John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Postproduction on The Alamo was done at the Goldwyn studio on Formosa Avenue. One day, Laurence Harvey came in to wrap up his dubbing. After an hour or two, Wayne got bored and said, “Let’s go over to Lucey’s.” The autograph hounds sniffed out Wayne and before long he was signing menus, napkins, and all manner of scrap paper. While everybody was asking Wayne for his signature, nobody was making a fuss over Harvey.

  “How come nobody ever asks you for your autograph?” asked an amused Wayne.

  “If we were in London, it would be just the opposite,” said Harvey. “They’d be coming after me, and they’d say, ‘John Wayne? Eh . . .’ They’re much more sophisticated over there.”

  “They had a great relationship,” remembered Tom Kane. “Larry wasn’t afraid of Duke. He’d tell him off and Duke loved that, instead of people kissing his ass all the time.” What was supposed to be a break from the rigors of the dubbing room turned into an all-night party, in which Harvey introduced Wayne to the brutal pleasures of the Bullshot—vodka, beef consommé, and lime.

  On January 18, 1960, Wayne wrote a letter to UA president Arthur Krim informing him that Russell Birdwell—who was being paid over $200,000, counting expenses and office overhead, for a year of work between November 1959 and November 1960—was to be in charge of the publicity campaign for The Alamo. “The emphasis,” wrote Wayne, “is going to be on publicity and not on paid advertising.”

  Krim grudgingly agreed, but UA’s ad and publicity budget for the picture had been set at $415,000, with $125,000 of that already spent. Birdwell’s close-to-the-vest style of operating meant that there would be unavoidable duplication of effort, not to mention much corporate irritation.

  All of Wayne’s financial troubles didn’t lessen his belief in the picture he had brought back from Brackettville. In March 1960, Wayne received an offer to sell his percentage in the picture for what James Edward Grant called “a huge capital gain.” He turned the deal down. Grant had a percentage of the profits, and would also have made a sizable chunk of money from the sale, but said that he was happy with his friend’s decision. Grant wrote that he believed his piece of the action would bring in so much money that he would be able to afford to start drinking again, although he hoped “[I] will have some sense enough not to.” That same month, a production memo carried the negative cost of the picture at nearly $5.3 million, almost $800,000 over Wayne’s initial budget.

  Ahead lay more editing, the musical score, print costs, and a massive publicity campaign. More money was going to be needed. Accordingly, in April an agreement was set up with Bank of America for yet another loan, a maximum of $700,000 secured by the Batjac film library. Once again, Batjac agreed that all the other investors, including the Bank of America, were to be repaid before Batjac could recoup its own investment.

  Attached to the loan application was an itemized list containing the purpose for each dollar of the loan. Included was $55,000 for Frankie Avalon and $25,000 for Richard Boone, both of whom had evidently done their stints without being paid. (Variety reported that Wayne bought Boone a Rolls-Royce for his contribution.)

  Also budgeted was $117,000 for the writing and recording of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, and, oddly enough, $100,000 for John Ford. But Ford’s files don’t show him doing any preparation or research work, nor do they show any disbursements from Batjac. Dan Ford, the director’s grandson and executor, says, “Ford didn’t do enough to ask for money. I’m sure it was a cover,” i.e., the money designated for Ford was actually being used for other expenses.

  Batjac was now in a nearly impossible financial position. At this point, the negative cost of the picture, plus prints and advertising, meant that it would have to return rentals—what the movie company gets after the theaters have deducted their share—of something like $15 million to reimburse the UA, the McCullough Tool Company, and the Bank of America loans, which didn’t even take into account the money Wayne had personally thrown into the bucket. (Clint Murchison had already been repaid.) Not only that, but Batjac had given away 10 percent of its net profits to McCullough and Murchison.

  Essentially, The Alamo had to be one of the fifteen highest grossing pictures in Hollywood history or there was going to be a lot of red ink on Batjac’s accounting books.

