American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  Wayne also declined the chance to coproduce the film through Batjac. When Mirisch Company (Mirisch-Llenroc) offered to come in if Batjac did, Wayne changed his mind and invested in the production (Mirisch Llenroc Batjac). The film was directed, written, and coproduced by Shavelson. After Wayne came aboard, other big names followed. Kirk Douglas agreed to play Colonel Marcus, Yul Brynner and Frank Sinatra appeared in cameo roles, and Senta Berger and Israeli actor Topol filled out the rest of the cast. Wayne played a scene where he said “L’chaim” during a toast, about as close to anything Jewish he was associated with during production.

  The film was shot from mid-May to July 1965, on location in Israel, utilizing eight hundred Israeli soldiers and over a thousand extras, with additional exterior scenes filmed in Rome and the Alban Hills, and interiors at Italy’s famed Cinecittà Studios. Wayne spent several months abroad prior to filming, to help Shavelson with preproduction, while Pilar remained in Newport Beach, blueprints in hand, pencil behind her ear, supervising the construction of their new home.

  He returned home only once before filming was completed, and Pilar took the occasion to tell him she was pregnant again.

  Wayne found it difficult to believe his body could still produce life, but he was happy to be proven wrong. At fifty-eight years old, he had fathered yet another child with Pilar. Marisa Carmela Wayne, his seventh, and third with Pilar, was born February 22, 1966. 2/22 was a very lucky number for Wayne and Pilar. Marisa shared the same birthday with John Ethan, born four years earlier.

  The event was life-affirming to Wayne, a physical, psychological, and moral victory, but not for Pilar. What began as a postpartum depression didn’t subside, and after a few months Pilar began to emotionally withdraw. She felt something had changed in Wayne, that he had become more distant, and it made her even more depressed. It was true, his fuse was shorter. He could go into rages over the smallest of things that used to make him laugh. The doctors had warned her to expect some changes in his personality after what he had been through. What he had been through? What about me?

  With all that going on, after a brief stay at home, Wayne quickly took off to make another movie, leaving Pilar alone with John Ethan and the new baby. It further upset her that he would risk his health just to play another cowboy. She worried that if something happened to him on-set she would be left alone to raise not just Marisa, but the entire family by herself. Justified or not, her emotional demons this time threatened to end her marriage. She had, in her words, turned into “a virtual zombie.”

  A nervous Wayne started chewing tobacco to calm himself down.

  CAST A GIANT SHADOW OPENED March 30, 1966, to mixed-to-negative reviews. The New York Times’ A. H. Weiler came in on the downside: “A confusing, often superficial biography that leans a good deal on comic and extremely salty dialogues and effects . . . full of sound and fury and woefully short on honest significance.” Variety liked it better: “Overlong pic has some exciting action highlights, fine production values and other assets.” At two hours and twenty-two minutes, the film lost one screening a day, which significantly cut into its profits.

  Wayne had wanted it to come in under two, but was overruled by Mirisch and Shavelson. The film failed to make back its negative cost of $4.3 million, but Wayne still liked the film’s statement, that under certain conditions war was noble and defending an ideal more important than anything. It was a message he hoped would resonate with a younger audience, and not just Jews, but all American youth now caught in the stranglehold of the Vietnam War. He had been surprised and disappointed when the nation’s young didn’t understand who the real enemy was. To Wayne, any country’s fight for freedom was a fight for the freedom of all countries. Why didn’t they see that?

  LIVING IN NEWPORT BEACH ON what amounted to a house on a pier, Wayne was so close to the water he could hop out of his back door and be on The Wild Goose. That part wasn’t so bad, but Pilar’s continuing depression put a damper on what he hoped would be a new start for their marriage.

  When it proved otherwise, Wayne couldn’t wait for his new film project to begin production. He needed space, and he needed money. The seemingly endless renovation was draining his cash, Batjac had taken a loss with Shavelson, and Pilar was making him crazy, so when Howard Hawks had come along with El Dorado before Shadow opened, Wayne jumped at it. Being home, amid the banging, the buzz sawing, the dust that aggravated his chronically sore throat, and Pilar’s behavior pushed him to leave as soon as possible for Tucson, Arizona, to join Robert Mitchum, who had, since the debacle of Blood Alley, become a friend, in Hawks’s paean to friendship, the Old West (the real Old West, according to Hawks), and getting old.

