John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  What my father always tried to zero in on was this: who was responsible? What power did individuals have? Nobody wanted to go before the committee and answer the questions positively or negatively. When people quit the Communist Party, they didn’t rush off to the papers and offer up the names of the other people in the party. They were compelled to do that by a congressional committee who had the power to throw them into jail.

  The informer is far down the food chain; my father wanted people to remember who the enemy really was. He didn’t like informers, but the idea of focusing attention on the informer is a mistake.

  One way or another, he was always trying to operate from principle, and when you do that you take the longer view. People focus on Elia Kazan, they don’t focus on the Committee. Kazan didn’t want to inform. Robert Rossen, same thing. Those men didn’t change overnight; they didn’t become different people.

  Wayne replicated the certainty of his screen character by refusing to admit he might have been wrong or at least overenthusiastic in his participation in blacklisting through the Motion Picture Alliance. Those things he deeply regretted—his marital failures, his failure to serve—he kept resolutely private.

  And he did indeed try to justify the Alliance’s behavior on retributive grounds. “It was the commies who did the first blacklisting,” he insisted, pointing to Morrie Ryskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Of Thee I Sing, and longtime screenwriter (A Night at the Opera, My Man Godfrey, among others). Ryskind, Wayne insisted, was blacklisted by Dore Schary at MGM because of his anticommunist activities.

  Schary responded by saying that Ryskind had been up for a job at MGM only once during Schary’s tenure as studio head. Schary was willing to pay him $2,000 a week, but Ryskind asked for $3,500. Schary thought that was too much and the deal was never made.

  In fact, MGM contract files show that Ryskind was employed by MGM twice: once in 1934 and once in 1935 to work on A Night at the Opera, along with an undated deal from the 1930s to buy the title Strike Up the Band. Ryskind was never employed at MGM during the 1940s, and had his last screen credit for adapting the Ginger Rogers vehicle Heartbeat in 1946—before the blacklist wave broke.

  Everybody wants to be the victim.

  But unlike many on the political right, the personal always trumped the political for Wayne. Several years after Foreman’s magazine piece, Wayne went to the popular Los Angeles restaurant Dan Tana’s for dinner, and there was Foreman. The two men looked at each other, then quickly embraced as if they were old friends. Foreman called over his English wife and young child and introduced them to his antagonist.

  Later, after they sat down to dinner, Foreman’s wife asked him about the sudden change of heart. “He was a patriot,” said Foreman. “I was a patriot. He didn’t do it to hurt me.” As with Dalton Trumbo, Foreman made a distinction between those who acted out of political principle, and those who acted out of personal expediency.

  The shifting alliances, residual anguish, and attempted moral equivalencies of the blacklist era are far more interesting and worthy of passionate response than Brannigan. Wayne’s budgets had been averaging around $4 million, but Brannigan was made for $2.5 million, with Wayne getting $750,000 of that plus 10 percent of the gross after $7.5 million. The total script costs for four writers were a minute $50,000, Richard Attenborough got $60,000 to co-star, and director Douglas Hickox, primarily a director of commercials until he had made the entertaining Theatre of Blood in 1973, got only $50,000.

  Wayne did some halfhearted promotion for Brannigan, hosting journalists at his house dressed in a natty blue blazer despite the fact that he had just gotten out of a dentist’s chair. The tequila was uncorked, and the journalists responded by baiting the tired old bull. They asked him about Cambodia, they asked him about a recent biography that had (wrongly) suggested he was conceived out of wedlock.

  “If my mother was alive, she’d have taken a horsewhip to the big stupid son of a bitch and run him out of town. And if I hadn’t offered to do it for her, she’d have turned the whip on me.”

  When one of the reporters suggested suing, Wayne warmed to his core issue—the gap between the world he inhabited as a young man and still inhabited as an actor, and the world he saw around him. “That’s the trouble with you people—you sue people. I think you ought to take it out in pieces of their body. We’re becoming a nation of who-can-you-sue instead of what is decent and graceful and nice and clean. I just don’t know how to think anymore. I don’t know who I’m talking to or which one of you is a person who believes in a completely different world than the one I was brought up to believe in.”

