by Scott Eyman
Hawks chose Arizona’s Old Tucson for the primary location, and did a lot of construction, building an entirely new main street about four blocks long that bisected the old, pre-existing pueblo structures and included twenty-six buildings, not counting the large warehouse that was blown up in the film’s climax.
Wayne is relaxed, commanding, unflappable. In a direct riposte to High Noon, he wants no help from well-meaning amateurs. In one of the great dialogue exchanges of the movies, he outlines his meager troops:
1. A drunk.
2. A crazy old man.
“That’s all you got?” asks Ward Bond.
“That’s what I got,” says Wayne.
John T. Chance is a self-sufficient man who inspires others to rise above their own acknowledged shortcomings. Beneath the surface it’s a very democratic movie—a small community of friends in which each individual shores up the next. Crude readings of Wayne’s persona accuse him of mindless cheerleading for American might. It would be more accurate to say that Wayne embodies the American experiment far more than he does American power, if only because he never avoided dramatizing the potential that experiment had for going wrong.
Howard Hawks didn’t have a lot of ideas, but the ones he had were solid: play comedy as fast as possible, underplay drama as much as possible, make the girl as tough as the leading man. Mainly, Hawks believed that if something worked once, it would work at least three more times. Angie Dickinson has the same part that Lauren Bacall had in To Have and Have Not, complete with thinly paraphrased dialogue, and Ricky Nelson rubs his nose with one finger, just like Montgomery Clift in Red River. As for Wayne, in a charming in-joke, he wears a belt buckle that sports Tom Dunson’s brand from Red River.
Angie Dickinson had to test for the part, not opposite Wayne but opposite football player Frank Gifford, who was moonlighting from the New York Giants while recovering from an injury. Hawks gave Capucine, Charles Feldman’s mistress, pro forma consideration for the part of Feathers, but he didn’t want an accent in his movie. Also, Capucine had an aristocratic air that was at odds with Hawks’s taste in women. (Feldman would finally get his way when he stuck Capucine in North to Alaska a year later.)
Dickinson had already worked for Wayne indirectly when she made Gun the Man Down, the James Arness western that Andrew McLaglen had directed for Batjac a couple of years earlier. She had also done an unbilled bit with Wayne in a George Gobel vehicle at RKO entitled I Married a Woman.
None of these films was going to earn her a starring role opposite John Wayne. “I had done one good movie, Cry Terror, with James Mason,” remembered Dickinson. “It was made in ’57, came out in ’58 and I was damn good. I could see I had something to stick around for.” Auteurists might also point to Samuel Fuller’s China Gate, but Dickinson insisted that the Fuller movie was barely seen.
Dickinson actually got Rio Bravo through an episode of Perry Mason. Chris Nyby, who had been Hawks’s film editor as well as the credited director on The Thing, had been directing Perry Mason and told his former employer to take a look at the startlingly sensual young actress.
“Chris’s recommendation meant that I was more than actress #47 coming through the door,” said Dickinson. “It was serendipity.” Also working in her favor was the fact that Dickinson had a mind of her own. One day Hawks played a song that he liked called “Tiger by the Tail,” and asked Dickinson if she liked it.
“No,” she said.
“Everybody always says ‘Yes’ to me,” mused Hawks, but Dickinson could see that he was pleased by her refusal to acquiesce. “I think it surprised him; Howard liked to be surprised.”
Dickinson joined the company in Old Tucson, where Hawks, Wayne, and Dean Martin threw a dinner in her honor. When they got down to work, Wayne didn’t offer her any coaching, as he often did with young actors, because “with Hawks around he didn’t have to coach. But Duke was incredibly patient with me. My scenes were well written, but they were tough to play. It was on the page, but you don’t know how hard to press.”
Dickinson’s problem was that she was playing the sexual aggressor—a part she wasn’t used to. “Wayne is better when the girl is forcing the issue,” said Hawks, comparing it to the way Clark Gable forced the issue in a love scene. “If you’ve got a love scene in a Wayne picture, you adjust it to his personality. He just wouldn’t be effective if he were aggressive toward a woman. Partly that’s because of his size. He’s too big to be a Rover Boy like Gable was.”
