An excerpt from Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away, to be released March 25 by University Press of Kentucky, exploring Miles’s impressive career and her relationships with the iconic directors and stars she collaborated with.
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Miles recognized decades later that her role in The Searchers cemented the perception people had of her as a character and set her as the “domestic” type: “John Ford set my image, and in those days, what you looked like was more or less what you got stuck with as far as image went. I played some heavies later on, but you couldn’t fight your physical appearance, and when I came out from Kansas, I still had the hay in my hair. I looked straight, and I looked Midwest, and those were the roles I got. Things are more flexible for actresses now, but then it was a bitch to break type.”
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Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney was a scion of both the wealthy Vanderbilt and Whitney families and built on his family’s already monumental fortunes through business enterprises in several industries, including mining. Another industry that Whitney tried his hand at was film production, having put up some of the financing to produce Gone with the Wind. After Whitney served in several roles in the Truman administration, he returned to film by establishing his own production company in the early 1950s, C. V. Whitney Pictures, and set out to make a prestige film as his company’s first production. Whitney hired famed producer Merian C. Cooper, the driving force behind the iconic film King Kong, to run his production company. In his role as vice president in charge of production at C. V. Whitney Pictures, Cooper purchased the film rights to Alan Le May’s bestselling 1954 western novel The Searchers, and offered the project to his longtime collaborator and close friend John Ford, with whom Cooper was a partner in his production company, Argosy Pictures Corporation. Argosy had previously released five John Ford films starring Hollywood superstar John Wayne beginning with 1948’s Fort Apache.
It’s no surprise that to make the biggest splash in the industry possible, Whitney sought out Ford to direct his company’s first project. By then Ford had become the most acclaimed director in Hollywood history, the only person to receive four Academy Awards for directing. Working with Ford meant the production would have access to a qualified roster of talent both in front of and behind the camera, the so-called John Ford Stock Company, a menagerie of frequent collaborators who often starred in or worked on his films, including the industry’s biggest star, John Wayne, and actors like Ward Bond, Olive Carey, and Harry Carey Jr. Though Ford was well known for directing westerns, The Searchers would be his first western since 1950’s Rio Grande and his first film with Wayne since 1952’s The Quiet Man (also starring Bond), which were both Argosy Pictures Corporation releases. However, Ford had shot some scenes (uncredited) for the 1953 western Hondo, which also starred Wayne and Bond, as a favor to Wayne when the film’s original director, John Farrow, had to leave the film to begin work on another project.
During preproduction, Ford cast The Searchers with a host of his frequent collaborators in roles both big and small, including Harry Carey Jr., Ken Curtis, Jack Pennick, John Qualen, and Wayne’s son Patrick. In addition, much of the talent behind the camera included longtime Ford collaborators. The screenplay was written by Frank S. Nugent, who had written six previous films directed by Ford, including the Ford-Wayne collaborations (and Argosy releases) Fort Apache (1948), 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Quiet Man (1952). As with with many of Ford’s recent films, Cooper served as producer of The Searchers. Other previous Ford collaborators who were brought into the production included Wingate Smith (assistant director), Max Steiner (music), Winton C. Hoch (cinematography), and James Basevi and Frank Hotaling (art direction). In addition, Warner Bros. agreed to distribute The Searchers.
Ford was coming off the success of the 1955 hit The Long Gray Line, released in February, and during the production of The Searchers would have an even bigger hit with Mister Roberts, released in July (Mister Roberts would be nominated for three Academy Awards the following year, resulting in a Best Supporting Actor win for Jack Lemmon). However, the production of Mister Roberts was difficult for nearly everyone involved. Ford was removed from the film as director by Warner Bros. after he came into conflict with the stars of the film, Henry Fonda and James Cagney, and because Ford needed emergency surgery on his gallbladder. Though many of Ford’s regulars were also in Mister Roberts – including Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Patrick Wayne, Jack Pennick, and Ken Curtis – it was likely a relief for Ford after that experience to be working with even more members of his “team” on The Searchers, a film he had much more control over.
By the time production started on The Searchers, Ford was now in his sixties, and his health had started to decline after his gallbladder surgery (after directing over one hundred films before 1956 since his 1917 debut, Ford would only direct eleven more features after The Searchers). But Ford’s well-known temperament endured. Patrick Wayne, who began appearing in films in Ford’s film Rio Grande (1950), appears in The Searchers as Lieutenant Greenhill, a young cavalry soldier, and remembers that Ford kept him on his toes when they worked together. “One of the characteristics of working with Ford that separated me from everybody else is that he was my godfather, so I got treated specially,” he shares. “I did not realize it at the time – I was always expecting that I would be the beneficiary of his acerbic wit because he really got everybody at one time or another. But I was always prepared for it. I had the same anxiety as every other person working on the film.”
