by Scott Eyman
Wellman . . . Wellman was enthusiastic. He had his day’s work in his mind when he walked on the set in the morning. He would talk to the cameraman, they lit it. Everything was preplanned, and there was no room for discussion whatever. He didn’t do a lot of takes, you did it his way and that was it. He knew what he wanted and he would go and get it.
I had a scene where I was supposed to break down and cry in front of the other men. I wanted my character to be silent in the interior of the plane, but Wellman said he wanted me to scream it out. In the rehearsal I did it my way, but he made me scream it out anyway.
Neither Ford nor Wellman was a cinch to work for, but I can only tip my hat to Duke. He wasn’t like what he was on the screen. On-screen, he was a strong, strong American leading man, [but] I always remember him sitting at Oliver Hardy’s feet, in awe of a star that he didn’t consider himself to be on the same level with.
Given the speed with which Wellman and Wayne made Island in the Sky, the picture couldn’t help but be profitable, but Jack Warner wasn’t prepared for its quality. “Ran Island in the Sky last night with Wellman Bob [Fellows] and boys,” he wired Wayne on April 29, 1953. “This is one of the most important pictures have seen in long time. Believe will have as much impact as Dawn Patrol and Wings.” A couple of months later, Warner’s opinion was confirmed by a preview and he again wired Wayne: “Had wonderful preview Island in the Sky last night. You and all concerned are to be congratulated. If you were here you would have been as proud as we were.” Charlie Feldman also chimed in, writing it was “a wonderful, wonderful film. It still lingers in my mind, after these many days.”
But praise from the studio boss was not about to nudge Wayne into a supplicating posture. On September 18, 1953, he wrote a letter to Jack Warner grousing about the fact that he and Bob Fellows had personally spent $3,000 for a party after the premiere, with plenty of TV and still cameras and reporters present, only to find that Warner Bros. had already opened the picture in some areas of the country before the news about its quality could get out.
“I was under the impression that when you have a class picture, it is a good idea to get the publicity in the people’s minds before it is released for grind runs. I know it doesn’t have the news value or the selling possibilities of something like The Robe, but . . . when you have the critics on your side, it would be a good idea to play the picture for a week or so in one place and let the news travel before it goes into the grind.”
On one level, Island in the Sky is old-home week; showing up in small parts are Bob Steele, Andy Devine, Harry Carey Jr., and Paul Fix. On another level it’s a very personal story for both its director and its star—an essay on their idea of courage. The story is simple—a transport plane goes down in Labrador in uncharted territory. The film cross-cuts between the five-man crew struggling to survive and the men who are searching for it. Wellman narrates the film himself, quietly, intently, from the inside of a pilot’s sensibility, and mixes in a stream-of-consciousness voice-over from Wayne’s character, so the audience knows his uncertainty and fear—things he can’t afford to show to his men.
This terse minor masterpiece is directed and played with precision and force.
By the time Island in the Sky was in previews, Wayne was in Mexico wrestling with Hondo, a heat wave, and an intransigent 3-D camera. Hondo derives from a Louis L’Amour story that is quite different from the film. The bulk of the original story involves Ches Lane, who searches for a young wife named Angie on the Texas plains to tell her that her husband was killed while trying to protect a stranger in a saloon fight. Ches is captured by Apaches and fights his way to their respect. The Apaches deliver him to Angie, suggesting that he is strong and brave and will be good for her.
Jimmy Grant improved the story in innumerable ways. He made Angie’s husband a skulking brute who is himself killed by Hondo, thereby creating suspense as to how she’ll react when she finds out the brave stranger with whom she’s falling in love killed her husband. Grant gave Hondo and the Indian chief Vittorio a relationship of grudging mutual respect, and he gave Hondo a dog who mirrors his owner’s self-reliance and lack of need for others. In many respects, it’s a model creative adaptation—everything Grant did sharpens the conflicts and strengthens the characters.
But making a movie with a largely untried technology on a distant and primitive location is a recipe for trouble, especially when your camera is malfunctioning. Hondo was shot in the summer of 1953 in Camargo, Mexico, five hundred miles south of El Paso, a hundred miles from Chihuahua. It was the biggest thing ever to hit Camargo’s seventeen thousand inhabitants, but for everyone else it was concentrated hell.
