American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  Wayne had tried to reason with Toni. He asked her to change her mind about excluding Pilar, saying that she was his wife, but Toni absolutely refused. And then Pilar insisted he not go without her. He went to the wedding over Pilar’s objections, and threw a reception for 750 invited guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Crystal Room. Among his friends there to celebrate the occasion were Ward Bond, Ann Blyth, Bob Hope, Ray Milland, and Loretta Young.

  WAYNE FLEW WITH HUGHES ON his private plane to Paris, Rome, Italy, and Berlin for the premieres of The Conqueror. He loved the overflowing crowds of screaming fans fighting each other to get a glimpse of him. And he loved running around Europe with Hughes, whose taste for women was almost as strong as his taste for money. Together, they made a formidable team, a pair of modern-day conquerors. On the way back to L.A. they stayed in New York for a week before Hughes convinced Wayne not to go home but instead to fly with him to Africa, ostensibly to scout locations for the next run of Batjac films.

  Despite his promise to Pilar that this time he would get it right, the new John Wayne behaved a lot like the old John Wayne.

  WAYNE’S FIRST FILM AFTER THE Searchers was made at MGM rather than for Fox, where his new deal was nonexclusive. It was a film biography of Ford’s good friend, screenwriter Frank W. “Spig” Wead. Ford was reluctant at first to do The Wings of Eagles. As he told Peter Bogdanovich, “I didn’t want to do the picture because Spig was a great pal of mine. But I didn’t want anyone else to do it. I knew him first when he was deck officer, black shoe, with the old Mississippi—before he went into flying. I was out of the Navy then and I used to go out and see him and some of the other officers. Spig was always interested in writing and I helped him a bit and encouraged him. We did a couple of pictures together. He died in my arms . . . Everything in the picture was true. The fight in the club—throwing the cake . . . when they all fell into the pool . . . and the plane landing in the swimming pool—right in the middle of the Admiral’s tea—that really happened.”

  The film follows as closely as possible (as close as Hollywood film biographies do) the life of Spig Wead, who, along with his friend Lieutenant John Price, played by Ken Curtis in the film, helped to take the navy airborne. In the picture, Spig marries Millie, played by Maureen O’Hara. They suffer the death of their infant son, which changes the dynamic of their relationship. Spig’s constant traveling for the navy puts a further strain on their marriage. Millie pointedly stays behind with the children when he is sent to Washington. Upon his return, he tries to effect a reconciliation but suffers a horrible tragedy one night when he falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck. Diagnosed as paraplegic, Spig forces his wife and daughters out of his life and begins a long, difficult rehabilitation supervised by former navy mechanic “Jughead” Carson, played by Dan Dailey. Attempting to start a career as a writer, “Spig” teams up with a Hollywood director, based on Ford, played by Ward Bond, and gains some professional success and also the limited use of his legs. He reunites with his wife, and at the film’s end is paid tribute by a crew line on a carrier deck. The film is filled with classic Ford sentimentality, the male heroes almost always in his film much more memorable than his female ones. According to O’Hara, “Despite all the horrible things John Ford had done to me, I reported happily to the set of The Wings of Eagles in August 1956 . . . it was good to be home again . . . I played ‘Spig’s’ wife, Millie . . . the picture gave Duke and me some wonderful dramatic scenes, although much of my best work was left on the cutting-room floor. Millie Wead had slipped into alcoholism later in life, but, at the request of her children, Mr. Ford cut that wonderfully dramatic footage out of the picture. The edited picture was good, but not vintage Ford. Something was missing. Perhaps that old magic—the Ford-Wayne-O’Hara fire—had waned . . . I never worked with John Ford again.”

  THIS TENTH COLLABORATION BETWEEN FORD and Wayne was filmed in forty-seven days, from July to October 1956 on location in Pensacola, Florida, and finished at the MGM Studios in Hollywood. The finale was filmed on the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea. Pilar came along to the location with Aissa and remained with her husband for the entire shoot, except when he left for a few days to do an uncredited cameo in Hal Kanter’s I Married a Woman (a.k.a. So There You Are), a goofy comedy starring George Gobel, a TV comic hot at the time, and the voluptuous Diana Dors, England’s answer to Jayne Mansfield. Wayne had befriended Gobel and did the two-day shoot as a favor to him. In it, only Wayne is in color, the rest of the film remains in black-and-white.

