by Scott Eyman
As the final version of the script was being completed, Wayne received a letter from Raoul Walsh, which was accompanied by a still from The Big Trail showing Wayne astride a horse with the Grand Tetons in the distance.
“Have been looking over some old stills and ran across the enclosed,” wrote Walsh. “Thought you might enjoy meeting a dashing young plainsman.
“Read in the trade papers that you are going to direct The Alamo and also play in it. This is a pretty tough assignment but with all the experience you have had I know of nobody better qualified to become a director. So I’ll be rooting for you. And if you take the advice of an old wrangler, do not start the picture until you have a finished script to your liking.”
Walsh had intuitively determined the primary problem of The Alamo. Wayne’s years of thinking about the project had resulted in a prolix script.
The script would be the focus of critical dissatisfaction then and now, but Happy Shahan insisted that Wayne’s original ideas were actually much stronger than what finally emerged. “I have to defend Wayne. It definitely wasn’t Wayne’s fault as much as it was the writer’s. . . . I was there during arguments when Wayne wanted to do what history said and Grant said, ‘Hey, who knows about that? Nobody but Texans.’ . . .
“You gotta remember one thing: Wayne was very loyal to his friends.”
Shahan’s version of events was confirmed by Al Ybarra, who said, “[Wayne] should have done more cutting, eliminating [the scene in the woods where Crockett sends the girl home] and also eliminating the scene in the Cantina. That didn’t mean a damn thing. . . . When guys were down there on that kind of a hardship and with a potential war on their hands, they don’t mess around with feathers on their noses. . . . His writer, Jimmy Grant, talked him into that. And he talked him into the love scene which should never have been left in the final cut.”
The script became “way too wordy,” according to Gretchen Wayne. “They never shut up. No wonder they lost—the Mexicans could have come over the walls while they were all talking. But Granddaddy wanted to get his points across, and it was his picture and he could do what he wanted.”
Wayne was blinded by his dream. Concerned that United Artists’ limited investment would correspond to a limited enthusiasm for the picture he hired Russell Birdwell as Batjac’s personal publicity man for The Alamo. Birdwell was a legendary figure who had supervised publicity for Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, as well as Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Not coincidentally, Birdwell had also been born in Texas.
Birdwell’s affinity for the bold began early; he had been a reporter at the sensational New York Daily Mirror in 1927 when he scooped the world with the story of Lindbergh’s takeoff for Paris. Birdwell had enormous energy, a lot of charm, and wasn’t hampered by excessive amounts of taste.
Wayne’s plan was that Birdwell would work in tandem with UA’s own publicity apparatus on The Alamo, but UA immediately resented the idea of Birdwell’s interference, mostly because they regarded his ideas as old-fashioned ballyhoo that, given the seriousness of the picture, was in atrocious taste. The conflict that resulted undoubtedly damaged the picture.
Wayne was pleasantly surprised when Frank Sinatra expressed interest in the part of the chilly, driven William Barret Travis. “Frank came over,” remembered Wayne, “he talked to me about the Travis part, he knew Travis as well as I do.” But Sinatra was booked up for the next year, and Wayne couldn’t afford to put off production and pay interest on the loans.
Wayne offered Richard Widmark his choice of either Travis or Bowie, hoping he’d take Travis. He took Bowie and a salary of $200,000. That left Travis, for whom Wayne recruited Laurence Harvey, hot from the previous year’s Room at the Top. Harvey came on board for $100,000.
Wayne not only personally hired every actor, he personally hired every stuntman. A twenty-seven-year-old Texan named Dean Smith was doubling for Dale Robertson on Tales of Wells Fargo when Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias took him to meet Mike Wayne and Bob Morrison. Smith had won a gold medal on the 1952 Olympic team with Mathias, who made China Doll for Batjac while Smith was playing for the Los Angeles Rams.
“I told them I could ride and jump with anybody,” remembered Smith, “and that I wanted to go back to Texas and work on something dealing with Texas history. While I was there with Bob and Mike, I also met Tom Kane. And then guess who walked in?”