The temperature never went below a hundred, and occasionally went twenty degrees past that. Sam, Hondo’s scruffy dog, was actually played by Lassie, covered with Fuller’s earth to make him look bedraggled. Since the ground was too hot to walk on, Lassie was outfitted with leather booties to wear between shots. Some of the enterprising Camargo locals kidnapped the dog and held him for ransom; after the ransom was paid, he was returned unharmed.
Adding to the difficulties was the fact that the film was being photographed in 3-D by what Warners was calling their “all media” camera, a five-hundred-pound behemoth mounted on a special truck with an elevator platform that could rise thirty feet and could shoot film simultaneously in 2-D, 3-D, flat, or in the widescreen ratio of 1:85. “We had a wonderful first day,” Wayne wrote Jack Warner, “if that monster got what we pointed it at.”
In that era, 3-D was photographed on two separate 35mm negatives by two cameras that approximated the angle and distance between two human eyes. When projected with Polaroid filters mounted in front of two 35mm projectors running in precise synchronization onto a silver screen, the effect on the audience—also outfitted with Polaroid glasses—was stereoscopic imagery. It was hard enough to shoot in the studio, but on a dusty location it was particularly stressful.
On June 17, Wayne wrote Jack Warner complaining that it took an hour and a half to get a simple two-shot because of the huge camera. What they needed, he told Warner, was the just-off-the-assembly line new 3-D camera that made setting up shots much easier. “We are throwing away what we think are values in composition because of the cameraman’s worries from the talks he’s had with the front office,” wrote Wayne. “He’s worried about his reputation.”
Wayne begged for the second camera so that they could save what he estimated would be about three hours of production time a day. Wayne wrote that at this rate Hondo would take forty-five days to make, about a third longer than the original estimate, all because of the difficulties they were having with the camera.
On June 18, Jack Warner wired Wayne that the new 3-D camera would be on its way in a week and he could keep it and the old one for a week to ten days.
Then Warner moved on to the matter of the rushes. “Saw three reels second group dailies tonight. Everything very good except director is not moving you and Geraldine [Page] close enough to camera. Everything seems to be too far away. Must have usual over shoulders close shots individuals and tight twos in three dimensional pictures so we can see people’s expressions and everything else. . . . All of this fundamental in making a picture which am sure Farrow you cameraman know. Best wishes . . .”
Wayne quickly responded: “Farrow has done everything but play music to try and get camera in for close shots . . . cameraman is over-cautious for fear front office will scream eyestrain. Will show cameraman your wire.”
The harried cameraman was Robert Burks, a staff cameraman who had been trained on the nascent 3-D technology. Wayne thought Burks was good, but he also realized that Burks’s ultimate allegiance was to Warner Bros., not Wayne-Fellows and not Hondo. A further complication was that the unit had to travel from Camargo, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, to see their rushes, which they couldn’t do every day, so they spent their entire time in Mexico on tenterhooks waiting for Jack Warner’s reaction to the rushes in Los Angeles.
Wayne’s leading lady was Geraldine Page, a fine actress but an eccentric person. Among those eccentricities was a hesitance about the use of soap and water. “She thought that was cute, walking around smelling like a goat,” said Tom Kane. Page was rooming with Mary St. John, who was made unpleasantly aware of Page’s shoddy hygiene. St. John endured it for a time, but finally she explained to Page that the next day’s work was the love scene between her and Wayne. “I strongly suggest you bathe tonight. It’s better that I tell you, because he’ll tell you, and he’ll tell you in front of the whole cast and crew.” Page took St. John’s advice.
It was Wayne’s first film with John Farrow, who proved to be a good director, but one who was excessively class-conscious. One morning he asked Wayne what he had done the night before.
“I went out with the boys,” said Wayne, meaning the stuntmen.
“Well, you shouldn’t do that,” said Farrow.
“What do you mean?” said Wayne. “They made me what I am.”