Similarly, John Wayne was coming off a difficult shoot for the RKO Pictures film The Conqueror, a much-maligned movie in which he was horrendously miscast in “yellowface” as Genghis Khan (before production started on Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle, Gordon Scott visited the set of The Conqueror and was photographed with John Wayne in his Genghis Khan costume; both The Conqueror and Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle were RKO Radio Pictures). Though The Conqueror would not be released until after The Searchers wrapped production, the shoot was difficult for Wayne and had gone significantly over budget, so much so that the film’s producer, millionaire Howard Hughes, would exit the film business in part over his frustration with the doomed project. While The Conqueror would ultimately do well on release – according to Variety, it was the eleventh highest-grossing film at the US box office in 1956, with an estimated $4.5 million take (ranked right above it was The Searchers, with an estimated gross of $4.8 million) – the expensive production would end up in the red and received largely negative reviews. Though the much more negative reception of the film would come later, Wayne was likely also relieved to again be working with Ford and so many familiar faces after that challenging experience.
Ford, Wayne, and the rest of the stock company would also be returning to familiar territory to shoot the film – Monument Valley, an expansive landscape on the Utah-Arizona border with towering sandstone buttes that have been featured in dozens of films set in the American West. Ford first shot a western in Monument Valley for 1939’s Stagecoach – his first film with Wayne in a starring role and the role that launched Wayne into stardom – and the pair returned to shoot Ford Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) in Monument Valley. The Searchers was the fifth film Ford shot in Monument Valley and the first of his Monument Valley films to be shot in widescreen (VistaVision). To shoot with such a large crew in the remote location, the production built infrastructure like roads and utilized a tent city for its cast and crew, which numbered three hundred, including some local Navajo who were hired as extras. Most of the cast was on location for all five weeks of the production, and the location shoot alone cost C. V. Whitney Pictures $500,000.
The Searchers features Wayne in what many historians consider one of his most complex roles. After spending a quarter of a century portraying mostly altruistic cowboys and soldiers in dozens of films, in The Searchers, Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, an imposing former Confederate soldier with a questionable background. In 1868, he arrives unannounced at the home of his brother in West Texas. While his brother’s family is happy to see him, Ethan does not explain his whereabouts since the Civil War ended three years earlier. Shortly after Ethan arrives, the Comanche steal cattle belonging to the Edwards’ neighbors, Lars Jorgensen and his family. When Ethan and other men of the area set out to recover the cattle, the Comanche raid the Edwards’ homestead; murder Ethan’s brother, sister-in-law, and nephew; and abduct Ethan’s two nieces. The elder of the two girls is soon discovered dead by Ethan’s hunting posse (the film implies that she may have been raped before her murder), and a grief-stricken Ethan sets off on a multiyear search to find his youngest niece, Debbie (played as an adult by Natalie Wood). It quickly becomes clear that Ethan may be less interested in rescuing her than he is in potentially killing her for being “soiled” by her life among the “savages.” Wayne’s riveting performance as Ethan is among the Duke’s greatest performances and is arguably the one for which he is most remembered. “It was one of my dad’s best roles,” says Patrick Wayne. “It was a different role for my dad, certainly at the time for him. He was really a nasty character that was not typical of the John Wayne character.”
Though The Searchers cast and crew were filled with Ford’s usual collaborators, there was room in the picture for new faces. While Vera Miles had appeared in an uncredited role in Ford’s 1950 comedy When Willie Comes Marching Home, she would be among the few actors on set in The Searchers who hadn’t previously appeared in a half-dozen or more Ford films. Miles’s casting in The Searchers resulted from the filmmaker seeing her on television. She told Parade in January 1957 that when her agent told her that Ford wanted to see her for a part in The Searchers, “I didn’t think I had a chance. Later, I found out that he had seen me on TV and already made up his mind.” It had been Ford’s wife, Mary, who spotted her in “The Tryst” on The Ford Television Theatre in June 1954 and pointed her out to her husband. Miles claimed her interview with Ford lasted three minutes and would recall to Screenland that the “meeting” simply consisted of Ford asking her, “Would you like to do a picture for me?”
