Duke also relied on several of Ford’s family members and associates: Ford’s son, Patrick, wrote an early screenplay (which was not used), and the cinematographer William Clothier, who had worked with Ford on numerous films, came on board. Ford’s son-in-law, Ken Curtis, took the rather colorless secondary role of Captain Dickinson, and roles were given to Olive Carey, Hank Worden, who had played the tetched-in-the-head Mose Harper in The Searchers, and Victor McLaglen’s wife, Veda Ann Borg, in a small but memorable part as the blind wife of one of the Alamo’s defenders.
Not only would Duke produce and direct the film, but in order to satisfy United Artists, the film’s distributor, Duke had to star as well. United Artists put $12 million into what was at the time the most expensive Hollywood movie yet made, and Wayne’s participation in a leading role was designed to guarantee that it would recoup its investment. Duke had originally thought about playing the smaller role of Sam Houston, the soldier, politician, and first president of the Republic of Texas, but the pressure from the studio left only three options: the Alamo’s troop commander William B. Travis, the legendary Jim Bowie, or the frontiersman and three-term congressman Davy Crockett.
Richard Boone, the rugged, eloquent actor best remembered as Paladin in TV’s Have Gun, Will Travel, was cast as Sam Houston, who is unable to bring his troops to the Alamo to assist Travis and his vastly outnumbered men. Travis, who is portrayed as something of an eastern-trained martinet along the lines of Henry Fonda’s Colonel Thursday in Fort Apache, was played by the English actor and former Shakespearean Laurence Harvey, providing a sharp contrast to the hillbilly Tennesseans and rough frontiersmen who make up the Alamo’s fighting corps. Jim Bowie—inventor of the outsized, eponymous knife—is portrayed as cantankerous and bellicose by a like-minded Richard Widmark. Although Widmark was shorter and slighter than Duke and many of the men assembled to defend the mission, Bowie’s huge knife worn conspicuously on his belt precludes any questions about his manliness.
Duke would probably have been more believable as Jim Bowie or Sam Houston, and he seems a bit old, heavy, and creaky in the part of the canny and likable Davy Crockett. But he understood the man whose folksy way of talking belied a keen intelligence, and in one scene he proves that he can drop the Tennessee talk and speak with studied eloquence when necessary—just as Duke taught himself to say “ain’t” early on and copy the walk and talk of stuntmen and cowboys he’d hung around with in his salad days. Wayne is suited to the role in another way: Crockett was famous in his day, greeted everywhere by strangers with friendly admiration, which he graciously shrugged off. By 1960, Duke had been famous—and admired—for well over a decade, and he, too, could be graciously humble in the public eye. And perhaps he alone could pull off the feat of wearing that impressive raccoon pelt on his head throughout the entire picture.
But soon the production was $4 million over budget, and that’s when John Ford stepped in.
By the end of the 1950s, Ford’s brilliant career was winding down, and his health and his eyesight had noticeably deteriorated. He was still cantankerous, still the alpha male in any group, but he was tired, aware that the motion picture industry was rolling on without him as the old studio system crumbled. In the new, more permissive climate dawning with the 1960s, movies often served up more sex and violence than he could stomach. One of his usual stuntmen, Chuck Roberson—known as “Bad Chuck” to distinguish him from the stuntman Chuck Hayward, known as “Good Chuck”—recalled that Ford “had always been growly with us, but now there was an edge of bitterness to him that seemed to dominate his personality.”
Ford’s own work broke new ground, too, but critics and audiences were not impressed. In 1959 he directed his 118th picture, Sergeant Rutledge, in Monument Valley. The film was ahead of its time: the hero, Sergeant Rutledge, played by Woody Strode, is a black cavalry officer wrongly accused of raping a white woman; he flees rather than face what he knows will be a biased military trial. “It was the first time we had ever shown the Negro as a hero,” Ford said about the picture. But it would receive a frosty reception in the spring of 1960. Some critics felt it had not gone deep enough into racial issues, and the film lacked some of Ford’s usual panache because much of it took place in a courtroom without the vast landscapes and physical derring-do that his films had become known for. After completing filming Sergeant Rutledge in September 1959, Ford was suddenly at loose ends. Following his usual practice, once the picture was completed, he took to his bed and drank himself into a stupor. He’d wear his pajamas all day and let his hair and fingernails—now yellowed by nicotine—grow long.