Wayne remembered Smith from the Olympics and the Rams. After a brief conversation, he turned to Mike and his brother and said, “Let’s take this kid to Texas. He needs to go back home.”
Over in Culver City, a young assistant director at MGM named Robert Relyea had just been fired for mouthing off to the head of production. He had never worked anywhere but MGM, so was understandably worried. That afternoon, his phone rang: “Bob Relyea,” announced a familiar voice. “This is John Wayne.”
“Yeah, and I’m Attila the Hun,” said Relyea as he slammed the phone down and wondered which of his jerk friends was teasing him. The phone rang again, and again it was that unmistakable voice. “If you’re done fucking around . . .”
The next morning Relyea left for Brackettville to work as John Wayne’s assistant director on The Alamo. It was now late August 1959, and William Clothier was making test shots of the set under varying angles of light with the 70mm Todd-AO camera. Wayne went down a month before shooting to get used to the location and the sets.
“When we walked on the set for the first time,” remembered William Clothier, “Duke said to me, ‘We have no angles here.’
“What do you mean we haven’t got any angles?’
“ ‘We haven’t got anything to shoot.’
“Well, this is the set of The Alamo, they spent a million dollars building this damn thing. I said, ‘Duke, you got all sorts of angles.’
“ ‘Well, show me one.’
“ ‘Well, over here, you shoot through the stairway.’
“ ‘Show me another one.’
“So I showed him half a dozen. Then he says, ‘What if I’m out in the middle of a street?’ I said ‘We got props; we got wagons, we got cannons, we got cows and horses, we got all sorts of things.’ You have to set it up to frame on something. You put something in the foreground. Anyway, he scratched his head and said, ‘I never thought of that.’ Well, he’d never directed a picture, either.”
To a great extent, Wayne hired John Ford’s crew, except for Wingate Smith, Ford’s assistant director for decades as well as brother-in-law, and a man Wayne didn’t care for. Relyea’s status as an interloper worried him—needlessly. The department heads, as well as all the members of the Ford stock company, turned out to be extremely courteous to the assistant director.
Once he saw the set, Relyea suggested to Al Ybarra and Wayne that the walls of the Alamo be built a bit higher, but Wayne wouldn’t hear of it. “I want to see thousands behind every wall,” he said. His ambition was laudable but expensive, because every time the camera did a reverse, people had to be moved to fill up the vast spaces visible beyond the low walls.
Just before production got under way, Wayne estimated that about $1.1 million was already spent. Once the cameras started turning, the weekly charges would range from $200,000 to $350,000, depending on the number of people before the cameras. That money did not include much salary for Wayne, who was making only Directors Guild minimum ($13,000 and change). Wayne was working for what he fervently hoped would be the profits. He was up for 7.5 percent of the gross, to be deferred until all the first and secondary loans were repaid. In case the loans were not repaid, then Batjac would pay him 7.5 percent of its net proceeds, although his compensation was limited to $100,000 in any calendar year, in order to avoid a huge tax bite.
On Wednesday morning, September 9, 1959, production began on The Alamo with an 8 A.M. blessing from Father Peter Rogers of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in San Antonio. “O, Almighty God, centuries ago, Thou raised a magnificent mission—a harbor for all, of peace and freedom. This was The
Alamo. Today, we ask Thy blessing, Thy help and Thy protection as once again history is relived in this production.”
Wayne had been waiting more than twelve years for this moment, and he was completely prepared. “Duke knew that script backwards,” said William Clothier. “He knew every line better than the actors did. In the morning we’d have our breakfast together and go out on location and discuss every shot we were gonna shoot that day, and figure out which we should start with and when we should do such and such a shot for the light.
“Wayne was always on the set. He was the first on the set in the morning and the last to leave in the evening.”
One production problem that immediately presented itself was a result of Wayne’s insistence on physical realism—the interior sets had been built without movable walls or ceilings. This meant that Clothier had to struggle to keep his lights out of the shot. A more easily solved problem was Wayne’s tension, which manifested itself with him silently mouthing another actor’s words while he was in the same shot. Clothier grew used to cutting the camera and telling Wayne to stop moving his lips.