Miles was cast in The Searchers as Laurie Jorgensen, the love interest of a young cowboy, Martin Pawley, Wayne’s character’s searching companion. Pawley is played by Jeffrey Hunter, a handsome actor with leading-man potential who, like Miles, had yet to have a true breakout film role. Though Pawley rides with Wayne’s Edwards, the former Confederate soldier holds the younger man in contempt for being a “half-native” who was adopted by his brother’s family. Laurie, in love with Pawley, waits for years at home for him to end his search for his adopted sister’s whereabouts and settle down with her. At one point, she even tells Pawley to give up, siding with Ethan’s point of view that Debbie has been tainted by the Comanche and saying that Debbie has likely become the “leavings of a Comanche buck, sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own.” She tells Pawley that his adoptive mother would have rather seen Debbie dead than a bride of a Comanche.
Throughout the film, Laurie tempts Pawley to quit his search and settle down so he does not end up a cold, ruthless man like Ethan. Though Ford presents and photographs Laurie as an extremely appealing beauty as a representation of a settled-down life in opposition to life on the trail, Pawley rejects that life because of his mission with Ethan. Laurie nearly marries another man (played by later star of Gunsmoke Ken Curtis, who at the time was Ford’s son-in-law) before Pawley interrupts the wedding when he and Ethan come to the Jorgensen ranch for a brief respite from their search. Ultimately, after Ethan and Pawley find Debbie (and Ethan opts not to kill her), the pair bring her to the Jorgensen ranch. Laurie runs out to greet their arrival and is last seen in the film entering the Jorgensen ranch with Pawley, symbolic of Pawley finally coming off the trail. As a counterpoint, Ethan, a cynical eternal rambler, never enters the Jorgensen ranch in this final scene, and the film concludes with Ethan walking away toward the horizon. As such, Laurie – hopeful, enthusiastic, and beautiful – represents the comforts of a domesticated life, one that Pawley can finally engage in now that the search for his adopted sister is over, but it is a life that is no place for a man like Ethan.
The casting of both Miles and Hunter was announced in the June 15, 1955, edition of the Los Angeles Times with the film only days away from production. According to the film’s production reports, Miles and Olive Carey (who played the mother of Miles’s character, Mrs. Jorgensen, and would be Miles’s roommate during the on-location production) traveled from Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Arizona, overnight from June 29 to 30, then arrived at the production base camp at 10:45 a.m. on June 30. The three-hundred-person production crew camped out in a tent city for five weeks, meaning that Miles was shooting on location in Monument Valley through July 10. The production then moved to RKO Studios in Los Angeles, with Miles working in the studio from July 18 through August 3. Finally, the primary cast, including Miles, was called to RKO Gower Studios on August 15 and 16 for publicity portrait sessions. Patrick Wayne was on location for the entire shoot and, after the production moved to Hollywood, was on set nearly every day even when he wasn’t in a scene. “When you’re in a remote area – like 350 miles to the nearest post office – the only place you’re going to have a conversation or any contact with anyone is on the set,” he recalls. “I got to know Vera Miles very well because you get to know everyone very well because you become a close-knit family. One of Ford’s techniques was taking meals together. In the afternoon at four o’clock, he would break and have a table set up. All of the principals would sit down and have a formal tea.”
On set, Patrick Wayne spent a lot of time, and developed a friendship, with Natalie Wood (who was only a year older than him). He recalled that they were often teased on set as the youngest cast members, but Miles did not join in on the teasing. “She was very sweet to us and very sympathetic,” he remembers. “I got along with her great.”
While Miles had appeared in more than a half-dozen films before The Searchers, it was by far the most prestigious and expensive project of her burgeoning career. Reflecting on being dropped from three contracts with three major studios in the preceding few years in an interview for Dorothy Manners’s gossip column, Miles remarked, “I didn’t let it get me down. I just squared my shoulders and determined to learn to act. I received my reward making The Searchers when John Ford told me after my big scene, ‘Kid, you’re okay.’”
For her part, Miles had a positive experience working alongside Ford, Wayne, and the other luminaries involved in The Searchers. She told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1981, “The Searchers really was terribly exciting. My first big film, a big, well-done western directed by one of the best-known directors in the world. It was a wonderful initiation. . . . Those two powerful men (Ford and Wayne) were terribly in love with each other, such great friends. They acted very gruff, but there was so much kindness and sensitivity in them. There was a great feeling of family, of being in a very close-knit group on that movie. It was such a mass of wonderfully talented people.” In the press kit for 1983’s Psycho II, Miles pointed to working with Ford on The Searchers as the first moment she saw being a film actress as a career versus a temporary excursion. She remarked, “It was the first time that I’d worked with anyone so intensely interested in and so serious about filmmaking. His passion inspired and even intrigued me; and I began to understand what it was that happened up on the screen.”
