John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Despite the traces of bad blood between the two men, Zanuck had no intention of delegating the direction of his biggest star to any of the film’s polyglot roster of directors. (Besides Gerd Oswald, Andrew Marton, and Ken Annakin, Bernhard Wicki was directing the German footage). Zanuck directed all of Wayne’s scenes himself, as he did with some other key actors.

  Wayne and dialogue director Mickey Knox became fairly good friends, despite Knox’s left-wing politics. Knox would occasionally take issue with Wayne’s defense of the blacklist, but he remembered that “Wayne never showed any disrespect or anger when listening to me.”

  The headquarters for the Normandy location was the Malherbe Hotel in nearby Caen. In Paris, Wayne was reunited with Stuart Whitman, who was sent to the location to deliver twelve boxes of cigars to Darryl Zanuck. After taking delivery, Zanuck asked Whitman if he wanted to go to work, and the actor was promptly cast in Wayne’s scenes.

  “It was late January or early February, and we were all freezing our asses off on the location,” remembered Whitman. “None of us could figure out how that son of a bitch Wayne could be so strong, so impervious to the cold. It didn’t seem to be bothering him at all.

  “So one day I followed him into his dressing room and I discovered that he had handwarmers built into his underpants so that they covered his kidneys. They kept his kidneys warm, folded newspapers in his shoes kept his feet warm. And he made sure I promised not to tell anybody else what he was doing.”

  During production, there was a party thrown by a local duchess, who had a slight scar on her face from a dueling mishap, which Whitman thought was extremely sexy. At one point, Whitman walked into a bathroom and discovered the butler sitting on the bidet while being straddled by the hostess, who was vigorously bouncing up and down. He promptly backed out and closed the door.

  A minute later Wayne came around the corner and Whitman beckoned him over. Whitman opened the door and Wayne and Whitman observed the butler and the hostess going at it.

  “We walked down the hallway just choking with laughter,” recalled Whitman.

  It was a long way from Winterset, Iowa.

  Unfortunately, the shoot was not all ribald fun and games. A friend of Whitman’s had just opened a restaurant in Paris and invited the actor to bring some guests for a visit. Whitman was good friends with Robert Ryan, who lived a few doors away from him in North Hollywood. Whitman also invited Wayne, without knowing that the two men had a visceral dislike of each other’s politics.

  “Bob was very liberal, and of course Duke was very conservative. We all sat down at this table and it didn’t take long before both of them stood up and started to go for each other. I grabbed hold of Ryan and someone else grabbed Duke.” It would have been an interesting fight; Wayne outweighed Ryan by forty or so pounds, but Ryan had been a heavyweight boxing champion at Dartmouth and a Marine drill instructor during World War II.

  Later, Whitman asked Ryan what set him off. “Those fucking Republicans,” he said. “The day before I left to do this film, someone set off a bomb in my doorway and the door got blown off.” Ryan blamed the John Birch Society, and he was in no mood for a typical Wayne crack about “goddamn liberals.” Within a few days, Wayne and Ryan had repaired the breach; Mickey Knox reported that they even went on a weekend bender together and reported for work on Monday morning only slightly the worse for wear.

  In his ten days of work, Wayne shot eight crackerjack scenes for The Longest Day, and he even does some expert but unnecessary exposition (“We’re on the threshold of the most crucial day of our times . . .”). The Longest Day was critically hailed and a great hit, but the script is inadequate to the drama, as almost any script would be. It’s a film with a couple of great sequences—the parachute drop into Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the Pointe du Hoc climb—more than it is a great film.

  Another glorified guest appearance entailed five days of work for John Ford in the Cinerama production of How the West Was Won. Wayne played an ahistorically oversized—but accurately unkempt—William Tecumseh Sherman for little glory and the modest fee of $25,000. (Part of the movie’s impetus was that a lot of the profits would go to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, so the all-star cast worked cheaply to keep costs down.)

  By this time, Ford had largely despaired of inclusion, let alone contentment, and his episode of How the West Was Won is all about leaving and longing. In the wake of the bloodbath of Shiloh, even U.S. Grant (Harry Morgan) is full of despair, which leads to Sherman’s pep talk: “Doesn’t matter what the people think. It’s what you think, Grant.”

