John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  What was not generally known was that there was also an agreement with Fox for a fourth picture, with Wayne’s compensation set at $175,000 against 50 percent of the gross, which, had it been publicized, would have undoubtedly caused aneurysms. Actually, the money was not far out of line with what was being paid to comparable names. Bob Hope was getting $200,000 and 50 percent of the profits, Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck were both asking for 75 percent of the profits of their pictures. “How much further can it go?” asked The Hollywood Reporter.

  As it turned out, quite a bit.

  The signing of the deal with Fox got a lot of attention, especially from traditionalists such as Sam Goldwyn, who decried the increasing industry reliance on the star as the single most important component of the industry. Wayne didn’t feel a bit guilty.

  “After 30 years in this business, the pendulum finally has swung to the actors—and everybody hollers,” he said. “We’re only getting the money that used to go to the relatives of the studio bosses. . . . When I used to turn out those old westerns you see on television every day, I was getting $75 a week and doing my own stunts. The pictures cost about $11,000 and made big profits. Those same profits built Beverly Hills mansions for a lot of people who would have been on relief if their uncles hadn’t been movie moguls.”

  But Wayne never got on a high horse where Charles Feldman was concerned. Through all the years that Wayne was the biggest box office star in the business, meetings with his agent were always conducted at Feldman’s office, never at Wayne’s.

  The Wings of Eagles is one of John Ford’s strangest pictures. Initially a labored, drably shot service comedy in which everybody is twenty-five years too old for their parts, it slowly morphs into the story of an absent father and an alcoholic mother who are oddly characterized as the salt of the earth despite their huge character flaws, finally ending as a genuinely moving story of personal regeneration. It’s less like the carefully plotted stories we’re used to seeing in the movies than the messy, random progressions of life itself.

  James Stewart was first considered as the star of a biography of Frank “Spig” Wead, a Navy pilot during World War I who helped devise the “baby” carriers and revitalized the Navy’s air operation between the wars. After a fall, Wead was rendered a paraplegic and became a screenwriter for John Ford (Air Mail, They Were Expendable) among others, until his death in 1947. In outline, it was a story of personal heroism transmuted into professional heroism.

  Early correspondence about the script indicates some of the problems. “There is no love story,” complained one writer, “and that is the problem. Mrs. Wead, soon after she knew his back was broken and he would remain a hopeless cripple, took her two daughters and left him. The men in the Navy are bitter about this and feel it is better left unsaid, although Mrs. Wead is dead now.”

  Dore Schary’s MGM was bedeviled by declining attendance and corresponding budget cuts. In the early stages of development, the studio was considering using black and white stock footage, tinting it and blowing it up into CinemaScope proportions, in the hopes it would get by. When John Ford came onto the picture, corner cutting was over.

  The script and some of Ford’s direction can be criticized, but there can be no criticism of Wayne’s performance in the latter half of the picture. He even goes without his toupee, although his performance is so intense that few people notice. (When Maureen O’Hara has a late-film reconciliation scene with Wayne, she affectionately kisses his bald spot.) If, after The Searchers, there remained any question about Wayne’s bona fides as an actor, you need only look at this garbled, touching movie—a textbook example of the credibility a great star can bring to a part.

  Frank Wead is written to conform to the Wayne model of self-determination; when he’s told that the doctors need the permission of next of kin to operate, he snaps, “I’m my next of kin.” For several reels after that, we never see Wayne’s face—just the top of his head and his huge, immobile body as he lies facedown in a hospital bed struggling to regain movement in his feet. Ford is gambling that he can take away any actor’s most valuable tool and not lose the audience. As usual, he was right.

  Wayne brings a total emotional commitment to Wead’s grueling rehabilitation, and Ford even indulges in an amusing self-portrait, as Ward Bond plays a querulous Hollywood film director named John Dodge, who has pictures of Harry Carey and Tom Mix in his office.

