by Scott Eyman
Chisum is a typical example of Wayne’s producing style in the final phase of his career. Fox signed an agreement to make the picture in July 1968, but the preliminary budget came in at $5.3 million instead of the agreed-upon $4.5 million. Mike Wayne cut $450,000 out of the budget, but Fox passed anyway. This was in July 1969, and The Undefeated wasn’t released until October, so Fox’s lack of enthusiasm couldn’t have been based on that film’s failure.
Richard Zanuck told Mike that Fox’s situation had changed considerably in the year since they had made the deal—New York was giving him a hard time about making deals on which Fox had only a marginal chance of making money, and things just generally didn’t look good.
Luckily, Warner Bros. had been happy with the financial results of The Green Berets, and Mike moved Chisum there in a matter of weeks. Chisum went into production in October. Mike Wayne and Andrew Fenady made Chisum for $4.5 million on a forty-five-day schedule. $1 million of the budget was apportioned to Wayne, with Fenady getting $100,000 and a percentage for his script and production. The picture came in five days under schedule. “It was a textbook production,” said Fenady. “We made a lot of money.”
Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher was acting in the picture, and Wayne’s affection for the father rubbed off on the son. One day, Wayne rode up to Christopher Mitchum and said, “You know, you should have played Billy the Kid.” (Geoffrey Deuel was playing the part.)
Wayne soon invited Mitchum to play chess, but the younger man couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “He had huge hands,” remembered Mitchum, “and for the first couple of days we were playing, he’d reach out to move a piece with his fingers, and his thumb would slide a rook over. And I’m looking at this thinking, ‘My God, the man’s cheating at chess.’ I didn’t know what to do. And of course, he was creaming me because he was getting two moves to every one of mine.”
Mitchum complained to Ed Faulkner, who explained, “Tell him to knock that crap off. He’s just playing with you.”
“Just like that?” asked the queasy Mitchum.
“Yeah, just tell him to knock it off.”
The next time Wayne moved a rook with his thumb, Mitchum swallowed and said, “Excuse me, Duke, but you’re cheating.”
“Well, I was wondering when you were going to say something,” Wayne said. “Set ’em up. We’ll play again.” With Wayne reduced to one move at a time, the games got competitive. When Howard Hawks visited the set, Wayne introduced him to Mitchum and suggested that Hawks consider him for a part in a western the two men were planning.
Most of the offscreen entertainment on the picture was supplied by Forrest Tucker, who was playing the heavy and had a high director’s chair outfitted with a couple of saddlebags. In one of the saddlebags was a fifth of Ballantine’s, which Tucker would start drinking at breakfast and finish by lunch. After lunch, he turned to the other saddlebag, which had a bottle of vodka or gin. That would be empty by the time the company broke for the day. In spite of such Homeric consumption, nobody ever saw Tucker drunk.
As always, Wayne was exuberant, although there was one flash of rue. The mornings are cold in Durango, and when Wayne and Tucker had to finish shooting a fight scene left over from the day before in very chilly weather, Wayne looked at Tucker and said, “Aren’t we getting a little old for this?”
Fenady noticed a couple of displays of temper. “He was not nuts about Teamsters, and one time he blew up because something wasn’t there and he blamed the Teamsters. And he blew up at Forrest Tucker once. In spite of his drinking, Tucker never missed a line. But Duke got mad at him because Tucker went to the assistant and pointed out that he wasn’t scheduled to work for the next six days. He wanted to take three or four days off. The assistant said OK, and I said ‘No, we might need him.’ ”
Tucker wanted the time off to go to Chicago and make a lucrative personal appearance, but it might have thrown the production off for one day. Wayne was adamant and confronted Tucker, who had been a friend since Sands of Iwo Jima. “Are you a professional, or are you not? You signed on to do this show. We’re shooting Saturday. You’re shooting on Saturday. I’m shooting on Saturday. We as a company are shooting on Saturday. Because that’s what we all signed up to do.” Tucker worked on Saturday.
