American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  He was surprised and delighted when both he and North to Alaska received positive reviews. Eugene Archer, writing in the New York Times, wrote: “Mr. Kovacs is droll as the would-be nemesis and Mickey Shaughnessy brightens a moment or two as his drunken stooge, but the proceedings are easily dominated by the indefatigable Mr. Wayne. Straddling the muddy terrain without benefit of his customary six-gun, he proves that he can carry his tongue in his cheek with the same impregnable aplomb.”

  As much fun as he had making the film, it also helped ease a lot of financial woes for Wayne. He received $666,666.67 to star in what was Fox’s most expensive film that year. The gamble paid off. North to Alaska proved a big hit, earning a domestic gross of over $12 million in its initial domestic release, from a budget of $5 million. And there was not even a whiff of stale politicking anywhere to be found in it. The film’s numbers were great for Wayne. He was back in the money, and back in the big show.

  FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER HE FIRST thought of making a film commemorating and re-creating the famous Texas battle, The Alamo opened October 24, 1960, with a gala tent-pole premiere held in San Antonio, paid for by Wayne, to offset “[o]ne smart-aleck remark from a newspaperman on opening day that could cost us plenty.” The road to the San Antonio opening turned out to be another battle for Wayne, this one behind the scenes to ensure the film received ample publicity in its buildup. Batjac originally hired Jim Heneghan to promote the film, with one eye on a rollout that would build to a climax with a klieg light “event” premiere, and the other on making The Alamo a certain contender for that year’s Oscar race.

  Heneghan’s strategy was to wine and dine critics, features writers, radio and TV talk-show hosts, anyone he felt could help promote the film. However, when too many women’s names showed up on Heneghan’s expense accounts who did not make their livings by writing and not enough writers who did, Wayne angrily fired him. Heneghan immediately sued, and to avoid any unwanted negative publicity, Wayne paid him his full fee of $100,000, and all the questionable expenses he claimed he had accrued.

  With no one to promote the film and the clock ticking, Batjac then hired Russell Birdwell, who had golden credentials; he had been in charge of the great publicity campaign for Gone with the Wind, which had climaxed with the star-studded Atlanta premiere. It didn’t get any better than that. Wayne agreed to pay him $125,000, plus all expenses, and provide office space for the duration both in New York and Beverly Hills. Batjac allotted $1 million for Birdwell to spend on media advertising, one-eighth of the film’s original budget, one-twelfth of what it actually cost to make.

  Birdwell immediately issued a 183-page press release and arranged for ABC to air a network special the night before the film’s opening, called The Spirit of the Alamo, in which Wayne appeared and read a letter out loud written by the real Davy Crockett. After, Wayne looked with squinting eyes straight into the camera, and warned viewers in his slow-paced style, “Nobody should come to see this movie unless he believes in heroes.”

  The next day, he continued promoting his personal message as much as the film, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I think we’ve all gone soft, taking freedom for granted . . . I think [the film] will be a timely reminder to Americans and the world that freedom does not come cheap and easy.”

  THE ALAMO PROVED A GIANT step forward in Wayne’s self-assigned mission to be, on film at least, America’s Great Defender of Freedom, but a giant step backward in Wayne’s development as a filmmaker and the complexity of his acting, which had reached its zenith in The Searchers. Everything that film was, The Alamo wasn’t. Any trace of Ethan Edwards’s dark, ambiguous, existential antihero was nowhere to be found in Wayne’s two-dimensional portrayal of Davy Crockett as loyal chauvinist. Ethan questioned everything and by doing so upset the status quo. Crockett questioned nothing and fought to maintain the status quo. In The Searchers, prejudice and vengeance set up the film’s redemptive climax. In The Alamo, there is nothing revelatory about the film’s inevitable climax. Wayne’s vainglorious performance as Crockett is sometimes painful to watch. At one point Crockett greets a blind man, the allusion to Jesus Christ unmistakable and completely out of place. If The Searchers was Ford’s great and existential epic poem, The Alamo was Wayne’s unspectacular and bloated political prose.