After a couple of weeks of production, Wayne wrote Charles Feldman that “we are working like hell, but the cast is wonderful and the backgrounds are magnificent. [Richard] Boone did a wonderful job . . . [and] I can’t tell you how beautiful the weather is here. We haven’t had one unusually hot day.”
But soon after that letter, Wayne’s anxiety ramped up, and for a good reason. Right after lunch one day, John Ford walked onto the set. “He plunked himself down in the director’s chair and stopped Duke’s scene,” remembered William Clothier. “ ‘Jesus Christ, Duke, that’s not the way to do it . . .’ ”
The company at large was flabbergasted, but Wayne had known he was coming. Ford’s participation had been whispered about for some time, before and during the start of production, perhaps as a result of the bogus agreement with George Skouras. In July 1959, The Hollywood Reporter had written that “scenes in which Wayne appears will be directed by John Ford.”
The night before Ford showed up, Wayne had taken Clothier aside and ranted: “Goddamn it. I want to make this picture and I don’t want Ford directing. What the hell am I going to do?” Clothier thought for a moment then offered up a solution.
“Look, I’ve got a big crew here. Let’s give the Old Man a second unit.” Wayne loved the idea, so Clothier got a crew together, and actors who weren’t scheduled to be used in the next couple of days.
The next morning, Wayne called the production’s twenty-seven stuntmen together. “Gentlemen, I want to tell you something. Old Man Ford’s coming up to visit and I know he’s going to ask for a camera. And I’m going to give it to him. And I know that he’s going to ask for you guys to do stunts. And you’re gonna do them. But, whatever he shoots, I’m telling you now, none of that will be in the picture. So do what you want, it makes no difference, but it’s not going to be in the picture, because all they have to do is find out in Hollywood that Old Man Ford shot a scene or something, they’ll say, ‘Well, he shot The Alamo.’ And this is not going to happen!”
John “Bear” Hudkins was one of the stuntmen, and he remembered, “We thought Ford was gonna burn [the] place down. Oh, he did everything. We had fires; we had jumping horses; we had falling horses; we were falling off walls and everything with the Old Man just sitting there and shooting, and we knowing that they weren’t even going to use this.”
“Ford went out and shot stuff that couldn’t possibly be used,” remembered Clothier. “It didn’t have anything to do with the picture we were making. I don’t think we used three cuts that the Old Man did. It cost Duke over $250,000 to give Ford that second unit.”
Ford would amble around and occasionally announce what he was going to do. “Duke needs close shots,” he said. “He’s got a lot of long shots.” He went about shooting what he called “three-footers,” quick details of action. Occasionally, he would get involved in the long shots as well. For a master shot of the aftermath of the battle, with dead men and horses lying on the ground in front of the Alamo, Ford wandered around, kicking dirt on a hat, moving the corpses into more compositionally attractive positions.
Ford would come down for a few days, go away for a week or two, then come back. “I don’t think he directed anything in the final film,” said Bob Relyea. “Ford would go off into a corner of the compound and shoot a couple of stuntmen fighting with nothing behind them, and we were shooting scenes with thousands of people. You couldn’t cut Ford’s stuff in. At night, Ford would get together with Ken Curtis and Wayne and play poker till one or two in the morning. The next morning, he’d fly out.”
One night, Ford was watching while Wayne directed a scene where the men go outside the fortress to steal cattle, during which Dean Smith did a standing jump over a horse. “It was a terrific shot,” Smith remembered. “I was standing there afterward when this old man walks up to me. He had on white buck shoes, cream colored slacks, a blue blazer, a slouch hat and an eyepatch. He pulled up the patch and looked at me.
“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I’ve done lots of westerns and I never saw a man jump over a horse like that. You didn’t even use a trampoline. My name’s John Ford. You hear of me working, you come and see me. You got a job.’ ” Smith would work for Ford on Two Rode Together, Cheyenne Autumn, and How the West Was Won.
Smith believed that Ford came down to Brackettville with the thought that Wayne would throw up his hands in abject gratitude and hand him the picture. “But he found out that Duke had learned more than he thought,” said Smith.
