Mercy

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Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar’s beginning sets out to trick its viewer: Sterling Hayden’s eponymously named character drifts through a rugged mountain landscape, a guitar slung over his shoulder, which recalls the preponderance of lonesome cowboy characters wandering through rough terrain, hardened and alone, as well as the singing cowboy popularized in the 20s, thirty years before Johnny Guitar. The progression of these characters follows a typical trajectory of passive engagement with the town they enter before that passivity slowly, after a series of injustices, turns to action and heroism. Johnny Guitar doesn’t tell this story. Director Nicholas Ray begins with these timeworn images so he can consciously flip them. When Hayden’s Johnny Guitar lands at Vienna’s saloon, he takes a backseat to Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, and a rancher named Emma Small, played by Mercedes McCambridge. Emma represents the ranchers who want the West to stay as it is, meaning the relatively recent normal—the normal so new, one might question whether its newness disqualifies it as normal—and Crawford’s Vienna represents the West as expansion and unending change, shown through her support of the looming railroad. Released in 1954, Johnny Guitar is luridly colored and elegantly paced, and it constantly upends genre expectations (starting with two female Western leads). But when I say Sterling Hayden takes a backseat, I should clarify that once Mercedes McCambridge arrives, everyone takes a backseat, even Joan Crawford’s Vienna.

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Mercedes McCambridge

McCambridge fills Emma Small with so much vitriol her body quakes throughout the scenes. She is shrewd, beautiful, manipulative, and tenacious. Several accounts say McCambridge was the same. In the opening paragraph of her memoir, The Qualities of Mercy, McCambridge says, “Most people call me Mercy. I like it. It’s difficult to sound cross when you say that word. Shakespeare tells me that ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath.’ But the quality of the Mercy that I am is very strained, and it droppeth like a ton of bricks onto everything into which it stumbleth.” For months after watching Johnny Guitar, I couldn’t forget Emma Small, and I couldn’t forget McCambridge’s face, her image populating my mind at random moments in the following days, because when I watched her, I saw my Grandma Bev.

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Grandma Bev

I saw Johnny Guitar for the first time a few months after Grandma Bev had died. She was on my mind a lot then. On my mind the way regrets always seem to reside in the periphery, waiting to punctuate and overtake consciousness at any random moment. I usually thought about Grandma’s last years, before her mind went, and during its decline. I thought about the time she had fallen when I had just arrived home from college. Both my parents were working, so I was called to check on her. She was talking to an EMT when I first walked through the nursing home door, and when she looked at me, I saw her right eyebrow bulged a berry-jam goose egg. This was only one of many falls. The falls never stopped. Months later, I found her lying in the bathroom, body spasming, eyelids flitting, a stain of blood blotting the tiles. It only slowed her for a couple weeks. She didn’t listen to the doctors, or to her children. She kept walking, kept falling. When she was alive, I thought of this determination as I tried—through our visits, through our drives to the hospital, through begrudged service—to show her love.

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Johnny Guitar

Emma Small’s face, at times throughout the film, contorts, but to say contorts suggests movement or flexibility, and there is no flexibility there—not in her face or her body, her back perfectly erect, her muscles taut. Body as metaphor, it isn’t hard to presume that this inflexibility extends to her unwillingness to compromise. The hatred between the two main characters comes from their differing ideas on the West’s future, a common point of contention between Western characters. But here, Johnny Guitar differs from many other films of the genre where the protagonist is a proponent of the railroad. Vienna is depicted as the futurist, the pragmatist, while Emma is the naïve. But she’s not just naïve. She’s a stupid woman who is unable to see the obvious, and this inability is caused, we are told, by her rage, and her rage, we are told, is caused by Vienna taking her man because even in this genre-breaking Western, these two women’s problems still revolve around a man.

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Grandma Bev

To avoid the ambulance costs, I drove her that night to Great Falls’ Benefis Hospital, where she had worked as a nurse for twenty years. We traveled the same roads she had driven all those years for all those night shifts. She hated the passenger seat. She fidgeted relentlessly with the lever. “My back hurts like Hell,” she said. “Like Hell. It hurts like Hell.” She tilted the chair back. Tilted it forward. Tilted it back more. Too far. She couldn’t lift herself back up. She moaned for twenty minutes. Just before the hospital, she had a ministroke. She babbled. Her face contorted. Her body convulsed. Her head twitched. Her hands fluttered up before her face. At that moment, I only felt mesmerized by what was happening to a body. I wasn’t sad or scared. I wasn’t worried that she was in danger. She stopped babbling. The twitching softened. I said, “Grandma,” again and again, and I held her arm. She turned to me, raised her eyebrows, and giggled.