Until he began delegating duties to Michael Wayne around 1960, Wayne was always a hands-on producer, and Hondo’s 3-D technology forced him to be even more vociferous. “Every morning, when he would be hung over, he would have a screaming fit,” said Geraldine Page. “He’d yell at somebody until he got hoarse. He would pick on some technical point, and he was always right.”
Page also noticed the peculiar gravitational pull of a great star, the way they attract sycophants and hangers-on. “Everybody tried to be Duke’s right-hand man and his favorite. It was like the stories you hear about the old court days. Everybody was trying to slice everybody else’s reputation in the Duke’s eyes. There was tremendous, tremendous competition.”
It was a time of convulsive upheaval in the movie business. Movie attendance had been plummeting since the end of World War II, and the studios were counting on 3-D and widescreen processes to stop the descent. Charles Feldman wrote Wayne and told him about a recent dinner with “Herr Warner.” While Warner was still “overboard” about 3-D, “for the first time he said, ‘CinemaScope will absolutely clean up.’ Everyone’s opinion seems to be that once The Robe and the other Fox pictures are released, there will be a mad rush by everyone to get CinemaScope.”
The Hondo crew finally got the second camera from Los Angeles, but it wasn’t long before Warners began agitating to get it back so they could use it for another 3-D production. (Clearly, the studio felt that time was of the essence regarding the fad for 3-D, which indeed turned out to be the case.)
Right after the second camera got to the location, the original camera broke down. They got the old camera fixed and held it in reserve in case anything went wrong with the new camera, which was both easier to use, lighter, and less prone to breakdown.
Stuck in Mexico under terrible heat and with technical problems to match, Wayne finally exploded. “I am goddamned sick and tired of every time I come in from location to have my Production Department say that you want that other camera,” he wrote on July 7. He went on to inform Jack Warner’s assistant Steve Trilling that he had no intention of sending the camera back before the unit returned from location. “If you don’t want to cooperate in this, just call me up and tell me to bring the camera back and I’ll bring it back and cancel our relationship.”
Having opened with anger, Wayne closed with logic. Warners had told him they had no more camera motors for the cameras in Los Angeles, the spares were down in Camargo with Hondo, and they certainly couldn’t afford to risk losing their spare motors. The second camera would be of no use to anybody in L.A. anyway.
He closed by telling Trilling to go right ahead and show the letter to Jack Warner. He had the second camera, he needed it to make the film in something close to an expeditious manner, and nobody was going to pry it loose from his grip.
Ward Bond was working on the picture, and Geraldine Page said that Wayne’s and Bond’s conversations tended to center on philosophy and politics. “John Wayne would talk so sensibly, while Ward Bond was just an oversimplifying bully. John Wayne, I feel, was a reactionary for all sorts of non-reactionary reasons. He would always say such sensible human things; he was so quick about everything, mentally as well as physically.”
Page came to feel that the cornerstone of Wayne’s personality was an honesty that demanded honesty in return. “He hates all kinds of hypocrisy and folderol. He’s a terribly honest man, and that comes across on the screen, underlined by the kind of parts he plays. One of his first mottos, I think, is always to be the hero to the people around you. Wayne has a leadership quality, so that people revere him.”
Page would be irritated by Wayne’s disparaging remarks about Stanislavsky and New York actors, but he would always back off when he sensed Page was about to explode. “ ‘Aw, Geraldine, you’re not mad at the old Duke, are you?’ And I would melt and say, ‘No.’ Then I’d go back to the motel and say, ‘What have I done? I’m so stupid. I’m the same as everybody else, I get taken by that charm, that tremendous charm.’ I just loved him.”
Wayne retained his unusual sensitivity to the crew, probably because of the years he had spent as one of them. The company had been shooting at a dry lake bed when a storm blew in. The Americans abandoned the location and left the Mexican crew to take care of the equipment. Hours later, Wayne was worried about the Mexicans, who were spending the night outside in the cold. He woke up the caterer, and the two men put together coffee, sandwiches, and bottles of tequila. Duke and the caterer took the food out to the location where they ate, drank, and sang with the crew until it was time to go back to work.