One day, word was sent to Relyea that Ford needed an assistant director. Relyea was feeling tired and grumpy, so he sent Mike Wayne. Ford was Pat Wayne’s godfather, but he and Mike were never close.
“Duke had a very strong admiration for Mike, who was a lot like he was—bright, hardnosed and short-tempered,” said Relyea. “And Pat was an actor, with his SAG card tattooed on his chest.” It wasn’t long before Ford started mimicking what he thought Mike sounded like around his father: “Dad, can we put the horses here? Dad, how about the cannons?” Mike responded in kind: he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and began tearing at it with his teeth—Ford’s primary nervous habit when directing.
“At that point, Ford went apeshit and started screaming bloody murder,” said Bob Relyea. “ ‘You little dumbbell!’ So I had to get Ford a different assistant director. It was kind of funny.”
Ford’s presence on the picture was unnerving for Wayne, as well as everybody else. “Ford was always courteous to me,” said Relyea, “but you could cut the air with a knife whenever he was around. I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seemed to me that in a lot of ways he was getting back at Duke. It felt like it was unwritten that if The Alamo ever got made, that Ford would direct it. And then one day Duke must have said, ‘How about lunch? And by the way, I’m going to direct The Alamo.’ And I think the hurt was so deep that Ford never got over it.
“It was a strange kind of love/hate relationship. I think Ford wanted Duke to succeed with the picture, but he couldn’t quite forgive him for not wanting him to direct it. Or perhaps Ford genuinely didn’t think the picture could succeed without him.”
But The Alamo was more than a movie for its director; it was a personal crusade that explained Wayne to Wayne—the patriotism, the single-mindedness that could result in compromised marriages. It would also, he believed, explain America to the world.
Occasionally, Ford would sit there while Wayne was in a scene. Richard Widmark remembered that after one scene between him and Wayne, Wayne asked him if it was okay for him. Widmark said yes, then Ford growled, “Do it again!”
“Why, Coach?” asked Wayne.
“ ’Cause it was no damn good,” said Ford.
They did the scene again.
In his career as an assistant director, Robert Relyea would work with, among others, William Wyler, Robert Wise, Richard Brooks, and John Sturges. In his estimation, “Technically, Wa
yne was the best director I ever worked with. He understood cameras, he understood editing, he understood lenses. What was wanting was communication with the actors. He was so gruff and short on patience that I don’t think he even knew he was gruff. If he had a weakness as a director, it was communication with the actors. The rest of the stuff he knew. Certainly, he knew exactly what he wanted. Completely. More so than anybody else I ever worked with. His abruptness was part of his nature. He simply had a short temper.”
Relyea found out just how short Wayne’s temper could be during one night’s shoot. Something wasn’t working that the electricians had promised to have working. Wayne wasn’t in a great mood to begin with—the weather was cold and rainy, and now the electricians were falling short. He began picking up rocks and throwing them at the offending electricians.
“They were standing on ladders at the time,” remembered Relyea, “and he picked them off as if he was Sandy Koufax. He had a hell of an arm.” Wayne undoubtedly felt better for expressing his dissatisfaction, but the next day The Alamo had need of twenty new electricians, because all the old ones had quit.
He was everywhere, all the time. Instructing some Mexican extras who were supposed to come in through a hole in the wall, he ordered, “You men, pour in here. Fill it up. Hold your rifles at high port. Get back in there. Get a gun. Come through with these men. Round up those guys sleeping in Bejar.” When a costume needed fixing, he yelled “Wardrobe!” When nothing happened, he bellowed, “When I call, somebody say ‘Yo!’ ”
Wayne took special care of his twenty-seven stuntmen, each of whom was earning about $1,000 a week. One of the few accidents involved Rudy Robbins, who was on horseback for a shot in which he was herding longhorns toward the mission. Robbins’s saddle began slipping, his foot wedged in the stirrup and he got hung up. The horse tried to throw him, but Robbins was still stuck. After being dragged facedown for a hundred yards, Robbins finally worked loose, but his nose was broken, not to mention jammed full of pebbles and sticks.