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Mercedes McCambridge

In The Qualities of Mercy, McCambridge says she won’t speak ill of Joan Crawford because she can’t speak ill of the dead, but she says she won’t stoop so low as to speak ill of that “rotten-egg Joan,” that “mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady,”and she will never recount the things Crawford did to her, for they are unspeakable, and we, the readers, could not imagine the depths of Crawford’s cruelty. But in the mind’s theater, cruelty’s depths lie lower than most stories that can be shared, and I wonder if McCambridge purposefully leaves these stories untold. The mystery behind them is tantalizing.

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Johnny Guitar

A story, one that began with a crew member and continued in its various forms to the kind of gossip we now have, goes that in one scene, McCambridge’s acting was so spectacular that the crew broke into spontaneous applause. The story says that Crawford saw this and was so enraged that she took McCambridge’s entire wardrobe and threw it into the street. Another story says another time she cut up McCambridge’s wardrobe. After the wardrobe throwing and cutting, McCambridge had to shoot her scenes in the mornings before Crawford arrived on set. I don’t know how true this story is, but I must admit that I’m captivated by the drama it arouses, and I am ready to believe it because of what I see in their performances in Johnny Guitar, the clear hatred that lights the screen. I realize writing that how silly it sounds, how swayed I can become by the lights, the costumes, the glamour of it all.

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Grandma Bev

Grandma Bev is something of a specter in our family’s discussions. She always has been, for as long as I can remember. At some point in the evening, if everyone was gathered together, she would be brought up, and the next hour would revolve around her. The conversations, these stories, oscillated between blame and attempts at understanding—just how they do in my mind. I know my grandma in a few ways I can see now. I know her from my memories of being afraid of her as a kid. Once, for a school project about family history, I had to call her and ask a series of questions. I remember feeling dread, and I remember diligently memorizing each question so I wouldn’t mess up in front of her. I don’t know why I was so scared. I don’t remember any experiences with her that would have led to such nerves. I suspect I was scared of what I had heard about her.

Later, I knew her when we moved to a town thirty minutes from her and Grandpa, when I was thirteen. Over the next five years, we saw them at church, and we had Sunday dinners. We spent plenty of time together, and yet, I can only remember flashes of this time. Grandpa, at this stage of his life, was always loving and kind. I felt a deep closeness to him, even though neither of us was very much like the other. And if I am like anyone that came before me, whether it is on my mom’s or dad’s side, I am like my grandma. I was always a little afraid of this truth.

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Johnny Guitar

There are other stories of Crawford, of course. When she stayed in Sedona for a month before filming began, one resident named Ruth Jordan said she was “a respected and beloved person in the little settlement of Sedona. For nearly a month she lived among us as neighbor and friend, talking with us, allowing her children to play with our local children—thus fitting herself and family into our community life.” During that time, she met a young girl who was having a birthday party. Crawford gave her a twenty-dollar bill (around $200 now), and then for something “more personal,” a bottle of perfume from her purse.

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Grandma Bev

In the last few years, my dad has admitted to himself, and maybe to his mother, that she was abusive. She wasn’t just mean or harsh; she was physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive. The stories that he has shared with me, stories that aren’t mine to pass on, are ones I’ve for years recognized as abuse—but that recognition came with a mental caveat that that’s how kids were raised then. My dad’s admission brought a certain amount of forgiveness for himself—forgiveness for what he passed on, what he didn’t do—but this too fluctuates for him, I believe. When she died, the guilt of not making everything right with her arrived, the feelings that he should have purged all of his hurt and anger towards her. From my perspective, his years of visiting her daily at the nursing home should absolve him of any such guilt, but self-forgiveness and forgiveness for others are, of course, as dissimilar as discipline and abuse.

