By 1950, people were snapping up TV sets, buying more than 7 million that year alone. Movie attendance sank to 50 million a year, almost half the previous tally. Many people moved to the suburbs, where geography also became a problem, along with mortgages and the cost of raising children. Some theaters raised prices to cut their losses, but this created a different kind of barrier.
Billy Wilder professed to be delighted with the so-called one-eyed monster of television. “It used to be that films were the lowest form of art,” he said. “Now we've got something to look down on.”1 More than 3,000 theaters closed between 1950 and 1953. To try to halt that trend, Cinerama was introduced in the fall of 1952. This wide-screen format required three projection booths and a huge curved screen that provided almost 160 degrees of vision. It was expensive, and not all theaters could be restructured to accommodate it, but the profits were tempting.
The contract system was also changing. Stars began to ask for percentages of the gross. Some of them even farmed themselves out to other studios. James Stewart's contract with MGM ran out during the war, and when he came home, his agent (Lew Wasserman) advised him to go freelance. (Stewart practically became a millionaire on the strength of his earnings from Winchester ’73 because Wasserman's deal gave him a chunk of the gross.) Other stars began to set up their own film companies.
As noted earlier, O'Hara tried to get in on this particular action, although her company, Price-Merman, seemed doomed from the start. In a last-gasp effort to revive it, Price accompanied O'Hara to Mexico in 1951, hoping to procure financing for a film he wanted to make. She was going there for another reason as well—to receive an award at a film festival. As soon as they arrived, he started to hit the bottle, and that was the last she saw of him for the whole festival. One night at a restaurant, she met a man who would have a huge impact on her future: wealthy financier Enrique Parra. They formed an immediate bond, despite his limited English, and danced the night away. The following day they met again. Price finally reappeared, but the financing for his film fell through due to his drunkenness, and Price-Merman was finished as a company.2
O'Hara had been wiped out financially by Price at this point. He had run up debts in her name in excess of $300,000. She'd decided to file for divorce some time previously, but before she could do so, they received word that Price's mother had died. She put everything on hold out of respect for his bereavement.
O'Hara became more involved in Parra's life as time passed. She felt comfortable in his presence. The obvious stumbling block to their relationship was that they were both married, although both were estranged from their spouses. He had a son and daughter, Quico and Negrita. Negrita resented O'Hara, although the two never met. Negrita also suffered from diabetes and was prone to diabetic coma as a result.
The more time O'Hara spent with Parra, the more she considered a long-term commitment to him. Could they marry one day? He was living apart from his wife, but he feared a divorce could exacerbate Negrita's condition. O'Hara felt helpless. At times, Parra seemed like an escape from her situation with Price; at other times, it seemed that a life with Parra would invite more problems than it would solve. She let things slide in the hope that a resolution would come somewhere down the road.
On December 29, 1951, their tenth wedding anniversary, Price “staggered” out the door, suitcase in hand, and never came back. “I still don't know why he left,” O'Hara confided to the Los Angeles Times some months later. “He didn't tell me he was leaving.”3 But she wrote in her autobiography: “I know what made him leave. The party was over and Will knew it. Charlie Fitz and Jimmy were at the house all the time now and he wouldn't dare treat me the way he had before in front of them.”4 His departure opened the door for divorce, and for Parra. Or did it? Many people disapproved of her relationship with Parra, including John Ford. Ford also disapproved of O'Hara divorcing Price. His generation believed that a bad marriage was better than none—it was the Catholic way.
Her mind aswirl with marital tension, O'Hara was offered another movie directed by George Sherman, this one starring Errol Flynn. The last time she had seen Flynn, he'd been down on all fours, sneaking away from a war bond function after draining a bottle of whiskey. She didn't imagine things had changed much in the interim.
Against All Flags is a fast-paced trifle. Flynn, nearing the end of his golden age as the derring-do supremo, plays Brian Hawke, a British naval officer on a secret mission. O'Hara plays the aptly named Spitfire Stevens, and Anthony Quinn is—again—the villain of the piece. Sherman directs as if he's running for a train. Flynn's character is working undercover, pretending to be a deserter in order to infiltrate Quinn's pirate gang in Madagascar. The two men fight for O'Hara. She enjoys their attentions but becomes enraged when Flynn briefly shifts his focus to an endangered Indian princess (Alice Kelley). O'Hara saves his life when Quinn tries to kill him. After Flynn's cover is blown, it's time for more thrills and spills, but nobody doubts that he will get the girl—and the ship—in the end.
O'Hara was well aware of Flynn's legendary charm, and she worried that he would endeavor to lure her to his bed during the making of the movie. Rumor had it, very few of his leading ladies had escaped thus far. The feared seduction didn't happen, thankfully.
O'Hara didn't approve of Flynn's penchant for eating vodka-laden oranges between scenes, but at least he was punctual. Because he was receiving a percentage of the profits, with no salary up front, he was motivated to make the film as good as it could be.5 With this in mind, he demanded that work finish at four every day because, as biographer Michael Freedland noted, “people would work harder if they knew they were going to get away early.”6 (Freedland might have added that Flynn wanted to shut down production at four so he would have more drinking time.) Everything went fine until Flynn refused to use a stunt double and broke his ankle in a fight scene; shooting was held up for five months.7
Flynn was reluctant to do a scene in which he challenges O'Hara to a duel. He asked Sherman, “Do you think this is going to work? You know I'm supposed to be the bravest guy on the screen. How could I fight a woman?” Sherman allayed his fears by telling him he'd worked with O'Hara before and warned, “You'd better be in shape.”8 Flynn found that out as soon as the scene began. Steve Jacques contended that O'Hara outdid Flynn in the bravado department, and “to protect Flynn's image, many of her most skilful scenes didn't make it to the final cut.”9
Sherman praised O'Hara's improvisational ability, something one doesn't normally associate with her. She was able to “ride with the scene,” he averred, if he suddenly did something that hadn't been rehearsed: “She'd be quick enough to grasp the change without missing a beat. You couldn't rattle her.”10 He also praised her for being proactive in scenes, often coming up with ideas that denied her “face time,” to use the contemporary idiom. She was sensitive to the story line of a movie, Sherman observed, “even when it meant taking a scene away from her.”11 The organic development was more important to O'Hara than her ego.