  In later years, Wayne seemed slightly embarrassed about Donovan’s Reef : “[Ford] never should have used me in that picture,” Wayne told me. “He should have picked some young guy. It didn’t require much of him. All he had to be was a good-looking young guy, and I wasn’t young enough.”

  Actually, a number of people connected with the picture seemed embarrassed by it. “Ford hired a friend of Wayne’s, James Edward Grant,” said William Clothier, who photographed the film. “Jimmy wrote a script and Ford hated it. He got another writer [Frank Nugent] and changed the whole damn thing. They called it Donovan’s Reef. You’ve got to blame the Old Man for things like that. Just plain bad judgment.”

  Actually, Ford hired several writers; Edmund Beloin is credited with “screen story,” Nugent gets billing over Grant, and no less than James A. Michener was credited with the original source material in publicity handouts but not on the film itself.

  The problem is not so much the picture—it’s a ragged but loving Quirt and Flagg movie mostly made on the island of Kaui between late July and September 1962—it’s that it’s relentlessly caricatured. It does have some compensations—among other things, Ford uses his ship the Araner in the movie.

  The film has one beautiful set piece, a Christmas pageant that once again brings out Ford’s great gift for ceremony. And yes, Wayne and Marvin are too old for their parts—Wayne had arrived at the same conclusion as Cary Grant: he was simply too old to get the girl.

  Wayne and Lee Marvin pursued their usual ration of after hours drinking, as well as comparing notes about literature, which led Marvin to exclaim, “You’re not the illiterate, uneducated ignoramus you’d like people to think.”

  “Neither are you,” said Wayne. “Let’s keep it to ourselves or we’ll ruin our image.”

  Dorothy Lamour went back a quarter century with Ford, to The Hurricane, but she and her husband had moved to Baltimore years earlier and she was more or less retired. “John [Ford] called and asked me to do the picture and right away I said, ‘I don’t know where I can find Hawaiian clothes in Baltimore.’ And John said, ‘That’s all right, Mary has a closet full of them.’ ” Lamour played much of the picture wearing Mary Ford’s mu-muus. She said that Ford “hadn’t mellowed too much, but he was a darling man.”

  Lamour was stunned one day when Wayne actually yelled back at Ford—an unheard-of occurrence. When Lamour asked Wayne about it later, he explained that Ford’s thinking simply wasn’t what it had been, and that his eyesight was also compromised. Wayne was checking out the rushes every day to avoid embarrassment, and he was feeling the strain. He finished by telling Lamour that he loved Ford too, and he was sure things would work out.

  But everybody noticed a difference in the Coach. William Clothier told stories about Ford wanting to work a short day, not wanting to venture far from his hotel room on location, and even making tentative moves toward settling for something less than top-notch photography—the foundation of his art.

  The reviews ranged from mildly favorable to what-the-hell-happened? One critic said that “the screenplay . . . is almost primeval in its foolishness.” Donovan’s Reef cost $3.4 million, earned worldwide rentals of $5.7 million, and didn’t go into the black for decades. Besides his salary, Wayne got 10 percent of the gross after recoupment.

  The film’s reputation has risen somewhat in the intervening decades, but it’s probably best regarded as a paid va
cation for a director who had long since earned one.

  As with many of John Ford’s extended family, Wayne had a boat, the Nor’wester, a seventy-three-foot motor sailer which increasingly struck him as insufficient. “There was no pride of possession,” was the way he put it.

  Between Ford’s Araner and his own Nor’wester, Wayne had had a lot of sailing experience, but he had always yearned for something grander—something with huge diesel engines. So, in 1962, Wayne finally scratched the itch and bought a boat. Not just any boat—a minesweeper commissioned YMS 382 by the Navy when it was built during the war. The Navy sold the ship in 1948, and it cruised the Pacific Northwest for a number of years until it was bought by Wayne’s friend Max Wyman.

  Wayne was a guest on the boat when Wyman traveled through the Princess Louisa Inland Waterway. “Well, we had a wonderful time,” remembered Wayne. “There were three couples on board, but nobody ever got in anyone else’s way . . . and the comfort of this thing was just great.”