It took Duke Wayne’s picture to jolt him out of his lethargy. He heard about Duke’s grand ambitions in Brackettville and decided that his protégé would need his help, regardless of the fact that it was unasked for. “I hope to go to Texas to cast a paternal eye on Duke Wayne,” he wrote to a friend. “This young and ambitious lad of fifty-six years [sic] is writing, producing, acting, and directing The Alamo.” So he showed up in Brackettville in December, uninvited, and plopped down in the director’s chair, interrupting a scene Duke was directing. “Jesus Christ, Duke, that’s not the way to do it,” was his only comment.
Ford hung around for days, barking orders and pretty much trying to take over the production, while Duke, naturally, resented the challenge to his directorial authority. He asked his cinematographer, William Clothier, how he should handle the situation. If it had been anybody else, Duke would have handed him his head, but he was still respectful of his most important mentor and friend of over thirty years. Clothier came up with a brilliant solution: Why not send Ford out to do the second camera sequences, keeping him out of Duke’s way?
Ford obliged, working with two hundred Mexican extras who stood in as Santa Anna’s soldiers; they were bused in across the border each day and then sent home at night, because they were virtually working as illegal immigrants. A single scene of the soldiers marching with bayonets along a river ended up being the only footage shot by Ford that made it into the final cut. Ford was wounded by that fact, but it was something Duke felt he had to do; he didn’t want the Old Man taking over his picture, but he knew he owed him a great debt. Clothier recalled, “I don’t think we used three cuts that the Old Man did.” That second unit subterfuge cost Duke’s production company an additional $250,000, but it was an act of diplomacy that soothed Duke’s conscience, and if Ford ever suspected that he was just being placated, he didn’t let on.
Seeing the tremendous strain Duke was under, Pilar was frightened for her husband. “He had put every penny he had on the line for this film and wanted to do it so badly. But I saw him going through such anguish.” Duke had put his soul and heart into the picture that came closest to expressing his patriotism and his deeply held political beliefs, risking his lifelong friendship with his mentor and witnessing the Old Man’s decline. Success was anything but certain.
Duke set out to dramatize a concept articulated by his character in the movie as “the eternal choice of all men—to endure oppression or resist”—and to celebrate the valor of the doomed combatants and their wives. The men are by turns blustery, comic, ornery, and loyal, but what unites them is their willingness to die for what they believe in. William Travis has that resolve from the beginning; Bowie—in bitter rivalry with his co-commander, Travis—plans to abandon the Alamo when he realizes what a lost cause it is. He persuades Crockett to gather his ragtag band of Tennessee fighters and leave with him, until—at the turning point of the film—Travis challenges them to stay. In one of the most dramatic moments of the picture, Travis marks a line in the earth and asks those who would join him to cross it. Bowie—surprisingly—buries his anger at Travis and crosses over. Several Tennesseans follow, one by one, with Crockett then dismounting from his horse and crossing over—not immediately, but perhaps realizing that if his men are willing to die in what they see as a just cause, then he must as well. That noteworthy moment of hesitation shows the uncertainty in a man we’re supposed to ad
mire for unfailing courage. It’s a moment that makes Duke’s character more human and less of a stereotypical folk hero.
Richard Widmark, Duke Wayne, and Laurence Harvey in Wayne’s 1960 directorial debut, The Alamo, the epic that nearly bankrupted Wayne.
An earlier scene with Jim Bowie serves a similar humanizing function. Bowie, angered by his struggle for supremacy with Travis, is suddenly informed that his wife has died of cholera in the distant town to which he’d dispatched her for safety’s sake. Guilty and heartbroken, he weeps at news of her death. He blames himself for being unable to protect her and for sending her away to meet her doom. Throughout the film, Bowie is portrayed as the most stereotypically macho of the three men, renowned for his fighting, his temper, and even his drinking—when we first see him, he’s hungover from a drunken night—yet in this scene we see him weeping in grief. Crockett responds with silent sympathy for his friend’s bitter loss, but then he says, “Hold your head up, Jim.” It’s acceptable to weep, but one must recover, at least publicly.
