The actor who hit John Wayne where it hurt the most: “What would a bald-headed son of a bitch know?”
Baldness can be a source of much consternation for a high-profile actor, especially in the days before hair transplants existed. Many of them, including John Wayne, opted to wear a toupee to obscure their thinning locks from the world, but one co-star struck a low blow by calling him out on it.
As superficial as it sounds, it’s also entirely true that chrome-domed leading men didn’t populate the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood. In order to lead a picture and enjoy longevity as a fixture of the A-list, a full head of luscious, flowing hair was pretty much a requirement.
Unfortunately, ‘The Duke’ wasn’t blessed with such genes, and his hair began to noticeably recede throughout the 1940s. By the end of the decade, he started wearing a toupee in every one of his movies and during his public appearances, under the impression nobody could sanction the idea of cinema’s most rugged beacon of masculinity sporting a haircut with an inbuilt sunroof.
There weren’t many souls brave enough to call him out on his follicular challenges, but Maureen O’Hara was in rare company. Over the course of more than twenty years, she worked with ‘The Duke’ on five movies, becoming so close to the cameras that the Academy Award-winning icon even called her his only female friend in the world.
The second of their collaborations came under the direction of another Wayne regular in John Ford, with the leading man playing a veteran boxer who returns to his home village in Ireland to reclaim the land that’s rightfully his. Along the way, he encounters O’Hara’s Mary Kate Danaher, and the chemistry between the pair is as palpable as ever.
That said, ‘The Duke’ had his issues with events that weren’t even in her control, with the wind wreaking havoc on a scene where O’Hara has little more to do than stand there. The gusts kept blowing the actor’s hair into her eyes and making her squint on-camera, with Wayne and Ford reminding her that keeping her eyes open was a pivotal part of her profession.
Clearly having had enough, O’Hara retorted with a barbed, “What would a bald-headed son of a bitch know about hair lashing across his eyeballs?” The answer, obviously, is not a great deal. In defence of Wayne – and Ford, who also saw his hair gradually disappear further up his forehead with the passage of time – neither of them ever sported ponytails, mullets, or anything lengthier than a short back and sides.
Still, O’Hara was pissed off at their interference, and it would have stung for the wig-wearer to be so brazenly called out in front of the cast and crew. The Quiet Man was released only a few years after Wayne embraced the art of the toupee, too, so it might even have cut a little deeper than it would in the years to come.
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