  Like The Long Gray Line, Ford’s elegiac movie about West Point’s Marty Maher, who was an alcoholic and, reputedly, a wife beater, The Wings of Eagles avoids some of the more unpleasant truths about its subject. Maureen O’Hara, for instance, found the real Spig Wead unpleasant and mean. “Two minutes after you were in the door, he knew just where to place the knife and twist it,” she remembered. O’Hara always brooded over the deletion of a couple of scenes depicting Wead’s wife’s decline into alcoholism—cut, she said, because Wead’s daughters objected.

  But if Ford was cornered by his own sentimentality into celebrating a man with darker corners than his friend wished to acknowledge, Wayne’s performance nearly redeems the enterprise. “He had authority,” said Maureen O’Hara of her favorite co-star.

  He had credibility. He had manliness. He had his humble—he didn’t have that overpowering actor’s ego. And you liked him and you couldn’t help liking what he was doing. He had the magic. And don’t forget that the magic doesn’t always photograph.

  When I was a young girl in England, there was an actress who was so beautiful I would literally gasp when I saw her at the studio. Googie Withers. And when I saw her on film, it wasn’t there. Her beauty didn’t register.

  But with certain people—Duke, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, old Spencer Tracy—the magic just goes through the lens onto the film. Just standing still, there’s a presence. Duke was a fine, fine actor. But when people accept someone totally, and believe them totally, they don’t think to call them an actor. But that’s what Duke was, a fine actor.

  Unfortunately, one of Wayne’s best performances was in a movie that takes too long to find its center. Ford shot the film efficiently in forty-seven days on location in Pensacola and Hollywood at a negative cost of $2.6 million, but the picture only earned domestic rentals of $2.3 million. The loss totaled $804,000.

  Legend of the Lost, Wayne’s next picture, was a co-production between Batjac, Dear Film, and United Artists. The studio initially stalled on making a decision about the picture, which provoked one of Wayne’s trademark letters of irritation. The total budget was $3 million, but UA’s investment was a modest $1.75 million. Wayne was budgeted for only $250,000 with the rest of his salary deferred. Wayne’s letter to UA’s Robert Blumofe pointed out that Batjac was offering the company a picture with Sophia Loren, one of the top stars of Europe (“I’m of pretty good standing in the United States . . .”) as well as a director named Henry Hathaway.

  “The deal is either worth it or it isn’t,” Wayne wrote. “I see no room for negotiation. . . . I would appreciate an answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ by the first of the week.”

  The original script was by Robert Presnell Jr., who was married to Marsha Hunt, Wayne’s co-star in the forgotten B western Born to the West. After a notable career at MGM, where she was being groomed as a potential replacement for Myrna Loy, Hunt was dropped by the studio and eventually blacklisted. When she was making The Happy Time for Stanley Kramer, she was told she could be cleared of the charge of Communism if she would take out a full page ad in the trade papers. “I said it was like taking out an ad saying ‘I don’t beat my wife,’ ” she remembered. “You can’t disprove a negative. I held out and continued not working.”

  Presnell worked with Henry Hathaway on the development of the script. “Hathaway and his cigars came over a few times, and the cigar slinging went on,” remembered Hunt. “Boy, were they pungent!” Shortly before the film got under way, Wayne invited Presnell and Hunt to his house in Encino for dinner. It was a working dinner, not a social dinner. “Wayne wanted
his character to be more monosyllabic,” remembered Hunt. “I don’t know if it was about breath control, or whether he was just concerned about his image as a man of few words, and not feeling comfortable with an articulate role. My husband wrote wonderful dialogue and I would have thought it would have been refreshing for Wayne to be more expressive. But Wayne wanted it simplified.

  “He was a good host. There was no trace of animosity about our differing politics. He showed no particular interest in me; I was invited out of courtesy to my husband. He was a nice man, not a perfunctory man. We had some brief talk about what he hoped for out of the changes. And that was the end of it.”

  It certainly was. Either Presnell resisted the changes or his changes were deemed insufficient, so Ben Hecht was called in and made the required alterations. Rossano Brazzi came aboard for $135,000, while Loren got $200,000.