Despite Ford’s admiration for the final cut—“It will last forever, run forever, for all peoples, all families everywhere”—the picture was a flop. First, the movie was just too long: 192 minutes with an intermission. Reviewers and much of the public reacted negatively to the movie’s jingoistic message, with screenwriter James Edward Grant, who had also written Big Jim McLain and Hondo, taken to task for an overly sentimental, pretentious, and long-winded screenplay. An aggressive publicity campaign headed by Russell Birdwell, who’d successfully promoted David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind and Howard Hughes’s Outlaw, met resistance, in part because there was some resentment that John Wayne had simply, hubristically, taken on too much. At 20th Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck groused, “I have great affection for Duke Wayne, but what right has he to write, direct, and produce a motion picture?”
The movie ended up being nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Chill Wills, in a small but colorful role as a Kentucky backwoods fighter, but Wills’s over-the-top campaign to win his Oscar rubbed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the wrong way; The Alamo won in only one category, Best Sound.
Duke was devastated. He had hoped that The Alamo would “reawaken American patriotism,” relying on the unquestioned heroism of men like Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Jim Bowie and using his own considerable clout and star power to make the case. He also saw it as a rebuke to the country’s increasing reluctance to engage the Vietcong, and by proxy the Chinese Communists, in Vietnam. Pilar Wayne saw that The Alamo was his “response to all the flag burners, draft dodgers, and the fainthearted who didn’t believe in good, old-fashioned American virtues.” Instead, Duke had not only nearly bankrupted himself, having to sell his share of the picture back to United Artists to clear the millions he owed, but put everything he knew about filmmaking, and everything he cared about in his personal life, on the screen. He was physically exhausted, and he’d lost money in other arenas: the $375,000 divorce settlement to Chata, and a $600,000 investment in a shrimping operation in Panama that eventually failed. Before The Alamo, Duke estimated his worth to be around $4 to $5 million; after 1961, he was virtually ruined. To add to his burdens, Ward Bond—his closest friend and cohort in nineteen movies, who had grown up in the business with him—died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven of a massive heart attack. Dark days loomed.
Despite the poor critical and popular reception of The Alamo, Duke Wayne would drive even further to the right, to the point of joining the John Birch Society. His obsession with politics, combined with his workaholic approach to filmmaking, weighed on his third and happiest marriage, threatening to derail it. Pilar came to believe that his ultra-patriotism and extreme conservatism were compensation for his guilt over not fighting in World War II.
It didn’t help Duke’s mood that the film that won the Best Picture Academy Award in 1961, easily beating out The Alamo, was about as foreign to Duke’s sensibilities as could be: Billy Wilder’s comedic drama The Apartment. Starring Jack Lemmon as a junior corporate cog-in-the-wheel who tries to please his bosses by lending his apartment to them for extramarital trysts, it ushered in a new kind of man: the ill-at-ease, alienated company man or “Marketplace Man”—cut off from family, nature, valor, and often love. Shirley MacLaine co-stars as the waifish elevator operator Jack Lemmon falls for, only to discover that she’s having an affair with his boss. It’s classic, sublime Billy Wilder, far more reflective of its time than anything John Wayne was appearing in.
Darker still, Duke Wayne had lost thirty pounds over the ordeal of making The Alamo, and—now a five-pack-a-day smoker—he had started coughing up phlegm. After Ward Bond’s early death, Duke’s daughter Aissa later observed that “death was more than a dismal abstract for my father. It had stolen his friends and darkened his world.” Nonetheless, he threw himself even harder into his work, taking just about any picture that came his way. He had losses—big losses—to recoup.
“THE HERO DOESN’T WIN, THE WINNER ISN’T HEROIC”
John Ford’s 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is his farewell to the genre that he most identified with and through which he was able to express his great, bittersweet vision of American immigrants moving west, bringing to the frontier the blessings of civilization. It’s not only Ford’s last Western; it’s arguably his last great picture. Ford would go on to direct five more feature films, but by the post-studio era of the early 1960s it had become difficult for him to find funding—and wide audiences—for his movies. As with The Quiet Man, he needed the help of his former protégé to guarantee that Liberty Valance would make money.
