by Scott Eyman
“Once,” said Vincent Sherman, “Jack called me into his office during the Red Scare and told me that one of the committees had questioned him. I can’t prove it, but I think it’s one of the reasons he let me go. You were on a gray list and he was trying to get rid of everybody that was on it, even if the only thing you had done was vote for Franklin Roosevelt.”
Hedda Hopper was still acting as the Madame Defarge of the Red Scare, castigating her ideological opponents and coddling her friends. Hopper’s own belief system was revealed when Jackie Robinson was scheduled for an interview at her house, and she yelled out to her cook, “Maude, if you see a nigger around the house, don’t be scared. It’s only Jackie Robinson!” Robinson, who had arrived a few minutes early for his appointment, overheard her. A few years after that, she said that the protests against Disney’s paternalist—at best—Song of the South were the result of “several Commie groups,” and she led a successful effort to get a special Academy Award for James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus in the film.
By this time, there was something of a schism in the Motion Picture Alliance. Leading one side was Hopper. On the other was Wayne. The screenwriter John Lee Mahin was a lifelong conservative and a member of the Alliance, and he put it this way: “You can’t get into any political situation without attracting a few crackpots, and we had our share of those. . . . I can remember the people that found a Communist behind every tree and under every bush, and it seems that half our time was spent calming these people down, saying, ‘Well, no, he’s not a Communist, he’s a liberal—a good, honest liberal. And there’s nothing wrong with that.’
“Duke, of course, was very liberal in his attitude toward people’s ideas. He would listen to anyone and draw his own conclusions. He came under attack, of course, because he was the president of the organization, but he was always the voice of reason and responsibility in the group.”
Mahin fingered the extremists in the Alliance as Ward Bond and Jimmy Grant. When John Ford was making The Long Gray Line in West Point, Ward Bond would head over to a bar across the street from the location and watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Bond knew McCarthy, and, according to Mahin, Wayne had Bond pass a message from him to the senator: “You’re going to have to name names because you’re just throwing out accusations and innuendo and not producing any facts, and you’re making everybody look bad.”
“I personally think McCarthy did more harm to the anti-Communist movement than anybody ever could have on the face of the earth,” said Mahin. “He was a fool, just an absolute fool.”
“Duke really went into the work of the organization,” remembered Borden Chase. “He became president [and] . . . he was no front. Duke had guts. We had a split in the group—The once-a-communist-always-a-communist group and the group that thought it was ridiculous to destroy some of those, who, say, joined the party in the ’30s in Nazi Germany. Duke and I were in the latter group.”
Ward Bond was still acting as a clearing agent for HUAC. “My agent at the time told me I had to go up and talk to Ward Bond,” recalled Vincent Sherman.
I got his address and made an appointment. He kept me waiting almost an hour. I told him that I’d never been a member of the Communist party, that I was a left-leaning Roosevelt Democrat. Perhaps I subscribed to some of the same causes, because I thought the cause was right, but not because it was communist in origin.
And Bond listened and said, “Well, it’s not only that. We’ve got quite a few things against you.”
“Well,” I said, “tell me what they are. I can tell you yes or no as to what I believed.”
He went on to say that one of the members of the party had said I had a great deal of influence, and that “you may not have been a card-carrying communist, but you had a lot of influence in the top echelon.” And I said that was ridiculous.
I didn’t get to know Bond too well; he didn’t behave very nicely, to me or anybody else.
John Ford’s place in all this is hard to ascertain. Ford loved Bond because he was the designated class clown, but he also thought Bond was on the dim side. Vincent Sherman, who knew Ford through the Directors Guild, said, “He was a very independent Irishman. I had the feeling that he didn’t really give a damn about politics. I certainly never heard him make any pro-McCarthy remarks, or anything like that.
“I also had the feeling that Wayne wasn’t that much in favor of some of the things that were going on; I think he was in over his head and knew it. I knew Wayne a little, and his attitudes were more liberal than many people thought. We were introduced by Howard Hawks, and I always got on well with Hawks, who was also right-wing, but not active about it. He was a good director and a straight shooter.”