  The original budget for The Wings of Eagles was $2.79 million, but Ford was able to bring it in for a hundred thousand dollars less. It opened in 1957, and proved disappointing at the box office. MGM took a million-dollar loss. Audiences were not interested in a static story about a physically impaired hero and with a lot of overly narcisstic navel-gazing on Ford’s part. If David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai was the audience’s favorite war film that year, it was because audiences preferred their heroes young, physically active and handsome, and could forgive their moral imperfections. William Holden’s reluctant warrior would rather sleep with nurses than save the world, but in the final reel makes the ultimate sacrifice. Holden’s moral uplift at the end of Kwai was far more appealing than Wayne’s being physically lifted up at the end of Eagles.122

  The commercial failure of the film confirmed to Ford that his times was over. The dialogue by Frank Fenton and William Wister Haines, based on the life and writings of Commander Frank W. Wead, had none of the snap and spark of Frank Nugent’s classic Ford screenplays. Ford’s filming of Spig’s true story of loss, deprivation, struggle, and redemption lacked any true diamond writing or directional wit.

  IN FEBRUARY 1957, WAYNE BEGAN production on Batjac’s The Legend of the Lost, coproduced by Panama, Inc. Knowing he was going to be away overseas on location for at least three months, he asked Pilar to come with him. When she told him the baby was too young to be inoculated and therefore couldn’t make the trip, Wayne suggested Pilar leave the baby in the care of a nurse. She refused, and Wayne reluctantly took off for Libya without her; they agreed to meet in Rome after the picture finished production at the famed Cinecittà Studios. He was gone less than a week when he sent her a telegram that he was sick, imploring her to come join him in Libya. She decided she had better go after all. After hiring a nurse, as Wayne had suggested, Pilar took off for North Africa. When she arrived, she found him in perfect health. He said he just wanted to share the glorious sunsets with her. The sunsets were great, but the accommodations were awful. Pilar was forced to share a mud hut with her husband (everyone involved with the production lived that way) and one communal toilet used by all.

  The Legend of the Lost costarred Italian sex symbol Sophia Loren and Rossano Brazzi, both noticeably younger looking than Wayne; nevertheless he played the love interest to Loren, while Brazzi acted the villain. The story is centered around a hunt for a lost treasure that takes place largely in the blistering desert. While she was waiting for her husband, Carlo Ponti, to arrive, Sophia carried on an affair with Brazzi. Wayne didn’t approve (maybe he was jealous) and neither did Pilar, who thought it unseemly for the international beauty to be so obviously disrespectful to Ponti. It created extra tension between Wayne and Pilar, perhaps because she showed her more clearly what goes on between married costars on location when they are away from their spouses.

  When Wayne was ready to move the production to Rome, hoping that would make things easier for Pilar, she told him she had had enough, that she missed their child and needed to go home. After arriving back in Los Angeles, she confessed to a friend the trip had left her an emotional mess. He sent her to a Beverly Hills doctor who prescribed tranquilizers to ease her anxieties. She started taking them and quickly became dependent, and by the time Wayne returned home, she was like a zombie. Don’t worry, Wayne reassured her, he was going to be home and for a long time and everything would to be better now.

  WHEN THE LEGEND OF THE Lost was r
eleased in December 1957, it proved another box-office disappointment and Wayne believed his career might be in serious trouble. Not long after the opening, despite his promise to Pilar, he left by himself for Japan to make his first feature for Adler and Fox, the jingoistic The Barbarian and the Geisha (a.k.a. The Townshend Harris Story, a.k.a. The Barbarian). Directed by John Huston, it is the story of the first American diplomat in Japan, sent by President Pierce, who arrives in “the forbidden empire” in 1856 to a hostile reception. A cholera outbreak occurs, and a love story is worked in between Harris and a geisha, Okichi, played by Eiko Ando, a twenty-three-year-old local burlesque dancer who Huston felt was perfect for the part. She has been hired to kill Harris but falls in love with him instead. The romance fails and the film ends with Harris marching triumphantly through the streets to the Imperial Palace, with Okichi watching mournfully from afar.