  Lacking either surprise or suspense—virtually everybody knows how the movie ends before they see it—at the premiere, which ran 202 minutes, The Alamo felt even longer than the real thirteen-day battle. After it opened for general release, at UA’s insistence, and over Wayne’s vehement objections, it was cut to 167 minutes. At thirteen minutes under three hours it was still too long to allow for as many plays-per-day as the standard two-hour film, and as UA feared, it hurt the film’s gross.128

  The critics were neither thrilled nor enthralled by the film. Most shared a similar complaint, too much Wayne, not enough Crockett. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther compared the film unfavorably to the immensely popular Disney version and wondered if the generation that grew up on coonskin caps and “b’ar-killing” would accept Davey Crockett as an older, more preachy character: “Whatever the case, we can assure you that [Davey Crockett] in ‘The Alamo’ is much less a convincing figure from history than he is a recreation of Mr. Wayne.”

  The Southern California Prompter pointed out the film’s unmistakable allegory: “If he is saying that America needs about 10 million men with the courage of Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis, the point is well-taken. It may also occur to some he is suggesting that the easy answer to today’s complex problems is to pit this raw courage against Russia’s 10 million Santa Annas.”

  The New Yorker dismissed the film as “sentimental and preposterous flapdoodle . . . a model of distortion and vulgarization.”

  Even conservative Time magazine could not find anything good to say about it: “Wayne & Co. have not quite managed to make it the worst [big western ever made].”

  Wayne was determined to find an audience for film, despite all the negative reviews, and asked Birdwell to devise a new advertising campaign. However, before any of that could happen, Wayne received a phone call that brought tears to his hard eyes. On November 5, 1960, fifty-seven-year-old Ward Bond was dead. He had been Wayne’s closest friend from their earliest days together at USC, and they had made twenty-three films together. Bond had finally gained a measure of real stardom with his portrayal of Major Seth Adams in the hit TV series Wagon Train, for which he had completed 134 episodes starting in 1957. That November weekend he had flown to Dallas during a break in production from the TV show to watch the L.A. Rams play the Cowboys. Shortly after arriving, he was taking a shower in his hotel room when he died from a massive heart attack.

  Wayne was sickened by the news. Other friends had passed, most notably Grant Withers, a member of the John Ford stock company, who couldn’t get over his addiction to pills and alcohol and committed suicide in March earlier that year. Wayne had felt bad about not being able to do more for Withers, but Bond’s passing was even worse. When Bond’s TV show became a hit, as if on cue his eating and his drinking increased, one long celebration of his long overdue stardom. When the show’s producers began to complain about his excessive weight for a man supposed to be rugged and in shape enough to lead wagon trains across the rough and dangerous terrain of the country, he did what everybody did in Hollywood in those years when told to shed pounds: he went on amphetamines. He popped the little pills like they were nuts on a bar top.

  At the time of Bond’s death, Ford also happened also to be in Texas, directing Two Rode Together with Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark. He interrupted filming to take Bond’s body back to California, accompanying Bond’s widow, Mary Lou. The funeral was held at Field Photo Farm in Hollywood. Ford didn’t stay for it; he had to get back to Texas and resume production on his film. Wayne gave the eulogy, during which he called Bond “a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”

  He was devastated by this loss but knew he had to keep his focus
on The Alamo. His goal was to turn it not just into the biggest film of the year, but the biggest of his career. In the first three months of release, The Alamo earned only $2 million in rentals, far short of the $17 million needed to break even. Wayne then knew that the only thing that could save his film now was a big showing at the Oscars. Out of his own pocket he gave Birdwell an additional $75,000 to devise an Oscar campaign and, at Wayne’s directive, to aim it squarely at the Academy voters.

  One of Birdwell’s industry ads listed the sizable number of paychecks that went to “American citizens” during the making of The Alamo, to remind everyone in the business of Wayne’s contribution to employment in Hollywood during a period when hiring had dipped. And Wayne allowed himself to be interviewed by several L.A.-based journals, during which he talked about the film’s Oscar-worthiness in political, rather than cinematic terms. In an interview with Dick Williams of the Los Angeles Mirror, he said, “The eyes of the world are upon us. We must sell America to countries threatened with Communist domination.” In response, an unimpressed Williams, wary of Wayne’s proselytizing disguised as promoting, in his piece compared Wayne’s Oscar tactics to the pressure he had applied during the height of the blacklist: “The impression is left that one’s proud sense of Americanism may be suspected if one does not vote for The Alamo . . . Obviously, one can be the most ardent of American patriots and still think The Alamo was a mediocre movie.”