“We didn’t shoot that many takes, but we rehearsed a lot,” said Dickinson. “And never once did Duke say, ‘Jesus Christ, can’t she just do it?’ Never once did he appear to be impatient. And for a star of his caliber, working with a green actress, that was remarkable. Never, not for a second, did I feel he didn’t approve of what I was doing.”
On-screen as well as off, Wayne was always slightly abashed when confronted with a strong woman, and Dickinson’s Feathers is definitely somebody he can’t quite handle. She backs him up, metaphorically and literally. “His characters are not adorable,” said Dickinson, “but in those scenes, he was adorable.”
Like Feathers, Hawks knew when to press and when to relax. As Dickinson and Wayne were shooting the last scene in the picture, where she forces Chance to admit he loves her, Hawks told her, “Try it again, and in the middle start crying.”
“Crying wasn’t in the script,” said Dickinson. “And that’s the take he used.” Dickinson remembered that Hawks “had a way of wanting you to do something very special. Yet he would not tell you how to make it special. He wanted you to come up with it by yourself. And therefore it would be special. If he told you, it wouldn’t be special. . . . He wouldn’t tell you very much; he would just leak out a little of what he wanted, and you had to play with it.”
In Hawks’s world, which largely derives from Hemingway’s world, the worst thing you can say to another human being is “You’re not good enough.” Because of this ethical stand, it was daunting for Dickinson to go up against Wayne and Hawks. “I was not really ready for it. It worked, but I was in over my head, and Hawks was very good. He just stuck with me and didn’t give up. Those were very tough scenes to do.”
It was a happy set, because there was a mutual respect between Wayne and Hawks, even though they were totally different men. “Hawks was complex and Duke was simple,” said Dickinson. “Hawks wanted excitement in his life, and Duke didn’t, particularly. They bore more respect than love for each other.”
Dickinson watched Wayne with an eagle’s eye. “When a movie is rich there’s so much to take from it—a lot of colors. But a rich movie takes a lot of work and finesse. As an actor, Duke was not Al Pacino, who I imagine looks at a scene and thinks of a dozen different ways to play it before starting to narrow down the options. Duke went on instinct. Which is not to say he wasn’t intelligent. He was, and well informed too; there was nothing casual about him or his approach to the work, or to his life. He was determined and solid in his beliefs.”
Wayne and Dean Martin got along well and would play chess, but there wasn’t a deep simpatico. “Dean was a Democrat, and that might have been part of it,” said Dickinson. “But Dean wasn’t a talker. He could be in a group for a long time and not say a word. At all. Forever. He was unschooled and shy; the intelligentsia would make him insecure. He was always difficult socially.”
Dickinson was conscious of a strong mutual attraction between herself and Wayne. She had grown up watching John Wayne movies, and had been astonished by his rugged beauty as a young man. When they made Rio Bravo, he was married and she was involved, but she believed that “in another world, on the right island, yes, we would have ended up together. In later years, whenever we saw each other, there was always a special warmth. Did I find him sexy? More romantic than sexy—the sort of man you fall in love with rather than fall into bed with. He wasn’t aggressive with women. He was always very respectful, and a gentleman.”
Rio Bravo is as much of an anthology as it is a mov
ie. Walter Brennan is back playing the ornery old coot, Wayne the granite wall, and Ricky Nelson the barely-out-of-adolescence baby-faced killer. (The picture’s great originality is in beginning to set Dean Martin’s character as an amiable drunk.)
Rio Bravo has enormous charm, but the picture goes on for an unconscionable 141 minutes—one song maybe, but two? Nevertheless, Rio Bravo was one of those pictures that everybody saw, and that almost everybody liked. Made for $3 million, it had world rentals of $10 million, and it proved that Wayne’s reach as a star was not bound by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans—its foreign take was $4.5 million, just a little short of the domestic gross of $5.4 million.