  Legend of the Lost filmed in Libya in February 1957. The location was hellish—“The Sahara desert during the day,” wrote cinematographer Jack Cardiff in his memoirs, “was a shimmering, ferocious furnace, but at night so numbingly cold that it was like being in cryogenic suspension. We slept in every garment we possessed, a couple of pullovers, as many socks as we could manage, overcoats—everything.”

  And Hathaway was . . . Hathaway, “screaming maniacally at those who left footprints in the sand, until we were all afraid to move.” Cardiff glumly remembered what Hathaway had told him in preproduction: “If you want to be a son of a bitch, be a good one.”

  Wayne wanted Pilar to accompany him to the location, which was Pilar’s idea of hell. She explained that their daughter Aissa, who had been born in 1956, was too young for the inoculations she’d require to come to Africa. Pilar didn’t want to leave her with a nurse. Wayne insisted that the nurse could handle the situation, so Pilar trooped off to Libya to find that her accommodations consisted of a mud-plastered room whose dirt floor had to be watered down every morning to keep dust to a minimum.

  Wayne and Loren never established much simpatico; he believed she was having an affair with the married Brazzi, even though she was engaged to Carlo Ponti. Wayne wrote a letter outlining the location’s difficulties to Billy Wilkerson of The Hollywood Reporter :

  We are working at an oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert, 400 air miles from Tripoli. This little village is completely isolated from the rest of the world; no radio, telephone; no modern facilities. We bunk in tents. In the day it’s sunburn hot, at sundown the temperature drops to around 30 degrees. . . .

  We move out of this village each morning at five in four and six wheel vehicles equipped with special desert tires, all flown in, and we move around until Henry Hathaway finds a background he wants and we start to work; finishing with that, we dash off to another location. It’s bitter cold when we leave and just as cold when we return to our base of operations around 9 at night. . . . I would not have missed this location for anything, but when I leave it, I’m certain that I would never want to make it again.

  The picture was scheduled for fifty days in Libya, with the interiors to be done at Cinecittà in Rome. The North African locations were in a place called Gaudemes, also a lost Libyan city named Leptis Magna that had only recently been uncovered. They were shooting at Leptis Magna when it was reported that Wayne tore a couple of ligaments in his left foot after a fall. He wired Charles Feldman not to worry; it was only a “painful ankle strain.”

  John Ford’s intuition told him the film was in trouble, and he wrote a letter to Wayne. “I hope Pilar is well. I called the house and the baby is fine. She is calling Ward ‘Papa.’ ” Another Ford letter was more expansive; he told Wayne that he had no particular interest in making a picture for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. “They asked me about it. Natch, I made no commitments. Remember, this is Jack speaking, and you’re Duke. You’re the guy that makes commitments—at bars, lunch, tables, steam baths, airplanes, George V hotel, at Batjac, at Romanoff’s . . .”

  A few months later, another Ford letter arrived, the main purpose of which seemed to be the venting of steam. Ford had made a tentative deal with Orson Welles to play the part of Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, and as soon as the trade papers announced it, Harry Cohn at Columbia received a packet supposedly documenting Welles’s “communistic or subversive activities (alleged). . . . These were sent by an actor who had said all over town that he was to play the part—a Ward Bond. . . .

  “You know my very decided views on Traitors, Commies, fellow travelers and such like—you also know my integrity in making films + also my ideas of justice—you are not guilty until proven so (and the jury is not necessarily Ward Bond).” Ford closed the letter by noting that Welles had missed a meeting because “of a slight fever upset etc. So fuck him. Coach.” Below that was a P.S.: “Fuck Bond too.”

  Ford suggested that Wayne play the part of Frank Skeffington. What was surprising was that Wayne gave it serious thought, although it would have meant breaking his boycott of Columbia Pictures and Harry Cohn. But Wayne was leery of being rushed into the deal by Ford—Feldman was already talking to Columbia about “a big-scale tax carry forward corporation” for several pictures. Ultimately, Spencer Tracy played Frank Skeffington—a much better choice than either Welles or Wayne.