O'Hara disclosed to Larry King that Flynn was fine to work with in the morning, but by four in the afternoon, he was unable to function because of all the vodka he was drinking. Because of this, he was usually advised to go home and sleep it off.12 As a result, O'Hara's declaration of “I love you” was delivered not to him but to “an X marked on a black flag that was supposed to be Errol Flynn.”13
Maybe the experience of working with such a broken-down man led to O'Hara's ruminations to Photoplay magazine in 1952: “I've been looking for some time at the motion picture stars who have lived sensibly and modestly in Hollywood and are living comfortably now. I've also looked at the stars who spent all their money, lived high and rich. Many of these, too many, are working as extras today.” She thought there was “nothing in life more forlorn than the big ex-star. There's nothing more forgotten. I feel so sorry for them I'll stand there until my feet ache listening to them as they talk about their ‘day.’ Just recently, on the set of Against All Flags, one of them told me, ‘In my day I wouldn't have done this scene as Flynn did it.’ My heart begins to ache as they go on and on about their ‘day,’ which is their yesterday. Don't they realize that every day must end?”14
O'Hara and Flynn were like two sides of one coin. Each was identified with swashbuckling roles in which they fought fiercely and usually did their own stunts. In his autobiography Flynn blustered, “Dammit, I said to myself, I'm not going to be a phony. The reason behind it was I had fear and I had to go out and meet it. If I'm afraid to do something I move in on it and try to tangle with it and lick it.”15 It almost could have been John Wayne talking.
O'Hara appreciated his attitude. In fact, she reprised it. Future generations of actors would see things differently. Some action heroes and heroines insist on performing their own stunts, but thanks to computer-generated special effects, they don't have to. They define fear and courage in other ways—like coming to grips with their characters. There's a famous anecdote about James Dean: He urinated in front of a crowd while filming Giant to free himself up to do a scene. If he could do that, he boasted afterward, he could do anything.16 That was his definition of courage.
This is one reason O'Hara had little respect for the finer points of Method acting. Actors were exhorted to dig down into their deeper recesses to access some neurotic impulse or memory that might act as a catalyst to interpret the characters they were playing. She was far too well adjusted to have any neuroses in the first place.
O'Hara's rival around this time was Rhonda Fleming, another effervescent redhead who was drop-landed into one action movie after another. As O'Hara was jousting with Flynn in Against All Flags, Fleming was playing an English noblewoman posing as a pirate in Sidney Salkow's Caribbean blockbuster The Golden Hawk. The 1952 western The Redhead from Wyoming (the original title was Cattle Kate) may have been better suited to Fleming, but she was otherwise engaged, so O'Hara stepped into the breach as high-spirited Kate Maxwell. When we first see her, she's alighting from a stagecoach to hook up with old flame Jim Averell (William Bishop). Her headgear could be mistaken for the Irish flag, except it's green, blue, and yellow instead of green, white, and orange. When she removes her cape with a sassy line to “the boys,” we realize she's trying to pitch herself as a kind of Mae West character. That's the first problem with the film: miscasting. Alex Nicol isn't right as Sheriff Blaine, either (putting a splinter in one's mouth to look “cool” doesn't quite cut it). In addition, the chemistry between O'Hara and Nicol, a kind of low-rent Randolph Scott, is poor.
Averell gives Kate his saloon, which is actually a front for his cattle-rustling operation. He's hoping this will fund his seedy campaign to be governor of Wyoming. Kate is the patsy, signing the “maverick” cattle in, and it isn't long before she's gussied up like a madam and cutting cards for the boys. She advises Blaine to kick up his heels, but she doesn't even do that herself; instead, she spouts lines like “There's a fight comin’ on” when a range war threatens. When Kate realizes what Averell is up to, she tries to derail him but ends up in jail, taking the rap for him. Now it's time for Blaine to stop chewing on that splinter, put Averell out of action, and live happily ever after with Cattle Kate.
Blaine thinks he has Kate summed up when he ventures, “You talk like you dress, but you don't feel that way.” This line prefigures their eventual pairing, a prospect one greets with a mixture of dread and boredom. How does Kate really feel? We don't know because her character isn't buttoned down. She ranges indiscriminately from ideological speechifier to party gal, leaving one to conclude that her final choice of Blaine (a thoroughly unlikely “drifter”) is predicated on his virtue quotient rather than any “man points.”
We get flashes of vintage O'Hara in some of her lines: “I oughta kill you but I'd rather see you hang,” she spits out at Bishop toward the end. But by and large, this is flat beer and not at all the “panorama of fast-paced excitement” promised by the trailer. The fault isn't really hers. Nicol seems to have had a personality bypass, while Bishop is a stock suave wheeler-dealer type. In such a context, O'Hara's misguided efforts to rebore her Mary Kate Danaher persona in sagebrush mode is doomed to failure. Her halfhearted blowsiness doesn't convince, and neither does her accent (which seems more Ena Burke School of Elocution than Wyoming drawl).
The film is only seventy-six minutes long. Such slightness, combined with its wafer-thin characterizations, slots it firmly in the “filler” bracket. O'Hara dubbed it a “stinkeroo.” This was a term she frequently slapped on films that didn't do well for her.
