by Scott Eyman
But Wayne’s co-workers knew they were having an affair, as did his friends, as did the FBI. Spurred by some barely literate letters claiming that Dietrich was a Nazi sympathizer—the truth was quite the reverse—the bureau began opening her letters and monitoring her bank accounts as well as her sex life. Besides Wayne, the FBI reported overlapping affairs with Gabin, Remarque, and Kay Francis.
Seven Sinners was shot from July to September 14, 1940. Of the film’s budget of $739,000, $150,000 was going to Dietrich. When the picture was finished, Wayne wanted to contribute to the cost of the traditional cast party that the producer and stars front for the cast and crew, but Garnett and Dietrich refused because he was only making his Republic salary.
Dietrich is billed over the title, while Wayne gets “With . . .” billing. It’s a pleasantly ramshackle affair bereft of plot but with a passel of great character actors (Mischa Auer, Oscar Homolka, Billy Gilbert, and the silent star Antonio Moreno). Dietrich sings “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.”
What Steven Bach referred to as Wayne’s “leatherneck masculinity” provided just as effective a seasoning for Dietrich’s languid eroticism as Jimmy Stewart’s hesitant willfulness had in Destry Rides Again. The material is vaguely Sternbergian, but Tay Garnett directs it to imitate the rhythms of the hugely successful Destry.
The Shepherd of the Hills had already begun shooting in and around Big Bear Lake while Seven Sinners was wrapping up. Wayne went right from one set to another, a pattern that would become close to normal during World War II, when he would become one of the most popular, as well as most bankable, of Hollywood stars.
The Shepherd of the Hills was a remake of a successful silent film about moonshiners and prodigal fathers, this time in stunning pastoral Technicolor. It’s essentially a Christian parable of forgiveness and by 1940 the material was verging on the archaic, but it had one advantage—the 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright had sold more than a million copies. The director was a temperamental wild man named Henry Hathaway, who would play a major part in Wayne’s career. Hathaway had directed The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a similarly groundbreaking Technicolor picture, a few years earlier, so the assignment was logical.
“A funny thing about Wayne,” said Hathaway. “Wayne is more particular about the pants he wears than anything in the world. . . . Unless he gets the thinnest kind of material, it drives him crazy. And I [told him], ‘You’ve got to wear homespun. You can’t wear cotton gabardine, for Chrissakes, or poplin or something. You’ve got to wear homespun.’ ”
Nearly twenty-five years later, Wayne walked into Hathaway’s office at Paramount to discuss The Sons of Katie Elder. On Hathaway’s wall was a still from The Shepherd of the Hills—Betty Field clothed in the homespun Hathaway had insisted on. Wayne stopped dead and stared at the picture. “Do you remember those damn pants?” Wayne asked.
Trailing Wayne to the location at Big Bear was Dietrich, who stayed at Arrowhead, about twenty miles away. One morning a panicked Ward Bond sought out Harry Carey’s wife, Ollie. Duke was missing, said Bond, and he didn’t want to even think about what Hathaway would do to a star who failed to show up.
Ollie Carey knew very well where Wayne was. She got in her car and headed for Arrowhead. Snow had fallen the night before, and she was driving slowly when she came around a bend and saw a man walking toward her, “a tall, lanky figure, and of course, it was Duke.” He quickly got in the car and she asked what happened.
Wayne explained that he’d started back from an evening with Dietrich, but his station wagon had hit a slick spot in the road and gone over an embankment. Wayne had jumped out before the crash, and had set out for Big Bear on foot. They got back to the location just as Hathaway was setting up his first shot. “I don’t think he ever knew what was going on between Duke and Marlene,” said Ollie Carey.
But Hathaway knew. “They had quite a thing going,” he remembered in 1980. “I don’t think he realized that I knew the extent of their relationship, but I was aware of what was going on.”
In later years, Hathaway tended to push past images to story, which accounts for an impression of brusqueness and lack of personal style. But in the first decade of his career, Hathaway was a visually graceful director—he had been an assistant to von Sternberg and it showed. In Shepherd of the Hills, he pulls off some stunning shots—Marc Lawrence trying to catch dust motes in a ray of sun, or a powerful scene of Beulah Bondi lighting her dead child on fire in a backwoods Viking funeral.