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Johnny Guitar

The only character who remains irredeemable in Johnny Guitar is Ernest Borgnine’s Bart Lonergan. The villain he plays here could sit comfortably alongside any of his roles in Bad Day at Black Rock, Hannie Caulder, or Convoy. Ten years after Johnny Guitar, Ernest Borgnine famously married Broadway star Ethel Merman. The marriage lasted thirty-two days, or until they returned from their honeymoon. Merman dedicates a chapter to the marriage in her self-titled autobiography. It is simply called, “My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine.” The chapter is a blank page. In later interviews, Borgnine attributed their divorce to Merman’s jealousy. He said that during their honeymoon, he would be recognized by fans and she wouldn’t, and this sent her into fits of fury. A friend of Merman’s later said that Merman had feared or discovered that Borgnine was only after her money, so she ended the marriage. Neither of these claims was substantiated, and they remain two markedly different perspectives. But isn’t Merman’s blank page chapter so much more alluring than anything Merman or Borgnine said about each other? That blank page generates a nothingness where any story can infinitely reach in any direction.

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Grandma Bev

Grandma Bev was mean to me, as she was mean to others. She was domineering and often said things to make me feel small and worthless, but she wasn’t abusive to me. I didn’t think so anyway, but my understanding of that word has also changed since that time, and now I’m not so sure. It’s still hard at times to think kindly of her and remember that we had nice conversations and that she often treated me as an equal. She had a wonderful ability not to condescend to teenagers, to treat them as thoughtful and mature people. I felt this often during my high school years. At a time when I craved (as most teenagers do) to be treated as someone older and more mature than I was, Grandma often offered this to me. But this attribute too could be twisted if she felt threatened. Throughout high school, my sister worked as a CNA, and once when she was sixteen or seventeen, she and Grandma disagreed about some insignificant medical practice. The disagreement was small, but my sister stood her ground, and Grandma didn’t speak to her for months afterwards.

I think of Grandma most now at Great Falls’ Benefis Hospital, but I don’t think of when we were together. I conjure images of her years before I was born. I see her here because it is where I know she was happy. I see her officious and flowing through the hospital in her perfectly pressed uniform. It is so beautifully white. How does it remain this pressed and this white? Grandma was an ER and an ICU nurse, and she was proud of this. She did not work in labor and delivery. That was for “nurses who just wanted to cuddle babies,” she always said. She worked with bodies, gashed and lacerated, and with appendages broken, severed, and ripped. When I imagine her here, the hospital is always in chaos. Wraps and bandages ribbon through the air. Patients are wheeled between jogging nurses and shouting doctors. There is clamor, and there is metal. Everywhere, there is blood, but there is none on Grandma. Her uniform is so white. She flows, and she is smiling. When I think of her happy, I see her somewhere I never knew her.

It’s the way Grandma clenched her jaw, the way her face trembled and shook. It’s the way those sounds erupted from her chest, between those teeth, through those pressed lips—thick and gnarling. It’s the way she shook those frail, blue-veined fists. Those fists I can feel now, remembering how her skin slipped beneath my thumb when we held hands. This outburst happened on a different visit to the hospital, as I sat beside her motorized bed in a funky-patterned chair scrolling through my phone. She lay at a forty-five-degree angle with her eyes closed. She was quiet, and then her eyes opened, and she looked at me and began shaking and shouting and growling at me. I didn’t know why she was so angry. I didn’t know from where this sound came, or how I caused it. I thought I might have missed instructions or a question while I was looking at my phone, but she wouldn’t answer when I asked what was wrong. “She could make you feel this small,” Aunt Libby said, her thumb and index finger pinched. When I got home, I told my mom about Grandma’s fit. “Oh, you finally saw it,” my mom said. The family talks about Grandma Bev as a warning: This happens when you become consumed by fury.

