The only actor John Wayne was banned from talking to on set: “We couldn’t say a single word”
Thanks to the raft of no-nonsense heroes he played on the big screen, and the way he’d cast Marion Morrison aside in favour of embracing his onscreen persona as his default setting in real life, audiences were conditioned to believe that nobody could tell John Wayne what to do.
That wasn’t too far from the truth, either, with his decades-long tenure as one of Hollywood’s brightest shining and highest-grossing stars giving him more leeway than most of his peers to do whatever he wanted, whether it was the movies he chose to make or the people he chose to work with.
Even though he was dead for almost a decade before it was released, Dirty Dancing was nonetheless applicable to ‘The Duke’ and his bulletproof reputation as an industry power player: nobody put John Wayne in the corner, apart from the filmmaker who not only put him in the corner, but expressly forbade him from speaking so much as a solitary syllable to one of his closest friends.
If you know anything about the face of the ‘Golden Age’ western and the people in his inner circle, you’ve probably guessed that the only person capable of telling Wayne to shut the fuck up and having him adhere to those instructions was, in fact, John Ford. Not only that, but it happened on the set of a film he wasn’t even in, making him look like even more of an obedient lapdog in the process.
After shooting Rio Grande and The Quiet Man together, Ford clearly liked the cut of Maureen O’Hara’s jib, as did ‘The Duke’. While they’d have to wait until 1957’s The Wings of Eagles to make their third picture together, the filmmaker enlisted O’Hara to play the female lead in his 1955 literary adaptation, The Long Gray Line.
Since the director he loved like a father and the star he loved like one of the fellas were working together without him, Wayne didn’t see any issues in visiting the set to catch up with his friends. On paper, he didn’t have any reason to think it would cause any problems, but he seemed to forget that Ford could be a spiteful prick whenever the notion took him.
Reflecting on “the day Duke came to visit,” when she was already “at my breaking point” with the overbearing auteur, “he caused me to snap” after laying down his non-negotiable terms. ‘The Duke’ was there, in both presence and spirit, not that anyone would have noticed when he was told in no uncertain terms to keep his mouth shut the entire time.
“Mr Ford refused to allow Duke and me to talk to each other, even though we were only a few feet apart,” she recalled. “We couldn’t say a single word to each other. He forbade it and told us, ‘You are not to talk. You are not to speak’. So we had to sit their and maintain this incredibly awkward silence while Mr Ford chewed and tugged on his kerchief, relishing being such a bastard.”
Why did he stop Wayne and O’Hara from talking to each other? She had no idea, other than calling him an “old bastard,” which is enough of an explanation in itself.
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