by Scott Eyman
Finally, after a few calls from Washington, and from the Marine Corps, Yates agreed that Wayne should make the movie. It was a time of congressional committees looking hard at military appropriations; there was some thought being given to folding the Marines into the Army, and the Marines thought that a big gung ho movie would serve as good propaganda for maintaining a stand-alone Corps.
At Wayne’s suggestion, Jimmy Grant was brought in to polish the script. That same year, Grant earned $12,500 plus 10 percent of the profits for the screenplay of Republic’s Rock Island Trail, and still later that year Yates paid him $15,000 for a script for California Passage. By comparison, Harry Brown got only $5,000 for the story and treatment of Sands of Iwo Jima. (The lowly writers of Republic’s Roy Rogers westerns were lucky to get $3,000 per script.)
There was a good deal of friction between Grant, Brown, director Allan Dwan, and Grainger, but without Wayne there really wasn’t going to be a movie, at least not a movie the size of Sands of Iwo Jima, so the star got his way.
Sands of Iwo Jima was shot in July and August of 1949. Republic paid some money to Camp Pendleton for their trouble, and in return had the use of an entire battalion for as long as it took to make the movie. The Marines gave the production a technical advisor, Captain Leonard Fribourg, who taught the actors how to handle their weapons, and who also ran interference with the brass to make sure that Republic got whatever it needed.
The actors remembered that the Marines of Camp Pendleton blended in with the actors staying at the Carlsbad Hotel. “There wasn’t a feeling that, you know, here’s an actor, and here’s a Marine,” said Wally Cassell. Leonard Fribourg remembered that the actors were appropriately gung ho. “They wanted to do it, wanted to cooperate. They wanted to wear the uniform right, the emblems, wanted to know what the stripes meant, wanted to know the Marine Corps lingo, and put the right words in the right place.”
Richard Jaeckel remembered that he got into the habit of setting his alarm clock earlier and earlier “cause I knew each day was gonna be better than the preceding one because we were having such a great time, all of us—it was more than a job.”
Fribourg said there was only one outright invention. In a scene where Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker is teaching his men bayonet fighting, he loses his patience and intentionally clobbers a man with a rifle. When Wayne rehearsed the scene, Fribourg said that he “almost fell off my chair.” He charged off to Allan Dwan and said there was no way a sergeant would hit his own man with a rifle butt. Dwan pointed out that the script had been approved by the Corps, but Fribourg was adamant. The matter went all the way to Washington, where Fribourg was overruled.
Dwan believed that for the first time Wayne related the qualities and flaws of the character he was playing to himself. “We had long conversations about the interpretation of the character. Sergeant Stryker was a man who was divorced from his wife and he had a son, and he got letters from his son. And yet he felt somehow guilty that he wasn’t with his family—that he was off doing this other thing and that he had neglected his child.
“As we talked about Sergeant Stryker’s relationship with his own family and with his son late one night, I looked at Duke and tears were rolling down his cheeks, and he mentioned his own son and his wife and how he had made mistakes and how the whole family had suffered for his mistakes.”
Wayne would tell the military historian Lawrence Suid that he became “a sort of Richelieu of Republic” during the struggle to make Sands of Iwo Jima. He peppered Fribourg with questions, as well as a warrant officer who typified the Marine spirit that Wayne wanted to put on the screen. Wayne came to realize that the Marines didn’t train men to die for their country; they trained men to be such expert fighters that they could fight for their country over and over again. “It was survival training,” said Wayne of the boot camp process. “We learned that you didn’t get to the bottom of the barrel toward the end of the war. You got to the young fellow who was so damn good that the older fellows couldn’t hardly keep up with him.”
“Wayne was terrific with young actors,” remembered William Self, who played one of three Marine recruits that make an entrance in the middle of the movie. “They’d been shooting for quite a while, and we were all nervous because we weren’t part of the established group. He sat down, ran lines with us, played chess with us. I wasn’t any good at chess, but there weren’t a lot of other guys to play with. He tried to put young actors at their ease.”
