by Scott Eyman
The salary on offer was $2,000—not $2,000 apiece, but $2,000 for all three serials, $2,000 for six-day weeks, twelve- to sixteen-hour days for the eighteen to twenty-one days it usually took to make one of Levine’s serials. To get the films made on time, two directors worked simultaneously, one on interiors, one on exteriors. Working for Mascot meant that you weren’t paid for acting, you were paid for endurance and for the willingness to work cheap.
The money was terrible, but it was the pit of the Depression, and Wayne was damaged goods twice over. There was only one catch: it was Levine’s intention to start shooting a serial called Shadow of the Eagle the very next day. Was Wayne willing to start shooting tomorrow, for that money and not a dime more?
The next day at four in the morning, Levine picked up Wayne in his chauffeur-driven Packard. He had thoughtfully brought breakfast so they could save some time. While Wayne ate his danish, Levine outlined the story of the serial Wayne was about to start shooting as soon as the sun came up.
“We were asked to be on location before sunup, so that shooting could start as soon as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon,” remembered one Mascot veteran. “We would sit there, poised—the cameras ready, performers on their horses. When the earliest rays broke across the valley, the director would jump up and yell ‘Roll ’Em,’ and away we’d go.” When the sun went down, flares would be lit and held by crew members so close-ups could be shot.
Mascot had been formed by Levine in 1927, when he was only twenty-eight years old. He had been the personal secretary for theater magnate Marcus Loew, then went to work for the distributor of the Felix the Cat cartoons. Levine operated on the states-rights fringe of the movie business and specialized in making features for $30,000, serials for $40,000. As with everybody on Poverty Row, Mascot was thinly capitalized. Much of Levine’s running debt was absorbed by Herbert Yates, who ran Consolidated Film Industries, the company that did the lab work for Mascot as well as most other Poverty Row outfits.
Mascot’s headquarters were above a contractor’s warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard, just down the street from Hollywood Memorial (now Hollywood Forever) Cemetery. To keep costs down, the only generators used were for cameras; Levine didn’t use lights for exteriors, only reflectors. In fact, he didn’t even have a studio of his own until 1933, when he leased the bankrupt Mack Sennett lot in North Hollywood (today it’s CBS Television City). Levine rented everything, including his sound equipment, which he got for so much per day from Walt Disney.
Shadow of the Eagle, Wayne’s first Mascot serial, began shooting in December 1931, with Wayne playing a stunt pilot working for a small carnival who tries to clear the name of the owner, who has been a father figure. Wayne had gained some assurance since The Big Trail, although considering the caliber of the filmmaking around him it wasn’t really necessary.
Except for the credits, there’s no music—too expensive—and a lot of the exteriors have no sound at all, which saved the company money because they only rented the sound equipment for interiors. There were very few second or third takes.
In the serial’s final chapter, Wayne trips and nearly falls, but director Ford Beebe keeps the footage. Wayne remembered one day when they didn’t finish until midnight, after Beebe had made 114 shots. They had to be ready to go just eight hours later, so most of the company slept in their cars rather than drive back home.
The cast of Shadow of the Eagle is notable only for the presence of Yakima Canutt, who would become Hollywood’s greatest stuntman, not to mention a close friend and working companion of Wayne’s, and Billy West, the leading Chaplin imitator of silent films, here playing the small part of a clown.
Canutt had been hired to double Wayne in addition to playing a henchman. Canutt called a friend who had already worked with the star to find out what kind of man he was. “You’ll like him,” said the friend. “He’s really great. And when it comes to ribbing, he’ll hold his own—even with you.”
The practical jokes began early. An actor named Bud Osborne told Wayne that Canutt was a spy for Nat Levine—everything that went on would be reported back to the producer. For a few days, Canutt pretended to be writing in a little black book, and Wayne reacted by giving him dirty looks and keeping his distance.