  The fourteen-week location shoot in Kyoto and Kawana produced a lot of friction between Huston and Wayne. They had never worked together before, and despite their perfect fit on paper, they proved not a good creative match. Huston did not appreciate Wayne’s constant and unasked-for suggestions about directing, and Wayne felt that Huston’s choices of shots, cuts, and camera placement were all wrong (it was something Wayne never tried with Ford). Moreover, as he always did, Wayne depended on guidance for his acting from his director, but Huston offered him none. Wayne felt that Huston was more interested in how a shot looked than the performance of the actors in it. Moreover, Wayne wasn’t a regular part of the Huston “gang” of regulars, like Humphrey Bogart, whose rapport with Huston made it easier for both to “understand” each other. Moreover, Wayne felt out of place in this historical romance drama. If Huston knew it, he didn’t appear to care, about Wayne or the movie. He did care about Eiko, though.

  During this production, Hughes decided it was finally the right time to release Jet Pilot. Wayne felt the film might make him look ridiculous costarring with Janet Leigh, especially since most people wouldn’t know the film was seven years old. He reacted to the film’s release this way: “My problem is I’m not a handsome man like Cary Grant, who will still be handsome at sixty-five . . . I may be able to do a few more man-woman things before it’s too late . . . [and I’ll look like a] silly old man chasing young girls, as some of the stars are doing.”

  Pilar decided to fly to Japan for the duration of the shoot, and it gave Wayne a chance to confide his frustrations over this film and Jet Pilot to her, which made her feel important and needed in his life. Not long after she arrived, Wayne brightened considerably at the news that his good friend Elizabeth Taylor and her husband, producer Mike Todd, were going to be passing through Japan and would like to stop by to visit. Wayne found Taylor down-to-earth, fun, with a salty tongue and that singular beauty highlighted by those famous dollar-coin-sized violet eyes. Wayne was less well acquainted with Todd but sensed they were kindred spirits of a sort, men’s men, and he was eager to get to know him better. They instantly bonded and while Wayne chain-smoked and drank scotch, Todd puffed on the big cigars he loved; they spent hours swapping Hollywood stories, while Liz talked away the time with Pilar. It was a visit Wayne would not forget, for its ease, bonding, and relief, for both him and Pilar. He told Todd he hoped to see him back in the States and maybe work out a plan to make some movies together.

  It never happened. Todd was killed four months later in a plane crash.

  In February 1958, with only two weeks left to shoot, the excitement and relief of Pilar’s visit had evaporated, and the tension between them became palpable, until Wayne suggested she go home and let him finish the film by himself. Pilar quickly agreed. One night, shortly after she arrived back in Encino, she was deeply asleep when the pet dog, Blackie, barked her awake. The house was on fire. She rushed down to the main floor, opened all the windows, got a fire extinguisher, went back upstairs to grab Aissa, wrapped her in a blanket, and then made a run for it back down the stairs and out the front door.

  When Wayne found out, he promised to come home as soon as possible, and had Bö Roos send over a blank check to her to cover any immediate expenses. Pilar appreciated the gesture but wished Wayne had delivered it in person. She took the fire as an omen and wondered what would have happened to Aissa if she hadn’t flown home earlier to be with her when the fire broke out.

  THE BARBARIAN AND THE GEISHA was due to be released in the fall, and Wayne had hoped it would break his four-film slide, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

  His instincts were correct. The film opened September 30, 1958, to mostly negative reviews—Variety’s expressed what Wayne had feld during filming. It praised the visuals but concluded that “the human story it tries to tell has been all but swallowed up by the weight of its production.” The picture failed to make back its $4 million negative cost. When Wayne complained to Hedda Hopper that Huston was the reason for the film’s failure, and she printed it, Huston returned the favor by publicly blaming Wayne for using his influence at the studio to make changes in postproduction that he, Huston, did not approve of.

  It was the oldest story in Hollywood. Everyone takes credit when a film is a success, and everyone blames the other guy when it fails. In this case, whoever was right or wrong, the film flopped, and Wayne feared his career may have passed the point of no return.

  He needed a hit, and he needed it fast.