He also tried to give young actors tricks of the trade. When Wally Cassell had to exit a scene, Wayne said, “Don’t respond that quickly. Before you make an exit, make a move first, then go. That gives you an extra four or five feet of film.”
Richard Jaeckel was only twenty-two at the time, and he said, “You’re pretty feisty at 22, but you weren’t feisty around this guy, really. He just set the tone for everything. And yet when it came time to zig and zag, he’d horse around with the best of them, but when he declared, ‘This is the time,’ you’d better decide along with him because otherwise, it’d be hard; it’d be tough.”
Leonard Fribourg might have been expected to look askance at an actor who had never served playing a military hero, but he called Wayne “a great American and a hell of a good guy that took care of people and made sure that they were in good shape. . . . And he was very fine with children.” Fribourg’s three-year-old daughter had a birthday while the film was in production, and Wayne insisted on attending the party and wishing her a happy birthday.
In coming years, Wayne would slowly accrete a reputation as a director killer—a star who could undermine or even appropriate the director’s function if he didn’t like what the director was doing. A childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of utter powerlessness had resulted in a man who was determined to be the master of his own fate, not to mention image.
But his attitude toward the veteran Allan Dwan, whose credits went back to the World War I era and wonderful movies with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., was respectful. “Wayne knew all about Dwan’s career,” said Self, “and he felt good about him. They had a good relationship.”
Sands of Iwo Jima was a big picture for Republic, and went over budget by more than $400,000, which didn’t make Herbert Yates happy. “A philanthropist he was not,” said Richard Jaeckel.1
When it was released in 1949, Sands of Iwo Jima was a smash hit, earning rentals of $4.2 million. The picture also earned Wayne his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor, up against Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High), Kirk Douglas (Champion), Richard Todd (The Hasty Heart), and Broderick Crawford (All the King’s Men). Crawford won.
By the end of 1949, John Ford’s Argosy Productions was in trouble. Fort Apache had amassed a world gross of $4.3 million against a cost of $2.14 million, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon had done nearly as well, but the profits weren’t enough to pay off the dead loss of The Fugitive, which had been the first Argosy production for RKO. Argosy owed nearly $700,000 on the picture, and it also owed the bank $320,000 on the recently completed Wagon Master. Then there was $235,000 owed to Ford and Merian C. Cooper for unpaid salaries and other incidentals. On top of all that, neither Wayne nor Fonda had gotten their profit percentages from Fort Apache. Argosy had little choice but to sell its pictures to RKO in return for a clean financial slate.
With no better offers on the table for Argosy, Wayne’s propaganda campaign about the benefits of Republic finally bore fruit. In January 1950, Argosy signed a three-picture deal with Republic. The contract specified that the pictures were to be made within a two-year period beginning March 6, 1950, and that none of the pictures would cost more than $1.25 million. Republic would pay for production costs, but except for the salaries of a couple of secretaries, Argosy had to pay the rest of its expenses. No provisions were made for salaries for Ford or Cooper; they and Argosy had to survive on the 50 percent of the profits that Yates agreed to pay them. In return for the tight financial parameters, Yates gave Ford final cut.
Bringing Coach to th
e studio cost Wayne a great deal of money. On both Rio Grande and The Quiet Man, the pictures Ford made for Republic in which Wayne starred, Wayne gave up his 10 percent of the profits and worked for a straight $100,000 per picture in order to keep the economics feasible.
Rio Grande was devised as a make-good so that Herbert Yates would finance The Quiet Man—Ford’s dream project. In order to facilitate production, Ford shot it in Moab rather than Monument Valley, which was harder to get in and out of, thus requiring more time and money.
“Moab was much better than Monument Valley,” remembered Mike Wayne. “You had motels with air conditioning and things like that, and you had a great restaurant, The Red Door. You weren’t quite as remote as you were when working [in Monument Valley]. Then, it was almost like being in the cavalry, you know.”