  Finally, he tried to turn the subject back closer to the ostensible subject at hand—show business as a celebration of grace and style. He picked a book off the coffee table and began flipping through the pages. “Here is the most beautiful person I’ve known in my whole life,” he said, pointing to a picture of Margot Fonteyn taking a bow after a performance of Swan Lake.

  The tub thumping for Brannigan entailed an appearance on the popular CBS sitcom Maude. The premise wasn’t bad—Maude, played by Beatrice Arthur, was a loudmouthed feminist, and the idea of her sparring with Mr. Conservative promised some laughs, somewhat in the manner of Sammy Davis Jr. kissing Archie Bunker on All in the Family. But the writers didn’t follow through and had Maude go weak in the knees at the sight of him.

  “I’ve spent thousands of hours in dark theaters loving you, Duke,” she says.

  Wayne looks roguish. “Was that you?” The writing, and the undying sitcom mannerism of braying the lines to the furthest reaches of the balcony submarined the show.

  Brannigan offered the unappetizing sight of an apparently demoralized, overweight sixty-eight-year-old man playing a cop under the undistinguished aegis of a British B movie director. It was pure hackwork, and it got what it deserved. The North American rentals on Brannigan came to only $2 million—a flat-out flop.

  With his own commercial appeal clearly on the wane, Wayne kept a wary eye on younger actors who were siphoning off his audience. He gave two primary rivals respect, if not enthusiasm. “I like most of what [Steve] McQueen has been doing and I think Eastwood has a chance. Peckinpah? Well, our business is all about getting attention. Peckinpah got the attention of the public by throwing away what I still think pictures are all about—illusion. He brought in realism. Capsules of exploding calf’s blood for when a guy gets shot. Not my cup of tea.”

  But Wayne was a capitalist, and in a capitalist society public appetites have a way of being met. “I can’t find fault too much with what these people are doing,” he said. “If people want to see nude pictures, they’re going to make nude pictures. If they want to see dirty pictures, they’re going to make dirty pictures.”

  In most respects, Wayne had always functioned above public taste and studio politics, if not his own. He wanted to make a western—the public came; he played Genghis Khan—the public came. The public’s taste conformed to Wayne’s powerful personality and knack for delivering movies as the people wanted to see them.

  But now he was older, heavier not just in body but in spirit. The image that he had built and sustained for nearly fifty years was working against him, at least in part because of his unflinching support of the most conservative causes—Vietnam, Nixon—which in turn bred hostile responses from the opposing camp who repeatedly characterized him, as Wayne put it, as “a caricature of a heavy in a Gene Autry western.”

  “On occasions . . . I have used sensationally bad English,” he said,

  but I’ve done it to exaggerate a point. Yet, there’s a tendency, seemingly to have me drop my g’s and to quote me in poor English on every occasion. I think that if they would go through the letters I have written—I write thirty or forty letters a day when I’m not on a picture—I don’t think they will find the type of English they try to put in my mouth. I don’t mind that. It’s not irritating to me. I know how well educated I am and I also know how stupid I am, so anything they might
do to set the picture doesn’t bother my ego. . . .

  The way the majority of them show their objectivity—if John Wayne rides down a street with Ann-Margret, their objective reporting will read something like this: “A balding, gray-haired old man with a rather heavy paunch is riding down the street with Ann-Margret.” The objective thing only goes as far as I’m concerned. At least they could say, “with the beautiful Ann-Margret,” but that’s not the way it would be written.

  He thought about playing General Douglas MacArthur in a biopic at Universal but finally turned it down, saying, “He was a magnificent man, one of the few people I really admire. But I don’t honestly think there’s a story in him. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve blown enough films in my time.” Despite a good performance by Gregory Peck, who was, in any case, more physically suited to the part than Wayne, the film failed.