As if to add to her woes, she was injured on the set. An extra fired a prop gun too close to her during a gunfight scene, causing powder burns on her neck and shoulders. She was rushed to the hospital to prevent any long-term effects on her skin. When she got home that day, she had an eerie feeling that something wasn't right. Female intuition made her check a closet where she kept her jewelry and important documents. When she opened it, she found, to her horror, a piece of paper covered with doodles of shamrocks—the same ones that adorned John Ford's love letters to her. But how had he gotten into her house? She could only put it down to his military connections. She was tempted to accuse Ford but felt that doing so would somehow play into his hands. She decided to say nothing, and the next time she saw him, he was as phlegmatic as ever. He was on the phone when she entered his office; he motioned her to sit down. As she looked around the room, she noticed that a picture of her on his wall had been turned back to front. Was this another ploy to humiliate her? (He was speaking to his wife about the forthcoming wedding of their daughter Barbara to Ken Curtis. O'Hara claims in her autobiography that Ford didn't approve of Curtis, but Harry Carey Jr. disputes this in his own memoirs.) Whatever Ford's motive, he said nothing to her about the break-in.
Things were going well between O'Hara and Parra at this point, but she was concerned that he might not be as estranged from his wife as he purported to be. She needed to be sure, so she employed a private detective. Here, we see O'Hara's pragmatism writ large: she was able to put her emotions in cold storage and do something sneaky. Others might say she had reason to be suspicious after what she'd been through with Price. The detective discovered that Parra's wife was dating a bullfighter, and this put her mind at ease. She then phoned Price and told him she was divorcing him. He was philosophical about the news. Now that she'd put the wheels in motion, she phoned her parents in Dublin and divulged how horrific the past few years had been—information she had carefully withheld from them up to this point. They were outraged, understandably, but happy that her psychological torture was about to end.
At the end of 1952 she sent a couple of trucks to her house to haul away most of her belongings—everything that wasn't nailed down. It wasn't easy for her to de-clutter this ruthlessly. “I'm a saver,” she said, “a human squirrel. I had every letter Mommie and Daddy and my three sisters and my two brothers and my uncles and aunts ever wrote me, all labeled according to date, all neatly tied with ribbons.” She'd also preserved everything from old theater programs to Bronwyn's first tooth wrapped in a Kleenex. She even had a piece of her wedding cake. But she'd made up her mind to start a new life, which meant emptying the house and putting it up for sale. The trucks stopped at her door, and “out of the house came my two brothers Charlie and Jimmy, my secretary, butler, my daughter Bronwyn's nurse, the gardener. They were staggering under boxes, crates and barrels which they dumped, like so much rubbish, onto the trucks. The trucks then drove off—with my past. I'd given it away.”17
After Price moved out, O'Hara was free to spend a substantial amount of time with Parra in Mexico, without having to worry about a scandal brewing. She even enrolled Bronwyn in a Mexican school. She enjoyed doing the simple things with Parra—walking down the street holding hands, shopping, being taken care of in a way that Price could never understand. She also started to learn Spanish. Eventually, she moved into one of Parra's homes with Bronwyn—but she kept one foot in Hollywood.
Once her marriage broke up, journalists felt emboldened to write more freely about her. Denny Shane was one of the first out of the traps. “For ten years,” he expounded, “beautiful Maureen O'Hara managed to keep her private life mysteriously to herself.” On movie sets, Shane continued, she was regarded as “cooperative but not particularly communicative.” She commanded huge salaries on her seven-year contracts “and then proceeded to freelance at even more gigantic fees.” But her expenses were also enormous. Now free of Price, she wanted to simplify her lifestyle: “When I was first married I was hopelessly, disgustingly efficient. I was the kind that overdid it—I even had labels neatly typed and pasted to every linen shelf. I made lists in duplicate for everything. Like an office manager.”18 That would all change now. She was looking forward to shedding the trappings of materialism: “I'm knee-deep in the process of reorganizing me. And to tell the truth, it's quite a job.”19 She made a brief reference to her trips to Mexico but didn't mention Parra by name. When in Mexico, she told Shane, she socialized with groups of interesting people. She was still playing her cards close to the vest. As for remarriage, that would be possible only if her marriage to Price was annulled, because her religion forbade it. For now, there were more movies to be negotiated to keep the wolf from the door.
John Ford continued to interfere in her life. He knew of her situation with Price and, more important, with Parra. When Price was in London, Ford met him for dinner and told him O'Hara was more or less living with Parra. Price called O'Hara after the meeting and said he intended to seek custody of Bronwyn because of her “immoral” double life. She knew he had no real interest in Bronwyn, that he was just looking for money, but she was deeply disturbed. Once again, Pappy had thrown a spanner in the works.
O'Hara filed for divorce from Price in July 1951 on the grounds of incompatibility, a euphemism that covered a multitude of situations in divorce suits; it was finalized a month later. The Hartford Courant reported that he was ordered to pay her $1 a year as token alimony, but she claimed she paid him alimony, as well as settling a $300,000 debt he owed. In a statement to the press, she described Price as an “excellent” director that she “wouldn't hesitate to work for” in the future.
It was difficult to keep her mind on her work while all this was going on. This may explain why she doesn't look quite right in War Arrow, a western she made in 1953. Jeff Chandler plays Howell Brady, an army major training a group of “good” Indians (the Seminoles) to help the army defeat some “bad” ones (the Kiowas). His commanding officer, Colonel Jackson (John McIntyre), opposes the idea of trusting any Indians at all. O'Hara plays Elaine Corwin, a woman who spends much of her time soul-searching about whether she's a widow (her husband may have been killed in battle) and whether she really likes Brady, who may be attracted to Avis (Suzan Ball), the fiery daughter of an Indian chief. She draws Brady close and fends him off by turns (something O'Hara's film characters do often with men). Such confusion accounts for some of O'Hara's fluctuating attention.
This account makes the film sound much more interesting than it is. O'Hara was bored with both the plot and her costar. She had lead billing over Chandler, whom she dubbed “a nice man but a bad actor.”20 In her memoirs, she said acting with him was like acting with a broomstick. This was cruel, as it would have been difficult for anyone to overcome the moribund material. Maybe he was simply trying to dumb himself down to its level.
