legends F e b r u a r y / M a r c h 2 0 1 8 3 1 corey templeton T h e R e a l J o h n F o r d By colin w. sargent It’s time we met the John Ford you never knew. Spoiler alert. Here are two scenes from a movie local director John Ford never shot, because he lived them. Scene No. 1: It’s 1954, and Maureen O’Hara is on the set of The Long Gray Line, about West Point cadets and their leaders. “I walked in- to his office without knocking and could hardly believe my eyes. Ford had his arms around another man and was kissing him. I was shocked and speechless. I quickly dropped the sketches on the floor, then knelt down to pick them up. I fumbled around slowly and kept my head down. I took my time so they could part and compose themselves. They were on opposite sides of the room in a flash.” Tyrone Power played the male lead in the film. Scene No. 2: It’s 1936. Katharine Hepburn is crazy in love with her director, John Ford. They’ve fallen in love. We see Katharine at her desk, carefully writing “a personal letter to [Ford’s wife, Mary McBride Ford], offering her $150,000 if she would divorce Ford and let him keep custody of Barbara, the daughter to whom he was par- ticularly close.” “Mary refused,” writes Nancy Schoenberger, author of Wayne and Ford, The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an Ameri- can Hero (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95), a book that’s touched off a global reassessment of Ford and his motivations just as sex- ual harassment revelations are erupting throughout the country.