John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  As the first year of Wagon Train closed out, Bond’s anger grew intense. He wanted the show to be all about him, but Horton had captured the young fans. “He had top billing, but I was getting five thousand fan letters a week and Ward was getting fifty,” said Horton. “That played on him. That said, although I knew we didn’t get along great, there was really no obvious sense of anger between us.”

  As the first season ended, Bond told MCA, the producers of Wagon Train, that he wouldn’t work with Horton anymore. There was a formal meeting at the producer’s office, where the brass made an introductory speech about how big a hit the show was. We—the studio—can’t afford to let personal views put the show off the air, and that could happen, etc. We all stand to make a lot of money, so let’s let bygones be bygones, etc.

  Bond was firm: “I won’t work with him anymore.”

  The producer asked Bond what he didn’t like about Horton. “I don’t like the spurs he wears,” said Bond.

  “I’ll get rid of them,” said Horton.

  “I don’t like his horse either,” said Bond.

  Horton said it was fine if Bond didn’t want to work with him; he was going to leave when his contract was up anyway. And then Horton said that he didn’t appreciate Bond spreading rumors that he was homosexual. The meeting broke up in disarray. Both men remained adamant.

  At the next production meeting, the brass announced that the two men didn’t have to work together; that Bond would front half the shows and Horton the other half, and scenes between them would be kept to a bare minimum. And for the next couple of years, that was the way it was.

  By the end of 1960, Wagon Train was in its fourth season and still a top ten show. In some respects, stardom hadn’t changed Bond much; he still lived on twenty-three and three quarters acres in Coldwater Canyon that he had bought in 1946, where he lived with his wife, Mary Lou, surrounded by handmade Early American furniture and a couple of Labradors named Joe and Angus. Mary Lou Bond was generally known as “Maisie,” and had lived with Bond for years before John Ford had enough and told them to get married and be quick about it.

  The house contained Bond’s proudest possession, a plaque from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge he’d received in 1959. It commended Bond for “steadfastness, courage, and clarity of thought in the face of personal abuse and vilification by advocates of the alien, atheistic doctrine of world socialistic communism.”

  The heavy workload of a weekly hour-long TV show hadn’t stemmed Bond’s drinking. He would start his day in the makeup chair with what he called a coffee royale—coffee and whiskey. On the set in the morning, there were Bloody Marys or screwdrivers, which he referred to as his “daily vitamins.” Lunch would be carried by both red and white wine, and in the afternoon there was a cooler that held a six-pack of beer, which he refused to share with anybody. At 5 P.M., Bond would declare, “Goddamn it, the sun’s going down, it’s time to have a real drink,” which meant whiskey or bourbon.

  In most respects, Bond was an open book—his drinking and his politics were all generally known. But Bond also had his secrets. For one, he was epileptic, which is why he hadn’t served in World War II. For another, he was taking Dexamyl tablets—time-released speed—in an effort to keep up with his workload. John Ford knew about the pills, and was deeply concerned.

  All this contributed to the fact that Bond seemed much older than his chronological age of fifty-seven—as the fourth season of Wagon Train got under way in the fall of 1960, Bond’s hair was turning from gray to white, his gut was even more prominent, and his voice was unusually raspy.

  Whatever his failings, Bond’s emotional intelligence made him lend each part a touch of humanity. “He was an excellent actor,” said Horton. “He was instinctive and very, very good. His choices were almost always dead-on. If the director had a different choice for him, he would take it instantly and not argue about it. And he was very professional and well prepared.”

  Bond pulled off a considerable coup when he got John Ford to direct an episode of Wagon Train in May of 1960. Ford’s show was called The Colter Craven Story, and featured a brief appearance by John Wayne as William Tecumseh Sherman. It’s the story of an alcoholic doctor whose will to stay sober is revived by Major Seth Adams (Bond) telling him the story—in flashback—of General U.S. Grant. It’s recognizably a Ford film, with dark-hued photography and a flashback structure that foretells The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  In November 1960, Bond made plans to go to Dallas to appear at halftime of a Cowboys football game as a favor to a friend. The night before he went to Dallas, he was in his dressing room, which he shared with co-stars (and former stuntmen) Terry Wilson and Frank McGrath. Robert Horton came in looking for McGrath, but he wasn’t there.

