Why John Wayne kept his most vital contribution to the western a secret for years: “I said nothing”
When you think of the western, several things immediately leap to mind, and John Wayne is one of the first. And yet, he claimed that acting wasn’t his longest-lasting contribution to the genre.
‘The Duke’ became more synonymous with the medium than any actor not named Clint Eastwood, dedicating decades of his career and dozens and dozens of movies to the wide open plains, dusty trails, six-shooters, and saloons that no self-respecting oater would be caught dead without.
However, when you think of the most iconic backdrop the western has ever seen, you won’t be thinking of Wayne; you’ll be thinking of his most famous collaborator instead. John Ford wasn’t the first filmmaker to popularise Utah’s Monument Valley as the perfect recreation of the American West, but he sure as hell popularised it in Hollywood circles.
In addition to the ten pictures he shot there, including Stagecoach and The Searchers, Easy Rider, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future Part III, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and dozens more productions have set up shop there. If you’ve seen even a handful of westerns made in the last 80+ years, then you’d recognise it from a mile away.
There’s even a popular lookout spot called ‘John Ford Point’ in honour of the man who transformed it from an arid desert into an industry hotspot, but according to ‘The Duke’, it would have been more accurate had it been named ‘John Wayne Point’ instead, because he claimed he found it first.
“It’s a secret I’ve kept for many years,” the Golden Age star revealed. “I was the guy who found Monument Valley, and I told Ford about this place.” According to Wayne, in 1929, a decade before Stagecoach, he went driving along the Utah/Arizona border, and a majestic sight greeted his eyes.
“I never forgot about it, and when Mr Ford was talking about locations on Stagecoach, I told him about Monument Valley, and he looked at me as if I was stupid, because he thought he knew the Arizona and Utah country, and he never heard of the valley,” ‘The Duke’ insisted.
When they went scouting for those locations, Ford declared that he’d found the perfect place to shoot Stagecoach, which was, of course, Monument Valley. “The old buzzard looked me straight in the eye; I said nothing,” Wayne recalled. “He wanted to be the one who found it. I don’t know why he never wanted to give me credit for telling him about Monument Valley.”
Ford was dead by the time he said that, which might explain why he kept it to himself, considering he was shit-scared of the mentor and father figure he called ‘Pappy’. Wayne was many things, but he wasn’t known for being a bold-faced liar, so maybe there’s some merit to his claim that he was the one responsible for transforming Monument Valley into the western’s most legendary backdrop.
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