During all this, Wayne publicly insisted that all the Alliance was doing was promoting a different point of view than “the excessively liberal one.” Wayne estimated the membership of the Alliance at about two thousand, and said that the group had no interest in being the “policeman of the industry. We merely want to inform the people how we stand.”
Budd Boetticher said that Wayne went so far as to have some of his co-workers vetted. “They were really American,” he said. “The only people they were against were the guys that weren’t in their group—everybody. The Jews, the Catholics, the Blacks, whatever—they were wrong, these guys were right. They fly the America flag and blow the bugle. And I mean, they were brutal.
“Of course, I never had anything to do with that . . . I only lasted two days as a Tenderfoot Scout. I never join anything.”
Boetticher went on to tell a story about a 6 A.M. phone call from Wayne. “ ‘Bood? The Duke.’ I said, ‘Hi, Duke, how are you?’ He said, ‘You’re clean.’ I said, ‘I’m what?’ He said, ‘You’re not a Communist.’ I said, ‘You son of a bitch. I hope it cost you $20,000 to find that out.’ ”
In later years, Wayne would say that “I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia. They’d have been taken care of over there and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first ones they’d take care of—after me.”
A friend of Wayne’s who sounds a lot like John Ford offered perhaps the pithiest summation of his politics: “Hell, Duke didn’t know anything about the menace of Communism. All he knew was that some of his friends were against them.”
* * *
1. The sole distinguishing moment in Operation Pacific arrived during production, when a repairman showed up to install a new air compressor on the set. It was Ralph Bushman, formerly Francis X. Bushman Jr., whom Wayne had doubled in his first movie appearance in 1926. “I know you, but I don’t expect you to remember me,” said Bushman. Wayne took a long look, then stuck out his hand. “Sure I do,” he said. “Your name’s Bushman and I doubled for you on my first movie job.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
William Wellman and John Wayne were united by vast stores of enthusiasm—each of them could get worked up over a story, an actor, a movie—their own or somebody else’s. Wayne was particularly gung ho about The High and the Mighty, a gripping story about a plane bound from Honolulu to San Francisco that develops a cascading series of mechanical problems culminating in a burned-out engine and the likelihood of running out of gas over the Pacific.
Wayne originally wanted Spencer Tracy for the part of the older copilot who brings the plane in against all odds, but the trade papers announced that MGM wanted $500,000 for Tracy’s services. This was a grossly inflated figure—MGM had just accepted $250,000, about double Tracy’s actual salary, for a loan-out to Fox for Broken Lance. Wellman said that he and Tracy had lunch, after which they shook hands on the deal. Then Tracy backed out of the picture.
It’s far more likely that Tracy simply didn’t want to work with Wellman—the two men had had a fistfight nearly twenty years earlier over a crack Wellman made about Tracy’s onetime lover Loretta Young. It’s also possible that Tracy was uneasy about working for Wayne, who may have been too closely associated with his Loretta Young period.
Wayne then tried unsuccessfully for Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda, after which he decided to play the part himself. Wayne cast Robert Cummings for the copilot role, more or less because Cummings actually was a pilot, but Wellman wanted Robert Stack and Wayne acquiesced. William Boyd turned down a part, and MGM wouldn’t loan out Keenan Wynn and Lionel Barrymore, so parts that had been intended for them were played by the less expensive alternatives of Sidney Blackmer and Wayne’s old pal Paul Fix.
In fact, the list of people who turned down parts in The High and the Mighty was extensive. Wellman took runs at eminent actresses such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Dorothy McGuire. Mostly, they rejected the film because the parts were too small. Claire Trevor and Jan Sterling got the jobs.
The High and the Mighty had one great attraction as far as Jack Warner was concerned: it was going to be economical. Eighty percent of the film took place inside an airplane, and the exteriors were almost all second unit.
