Having made 14 movies together over a 24-year period and becoming cemented as one of the most iconic partnerships of actor and director in Hollywood history during that time, it’s reasonable to expect that John Wayne and John Ford were so familiar with each other that they’d know exactly how their opposite number would think.
Individually, they had a reputation for pulling practical jokes, which by extension presumably made it increasingly difficult to get one over on the other considering their respective penchant for tomfoolery and in-depth knowledge of each other’s mindset. However, Wayne managed to steal a march on his regular collaborator, even if it took him an entire year.
As revealed in Pilar Wayne and Alex Thorleifson’s book John Wayne: My Life With the Duke, the iconic star waited until Ford had become acquainted with his then-current residence before starting to cause mischief. Wayne “borrowed a replica of a city truck from Warner Bros.,” which he then sent to the filmmaker’s new abode, but not before he’d “hired a couple of actors to impersonate a survey crew.”
When they got there, they were to “announce that Ford would have to move because a freeway was going to run right through his living room,” which unsurprisingly left four-time Academy Award winner with a mindset that was described as “apoplectic.”
Wayne had conjured the idea long before he set his plan into motion, but he held off until he was fully convinced that Ford was so comfortable in his freshly-purchased surroundings that he’d be at his most furious upon being told the desire to expand the network of freeways in the area would necessitate his exit.
Ford and Wayne at various points had deliberately strewn sheep dung on the ground for the express purpose of dragging Maureen O’Hara through it on The Quiet Man, and hired an actor to masquerade as a plate-smashing bumbling waiter to get back at a pair of producers on Rio Grande, so it’s not as if the air of mischief that lingered between them would come as a bolt out of the blue.
After all, it’s a rite of passage for long-time close friends to have fun at each other’s expense every once in a while, regardless of whether or not they happen to be two of the biggest names in Hollywood operating at the peak of their powers and combining their creative might for a string of wildly successful films spanning multiple decades.
Once a prankster, always a prankster it would seem, with Wayne relishing the opportunity to score a victory over Ford by leaving him genuinely concerned that he’d be forced to evacuate his home just a year after moving in. It might not have been Ford’s favourite example of one-upmanship, but it was almost certainly the slowest-burning.
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