  WHEN THE NOMINATIONS WERE ANNOUNCED the morning of February 27, 1961, The Alamo had seven—Best Picture (John Wayne/Batjac, UA); Supporting Actor (Chill Wills); Best Film Editing (Stuart Gilmore); Best Sound (Gordon E. Sawyer, Fred Hynes); Best Score (Dimitri Tiomkin); Best Song (Dimitri Tiomkin and Fred Francis Webster); Best Cinematography (William H. Clothier). Sidney Skolsky, in his syndicated column, made fun of both Wayne’s campaign for Oscar, and its apparent success: “The biggest surprise . . . was the Best Picture nod for The Alamo. It appears more people voted for the film than have seen it.”

  Wayne’s campaign seemed to be working, when Chill Wills, who was in the film only to provide some (much-needed) comic relief, went on a desperate campaign of his own for what likely would be his only chance at a coveted golden statuette. He wrote each member of the Academy a personal note, ending with: “You’re all my cousins and I love you all.” Groucho Marx, a voting member, published his response in the trades to Wills’s campaign: “Dear Mr. Chill Wills. I am delighted to be your cousin but I voted for Sal Mineo [for his performance in Otto Preminger’s Exodus].” At the Screen Writers Guild Awards dinner not long after, comedian Mort Sahl quipped that Groucho Marx should be given an Oscar for Best Ad.

  The fact was, for all the joking about it, Wills’s personal campaign had turned off a lot of industry voters and by doing so hurt The Alamo’s overall chances. The day after Marx’s response to Wills ran, an infuriated Wayne placed an ad in Variety, denying he had known of, or given his approval to, Wills’s self-promotion campaign. Not long after, Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, who was disgusted with both Chill’s bone-headed actions and Wayne’s self-important public rebuke, and for that matter the film’s entire “vote for my film to prove you’re really an American” Oscar campaign, publicly referred to Wayne as a “poor old man” out of touch with the Hollywood of the poststudio era. That put Chill Wills in even hotter water with Wayne, who then took out another ad in the trades, insisting that he had had nothing to do with his own campaign, and blamed all the intimidating implications on Birdwell, which infuriated him, while all Hollywood ignored Wayne’s cop-out and continued laughing at Wills’s campaign and what was mostly viewed at Wayne’s pathetic attempts to somehow link voting for The Alamo with the Waldorf Statement.

  THE ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONIES WERE held on April 17 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, hosted by Bob Hope and televised in the United States over the American Broadcasting Company and seen all over the world. Wayne attended the Oscars with Pilar, he in black tie, she in full gown. In his opening monologue, Hope got the biggest laugh when he made fun of the brouhaha over Wills’s ill-conceived self-promotion: “The members of the Academy will decide which actor and actress has the best press agent. I didn’t know there was any campaigning until I saw my maid wearing a Chill Wills button!” Later, deep into the endless show, just before Hope brought on Eva Marie Saint to present Best Supporting Actor, he couldn’t resist taking one last shot at Wills: “There are five actors being held down by their psychiatrists and their cousins.”

  Saint then came out, read the names of the nominees—Wills, Sal Mineo, Peter Falk for his performance in Stuart Rosenberg and Bob Balaban’s Murder, Inc., Jack Krushen for Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and Peter Ustinov for Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. Saint opened the envelope and a roar went up when she announced the winner—Peter Ustinov. Wills, in the audience, caught in close-up by a TV camera, looked deflated. Wayne, meanwhile sat stone-faced, showed no expression.