William Clothier was the cameraman on the aerial scenes, and captured the culminating shot of the runway lights forming a cross. “I didn’t know what I had until I saw it through my lens,” Clothier remembered.
It was a pretty good shot. Two nights later, Bill Wellman calls on the phone. “I have just seen the greatest goddamn shot that was ever made for any goddamn picture in the world.”
“Which shot is that?”
“That shot coming into the airfield! It’s going to make our picture! These people have come across the ocean, they’re flying on the vapor in the gas tanks and all at once the airfield opens up in the form of a cross.” He raved for five minutes. Then Duke got on the line. “Bill, it’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Playing the ingenue was a young actress named Karen Sharpe, whose credits consisted of a couple of five-day wonders at Monogram, the most successful of which was Bomba and the Jungle Girl. “Wellman directed my test,” remembered Sharpe. “I was very prepared, and we shot the scene, where I think I’m pregnant. Now, if Bill Wellman didn’t like you, everybody down the block knew about it. And if he did like you, the same people knew about that, too. And when we finished the scene, he said, ‘My God, Karen, where have you been? You’re it. This girl is fantastic!’ He never even looked at the footage.”
Sharpe remembered that The High and the Mighty “was a Wellman film all the way down the line. Duke may have been producing, but he was like any other actor on the set. He knew his lines, stepped in, and did it. He was very professional. I noticed that when I was working, he would come and stand close to the camera and watch me.” Soon after the film wrapped, Wayne signed Sharpe to a contract.
A young actor named William Campbell was featured as a brash young aviator who holds Wayne’s character in contempt. It was a difficult part for Campbell to play, simply because he was in awe of Wayne, and he had particular trouble with a scene where he had to humiliate Wayne for being old and passé. “I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, I’m going to be tongue-lashing John Wayne. And we did it in very close quarters. It just went phenomenally well. . . . When Wayne worked with you, he never would be, or could be, threatened by any other actor, unlike some others.
“Some actors weave a scene to make their character more important. Wayne never did that. He knew what he was doing, always knew his lines. . . . He had a problem in that he was so big, so overpowering. It didn’t matter who had the authority in a scene; Wayne was always bigger. That’s why he always seemed so comfortable lounging in the background, letting others have all the good lines. Inevitably the eye is drawn to him.”
Wayne was worried about his own performance, but Wellman wasn’t. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t think you were good in that?” Wellman asked after Wayne requested another take. “You couldn’t ask for anything better.”
Robert Stack remembered that “Wellman scared the shit out of me; he scared the shit out of everybody. But he was a marshmallow. He was working on a scene with Doe Avedon, and he said to her, ‘Jesus Christ, can’t you walk straight?’ ‘Mr. Wellman,’ she said, ‘you’ve got me so scared my knees won’t work!’ And he said, ‘Oh, don’t take me seriously.’ Wellman was never cruel, but he kept enough pressure on me, particularly in the scenes in the cockpit, for the realism of the situation to always come through.”
Sharpe remembered the picture as “a very happy set, except for the fact that people were scared of Wellman because he could be very boisterous one way or the other.” Wayne had Wellman’s director’s chair embroidered with the ironic words, “Sweet William.”
Wellman had a habit of photographing the first rehearsal, and a lot of times there was never a take beyond that. “One take and that was it,” said Sharpe. “He loved everything I did, and every shot I was in was the first take.” One critic visiting the set called Wellman the fastest director since W. S. Van Dyke II, and, among A list directors it was probably true.
Wellman was gung ho about the picture, about CinemaScope, about WarnerColor. “If we’re gonna make ’em bad, we’re gonna make ’em bad with everything there is,” he bellowed. This gusto explains how Wellman was able to shoot a very long film (147 minutes) in little more than six weeks, from November 25, 1953, to January 11, 1954, including a week in San Francisco, the Goldwyn studios for interiors, followed by two nights of wrap-up work at the Glendale Airport.