Andrew Fenady noticed Wayne’s way of reading a script: “He only read the dialogue, never the descriptions. Descriptions he skimmed.” The first time Wayne opened the script, his eyes fell on a line another character had about Chisum: “He thinks his boots is filled with something special.” Wayne didn’t like the line, so out it went. After that, Fenady was afraid Wayne would run roughshod over the dialogue, or bring in another writer, but he found the actor very respectful of good dialogue, and even given to removing unnecessary lines from his character.
“There’s a scene where Chisum is opening up a general store. Someone says that the next thing is to open a bank. ‘Why not,’ was the line, ‘all it takes is money, and I got plenty.’ And he said, ‘McFenady’—he always called me McFenady—‘I don’t need to say that.’ ”And he took himself out of a scene . . . entirely. He was the most generous actor.”
Fenady noticed the easy working relationship with Andrew McLaglen. “When Duke worked with Burt Kennedy, it was ‘Don’t put the camera there. Put it here. Here!’ And it had been the same thing on McLintock!, Andy’s first picture with Duke. But by the time we made Chisum, there was never a strained word between the two. Chisum was really an easy shoot. And Duke told me, “McFenady, this is the most pleasant picture I’ve ever made.”
One morning Mike Wayne gave the company a 9 A.M. call, which meant the crew call was 8 A.M. As usual, Mike drove to the location with McLaglen and Fenady. It was 8 A.M., the sun was up, but there was only one lonely, large figure standing in the middle of the set. He wasn’t happy.
“Who is the smart son of a bitch who gave a nine o’clock call?” Wayne demanded, looking right at his son.
“I did,” said Mike Wayne.
“Well, tomorrow, it will be 8 A.M.”
“When that sun broke, he wanted to start shooting,” said Mike Wayne. Habits left over from Monogram and Republic persisted.
Besides his $1 million salary, Wayne was getting 10 percent of the gross, plus 15 percent of the gross TV sales—a very rich deal, commensurate with the great box office and critical success of True Grit. Ben Johnson got $30,000, Forrest Tucker $75,000, and Bruce Cabot $17,500. Chisum was a success, although not compared to True Grit. By 1974, it had earned world rentals of $9.6 million.
Wayne and Howard Hawks had been talking about another western for a good six months, and Hawks found financing from Cinema Center, a production arm for CBS. When the cast and crew arrived in Cuernavaca for the location work for Rio Lobo, Hawks had about eighteen pages of material. “It wasn’t a script,” said Ed Faulkner, “it was a fragment. Hawks did a lot of the writing down in Cuernavaca, although I’m sure he had some collaborators.” This wasn’t unusual for Hawks—he had made a lot of good pictures writing a day or two in front of shooting—but he had passed the point where he could pull off that particular high-wire act.
The altitude at Cuernavaca was difficult for Wayne, and Chuck Roberson was called upon to do almost any shot involving action. Otherwise, he was the same old Duke. The young actor Peter Jason remembered his first day on the set, when Wayne greeted forty Mexicans, walking up to each of them and shaking their hand, greeting them by name. “It was very impressive to watch the real guys do it. As opposed to today, when nobody even knows who the hell’s on the set.”
Rio Lobo began to go off the rails fairly quickly, and Hawks couldn’t bring himself to admit that he might be the problem. “Wayne had a hard time getting on and off his horse,” he complained. “He can’t move like a big cat the way he used to. He has to hold his belly in. He’s a different kind of person.”
Actually, Wayne was in better condition than his director. One Monday morning, the company was ready to shoot but there was no Hawks.
They scoured the set, and everywhere else they could think of. Finally, someone went to his hotel and found the director relaxing by the pool. He had lost track of time and thought it was Sunday.
In March 1970, just a few weeks into Rio Lobo, Wayne had to fly home—Molly Morrison had died at the age of eighty-one. She had always been formidable, and she didn’t get any less so as she aged. Bob Morrison would die that year, too, from lung cancer. On the ride over to visit his brother in the hospital, Wayne railed to his children, “You know what your uncle did? He’s got a tube in his throat, and the stupid sonofabitch is inhaling cigarettes through that.”
Wayne soldiered on. His energy was good—Dean Smith said he was “still as tough as an old boot”—and he still loved to play chess. Near the end of every shooting day, he’d say to Ed Faulkner, “Doing anything tonight?” If the answer was no, he’d say “We’ll have dinner and play chess.”