The picture provided Wayne’s first opportunity to work with a boyhood idol, and unlike Tom Mix, Harry Carey wasn’t a disappointment. If John Ford was the tough, demanding coach whose approval Wayne craved, Carey and his wife, Ollie, were surrogate parents who offered something approaching unconditional love. Their temperaments were well matched: Harry Carey was calm and good-humored, Ollie Carey was salty and plainspoken. (It’s no wonder that Ford cast her as a succession of flinty pioneer women.)
It was Ollie Carey who gave Wayne a piece of advice that became crucial in his career.
“Harry Carey always wore a good hat, a good pair of boots, and what he wore in between didn’t matter too much,” remembered Wayne.
He had a style of acting that has now become the way of acting in our business. He tried to play it down a little and be kind of natural. You have to keep things going and try and get your personality through, which is what Harry could do. I loved him, because I’d known him for years, and I was a young man and he was an older man.
Anyway, he and his wife were around . . . and I was talking about how I wanted to play every kind of part. The big hero that did everything, the heavies, everything. I wanted to play it all.
And Ollie Carey said, “Well, you big dumb son of a bitch.”
I said, “What’s the matter?”
She said, “Do you really mean what you said? That you’d like to play every kind of part? You think you’re Sydney Carton?”
And I said, “Yes, I’d like to get the chance to play all those things.”
And Harry was just standing there, and she said, “Do you want Harry Carey to be any different than he is in the movies?”
And I said, “No, of course not.”
And she said, “The American public [have] decided to take you into their homes and their hearts. They like the man they see. Forget all this other junk. Be like Harry.”
That was something I never forgot.
Duke Morrison had incrementally put together the pieces of a screen character over ten long years—a voice, a name, a walk that would grow more pronounced in the future, an overall attitude. He would continually analyze himself, as well as other actors, but Ollie Carey’s advice served as a defining shot to the chops from a woman he loved and respected.
Maybe he needed to rethink his hunger for character parts; maybe he should concentrate on developing and playing John Wayne.
The relationship with Dietrich continued for another year and a half. Early in 1942, Wayne and Dietrich were reunited on a remake of The Spoilers. Dietrich’s agent, Charles Feldman, had bought the remake rights to the Rex Beach novel for $17,500 in July 1941, packaged it, and turned around and sold it to Universal five months later for $50,000 and 25 percent of the profits.
Ollie Carey was amused by the affair. “You can tell—the way they look, the way they talk to each other, the way they flirt. Of course, Marlene was double-gated, you know. She had a very masculine-looking young woman that hung around the place a lot. But even so, Duke was quite taken with her and I could tell that Marlene was taken with him as well.”
The Spoilers was another hit, grossing nearly three times its cost.
Six months later, Wayne began his third and final film with Dietrich. Pittsburgh was again produced by Feldman, who sold Universal the script for a cheap $13,500, although the deal also involved the studio paying Feldman 12.5 percent of the first $240,000 in gross profits. (Feldman would eventually realize $147,843 as his share, a lot more than Wayne’s flat
$50,000 salary, which was also outpaced by Dietrich’s $100,000 and Randolph Scott’s $65,000.)
It’s a very watchable picture, written by a mélange of mostly uncredited Feldman clients (Tom Reed, John Twist, Winston Miller, Robert Fellows) and directed for speed by the B movie veteran Lew Seiler, who took over when Arthur Lubin backed out.
The picture begins as capital and labor unite for the war effort, then flashes back to Wayne as “Pittsburgh” Markham, a coal miner who has no intention of working for anybody but himself. He’s a self-confident master of men, and his charm barely covers his ruthlessness—he even two-times Dietrich, who, unbelievably, plays a woman called Josie.
Pittsburgh grows arrogant and corrupt, eventually marrying a ritzy society dame with whom he’s uncomfortable. He’s a ruthless boor who loses everything, then redeems himself by diving into war work. Dietrich’s Josie ends up bringing the two warring men together in a deeply unlikely but commercially effective ending.
By this time, Wayne and Dietrich had, as you might expect, an easy rapport together. While the film could have been played as a heavy drama, Seiler paces it like a screwball comedy. Pittsburgh cost $630,782, and had world rentals of $1.9 million—a considerable success.