Oscar nominations were due to be announced, and O'Hara's friend Anne Baxter thought there was a good chance she'd get one for The Quiet Man. Sadly, it never materialized. Once again, O'Hara felt Ford was responsible. He had put out a rumor that she was having an affair with Wayne to scupper her chances. To her face, he expressed sadness that she wasn't nominated, even giving her a gold bracelet as a consolation, but deep down she thought he was delighted.
She then went to Spain to film Fire over Africa, a film she would remember for all the wrong reasons during her 1957 court case against Confidential magazine. En route, she stopped in Dublin for an informal visit and was snapped getting on the number 14 bus. “Could it be…?” the conductor wondered, mimicking the opening line from The Quiet Man.21
Fire over Africa has her as the Mata Hari–like Joanna Dane, a secret agent trying to track down the leader of a gang of smugglers operating from Tangiers. Macdonald Carey is Van Logan, another agent, although Dane doesn't discover this until the film is almost over, and she suspects him of being in league with the villains throughout. O'Hara's brother Jimmy, again using the surname Lilburn, has a cameo as one of her admirers. (He later changed his name to Jimmy O'Hara to capitalize on his sister's fame.) If one ever wondered why Jimmy's film career never took off, the answer lies in his thumbnail sketch here as Danny Boy. Binnie Barnes fares better as Frisco, the ice-cold nightclub madam who turns out to be the linchpin of the smuggling operation. The plot is so thin on drama that this revelation wakes the audience up.
The film is like the poor man's Casablanca, with Carey and O'Hara as second-string versions of Bogie and Bacall. They spar verbally. “See you tomorrow,” Carey says to her at one point, getting the clichéd reply, “Not if I see you first.” Elsewhere he warns, “Tangiers can be tough,” eliciting the response, “So can I.” They seem to speak in italics in their seriocomic exchanges. Things reach a head when she hisses at him (prior to pumping three bullets into his chest), “You're no good but I'd still hate to kill you.” In the event, she doesn't—he's wearing a bulletproof vest—but not for lack of trying.
Matters aren't helped by Richard Sale's insipid direction. The Monthly Film Bulletin chided, “Maureen O'Hara looks very handsome in Technicolor but her expressions are limited—mostly to disgust at shooting smugglers or pulling knives from dying men.”22 By now, criticism from these self-styled arbiters of taste had developed a familiar pattern: the Technicolor sop, followed by a putdown based not so much on O'Hara's acting ability as on the scripts she was being offered. Why did she continue to take them? She may have been thinking of John Ford's dictum: “One doesn't become a better director by not directing.” The secret was to keep going in the hope that something better would come along.
That something better was Ford's The Long Gray Line, which she made in 1955. John Wayne was supposed to be her costar, but when his schedule conflicted, she suggested Tyrone Power, with whom she'd worked well in The Black Swan. Ford was happy to go with that recommendation. She also secured a small role as a cadet for her brother Jimmy. Ward Bond plays the token hard-nosed superior, and Harry Carey Jr. has a cameo as a young President Eisenhower. Ford gave Carey the part after examining his head for signs of premature baldness. (This pretty much qualified as a screen test for a Ford movie—at least if he liked you.)
The Long Gray Line tells the story of Marty Maher (Power), an Irishman who becomes head physical instructor at West Point Military Academy. Maher is a raw recruit at the beginning of the film, but he eventually finds himself training cadets on the cusp of World War I. He marries Mary O'Donnell, a Donegal lass played by O'Hara. Their first child dies shortly after birth, and the cadets become like surrogate sons to Maher. In the scene in which she gives birth to their ill-fated son, Maher's father (played by Ford stalwart Donald Crisp) says to him: “We'll be needin’ a rest after the great thing we've done this day.” One wonders exactly how tongue-in-cheek Ford is being here, as the doctor reveals that the birth was rough on Mary (Ford could never have been accused of being a New Man). Tragically, the child dies. Worse, Mary is informed that she can't have any more children. Instead of Maher sympathizing with his wife, she finds herself imploring him to “forgive” her for this traumatic news. He then goes off on a bender, from which he's “rescued” by a group of cadets.
The film showcases Ford at his best and worst—best in his celebration of military life (his “masculine” side), and worst in his saccharine emotion (an excess of his “feminine” one). The accents of both O'Hara and Power are overdone, and O'Hara's carries no trace of Donegal in it. Power's brogue is, in Fred Lawrence Guiles's phrase, “as thick as Mulligan stew.”23 Nevertheless, O'Hara's performance is solid, from the silence of her first rendezvous with Power to the garrulousness of later ones, where her familiar headstrong persona comes to the fore. Power dominates the film, but O'Hara rides shotgun with both charm and feeling; she even manages to sound convincing while delivering lines like this: “Is it sorry you are already, Marty Maher?” (which sounds like something from a bad Sean O'Casey play). Critical views of the film differed radically. For one reviewer, it was little more than “sweetness and sunlight.”24 For another, the Irish emphasis wasn't true to the “ethnic balance” of real West Point history.25
In any case, O'Hara was proud of the way she died in the film. She decided to play it totally naturally “and simply let the audience put into the scene any sentiment or feeling they wanted to.” She was in Ford's bad graces at the time, having been “in the barrel” for days, and couldn't wait to finish the picture. But if Ford saw that one of his stars had been pushed past the breaking point, that was when he became his most charming. And so it was here. After O'Hara “died,” he called all the crew around and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you want better acting than that, you'll never find it.” But O'Hara knew what he was up to—using flattery to win her back.26 “Periodically,” she giggled, “he dropped you a little praise to keep you under control and you'd think, ‘The old bastard.’ He knew what he was doing and why he was doing it.”27
The relationship between O'Hara and Ford reached a nadir on the set of The Long Gray Line. He made it his business to rob her of all dignity from day one of the shoot. Each day he greeted her with the words, “Well, did Herself have a good shit this morning?” Then he'd ask the crew what her mood was like. If they said it was good, he'd say, “Then we're going to have a horrible day,” and vice versa.28 Harry Carey Jr. was shocked when Ford reduced her to tears during a scene in which she had to shake a rug out a window.29 Betsy Palmer, who also appeared in the film, viewed Ford's behavior toward O'Hara from a totally different perspective. “She needed some fire set under her at times,” Palmer ventured, and to get that fire going, Ford had to make her angry: “He would refer to her ‘fat ass’ to get her kinda steaming. Then they'd shoot and she'd have the energy. I saw him tease her that way. He would say, ‘Listen, Maureen, get your fat Irish ass over here.’ The fire was there but it was banked down and he knew how to unlock it.”30 A more likely reason for Ford being so hard on O'Hara was that John Wayne wasn't there to protect her. (Wayne visited her one day on the set, but Ford refused to let them speak.)