Then Osborne took Wayne behind the set for a quick drink, and Canutt came around the opposite corner. Canutt checked the time and wrote in his little black book. Wayne lost his temper and went for him, but Osborne and a few others grabbed him and let him in on the joke. Wayne thought it was hilarious, and the picture proceeded as smoothly as it could considering the endless hours necessary to get the picture shot on schedule.
Wayne remembered that it was the shared pain of the Mascot experience that sealed his friendship with Canutt. One terrible day, the company worked till midnight shooting dialogue scenes at the studio, then had a 5 A.M. call at a rock quarry in the San Fernando Valley. Wayne had no car and the buses didn’t run that early, so he asked Levine for help. Levine let him have a Chevy convertible to drive home for a few hours sleep in order to guarantee that he’d be on location on schedule.
When he got to the rock quarry, it was still dark, but one man had beat him to the location and had built a fire. Wayne went over and knelt down by the fire to get warm. “It doesn’t take very long to spend all night out here,” said Yakima Canutt. Canutt pegged their friendship from those minutes of mutually shared weariness.
Making these serials was the movie equivalent of a forced march, and Wayne was always slightly embarrassed about them. They were more humiliation than he preferred to remember, and more exhaustion than he expected to endure. On one of the Mascot serials, he worked for twenty-six straight hours—not abnormal for a low-end production in the pre-union days.
Wayne’s other two Mascot serials—The Three Musketeers (shot in April 1932, released April 1933) and The Hurricane Express (shot in July 1932, released August 1932)—represent a slight upgrade from Shadow of the Eagle. Among the actors in The Three Musketeers are silent stars Jack Mulhall, William Desmond, Raymond Hatton, and future star Lon Chaney Jr., working under his real name of Creighton Chaney. Wayne’s leading lady was Ruth Hall, who would later marry the cinematographer Lee Garmes.
The Hurricane Express, while crude in terms of production, has considerable charm, as it divides its time between the air, the railroads, and the dusty roads of Depression-era America—it’s a movie without a lot of pavement. Wayne slugs his way through a small army, usually by the simple expedient of picking someone up over his head like a sack of grain and heaving him in the general direction of his adversaries. He performs the twelve chapters of the serial dressed in one rather well-cut gray business suit—his entire wardrobe.
One of the primary locations was a railroad station in Saugus, north of Los Angeles, where a hobo was cooking stew by the side of the tracks. It smelled good, so Wayne went over and had breakfast with him. Canutt remembered that the company “got the biggest kick out of it.” At one point, the action moves to Bronson Canyon, a mile or so from Hollywood, where, twenty-five years later Wayne would perform a scene with considerably more emotional and spiritual impact than anything in The Hurricane Express: the climax of The Searchers.
Independent serials of the 1930s are generally a sluggish lot, but Mascot’s serials run, jump, leap, and fight more than they talk. The miniatures are good too. Levine seems to have been instrumental in instituting the practice of cheater episodes, that is, a recap episode that would be made up largely of footage from earlier chapters, or, failing that, simply recycling footage—Chapter 11 of The Hurricane Express uses some footage for at least the second or third time. As for the star, Wayne’s look of surprise rivals Jimmy Finlayson’s double take in Laurel and Hardy comedies.
Wayne remembered Nat Levine as entertaining but incredibly cheap. “We had a party one day, lots of guests and everything,” Wayne reminisced. “Levine had a diamond ring on, and, as a gag, [stuntmen] tried to take it off him. Well, the son of a bit
ch put up one hell of a fight and ended the whole party. He wasn’t going to give up that diamond ring. And I knew he was close with a buck; if they’d come to me first, I could have told them not to bother.”
In the midst of fulfilling his Mascot deal, Wayne continued to pick up whatever work he could. In April and May of 1932, he worked ten days at Paramount on a B picture called Lady and Gent. Wayne was billed fifth, behind George Bancroft, Wynne Gibson, Charles Starrett, and James Gleason. His salary was $150 a week—Bancroft got $6,600.
