John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  By now, everybody in Wayne’s inner circle could list all the reasons not to make The Alamo. There were a dozen financial concerns Bö Roos could cite and John Ford had more objections: Wayne was too old, had never directed, and the story of the Alamo would be one hell of a complicated production to use as a learning experience. Wayne turned a deaf ear to all of this. He had made up his mind, and when he arrived at that point he could be every bit as focused as one of his obsessive characters.

  In 1956, Batjac had outlined a distribution deal with United Artists in which UA would front $2.5 million of the budget in return for distribution rights. Batjac had to match the funds. Wayne had to abandon his plan to play a cameo as Sam Houston in order to play a major part and add some box office insurance. He chose Davy Crockett, then had to find someone equally commanding for Sam Houston. He eventually settled on his old contractee James Arness, now a huge TV star on Gunsmoke.

  Wayne asked Andy McLaglen to set up a meeting with Arness, which he did. Wayne brought his entourage over to the Gunsmoke set after shooting one day to ask Arness to be in the picture, only to find that Arness had skipped out on the meeting. “Jim powdered,” remembered McLaglen. “He absolutely did not show up for the meeting. He totally powdered.”

  Wayne was understandably furious, and never really forgave Arness for his flagrant disloyalty. “Get that other guy you work with,” he snapped at McLaglen, meaning Richard Boone, the star of Have Gun, Will Travel. So Richard Boone played Sam Houston.

  Besides casting difficulties, there were money problems. The proposed budget of $5 million wasn’t anywhere near enough to make the movie Wayne was planning. In search of additional funding, he approached Texas governor Price Daniel, who introduced him to Texas businessmen who were anxious to counter the negative, nativist image that George Stevens had given the state in 1956’s Giant.

  In June 1958, Clint Murchison agreed to invest $1.5 million in incremental amounts, under the condition that he was in line to get his money back after UA but before anybody else was repaid. He was also charging 6 percent per year interest, and demanded that Wayne receive no personal salary for making the movie. All this and 5 percent of the net profits. He also capped his investment at $1.5 million; any further monies were Wayne’s problem. What all this meant was that Batjac’s own investment could not be recovered until both UA and subsidiary investors got their money back.

  Wayne would later estimate that besides Batjac’s contractual contribution, he dropped in $1.2 million of his personal funds—more or less all the ready cash that he had in the world.

  Since 1956, he had been looking for a place to shoot his movie cheaply, which led him to consider Mexico and Peru. But those locations were submarined by the problem of finding sufficiently skilled professionals to staff the picture and the fact that distance added costs.

  One man was convinced that the movie needed to be made in Texas, and that man was James T. “Happy” Shahan, the mayor of Brackettville, Texas, a town of 1,800 hardy souls one hundred miles west of San Antonio. It just so happened that Shahan owned a 22,000-acre ranch in Brackettville that he believed had all sorts of possibilities.

  Parts of The Last Command, Herbert Yates’s underhanded attempt to preempt Wayne’s dream project, had been shot in nearby Fort Clark, although the set Republic built was only a small L configuration on the ranch of Louis Hobbs—the Alamo chapel itself had been a matte painting. Shahan believed that Brackettville was the perfect location to build a more expansive set.

  At this point, Wayne was planning to shoot in Durango, Mexico, where he had already set the local people to work making authentic adobe bricks to use in constructing the sets. But beginning in 1955, Shahan set siege to Wayne. As he put it, they started talking in the spring of 1955, “and we argued until September, 1957.”

  That summer, Wayne sent Nate Edwards, the Batjac production manager, to examine Shahan’s ranch. Edwards arrived in late June, and Shahan took him around Kinney County. Edwards liked Fort Clark, because it could billet a large crew, but they needed something more for the actual Alamo set. After several days of looking, Edwards hadn’t seen anything that would work.

  On the last day of Edwards’s visit, Shahan had to double back to his ranch to cut out some cattle. Shahan and Edwards pulled into the ranch as the sun was setting. As they drove past Shahan’s house and onto the flatland where the cattle were corraled, Edwards told Shahan to stop his truck. Why, he wanted to know, had Shahan not brought him here before? On July 1, one week after Edwards returned to Hollywood with photographs of the proposed location, Wayne called Shahan and told him he was on his way to Brackettville.