On the other hand, she also recognized decades later that her role in The Searchers cemented the perception people had of her as a character and set her as the “domestic” type: “John Ford set my image, and in those days, what you looked like was more or less what you got stuck with as far as image went. I played some heavies later on, but you couldn’t fight your physical appearance, and when I came out from Kansas, I still had the hay in my hair. I looked straight, and I looked Midwest, and those were the roles I got. Things are more flexible for actresses now, but then it was a bitch to break type.”
Ford and Wayne worked with Miles several more times over the next dozen years, obviously impressed by the performance and professionalism of the twenty-six-year-old actress, who portrayed Laurie with both youthful exuberance and domestic maturity. That was no easy feat, especially for Ford, who, even on his most agreeable days, could treat his actors, even the ones he considered close friends, harshly. Patrick Wayne recalls that Miles quickly exceeded Ford’s strict expectations for actors. “I was crazy about her,” he says. “First of all, she was very beautiful and extremely talented. She was always engaged when she was performing. I thought she was great. She had the right disposition to work with Ford. You had to be flexible, and you had to be ready for anything because he had in his mind the way he wanted a scene to go and how he wanted his actors to perform, even to the point of giving line readings. So, you better be prepared because he would hold on like a wolverine until he got it the way he wanted it.”
Miles’s experience working with Bond, another longtime friend and collaborator of Ford, was allegedly far less respectful. Decades after the production of The Searchers, Carey Jr., who played Brad Jorgensen in the film and was the son of Ford favorites Harry Carey Sr. and Olive Carey, wrote in his autobiography Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company that Bond, who was his roommate for the shoot, was determined to seduce Miles during production. Attempts by Bond, nearly thirty years Miles’s senior, to attract her by walking around naked or trying to catch her naked were futile. Bond’s behavior – coming from a man just recently married to his second wife, Mary – would clearly be understood today as the type of sexual harassment that was rife in the entertainment industry for decades. As far back as her experience working for Howard Hughes, Miles had regularly rejected the advances of older, established men, and Bond would have been no exception to that because Carey said that Miles never even noticed Bond’s nudity. However, Miles never publicly addressed Bond’s alleged on-set behavior toward her, and she went on to work with him on two television projects before he died in 1960.
By mid-August, Miles had sufficiently impressed C. V. Whitney Pictures with her performance in The Searchers that the company signed her for a three-year, three-picture nonexclusive contract, making Miles the new company’s first contracted star. Nonetheless, months would pass without any announcement regarding Miles appearing in any C. V. Whitney Pictures films. In her May 19, 1956, column, Sheilah Graham reported that Miles was “postponing” her next Ford / C. V. Whitney film because she was “torn between so many picture assignments, and marriage with ‘Tarzan’ Gordon Scott.” Even as late as May 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that C. V. Whitney Pictures was “busy seeking new story properties” for the films left on Miles’s contract with the production company. However, the production company would only make two additional films, 1958’s The Missouri Traveler and 1959’s The Young Land, before folding, and Miles appeared in neither film (John Ford also was not involved in either movie, though his son, Patrick Ford, produced both). Some reports say that Miles was initially supposed to star in The Missouri Traveler, but she ultimately did not make the film (perhaps she was pulled by Hitchcock after signing her contract with him).
Even shortly after The Searchers entered postproduction, the film gave a significant boost to Miles by pushing her name more regularly into the gossip columns. In the aftermath of Jeffrey Hunter’s divorce from actress Barbara Rush (with whom Miles would star in the memorable pilot episode of The Outer Limits in 1964), Sheilah Graham reported in her August 13, 1955, column that “press agents are trying to stir up a romance between Jeff Hunter and Vera Miles,” despite Miles’s by now well-documented relationship with Gordon Scott. Two weeks later, Graham reported that Ford gifted Miles a pair of the tight-fitting pants that she wore in one scene of The Searchers with a cheeky note saying, “Wear these more often, and I can guarantee you will receive better parts.” In one of his February 1956 columns, Hollywood columnist Mike Connolly remarked, “Give her two years and I’ll bet almost anything I own that there’ll be no bigger name among Hollywood’s leading ladies than Vera Miles, John Wayne’s leading lady in The Searchers.” While Miles has the most substantial female speaking role in the film, it was a big stretch to refer to her as “Wayne’s leading lady” in the movie as she is the love interest of Hunter’s character. However, the association with the screen’s biggest star certainly wouldn’t have hurt Miles any.