Although the picture is more than slightly baggy and can’t build up much suspense, Todd McCarthy correctly points out that it represents perhaps the most direct expression of the director’s interests: “self-respect, self-control, the interdependence of select chosen friends, being good at what you do, the blossoming of sexual-romantic attraction—as demonstrated by characters utterly removed from the norms of routine existence.” And because Wayne was finely attuned to “the interdependence of select chosen friends” as well as a philosophy of personal excellence, it naturally provided him with an arena in which he shone.
But for Wayne, Rio Bravo was more or less a job of work, for his attention was increasingly centered on The Alamo. Potential partners were circling—even Jack Warner was suddenly attentive: “I was going to come down to the set to see you this afternoon late,” he wrote Wayne a few days before the end of production on Rio Bravo, “but when I phoned was told the company had finished for the day . . . have been seeing almost all the dailies and the film looks great. I feel we will really have a very important picture.”
He then got down to brass tacks: “[Louella] Parsons had a story in her column today that Clint Murchison and a group of Texans were going to finance your Alamo film. Is there any chance of our company getting this for distribution?”
What with Batjac’s experiences in the recent past, it wasn’t hard for Wayne to resist Jack Warner’s overtures. He had been happy there, he had made a great deal of money there, and he would return and make more money. But Warner Bros. was entering a bad period. “Jack got to the point where he wasn’t buying properties unless he felt it could be a big, successful film,” said Vincent Sherman. “Contract people were let go. Raoul Walsh was there as long as anybody, but eventually he left too. Jack didn’t know what to make exactly, and he didn’t want to spend a lot of money unless he thought a project couldn’t miss—My Fair Lady, for instance. He didn’t know which way the business was going, and he got gun-shy.”
Victor McLaglen died in 1959, the first major figure of the Ford stock company to go. He had watched his son’s progress through the ranks with eagerness and pride. Andrew McLaglen had moved from being an assistant at Batjac to directing quality TV westerns such as Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke, and had tentatively begun a career in features by the time of his father’s death. Wayne remembered that “[Vic] would always come to me and say, ‘How’s he doing? How’s the boy doing? How do the other guys your age feel about him?’ Always worrying about the boy.” In a few years, Wayne would give Andrew his break into the big time.
That same year, Grant Withers committed suicide. Wayne had carried him financially for years, and even gotten him a job at Universal guiding celebrities around the lot for $200 a week. But Withers’s alcoholism and the accompanying physical problems finally overwhelmed him. Typically, Wayne blamed himself, but only because he had been too benevolent. “It’s all my fault. I made it too easy for him. If the guy had to go out and goddamn go to work or something, maybe he wouldn’t have done it. But I let him keep up his half-ass standard of being a big shot around town. I made it too easy for him.”
Shortly after Rio Bravo ended production, Wayne gave an interview to UPI’s Vernon Scott that centered on his financial difficulties. “I’ve been acting for almost 30 years, and never come close to amassing a fortune,” he said. “I’d like to take it easy for a while, but I can’t. I have to work to keep my head above water. By the time I pay off alimony, my business agent, manager and raise five kids, I’m lucky if I break even. I keep working because I need the money.”
Wayne continued to be alarmed at the state of the industry he loved. He was particularly upset about the Tennessee Williams film Suddenly, Last Summer, with the homosexual Sebastian being cannibalized by native urchins. Wayne said the film was “polluting the bloodstream of Hollywood.”
He committed to a group of films that would be made nearly back to back in order to build up cash reserves for The Alamo. The Horse Soldiers was a picture that Martin Rackin and John Lee Mahin ginned up with John Ford before they brought it to the Mirisch brothers. The latter had raised themselves out of Monogram by renaming the company Allied Artists and producing William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion and Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon. Leaving Monogram/Allied Artists behind, the Mirische’s decamped for United Artists, where they would be organization mainstays for the next fifteen years.
