by Scott Eyman
Podlasky was reading The Hollywood Reporter at the time. As Wayne finished his request, Podlasky folded the paper up and handed it to Wayne. “Stick that in there,” he said.
Wayne remembered thinking, “You old son of a bitch, if I ever get a company of my own, you’re the first guy I’m going to hire to protect my money.” As far as Wayne was concerned, the one-armed accountant had a job for life.
Things were changing everywhere, and not necessarily for the better. Grant Withers was gone, Ward Bond was gone, and Jimmy Grant was now a mainstay of Alcoholics Anonymous.
After a few years of hibernation, Batjac was reactivated for McLintock!— one of Wayne’s more personal films. It was an obviously commercial project, and the reason United Artists got distribution was that Batjac still owed the company $700,000.
In August 1962, Batjac and UA made a deal in which Batjac would repay the studio out of the gross receipts for McLintock! To maximize profits, the budget was kept to a very low $2 million. Wayne took no salary, only a percentage: 5 percent of the gross up to break-even, the first $700,000 in profits, and 10 percent of the gross thereafter. After recoupment, Batjac took 10 percent of the gross and 75 percent of the net, and the film negative was to revert to Batjac after five years.
In return, UA released the Batjac film library that had served as collateral for The Alamo loan and Charles Feldman agreed to make a good-faith effort to convince Wayne to play the title role in Mister Moses, a project UA was very high on. (Robert Mitchum played the part, to no great public or critical response.)
For $100,000, Mike—who became the executive producer on Batjac pictures—and his dad hired Maureen O’Hara for the part of McLintock’s estranged, continually outraged wife, a part she could have played in her sleep. (Some thought was also given to Deborah Kerr—who was twice as expensive as O’Hara—and Susan Hayward.)
Mike’s mandate in producing the picture was to cut costs whenever possible without cheating the picture. Mike’s father wanted Henry Hathaway to direct, but Hathaway’s price was $100,000 and a percentage. Mike hired Andrew McLaglen to direct for a flat $25,000, and so on down the line—not Dimitri Tiomkin but Frank De Vol, etc.
The film had a fairly comfortable fifty-nine-day shoot, but costs were rigorously watched. Although UA was releasing the picture, Batjac shot the interiors at Paramount. A month before shooting began, Paramount’s Frank Caffey wrote a memo stating that Batjac was “promised complete autonomy. . . . It is of the utmost importance that we watch every expenditure and make sure it has been OK’d by the Batjac office, as they have had some very unhappy experiences at Warners.”
Everybody remembered the film as a pleasant experience, with Wayne always hovering. For a scene where doubles for Wayne, Yvonne De Carlo, and Maureen O’Hara were to tumble down stairs, Wayne said he didn’t want stuntwomen doing the shot. “Why not?” asked Polly Burson, who was supposed to double for De Carlo.
“Someone might elbow or knee you in the breast or someplace,” Wayne grumbled. “I just don’t want to risk it.”
“Duke, I just did an outside stair fall at Universal with no pads on,” said Burson.
“Well, that’s fine,” he said, “but you’re not going to do it for me.” Two small stuntmen in drag doubled for De Carlo and O’Hara, while the stuntwomen stood by and got paid anyway.
Andrew McLaglen had been born in London in 1920, but came to California with his father at the age of five. He met John Ford for the first time when he accompanied his father to the Arizona locations of The Lost Patrol. By the time he was fifteen he was making 16mm home movies with his friends at the Cate prep school in Santa Barbara. He first met Wayne around the time he was nineteen, when Wayne had just finished Stagecoach.
McLaglen attended the University of Virginia because it had a good boxing program and his father had been an excellent boxer in his youth. Beginning as a clerk in the production department of Paramount, McLaglen then graduated to second assistant director, then first assistant, in which capacity he worked on Sands of Iwo Jima and The Quiet Man.
He’d been under contract to Batjac, where he worked mostly as an assistant director and had produced Seven Men from Now with Bob Morrison. Wayne had guaranteed the bank loan for Man in the Vault, McLaglen’s first feature in 1956. After Gunsmoke went on hiatus after its first year, McLaglen directed James Arness in the low-budget Batjac western Gun the Man Down, with Angie Dickinson.