Yates insisted that the Sons of the Pioneers appear in Rio Grande, which Ford found appalling, but he found a way to work them in as a sort of musical Greek chorus, cavalry style.
Rio Grande was shot from mid-June to mid-July 1950. Mike Wayne was on summer vacation, so came on the shoot and hung out with the wranglers, stuntmen, and the prop men—the latter because they had the guns and Mike was interested in firearms. Hanging out with them was also a way of avoiding Ford, whose preferred term for Mike was “Numbnuts,” even as he doted on his godson Pat Wayne.
Claude Jarman Jr., who had won a special Oscar for his performance in The Yearling, was playing the son of Rio Grande co-stars Wayne and O’Hara. “No one could ever know what Ford was thinking,” remembered Jarman. Actors often did scenes that weren’t in the script, and someone told Jarman not to bother to learn his lines, because they would probably all be changed anyway.
For a scene with Harry Carey Jr., Jarman mastered the difficult and dangerous stunt of Roman riding—riding two horses while standing up, one foot on each horse. This endeared Jarman to Ford, so he could do no wrong.
As always with young actors, Wayne was approachable and kind. In contrast to Maureen O’Hara’s retrospective claims of perpetual humiliation at Ford’s hands, Jarman said that “Ford adored Maureen. He treated her as a queen.”
Esprit de corps was not an option; it was enforced. The cast and crew stayed at the same hotel, were driven to and from the set as a group, and ate their meals together. At night, there were more impromptu theatricals—Maureen O’Hara sang Irish songs, Victor McLaglen did vaudeville sketches he had performed as a young man, and Wayne had to sing. Badly.
O’Hara was making her first picture for the director since How Green Was My Valley. Wayne and O’Hara had met at Ford’s house in May 1941, and found that their friendship carried over into their working process, although O’Hara was appalled at Ford’s cruelty toward Wayne, which she termed “vicious . . . extremely severe.”
Wayne took it—Wayne almost always took it—but not everybody would. One night over dinner, Ford thought Ben Johnson was unhappy over the way Ford had handled a scene that day. Ford began belittling him, calling him “stupid” over and over again. Johnson got up and left, but not before telling Ford quietly what he could do with his picture. Ben Johnson didn’t work for John Ford for fifteen years.
Back at the studio, Wayne was enraged when he found out that Herbert Yates was refusing to pay him his percentage from Sands of Iwo Jima, which led him to go on strike and refuse to show up for several days of shooting. Yates went down to the inactive set and ordered Ford to shoot around Wayne. Ford flatly refused and told Yates to “quit messing around with my hired help.” Wayne got his money and went back to work.
Because of the quid pro quo nature of the production, and the fact that Ford shot it very quickly—five weeks—using mostly first takes, Mike Wayne thought at the time that it “didn’t have the same oomph that the other Ford pictures had. I really thought it was one of the lesser films. But when you look at it today, you really realize how good it is.”
True. Although there are too many songs, Rio Grande is distinguished by the delicacy of its emotion and the beauty of its photography, including some stunning day-for-night work. Ford kicks in with his heroic imagery from the beginning, as the exhausted cavalry comes back from a mission to be met by the women of the fort, who gather to see if their men have survived.
Ford is a master of the gesture that reveals subtext. After Kirby Yorke—nobody has ever figured out the extra “e” in the name of the character from Fort Apache—and his son have an angry confrontation, the son leaves. Yorke walks over to the side of the canvas tent and silently checks his own height against the boy’s, revealing a father’s pride that he’s too proud to admit.
For Ford, words are for story, images are for emotion . . . or beauty.
In its central situation of an estranged husband and wife whose essential passion for each other is never compromised, the film is a dry run for the central narrative of The Quiet Man. Wayne’s performance is equal parts steel and grace—the burden of responsibility leavened by the realization of what that responsibility has cost him.
