by Marc Eliot
And then the bottom fell out of the project. Universal, which had never finalized its commitment, notified Batjac that it was pulling out of its end of the deal. The problem wasn’t the movie, they said, it was the war itself, and the increasing protests that were taking place in the streets. Who was going to see this film, the executives wondered? Who would want to see this war glorified? Colonel Mike Kirby (John Wayne) was no Sergeant Stryker, and the North Vietnamese and VC were not the Japanese, the Gulf of Tonkin was no Pearl Harbor, and Universal was not Republic Pictures. There was too much to lose, they concluded, and not enough to gain. Perhaps, they suggested, Wayne should wait until the war was over, and then the film could have a happy, meaning victorious, ending.
Angry but undeterred, Wayne then took the project to every other studio, and they all said no. His last hope was a personal appeal to Jack L. Warner, who, like all the other studio heads, didn’t think the film could earn any money. Warner, however, had made a fortune from John Wayne movies in the past and was a big supporter of the war. It didn’t hurt that the number-one song of 1967 was Lieutenant Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” cowritten by Robin Moore and Sadler. It sold more than four million copies and was on every radio station in America, playing over and over. Even the most radical young leftists found themselves humming the song’s catchy, deep-throated marchlike cadence. What it told Jack Warner was that maybe there was an audience for this film after all. After meeting again with Wayne, Warner agreed the studio would coproduce with Batjac because it was Warner Bros’ patriotic duty to support the war.
If Wayne took no salary.
HE ASSEMBLED A SOLID CAST to support him on-screeen, with Aldo Ray as the tough master sergeant, Sergeant Muldoon. Ray, with his wrestler’s body and raspy voice, had been for a time Hollywood’s other go-to war movie actor. He had made an especially big splash in Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry, based on the Leon Uris bestseller, also made at Warner Bros. Next Wayne wanted David Janssen, extremely hot after his successful long-running TV series The Fugitive. The dark-haired, good-looking Janssen was hired to play George Beckworth, a skeptical journalist who gets his head turned around (after its nearly blown off) and winds up writing favorably about the heroism of the Green Berets. It was believed but never confirmed that the character Beckworth was based on the liberal newspaper columnist Pete Hamill. The cast was rounded out by Jim Hutton, as Sergeant Petersen, a recruit who is destined for a date with Punjab sticks. Hutton was the only actor cast as a soldier who looked young enough to be a recruit, although in the film he does not play a Green Beret.
Then Captain, now Major Ron Miller was assigned as the consultant to the film, for helicopter accuracy and safety: “Aldo Ray had had his troubles in Hollywood and needed a job. Wayne liked him and cast him as one of the Green Berets. Both Wayne and Ray looked a bit too old and too out of shape to be Green Berets, but the army gave them a lot of real ones to surround them, to give the film a bit of a more authentic look.
“All the stars had private little apartments near Fort Benning. It was no problem for anyone except David Janssen, who had just finished shooting the final episodes of the TV show The Fugitive, which hadn’t as yet aired. We had to have special security around him 24 hours a day, especially at night. Everyone wanted to know what happened between Richard Kimble and the one-armed man, and by contract he was not allowed to tell. Maybe it was one of the reasons he decided to make the film, to get out of Hollywood for awhile, where it must have been impossible for him to breathe. The other thing was women. Janssen was a very handsome man, and women just swarmed all over the location trying to get to him. At night there was a soldier stationed at his door to protect him from the hordes of young girls wanting to break in to his place to be with him.
“I supervised the kidnapping of the General, one of the more ridiculous scenes in the film. I think he was sneaking into the South to see a woman, or something, as if there weren’t enough women in North Vietnam. I remember advising shooting the scene the way Wayne wanted it done, in real time, because it was too dangerous. He had Hutton run underneath the blades, something a stunt man should have done, and almost got his head cut off. Wayne was having a little fun with the young actor, and it did look great on film, but it was a risky move.”