Arness recommended McLaglen to CBS, who signed him as a staff director. Over the next six years, McLaglen directed ninety-five episodes of Gunsmoke and over a hundred episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel, not to mention Rawhide, Perry Mason, and whatever other CBS shows came along. He also directed one of his father’s last movies.
By the time Wayne gave McLaglen the nod for McLintock! he was a highly professional and experienced budget-minded director. And because he had been brought up at Wayne’s knee, the always affable McLaglen was also unlikely to tell his old mentor when he was settling for second-best.
Also joining the Batjac family was a young man named Luster Bayless, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper, who was hired to help out on the production department of McLintock! Bayless would become Wayne’s primary costumer for the rest of his career, and he remembered his favorite star’s measurements all his life: “chest 49, hat 7 3/8, shoe 10 1/2 D—he had small feet.”
McLintock! began production on October 25, 1962, and wrapped on January 10, 1963. Playing McLintock’s daughter was Stefanie Powers, a young actress under contract to Columbia, who had never encountered a similar environment before and only occasionally would in the future.
“If you worked for Batjac,” Powers remembered, “you were moving into the Wayne family, which was an offshoot of the John Ford family. It was utterly and completely a family, a club.
“Nobody was forgotten. We had Ford’s Indians from Kanab, Indians I had seen as a kid growing up at the movies. There was a small part of a train engineer, and they hired Bob Steele, who had been a big western star I saw at matinees. There was a sense of loyalty, a sense that Duke never forgot people with whom he had rapport.”
It was an adjunct of the Ford family in all sorts of ways. Every morning Danny Borzage would play the accordion in the makeup trailer. “From top to bottom, it was a mentorship,” said Stefanie Powers. “Old stuntmen were teaching young stuntmen how to do their jobs, and the same stuntmen were teaching me the tricks of the trade, like how not to eat dust. The abiding word was generosity.”
Coexisting with the generosity was Wayne’s innate competitiveness. One day on the set, Wayne grew irritated with Maureen O’Hara’s approach and growled, “C’mon, Maureen, get going. This is your scene.” O’Hara replied that she was trying to go 50–50. “It’s your scene,” repeated Wayne, “take it,” then added, almost under his breath, “If you can.”
McLintock! was the first film to be entirely produced by Michael Wayne, and he and his father kept their relationship entirely professional. “There was no father and son scrapping,” said Stefanie Powers. “If they had any disagreements, it was private; Duke made sure that Michael maintained his dignity.”
Pat Wayne was also in the film, and Melinda Wayne was hanging around the set as well. Pilar—“an ice queen” according to Powers—was on location for a while, then left, and Pat Wayne and Powers were assigned to keep Wayne company. If he was lonely, they would play chess with him, and Powers found that “in any state of inebriation, he could cream you.”
Andy McLaglen wasn’t directing the picture by himself. “It was a collaboration,” said Powers. “Andy deferred to Duke. Wayne was there for every rehearsal of every scene, he did every offstage line in every scene he was in—he never abandoned an actor. There was not a shot of that movie he didn’t attend.”
McLaglen would rehearse a scene, and Wayne would point out “If you moved the camera over there, the actors can move without a cut.” Wayne’s suggestions were invariably followed. Wayne offered the young actress only one tip: �
�It’s all in the eyes.”
For a scene in which Powers had to ride out fast, the production had hired a local palomino instead of an experienced motion picture horse. The palomino fell and threw Powers, and when her eyes were able to focus, she looked up at John Wayne. He was in tears, carefully putting his jacket under her head.
“Did you get that on film?” she asked, which cemented their relationship. She would be invited regularly to the Encino house for screenings.
One day the word came down that Andy McLaglen was sick and someone else was going to take over. The company sent a car to the airport to pick up the substitute director but the car came back empty. The substitute had taken a cab instead.
The entire company was standing at attention as the cab advanced from the far distance, a puff of smoke on the dirt road to Nogales. When the cab arrived, the door slowly opened, and a sneakered foot stepped tentatively out, followed by a head covered with a filthy old hat, followed by the rest of John Ford. Wayne walked over to lend a hand, but Ford slapped the hand aside and walked over to Bill Clothier standing by the camera.