  After Brannigan, there was no doubt about Pat Stacy’s place in Wayne’s life. “He was so lonely,” said Cecilia deMille Presley, “and Pat Stacy was there.” Pilar and Wayne would never sign divorce papers, according to Gretchen Wayne, “because he didn’t want to be a three-time loser. And that way he never had to marry Pat Stacy.”

  Stacy would be Wayne’s companion for the rest of his life, but there would always be a clear demarcation between her and the rest of the family. One day, Cecilia deMille Presley noticed an attractive picture of Wayne and Stacy on a desk and suggested he sign it to Stacy with a suitably loving inscription. “He looked at me as if I was crazy,” remembered Presley. “And that told me everything. Pat was there, someone to keep him warm. But it didn’t go further than that.”

  After Wayne’s death, Stacy wrote a book that some in the family felt glamorized their affair to make it seem more than it was. Aissa said that Wayne was always slightly distant with Stacy whenever the family was around. If he had loved her that much, their reasoning went, he would have married her.

  In September of 1974, Wayne once again donned his eyepatch and flew to Oregon for location work on Rooster Cogburn, a sequel to True Grit. Surprisingly, Hal Wallis’s staff had made a preliminary list of people who could conceivably play Rooster, although Wayne was always first choice. Following him were Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, George C. Scott, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Burt Lancaster, Richard Burton, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, and Rock Hudson. It was more or less a catch-all list of every leading man of the period, but Wallis got his first, his only choice.

  Wallis’s initial idea for Wayne’s leading lady was Ingrid Bergman, who might have been a better choice than Katharine Hepburn, if only because Hepburn and Wayne were similarly assertive personalities who could cancel each other out. Bergman was softer, as well as sexier, while Hepburn’s sexuality had long been subsumed by her expert playing of a succession of flinty spinsters.

  Bergman didn’t work out, which opened the door for other possibilities. Maureen O’Hara was considered, as well as Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, or Glenda Jackson. “We should talk about Bette Davis too,” wrote Paul Nathan, Wallis’s associate producer, “although I think she’d turn over the raft and beat the hell out of Wayne.”

  Wallis began negotiating with Hepburn, but Paul Nathan offered the wild card of a comeback from Loretta Young, who was Mike Wayne’s godmother and still a friend of the family. Wallis drew a line through Young’s name and scribbled “No thanks” on the memo. As the choices for his leading lady narrowed, Wayne decided to throw in his two cents.

  In a surprising letter to Wallis that shows both his big-picture viewpoint and his knowledge of film history, he pointed out that Wayne and Hepburn together were no guarantee of success: “To the people under 30 years old the combination won’t mean anything but two older people in a picture . . . so far no one has ever made a success of [a picture] about two old people—not even Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey could stand the pressure.”

  He went on to say that someone younger—he mentioned Mary Tyler Moore—with some appeal to younger audiences might be a better idea. It was a typically logical argument, but Wallis wasn’t deterred. Hepburn was signed that same month for $150,000, plus $100,000 deferred and 10 percent of the net profits.

  Wallis again offered the director’s job to Henry Hathaway, but Hathaway wasn’t too sure—he thought the script, which had mostly been written by Wallis’s wife, actress Martha Hyer under the name Martin Julien—“Marty” was Hyer’s nickname, and “Julien” was her father’s name—was close to self-parody. There were also some contributions from Wallis, while Charles Portis, the author of True Grit, did a polish on the dialogue. The result was a more or less blatant retread of The African Queen—Hepburn as a prim minister’s relative stuck with a boisterous but resourceful drunk on a dangerous river voyage.

  Wayne’s notes on Hyer’s script are dated May 6, 1974. This version of the script picks up Cogburn after he is no longer a marshal and is more or less the town drunk. Wayne took exception to seeing Cogburn falling that low. Beyond that, he thought that there was a lack of a point of view; he referred to the scene in True Grit where Rooster shoots a rat and talks about how the law can miscarry justice. He felt it was important that Rooster be able to justify his killing, as a way of asserting that he hasn’t gone completely to seed. Wallis seemed to agree with almost all of Wayne’s points, checking them off one by one, and the things Wayne objected to were indeed altered in the final script.

