The movie Natalie Wood hated every second of making: “Put me on a plane and send me home”
During her heyday around the late 1950s and early 1960s, Natalie Wood boasted an incredibly chequered filmography for the era.
Wood was something of a stalwart of Hollywood’s golden age before she even entered adulthood. Already a minor child star from her appearance in the festive comedy Miracle on 34th Street, before a string of high-profile television roles. Into her teens and early 20s, she jumped across an eclectic scope of roles, winning a crucial part in Rebel Without a Cause, before a period of career wane suddenly bloomed across movies as disparate as West Side Story, the romantic drama Love with the Proper Stranger, and A Great Race’s slapstick farce.
Yet, for many, Wood would always be Debbie Edwards. A brief but crucial role in 1957’s epic western The Searchers, Wood played the kidnapped Edwards, snatched from her West Texan colonial home by the Native American Comanche tribe, prompting John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards to traverse into the great frontier to rescue her. Arguably the most famous western of all time, The Searchers sits in director John Ford’s body of work as his centrepiece masterstroke, and is routinely celebrated as one of cinema’s greatest films of all time.
Working with such a titanic auteur was a dream break for the teen Wood, but not without some daunt. Ford held a notoriously tough on-set reputation, respected for his ability to coax depth out of his performers but at great costs to well-being and blood pressure levels. Reportedly, two weeks went by into the shoot before her first call-up, killing time by playing Scrabble with Wayne’s son, Pat, all the while whispers and rumours of ‘Pappy’ Ford’s temper would trickle back to Monument Valley HQ, as well as his purported favourite punishment method.
“Every day they’d go out on location, and they’d come back with these horror stories of somebody changing one word of dialogue, and ‘Pappy had them put in the barrel’ is what they used to say,” Wood recollected to an AFI seminar. “So I was terrified because I had a tendency to change lines, and thought I was going to get in the barrel.”
Reportedly, Ford had dunked the odd actor in a barrel of cold water for whatever perceived transgressions, later in life easing with a simple stress position. Whether a dip in a freezing tub or a sustained box balance, Wood had possibly incurred ‘Pappy’s infamous wrath before her first day’s shoot had even begun. Deeming her skin too pale for a girl living among Native Indians for years in the Texan sun, a minor disaster in a sunbed resulted in a badly burnt Wood fainting and requiring some medical assistance for her scorched skin.
According to Wood, Pat came to the room, informing her that Ford wanted Wood to go to the dining room for rehearsals. Feverish, irritated, and fed up with the two-week wait, Wood told Pat to relay the message that if rehearsals were to take place, he would have to come to her cabin.
A ballsy move. A short while later, Pat sheepishly returned to pass Ford’s response. “I said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ And Pat said, ‘Well, he just gave a terrible message. He said to tell her to go shit in her hat.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be talked to that way, and screw him, and just put me on a plane and send me home. I hate it here. I hate my part. I don’t want to be put in the barrel. Send me home.’”
As far as historians are aware, no barrels or stress positions were meted out on Wood, perhaps owing to the teen star standing up to the Hollywood veteran. While never shy about her feelings toward the old-time director, Wood perhaps held some gratitude for his essential role in furthering her career, attending Ford’s AFI Life Achievement Award in 1973 shortly before his death that year.