“Bill,” said Ford, “let’s go to work.”
It was all terribly impressive for everyone but Stefanie Powers. “I was peeing myself with fear. I was the only person on that set who had never worked for him.” Ford never turned on her, but he didn’t turn on the charm either. He was mostly just gruff. “Duke and Maureen called him Pappy. He had such total patriarchal power that everybody around him was reduced to the level of a child.”
Ford shot for three days, a lot of footage around the house in Nogales, entrances and exits and some entire scenes. Aside from the mortal fear engendered by Ford’s aura, for a young actress “it was a dream experience,” remembered Powers. “Duke had a very poetic soul, an interestingly sensitive side to go along with his great moralism. And he did love his ladies. I found him adorable. The entire experience was a cherished part of my life.”
“He was a marvelous actor,” said the character actor Ed Faulkner, who worked with Wayne in McLintock! and a batch of pictures afterward. “A lot of what he did was movement and timing. For a scene at a train station, he said, ‘Let me show you something. Make your turn like this—watch how I do this.’ And it worked. He was very good to work with. He’d run lines and seldom gave you specific directions. I just loved working with him.”
The production was enlivened by the presence of “Big” John Hamilton, a restaurateur from San Antonio. Despite his size, Hamilton possessed a high, squeaky voice and a Pekinese named Buck. He also drove a specially modified Cadillac that held several tanks of booze in the trunk so he’d never be without. Wayne cast Hamilton as a man who tries to break up a fight.
The brawl in the mud pit was shot over four days, from November 16 to the 19. During the sequence the weather turned cold—the temperature was about forty-two degrees. Some stars would have insisted the scene be postponed until the weather warmed up, but Wayne wasn’t about to complicate what needed to be an efficient production.
Nineteen stuntmen were employed, but both Wayne and O’Hara took the slide in close-up. The mud pit wasn’t actually made of mud, but of bentonite, which was much slicker than mud. “Good God, Duke,” said O’Hara, caked in the horrible chemical mixture, “this bloody stuff is like bird shit!”
Wayne disagreed. “It’s like snot!” he said.
As McLintock! wrapped production, Jimmy Grant wrote Mike Wayne a Dutch uncle letter in commiseration at having to once again deal with United Artists. “This town is full of independent producers,” wrote Grant. “They come and go like the bait on which the big fish feed, swelling in here by the millions and going out with the tide. Everyone deposits his sad tale of his UA experience before he goes. No one, but no one, has ever made five cents with a UA deal.”
But McLintock! was a hit, if a muted one because much of the profit went to pay off Batjac’s indebtedness to United Artists. McLintock! cost $2.1 million, earned domestic rentals of $4.5 million. Adding in foreign monies meant that the debt to UA was paid off, with a little left over. Batjac was out of debt and once again owned its film library. They were back in business.
McLintock! has been aptly described by Leonard Maltin as a “boisterous, rowdy comic western,” as it eventually becomes a rough—very rough—variation on The Taming of the Shrew. It completes the transition of Wayne’s character from disenfranchised outsider to a monied, occasionally belligerent (“Don’t say it’s a fine morning, or I’ll shoot ya’ ” is McLintock’s first line) land baron—an extension of Wayne’s politics, and his respect for his own accomplishments.
McLintock is proudly paternalistic, has a passion for chess, and what he regards as an appropriate loathing for government bureaucrats and seedy politicians. The film is a virtual anthology of Wayne’s social views, including a certain propensity for ethnic caricature—the querulous proprietor of the general store is named Birnbaum—not to mention his sense of humor.
“What does ‘reactionary’ mean?” asks one character of McLintock. “Me, I guess,” he replies.
Despite a blatant steal of the ending of The Quiet Man, with Wayne chasing and humiliating Maureen O’Hara, albeit without the earlier film’s careful dramatic justification, the film is never as irritating as it might be because of its expansive good humor—a mélange of familial and political philosophies, comic fights and Indian rights, all of it slammed over with good humor.