Another day, O'Hara was in Ford's office and he started drawing penises on a piece of paper in front of her. Today, that would be regarded as sexual harassment. A few days later, she walked into his office without knocking and saw a sight that shook her to the core of her being: Ford had his arms around “one of the most famous leading men in the picture business” and was kissing him. She didn't know what to do, so she fumbled some papers to give them a chance to disentangle themselves.31 She didn't say anything to Ford then or later, but the experience made her wonder whether he was a closet homosexual. That possibility made her reevaluate all the male bonding scenes he was famous for. Was there something deeper at work there? Instead of being awkward with her (or perhaps because of this awkwardness), he harassed her even more afterward. One day he accused her of having a crush on Wayne and then advised her not to think of him that way because he had a small penis.
O'Hara was aware that much of this nonsense came from resentment. Ford was jealous of her relationship with Parra and upset that she was finally crawling out from under Price's influence. In all the years she was with Parra, Ford never once invited Parra to his house.32 Matters reached a head one day during an executive meeting concerning the promotion of The Long Gray Line. Ford snapped to O'Hara's brother Charles, “If that whore sister of yours can pull herself away from that Mexican long enough to do a little publicity for us, the film might have a chance at some decent returns.”33 Charles demanded an apology and got one, but it rang hollow; the damage had been done.
Maybe it was for the best that O'Hara's relationship with Ford deteriorated over the years. He gave her huge opportunities, to be sure, but he also limited her acting scope. Irish critic Philip Molloy wrote: “It is not something that she would accept herself, but Maureen O'Hara's career probably suffered from its long-time association with John Ford. Ford's view of Ireland, and things Irish, tended to be broad, sentimental and sociologically distorted, and his characters were often clichéd representatives of their nationality. They were played for their bigger, more overt qualities. The men were boisterous, gregarious and sometimes boozy. The women were betimes fiery and tender.”34 Molloy contended that she put herself out of the running for “Method-inspired” roles in the mid-1950s: “Because she was such an awed paragon of Ford's view of womanhood, it was unlikely the opportunities implicit in the evolving screen view of her sex would be available to O'Hara.”35
The especial Method actor of the time was, of course, Marlon Brando. He was busily burning up 1950s film screens with a panoply of Oscar-nominated roles that had him in a multiplicity of foreign guises (Mexican, Polish, Roman), not to mention his role as a broken-down boxer from Hoboken with a one-way ticket to Palookaville in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). The talk on the street was that he was a shoo-in for the Oscar that year, but O'Hara felt that because of his antiestablishment principles, the anal-retentive Academy “suits” would deny him that accolade. She emceed the Press Awards ceremony in 1955 and talked Brando up in her closing speech: “Ladies and gentlemen…. This year there is a young man up for the Best Actor Oscar and the vitriol against him is so horrible that he hasn't a chance of winning it if it is only about who likes whom best in this business.”36
Whether O'Hara's speech had any effect, Brando won for On the Waterfront. He accepted the Oscar but later regretted it, saying he would “never again accept one of any kind” because he objected to the rationale behind such awards.37 (He refused an Oscar for The Godfather in 1972.) Brando didn't believe he deserved to win; in fact, after he saw his performance for the first time, he got up and left the screening room: “I thought I was a huge failure and walked out.”38 Whatever his own feelings, O'Hara's speech on his behalf was rewarded with a bouquet of roses sent by Brando's minders. She affectionately called them her “Marlon Brando roses.”39
Her next undertaking was Lady Godiva, the story of a woman who “put everything she had on a horse.” It's difficult to appear unerotic dressed in only a wig and a body stocking, but O'Hara pulls it off here. She preserves her modesty, and audiences worldwide fell asleep. There's too much talk in the film, making it seem like a history lesson on camera, and too few battle sequences. How can people become excited by a plot based on a tax problem? We end up with a staid melodrama and wooden emotions. As for Lady Godiva's final ride through the deserted town, she remarks, “There will be no person in Coventry who will look upon my nakedness.” Her flesh-colored outfit takes care of that. (The Rapunzel-like hairstyle also covers her “bare” back.) O'Hara's refusal to go au naturel means that Lady Godiva's protest against the crippling taxes imposed by her husband Lord Leofric (George Nader) is as flat as the town built on the grounds of Universal Studios. A minor item of interest is the blink-and-you-miss-him appearance of Clint Eastwood as “First Saxon.” Even then, O'Hara professed that she sensed the potential of the rangy young man with the husky voice (probably an overstatement, as he had precious little to do in the film).
She gave an interview around this time to Mike Connolly of Photoplay magazine concerning the awkwardness of her marital situation. “Since you're a Catholic,” Connolly inquired, “how can the stories be true that you will remarry after your divorce from Will Price is final. Doesn't the Church forbid that?” She replied that she hoped to secure a dispensation to marry again: “Any woman would be telling a lie if she said she didn't want to be married and have a man of her own—and children, lots of children.” She conceded that love was important, but not, she suggested, as important as having children. The most important thing of all was God, but married love was godly because it was natural.40 She seemed to be arguing herself into a position that would theologically justify remarriage if it resulted in a brood of “godly” children.