Wayne and Dietrich never worked together again, although there were occasional meetings. Wayne always broke into a fond smile when the subject of Dietrich came up, and his précis description of his experience both on- and offscreen was enthusiasm itself: “FANTASTIC!”
Throughout this period, Wayne’s Josie was relegated to the part of the suffering wife. “Josephine was a wonderful gal, a very nice person, a real lady,” remembered Carolyn Roos Olsen, the daughter of the man who would become Wayne’s business manager. “It was a shame they couldn’t have stayed together. But everybody’s assumption was that her religion was strict; she had four children and didn’t want any more, which meant that Duke’s access to her was heavily restricted. And he started playing around.”
Josie endured much, and she tried to keep the marriage together. It seems that she asked a Father McCoy to come to the house and counsel her husband about his extramarital adventures. Wayne could not have been thrilled about his wife’s reliance on priests for domestic advice, but he was suitably contrite and promised to stop seeing Dietrich if Josie would let the matter drop and never bring it up again.
Moments after the priest left, Josie was talking about the affair. “That’s when I knew the marriage was over,” Wayne said. Wayne had been indulging himself with actresses for years, but Dietrich was very near the last straw. Sally Blane, Loretta Young’s sister, said that she overheard Wayne telling a priest, “Father, you just don’t know what it means to really screw a woman!”
Wayne halfheartedly attempted to justify his behavior by emphasizing the disparity in their social standing. “We’d go to the fancy social night spots,” Wayne remembered near the end of his life. “Josephine was really into that. Hell, I was even in the Blue Book. I enjoyed some of these people, but a lot of them, I didn’t. Josie’s society crowd didn’t look down on actors and movies. I was accepted by them. But my work threw me with people they didn’t accept. When I had to tell Josie I was going out with this guy who spits tobacco, she just couldn’t deal with it. So I just went out by myself and finally it got so I couldn’t handle both worlds and Josie and I just sort of drifted apart.”
“Josie was the greatest,” said her daughter-in-law Gretchen Wayne.
But she had a temper. They each had tempers. Michael’s dad always said, “I wish I had waited; I wish your mother could have been more patient with me. I was a young man; I thought [infidelity] was part of the contract.”
Bob Hope’s wife was patient; Ray Milland’s wife was patient. When Grace Kelly went to work on a picture with Ray, Mal Milland knew the affair would be over when the film was over. Many Hollywood wives know that.
But Granny wouldn’t put up with it. She just didn’t have the patience for philandering. It put her in a terrible position. In those days you had to go downtown to the cardinal for a divorce. A marriage meant something.
The two lovers now enacted a sex-reversed “Pygmalion,” as Dietrich introduced Wayne to Bö (pronounced “Boo”) Roos, her business manager. Roos ran the Beverly Management Corporation, which had a roster of thirty clients that included Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, Red Skelton, Johnny Weissmuller, Ray Milland, the Andrews Sisters, and Fred MacMurray.
Roos was a man’s man, a ladies’ man. He was born in 1903, made a fortune in the California real estate boom of the 1920s, and segued into money management. He sported a fedora, good suits, had a beautiful smile and blue eyes that women regarded as sexy. His standard fee was 3.5 percent of net return, and he usually invested his own money alongside his clients’. There was no written contract, because, said Roos’s daughter, Carolyn Roos Olsen, “Movie stars are a different breed of cat. They’re emotional, and the lack of a contract made them feel that they could come and go as they pleased. And it formed more of a friendship than a strictly legal arrangement.”
Roos’s wife was the daughter of a Beverly Hills builder, and Roos believed devoutly in real estate, partially because it was the easiest entity on which to get tax deductions. Roos and Fred MacMurray built several apartment buildings that still exist, one on Olympic, one on Spaulding. They also purchased the California Country Club in West Los Angeles, which did very well—Roos’s (mostly correct) instincts were that golf would always be more popular than tennis, because tennis was too much like work.
Wayne was comfortable in business relationships that were also personal friendships—a quirk that would cost him a great deal of money over the years. He and Roos soon became buddies, with equivalent passions for the Republican Party and Mexico. “They should have had dual citizenships,” said Olsen. They traveled together, bought a boat together—the Nor’wester, a big, wooden seventy-six-foot ship—drank together, played poker together.