Pilar was hanging around the set, and Wayne asked Sharpe if Pilar could stay in her dressing room. Sharpe was from Texas and had numerous Hispanic friends, so she and Pilar got along famously.
As the picture went into the cutting room, Wayne supervised the editing himself, eventually cutting five close-ups of himself that he thought were unnecessary. Warners was very high on the picture, and so was Wayne. Billy Wilkerson of The Hollywood Reporter caught Wayne and Wellman at their best after the two men watched the final version of The High and the Mighty for the first time. His description of the conversation captures the bond between the two men, as well as the personal qualities that enabled them to sustain forty-year careers.
Wilkerson ran into them at a restaurant and they adjourned to Wayne’s house, where the conversation lasted until 3:30 in the morning. Wilkerson didn’t “remember a more entertaining and inspiring evening since the old days of Henry’s on [Hollywood] Boulevard, when most of the picture-makers used to sit around at night and talk—pictures.
“Both Wayne and Wellman have been around a long time, both have been successful. However, from their conversations you would think they were two kids just starting out in the business, fighting and pushing every minute to get ahead, revealing in their seeming amazement the wonderful accomplishments of others and hoping to match those accomplishments. They had praise for every name brought into the gab and, above all, praise for the business that made it possible for unknowns to become great personages in such a short span. They had logical excuses for some failures—theirs and others—with never a knock, never derision, always enthusiasm.”
When The High and the Mighty was released in May 1954, the critics were impressed. The Hollywood Reporter called it “highly entertaining, widely appealing and handsomely mounted . . . one of the great pictures of our time.” The studio gave it a lavish premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Wayne invited Karen Sharpe, who was thrilled to be the date of Tab Hunter. “I met Tab for the first time in the limousine on the way to the premiere. When we got out of the car, the fans went nuts for him, and he introduced me to the world of Hollywood premieres. I had no idea how lucky all this was. And at the end, when the lights went down and the movie started, Tab looked at me and said, ‘Loved meeting you, I gotta go. I’m making a film and I have to get back to the studio.’ So Robert Fellows escorted me to the party at Ciro’s, where I sat between him and Jack Warner.”
Wellman’s directorial gusto led him astray, and the forcefulness he usually brought to scenes of elemental struggle or combat was pitched a bit too high for a character-driven emotional drama. What The Hi
gh and the Mighty needed was some of Howard Hawks’s terseness. Wayne stands out because everybody else is lunging for an Oscar nomination and he’s playing a calm professional in a calm, professional manner. The dramatic problem at the core of the film is basic—the plane either has enough fuel to get to its destination or it doesn’t—but the script invents personal crises for each and every character, which doesn’t ratchet up the tension so much as get in the way.
It’s essentially a decent blood-and-thunder melodrama whose primary attributes come down to William Clothier’s aerial photography and Dimitri Tiomkin’s thundering score, which even lends a spiritual dimension to the proceedings. But commercially speaking The High and the Mighty was the right movie at the right time and one of the biggest hits of its year—a cost of $1.4 million, world rentals of $8.1 million, and a lot of money in the pockets of Wayne, Fellows, and Bill Wellman, who had a third of Wayne-Fellows’ profits. With the exception of a single TV broadcast in the late 1970s, Wayne kept the film out of circulation for decades, which gave the film the patina of a lost classic that it didn’t really deserve.
The huge back-to-back hits of Hondo and The High and the Mighty put Wayne at the top of his profession, not just as an actor, but as a producer. The only problem to be found in their first two years of Wayne-Fellows’ operation was that the company was having trouble controlling costs. Warners had advanced $750,000 to make Big Jim McLain, which ended up costing $825,544; likewise, Island in the Sky cost $66,815 more than the $900,000 Warners had advanced, despite the fact that Wellman had shot the picture in twenty-six days—a full ten days under schedule. After four starring pictures (Big Jim McLain, Island in the Sky, Hondo, The High and the Mighty, and the non-Wayne film Plunder of the Sun), Wayne-Fellows had spent $258,859 in excess of studio advances.