Wayne, Pilar, Ethan, and Marisa relocated to Ford Benning the last week of July so he could be ready to start filming August 9, 1967, and stayed there for the rest of the year. Early in 1968, a few additional scenes were filmed at Warner’s Burbank studios. By then, everyone had deserted the surefire-hit bandwagon, fearing the film was going to be rejected by a nation that was being torn apart by the war. And then the Tet Offensive happened.
IT BEGAN JANUARY 31, 1968, and although it proved to be a strategic disaster for the Vietcong, it was a strong moral victory. The message they wanted to send came through loud and clear. This war was not going to be a one-night stand. They were there and were going to stay there until every VC was dead, or every American soldier. The Tet Offensive proved the turning point in the public’s opinion against the war. After that, even though the military withstood the attack, Americans increasingly believed the war might be unwinnable and it should end immediately before more lives were lost. In February, TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, the “most respected man in America,” declared on CBS TV that Vietnam was unwinnable. Losing Cronkite, Johnson feared, meant he had lost the American public.
Everyone’s, that is, except Wayne, who believed more than ever The Green Berets was another The Alamo, a film about heroes, courage, the bravery of fighting men, and the inevitability of the righteous power of American way. He wanted to see LBJ reelected, even though he was a liberal Democrat, because he didn’t believe a wartime president should be replaced and thought The Green Berets would help Johnson stay in office. Wayne told Variety, “I think our picture will help re-elect LBJ because it shows that the war in Vietnam is necessary.”
By the time the film was set to open that June, the mood of the country had sharply turned. Vietnam was becoming a hated war, and not just by the hippies, college students, and draft dodgers. Mothers were losing sons, wives were losing husbands, and nobody could say for sure exactly why. Johnson read the handwriting on the wall and realized that Americans were no longer willing to go all the way with LBJ. On March 31, 1968, on live television, the president announced to the nation that he would not run for reelection in the fall. Jack L. Warner then wanted to pull the film, but too much money had been spent on it that the studio could not afford to lose.
The Green Berets opened at New York’s Warner Theater on June 17, 1968. Wayne then accepted an offer to be the grand marshal of the Fourth of July Salute to America Parade in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended the gala premiere in what Wayne hoped would be as good a launch for his film as Atlanta had been for Gone with the Wind twenty-nine years earlier.
Despite notoriously bad reviews—the one most remembered was by the New York Times’ film critic, Renata Adler, who eviscerated the film on every level, including plain logic: “The Green Berets is a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything, and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in the country. Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull. . . .”
Ten days later, the New York Times ran Adler’s review of the film again, a Sunday piece that was essentially an expanded version of her first hand grenade critique. The rest of the print reviews fell into lockstep, one after the other. The film was too simplistic. The film was too political. The film was too ridiculous (many reviews pointed out that all the Green Berets, especially Wayne and Ray, seemed far too old and paunchy to be believable as America’s fighting elite who jump and die).
And yet, for all the criticism and the war’s growing disapproval among the American public, Wayne’s star power turned what could have been a disaster into a big hit at the box office. From a negative cost of $6.1 million, the film’s initial domestic gross was more than $24 million, with another $8 million in foreign. The film was especially popular in Japan and other countries of Southeast Asia.
Just as he did with The Alamo, Wayne had turned a familiar story into powerful political propaganda. Many in America wanted to see it precisely because the reviews were so bad, to see the ship sink for themselves, regardless of what the message was. The single biggest problem with The Green Berets—and there was a lot wrong with it—was that it inverted the schemata of The Alamo and by doing so neutralized its dramatic and emotional impact. In the Crockett saga, the heroes of the Alamo are defending it against foreign invaders, sacrificing their lives for freedom, to preserve the American way. In The Green Berets (as was true in real life) the heroes were the invaders, fighting against natives defending their homeland.
