Jim’s Reviews > Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford > Status Update

“It was” remembered Bruce Herchensohn, “as though God had touched John Ford at the beginning of his life and said, ‘How would you like to be a very unique man-like no one else. However, you may scare some people.’ [...]”

“I have this theory,” said Roddy McDowell, “that certain combinations -Ford and Zanuck, Capra and Cohn, Wyler and Goldwyn-abrased each other in a very creative manner, like Michelangelo and Pope Julius. They were constantly criticizing each other, and there was conflict, but the end results were astonishing,”

[I've been gradually coming to the realization that I'm going to have to return this book to the library, read "The Grapes of Wrath", so that I can then watch Ford's film version of Steinbeck's work before I can read about the making of that film. *groan* -j]

[Katherine] Hepburn was one of the few people of either sex Ford couldn't cow. Once, they were golfing and she refused to concede him a three foot-putt. He missed it, then missed again. Furious, he heaved his club sixty feet. "If I were you," Hepburn cooly observed, "I'd use an overlapping grip for distance."

[Ford:] "You asked me a question once-why I always have the Parrish and Watson kids. It's because the Watsons have nine kids, and the Parrishes have four, and I can fill a schoolhouse and have only two goddamn mothers around."

With an excess of youthful high spirits, [Harry] Carey[Sr.] once borrowed some long underwear from a nearby whorehouse called Madame Moran's and raised them on the university flagpole. He was promptly expelled, and afterward referred to himself as a "premature alumnus" of NYU.