by Scott Eyman
Fellows got his divorce in 1955, and to pay for it he had to sell half of his interest in the films he and Wayne had made together, an amount estimated as $500,000. Fellows would be out of the company as of January 1956, after which John Wayne would be in total control of both Batjac and his career.
In the breakup Fellows got 10 percent of the net income from the company’s pictures to the extent that said income exceeded $2.34 million. He also got the contract of Anita Ekberg, as well as two scripts: The Quality of Mercy by Ben Hecht, which was never made, and a Burt Kennedy adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story that became The Tall T. After Fellows left Batjac, he produced only two more movies: Screaming Mimi and The Girl Hunters, in which Mickey Spillane made another bid for stardom.
Wayne redoubled his efforts to set up The Alamo. It wouldn’t be for Republic, and it wouldn’t be for Warner Bros. But make it he would.
William Wellman’s Track of the Cat emerged as a strange, attractively arty western shot in color but with only Robert Mitchum wearing anything other than earth tones.
Wayne liked Mitchum, even though the actor was not a producer’s best friend. The locations for Track of the Cat were in Olympia, Washington, where a high school girl interviewed Mitchum for the school paper while some of the Batjac people stood by.
“Do you have any hobbies, Mr. Mitchum?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, what would you say is your principal hobby?”
“Hunting.”
“Well, what do you hunt in particular?”
“Poontang.”
A rustling sound from the Batjac people.
“I never heard of that.”
“Well, it’s an elusive, furry little animal.”
Wayne was hired to play Genghis Khan in The Conqueror for Howard Hughes, but not before the usual series of charades that always attended anything requiring Hughes’s signature. A fleet of seven Chevrolets pulled into the Batjac offices on Palm Avenue. They were all the same, with the backseats ripped out and no whitewalls. Hughes got out of the third Chevy from the front and came into the office. “Everybody’s got to get out of here, got to get out of the building before we can complete the negotiations,” he announced.
Wayne ordered everyone out, except for the woman at the switchboard. “What about her?” asked Hughes. “She’s got to answer the phones,” said Wayne—an exception Hughes accepted. Hughes and Wayne went into an office for about twenty minutes. In the meantime, everyone except the woman at the switchboard cooled their heels in the parking lot.
Finally, the two men came out and Wayne got in the third Chevy with Hughes. The fleet went west on Sunset, then made a hard right into the hills and was lost to sight. The next day the office was clamoring to know where the caravan had gone.
“You won’t believe it,” said Wayne, who seemed resigned to the madness. “We went up in the hills and then came down out of the hills and headed for Culver City. We eventually went down some alley there and in the back door of an abandoned laundry that Hughes must own. Anyway, his people had a key to it, and we went in there and that’s where we signed the contract.”
Wayne had estimated that RKO’s constant postponements of its commitments to Wayne had cost him around $1 million, because he had held himself ready for weeks every year for three consecutive years and turned down a lot of work. Hughes agreed to pay his star an extra $100,000, but there were still more postponements, which led to problems with the schedule of The Sea Chase, which led to Warners threatening to charge Wayne for the delays.
Now Wayne was really angry. He wrote Hughes a letter saying that “$100,000 does not even start to make the necessary adjustment.” Hughes wanted to settle up after The Conqueror was shot, but it wasn’t Wayne’s first rodeo. He sent a wire to Hughes at his headquarters on Romaine Street in Hollywood, with two more copies addressed to Hughes at RKO saying that “I insist it be done right now.” He must have gotten what he asked for, because The Conqueror went into production that same month.
Although the picture was shot between May and August of 1954, the release was held up when Hughes sold off RKO and its library to General Tele-radio for $25 million in July of 1955. For a time, Wayne harbored feverish fantasies about buying RKO from its new purchasers for $5 million, with the two unreleased Wayne pictures costing another $5 million. Charlie Feldman talked sense to him, but Wayne always had a burning urge to be wealthy and he kept returning to the RKO idea.
In January 1956, Hughes bought back The Conqueror and the still unreleased Jet Pilot for a whopping $12 million. The Conqueror was released in February 1956, Jet Pilot in October of 1957—nearly eight years after it had begun shooting.