Mike Wayne always had a soft spot for the picture because it proved to both his father and the industry at large that he was the businessman his father had been looking for. John Wayne had spent nearly ten years looking for someone to effectively run Batjac, and the best candidate had been underfoot the entire time. Mike Wayne ran Batjac for the rest of his father’s, and his own, life.
McLintock! was shot in part at Old Tucson, a 320-acre western town located in the middle of a 29,000-acre county park. The town had been built by Columbia for its 1940 film Arizona, and had been run since 1959 by Bob Shelton, who built a soundstage that brought even more productions to town. Shelton played host to Wayne numerous times; among other pictures, El Dorado and Rio Lobo would be shot there, and Shelton became a good friend.
Shelton’s first film as proprietor of Old Tucson had been Sam Peckinpah’s The Deadly Companions, with Maureen O’Hara. Shortly after that, Shelton was in Tucson giving a luncheon talk to a Rotary club. When he returned to his office, a secretary told him there was a film company looking around the location.
Shelton went out to the plaza area and met a production manager who said, “The Boss is around back, by the Mission.” They went over to the Mission and when Shelton approached a large man standing in front of the building, the Boss turned around. It was John Wayne. “I almost crapped my pants,” remembered Shelton, “because I had been a big fan since the days of the Three Mesquiteers. He was big as life, and just as blustery.”
“I want to put a building here,” Wayne told Shelton, “and I want to put a false front on that building over there. Now, what are you going to do for me?”
“Well,” replied Shelton, “I got an old pocketknife, a used Cadillac, and a wife who plays good bridge. You can have ’em all.”
They laughed, shook hands—“it was like grabbing a Virginia ham”—and that was the beginning of the friendship. “He was a gregarious, loving kind of guy,” said Shelton. “He enjoyed everybody and everything. He had very good friends in Nogales: the Wingfields—Ralph Wingfield and his wife. Great, wonderful people. He and Wayne became acquainted when Duke made Red River and Wingfield supplied some cattle for the picture.
“Wing had a big spread, and a hacienda type house in southern Pima County, near Nogales. He created a suite of rooms for Duke, reserved just for him. Duke would come there quite frequently; between pictures, Duke would loaf at Wing’s. We used to play gin rummy all day, drink some tequila, then go into Nogales and whoop it up at night. In the morning, he’d go off to work. A great professional.”
When
he was in production in Old Tucson, Wayne would remain in the vicinity because he liked to stay at the same place as the crew. A Wayne picture shot six days a week, and there was usually some sort of activity planned for Sunday—Wayne’s idea of hell was an empty afternoon with nothing to do but watch television. There would be parties at Bob Shelton’s house, or the Arizona Inn, or the Tucson National Country Club. When Shelton’s stepson got married, Wayne went to the reception.
Being with John Wayne in Arizona, or, for that matter, anyplace, was not unlike being with the pope in Rome—everybody knew him and everybody that didn’t know him wanted to meet him. “He had a partner in Stanfield, Arizona, who was in the cattle business with him, a man named Johnson. Duke owned a couple of ranches. And we’d do trips to all these places just to say hello. I drove him all over hell’s half acre looking for locations. Everywhere he went, there were people he knew. And everywhere he went, people gravitated to him like you wouldn’t believe.”
“A man named Johnson” was Louis Johnson, a little beer keg of a man who was born in 1919 and who provided Wayne with one of his few lucrative investments. In 1958, Wayne borrowed money to buy four thousand acres of land south of Phoenix that was earmarked for cotton farming. Johnson owned land adjacent to Wayne’s, and Johnson was getting four bales of cotton out of an acre when everybody else was getting only two and a half—if they were lucky. The two men cut a deal to have Johnson manage Wayne’s fields. Johnson kept on making four bales an acre, so in 1960 the two men became partners.
Johnson was one of the few businessmen in Wayne’s life who was better than his word; at one point, at a time when Wayne was incommunicado because of The Alamo, Johnson personally guaranteed a $500,000 loan in order to bring in a bumper crop.
In 1961, Wayne and Johnson combined their acreage into a single operation and plowed all the profits back into the operation. The cotton was eventually replaced by the 26 Bar Ranch in 1964, where they became leading breeders of purebred Herefords on twenty thousand acres, with another thirty thousand acres rented from the Forest Service.