The Searchers truly was a star-making performance for Miles, who manages to make a memorable impression as the only prominent female character in the film (Wood’s Debbie, while visually striking, is more of a plot point than a full character). Miles portrays Laurie as a determined, graceful young woman who is as headstrong as she is beautiful. Audiences instantly recognized her character’s promise – The Searchers had an extremely successful preview screening on December 3, 1955, at the Paramount Theatre in San Francisco. Walter MacEwen, an executive at Warner Bros., wrote a memo to Jack L. Warner that praised the film and the audience’s response to it (the memo was reproduced as an insert of the fiftieth anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD release of The Searchers). Of Miles, MacEwen wrote, “Vera Miles is lovely, with lots of spirit.”
While Psycho may be Miles’s most-watched film, The Searchers is almost inarguably the best film she made in her career, and her spirited performance is the reason so many critics thought that she would be one of the industry’s top stars by the end of the decade. It remains one of the most highly regarded American films of the studio era and is thought by many critics, scholars, and fans to be Ford and Wayne’s greatest collaboration. The film’s esteem has grown substantially in the years since its release. When the American Film Institute (AFI) created a list of the one hundred greatest American films in 1998 by polling fifteen hundred principals in the film industry, The Searchers ranked at number ninety-six. When AFI revised the poll nine years later, The Searchers jumped an astounding eighty-four spots to number twelve, by far the largest gain of any film on the list. Likewise, the British Film Institute’s once-a-decade Sight & Sound critics’ poll has ranked The Searchers as one of the top films ever made since 1982, with the film ranking at number seven in 2012 and number fifteen in 2022.
Following production of The Searchers, Ford carried over four of the film’s principal actors – Miles, Bond, and John and Patrick Wayne – and assistant director Wingate Smith for one of his first television productions, which started shooting on October 10, 1955, two months after production wrapped on The Searchers. The NBC anthology series Screen Directors Playhouse launched in 1949 as a radio program that adapted popular films for radio broadcasts. In 1955, NBC revived the series for television. Through its sponsorship by Eastman Kodak and because its productions were shot at Hal Roach Studios, Screen Directors Playhouse had access to high-caliber talent from the Screen Directors Guild, like Ford. Ford’s production, titled “Rookie of the Year” from a script by Frank S. Nugent (who had also written the screenplay for The Searchers), was the tenth program broadcast in the series.
In the program, Patrick Wayne stars as a promising rookie baseball player, Lyn Goodhue, who plays for the New York Yankees. Goodhue’s father is Buck Garrison, played by Bond, who was (unbeknownst to the rookie and the public) a member of the notorious Black Sox who threw the 1919 World Series. The elder Wayne plays Mike Cronin, a small-town sportswriter who has been itching to get out of his dead-end job in Emeryville, Pennsylvania. Cronin discovers the truth about Goodhue’s disgraced father, and he sees the scandal as the breakthrough story he’s been waiting to write for his entire career. Miles portrays the girlfriend of Goodhue, Ruth Dahlberg, who threatens Cronin at gunpoint not to expose the story when she discovers his snooping and learns the truth about Buck herself. After talking it over with Ruth, Cronin accepts that the story would ruin the promising career of a rookie who could end up an all-time great and agrees to not publish it – only to discover that Goodhue’s parentage is common knowledge among his sportswriter acquaintances in New York, and they’ve all also agreed not to write about it to protect Goodhue’s reputation. However, Cronin is offered the opportunity by one of his acquaintances in New York to travel to Japan to cover a baseball tour there in exchange for keeping the story quiet so he can escape his small-town paper regardless.
Though Miles plays Patrick Wayne’s girlfriend in the program, the pair do not appear on screen together as much of her screen time is opposite John Wayne. “We were never in a scene together,” recalls Patrick Wayne. “We were never even on the set together. I think I saw her once during the production. Our scenes were completely different.”
Miles and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The half-hour program aired on NBC on December 7, 1955 (six months before The Searchers would premiere in theaters), and amounted to one of Miles’s strongest and most visible supporting television roles in a year that was already full of them for her. NBC re-aired the episode on April 18, 1956, a month before the release of The Searchers. Luckily for Miles, it would not be the last time she would work with either Ford or Wayne.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