In 1957, Wayne again told Feldman to look into a deal to buy RKO, which had just closed. Feldman took the time and trouble to write a detailed two-and-a-half-page single-spaced letter about why that was a very bad idea: “Everything points to RKO getting further out of the business rather than getting into active production.”
The Conqueror is one of those unusual pictures that really is as bad as its reputation. It features some of the most jaw-dropping dialogue in movie history. Nothing is clearly stated, but inverted to the point of gibberish. Instead of “I don’t doubt it,” the line becomes “I doubt it not.” As Genghis Khan, Wayne is defiantly miscast, but the dialogue would defeat anybody: “Know this woman: I take you for wife,” announces Wayne just before he forces himself on Susan Hayward, who spends the movie heaving her admittedly enticing chest while looking sullen. Clearly, she had read the script.
In outline, and probably in intent, the film is a throwback to a Jon Hall/Maria Montez epic of the 1940s, except on a much larger scale and played for complete seriousness. Hughes’s sense of scale always trampled his nonexistent taste, so the film, like all of his later productions, is a leaden howler, dismally dull whenever the cast isn’t struggling with the dialogue. The Conqueror is completely unaware of its own absurdity as the world’s biggest Ed Wood movie.
Hayward decided a location affair was the perfect antidote to the script and the boring location of St. George, Utah. One night, after drinking too much, she stumbled across the street to the house where Wayne and Pilar were staying and challenged Pilar to a fight. Later, while shooting a love scene, Hayward stuck her tongue in Wayne’s mouth. All this didn’t stimulate Wayne; rather, it irritated him. “That goddamn bitch just stuck her tongue halfway down my throat,” he raged to Mary St. John, while never saying a word to Hayward.
Wayne seems to have known what he was involved with; he referred to the film as his “Chinese Western,” but otherwise plowed through manfully. “His camaraderie impressed me very much,” said the actor Gregg Barton, who was in the film. “He played hard, he worked hard, and was very responsible.”
He probably played too hard. For one of the few times in his career, his carousing affected his mornings. Gregg Barton remembered that at breakfast Wayne’s hands were shaking so badly he had to rig a handkerchief around his neck as a pulley to raise his coffee cup to his mouth. Wayne made jokes about it, but must have realized it wasn’t really a joking matter, as it didn’t reoccur.
The sole bright spot of The Conqueror was the presence of Pedro Armendáriz, a close friend since Fort Apache, who was playing Genghis Khan’s blood brother. Armendáriz and Tom Kane cooked up a practical joke based on Armendáriz’s firmly held belief that Pilar had the upper hand in Wayne’s marriage. Armendáriz objected to Pilar’s dachshund having the run of the Wayne house, up to and including sleeping on the bed. “Dogs are great,” Armendáriz proclaimed, “but you don’t have them in the house. They stay outside. You play with them in the yard.” Armendáriz decided to steal the dachshund. With the dog stashed in a room at a motel, Armendáriz and Kane went back to the bar, confident in the inevitability of the explosion.
The next morning, Armendáriz asked an obviously exhausted Wayne what was the matter—he looked tired. Hadn’t he slept? “Ah, that damn dachshund ran away or something. Pilar’s all
upset and had me up climbing around the hills trying to find him.”
Armendáriz and Kane got the dog out of the motel room and tossed him over the fence of the house where Wayne was staying with his family. The dog’s magical reappearance satisfied everyone, and neither Armendáriz nor Kane ever summoned the courage to tell Wayne the true story.
When The Conqueror was released, the publicity (“The Warrior Who Shook the World! This Tartar Woman Matches His Fury with Flame . . . Meets His Fire with Ice! . . . Mighty in Scope . . . Mighty as the Man Whose Conquests Changed the Face of the World!”) claimed that the film cost $6 million. Actually it cost $4.4 million, with Wayne earning $250,000 for the privilege of thoroughly embarrassing himself.
