Throughout John Wayne‘s long and winding career as a matinee idol, there weren’t often many mysteries surrounding his films. Wayne made more than his fair share of beloved westerns, war movies, and cop films, and almost all of them were precision-engineered to deliver exactly what Wayne’s hordes of fans wanted to see. In one of his most popular movies, though, he stepped outside his usual genre confines and made a beloved classic that ends with one of cinema’s most talked-about lines of dialogue. Unfortunately for audiences, though, Wayne and his co-stars were sworn to secrecy about it.
When Wayne’s longtime collaborator John Ford read a short story by Irish author Maurice Walsh in 1933, he immediately knew he wanted to turn it into a film. The tale of a retired boxer who falls in love with a spirited and beautiful redhead in 1920s Ireland charmed Ford so much that he bought the movie rights for a princely $10. However, to his chagrin, it would take 18 years for cameras to roll on the movie with Republic Pictures producing, mostly because Ford wanted Wayne to star, and every studio in Hollywood saw the romantic drama as too much of a departure for The Duke.
Ultimately, Ford and Wayne had to make a deal with Republic to make another western in return for being allowed to make The Quiet Man on location in County Mayo and County Galway. The film united Wayne with Dubliner Maureen O’Hara as the feisty Mary Kate Danaher, and their chemistry, coupled with Ford’s outstanding photography of the rolling green hills of the Irish countryside, helped make the movie a significant hit.
While The Quiet Man would have still been a beloved favourite without its unique ending, Ford’s choice to introduce a little bit of mystery at the denouement undoubtedly ensured it would be talked about long after audiences left the cinema. In the final scene, O’Hara’s Mary Kate and Wayne’s Sean Thornton stand by a stream, waving goodbye to the man who was instrumental in their burgeoning romance coming to fruition. After he leaves, she leans over and whispers something the audience can’t hear in Sean’s ear, and his look of surprise is iconic. She then dashes back to their cottage, with him following suit soon after.
So, what sweet nothings did Mary Kate whisper in her new husband’s ear? Well, the only three people who ever knew were Ford, Wayne, and O’Hara, and they all took that knowledge to their graves. According to O’Hara, though, the whispered words were “extremely suggestive”, and the mischievous Ford pushed her to utter them.
“It was something very rude, and John Ford insisted I say it,” she once admitted. “I said I didn’t want to, and he said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re doing it. You must do it.’ So, the agreement was that neither Duke, nor I, nor John Ford would ever, ever, ever tell what I said.”
Amusingly, Wayne also stonewalled his biographer, Michael Nunn, when the author outright asked him what O’Hara said. However, just like O’Hara, all he would divulge was that it was pretty racy. “That, my friend, is a trade secret. No, it really is.” He confirmed that Ford, whom he always called ‘Pappy’, gave O’Hara her verbal ammunition, and when those words drifted into his ear, he confessed, “Believe me, coming from the lips of a lady, it was shocking. Pappy wanted me to look shocked, and the look on my face was real.”