  “When?” asked Shahan.

  “Tomorrow,” said Wayne. After Wayne saw the location, negotiations were quickly accomplished. He would make his movie in Brackettville. What seems to have closed the deal was Shahan’s willingness to serve as the construction ramrod on the project. “All I want is an architect, your art director and that’s all,” he told Wayne. “I can do the rest.”

  Wayne thought it was an empty promise until Shahan introduced him to a round little man named Chato Hernández, whom Shahan said could handle the construction. Wayne drew himself up to his full height and said, “Chato, can you build an Alamo?”

  “Mr. Wayne, can you make a movie?” replied Hernández.

  Set construction got under way in February 1958, with production planned for September. Eventually, the sets spread over four hundred acres of land. Wayne had hired Al Ybarra as the Batjac art director because of the work Ybarra had done for Ford on The Fugitive in 1947. “When John Wayne saw it,” Ybarra told the film historian Frank Thompson, “he was in love with the picture, the way it was done. He liked particularly the fade-out scene, and I designed the fade-out scene. . . . He says, ‘Look, one day I’m gonna do a story on the Alamo. I want you to be my art director.’ ”

  Ybarra was the art director on The High and the Mighty, Hondo, and all the other Batjac productions while he kept working on The Alamo. When it finally came time to start building the set, Ybarra had the benefit of nearly ten years of thinking and planning.

  The facade of the Alamo was built of stone, with most of the wood cannibalized from derelict buildings at Fort Clark. Only the chapel was reproduced to exact scale—the rest of the compound was constructed at about 75 percent actual size—and even then Ybarra cheated a little. The humped gable on the facing of the chapel wasn’t actually there when the battle was fought, nor were two upper windows that were added in 1850.

  Ybarra went down to Mexico and bought old handmade iron hardware, then brought in 150 Mexicans from across the border to make adobes. Four months after construction began, a rainstorm washed away fifty thousand adobe bricks that had been drying in the sun. Parts of the set representing old San Antonio also disappeared. After the rains, Ybarra had his crew dig drainage ditches around the entire set.

  Even with the flash flood, Ybarra was on schedule, but the September 1958 production date came and went because Batjac had a cash shortfall that resulted from buying out Robert Fellows’s share of the company. Wayne realized that the filming had to be postponed for an entire year. Wayne called Shahan and told him to stop building the set, but Shahan said he couldn’t stop. He decided to take over financial responsibility for the construction himself, and got a loan for $100,000 that was co-signed by Wayne.

  As if all this wasn’t enough turmoil, at the end of 1958 Wayne terminated his professional relationship with Bö Roos’s Beverly Management Corporation. Although Wayne would always claim Roos had cheated him up, down, and sideways, after a thorough investigation nothing illegal was found. Most of the money Wayne had given Roos to invest had been flushed down the toilet of bad real estate, overpriced Mexican hotels, dry wells, and management fees. Lots of management fees.

  Another financial hit came with the Panamanian investments Wayne had made through Roberto Arias, the husband of Margot Fonteyn and the son of the former president of
Panama. Arias was, first, a charmer, and, second, a rogue. Rampant infidelity was not unusual for a Latin male, but Arias took it a step further. In April 1959, Arias fled Panama, which led to Fonteyn being arrested for purportedly plotting against the government. Wayne claimed that “Tito” (Arias’s nickname) “never talked politics and I never heard him say anything about overthrowing the Panamanian government.”

  What made it awkward for Wayne was the discovery of Arias’s suitcase that held an envelope with Wayne’s address. Inside the envelope was a memorandum to Wayne outlining a “schedule of funds totaling $682,850 given to or drawn by Tito Arias in connection with his Panamanian operations in which you are involved.” The memorandum went on to specify that $525,000 had been turned over to Arias personally.