  Hawks had recently made a series of films that were not up to his usual standards. Hatari! had been a box-office hit due more to Wayne’s star power than any great rush on the public’s part to see it because Howard Hawks made it. After two more films went nowhere, Hawks needed a real hit. He purchased the rights to a Harry Brown novel, The Stars in Their Courses, and assigned Leigh Brackett, Hawks’s favorite screenwriter, to adapt it. After several tries, the final script for El Dorado resembled nothing so much as a remake of Rio Bravo. According to Howard Hawks: “The Western takes, really, a couple of forms. One is how the West started, the formation of the great cattle herds. Actually, Red River started as the story of the King Ranch . . . [one is] the period of law and order. Rio Bravo and El Dorado fell into that. We had a lot of fun in writing Rio Bravo. Because we ran into so many good situations, we said, ‘We’ll save that for another picture.’ In making Westerns, I’ve worked practically just with John Wayne. He is by far the best . . . the young fellow in Rio Bravo was a really good shot. Ricky Nelson played him—in El Dorado, when we started to work on that, I said, ‘Let’s get a boy who can’t shoot’—and that was Jim Caan. And in Rio Bravo, Wayne was the sheriff and the deputy was a drunk; in El Dorado, the drunk was the sheriff. You just take opposites of everything . . . a sheriff who’s any good would say, ‘You better hope your friends don’t catch up because the first man shot is going to be you.’ [That line made it into] Rio Bravo . . . in El Dorado, we had a scene where the jailer said, ‘You better hope nobody comes in here, because you’re going to be the first one shot.’ ”

  Wayne was happy to be working on a film again with Hawks, who was much easier to act for than Ford. Peter Bogdanovich met Wayne on the set of El Dorado and conducted a long interview: “We chatted for an hour and when he was finally called away he told me how great it was to have spent some time talking about movies. ‘All people ever want to talk about with me these days is politics and cancer,’ he said. Wayne’s rightwing politics had become notorious while his acting abilities were largely written off. He was considered for most of his career to be a one-trick pony. But he brought such strong personality to his roles and still tops polls of America’s all-time favorite movie stars. Wayne loved the process of acting. He couldn’t get enough of it. On a movie set he was like a kid in a candy store. On the set of El Dorado I watched him spend hours playing with props, talking with the crew and watching it all happen. He’d never go to his trailer. He was too excited to be around the film-making process.”

  In the film the vulnerability of its two stars, Wayne and Mitchum, and the inevitability of aging—for them as well as for Hawks—was contrasted by the presence the young and intense James Caan, in the pre-Godfather stage of his career when he was still relatively unknown. Wayne received $750,000 for this Paramount film, Mitchum $300,000, Caan $14,000.

  WAYNE FELT HE WAS ONCE more at the top of his game, but he still couldn’t find the financing to get The Green Berets made. To his dismay, no studio would go near what they considered not just a political hot potato, but at the time, a film about a war that had no cinematic potential or appeal. How could anybody make a popular movie about such an unpopular confrontation, with no real-life heroes, no decent women roles, and no end in sight?

  Instead, Wayne, impatient to get back in front of a c
amera after the exhilarating experience working with Hawks, signed on to The War Wagon, a Batjac production for Universal. The film was part of a new two-picture deal Feldman had made for Batjac, hoping he could convince Universal to make The Green Berets the second picture. As of now the studio execs were not out, but they were not in. It was a possibility, they told Wayne.

  On September 15, 1966, production began on The War Wagon, a tale of justice and revenge set in the Old West starring John Wayne. It was shot on location in Durango and Mexico City with a script by Clair Huffaker, based on his novel Badman, a score by Dimitri Tiomkin, Bill Clothier as cinematographer, and a solid cast that included Bruce Cabot as the bad buy, Kirk Douglas as a gunslinger, Howard Keel in the Indian role, Valora Nolan as the love interest, and Wayne as a framed and paroled ex-con.

  During production, Wayne and Douglas got into some heated discussions about the war—Wayne was for it, Douglas against it—and California politics. Douglas was a big supporter of incumbent governor Pat Brown, up for reelection in the midyear between presidential campaigns. Douglas, Wayne could not forget, had broken the blacklist, which never sat well with him, and Douglas supported Brown’s ample public support programs. He wanted more of that from the government, while Wayne felt that Brown was too far to the left to be running California, and that his ideas bordered on socialism. Despite their differences, Wayne and Douglas were close friends and remained so.

  On-set during production, Wayne received a phone call from his friend Nancy Reagan. The Reagans were longtime friends of the Waynes, and she told him she needed a favor from him. Wayne temporarily closed down production on the film and returned to Los Angeles to help Reagan’s campaign for governor. Reagan had been a Roosevelt Democrat before changing parties and was fond of telling everyone that he hadn’t left the party, the party had left him. Wayne happily went on the stump with his friend. That fall, Reagan won by a landslide and there was talk of the Republican Party making Wayne a candidate on the 1968 Republican national ticket. Once again Wayne rejected any notion of his running for political office. He was just an actor, he insisted, and besides, he wasn’t sure his health would be up for the intensity of such a physically taxing campaign.

  However, Wayne certainly appeared “presidential,” whether that was his intention or not (perhaps to drum up business for his dormant war project), when in June 1966 he traveled to Vietnam as part of a three-week USO tour and to narrate a Department of Defense film. He began the trip in Saigon and traveled all over South Vietnam. In Chu Lai, the Vietcong shot off hundreds of rounds at the entourage, some coming uncomfortably close to Wayne, the nearest he had ever been to real enemy fire in any war. He was so unfazed he made a joke out of their poor aim. Everywhere he went, he was recognized and cheered by both Americans and South Vietnamese as a hero.