  Chapter 20

  He got it with his next film, Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo. Hawks had last directed Wayne in Red River, and continued to have a string of hits, until 1955, when he directed and produced Land of the Pharaohs for Warner Bros, a sandals-and-robes epic that, despite the popularity of Henry Koster’s 1953 The Robe, laid an atomic bomb. Warner Bros had advanced Hawks $2.9 million for the production and was not at all pleased the film failed to make back its investment, due mostly to the lack of star power, crucial in this genre. Jack Hawkins, a major star in England, voted its sixth-most-popular star in 1955, remained a familiar face without a real name or box-office draw in America.

  Hawks was looking to return to form and decided the best way to do so was to make another western with John Wayne: “I came in and said to Jack Warner, I want to do Rio Bravo . . . and it started a whole cycle of [studio big screen] Westerns going again.”

  As it happened, Wayne and Hawks had each sought out the other to use as a way to return to the top of their respective games. Separately, they had both agreed about how much they had disliked High Noon. Wayne had told Hawks on more than one occasion how much he hated the film, and Hawks promised him they would make a film to “correct” High Noon’s misleading image of Americans. He later talked a lot about how disappointed he was with Hollywood after High Noon and another western, Delmer Daves’s 1957 3:10 to Yuma, not for their politics—High Noon had plenty, Yuma had little, if any—but for their “warped” portrayal of bravery. In Hawks’s words, “I don’t like High Noon. It’s phony. The fellow’s supposed to be good. He’s supposed to be good with a gun. He runs around like a wet chicken trying to get people to help him. Eventually his Quaker wife saves his guts.”

  Putting aside the dramatic impact of that last act, it is interesting to see how long High Noon remained in the consciousness of Hollywood’s premier filmmakers, and how little of what was supposed to be its antithesis really appears in Rio Bravo. It would be surprising if it did, as Hawks’s films were never explicitly political, unless one may infer from his love of action a reverence for freedom, but either way he was not considered one of Hollywood’s polarizing politicos. In Rio Bravo audiences simply wanted to see Wayne back in action in a western and with Rio Bravo he had a hit.

  In truth, Rio Bravo resembles nothing so much as a dry run of Wayne’s vision of The Alamo—plenty of action based upon a premise that a small, tough, and dedicated group can hold off a much larger band of evil attackers.

  Wayne left Encino on May 4, 1958, to begin filming Rio Bravo on location in Old Tucson, Arizona, leaving Pilar behind to “redecorate,” or more accurately, cl
ean up the mess left behind from the fire and supervise the construction crews. It was not a chore she wanted, and it left her with the feeling that she might be able to rebuild the house, but not so easily her relationship with her husband. She could not escape the sense of having been abandoned once again. Wayne made no pretense about what he wanted and needed to do; the unreal excitement of filmmaking was where he lived, not in a home with a moody wife and a crying baby.

  As soon as he left, she began taking pills again.

  RIO BRAVO WAS STUDDED WITH costars. Besides Wayne, the film had adult idol Dean Martin, teen idol Ricky Nelson, Wayne’s pal Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, who had been Wayne’s sidekick in Red River, and newcomer Angie Dickinson to provide some female heat.123 According to Dickinson, “The scenes we were in were long and complex and Duke was used to ‘All right, get up, and I’ll hit you again . . .’ Usually, he had very short, tough [action] scenes in his movies. Ours went on for pages, for minutes, and they were very difficult. They ended up great, but it was hard work.”

  Wayne was paid $750,000 to appear in the picture, while Hawks only received $100,000 to direct.

  Rio Bravo was released February 17, 1959, and played to sold-out audiences everywhere. Audiences loved it and so did critics, from its opening, wordless action sequence, which sets the tone and the pace for the rest of the film. Variety called it “[a] top-notch western . . . Wayne delivers a faithful portrayal of the peace officer.” After the film opened, Andrew Sarris was among the first American critics to acknowledge the importance of Wayne’s body of work to American movies. In his paper “The World of Howard Hawks” for the New York Bulletin in 1961, Sarris wrote, “[Wayne] has always been an underrated screen personality, and if one does not accept the preeminence of Wayne as the incarnation of the Western hero, one will have difficulty in fully appreciating the stature of Ford and Hawks’ westerns.”