When I have said—when I say—I am most like my grandmother, I have said it warily, focusing on the aspects of myself I wish weren’t there—my quickness to judge, my anger that always feels too quick to surface, the meanness I can carry out, my occasional desire for it—these all I have at one time or another attributed to her, often as a joke. “Too much Grandma Bev in me,” I’ve said before. I struggle with despair. I struggle with acknowledging and seeking hope, for myself, for those I love, for those in the world I don’t know or understand. It’s easy for me to feel trapped in circumstances I feel I haven’t chosen, and to let this feeling seethe. Because of this, it should be easier for me to empathize with her. She was intensely proud of her education, that she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in the 1950s. She enjoyed traveling and living in different cities while my grandfather was a helicopter pilot for the army. I think she envisioned a life in which she would continue living in these cities, and that my grandfather would reach a high status in the army, and that this would bring greater financial security and, more importantly for my grandma, prestige. But instead, my grandfather, a man who was very good at flying helicopters, and who received many medals for his service, but who was totally unable to perform the necessary schmoozing and game playing required to politic up the ranks (I don’t know if this was a kind of principled refusal on his part, or if it ever crossed his mind. I wonder if he believed hard work and excelling at one’s job was enough to be rewarded in such a way, but I don’t know), retired and brought (dragged) his family back to Augusta, Montana, where my grandma also grew up. But unlike my grandpa, she never wanted to return. Not long after returning, and with the help of his family, my grandfather soon lost the majority of his money and cattle. A contested point, to be sure, but my grandfather lost a few hundred head of cattle, and his father ended up with them. His father claimed they were what he was owed. Depending on which part of the family one is a member of, this story diverges sharply at this point. Regardless, my grandmother felt stuck in a town she didn’t like, surrounded by people she found stupid and dishonest. On top of that, she was left with little support from my grandpa either financially or with raising the children. I don’t know what it feels like to be stuck somewhere, living a life you never wanted. When I’ve felt stuck, I’ve left. Even if leaving was to my detriment, I still had the ability to find someplace new, find some new circumstance for myself.

I don’t know if I miss her often like I do my grandfather. I miss him. I miss his presence. But he was easy to love. In the years I knew him, he loved easily. It has been easy for me to forget the stories of his abandonment, to justify his decisions. One day, when we parted, he grabbed my shoulders and looked into my eyes for a long time to tell me he loved me. I never doubted it.

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Mercedes McCambridge

In 1973, McCambridge played the most terrifying voice in the most terrifying movie ever made. She was the voice of the demon, Pazuzu, in The Exorcist, a role she called purely radio, perfectly suited for the woman Orson Welles called “the greatest living radio actress.” For the performance, she started drinking again, something she hadn’t done for twenty years. She started smoking, she drank raw eggs, and for the scenes where Linda Blair, who played the possessed child, was bound, McCambridge was also bound. A devout Catholic, she requested that a priest be with her the whole time. Years later, in an interview, she says, “It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the rage.” She’s wearing a blue turtleneck with gold earrings, and she’s sitting still, but she begins contorting, rolling her neck. She starts breathing quickly, her hand flutters, and her eyes roll. “See, if it’s this close in me right here—I’m only a human being—it’s that close for everybody,” she explains. “Everybody can from this second forward—” she yells and throws her arms. She weeps, and her weeping becomes growling. This range of frayed emotion only lasts a few seconds before she composes herself again and says, “That isn’t hard.”

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Johnny Guitar

“I’m coming up, Vienna!” Emma yells in the film’s climax, the showdown when both women draw their pistols and fire. Emma wears a black dress with a white collar. She looks small and twisted with madness. Vienna calls back that she is waiting. She looks scared but resolute, cornered and brave. Her shirt is a beautifully vibrant yellow and her tie an equally vibrant red. She is a hero with no other option but to defend herself and end this feud she never wanted. Vienna and Emma face each other on the deck of a cabin that is perilously perched on a rocky hill. Each is shown in medium closeup. We alternate between Emma and Vienna as tension builds, and we breathe as heavily and deeply as the two characters in anticipation. Emma is snarling and curled in on herself. Vienna is poised and straight backed. McCambridge is harshly lit, bushes behind her warped and blurred. Crawford is softly lit, the famous red rocks of Sedona behind her are also soft, majestic, but a mirage. In this scene, McCambridge is standing on the deck of a cabin in Sedona, Arizona, and Crawford is standing beneath satin lights on a set in San Fernando Valley, California.

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Mercedes McCambridge

McCambridge said, “She looked absolutely dazzling, squeaky clean and velvet-skinned, moisty-eyed. It was a dirty rotten trick, it was.”

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Grandma Bev

Now that she’s dead, I think of my grandma with more compassion than I ever did while she was alive. I thought of her nastiness most when I was around her most, the summer after I graduated college when I visited her nearly daily in the assisted living facility. And, as with so many of us, she was meanest to those she saw most often. She was excellent at pretending for the occasional afternoon visit, but in the daily visits, she couldn’t help but let loose on the nearest person. But I’ve forgotten most of those comments now. I remember once when I was twenty or twenty-one, I gave a speech where I was dressed in a suit, white shirt, and tie. She attended, and afterwards the only thing she said to me was that my shirt wasn’t white enough and that she wanted to burn it. I remember it now mostly for its oddity. That she said she wanted to burn it was so strangely aggressive, so unexpected. I didn’t know how to respond then, and I don’t know how to understand it now. But the other comments have faded, and what’s left is only their vague imprint.