  Horton told Bond, “You know, Ward, we’ve had our differences, but we can agree on one thing: this script stinks.” Bond smiled and put his hand on Horton’s shoulder.

  “Bobby,” he said, sounding for all the world like Major Seth Adams, “we don’t have any goldarn differences.”

  The next day, Bond was taking a shower in his hotel room in Dallas when he was stricken with a heart attack. He collapsed against the bathroom door, and by the time the ambulance crew got there, he was dead.

  Terry Wilson broke the bad news to Wayne: “Hold on,” blurted Wilson by phone, “Ward just dropped dead.” Wayne and Wilson both began crying. The funeral was two days later, at John Ford’s Field Photo Farm, where Bond was laid out in an open casket. Among the attendees were Wayne, Gregory Peck, Adolphe Menjou, Jane Darwell, Monte Blue, Harry Carey Jr., Terry Wilson, Frank McGrath, and Robert Horton. John Ford was there but was too upset to speak.

  Harry Carey and Ken Curtis sang “He Was There” and “Come, Come Ye Saints.” After the service, Wayne came up to Terry Wilson and asked him what the studio was going to do about the show. Wilson said he didn’t know.

  “I’ll tell you what you do,” said Wayne. “You go back tomorrow. You tell those guys if they want me to come in, I’ll make two or three of the shows for them as a guest appearance thing . . . until they can get somebody [else] to do it.”

  Wilson relayed the offer to MCA, but they thought that Wayne would unbalance the show; they carried on with the existing cast for some months. In March 1961, they finally cast John McIntire as the leader of the wagon train, without ever explaining what had happened to Major Seth Adams.

  After the funeral, Wayne delegated Terry Wilson, Mark Armistead, and Ray Kellogg to spread Bond’s ashes around Catalina. The men loaded up with a bottle of scotch, a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of vodka. Each one of them tossed a handful of Ward into the ocean around Cherry Cove, then took a drink. By the time Ward was dispersed, they were thoroughly lubricated.

  The only untoward thing was the fact that Bond had been cremated wearing his stainless steel watch, and there were recognizable pieces of the watch amongst the ashes and bone fragments. Terry Wilson kept the pieces of the watch as a souvenir of his friend. Bond’s 1956 will left most of his property to his wife, but he left Wayne his favorite shotgun—the same gun that Wayne had shot him with years before.

  On November 23, Wayne watched the episode of Wagon Train that Ford had directed. When it was over, he turned to Pilar and said, “There will never be another Ward Bond. I remember telling him, a hell of a long time ago, that he was too damn ugly to be a movie star. But I was wrong, Pilar. He was beautiful where it counted—inside.” And then he began to cry, his huge body shaking with grief as the tears poured out of him.

  It took Wayne a long time to process his grief at Bond’s death. “I had never seen him so preoccupied, so quiet, so depressed,” said Mary St. John. “He lost fifteen pounds . . . because he didn’t want to eat. It was as if someone had cut out his heart.”

  Bond’s death got Wayne thinking about his own inevitable end. He came to the conclusion that “funerals are so medieval—I don’t want one. John Ford has a little clubhouse in the valley. Harry Carey,
Ward Bond—they were buried out of the chapel there. I will be too.”

  In 1959, a candy manufacturer named Robert Welch established the John Birch Society, named after a Baptist missionary murdered by Chinese Communists in 1945. The Birch Society was against taxes, welfare, the United Nations, the fluoridation of water, and Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. Above everything else, they were against Communists, who, they believed, were behind all the above. The FBI regarded the Birch Society as a “fanatical right wing” group with “utterly absurd viewpoints.”

  In June 1960, an informer, rated by the FBI as “reliable,” listed the members of the Beverly Hills chapter of the Birch Society as including John Wayne, Adolphe Menjou, Hedda Hopper, Morrie Ryskind, and Ronald Reagan. Nobody has ever confirmed Reagan’s membership, and it’s unclear if the FBI believed it. But the president of the Birch Society did confirm that Wayne, Menjou, and Ryskind were members.