  As the evening dragged on, it became clear that even if The Alamo had deserved to win, the Academy was not going to reward Wayne’s movie, not because it wasn’t a good film, but because of the misguided, politically offensive campaign he had waged for it. Except for one Oscar the film won for Best Sound, which went to a group of unnamed technicians from the Sam Goldwyn and Todd-AO sound departments, The Alamo was otherwise completely shut out. Best Picture went to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, produced by the director and Mirisch/UA, Color Cinematography went to Russell Metty, for Spartacus, Best Song went to Manos Hadjidakis for the title song to Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday, and Best Score went to Ernest Gold for Exodus.

  Then it was over. The lights came up, and everybody shot for the exits racing to get to the post-Oscar parties to follow. Wayne, not wanting to appear angry or disappointed, took Pilar. Going through the motions was something they were never good at, not just for the public, but in their relationship, in which, increasingly, they acted as if they were making a movie of their marriage for some invisible camera, rather than actually living it.

  BY THE SPRING OF 1961, Wayne was filled with emotions, none of them good. He was facing financial ruin because the public had not supported The Alamo. He was disgusted at the election of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon, the effective end of the blacklist, and felt ongoing grief over the death of Ward Bond.

  Approaching fifty-five, bloated and balding, he felt over-the-hill. He was convinced no studio would ever hire him to direct another movie, and he was no longer in any position to finance one himself. Zanuck’s words haunted him like some hit song playing endlessly in his head that he couldn’t stop hearing. Poor old man . . . poor old man . . . poor old man.

  Chapter 22

  Not long after wrapping production on The Alamo, Wayne had received a phone call from Charles Feldman with the news that the film they had done some scouting for in Alaska during the making of The Alamo had finally gotten a green light. Wayne was practically packing his bags before he hung up the phone. As it happened, North to Alaska was to be his next film for Fox, not McLintock! at UA. Wayne would still make McClintock!, they assured Feldman, just not right away.

  Buddy Adler at Fox had had no such qualms when he was first approached by Feldman during the making of The Alamo. Alaska had just become the forty-ninth state and Adler thought the tie-in would assure the film’s success. As it happened, Feldman also represented Buddy Adler as well as two writers on North to Alaska (a.k.a. Go North, a.k.a. Port Fury), John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin. Adler was recently divorced from actress Anita Louise and living with the French beauty Capucine, a discovery of Feldman. She was an actress whose career Feldman was not having much luck getting off the ground in America, and to do so he had introduced her to the head of Fox. American audiences usually wanted American actresses in their films. Few foreigners, except for the British, made the crossover easy. Dietrich was the big exception, but even she, at the height of her popularity, had to play either Nazis (Billy Wilder’s 1948 A Foreign Affair) or Nazi sympathiz
ers (Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg), or exotic showgirls cast as some echo of Lola-Lola (George Marshall’s 1939 Destry Rides Again). Language was the killer for most foreign actresses, no matter how beautiful they were. It was why Brigitte Bardot never made a successful American film. Feldman had assured Adler that Capucine could star in North to Alaska, and that Richard Fleischer, a veteran director whose career had taken off after Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and 1959’s feature Compulsion for Buddy Adler at Fox, a fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb murders, was eager to direct. Adler was confident this project had all the right components to make a big hit.

  And then a series of disasters struck. Before the film could begin production, Adler died from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one and Fox was taken over by Spyros Skouras, who was less than thrilled with the project. Fleischer then had second thoughts and for the first time said he wanted to see a script, but Mahin and Rackin had nothing ready. Fleischer had also had reservations about being able to direct Capucine as a prostitute. To him, she did not project a lot of heat. He wanted off the film now but didn’t want to offend Feldman. He consulted with a friend who told him the easiest way out was to simply call Feldman and tell him Fleischer didn’t think Capucine was right for the role.

  Feldman released him and hired Henry Hathaway, another client, and more important, a director Wayne was comfortable with. Hathaway had already made a couple of films with Wayne, including 1941’s The Shepherd of the Hills, a film Wayne had liked, and 1957’s Legend of the Lost, and he was eager to work with him again.

  And then the Screen Writers Guild went out on strike and Hathaway and company had to make the movie without a finished script. The SWG had been the hardest hit during the height of the blacklisting. The strike proved just how dead blacklisting really was, if the writers were willing to risk staging a walkout to protest wages, residuals, credits, and other things they felt they deserved.