Another movie role beckoned, this one seemingly with more potential than Lady Godiva, at least on paper. The Magnificent Matador teamed O'Hara with her friend Anthony Quinn. “I felt Anthony and I would be thoroughly convincing lovers on the screen,” she predicted, but sadly, they weren't.41 Was this due to the wobbly direction or the fact that they were friends offscreen? Perhaps a combination of both.
The title of the film is ironic, as Quinn plays a matador who is long past his prime. As Luis Santos, he agonizes over his commitment to the (blood) sport while acting as mentor to his young protégé Rafael (Manuel Rojas). O'Hara is Karen Harrison, the love interest, but she becomes little more than a figure on a tepid landscape. Budd Boetticher, in the director's chair, seems more focused on showing us Mexico and the corrida than anything that might transpire between the characters.
The main surprise comes when Santos tells Karen that Rafael is actually his son, born to his young lover who died giving birth. This should have been the most dramatic scene in the film, but Quinn and Boetticher throw it away; he might as well be advising O'Hara what time he's having lunch. She encourages him to tell Rafael, and again, he relates the news nonchalantly. (Rafael already knows, as it transpires, but that's beside the point.) All that remains now is for Santos to show bravery in front of the bulls to impress Rafael and Karen.
Boetticher was a matador in real life, and he had a few close calls, so he knew what it meant to be on the receiving end of a bull's rage.42 It's too bad he failed to transfer this authenticity to the screen. Describing himself as “the only gringo in Mexico,” Boetticher regarded bullfighting as an art rather than a sport, but this doesn't come across in the film either. He claimed the word macho gave him a pain in the neck,43 but unfortunately, his film is a hymn to such superficial definitions of masculinity.
The Magnificent Matador was Quinn's third bullfight movie and his fourth appearance with O'Hara. By now, they were almost like family. Quinn declared that at one time he thought O'Hara would be his “future.” She was already an established star when they met on Sinbad the Sailor, whereas he was “bouncing from picture to picture.” He fell hopelessly in love with her on the set of Sinbad and wrote in his autobiography: “She was dazzling, and the most understanding woman on this earth.” At this point, Quinn was unhappily married to his wife Katherine. He intimated in his book that he and O'Hara had an affair, “but after a while we both tired of the deceit. It was one thing to bed around on our spouses but quite another to settle into a serious relationship.”44 Quinn claimed O'Hara brought out the Gaelic in him. (He was half Irish on his father's side.) “I cherished what I looked like through her eyes,” he gushed, “the ways she made me feel, and she in turn could touch a part of me that no woman had ever known.”45 The writing here is like something out of a nickel-and-dime novel, and it gets even more rhapsodic: “She counted the days until her husband returned from overseas so she could divorce him and marry me and the thought gave me pause. I was already disentangled from Katherine in all but the material sense so it would have been nothing to pick up and start all over again. It would have been nothing and everything both.”46
O'Hara didn't allude to any of this in her own autobiography. She told Larry King in 2000 that she'd never had a relationship with any of her leading men.47 A few years later, Quinn told King that O'Hara's beauty made him forget his lines. King considered this a high compliment from someone “as particular as Tony Quinn.”48
“Maureen and I were not meant to be married,” Quinn concluded in his book:
Something always came up to keep us apart—usually a picture, or another affair, or some problem in the timing—and yet there was a connection between us that even our indecision could not shake. We stayed together not knowing where our love would take us, not knowing that it mattered. Every once in a while we landed on the same picture—Against All Flags, The Magnificent Matador—and resumed our affair. It was a wonderfully uncertain relationship and in it we both found a lifelong friendship, but I was still left to search for the one woman who was meant for me.49
O'Hara never mentioned a romantic connection with Quinn. When a journalist asked her how she'd managed without a man in the “prime” years of her life, she replied, “There was one but I don't want to talk about it.”50 Was she referring to Quinn here? It's possible, but unlikely. Remember, this was a man who bragged, “Once you're a star you realize you can have any woman you want.” He wouldn't have gotten far with O'Hara with that presumptuous attitude.
On the set of The Magnificent Matador, Quinn seated his girlfriend, a woman he described merely as “a society lady,” in the front row as he prepared to fight the bulls. He then bowed in front of her. As for his feelings for O'Hara, “The time between us had passed and I was not prepared to re-ignite those embers.”51 Quinn then presented his mantilla to O'Hara. “There was still a closeness between us,” he propounded, “and we were playing lovers in the picture so the meaningful glances we exchanged for the cameras were easy to come by.”52 To the audience, those glances look anything but meaningful.
In the final bullfight scene, the director has a tough job: he has to make it look authentic without spilling any blood, to satisfy the censors. Another problem was that Boetticher needed to fill the stands, but it would have been too expensive to employ so many extras. An elaborate advertising campaign was launched, and almost 25,000 bullfighting aficionados showed up—expecting to see a real bullfight. The trouble began when Quinn disappeared into a tunnel and was replaced by his stunt double. The people in the stands immediately knew they'd been duped and started to boo and throw fruit into the ring. Quinn's girlfriend led the chorus of disapproval. They were yelling in Spanish, “Tony Quinn's a whore. His mother should stuff him up her womb.”53 Boetticher started to panic as things spun out of control. The bull even got in on the act, refusing to charge Quinn's double. Famous matador Antonio Ordonez, who was on the set, told Quinn he'd have to fight the bull himself to restore his reputation. Quinn roared: “Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm an actor, not a bullfighter.” He suggested Ordonez replace the bull with a cow to improve his chances of surviving. Ordonez tried to encourage him, telling Quinn he'd have to make only one or two passes and if anything went wrong, he'd be nearby. Quinn decided to give it a go. As he stepped out, his girlfriend was still shouting “Coward!”54 It was decision time. He dropped to his knees to entice the bull to attack him, and it worked. To his relief, the second pass was even better than the first. The crowd erupted, throwing flowers at his feet in exultation. Ordonez then led the bull out of the ring. Quinn felt as if he'd won ten Academy Awards.55
His elation wasn't shared by many, as the press savaged the film. The New York Times critic sneered, “As near as you can make out from this picture, they kill the bulls by running them to death and, for that matter, Miss O'Hara nigh kills Mr. Quinn the same way.”56 This was a salad niçoise without the salad. The bulls didn't die, but the film surely did. O'Hara grew morose, as Lady Godiva hadn't been well received either. In that film, audiences had been promised nudity and felt swindled by the trick photography. Likewise, the promised violence in The Magnificent Matador fell short.