  The result of the Libyan agony was a picture of no distinction whatever save its visuals, thanks to the talents of the great Jack Cardiff, who lavished attention on each composition as if he were making a much better movie.

  “When I finally saw the film in New York,” remembered Marsha Hunt, “I wept. I wept for my husband’s script, which was nowhere to be found. It seemed to have been savaged. A little later, I met Sophia Loren by chance. She was doing Houseboat and I was doing some little independent picture, and there we were at the same restaurant. I mentioned that my husband had written Legend of the Lost, and she looked puzzled at his name. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

  Hunt’s career never regained any traction, but she always resented people who regarded her as a victim of the blacklist.

  “I never had this attitude of people who’ve never met me who summarize my career. ‘Poor thing, she never made it.’ The truth is that I never wanted to be a big star. It was a motion picture, you did your best on it, and gifted people worked with you. Someday it’s got to be said that I was the happiest actress in town because I never got any two roles alike. I got challenging characters to play; I was blissful at Metro doing starkly different things because that is what I became an actress to do.”

  When it came to the blacklist, Hunt drew a line between hard-core conservatives and people who informed for reasons of career. “I know what [Wayne] was doing was arrogant and unfair and damaging and awful—all those things. But I have to respect conviction. He was absolutely sure he was right. I once ran into Roy Brewer, who was a great ally of John Wayne’s in that period. And Brewer and I concluded about each other that we both were following strongly held conviction. They just happened to be opposing convictions. Wayne didn’t do what he did for economic reasons. He was up to mischief about other people’s lives and careers, but I could hate that without hating him. I guess I’m just not an angry person.”

  Legend of the Lost returned only $3.6 million in rentals to United Artists.

  In 1957, Wayne attended a studio preview of Lust for Life, the florid Vincente Minnelli movie about Vincent van Gogh. Afterward, there was a party at Merle Oberon’s house where Wayne motioned Kirk Douglas onto the terrace. “Christ, Kirk,” he began, “how can you play a part like that? There’s so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers.”

  “Hey, John, I’m an actor,” said Douglas. “I like to play interesting roles. It’s all make-believe, John. It isn’t real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know.” Douglas remembered Wayne looking at him oddly, but not for the reasons Douglas imagined—that he really thought he was John Wayne.

  In Wayne’s own mind, he was Duke Morrison. John Wayne was to him what the Tramp was to Charl
ie Chaplin—a character that overlapped his own personality, but not to the point of subsuming it. And Wayne was emotionally committed to playing nothing but John Wayne parts, so that he would never, ever have to go back to being Duke Morrison.

  At this point, Wayne was juggling a couple of possible properties. One was a movie about Heartbreak Ridge, written by the actor Barton MacLane; another was “Thunder in the South,” about the Civil War, and there was “Earthquake McGoon,” a story about a Chinese adventurer by Corey Ford and A. S. Fleischman.

  Instead, in December 1957, Wayne went to Japan to star in The Barbarian and the Geisha, the first of the three films for Fox. It was the story of Townsend Harris, the first American envoy to Japan. The director was John Huston, and the picture was problematic from the beginning. An early script, from December 1956, describes Harris as “a Robert Mitchum type,” but as written he’s more of a John Wayne type; a still earlier script contained a reflective character that could have been played by Spencer Tracy.

  In years to come, Wayne blamed Huston for the entire debacle, explaining that he signed on to a fragmentary script purely to work with Huston. Whereupon Huston, instead of working on the script, took off for four months in Mexico, digging up pre-Columbian art and staying out of the country to avoid taxes.

  The surviving memos from Fox production chief Buddy Adler to Huston prove that Adler was a smart executive with a good story sense and Huston was more interested in his images than his story. After reading the script by Charles Grayson, Adler wrote Huston, “I feel that on the whole the script: a. lacks emotional impact; b. there is a lack of depth to certain characterizations; c. there is very little excitement in the love story.” It simply wasn’t as good as it could be.