Some nights, a small group of actors that included Faulkner and Chris Mitchum would be invited to dinner at Wayne’s rented house. The company had a 6 A.M. call, so the actors had to get up at five, but Wayne would say, “Well, why don’t we go up to the Tropicana and see the girlie show?” Soon, there would be three cars lined up to transport the actors to the Tropicana, where tables would have been cleared in advance, surrounded, as Chris Mitchum remembered, “by 30 glaring Mexicans . . . who’d been thrown off their tables.” The group wouldn’t get back to their rooms until three or four in the morning—just in time to shower, shave, and go to work.
In June 1970 Wayne received an invitation to go to Las Vegas for a benefit that featured the astronauts that had landed on the moon. The astronauts had been asked whom they wanted to meet, and their answer was: John Wayne.
Wayne told Bob Shelton that he’d go if Shelton would go with him, and the entire twenty-four-hour experience gave Shelton a ground-level view of just what it was like to be John Wayne. By the time the benefit rolled around, Rio Lobo was shooting in Hollywood. Shelton went there with an overnight bag and at the end of the day they got on a private jet to Vegas. The plane was supposed to land and taxi to the private terminal. “Don’t worry,” said the pilot, “nobody knows you’re coming, and we’re taking you to the private terminal.”
The plane taxied over to the corner of the hangar where Shelton observed thousands of people clustered around, including some on top of the hangar—a mob scene. Wayne wasn’t appalled—“he expected it,” remembered Shelton, and he gave Shelton some of the autographed cards he always carried, so Shelton could pass them out.
At the Frontier Hotel, the beautiful people were out in force and also mobbed Wayne. If he was uncomfortable or in an awkward moment, he would pull his earlobe, which was the signal for Shelton to come over and say “The governor wants to speak to you.”
Glen Campbell was appearing at the hotel, and Wayne said he’d like to take a peek at the show. Campbell was in the middle of his set, but his conductor told him who was in the audience, and Campbell introduced Wayne from the stage. The lights went up and people swarmed Wayne. The lights went back down and Shelton watched with amazement at people crawling down the aisle on their hands and knees to get an autograph.
Wayne had made Shelton promise to get him on the 7 A.M. flight because it was imperative that he be back at the Newport Beach house by 8 A.M. It wasn’t business, it was Pilar. “If I don’t get there in time, it’s a death sentence,” he grumbled to Shelton.
Wayne and Shelton were given a large suite with a bedroom on either side. They finally got to bed about four in the morning, but not before Shelton left a 5 A.M. wake-up call.
The call woke up Shelton and he went into Wayne’s room to rouse him. He just followed the clothes—a shoe, another shoe, pants, then underwear. Wayne had simply shed his clothes on the way to bed. With one hour of sleep, Wayne bounced right up and the two men went off to breakfast. They made the flight, and Wayne was back home in time to avoid domestic unpleasantness.
The interiors for Rio Lobo were shot at Studio Center in Hollywood, the renamed Republic Studios lot. Someone asked Wayne where his dressing room had been in the old days and he snorted, “Dressing room? I didn’t have a dressing room. I had a hook.”
Joining the company for a bit part was George Plimpton, then at the height of his success as an Everyman attempting fish-out-of-water experiences, which he memorialized in books, or, in this case, a TV documentary. Wayne enjoyed teasing the writer by mispronouncing his name, or referring to his popular book Paper Lion as Paper Tiger. Plimpton observed the care with which Wayne made a movie—his pleasure in being on the set at all times instead of hiding in his trailer. And he also overheard, as he was meant to, some of Wayne’s oft-stated political views, which struck him as paradoxical. How could a man who listened so intently, who was a first-class bridge player, a very good chess player, a man with an obviously fine mind—Plimpton listened to Wayne recite John Milton from memory—how could that man’s politics be so rigid and simplistic?
The movie industry was much on Wayne’s mind. He gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which he vented his pessimism about the industry. “The Jack Warners, Harry Cohns and Louis B. Mayers were men with a certain integrity, whether for business reasons or not, and they cared about the future of the industry,” he said. “Now we’re afflicted with fast-buck producers cashing in on pornography and depravity, and there’s no leadership to stop them.”