  Wyman used the boat only once a year or so. Mostly it just lay at anchor in Seattle. Wayne told Wyman he’d like to buy the boat, and a deal was quickly consummated. The price was $116,000, and then Wayne spent even more to remodel it to his specifications. He called it the Wild Goose.

  The Wild Goose wasn’t a trim thing of beauty like Ford’s Araner, but rather 136 feet of form following function. She was made of Douglas fir, drew nine feet, with a twenty-five-foot beam and twin diesel 500 horsepower engines. When the Navy had her, she held four officers and twenty-nine enlisted men, but as a private vehicle she carried a crew of six, slept twelve, and cruised nicely at 11 knots.

  Her appointments included two chattering Teletype machines—one for AP and one for UPI—a barbecue outfit, a wine cellar, and a 16mm projector for watching movies. The pilothouse, master stateroom, and a small two-bunk cabin were all on the top deck, while the main salon, a small head, the engineer’s cabin, a double guest cabin, and the galley, forward of which was the only enclosed dining area on the boat, seating up to eight, were on the main deck. The ship had five deep freeze refrigerators, with enough space to keep the ship fully supplied for a two-month cruise.

  In 1965, Wayne renovated the master stateroom to make room for his king-sized frame. It was located directly behind the wheelhouse, and it had six feet, eight inches of headroom. That was all to the good, but the added weight on top of the ship meant that the Wild Goose was even more inclined to roll than she had been. With stability that crew member and later Captain Bert Minshall remembered as “marginal,” the crew dropped eight-hundred-pound sacks of cement into the bilge to steady her. The boat dropped down six added inches in the water, which helped, but over the years the cement broke loose and caused problems with the bilge pumps.

  The master cabin had a color TV and a small library with some of Wayne’s favorite books, and the chessboard was always set up for a game. Hanging on the sides of the boat were a sixteen-foot Boston whaler and a seventeen-foot British dory for excursions. The atmosphere was comfortable, masculine, and far from ostentatious. For the next sixteen years, until just before Wayne died, the Wild Goose was kept at Berth 54 at the Lido Yacht Anchorage.

  Bert Minshall, who went to work on the boat in 1963, believed that Wayne was far less a cowboy at heart than he was a sailor.

  “He liked to fish for giant salmon,” remembered Minshall. “Forty- and fifty-pounders. He’d do that from sunup to sundown. He also liked wahoo, tuna, marlin, and lobster, but he was a fanatic about salmon.” Wayne would put about 100,000 miles on the ship every year, with his favorite destination being north of Vancouver, where he liked to fish.

  “The first time we met, I was wearing brand-new Top-Siders,” remembered Minshall. “We were shooting the breeze and then he suddenly spat on my shoes. I guess I looked confused, because then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Always spit on new shoes for luck.’

  “Well, okay.”

  Minshall was from Liverpool, and became popular with the Wayne family because of his tireless energy and the fact that he was a good nanny for the children. Wayne adored them, but felt he was too old to tend them personally and handed them off to Minshall when they were on board. “It gave him a chance to relax, play bridge, go over his scripts.”

  Typically, Minshall would swim with the kids and man the boat pulling the water skis. Once in Acapulco, Minshall was towing Marisa on a plywood sled he had constructed, with the other children in the boat with him. Wayne didn’t like the look of the jury-rigged sled and yelled out, “I’m gonna shoot four people if Marisa gets hurt on that thing!”

  That put an end to the festivities, and the next day Wayne came up to Minshall and apologized. Wayne told Minshall he should call him Duke, at least when he was off the ship, but that came hard for the sailor.

  Over his years with Wayne, Minshall became familiar with the actor’s fury, which was sudden and complete, but also transient. He also grew used to his apologies. “It’s my damn Irish temper,” Wayne would say by way of explanation. When Minshall’s parents visited from England, Wayne invited them to the house and cheerfully posed for pictures with the awestruck couple. For that matter, he didn’t mind Minshall bringing his camera on trips, good-naturedly griping that he ought to be getting a performance fee if Minshall insisted on taking home movies. The Wild Goose would occasionally be chartered out to friends, and Otto Preminger used the boat on-camera for his lamentable Skidoo.

