The one thing John Ford hated the most about John Wayne: “I wanted to murder the old son of a bitch”
They might be one of the most iconic actor and director partnerships of all time, but the bond between John Wayne and John Ford was anything but straightforward.
They were close friends and regular collaborators and shared a deep-seated mutual respect and appreciation for each other, but that didn’t come close to telling the whole story. They were father figure and surrogate son, mentor and protege, and occasionally two massive personalities who’d become involved in screaming matches, insults, and threats of violence.
Ford and Wayne first crossed paths when the latter was working in the props department on the studio lot, and it would be the better part of a decade before they made their first picture together as filmmaker and star. When they did, the end result was Stagecoach, which laid down a marker that they made for a formidable duo.
It was the first major picture that solidified Wayne as a bankable leading man and box office draw, almost ten years after his first attempt in The Big Trail had shown him to be anything but. ‘The Duke’ was still fine-tuning and refining the persona that would make him one of the biggest names in Hollywood and keep him in that position until his dying day, and Ford couldn’t stand one of his signature traits.
Stagecoach may have been instrumental in kickstarting the actor’s ascent up the ladder, and while there are flashes of it here and there in his performance as the Ringo Kid, the character isn’t quite the full representation of the larger-than-life movie star Wayne would become once he’d perfected his own mythos.
He was still breaking in several techniques that would become his hallmarks, and Ford couldn’t stand one of them in particular. “He’d yell at him, ‘You dumb bastard, I should have got Gary Cooper. Can’t you walk like a man instead of a goddamn fairy?'” John Carradine recalled in John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth. “He treated Wayne like a newcomer, but he’d been making films for ten years or more. He’d learned his trade all right.”
It sounds crazy knowing how it became woven into the fabric of Wayne’s persona, especially the films he’d go on to make with Ford in the years to come, but the director hated the way his leading man walked. Everybody with a passing interest in cinema history would recognise the inimitable strut of ‘The Duke’ from a mile away, but the man he called ‘Pappy’ didn’t warm to his newfound gait.
There was an element of tough love in play, but at the same time, Wayne found it difficult to deal with. “He sometimes got me so goddamn angry and so ashamed that I wanted to murder the old son of a bitch,” he confessed of being pushed to his limits, regardless of whether he was busting out his signature strut or not.
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