In the middle of 1932, Wayne signed a contract with Leon Schlesinger, who had an in at Warner Bros. Schlesinger had been the principal of Pacific Title and Art, which made titles for silent movies. When sound came in, the market for titles shrank in a hurry, and Schlesinger began exploring ways to make money from talkies. By 1930 he was buying cartoons from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising for $4,500 apiece and selling them to Warners for $5,000 to $6,000 apiece. He proposed to do the same thing with westerns starring John Wayne.
Schlesinger produced six Wayne westerns, made in as few as three days apiece, which was possible only because the action sequences were built around silent footage originally shot for Ken Maynard’s silent westerns at First National, which Warner Bros. now owned.
Again, Harry Cohn tried to blackball Wayne, calling Warners’ Sid Rogell and telling him that Wayne was an unreliable drunk. Wayne suggested to Rogell that Cohn say that in front of him so he could “bust his face wide open.” Rogell called Wayne back to say that they could make a deal. “What happened?” asked Wayne. “He wouldn’t say it in front of you,” said Rogell.
Wayne’s understandable grudge against Cohn grew till it enveloped all of Columbia Pictures. It was Wayne’s first experience with arbitrary cruelty. “I had only dealt with nice people all my life,” he told me. In later years, Wayne took great satisfaction in never making another movie for Columbia. “There were plenty of opportunities,” he said. “Harry would come and say, ‘Duke, you’d be just great in this—what do you want?’ I’d say, ‘Gosh, Harry, I just haven’t got the time.’ That’s the only delight I ever had with that guy.”
Using the big action scenes from the Maynard films—among the best series westerns of the silent era—and combining them with Warners’ well-appointed and detailed interior sets, which were far beyond the budgetary reach of most B western producers, meant that the Schlesinger pictures had an unusual production gloss, even if the directors were run-of-the-mill B movie talents.
The six Schlesinger pictures paid Wayne $850 each, more money for less work than he was getting from Nat Levine. They have more stock footage than the norm, but they also have tighter scripts and better casts. In Ride Him Cowboy, the first of the series to be released (shot in July 1932, released a month later), the comic relief is in the capable hands of Mack Sennett veteran Harry Gribbon, while the great Henry B. Walthall, D. W. Griffith’s Little Colonel from The Birth of a Nation, plays the heroine’s father. (He also shows up in another Schlesinger quickie, Somewhere in Sonora, as does Paul Fix, who would figure importantly in Wayne’s career.)
There are welcome touches of lunatic humor—a jury walks in one door to deliberate and immediately files right back out another door. The slap-happy overtones happen too consistently to be accidental; in The Telegraph Trail, Yakima Canutt plays an Indian named High Wolf.
Any action footage outside of a basic fistfight derives from the Maynard silents, but the filmmakers working on the Warners films were always trying, and the films are full of little grace notes unusual for the product and the period. In Haunted Gold, the 274th variation on The Cat and the Canary, there are animated bats in the credits that foretell Schlesinger’s lengthy career as the executive producer of Warners’ cartoon department.
Despite the presence of some medium-appalling darky humor in Haunted Gold, the Schlesinger pictures are always at least passable, and they’re very well shot by Ted McCord and Nick Musuraca. (Theory: the cameraman was more important to B westerns than the director.) Mainly, they avoid that unmistakable overtone of dead air that permeates so much Poverty Row product, because they have the trademarked Warner Bros. zip and charm, which was also a feature of the ads.
“Here he is again,” announced one ad, over a big, smiling face of Wayne. “ACTION gallops across the screen,” said another. “The most daring of the cowboy stars and the world’s brainiest horse give you more thrills, scares, surprises in five minutes than you usually see in a whole picture.” Throughout the six Schlesinger productions, in all of which “Duke” the white stallion gets second billing, Wayne was costumed in clothes similar to Ken Maynard’s to make the matching of shots easier. And yes, Duke the horse was named after his rider.
The internal evidence of the films suggests that Wayne was continuing to work on his craft. He’s far less stiff in front of the camera than he was only two years before. The boyishness is still there—he would never really lose that—and so is a gentleness that was a primary component of his personality in these years, and the quality that appealed to John Ford. His delivery of dialogue is more natural, and he’s far more comfortable in scenes with actresses than he had been before.