While Wayne was coping with 3-D, he was also coping with his divorce. In the middle of 1953, Chata was living in an Encino house that Wayne was renting for $1,354 a month. A preliminary hearing got under way in the last week of May 1953. Wayne’s accountant testified that out of every $500,000 Wayne earned, he had about $50,700 left after taxes and living expenses. $155,000 would go for professional expenses, $187,200 for federal income tax, and $15,300 for child support. Wayne’s net worth, according to the accountant, was a mere $160,000, and his liabilities amounted to $394,075. Wayne himself testified that he hadn’t seen a paycheck in years—his money went directly into the coffers of Bö Roos’s Beverly Management Company. Wayne was also paying his mother-in-law $650 a month because, supposedly, he had promised to support her when he married Chata. (The mother-in-law stipend was ended by the court.)
Interestingly, the court filings revealed that Chata received $150 a week from Republic Pictures between 1942 and December of 1953 despite the fact that the studio had never called her to work as an actress—about $78,000 in all. This was the sort of minor payoff that studios indulged in all the time, putting a useless relative or mistress on the payroll in order to keep a star happy. Some of the money might even be funneled into the star’s accounts without the IRS being any the wiser. That a chronically cheap outfit like Republic would fork over nearly $10,000 a year for services that were being rendered not to the studio but to a star shows just how important Wayne had been to the studio.
Other arcane sidelights of studio finances came out. RKO had loaned Wayne $100,000 at 2 percent interest so he could buy his house; the loan was being repaid by monthly deductions from his salary. Wayne also testified that he was carrying about $8,120 in bad debts, among them loans to Bob Steele and Grant Withers, which he didn’t expect to be repaid.
Wayne regularly attended the court hearings, mostly maintaining a stoic facade except one time when Chata’s attorney said to the judge, “But your honor, what if I can prove that John Wayne is a liar?” Wayne turned red, smashed his fist down on the guard railing and partially rose from his seat. After a few moments, he left the courtroom for a cigarette.
By July, Chata was indulging in exotic divorce theater. With her claimed “unlimited charge accounts” long gone, and her car repossessed over an unpaid liquor and grocery bill of $2,367, she drove a battered pickup truck to a court date. “Why doesn’t someone ask her if the only
time she ever drives this truck is to court?” Wayne asked reporters during a break. Then a little girl put a note in his pocket. It was from her mother, asking him to consider the child for a part in a movie.
Under questioning, Wayne talked about his encounter with a stripper, which led to the infamous hickey. “We were making the picture Bullfighter. One night it was arranged to go to Mr. Boetticher’s home. It was so-called stag—the only one I ever went to in six years of marriage, incidentally. We had drinks. A man sat down at the piano and out came a strip tease girl. It was a very dull affair. Armida [the stripper] did not speak English and she was not having a good time. I was sitting on the sofa talking to [Andrew] McLaglen and she came around behind and bit me on the cheek. I stood up and showed anger the best I could. I said, ‘What can I tell Chata?’ They said, ‘Tell her the truth. We were all here.’ ”
Wayne said he then went to the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, had a sandwich, and went home and told his wife what happened. “ ‘That’s pretty strange,’ she said.”
Chata admitted in court that out of $89,613 she and Wayne spent in the first six months of 1952, $56,103 went exclusively for her needs. There was another hearing in which Chata’s demand for $9,350 a month was reduced to $1,100 a month. Likewise, she asked for $40,000 for her lawyers. She got $10,000.
After the session, Wayne smiled and signed autographs for the teenagers that had packed the courtroom and applauded the verdict, while Chata sobbed as she drove away from the courthouse in a Cadillac that had mysteriously replaced the pickup truck.
Judge William R. McKay was clearly not enamored of either side. “From the fact that this preliminary hearing took 15 days,” he said, “it can be surmised that the trial may be a very long one.”
Chata went on to claim that Wayne had an affair with Gail Russell while he was shooting Angel and the Badman. Chata said she nearly shot him when she mistook him for a burglar when he staggered in after a night with Russell. The only thing that stopped her, she said, was that her mother recognized Wayne. (Mamacita was still living with them.) Wayne testified under oath that he and his wife had struggled over the .45 she owned.