There are three words that chill the blood of the most indiscriminate movie lover: “Howard Hughes Presents.” It wasn’t always that way; Hughes began his career with some effective genre pieces in the silent and early sound days: The Racket, Scarface, The Front Page. But as he got richer and more heavily medicated, his films became underwritten and overshot, full of mismatched shots and grainy opticals—remnants of shooting schedules that were simultaneously endless and haphazard.
In 1948, Hughes bought a controlling interest in RKO. Wayne already had a loose arrangement with the studio, where he had made Tall in the Saddle, Back to Bataan, Tycoon, and, for Ford, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Wayne and Hughes were alike in some respects—anticommunists—and unlike in others—Hughes was a promiscuous isolate.
The pictures Hughes produced for Wayne are among the most bizarre in the annals of Hollywood. They include Flying Leathernecks— a gung ho World War II movie directed by Nicholas Ray, of all people; Jet Pilot—a movie shot between December 1949 and May 1950 that wasn’t released until 1957, directed by Josef von Sternberg, of all people; and The Conqueror, the legendarily terrible movie in which Wayne plays Genghis Khan, directed by Dick Powell . . . of all people.
Flying Leathernecks—the title sounds like a Mel Brooks parody of a war movie—was designed by Hughes as a test of Nicholas Ray’s political and professional loyalty. Ray and Robert Ryan were liberal and Wayne and most of the rest of the cast weren’t, which made for some interesting lunchtime discussions.
“Wayne would close all political discussions with ‘You’re full of shit!’ ” remembered Rod Amateau, the dialogue director. Despite that, the company grew fond of its star. “Wayne was always a very prudent, careful man,” said Amateau. “He was kind to everybody. And he felt sorry that Nick made a lot of enemies. The reason Nick made enemies wasn’t because he was a bad person, he honestly wasn’t, he was a good, decent person. But he was so intense about his work. If nothing matters but the work, you’re going to make enemies.”
Ray was an acolyte of Elia Kazan and lived and breathed emotional conflict. Like his mentor, he brought something new and authentic to Hollywood. He was fascinated by Wayne’s clarity of character, and stimulated by what he believed were untapped dramatic reservoirs. “I thought the Broadway drugstore critics who hadn’t yet been asked out to Hollywood were just terribly imperceptive about him,” said Ray. “He was a much better actor than most people gave him credit for being, almost daily full of nice surprises. But he was not flexible about himself. He couldn’t conceive that I would be serious in wanting him to do O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet.”
Flying Leathernecks and The Conqueror fall into known genres. Jet Pilot is something eccentrically homemade, something . . . insane. The narrative is conventionally anticommunist: a female Russian jet pilot seeks asylum in America, but she’s a double agent intent on discovering American secrets. Marriage to Wayne and an immersion in American consumer culture turn her around.
Wayne’s ears pricked up when von Sternberg noted Wayne’s chessboard and made a remark about the excellence of his own game. “I played him without looking at the board,” said Wayne. “And I beat him. Pure luck. He was livid.”
“Jet Pilot was the first time I ever used a four-letter word on a movie set,” remembered Janet Leigh.
It wasn’t the last time, but it was the first. Von Sternberg was a very frustrating man. It’s not that he yelled; it was his attitude. He was used to working in the days when you could be Hitler, with Marlene in complete thrall. He was talented, no question, but his way had gone.
Von Sternberg was a little man, very short. Slight. Duke was a giant. And strong. And Sternberg directed him to act as if Duke was the size of von Sternberg. In one scene he had me knocking Duke out! Sternberg directed him as if he was a little man instead of the big man he was.
I asked Duke, “Why don’t you say something?”
And he said, “I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
Von Sternberg was never abusive, just aggravating, and controlling. He didn’t think the camera operator could operate the camera, he had to do that. He had to light the scene—no one could do anything but him. It was strictly a solo flight; he wasn’t a group player.