While writing this, and about her, late one night, I felt, distinctly, her presence. It’s difficult, as the preceding sentence’s choppiness might convey, for me to conceptualize, much less write about. I feel as though I am coughing these words out, struggling for coherence, my mind wanting to flit away from that which is difficult to discuss. But I felt, as clearly as I’ve felt anything, that, wherever she is, or a part of her is, she is somewhere, and that she is, as the tombstone acronym suggests, peaceful. That she has found some semblance of peace, a thing that, while I knew her, always seemed out of reach. I felt her presence that night, and I haven’t since. I don’t expect to. I’ve resisted writing this moment down, although I think of it often, because I know the reticence with which such stories are met. I know my own disbelief in hearing such stories. I don’t think I’m asking to be believed here, or that it will be understood. How can it be? I don’t understand it, and I fluctuate between believing and not believing it myself.

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Mercedes McCambridge

Film critic and news reporter Bobbie Wygant interviewed McCambridge during the book tour for The Qualities of Mercy. During the interview, McCambridge is articulate and energetic and willing to attack any misunderstanding Wygant may have, but the most fascinating part of the video comes after the interview cuts.

We see a medium close-up of Bobbie Wygant. She begins by asking McCambridge the same question as she did in the start of the interview, “Was it difficult for you to write this book?” It seems the interview is repeating, until she finishes her question. The camera doesn’t cut away, and we are left watching Wygant, who, into silence, reacts just as though McCambridge is still there, answering the question—she nods and smiles and makes small, affirmative sounds. But then she says, “What was the most difficult thing for you about writing this biography?” Another, shorter pause, and then she revises, “What was the most difficult thing for you in writing your autobiography?” A voice from the side says, “That’s fine,” and Wygant looks at her notes before prepping herself and launching into: “You won an Oscar for All the King’s Men…Do you think your Oscar-winning performance, All the King’s Men, is your best work? …You of course played in Little Foxes on the stage, very successfully, what do you think about Elizabeth Taylor doing that role now?” Wygant looks at her notes. “You worked with her in Giant.” She checks her notes again. It goes on like this, as Wygant runs through the interview asking and rephrasing the questions, pausing and smiling and nodding at no one.

After I watched Wygant’s practice interview, I became obsessed with this manufactured moment, starting this section over and over again, never re-watching the real one with McCambridge. I’ve come to realize the unusual similarity between what Wygant did and what I’m doing in speaking to and trying to understand my grandma now that she has passed. I’m asking questions into a void that allows me to create my own reactions, my own small laughter.

In the reaction shots, Wygant blinks and tilts her head. She offers a tight-lipped smile. She leans in and a little to the side, and then she extends a big toothy grin. She breaks into a small laugh, but it’s clipped, and her smile turns down. Her voice turns hard, and she says, “Alright, Jimmy that ought to do it.”

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Grandma Bev

Time collapsed in those last days with Grandma Bev when her memory was slipping and reality was fading, and in those times, she spoke about ice skating with her sister. Her sister could never remember her gloves, she said. She was so absent-minded. They had gone the day before, and everything was fine, except her forgetful sister’s cold hands. In those days, I became sometimes her son, sometimes her husband, sometimes her father, and a few times, me. It was easier to be with her then. She still screamed at CNAs and called them names, but she was happier to see me, or whatever person she saw when she looked at me.

The year before she died, I told Grandma my plans for graduate school. She said, “Holy balls,” because she knew I would laugh. When I told her it was for creative writing, she asked why not engineering, a more admirable profession. But in this moment between us, when her mind was swirling towards oblivion, what broke through wasn’t a comment on my stupidity, but a joke. At her funeral, I thought of “holy balls,” of her love for dirty jokes. I thought of the way her lips curved and her eyes took on light when she was about to say something outrageous.

After the funeral, I remembered the time Grandma drove away from our house with two middle fingers gleefully waving out of the window, her laugh cascading out of the car. A friend asked, “That’s your grandma?” It was. It was more her than anything else I can think of. Middle fingers as “fuck you,” but middle fingers so the “fuck you” was silent, and the silence gave room for laughing, something to laugh at, something to laugh with. And there it is. And there she was. There was “fuck you,” and there was laughter.