The Horse Soldiers was a Civil War picture, and with Ford’s interest, which generally translated to John Wayne’s interest, it quickly became what the industry likes to term a Go project. At his first meeting with Ford, Walter Mirisch asked about a leading man. “Well, Duke. Duke,” said Ford. Mirisch breathed a sigh of relief but pointed out that the picture was mostly exteriors and would have to be made in the spring or summer, and it was already the fall of 1958—not much time to lock in a script and the services of major star. Ford wasn’t alarmed. “When I’m ready, he’ll be there,” said Ford. In due course, Wayne was there. Wayne and William Holden each signed on for $750,000 plus 20 percent of the profits; Ford was in for $200,000 and 10 percent of the gross.
Hiring on as an actor was William Wellman Jr. He had known Wayne for years; when he was a young boy, his father took him to Johnny Indrisano for boxing lessons, who also instructed Mike and Pat Wayne in the manly art of self-defense while their fathers looked on.
But The Horse Soldiers was William Wellman Jr.’s first time on a Ford picture, and the experience left him shaken, especially because of what it did to his idea of John Wayne. “I liked John Wayne. I was a fan. I thought he was a god. And the fact that he would take the abuse from Ford. . . . I mean, people would turn away. It was cringe-making. Ford would say things like, ‘You’re nothing but a goddamn cowboy. You couldn’t act your way out of a paper bag.’ And that was for starters. And Wayne just took it. He never spoke back. Ford was like his father, he had given him his career. Eventually Ford would stop, and Wayne would just pick up where he had left off and go on. It rolled off him, or seemed to.”
One day Ford tried the same thing with Holden, who came over and stuck his finger in Ford’s chest and said, “Don’t ever do that again. If you ever do that again, I don’t care who you are and how old you are, I will pick you up and throw you in the river.”
“Ford hardly talked to Holden after that,” remembered Wellman. “Ford was never mean to women, always treated them with respect and courtesy. It was actors and men that he would go after.
“Now, Ford liked my father, and my father liked him. They were friendly, but I was afraid to get close to him, because he got angry with me my first day on the picture. I was whistling, and Ford turned suddenly in his chair and looked at me and all work stopped. And I stopped whistling and everybody turned to go back to work. Later, someone told me, ‘Don’t ever whistle around the Old Man. And don’t laugh or sing or tell any stories unless he instigates it.’ So I just stayed clear of him.”
The Horse Soldiers would be marred by the death of stuntman Fred Kennedy, who broke his neck doing a simple horse fall. Ford and Wayne had worked with Kennedy for years and both were devastated. Ford lost interest in the picture.
If The Horse Soldiers was a missed opportunity for Ford, it must have been a nightmare for Wayne. Pilar had been beset by insomnia for some years, a function of anxiety at bein
g plucked out of Peru and tossed into the highest reaches of Hollywood life. She had begun taking Seconal to sleep and gradually became addicted.
On location in Louisiana, Pilar ran out of the pills and began an inadvertent drug withdrawal. Her mouth went dry, her breath was short, her heart began pounding wildly, she began to hallucinate. The episode culminated in Pilar slashing her wrists. Wayne hired a private airplane and nurses to get her back to California while he stayed in Louisiana. There was nothing else to do. There was a movie to be made.
“I liked Duke Wayne a great deal,” said Walter Mirisch. “A very decent, professional man, no nonsense. He came to work, he knew his lines. He was approachable, he didn’t throw his power or prominence around. And a tremendously underrated actor. He gave many extraordinary performances—Red River, The Searchers—but he had to wait until the end of his career for an Oscar.
“I thought he was good on script, although my only experience with him was through Ford, and his whole relationship with Ford was so screwy. I was on the set one day when Ford made some kind of disparaging remark to him: ‘Get over there, you dumb cluck’ or something like that. It bothered me, and later I said to Duke, ‘Why the hell do you let him talk to you like that?’
“ ‘Aw, that’s just the Old Man,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t mean it. Forget about it.’ But I didn’t like it.”
Nineteen fifty-eight had been devoted to three movies and to preparation for The Alamo. Nineteen fifty-nine would be devoted to one movie only. As Wayne wrote in August of that year, “my career, my personal fortune, and my standing in the business are at stake.”