He was convinced that the movie industry as it was constituted in the early 1970s was a house of cards. “I see pay-TV in the not so distant future and this, I think, is how it will work as far as those who make it are concerned: At the moment, we know our feature films will show in theaters for from one to a couple of years, and then, after quite a while, they go on the air. But pay-TV is going to work differently. We’ll do the feature films, all right, but we’ll pull them out of the theaters in three to six months, hold them for another three months, then show them on pay-TV. And it won’t be the tiny screens we show them on now.
“See that over there?” he said, pointing to a movie screen of about three feet by five feet. “That’s what’s coming, you mark my words, and it’ll be the death blow of dirty X-rated pictures, which have just about run their cycle anyway.” Except for overlooking home video, and the human appetite for pornography, he got it right, up to and including the time element.
When it was released in December 1970, Rio Lobo proved to be flaccidly written and shot, shakily acted by almost all of the supporting cast—a careless old man’s movie capable of lowering the spirits of the most ardent auteurist. Some idea of the messiness of the enterprise can be gauged by the casting of a Mexican actor to play a Confederate officer, which is explained by giving the character a French mother and a Mexican father from New Orleans.
Structurally, it’s a mess—the film’s first half hour has almost no relation to the rest of the film—and even William Clothier’s camerawork is perfunctory. The only charming moment passes almost unnoticed—a wanted poster for one Hondo Lane brightens up a sheriff’s office.
“Rio Lobo doesn’t look like a Hawks film,” wrote critic John C. Mahoney. “It hasn’t the relationships of a Hawks film. It hasn’t the sound of a Hawks film, the wit, mocking, contrapuntal and over-lapping dialogue. . . . Nor does it have the cast and performances, having an even poorer ensemble of actors than those corralled for Red Line 7000.”
The film’s only attributes were a good opening sequence of a runaway boxcar, and Wayne, who knew the picture was terrible. “Rio Lobo is bad,” he admitted to one writer off the record. “Hawks made the mistake of doing too much of the writing.” He went on to remark on Hawks’s habit of playing off writers against each other. “Both Ford and Hawks could direct . . . but Hawks couldn’t write. He never should have tried. That was pretty obvious by Rio Lobo. He’d become sort of aloof and I guess there have been too many showings in Paris of his films. He’s feeling that he’s a cult now.”
Rio Lobo brought in $4.25 million in d
omestic rentals against a cost of $5 million—in twentieth place for movies that year. “Anybody else would have made it, [it] wouldn’t even have been released in LA,” said Tom Kane. “It would be Rod Cameron [and it would play] somewhere down in Sweetwater, Texas.”
John Ford was now retired. Every once in a while, he’d make an appearance at one of the colleges around town, as with a January 1970 turn at USC. The future screenwriter John Sacret Young was there, and he remembered that Ford “looked like a big man who had lost his bigness. Age and ill health had eaten it away.”
Ford called the camera “this wonderful looking monster,” and told the kids to “forget about it. Get a good cameraman and work with the people. Shoot their eyes. You can express more with the eyes than with anything else.” Someone asked him about French cinema, and he grumbled, “All they do is get in and out of cars.” He said that Dudley Nichols and he had the same idea about scripts—that there should be a “paucity of dialogue.”
“In just his choice of words there is the flavor he imbued,” wrote Young in his notes. “This self-created image, now deeply ingrained, of a big, slouching roughneck of an Irish New Englander slipping in the word ‘paucity.’ It is funny and more.”
Five months later, Young attended the annual Memorial Day service at the Field Photo Chapel, which had been moved to the grounds of the Motion Picture Home. It is a small white building with four pillars in front and an antique pulpit. There are nine rows of benches and a sign that says, “Here dead lie we/Because we did not choose/To live and shame the land/From which we sprung,” followed by the names of the men of the Field Photo Service who had died in the war.
Ford was in uniform, with seven and a half rows of bars. He was smoking a Tiparillo, but put it aside as Ray Kellogg helped him put on his sword. “Every year the same sword,” Ford muttered.
Mike was making deals. Wayne was continuing to spread himself very thin and was enjoying every minute of it. But when he was with his family, he was totally there.