  Contributing to Wayne’s enthusiasm for the Wild Goose was the fact that it could be used for parental leverage. “I need the space for six kids and the six grandchildren and the wife, that makes fourteen people already,” he explained. “A boat’s the only place I can relax and forget about my work. And I like to have my kids around me. You know how kids are. The only way you can have them is if you have something they want that no one else has. It was the same way with me. I love my mother and my father, but you make your own life and don’t see your parents much unless they have something extra to offer.”

  In the winter, Wayne would sail for Mexico, in the summer for Seattle, with occasional weekends in Catalina. Few movie people were to be seen on the boat—only co-workers such as Claire Trevor, Dean Martin, Maureen O’Hara, and Hugh O’Brian were welcome. Mostly, he favored friends who were businessmen—a car dealer named Chick Iverson, or, for that matter, the boat’s ex-owner, Max Wyman.

  Wayne made sure that Pilar didn’t succeed in her occasional attempts to redecorate the ship to her specifications. He once told an overenthusiastic interior decorator, “I don’t want my boat turned into a goddamned French whorehouse.” On board, Wayne would read and engage in marathon sessions of gin or bridge. In the early years aboard the ship, he drank brandy on the rocks, but in the mid to late 1960s he switched almost exclusively to tequila, which remained his drink of choice for the rest of his life. As with everybody else who watched Wayne drink, Minshall was amazed at his capacity. No matter the volume, he always remained on his feet, “coherent and coordinated. He never got seasick, but didn’t pretend he was more of a sailor than he was, either. I never once saw him take the wheel.”

  Like all boats, the Wild Goose was an expensive toy. The ship’s original captain was named Pete Stein, a wild man with a drinking problem who was once thrown overboard by a steward he had just fired. Wayne didn’t mind Stein’s occasional benders, saying, “I don’t trust a man that doesn’t drink.”

  “He couldn’t stand to be alone,” remembered Bert Minshall, “so even if we were only going to Catalina, he’d invite two other couples and play bridge all day. Every once in a while, he’d take a little five-minute break and dive off the stern to cool off. And every single time he’d come to the surface and say, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s cold.’ It didn’t matter if the water was 80 degrees—‘Jesus Christ, it’s cold.’

  “He’d go out fishing in the morning, come back in the afternoon, go back out, back for dinner, then back out until it was dark. He’d hire professional guides to find the hot s
pots where the fish were. He’d come back with gunny sacks full of fish.”

  On one trip aboard the Wild Goose, Batjac story editor Tom Kane was puzzled by the presence of a man who was introduced as Joe Roe. Kane thought he knew everybody in Wayne’s circle, but he had never met him before. Not only that, Wayne treated Roe as if he was a dear friend. Kane asked Mike Wayne about Roe, and Mike didn’t know any more about him than Kane. Finally, Kane asked Wayne.

  “Joe Roe kept me from starving,” he explained. It was just after Harry Cohn had fired him from Columbia and blackballed him. “I couldn’t get a day’s work. I literally was not eating.” But Joe Roe owned a restaurant on Sunset and Gower, right across the street from Columbia, and he grubstaked Wayne to three meals a day for as long as it took to get back on his feet. Once Mascot hired Wayne for the serials, he repaid Roe for all the meals, but didn’t think it was quite enough.

  Years later, he had Mary St. John track the man down. Roe’s restaurant was gone, as was his money, and he was at the veterans hospital in Sawtelle. Roe jumped at the chance to go on a fishing trip, and when he came back from the voyage Wayne gave him a box of fancy lures as a keepsake.

  Perhaps because he worked in a business that was always convulsively unsettled, Wayne took great solace in familiar faces. Among the Batjac staff was a crusty man named Al Podlasky, an accountant who lost an arm in a streetcar accident. Wayne had met him at Republic when he was making the Three Mesquiteers pictures. Wayne asked Podlasky for a new pair of boots, as his had holes in the bottom and he was getting pebbles in them.