  THE POSITIVE PUBLICITY HE RECEIVED while in Vietnam convinced Universal to finally give Batjac a tentative green light for The Green Berets, and Wayne immediately started his son Michael working on the film’s preproduction. With a budget of $6.1 million, Wayne wanted a screenwriter he had worked with before and knew he could rely on. Jimmy Grant had always been his first choice for the project but had just passed away from lung cancer. Michael now suggested Robin Moore, who had written the original novel The Green Berets, already owned by Batjac. Moore was a Vietnam veteran, and his book had the feel of authenticity about it. However, Wayne rejected him after Moore ramped up his public criticism of the Defense Department. Wayne didn’t mind Moore’s comments, but he was afraid using him might result in the government not cooperating with the film, which would make it too expensive to make. Instead he chose James Lee Barrett, a former marine turned screenwriter, who had written a hard and tough novel about the Marine Corps’s training techniques. Using Barrett, the film had no trouble acquiring the cooperation of the Pentagon. When he finished a draft of the script, Michael delivered it to Universal, along with a signed letter from Wayne agreeing to star in the film.

  Universal liked the script and was ready to go with it when it was unexpectedly rejected by the Pentagon because it depicted Special Forces carrying out covert missions in North Vietnam, which they weren’t supposed to be doing and had always denied, including an elaborate kidnapping of one of their generals. At Wayne’s directive, Barrett revised the script so that the general is taken while he is in South Vietnam, an unlikely scenario—what would a North Vietnamese general possibly be doing in South Vietnam—but a necessary change. It satisfied the Pentagon and they gave their much-needed approval of the script.

  Wayne then made a guest appearance on Lucille Ball’s highly rated The Lucy Show playing himself, and soon after the Merv Griffin nightly talk show, to promote his movies but also to demonstrate to the world, to the Pentagon, and to Universal that he was in good enough condition to make the film, that he had indeed “beat the big C.”

  THE WAR WAGON WAS RELEASED May 23, 1967, just two weeks before El Dorado. That same month the list of the top ten most popular box-office stars of 1966 was issued. Despite having only released one film that year, Cast a Giant Shadow, which hadn’t done all that well, Wayne placed seventh.131 He was the second-oldest star to make it; Cary Grant beat him by three years. It was a powerful demonstration of Wayne’s enduring star power.

  The War Wagon was an immediate hit. It grossed just over $6 million in its initial North American release, and double that overseas, where it was released first. El Dorado opened June 9, 1967, a full two years after the completion of principal shooting, due mostly to extensive problems Hawks had in editing, similar to what had happened with Red River. He cut at least a dozen versions of the film before he was satisfied. When it did finally arrive in theaters, it received excellent reviews and did well at the box office, grossing nearly $16 million from a $4.5 million negative cost. Paramount had wanted both films out in the summer even if it pitted one Wayne film against another.

  The New York Times called El Dorado “a tough, laconic and amusing Western that ambles across the screen as easily as the two veteran stars.” The New York Daily News: “The heavyweight crown in boxing may be up for grabs, but in the movies it is still firmly planted on the balding head of John Wayne. In El Dorado, though he may be a bit arthritic, Wayne still greets the opposition on a first-come, first-served basis and the wrongo [sic] who tries to outdraw him and winds up feeling kind of shot.” And Variety: “An excellent oater drama, laced with adroit comedy and action relief, and set off by strong casting, superior direction and solid production.” In 2014, film critic and historian A. J. Hoberman, writing in the New York Times on the occasion of the film’s rerelease (and its inclusion in a forty-DVD reissue of a number of Wayne’s films), offered this reevaluation: “City of Gold indeed: For one who grew up in the heyday of the post–World War Two western . . . two self-aware relics, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, star in Howard Hawks’ equally self-aware movie [that leisurely summarizes] many of Hawks’ career-long concerns.”

  Wayne was now ready to turn his full attention to getting The Green Berets made. However, one day, in what seemed like a moment of déjà vu, from the Roos days, he was stunned to find a department store sent a collection letter to Pilar, that a $3,200 bill from Saks Fifth Avenue had gone unpaid. Wayne was furious, had a long talk with his son-in-law, La Cava, and decided from now on, it was best that, if it was true, he take care of his own expenses.132 He figured he couldn’t do any worse than his son-in-law, who, like Roos, had charged him a fortune to lose his money.

  WAYNE WAS SO EAGER TO get The Green Berets into production he turned down an attractive offer to be in The Dirty Dozen, from producer Ken Hyman, in association with MGM. It was Wayne’s kind of picture, a bunch of tough guys taking on the Nazis. And it would have reteamed him with Lee Marvin, one of his favorite tough-guy costars. But that was a World War II film and he wanted to make one about the war raging now, that took on the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, all in the name of freedom and liberty. That was the war he wanted to fight now.
/>   On-screen, of course.

  Chapter 25

  Wayne had wanted to film The Green Berets on location in Vietnam, but nobody else thought it was a good idea, especially the Pentagon. They suggested instead Fort Benning, Georgia. Early in 1967, Wayne and Michael visited the base. In return for letting him use their facilities, Wayne promised to build an exact replica of a South Vietnamese village that he would leave standing when filming was completed to use as a training facility.