  The implication was that Arias had diverted some of Wayne’s investment monies into political activities against the Panamanian government. Wayne said that the charges against Arias were “ridiculous.”

  Before all this happened, Wayne estimated that he, Arias, and Arias’s brother Tony had about 70 percent of the shrimp business in Panama locked up. It all came tumbling down when Tony Arias was killed in an airplane crash, and his brother fled the country. Wayne estimated that he lost $500,000 in the resulting debacle.

  While Wayne went off to make The Barbarian and the Geisha, Rio Bravo, and The Horse Soldiers in rapid succession, Al Ybarra and Happy Shahan kept going. The Alamo set eventually took more than a year to build out of wood, limestone, and thousands of handmade adobe bricks. Ybarra had to install ten miles of wiring, and Batjac fronted the cost of fourteen miles of gravel and tar roads, as well as a four-thousand-foot runway at nearby Fort Clark, where the unit would be housed.

  The isolation of the location forced Wayne into great expense. At the height of the production, about 2,500 people would be living and working around Brackettville, so Batjac had to have deep-water wells dug and twenty miles of sewage lines laid into mammoth cesspools. In addition, a series of dikes and dams were constructed to turn a lazy prairie creek into a decent sized river. Giant corrals were built to house the one thousand horses and three hundred longhorns needed for the production.

  The longhorns posed a particular problem; they were practically extinct by 1959, and the herd had to be put together in small numbers. Each animal had to be insured for $1,500, and they were driven to Brackettville from ranches elsewhere in Texas.

  Throughout 1959, Wayne made a series of visits to the Brackettville location to check out Ybarra’s set as it grew. During his final walk-through before production, Wayne noticed that Ybarra had placed a small cross on the very tip of the chapel. Wayne stared at it for a while, then said, “Take that down.” After it was removed, he stared at the front of the chapel some more, then said, “Gimme something allegorical. We need something up there—maybe a larger cross.”

  Ybarra thought about it for a few minutes, then told the crew to place a large cross on top of the chapel, only at an angle, as if it had fallen over. Ybarra wasn’t happy about the substitution—he felt the fallen cross was out of scale—but Wayne wanted something allegorical, and he got something allegorical.

  Ybarra didn’t attempt to accurately reproduce the San Antonio of 1836. Although Mexican towns of the time were constructed around plazas, Ybarra’s San Antonio is more or less a conventional western town, with dusty streets and parallel lines of buildings.

  Wayne’s passion for the picture continued to lead him into a series of bad deals. Besides the fact that UA’s investment was small considering the overall budget, and both UA and the additional investors were due their money before Batjac could recoup, the set he was building at great cost became Happy Shahan’s property when the picture was finished. (No wonder Shahan was happy.)

  But Wayne believed that the picture had to be done right if it was going to be done at all, and he wasn’t about to let niggling financial considerations derail him. He even laid a railroad track into Shahan’s property to drop hay for the horses and feed for the livestock.

  Among the people he consulted about the picture were the historian J. Frank Dobie, and former vice president John Nance Garner, who, Wayne told Hedda Hopper, “was the only man in his administration with enough guts to stand up against FDR”—a comment that disappeared between the interview and the printed version.

  By June 1959, Wayne was negotiating with Todd-AO to shoot his film in the 70mm process, but he realized that he needed still more money. He began canvassing for additional investors and the McCullough Tool Company seemed interested. On June 30, he wrote them a long letter outlining the project’s financials. The production cost was listed as $4.5 million, with an additional $1 million for advertising and publicity, $1.5 million apiece for the cast as well as distribution costs. With this—grievously underestimated—math, the break-even point on The Alamo was forecast to be $9.6 million.

  He then outlined the returns on the three previous Todd-AO spectaculars: Oklahoma! had returned rentals of $11 million, Around the World in 80 Days had returned about $27 million, while South Pacific was at $10 million and still playing.

