Free American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot Page B

of it a failure of a husband and father. Because of it, she no longer felt she should be with him in bed at night. There could be no reward for failure. Wayne was well aware that the passion had gone out of his marriage, like the air in a flat tire. He had no idea how to save it nor was he even sure he wanted to.
    BOTH WAYNE AND FORD WERE both at a crossroads in their respective careers. While Wayne was trapped running on the gerbil wheel of western cheapies, Ford’s career felt stuck in second gear. He was hoping to make a filmed version of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, the story of an Irish Communist rebel, Gypo Nolan, who turns in a comrade for the twenty pounds’ reward during the Irish Civil War of 1921–23. The novel, with its Judas-like hero, had already been filmed once before in England, in 1929, but that version had never been released in America.
    Getting The Informer made, Ford knew, was not going to be easy, and not just because of its controversial subject matter. He was having trouble getting any films produced. It was partly a sign of the times, and partly his own antiauthoritarian ways. With the arrival of sound, and as with so many other silent directors, including D. W. Griffith, one of the early giants of the industry whose career ended as talking pictures took off, Ford’s style of moviemaking was thought by many in Hollywood to be out of fashion, more suited to the days when pictures moved but didn’t speak, and Ford had no Birth of a Nation on his list of accomplishments. His best film to date had been 1928’s Mother Machree.
    What made it even more difficult for Ford was his reputation as a troublemaker. He was known to be disagreeable on-set, to carry a gigantic chip on his shoulder when it came to studio executives, especially when they tried to butt into the production of his films and tell him how to make them better, meaning more commercial. And he was an alcoholic. His first all-talking feature, 1929’s The Black Watch, starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy, a spy thriller set in India during the early days of World War I, was not well received, making every project for him that much more difficult to get made.
    The same year William Fox had begun what would be made his disastrous attempt to take over Loew’s Inc., Ford took the opportunity to have his contract negotiated, fearing his career would get lost in the reshuffle. Agent Harry Wurtzel successfully arranged for Ford’s new deal at Fox to be nonexclusive, a move that would prove crucial to his career.
    Because of his new contract, Ford was able to make his first important sound film, 1931’s Arrowsmith, an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, screenplay by Sidney Howard, for independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, released through United Artists. However, during production, Ford had a falling-out with Goldwyn over the condition, in writing, that he would not drink while making the film. Ford failed to keep his part of the bargain and tried to rush the film to completion, partly to get Goldwyn off his back, but mostly to get his hands on more booze. The two butted heads continually during production, and despite the film’s becoming a huge commercial success when it was released, and earning four Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography), Goldwyn swore Ford would never work for him again. During filming, Ford had walked off the set and gone on an extended binge in Catalina. Goldwyn demanded that Fox Studio pay him the $4,100 fee he had paid them to use Ford. Fox paid it and promptly fired Ford, releasing him from any and all further obligations.
    He then made films for Universal and MGM before being rehired by Fox in 1932, in a nonexclusive multiple-picture deal, the most important being the three films he made there with Will Rogers as his leading man (1933’s Doctor Bull, 1934’s Judge Priest, 1935’s Steamboat Round the Bend