RKO mounted a huge advertising campaign, complete with color ads in the Sunday supplements and a Dell comic book adaptation. The picture eked out domestic rentals of $4.5 million. Amazingly, it actually got some good reviews: the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said that “for sheer magnitude, wild beauty and thrilling action, The Conqueror stands in a class by itself!”
The only reason The Conqueror and Jet Pilot had even trace elements of commercial viability was Wayne’s presence. In later years, Wayne gave the impression that he put up with Hughes because he aroused the actor’s pity. “He used to call me up and say, Would I meet him . . . and then I would meet him and we’d go up for a ride and he’d talk about the studio and talk about a lot of things and ask my advice and I got to where I started feeling sorry for this guy.”
Then it dawned on Wayne that it was ridiculous to feel sorry for a man rich enough to do anything he wanted in a world eager to sell itself to the highest bidder. “He was a very, very shy man,” said Wayne. “I was conscious that he was embarrassed by people, [who] don’t embarrass me a goddamn bit.”
Wayne had gradually come to believe that Bill Wellman was the answer to Batjac’s problems, which were the same problems that every other independent in the business had: manufacturing reliable commercial films at a price so low that even expert bookkeeping couldn’t hide all the profits.
Other people at Batjac weren’t so sure. One day Tom Kane came into his office to find Wellman furiously opening and closing the drawers in Kane’s desk.
“Are you looking for something, Bill?”
“Yeah. I’m looking for some pipe tobacco. You got any?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Kane went over to the drawer where he kept his pipe tobacco and brought it out.
“Goddammit,” Wellman said, “I don’t want to be indebted to you, you son of a bitch.” He stalked out of the office without the tobacco.
“Wellman had a terrible temper,” said Michael Wayne. “One time at our office they were taking some publicity pictures with [stunt flier] Paul Mantz. Wellman and Mantz had known each other for years, but they were having some sort of disagreement, and Wellman suddenly sucker punched Mantz and knocked out a tooth. Wellman was scrappy—he would throw the overhand right. You never knew what Wellman was going to do.”
Wellman was assigned a Batjac production entitled Blood Alley that was to star Robert Mitchum and began shooting on January 2, 1955, after two months of preparation near San Rafael, California. Mitchum was again reuniting with Wellman, the director who had made him a star in The Story of G.I. Joe.
But Mitchum was drinking and feeling obstreperous. George Coleman, the transportation manager, refused Mitchum permission to take a bus full of people to San Francisco for a party. “Mitchum started bouncing on a gangplank and blew [Coleman] right off the plank,” remembered Michael Wayne. “After that, we couldn’t find Mitchum; he wasn’t at the hotel the next morning.”
Wellman was in no mood for such juvenalia. He overnighted a letter to the studio. There was a forty-five-minute meeting with Mitchum during which he refused to apologize. “Me? Push anybody? Who told you that?” he asked with a straight face.
So Mitchum was fired, which undoubtedly felt good, but was no joke with the picture about to start in a day or two and most other major leading men either working or with impossible schedules. Batjac tried for Humphrey Bogart or Gregory Peck, but neither was available. Wayne suggested Burt Lancaster, but no dice. William Holden? Not available. Kirk Douglas? Working. Fred MacMurray? Not big enough.
The clock was ticking—Wellman estimated he could stall for two weeks by using doubles for long shots or shooting around the leading man. “If we can’t get anyone else I suppose I’ll have to do it,” grumbled Wayne, “although I really don’t feel up to it.” He was battling a flu he had recently picked up in New York.
Wayne had little choice but to rush to San Rafael and step into the void, thereby upsetting Pilar, who had been looking forward to having her husband to herself. Lauren Bacall had been all set to work with Mitchum, and was nervous about the change in her leading man. She was an ardent New Deal Democrat, a fan of Adlai Stevenson, and Wayne’s reputation as a Red baiter preceded him. As it turned out, she didn’t have to worry.
“I was apprehensive, when I first met him, about what he might discuss politically,” Bacall remembered. “But of course . . . he never brought up anything. He never embarrassed me, he never inflicted his own thinking onto me, he never backed me against a wall and made me feel uncomfortable.”