Whether or not one supported the war, the factor of aggression was inseparable from the rest of the story, and it was hard to make a case for any foreign army to be seen as anything but an invader, no matter what the cause, even if invited in to help fight the enemy, to serve as the cops of the world. The French had learned that lesson (to a degree) in Vietnam and again in Algiers, and the Germans in France and Russia. Because the premise of the film was so flawed, no matter how many people went to see it—to laugh at it, to see John Wayne back in a war picture, or as a personal statement of support for the war—The Green Berets could not overcome the critical avalanche that struck it down, and despite its financial success the film remains an odd artifact of self-aggrandizement, a monument to America’s mistaken involvement in a war that killed more than fifty thousand GIs.
To Wayne the film was a moral victory because it was a financial success, and no one could convince him otherwise.
FOR HER PART, PILAR HOPED that The Green Berets was going to be her husband’s cinematic swan song. He had done it all, he had said it all, and he was getting on in years. He was sixty-one when the film opened, a cancer survivor, the father of seven, the grandfather of nine, and one tired man. Wayne talked it over with Pilar, thought about it, even considered buying a big spread in Baja and spending the final years of his life sailing.
There was only one problem with that plan. Because of the structure of the funding, most of the profits from The Green Berets went to Warner Bros. As the summer of 1968 turned into fall, Wayne found himself once again a few bucks shy of broke.
To generate immediate income, he agreed to star in Universal’s Hellfighters, directed by Andrew McLaglen. The film reunited him with Jim Hutton, and also starred newcomer Katharine Ross, hot off the success of Mike Nichols’s 1967 The Graduate (a picture Wayne loathed). The Hellfighters was a formula film about oil rig fighters, loosely based on the life of “Red” Adair, set in Latin America and filmed in Casper and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Texas, the script tailored to Wayne’s acting strengths and physical weaknesses. It was made quickly and opened December 14, 1968, to mostly negative reviews, but did well at the box office, grossing a little more than $9 million. Wayne received a million dollars plus a percentage to be in it, and that money greatly eased his cash flow problems. As a career move, however, it was a definite step backward.
And then out of nowhere came True Grit.
AFTER HUFFING AND PUFFING HIS way through Hellfighters, Wayne was certain time had finally caught up with him and that the big parts in major movies were no longer going to come his way. He wasn’t just older, his weight was up, he wore a bad toupee, and he could no longer make the kind of physical moves he used to be able to do so effortlessly. As 1968 dragged to a close, Wayne took a break to do some sailing with his family.
Not long after, he received a call from an old friend and director Henry Hathaway, who had just read a galley (proof) of a new novel by Charles Portis and immediately thought of Wayne for the role of Rooster Cogburn. He messengered the galley over; Wayne read it and immediately agreed to do it. He loved the character, felt it was perfectly suited for him, and wondered if Portis hadn’t based the character on “John Wayne.” He made an offer through Batjac of $400,000 for the rights to the book, only to discover he was not the only one who wanted them.
Portis had taken Wayne’s offer to Hal Wallis at Paramount, and Wallis put $500,000 on the table for two Portis novels, True Grit and Norwood, with penalty guarantees for the author if either one of them didn’t get made. Batjac couldn’t match Wallis’s offer and he easily won the rights. And then the first thing he did was call Wayne and offer him the part of Rooster, which he accepted before he hung up the phone. His deal was finalized the next day, $750,000 plus $1,500-a-week living expenses, and 35 percent profits from all related film and television revenues.
Wallis, at Wayne’s request, then hired Hathaway to direct True Grit (a.k.a. Alma Mater), whose first job was to find the right actress to play Mattie Ross, the fourteen-year-old who resurrects Rooster from his life of drunkenness and his surrender to the ravages of old age. The first one Hathaway approached was Mia Farrow. Although she was much older than Mattie, the waifish Farrow could have pulled it off. However, she wanted Wallis to replace Hathaway with Roman Polanski. She had worked with Polanski on his Rosemary’s Baby and thought he could make True Grit a much better film. Wallis refused and Farrow backed out. Although in the years that followed Farrow would come to regret her decision, for now, it left Wallis having to continue his search for Mattie. He auditioned many actresses but it wasn’t until he saw Kim Darby on a TV show that he found the one he was looking for. Darby, however, had just had a baby with actor Jim Stacy and wanted to be a stay-at-home mother for a while. Eventually, however, Wallis convinced Darby to sign on for $6,200 a week. Stacy demanded an agent’s fee to let his wife be in the film, and Wallis told him where to go to get it.
