If I saw Ford on the set, he was “Mr. Ford.” Up to dinner at his house or something like that, it was “Pappy.” And Duke called him “Coach.” While we were making “Rio Grande” in Moab, Utah, in 1950, [the company] lived in a motel. Oh, we had to do concerts almost every night, because Ford loved singing. He couldn’t sing. Duke could sing, but he had to sing off-key to satisfy Pappy Ford. Duke had to sing the one song, “Mary Is a Grand Old Name,” way up high because Mary was Old Man Ford’s wife. And he had to do it off-key because it gave Ford the opportunity to laugh and roar and make fun of him.
But I don’t think there’s anybody ever could use a camera like John Ford. In “How Green Was My Valley,” I was doing a scene in the kitchen. And there was the shadow of the back of an old-fashioned kitchen chair on the wall. He spoke to the cameraman and he said, “I want that shadow to be twice that size. I want it to be the big shadow of a chair.” You looked and you saw and you said, son of a gun, that’s beautiful. Before it was just a scene, now it’s spectacular. When he got Monument Valley to photograph, I think he just forgot about the actors. Monument Valley was really the star of all his Westerns.
In the horse-racing scene in “The Quiet Man,” he had put a wind machine behind me at the scene on the beach so that my hair blew forward. Everybody else would have put the wind machine where it’d blow your hair back. And my hair was thick, thick hair and it was brushing across my eyes like wire. I was squinting. And Ford started getting nasty. And I’d had it. I remember putting my hands on the edge of the cart and saying, “What would a baldheaded old son of a bitch like you know about hair brushing across your eyes?” And I thought, oh, holy God, why didn’t I keep my tongue in my mouth and shut up? Oh, I’m going to get it. I watched him. I watched him look at every face, and make his decision whether to kill me or laugh. Thank God, he decided to laugh and the whole set fell apart. For 10 minutes everybody was laughing, and Ford had the whole company in his pocket. All the stunt men and all the cowboys and everybody else said that Ford was a mean old son of a bitch, but he was their son of a bitch.
