilling, me privy to never published love letters penned by the always candid Hepburn. According to her account, she got along famously with Ford's wife until Mary caught on. The most eye-opening letter is one that Hepburn wrote to Ford December 5, 1938, in the form of a mini-play dialogue with her skeptical alter ego, who's called "Miss D."

Hepburn to Miss D. about Mary Ford: "I think she is insensitive and crude but still hasn't had an easy time of it. He is probably better married to that type of woman than to some fascinating creature with whom he would have been happy." (Hepburn herself, of course.)

Hepburn to Miss D. about John Ford: "I think if anyone could have made Jack happy, I am that person. Jack really loved me. Don't you think so?"

Miss D: "I doubt it."

Soon after, Hepburn moved on to a celebrated, long-lasting romance with another ever-married Catholic man, Spencer Tracy.