Harry Carey, Jr., 1921-2012

Carey, left, bring­ing up baby with Pedro Armendáriz, and John Wayne, in 3 Godfathers, John Ford, 1948. 

From Carey’s 1994 mem­oir Company Of Heroes: My Life As An Actor In The John Ford Stock Company:

I was down in Durango, Mexico, around 1971. We were shoot­ing Cahill, US Marshall for Andrew McLaglen. I had­n’t seen Duke for about a year, not since Big Jake. 

I had been vis­it­ing Uncle Jack quite a lot because I knew he was ail­ing, although he nev­er com­plained or men­tioned it. They had sold their plush house in Bel Air and moved to a more simple one in Palm Desert, on Old Prospectors Trail. I was sit­ting in the café at the Mexico Courts in Durango when in came Duke with all his entour­age. I went over to him and asked if I could talk to him privately. This seemed to make him sore. He poin­ted to a table far away and said, very harshly, “Does this suit your fancy?”

What the hell was he sore about? I thought we’d got­ten all that bull­shit behind us. I stated that the table would be fine and it would only take a minute. 

“Okay, shoot!” he said, look­ing like he was going to shoot me. 

I told him that I had been vis­it­ing Uncle Jack quite often lately because I thought his days were numbered, that he was quite ill, and I thought it was cancer.

“Bullshit!” Duke yelled, when I had fin­ished. “Bullshit! All he has to do is get out of that god­damn bed, and move around, and stop feel­ing sorry for him­self because no one will hire him”

I don’t think Duke really meant that. His words were untrue and too masty. Probably he’d heard some bad news about the pro­duc­tion when I had accos­ted him.

I said, “No, Duke, you don’t under­stand. I know he’s always liked to sit all day in bed and read, but I’m cer­tain that, this time, he’s really ill.” 

This made the big man stop and think, and he said some­thing about “check­ing into it” or some oth­er non­sense to get rid of me. It pissed me off.

Anyway, to his ever­last­ing cred­it, John Wayne must have made one of his infre­quent phone calls to Palm Desert, because he was on a plane the next day. He was gone only long enough to have a vis­it with his old ‘coach,” and then he returned to Durango to get on with the movie. 

I think Duke really believed in the line Nathan Brittles says a lot on Yellow Ribbon. “Never apo­lo­gize, sol­dier. It’s a sign of weakness.”

He did come over to me after he got back. He’d been on the saloon set, and he was­n’t in a very good mood, but he saw me, came over, and said, “Wasn’t it great when you did­n’t have to think?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You sure did­n’t have to worry when Uncle Jack was run­ning things. If he shot you, you knew it was your best.”

He looked off, sadly, and after a few seconds, he exclaimed, “You were right, Dobe, he’s down there in that god­damned Palm Desert, dying, Dobe! And we need him! We need him real bad!”

He said that just like he said a line in 3 Godfathers. It had all the futil­ity that Ford made him feel in that scene back in Death Valley. Duke was very much the same man he usu­ally por­trayed on the screen. 

Carey is sur­vived by his wife of 64 years, and by three of his chil­dren. One of those chil­dren, Thomas Carey, was the sub­ject of a poem writ­ten in the mid Eighties by the great James Schuyler. The poem, “Tom,” ends with these lines: 

Running from a cab to

the deli, the energy

(grace) of youth.

Thomas Paul Carey of

Sherman Oaks, California,

who writes and sings

his own rock songs, the

son and grand­son of two

great movie act­ors, the

two Harry Careys. Love

is only and always beautiful.