  The publicity drums began to beat in the summer of 1960. There was a hugely expensive ($152,000) three-page fold-out ad in Life magazine on July 4, headlined “There Were No Ghost Writers at the Alamo,” which made a tenuous connection between the flacks working for the two presidential candidates of 1960 and the lack of same at the Alamo. “There were no ghost writers at the Alamo. Only men. Among them Colonel David Crockett who was 50 years old, Colonel James Bowie, 40; Colonel William Barret Travis, 26.

  “These men left a legacy for all who prize freedom above tyranny, individualism above conformity.” It was signed by Wayne and Grant, although it had been written by Birdwell.

  In May, Wayne started shooting North to Alaska, another one of his 20th Century Fox commitments. In between shots, he worked on the final editing and release plans for The Alamo. Wayne ordered two hundred Bowie knives as gifts for reporters at the San Antonio premiere, and a series of full-page newspaper ads for thirty-five papers in twelve cities. The ad budget for the premiere cities alone was $353,393.

  Wayne began screening the rough cut for friends and family. John Ford responded with a blurb for his pal: “This is the most important motion picture ever made. It is timeless. It’s the greatest motion picture I’ve ever seen. It will last forever—run forever—for all peoples, all families, everywhere!” The exclamation point was presumably Birdwell’s addition.

  Director George Stevens came on board too: “When the roll call of the great ones is made, The Alamo will be among those few by which the films of the future will and must be measured. There are images in The Alamo that will haunt you and inspire you for a lifetime. The Alamo is among the screen’s finest literature—a classic.”

  By August, Jimmy Grant had succeeded in hypnotizing himself: “I have to admit that I am now married to Birdwell’s estimate of an Alamo gross in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars,” he wrote. He asked Batjac to pay out his profits at no more than $50,000 a year, so as to avoid tax nightmares.

  But by September, a month before The Alamo opened, Wayne was depressed about Batjac’s financial position. Everything Wayne and his company owned was either spent or mortgaged. On September 24, Grant wrote Wayne a long letter outlining his ideas for cutting back the company overhead so that the company could survive while waiting for the profits to roll in.

  At this point, Batjac’s overhead was about $450,000 a year. Grant suggested that Wayne get rid of the accountant ($24,000 a year), then furlough production manager Nate Edwards ($26,000 a year), who wouldn’t be needed for at least a year—the company had no immediate production plans after The Alamo. Cut one or two other people, and for God’s sake knock off free coffee and phone service for out-of-work actors. As for Bob Morrison ($15,000 a year), Grant suggested cutting his salary in half, and letting him pick up work as an assistant director on television.

  Then Grant kicked into high gear: sell the Batjac building, rent some space, keep Mary St. John, a few others, rent help when you need it, and lower the yearly costs to $75,000–$100,000 a year. Failing that, Grant suggested that Wayne make two Batjac pictures back to back that would at least cover the company overhead, preferably two scripts by James Edward Grant. (Grant’s was not a subtle personality.) Either way, Grant counseled speed: “The grave awaits much more suddenly than we ever expect . . .”

  The fate of Batjac hung fire for several years, and Charles Feldman did a good deal of spadework to insure the company’s survival. At one point, there were conversations of varying degrees of seriousness with Columbia, Fox, and Seven Arts. The rough outline of the deal with Seven Arts was a purchase price of around $3 million for the Batjac assets—the film library, the company’s percentage of The Alamo—plus a four-picture deal with Way
ne.

  Feldman was having health problems, and he was worried about himself and his client. Wayne was in the middle of bouncing from The Alamo to North to Alaska to Hatari! to The Comancheros with hardly any time off between pictures, in order to replenish his cash reserves. “I am very concerned about you, Duke, and your not getting a holiday and working week after week practically for the past year. This must be remedied. . . . Please take care of yourself and again take care of your health.”

  The deal with Seven Arts would have wiped out all the debt and given Wayne $1 million in the bank, but he didn’t pull the trigger. Batjac was a large part of his identity—it meant he was more than an actor for hire, and losing it would have meant far more than an acknowledgment that his idée fixe had cost him his company.

  Instead of selling out, he handed the company over to his son Mike, who embarked on a strategic and successful series of maneuvers that kept the company alive. Wayne maintained Batjac as a production entity for the rest of his life.