  Wayne ultimately became uneasy about the Birch Society because of its campaign against fluoridation, not to mention Robert Welch’s conviction that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated conscientious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

  “What a bunch of horseshit,” he told a friend. “Ike was not my favorite politician, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Communist.”

  Wayne had not been shy in complaining about what he regarded as confiscatory tax rates, as well as producers who couldn’t produce, and the ethical swamp of modern—as of 1960—Hollywood. And some producers weren’t much happier, in large part because of movie stars such as John Wayne.

  “Actors are now directing, writing, producing,” complained Darryl Zanuck. “Actors have taken over Hollywood completely with their agents. They want approval of everything—script, stars, still pictures. . . .

  “Now, I’ve got great affection for Duke Wayne, but what right has he to write, direct and produce a motion picture? What right has Kirk Douglas got? . . . My God, look at Brando with One-Eyed Jacks. My God, he’s still shooting!”

  Wayne read Zanuck’s comments and steamed. But before he could exact his pound of flesh, he had to make some money, which is where Hatari! and The Comancheros came in. Hatari! is one of those movies that was probably more fun to make than it is to watch. Highly regarded at the time, nobody talks about it anymore. It’s more or less Hawks’s Rio Bravo formula: a group of likable characters interacting at inordinate length in a picturesque setting—Africa.

  Hawks wanted to emulate John Huston and make a picture in Africa for years, and after the success of Rio Bravo, he decided it was time. Wayne came aboard for $750,000 plus 10 percent of the gross after the picture earned $7.5 million, i.e., theoretical break-even. The long location work in Africa meant that the picture was bound to be expensive, so Paramount refused to pay for another big star opposite Wayne. A provisional budget was set at $4.25 million, but that proved illusory. Base camp for the story about men who catch wild animals for zoos was set up at Arusha, about sixty miles west of Mount Kilimanjaro, on the eastern edge of the Serengeti.

  Hawks told the cast and crew that they were privileged to be going on the most expensive safari ever, and he expected steady nerves and a lion’s energy. Unfortunately, nobody had profferred copies of the shooting script and the actors began to panic. They knew that Wayne had worked with Hawks before, so they descended.

  Wayne heard everybody out, then explained a few things. “Listen kids, I’ve shot a hundred movies. Well, the greatest directors, including Hawks, never handed me a script. . . . You just have to trust them. If you’re good, they’ll show you to your best advantage day by day.”

  Production got under way on November 28, 1960, and continued to mid-March 1961. Wayne didn’t want to use any doubles for the dangerous scenes with the wild animals and did a lot of the work himself. Pilar and Aissa were there for the first few weeks of shooting, and Wayne was relaxed and happy. Getting out of the country and away from the flailing of The Alamo was undoubtedly good for Wayne’s disposition.

  One night Wayne and Red Buttons were outside their tents playing cards. Over Wayne’s shoulder Buttons saw a leopard walk out of the bush and begin moving toward them.

  “Duke, there’s a leopard walking toward us,” Buttons noted.

  Wayne didn’t turn around, merely said, “Buttons, see what he wants.”

  Elsa Martinelli, the female lead, found Wayne to be a complete gentleman; she played chess with him and enjoyed cooking pasta for him and Hawks. Martinelli also claimed that after his wife and daughter left the location, Wayne began a discreet affair with a blond woman who lived nearby, but if it happened it was so discreet it was unknown to everybody else on the production.