But Roos still had to struggle with his most famous client, simply because once Wayne made up his mind, no further discussion was necessary. Even if Wayne got good advice, he was perfectly capable of ignoring it. Saying no to Wayne was not only not easy, it could be counterproductive.
“Duke was a man’s man all the way,” remembered Olsen. “He loved being with the guys, playing cards, drinking and smoking. That was the Duke. He talked that way too, and was forever apologizing to my mother for his language.”
One story indicates the level of trust Wayne had in Roos; it also indicates his level of generosity. Roos had opened a place called the Cabana Club, a swimming pool/bar/getaway, but the timing was wrong—when it opened, the backyard swimming pool was common in Hollywood. One night, Roos glumly observed that the Cabana Club was in trouble. Wayne took out his checkbook and handed it to Roos. “Write in any amount you need to keep this place going and I’ll sign the check.”
As a friend, admirable; as a businessman, disastrous.
“I always thought Duke was an intelligent man,” said Olsen, “but vulnerable when it came to the really nice guy con man type.” Wayne was, with good reason, becoming optimistic about money—any temporary financial shortfall could be solved by doing another movie.
But other disasters wouldn’t be so easily fixed. The woman who became Wayne’s second wife was Bö Roos’s fault. In August 1941, Roos took a group of clients to Mexico to see about an investment in a movie studio. Wayne, MacMurray, Milland, and Ward Bond were staying at the Hotel Reforma when Milland introduced Wayne to a young woman named Esperanza Baur Díaz Ceballos, known as “Chata,” or “pug-nose.” Wayne was immediately taken, despite the fact that Milland had been taken some time before, and she was generally regarded as Milland’s private port of call.
Chata began flirting, Wayne responded and soon he was telling Roos that the great thing about Latin women was that they liked the simple things–marriage, family, children, a home. Roos was appalled. For one thing, Chata was quite obviously the woman you took to bed, not the wo
man you married, and he didn’t believe that Chata—or her omnipresent mother—were remotely capable of being Hollywood wives.
“Dad’s response to Chata was that Duke couldn’t afford her,” said Olsen. “How can I put this? She was a Mexican woman trained to be a friend to men. Oh, hell, she was a courtesan. I never thought she was attractive because she had blotchy skin; I couldn’t understand what Duke saw in her. Dad knew her history, and Duke knew her history, but Duke fell in love.”
Roos had several come-to-Jesus meetings with his client. In one room he was yelling at Wayne that he couldn’t possibly afford another financial burden. In the next room, Carolyn Roos was talking to Chata, saying it was a bad idea to marry a man with so many family obligations. Then there was the fourteen-year age difference. All of their combined arguments failed to make a dent.
There was always a great deal of on/off, back/forth with Chata. The affair was tempestuous, and it was a preview of coming attractions. “We kept trying to talk him out of marrying her,” said Olsen. “One time after a meeting at our house, he walked me out to my car and got in with me. He turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Would you please call Chata and tell her I love her?’ ”
“Chata made a certain kind of sense,” said Gretchen Wayne. “Her mother was a madam, and she came out of the brothels of Mexico.” A man who had only recently been introduced to the further reaches of sensuality by Marlene Dietrich was now head over heels with his very own Mexican spitfire. Within a few months, Chata was in Hollywood, where she was put under contract by Herbert Yates. Chata became an accepted part of Wayne’s life. Victor McLaglen’s son Andrew remembered a night at John Ford’s house on Odin Street when Wayne got down on his knees and told Chata how much he loved her.
In a background document probably written by Bev Barnett, Wayne’s publicity man, the standard line for Wayne’s rapidly approaching divorce was devised. It was not inaccurate so much as deeply self-serving: “Josie . . . was a Pasadena society girl. Duke’s pals were Ward Bond and John Ford, both of whom she loathed. Duke liked to drink and raise hell; Josie liked to go to society parties in Pasadena. Wayne is not a tuxedo man. Duke always has said if he could make as much money propping, he would rather do that than act. Because a prop man can do as he pleases; a star can’t. Duke is a passionate guy; Josie was cold. When that was brought up in court, she pointed to her four children. Wayne said . . . ‘Yeah, four times in ten years.’ On the surface they lived happily for ten years; the fact is they should never have been married in the first place.”