She was hit by another thunderbolt after the film was released as Price took her to court seeking custody of Bronwyn, as he'd threatened to do after his meeting with Ford in London. The newspapers picked up on the tug-of-love tussle, and the Irish Times quoted Price's allegation that O'Hara was an “unfit mother” by dint of her association with Parra. She filed a countersuit, charging him with contempt of court for failing to pay $50 a month child support and $7 a month alimony.57 She also accused him of being so drunk in front of Bronwyn on certain occasions that he'd endangered her life.
One day, a stranger divulged something that almost knocked O'Hara off her feet: Will Price was gay. She found this revelation unfathomable, but the man said he was willing to testify in court. That might have been interesting, but as things worked out, he didn't have to. Price backed off (perhaps he heard about the gay allegation), and Bronwyn was entrusted to her mother.
The year 1956 was better forgotten for other reasons as well. It was a time of missed opportunities and poor career choices. She was rejected for the part of Anna in The King and I and also lost a starring role in the Gary Cooper film Friendly Persuasion, the latter due to John Ford's interference. Instead, she played a villain in the insipid Lisbon with Ray Milland, who also produced and directed. The outdoor scenes set in Portugal are attractive, but the human factor pales in comparison. Claude Rains is an international thief who hires Milland to rescue O'Hara's husband from his incarceration behind the Iron Curtain. At first, O'Hara genuinely wants her husband freed. It's only when she falls for Milland that she decides she wants the old man killed instead. O'Hara does her best to make the story credible, but Milland's direction isn't subtle enough to convince us of the sea change.
Rains and Milland spend most of their time trying to outsuave each other, with O'Hara caught uncomfortably between them. She makes a valiant attempt to appear villainous, even wearing her hair up to increase her aggressive edge, but she doesn't get enough scenes to drive it home. An interlude on a boat with Milland is inserted in a vague attempt to develop her character, but this is far too perfunctory: it acts as an isolated oasis in a plot geared toward a tepid resolution. She uses her stubborn persona effectively in her scenes with Milland, but unfortunately, this militates against their would-be burgeoning romance (a familiar O'Hara predicament). In the end, we're left with a too-neat finale: Rains is arrested, O'Hara is stuck with an old man she now despises, and Milland finds love with Rains's exotic secretary, Yvonne Furneaux. Despite the film's faults, it was an interesting change for O'Hara, and one she apparently enjoyed. “For the first time in my career,” she chirped in her autobiography, “I got to play the villain, and Bette Davis was right—bitches are fun to play.”58
She also made Everything but the Truth that year. Again, this was a mixed blessing. If she was trying to wean herself away from adventure films, she should have chosen a more cerebral alternative. She plays a teacher supporting an orphan (Tim Hovey) who joins a truth pledge crusade at school and ends up exposing details of a crooked real estate deal that stirs up a hornet's nest of trouble. The idea is interesting, but the film collapses under the weight of its pretensions. O'Hara struggles valiantly with the inchoate plot, and she exhibits something not normally associated with her: a gift for comedy. The pity is that director Jerry Hopper doesn't exploit this; nor does he develop the budding romance between O'Hara and an author (John Forsythe) she recruits to bolster Hovey's credibility. She hits him over the head with a doorknob to fend off his advances early on, in the great O'Hara tradition of fighting with her lovers or would-be lovers, but the romance is cut off at the knees. There's a token reconciliation at the end, but by then, it's too late to matter. The film tries to pass itself off as a kind of Mr. Smith (or, in this case, Master Smith) Goes to Washington, but the idea of an eight-year-old delivering a keynote address to high-ranking officials required the expertise of a Frank Capra or a Preston Sturges. O'Hara usually worked well with child stars, as she proved with Natalie Wood and Hayley Mills (if not Binkie Stuart), but she has too few scenes with Hovey to work up any energy here. O'Hara thought so little of the film that she didn't even go to see it.
The longtime collaboration of O'Hara, Wayne, and Ford came to an end the following year with the military-themed The Wings of Eagles, a biopic of famed World War I aviator Frank “Spig” Wead (Wayne). The first half of the film is adolescent. We get scenes of Wead flying planes into swimming pools and throwing pies in people's faces as a prelude to free-for-all fistfights. It's as if Ford is back in Quiet Man country. In one scene he even has O'Hara do the familiar routine in which she throws a punch, misses her target, and ends up spinning around in a circle. She plays Spig's wife, Min. “Spig just joined the Navy,” she cribs, “I'm married to it.” His obsession with things military makes it difficult for her to breathe. She wants to enjoy life, kick up her heels. When she tells Spig this, he drones, in classic MCP mode, “I think you're getting too big for your drawers.” End of discussion.
Wayne and O'Hara interact well in these early scenes, giving effortless performances and exhibiting a strong chemistry. One can sense the offscreen friendship in little nuances between them. Ford probably had little direction to give them—not that he gave much anyway. Katherine Clifford claimed O'Hara fluffed her lines no fewer than fourteen times during one scene, but Ford was uncharacteristically patient with her, quietly commenting after each botched take, “We'll do it again, Maureen.” Could he really have changed so much? And what had happened to the actress who set such store by mnemonics?