  By the fall of 1960, the publicity drumbeats for The Alamo would have terrified the bravest man behind the mission walls. United Artists sent out what was believed to be the world’s largest press release—actually the film’s production notes. They ran to 184 pages and weighed in at two and a quarter pounds. Ten thousand of them cost $14,752 to print and $3,500 to mail.

  The Alamo premiered in spectacular fashion in San Antonio on October 24, 1960, as the culmination of three days of Alamo-centered hullabaloo. There were round-the-clock appearances by Wayne and the rest of the cast, uniformed high school bands, a symphonic concert of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, a group of trail riders from 130 miles away, and a column of U.S. Marines who reenacted the seventy-mile march of Alamo reinforcements with a banner that read “Come And Take It.” There was also a three-hundred-foot-long cake in the shape of the Alamo, which Wayne helped cut with a Bowie knife.

  ABC aired a special entitled The Spirit of the Alamo that amounted to a one-hour commercial. There was a tour of the set in Brackettville, Laurence Harvey recited Shakespeare, Frankie Avalon and Chill Wills sang, and Wayne and Richard Boone extolled the virtues of Texas in particular and America in general. There was even an interview with the ninety-two-year-old John Nance Garner that Variety termed “rather painful.”

  A couple of days before the premiere, Wayne admitted to Hedda Hopper that he thought the picture was too long. He also said that the picture could wipe him out. “When I say we spent $12 million, I’m leveling. I’ve got everything I own in it. I borrowed from banks and friends. Take a look at one scene and you’ll never be able to count the thousands of people. . . . But I’m not worried. This is a darned good picture—it’s a real American history, the kind of movie we need today more than ever. It’ll make money for years to come.”

  Wayne did press in Los Angeles, he did press in Texas, he did press in New York. For Wayne, all the publicity was worthwhile, because he felt compelled to speak out on politics and, increasingly, movies. There were more and more movies—On the Beach and Robert Rossen’s They Came to Cordura—that aroused his ire. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he objected to a “trend in certain quarters of Hollywood to glorify all that is degrading in a small percentage of disreputable human beings.”

  Warming to his subject, he said he didn’t see how they got Gary Cooper to make the Rossen picture—Coop was always going off the reservation and making a movie about fear instead of resolution. By comparison, there was The Alamo, “a film made up of men and women who believed that in order to live decently one must be prepared to die decently.”

  Also upsetting him was the way he felt America tentatively addressed other world powers. “Why don’t both our presidential candidates emphasize that this is the greatest nation in the history of the world?” he asked. “When the world was flat on its back, what brought it back? American money and American energy, our humanitarianism and our sense of social responsibility for friend and foe alike.”

  The reviews of The Alamo began rolling in, and they were good, not great. Opinions were not radically different than they have been ever since—a splendid physical show with majestic battle scenes marred by too much didactic palaver. “His action scenes are usually vivid, his talk scenes are long and unusually dull,” wrote Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, while Variety said, “The picture is too talkative at times. . . . In undertaking production, direction and thespic participation, Wayne may have spread his talents out too thin for best results.”

  “A great deal that goes on in the first two-thirds of the film,” wrote Philip Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times, “might have been scissored to advantage—not so much because it is incompetent, irrelevant or immaterial as because it is corny.”

  The Alamo received the signal honor of a parody in Mad magazine, in which “John Wayde” narrates the story of the making of the movie: “As we all know, the longer the picture nowadays, the greater it is,” says Wayde by way of introduction. “Well, we had a greatness problem right from the start. Namely, how to add three hours to an exciting half-hour assault on the Alamo by the Mexican army. One way was to pad the time with lengthy speeches about freedom . . .”

  As far as Wayne’s friends—and quite possibly Wayne himself—were concerned, all this was delayed retribution for the activities of the Motion Picture Alliance. “The word of mouth was that [The Alamo] was a dog,” said Borden Chase. “This was created by the Communists to get back at Wayne. Then there were some bad reviews inspired by the Communists. Of course, I wouldn’t say that all criticism of The Alamo was Communist-inspired, but some of these movie reviewers, who are only liberals, have some best pals who are Communists.”

