The old man was in rare form, and he had picked a fine place for it.
The Lido is a tree-covered island about eight miles long and a few hundred yards wide that forms the eastern boundary of the Venice lagoon. In the first week of September 1971, John Ford came to the Lido, to the arabesque Excelsior Hotel, to be honored by the Venice Film Festival.
He was a frail, seventy-seven-year-old man in poor health who invariably contrived to give the entirely correct impression that he was not to be trifled with. On the boat from the airport, he had been plagued by a fussy attendant in the private vaporetto. "Water a bit choppy, sir?" the attendant had inquired. "Fancy saying that to an admiral in the Navy," he shot back.
And now there was a critic at the door of his hotel room, come for his scheduled interview. Barbara Ford, her father's traveling companion and handler, politely told the critic that the interview might not be possible; Daddy was being inconvenienced by some sudden stomach trouble. "Come in, come in," yelled Ford from the lavatory. "I can deal with two shits at once."
Scott Eyman "Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford" (1999)