O'Hara understood what it was like to be married to an absent husband: in this regard, the film was close to her own experience. Min watches Spig drift away from her when the navy commissions him to set a new seaplane record. Their daughters know him more from newsreels than anything else. When he makes a surprise visit home, they don't even recognize him. “Don't you kids ever read the newspapers?” he wonders bemusedly. “Are you the funny man with the goggles?” one of them inquires.
Min takes the “star spangled” Spig back to her bosom with the words, “Let's grow up before our kids do.” They're about to embark on a second honeymoon when Spig has a serious accident. Hearing one of the children crying in the middle of the night, he rushes down the stairs and falls, breaking his neck. His expression tells us he knows the injury is serious. So does Min's. At the hospital, the prognosis isn't good. He's paralyzed and is unlikely to regain feeling in most of his body. An operation saves his life, but his spirits are low when Min comes to see him. (This scene prefigures one years later in real life, when Wayne was dying of cancer and O'Hara visited him at his home.) Spig pushes her away, unable to let her see him in such a vulnerable condition. The most important relationship for Spig becomes his friendship with his navy buddy Dan Dailey, who keeps him in touch with the outside world and encourages him to move his limbs. He also encourages him to try his hand at screenwriting, and after a raft of rejections, Spig hits gold on Broadway.
A number of years later, Spig makes an overture to Min, hoping to reignite their relationship. Their children are grown, and she has a new life as a businesswoman, but she agrees to give the marriage another go. Just as she's about to move back in with him, Pearl Harbor is bombed. Spig is galvanized and goes back into action, this time in the Pacific. He performs heroically here, but it's all too much for his battered body, and he collapses. The film ends with him reminiscing about happier times with Min, tears in his eyes as he's airlifted to a ship. We don't know how much time he has left, and neither does he.
The Wings of Eagles is the story of a man who leaves his wife twice: first in health and then in ill health. Ford understood Wead because he resembled him in many ways. Neither of them was domestic, and both were rugged individualists and stubborn as mules. Min Wead, however, was no Mary Ford. If she had been, O'Hara's role could have been fleshed out significantly. As it stands, it's Wayne's film. O'Hara, as usual, is left to wring her hands on the sidelines as the demented spouse. Does Wead deserve to win her back? Within Ford's frame of reference, yes. But then, Ford was an incorrigible chauvinist.
It's a mixed blessing of a film, misfiring on a number of scores and causing the O'Hara-Wayne-Ford triumvirate to self-destruct before its time. A minor consolation is Ward Bond's cameo as John Dodge, a spoof of Ford himself performed with some gusto. Ford always enjoyed Bond's mischievousness, even though he might have bawled him out at the time. “Bond is a shit,” he used to cajole playfully, “but he's my favorite shit!”59 The film in general appealed to that part of Ford that fancied himself an army hero. Film scholars who see Wayne as the man Ford always wanted to be can justifiably cite The Wings of Eagles as a test case for that argument.
During that famous scene in The Quiet Man when Wayne and O'Hara engage in a passionate rain-soaked kiss, Ford insisted on multiple retakes, importuning his stars to kiss more passionately each time and to draw each other closer. Wayne's wife Pilar once asked him why Ford did that. Wayne guffawed, “Hell, honey, he just had me do all the things he wanted to do himself.”60 Sometimes this form of role-playing worked better than others. In The Wings of Eagles, Lindsay Anderson, among others, found the scenes of army-navy rivalry “charmlessly rowdy and full of liquored-up horseplay.” Nor did he enjoy Ford's “heavy laughter.”61 (He meant this metaphorically.)
Joseph McBride felt the film's blend of tragedy and low comedy worked to its detriment.62 Since most of the focus is on Wayne, all O'Hara can do is deliver squirm-inducing lines with as much conviction as she can muster: “All I know is I'm in the arms of a fellow, Spig, that I'm nuts about.”
Wead is typical of the characters Wayne played, in the sense that they usually preferred to “nudge out alternative familial spaces away from the domestic.” This is why Spig falls down the “unfamiliar” stairs of his own home when his daughter is crying.63 What differentiates this film from other Ford films is his intense familiarity with the subject. In real life, Wead died in Ford's arms.64 Ford was very close to the material—maybe too close. As with his Irish turns, this often led to bald sentimentality. Here, he just barely avoided it.
What might have been O'Hara's best scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Min Wead became an alcoholic in later life, and O'Hara captured this in some steamy scenes, but the Weads’ daughters wouldn't allow Ford to show her this way, so he had to sacrifice that footage. O'Hara believed this cheated her out of an Oscar nomination, and she had a point. Joseph McBride had commended O'Hara for her “shrewdly observed characterization of an acerbic modern woman forced to find her own identity while struggling with drink and loneliness.” It had been years since she'd received such a ringing endorsement of her acting ability, and it felt good.
The irony of The Wings of Eagles is that the critics liked it more than the public did. As one writer remarked, “Ticket buyers expected to see John Wayne in aerial dogfights with Japanese Zeros.” Instead, they got Wayne “sans toupee, fighting the war from a wheelchair and a desk.”65 Just as The Wings of Eagles was the end of the relationship among O'Hara, Wayne, and Ford, it also signaled the end of a genre that had once been popular with the public. The movie industry in general was changing too. The studio system continued to wane in the late 1950s, as did stars’ pulling power. Movies slowly began to be driven by content rather than form. No longer would they be cranked out on a conveyor belt of predictability with staple plots.
Glamour was dying, and in its place was kitchen sink realism. With the disappearance of censorship, directors were becoming bolder and more diverse. Taboos of style and substance were being broken. Topics that hadn't been discussed before, or even alluded to, were now common currency. Otto Preminger released The Moon Is Blue without a seal in 1953, and miraculously, his career survived the insolent move. Two years later, he had Frank Sinatra play a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm. In such circumstances, films like The Wings of Eagles seemed strangely anachronistic, a jovial nod to a previous era.
Where would O'Hara turn, now that the hatch marked “Escapist Fantasy” seemed to be closing down on her? As it happened, the next phase of her life would be remembered because of an appearance not on celluloid but in court.