Filming was set to begin on September 5, 1968, and continue through December, on location in Montrose, California, and Mammoth Lake, at a production cost of $4.5 million. However, before production began, Hathaway and Wallis had to deal with Portis, who objected to the story’s locale being changed from Arkansas in the novel to Colorado, and the flashback aspect of the novel being missing from the script. He next insisted he didn’t want Wayne to play Rooster Cogburn. Wallis then gave Portis a hard reality check, explaining as calmly as he could that the author should get down on his hands and knees and thank whatever Lord he favored that John Wayne had agreed to play Rooster. If he didn’t accept the casting, over which he had no legal control, Wallis told him he could take his book and leave and that would be the end of the movie.
It was the last time Portis complained about anything.
WAYNE LOVED FILMING IN MONTROSE. It was quiet, peaceful, and gorgeous, with clean air and not a film critic as far as the eye could see. What he didn’t love was the way Wallis wanted him to look in the film, over-the-hill, creaky, with a patch over one eye. Wayne insisted his fans didn’t want to see him that way. He went to Hathaway, who backed up Wallis and told Wayne this was the way the film was going to be made. He had no more complaints. Instead, he threw himself into the part, playing a character different from any he had ever done before. And for once, he didn’t have to go on one of those studio-mandated killer diets. Hathaway actually wanted him to gain twenty pounds, something Wayne had no trouble doing.
The director had problems with Robert Duvall, who played Lucky Ned Pepper, another hot-shot would-be director/actor (this was after his debut in To Kill a Mockingbird and before his star-making turns in The Godfather and The Godfather II). Duvall, who was being paid $4,500 a week, didn’t particularly like or respect Hathaway. He considered him one of the old guard of directors out of touch with the new wave of independent filmmakers.133
Besides Duvall’s complaints about Hathaway, Darby had little respect for Wayne and made no secret of it. At one point
, he referred to her on-set as a spoiled brat, but he held most of his anger at her in for the sake of the film.
Rooster Cogburn is a washed-up U.S. marshal; his wife and child long gone, the only love he has left is for booze. When young Mattie Ross comes to him to catch the man who killed her father, she tells him he can do it because she knows he has “true grit.” He accepts the job and through it rediscovers his life and redeems his soul.
Wayne’s favorite scene in the film was the last, when he tells Mattie to “Come see a fat old man sometime” and then rides off on his horse and jumps a four-rail fence. Despite his missing lung, being grossly overweight, and sixty-one years old, he did the jump in one take with no stunt double. He meant to show the world that he was not just still alive but kicking, and Hollywood that he could still do the job.
Advance screenings went well, and word began to buzz through Hollywood that True Grit was a real winner. When it opened, June 12, 1969, the critics raved about it, and especially Wayne’s performance, and all was forgiven for The Green Berets. Charles Champlin, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that “Rooster Cogburn sits like a crown atop [Wayne’s] forty years of playing John Wayne . . . until you’ve seen John Wayne with the reins in his teeth, you haven’t seen it all.”
Time: “By growing old disgracefully as the fat, swaggering Rooster Cogburn, Wayne proves he can act—and solves his own senior citizen problem in one master stroke.”
The New York Times: “John Wayne has the best role of his career . . . the last scene in the movie . . . will probably become Wayne’s cinematic epitaph . . . This is only July but I suspect that True Grit will stand as one of the major entertainments of the year.”
And so it went, one critic after another heaping praise on Wayne. Soon enough there was talk of an Oscar for him, but Wayne brushed it off, not wanting to let the buildup get to him. The higher his expectations, he knew, the harder the fall would be when he lost, as he was sure he would.