As for Duke, after losing his shirt on The Alamo and seeing the fruits of his long career all but disappear under his business manager Bo Roos’s negligence, the veteran actor was nearly broke. “I’d worked twenty years for no gain,” he realized, to his considerable dismay. But he hadn’t worked for nothing; his reputation and his popularity continued to hold firm. Paramount came to the rescue, offering Duke a contract for ten pictures at a guaranteed salary of $600,000. Liberty Valance would be the first picture under his new contract with the studio, after he fulfilled a commitment to star in The Comancheros for 20th Century Fox, for $2 million—thus easing some of his losses.
But Duke continued to be haunted by the specter of financial ruin, something he’d witnessed firsthand growing up when his father failed in the pharmaceutical business and ended up moving the family to a hardscrabble farm in the California desert—a place Duke had hated.
“I was scared to death that I would never have financial security again, and I put that before all else, even though I thought I was doing it for the good of all my family,” Duke said, not recognizing at the time that his relationship with Pilar, now pregnant again after three miscarriages, was strained to the breaking point. Not surprisingly, Pilar’s miscarriages had left her depressed, and with Duke working around the clock to restore their finances, she felt alone and abandoned. She turned to charity work, becoming involved with SHARE, which raised funds for disabled children, but the more Duke became obsessed with work and with restoring his financial well-being, the more isolated she felt. Pilar didn’t doubt that he loved and respected her. Duke once said, “I’ll tell you why I love her. I have a lust for her dignity.” But he continued to work relentlessly to support Pilar and his beloved daughter Aissa, as well as providing financial support for his first wife and their four children. Aissa later recalled her father’s long absences, which he tried to make up for by showering expensive presents on his wife and daughter. In her memoir of growing up as the daughter of a legend, Aissa recalled her father saying, “ ‘If I don’t make this movie, we’re all gonna be hurting.’ I never quite knew if he was telling the truth when he pleaded poverty, or if we were really in trouble.”
Ford was hired by Paramount to direct The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with John Wayne starring alongside James Stewart. Lee Marvin, who ha
d first worked with Duke as a gunrunner in The Comancheros, was cast as the sadistic bully and outlaw Liberty Valance.
The film pits the “new man,” a country lawyer turned U.S. senator, against the heroic gunman, while eulogizing the end of the western frontier. It’s a film of tribute and of loss; befitting its elegiac tone, it’s shot in black and white, which Ford preferred because it “looked more like photography” and was able to convey a more somber mood than Technicolor. Unlike many of Ford’s earlier masterpieces, this film was shot not out on location but at Paramount’s Hollywood studio. William Clothier, a veteran of many of Ford’s and Duke’s pictures, offered a simple explanation: “There was one reason and one reason only why the film was shot in black and white and on Paramount’s soundstages,” instead of Ford’s usual, majestic landscapes. “Paramount was cutting costs. Otherwise we would have been in Monument Valley or Bracketville [sic] and we would have had color stock. Ford had to accept those terms or not make the film.” The lack of grand, Fordian vistas left the picture with a closed-in, somewhat cramped feel, but that lack of dimension actually adds to one of the film’s major themes: the end of the vast American frontier.
The constricted budget might also have added to increased tensions on the set, where Ford and Wayne clashed incessantly. Filming Liberty Valance was not a happy experience. Perhaps because Ford knew he needed Duke to guarantee the profitability of the movie, he continued to resentfully ride him on the set. Lee Van Cleef, who plays one of Liberty Valance’s henchmen, recalled how
Ford was a complete bastard to Wayne. He’d abuse him and swear at him and call him a “goddamn lousy actor”…intent on humiliating the guy who got him the job of making that film, because Paramount said that if he couldn’t get Wayne…they wouldn’t back the film. And that’s probably why he treated Duke that way. He didn’t want to think he was doing him any favors.
Wayne and Ford Page 15