A little more than a week after Wayne took over the lead in Blood Alley, he also had to take over the direction when Wellman got the flu. And a couple of weeks after that, there was a wild party at a Stockton bar that resulted in five members of the company being jailed, with one requiring hospital treatment. Wayne, who seems not to have been at the party, had to bail everybody out.
After a lot of difficulties, Blood Alley finally got made and was released in October 1955. It’s not much of a picture—Paul Fix plays a Chinese elder—and Wayne has some impossible monologues addressed to God, whom he refers to as “Baby” when he’s imprisoned by the “Commies.” It’s a picture that would have been every bit as bad with Mitchum, and it’s just possible Mitchum decided discretion was the better part of valor.
Blood Alley was a flop, with worldwide rentals of $3 million against a cost of $2.5 million. Wayne and Wellman never worked together again. “They were so much fun together,” remembered William Wellman Jr. “They were like two college boys, patting each other on the back, so excited about things. They had similar personalities in terms of their enthusiasm for the movie business. And similar senses of humor.”
But there had been some tension between the two men. With truculent patriarchs like Ford, Hawks, or Henry Hathaway, Wayne would listen to instructions, nod, and say “Yes, sir.” But increasingly, and for the rest of his life, with other directors it wouldn’t be that simple. The problem stemmed from Wayne’s ambitions.
“Wayne wanted to be the filmmaker,” said William Wellman Jr. There had been no problems on Island in the Sky, but there was a single incident on The High and the Mighty, when Wayne made some comments that Wellman interpreted as directorial in nature and that got his back up.
Wellman announced “If I try to do your job, I would look just as silly as you do trying to do mine. You’re bigger and stronger, but if you continue with this I will take your face and I will make a character actor out of you.”
Wellman wasn’t kidding. “My dad had a darker side than Wayne had,” Wellman Jr. said. “Wayne liked to get along with people; my father, not so much.” Wayne quickly backed down, the two men finished the picture, but Wellman held a grudge, as he was wont to do.
Wayne kept trying to get Wellman to make a picture with him for years, even after Wellman retired. He sent Wellman the script for The Comancheros, but Wellman didn’t like it. A few years later, when Wellman was thinking about coming out of retirement to make The Flight of the Phoenix, he had mellowed to the extent of calling Wayne and asking him to co-star with Joel McCrea. They both said yes, but the project fell apart and Robert Aldrich eventually made it with Jimmy Stewart.
To the end of his life, everything Wayne said about Wellman marked him as a fan. “H
e’s a wonderful old son of a bitch,” Wayne told me when the topic of Wellman came up. “He had a metal plate in his head [from World War I] and he’d go around belting all these big, tough guys, and they’d be afraid to hit him back for fear they’d kill him. Wild Bill Wellman, a wonderful old guy. A fine director. Didn’t delve into character as much as some.
“I’ll tell you the difference between directors: Hawks has tremendous patience with people. Ford won’t hire you unless he knows he can get it out of you. Wellman figures you’re a pro and doesn’t bother you as an actor. If you don’t deliver, he’ll simply cut the part down. It’s that easy.”
As for Wellman’s feelings about Wayne, well . . . “When I put a tribute together for my dad on The Merv Griffin Show,” remembered Wellman Jr., “I called Wayne and he gave me clips from The High and the Mighty, and he wasn’t giving those out to anyone. And on the show when Griffin asked my dad about John Wayne, he started talking about his ‘fairy walk.’ And I just shrank in my chair. So at the commercial break, I said something to him, and when they came back my father said he wanted to talk more about Wayne, and he called him the greatest star in the business.
“But the truth is that my father spent the rest of his life lambasting him. I would say, ‘Dad, look at the films you made together.’ But he held a grudge and I don’t know why. I just can’t believe it was that incident on The High and the Mighty all by itself.”
Wayne’s relationship with Mitchum was entirely free of such undertones. Despite having had to fire Mitchum, there was no animosity, and Mitchum would pop in and out of Wayne’s life more or less according to the state of his marriage to Pilar, who had a single ongoing complaint about her husband’s friends: they drank too much. “After a while, it got tiresome being around drunks,” she said.