  The vast left-wing conspiracy helped to focus United Artists’ doubts that The Alamo was not really a road show (reserved seat) picture, if only because Wayne’s audience did not consist of sophisticates in big cities who traditionally attended such movies. Business the first week was very good, mostly sellouts, then started drifting downward. With grosses not holding firm, United Artists also wanted to cut the picture in order to squeeze in more shows per day.

  Batjac wanted to stick with the road shows because it was to their economic advantage—UA’s distribution fee for the road show was only 15 percent versus 30 percent for general release. Conversely, UA wanted to rush the picture into general release because it was to their economic advantage. Then there was the fact that the film wouldn’t be able to break even without the premium pricing of reserved seats. Also contributing to the studio’s attitude was the unpleasant fact that UA’s investment was less than Wayne’s, which meant that UA had less of a commitment to maximizing revenue than did the star-director.

  The other shoe dropped very quickly. On November 4, only a few weeks after the premiere, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Wayne was cutting the film to about two and a half hours for a general release, a trim of about thirty minutes—an admission that the film was too long and wasn’t pulling the desired audiences. Although UA announced that the shorter running time wouldn’t mean any change in the reserved seat engagements, everyone in the business knew that was only temporary.

  Wayne had just left for Tanganyika to make Hatari! for Howard Hawks, so Mike Wayne and editor Stuart Gilmore cut thirty-one minutes out of the picture. It’s not uncommon to lop off the beginning and ending of scenes in such cases, in order to get to the drama more quickly, which Mike and Gilmore did. But they also changed the order of some scenes, and in the film’s final battle scenes there are several shots without dialogue that were also trimmed, probably because doing so wouldn’t upset the sound mix.

  Some of the scenes that were cut take place just before the final assault, as the men contemplate what they know will be their deaths. Laurence Harvey had more screen time in the uncut version, and many of his scenes were truncated. Likewise, Wayne’s death scene is more protracted and slightly more violent in the uncut version. The primary difference between the two cuts is that the road show version is an authentic epi
c, while the edited version feels more like a very long western.1

  Jimmy Grant wrote Wayne that UA was making contracts for the general release of The Alamo in March, and glumly noted that they didn’t seem to be planning any sort of campaign to counter the underwhelming business of the road shows. “We have no stick to threaten with, and we have no one on our side to wield it if we had one,” concluded Grant.

  By December 12, the writing was on the wall, and in large letters. “There doesn’t seem to be any sense in my flailing the ghost of The Alamo,” Grant wrote Wayne. “I think you’ll agree with me that [United Artists] have no intention of letting the picture ever break even.”

  It was becoming clear that The Alamo was going to be, at best, a lot like the battle it dramatized: a moral victory perhaps, but otherwise a bloodbath. Grant recommended hiring outside auditors in order to bring suit against United Artists. “It dawns on me that this is a morbid Xmas communication, but it ain’t only in Africa that things are tough.”

  A day later, Grant talked to distribution executives at Paramount and others who told him that the general feeling in the industry was that North to Alaska (which Fox had unhelpfully rushed into release a few weeks after The Alamo) “is kicking hell out of us. The public can see Wayne for a buck, so why should they pay three or four?”

  It was true; Charles Feldman wrote Wayne that “North to Alaska business is exceptionally good. . . . It was the hottest picture around the country during the Thanksgiving weekend.”

  Wayne’s delight in the success of the Henry Hathaway picture must have been severely muted, but Feldman was doing the best he could for his friend. Fox offered Feldman 25 percent of the profits of North to Alaska for his packaging services, but he rejected that as “unsatisfactory.” Feldman wrote his client that whatever Fox paid him, the money would go to Wayne.

  In the first week of January 1961, Jimmy Grant’s instincts about United Artists were borne out when UA’s Seymour Poe wrote Mike Wayne that there was no possibility of the Chinese Theatre, nor any other of the prestigious theaters on Hollywood Boulevard, for the general 35mm release of The Alamo.