Despite his reputation as one of Hollywood’s toughest customers, John Ford’s status as a mentor, best friend, and father figure meant he was about the only person in the industry John Wayne was too afraid to stand up to.
A bond forged on tough love that often saw them at loggerheads, the legendary director and iconic actor became one of the most famous partnerships in cinema history, even if ‘The Duke’ was forced to admit he should have never played the lead role in one of Ford’s pictures.
Why did he do it, then? Because he didn’t want to say no to the man he called ‘Pappy’ and the single biggest influence on his professional life. Matters weren’t helped by 1963’s Donovan’s Reef suffering from having too many cooks in the kitchen, which resulted in a picture that neither Wayne nor Ford was happy with.
James Edward Grant wrote the original screenplay, but Ford insisted on bringing in his own people. Frank S Nugent, Edmund Beloin, and James A Michener were all involved at one stage or another, with cinematographer William Clothier holding Ford responsible. “You’ve got to blame the old man for things like that,” he said. “Just plain bad judgment.”
As for Wayne, he knew he was miscast from the beginning, especially when the story called for him to romance Elizabeth Allen’s Amelia Dedham, with the actor over 20 years his junior. “I was just all wrong for the picture,” he confessed. “It needed a younger guy. I felt awkward at my age to be romancing a young woman.”
Doubling down on his despair, ‘The Duke’ said Ford, “never should have used me in that picture,” but he didn’t have the heart to turn ‘Pappy’ down: “He should have picked some young guy. It didn’t require much of him. All he had to be was a good-looking young guy, and I wasn’t young enough.”
There’s something ironic about Wayne, the beacon of all-American masculinity who always presented himself as the toughest sumbitch on the silver screen, knowing he shouldn’t have been playing the lead in Donovan’s Reef but being too reluctant to inform Ford that the film would suffer by having an actor in his mid 50s canoodling with a co-star who was only 23 when the cameras started rolling.
That was the hold Ford had over him, though. All it would have taken was one conversation between the pair for Wayne to voice his concerns, and maybe the filmmaker would have brought in a more suitable leading man. Instead, ‘The Duke’ was left to admit that he should never have played Michael Donovan.
Did audiences share his concerns? Absolutely not. Critics tepidly received Donovan’s Reef, but it was an unqualified success at the box office, indicating that paying customers didn’t care in the slightest about the questionable age gap that left Wayne feeling so regretful.