  A lot of interesting people visited the set—William Holden, Rosalind Russell, the advertising guru Ed Lasker, and even the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who came to talk to Martinelli. At one point, the publicity people inveigled Wayne into shooting an elephant for a photo op. While Wayne would say that “there’s no particular thrill in killing an animal,” he did enjoy an occasional bird-hunting jaunt with Bill Clothier or Webb Overlander. He also allowed as how the African environment, filled with the sounds of savage animals in the morning and night, did awaken certain atavistic impulses. “You take a different attitude than you did when you were at home saying, ‘Well, I’d never shoot a little deer.’ ”

  Back in Hollywood, Leigh Brackett stayed with the film for the studio work, writing scenes that would tie the African footage together. She observed the star’s humor and professionalism: “I remember his working with the baby elephant in the scene at the end of Hatari!, when the critter gets on the bed and it crashes down. They tried about 18 takes, and he said, ‘He’s doing it right. I’m not.’ The elephant had his cues down perfectly, but it was Duke who was blowing it. He’s a much more complex person than people give him credit for being.”

  Hatari! opened in June 1962 with an insane running time of 159 minutes, completing Hawks’s transition from the fastest director in Hollywood to the slowest. In most respects, it’s a lazy picture, albeit with a first-rate score from Henry Mancini. Hawks is doing the mixture as before, with one new wrinkle that would be present in all of his later pictures: beautiful young women who can’t act.

  It’s a strange, amiable ramble, with overly broad comic relief. Yet, by some strange alchemy, by the end of the movie there exists a palpable affection for all the walking, talking clichés.

  Wayne thought the movie was okay, but overlong: “We should have done something so two or three of the sequences would have been different. You know, you just can’t ride out and catch animals the same frigging way all the time . . . it needs to have a variety of approaches and [Hawks] let the second unit do it and they didn’t know how to handle action. . . . Shit, we did everything the second unit did.” By the end of 1964, the film had amassed domestic rentals of only $4.7 million, although it went into profit in the 1970s.

  Wayne enjoyed making the picture, but it became less enjoyable after he again had trouble extracting his overage from Hawks and Paramount. Wayne had agreed that Hawks was to have twelve weeks of his time, which later became fourteen. But as the shoot kept going and going, Wayne found himself budgeted for twenty weeks—five months, “which is about as much as a fellow can be asked to give.”

  Paramount claimed that Hawks had said Wayne wouldn’t want any overage. Au contraire, said Wayne. “I would appreciate hearing from you on this subject,” wrote Wayne to Hawks. “I certainly want to keep my relationship with you a pleasant and fair one.”

  Paul Wellman’s novel The Comancheros first entered Wayne’s orbit in 1953, when Charles Feldman sent him a copy of the book, which had been purchased by George Stevens. The director eventually sold the property to 20th Century Fox in 1959 for $300,000 as part of the deal to make The Diary of Anne Frank.

  Originally, the film was planned for Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster as a follow-up to their very popular Vera Cruz; after Cooper died the western was reconfigured for Wayne as part of his three-pic
ture deal with Fox. Charlton Heston was originally set as Wayne’s co-star, but after Ben-Hur Heston wasn’t about to take second billing to anyone, so the studio downshifted.

  Stuart Whitman was making Francis of Assisi with Michael Curtiz in Italy when the director gave him the script for the western. “There’s a hell of a role in there for me,” Whitman said the next day.

  “I think the part is cast,” replied Curtiz. “But when you get back to Fox, check and see.” It was indeed cast, but Curtiz told Whitman he would prefer him to the actor that had gotten the job, and told him to go talk to Wayne, who was shooting the interiors for Hatari!

  “I went over and walked behind him as he was going into his dressing room,” remembered Whitman.

  “What do you want?” asked Wayne.

  “I want to play Monsieur Regret.”

  “Oh, you do?”

  The two men spent about twenty minutes together and Wayne ended the conversation by telling Whitman, “You’ve got the role.”

  When production began in the summer of 1961, Whitman could see that Curtiz was not in good shape; he had been diagnosed with cancer and had begun fading toward the end of Francis of Assisi as well. Working as a third assistant director was the future screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, the son of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The young man’s primary assignment was to pick up Wayne every morning at six at the house he was renting in Moab. The first day of the picture Mankiewicz was in the coffee shop of the Apache Motel where most of the company was staying, killing time until he was due to pick up the star.

  At 5:40 A.M., Mankiewicz was just about ready to leave when he heard a clanking sound behind him. He turned around to find Wayne, fully costumed and made up, complete with spurs.