  After thinking about it, Hathaway turned down the picture. Aside from the script, trying to handle both Wayne and Hepburn on a distant location just seemed like too much work for a man who was, as he liked to point out, quite wealthy.

  At that point, Wallis began canvassing for a director. Wallis wrote Wayne telling him that George Seaton was working on a play, hence unavailable, and mentioned some alternatives: Lamont Johnson, Charles Jarrott, John Avildsen, John Moxey. Wallis lobbied hard for Dick Richards, who had made The Culpepper Cattle Co., but Wayne resisted because of what he felt to be “a lot of bad taste” in the picture. There were many other possibilities, but at no time were the names of either Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone in the mix, indicating that Wayne, Wallis, or both of them felt they were unacceptable.

  Wayne overcame his reservations about Dick Richards, but Richards couldn’t overcome his reservations about the script. Tom Gries was also in the last stage of the directorial competition, but Wallis decided he didn’t like Gries’s penchant for multiple cameras.

  Wallis deserved to be criticized for his eventual choice: Stuart Millar, a man who had directed precisely one picture (When the Legends Die). It was a lowball choice—Millar was only making $50,000—indicative of Wallis’s preference at this stage of his career for younger, cheaper directors, probably because they were less inclined to argue.

  In the first week of September the cast and crew assembled for six weeks of location work in and around the Cascade Mountains near Bend, Oregon. Just before shooting started, Hepburn told Millar, “You realize, of course, that you are working with three bullies.”

  Faced with two bullies too many, Millar never had a chance.

  Production got under way on September 4, returned to the studio on October 28, and wrapped two days later, six days under schedule. The only real mishap involved Wayne getting hit in the eye with a golf club swung by his daughter. Waiting for the swelling to go down took four days, and Wallis dropped a couple of scenes rather than reschedule them.

  The working day habitually began with Wayne and Hepburn telling Millar how the scenes should be shot. Millar would groan and Hepburn would offer her nostrum of the day, which was borrowed from the script: “A sharp knife cuts the quickest and hurts the least.” Hal Wallis joined the scrum by sending Millar memos complaining about coverage—too many setups per scene, with lines being dropped.

  When Millar would call Wayne on his ad-libbing, Wayne groused, “I haven’t said lines just as they were written in a scene since I worked for Masc
ot Productions.” Wayne’s main complaint was that Millar was indecisive and overshot. “Goddammit,” he said, “we can say these lines just so many times before they stop making sense.” Millar would say “Action!” and Wayne would grumble that he wasn’t ready yet. Or Millar would say “Cut” and Wayne would say, “No! Keep going.” The cameraman usually followed Wayne’s orders. When Millar got flustered, Wayne would pile on: “Hey, Mister Director, you’re supposed to say ‘Action’ aren’t you?” At one point, Wayne fulminated that Millar was “a six-foot-six son of a bitch no-talent.”

  Hepburn’s touchy mood might have been exacerbated by hip surgery she had undergone nine months earlier. She hated the way she looked and wouldn’t watch rushes; she did her lipstick with a special mirror that blocked out her face so she wouldn’t have to look at the lines and wrinkles.

  “Katharine Hepburn was all over the place,” said Mark Rydell, who would direct her in On Golden Pond. “She would give you much too much. You had to curb her, contain her.” Millar couldn’t contain either of them. Twice Wallis went to Wayne and offered to fire Millar, and twice Wayne said no; it would hurt Millar’s career and Wayne said that if they all worked together and did what needed to be done they could make the best of it.

  The relationship between Wayne and Hepburn could be characterized as a chaste infatuation. “I can honestly say I never met a man who worked harder or played harder than Duke,” said Hepburn. “He was a total straightshooter, decent, and fun. Just a natural. We were up in the Cascades, and some days we got on our horses and rode all day. Great fun. Big man. Small backside.” (Hepburn mentioned what she considered Wayne’s most delectable physical attribute whenever she was asked about him.)