  Donning the cap of Max Bialystock, Wayne went on to feverishly assert that the worst-case scenario for Oklahoma! and South Pacific was that investors would get their money back, plus 6 percent interest, plus a profit of about $600,000. If The Alamo turned out to be a real smash like Around the World in 80 Days, “my adding machine’s broken. . . . Under these circumstances, it seems to me that the million dollars and completion guarantee from your group is a safe investment.” The inference, of course, was that Todd-AO was some sort of commercial safety net that would bring the picture home no matter its quality.

  In New York, Todd-AO cleared their corporate throats and announced that they had . . . issues. On July 8, George Skouras, brother of 20th Century Fox’s Spyros Skouras, wrote Wayne that the board of Todd-AO would have to read the script before it agreed to honor Wayne with its 70mm cameras. A week later, Skouras wrote, “To be frank, I am not enthusiastic over the script. I find the first 112 pages more or less anemic.”

  At this point, Skouras was under the impression that John Ford was going to direct the picture, but even that didn’t cut any ice: “I don’t believe, however, even in the hands of John Ford, that the story incorporated in the script has the ingredients of a road show Todd-AO picture.” A few days later, Charles Feldman talked to Skouras, who told Feldman that if Wayne persisted with Jimmy Grant’s existing script the film would be a fiasco.

  Wayne responded with both a letter and a telegram. The former quoted John Ford’s opinion of the script—“thrilling”—and went on to enumerate the displays of showmanship he was planning. He said that he would reproduce John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo as embodied by José Greco and his troupe during the night raid on the Mexican army. “Picture that being used just as a background to a suspense sequence in which a group of our men are sneaking through enemy lines, and you will realize the scope of our artistic planning in this picture.”

  After a few days of intense lobbying with Skouras, Feldman sent a memo to some associates in his agency outlining the situation. George Skouras hated the script and believed it would bankrupt Wayne. But his brother Spyros, the chairman of Fox, with whom Wayne was in serious business, pleaded with his brother and finally wore him down. Spyros Skouras even said that Fox would pay half of the guarantee that Todd-AO was demanding. “If Spyros didn’t put it in a personal basis—brother to brother—George would have said ‘no,’ ” reported Feldman.

  But George Skouras wanted a guarantee that John Ford would direct key scenes. Feldman had raised this chimera earlier in the year, in February, when he wrote Spyros Skouras that “in all probability there will be a codirector who may not get credit for the personal scenes and of course a second unit director for the big battle scenes.” Since everybody in the industry associated Wayne with Ford, they assumed Ford would be the uncredited co-director.

  Feldman’s opinion was that nothing else mattered but getting
Skouras to sign on the line which is dotted—“once you sign the papers, you needn’t be concerned, as I will handle it.” (Feldman’s emphasis.) Spyros Skouras finally offered to have Fox take the picture over from UA if it came to that.

  While all this was going on, Clint Murchison made noises about pulling out his investment. Murchison had agreed to advance $2 million, an extra $500,000 over his initial investment, in return for a bump in his share of the profits to 15 percent. Then Murchison got cold feet. Wayne wrote that he could probably find the extra $500,000 elsewhere, but Murchison’s $1.5 million was crucial; there wasn’t enough time to raise it elsewhere, and postponing the picture was impossible.

  Batjac forwarded a balance sheet which showed that the company’s assets totaled $707,344, while the liabilities amounted to much less; there was a surplus of $242,943. Most importantly, the Batjac film library, which included The High and the Mighty, Hondo, and ten other pictures, was carried at a net value of only $27,655. Attorneys regarded the financial potential of the library for reissue and television to be, conservatively speaking, $500,000. They were Batjac’s own attorneys, but they were still grossly underestimating the library’s value.

  On July 3, 1959, Murchison’s attorney wrote Wayne that the commitment would be honored. But Wayne’s massively scaled historical spectacular was still underfunded. Wayne and everybody else knew that he was going to have to ante up more money.

  The final shooting schedule, dated August 21, called for sixty-six days, an improbably short schedule considering the scale of the picture. While final preparations were going on through the summer of 1959, Wayne and Jimmy Grant were polishing the script, with Grant beginning yet another rewrite—the twelfth!—in May. When he finished, the script had expanded from 106 pages to 156 pages.