That said, while Wayne can hold his own with the other younger actors in these pictures, he’s unable to compete with Henry B. Walthall, although the frenetic pace of production would probably have defeated anybody but the most seasoned old pros.
For Wayne, these pictures would always be a trial by fire, something he had to do, and he took little pride in them. “I made $250 a week,” he said one day while looking at stills from this period. (Actually, $850 per picture.) “I was the star of these damn pictures. John Wayne this and that. $250 a week. No makeup man. I’d bring my car out there and put on the headlights at 4:30 in the morning and get a mirror and put on my own makeup. That was it.
“I’d change my clothes, read the lines, change my clothes, read some more lines. We’d start before dawn, using flares to light close-ups. When the sun came up, we’d do some medium-range shots. In full daylight, we’d do the distance shots, following the sun up one side of the hill and down the other side. It didn’t matter who was the director. They had no chance and I had no chance. They could sell five reels of film with me riding a horse.”
The mainly juvenile audiences of B westerns mandated dialogue that wasn’t much more complicated than “Indians! Circle the wagons! Get the women and children under cover!!” (actual dialogue), but within those limitations Wayne was gaining ground in terms of his skills, even if he was losing ground in terms of his collaborators.
On the other hand, the environment was to his liking. “Nothing is so discouraging to an actor than to have to work for long hours upon hours in brightly lighted interior sets,” he would write in a guest column around this time. “On western locations, which are generally three or four hundred miles from Los Angeles up in the mountains, we arise at five in the morning, then [spend] practically the entire day in the saddle—running, riding, chasing and jumping.”
His enthusiasm for a lifestyle he regarded as intrinsically healthy derived at least partially from John Ford, who grew to love making westerns for many reasons, among them the fact that they got him away from a town he was ambivalent about, and from people in that town whom he wasn’t at all ambivalent about: those who tried to tell him how to make pictures.
While Wayne was grinding out the westerns, his contract with Schlesinger got him a few bits at Warners. (He had eleven features and one serial released in 1933 alone.) The Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade uses a quick shot of Wayne in a film within the film before the musical numbers start. And he played a couple of tiny parts for a tough young director named William Wellman, with whom he would collaborate far more rewardingly twenty years later. In Wellman’s Central Airport, Wayne has no billing and no lines, but he does get a chance to dive into the studio tank and drown. In College Coach, Wayne walks up to Dick Powell and wishes him luck.
Also at Warners, there was another brief bi
t supporting Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in The Life of Jimmy Dolan, and a better part in the rough-and-ready Baby Face as one of the men Barbara Stanwyck beds and discards on her way to the penthouse.
The trajectory was unmistakable: Wayne could headline B westerns made for undiscerning audiences of kids or rural roughnecks, but for A or even A minus pictures, he was fit only for throwaways or bits.
Near the tail end of his westerns for Leon Schlesinger, Wayne played the lead in a picture called His Private Secretary, which was made by a company called Screencraft Productions somewhere in the darkest reaches of Poverty Row. The production manager was the young Sam Katzman, in the early stages of a forty-year career that would never be even tangentially involved with a good movie.
The plot of His Private Secretary is pretty strong for a five-day wonder—girl-crazy rich boy goes to work for his dad, gets fired, meets and marries a smart young girl, who goes to work for the father and earns his trust. Father and son are reconciled through the young wife. With a bit more polish it could have worked for an A picture at MGM, with an upmarket cast: Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, Lewis Stone.
What’s surprising is that for the first time, Wayne is good: charming, naturalistic, and believable, even though he’s working far out of his comfort zone. If anybody in the industry had seen His Private Secretary, it might have provided a different path for a young actor already being typecast in action films. But the problem with Poverty Row was that nobody gave you points for effort. The Motion Picture Herald sniffed, “There are no outstanding names with which to decorate the marquee, the two leading players being Evalyn Knapp and John Wayne, familiar names but that is all.” The romantic drama was a brief respite between stints at Mascot.
