There
were two cataclysms in the last years of the '20s: one on Wall Street, one in
Hollywood. The Fords got off fairly lightly in both. "We were lucky in
'29," Mary Ford would remember. "A Jewish friend and stockbroker flew
out from New York to tip us off. Everyone else went broke but we came out on
top." Actually, Ford wrote off about $76,000 in stock losses between 1930
and 1932, but since he earned $268,000 in those three years, he was in
considerably better shape than most people in a country where unemployment
hovered around 33 percent.
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Nineteen
twenty-nine was the year Ford paid cash for a new Rolls-Royce. He had called up
the showroom and told them he was coming down to pick out a car, but he showed
up in khaki pants and a floppy hat. The dealer didn't wait for the disreputable
man to identify himself before asking him to leave the premises. An enraged
Ford returned home but couldn't bring himself to talk about what had just
happened. He called the dealership and told them to throw a mink coat in the
back seat and deliver the car to his house.
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When
it arrived, Ford handed over the cash and told Mary, "Don't ever ask me
for anything else." Perhaps because of the humiliation Ford had suffered,
he always considered the Rolls to be Mary's car, and carried something of a
grudge against it for as long as he owned it. "I don't think they're worth
a damn," he would tell one employee. By the late '60s, the car was up on blocks
in his garage, and Ford seemed to prefer it that way.
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The
Depression would decimate the movie business, along with a lot of pie that Ford
had worked with since he arrived in Hollywood. Frank Baker remembered Ford
being accosted outside his office by an old actor in the Universal days whose
wife needed an operation. He asked Ford for $200. Ford stared, then backed
away, then launched himself at the actor, knocking him down. "How DARE you
come here like this?" he screamed. "Who do you think you are to talk
to me this way?"
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Baker
witnessed this exchange, and also witnessed Ford's business manager Fred Totman
coming out of the office door with a check for $1,000. Totman ordered Ford's
chauffeur to drive the man home, where an ambulance transported the woman and
her husband to San Francisco for the operation.
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Baker
told the story to Frank Ford, who was amazed. "I've been trying to figure
Jack since the day he was born," Frank told Baker. "This is the key.
Any moment, if that old actor had kept talking, people would have realized what
a softy Jack is. He couldn't have stood that sad story without breaking down.
He's built this whole legend of toughness around himself to protect his
softness." Later, as the Depression deepened, Frank Baker served as Jack's
financial beard, sending checks to more than a dozen families under his own
name, so that Ford, who could not bear to be thanked, would never be connected
with the stipends.
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Scott Eyman "Print the
Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford" (1999)
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