American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  After a week of filming, with all the other actors sounding like Broadway actors trying to sound like cowboys, a disgusted Walsh told Wayne to forget everything he’d learned in his speech lessons, to just speak in the halting way he normally did, and to leave in that funny walk of his. Years later that walk and talk would become every comic impersonator’s bread and butter.22

  The production was mired in Yuma for twenty-eight days, during which time Wayne kept mostly to himself. He didn’t drink with the other actors. Nor did he have much to do off-screen with the film’s leading lady, Marguerite Churchill—a Broadway actress discovered by Sheehan who was also being given the big studio buildup—after she made it clear to Wayne when he’d made a pass at her that he’d be better off spending whatever free time he had studying his lines.

  After finishing up in Yuma, the caravan moved to Sacramento, where Walsh wanted to film a river sequence. It was in Sacramento that the production began to come apart. Part of the problem was the widespread weariness among the cast and crew, who weren’t used to doing so much traveling to make a movie. At the time, most Hollywood films were shot on soundstages in Hollywood, where it was possible to re-create almost any location, indoors and out. Few, if any connected to the production, including Sheehan, had agreed with Walsh’s decision to take the film on location but Walsh argued, convincingly, that shooting in Grandeur was going to make fake outdoor sets look even more unreal than usual. He insisted that for the widescreen, they had to shoot The Big Trail outdoors in Sacramento.

  As soon as they were set up, crates of bootleg whiskey suddenly arrived for the cast and crew, much-needed balm imported by them to get through the increasingly long and difficult production. Walsh demanded throughout the location shoots that the actors be ready to film at dawn, so he could catch the all-important first rays of golden sunlight and before the heat became unbearable. The actors, mostly out of the New York theater, where they could sleep all day and perform at night, hated him for it, and he had little use for them. As Walsh later recalled: “Sheehan and [Bill Fox’s executive assistant] Sol Wurtzel figured this boy [Wayne] should have some help. They sent back to New York and they engaged five prominent character actors, the most prominent actors of the day, and brought them out and surprised me with these fellows . . . I knew none of them had ever seen the sun rise or the sun set—I knew I was going to have a hell of a time with them. We got on location, got started and I called John and said, ‘sit beside me when I’m directing these character actors, because they’re the best and you’ll learn something from them.’ Well, the night before, a bootlegger got in to them and they were pretty well oiled up for this scene. Not only did they scare the Indians that were sitting around, they scared the hawks and the crows that were in the trees . . . these great character men stayed loaded all through the picture, and things finally got so bad we nicknamed them Johnnie Walker, Gordon Gin, and several other names of whiskey.”

  The script, too, was a problem. It suffered from a lack of any stylistic cohesion, having been written by committee—story by Hal G. Evarts, dialogue and sequences woven together by Marie Boyle, Jack Peabody, Florence Postal, and Fred Sersen—which on location made it difficult to get the quick rewrites necessary to adapt the reality of the locales to the logic of the story.

  Finally, the massive and delicate Grandeur equipment was extremely difficult to set up, break down, and move from site to site. Dozens of expensive motors for the cameras burned out and had to be replaced. Every scene had to be shot at least three separate times, once for the Grandeur format, once in the standard 35 mm so it could be distributed in cities where there were no theaters equipped with the widescreen equipment, which was most of them, and once in German (Walsh was helped with that version by Lewis Seiler), part of Fox’s still-grand scheme to become the king of world cinema. Having some of the actors try to speak phonetic German proved a nightmare for Walsh, and after a lot of wasted time and money, much of the German version was eventually overdubbed.23

  EVEN WITH ALL THESE DIFFICULTIES, Walsh continued to drag his cast and crew across the face of the American West another four months, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the Grand Teton Pass; St. George, Utah; Sequoia National Park; Moise, Montana. And it paid off. Many of the wagon train sequences shot by cinematographers Lucien Andriot and Arthur Edeson are stunning, and Walsh’s use of natural sound was innovative and exemplary.

  However, the physical strain on machines and humans continued to take its toll. Wayne became seriously ill during filming: “I was three weeks on my back with turistas—or Montezuma’s revenge, or the Aztec two-step, whatever you want to call it. You know, you get a little grease and soap on the inside of a fork and you’ve got it. Anyway, that was the worst case I’ve ever had in my life. I’d been sick for so long that they finally said, ‘Jeez, Duke, if you can’t get up now, we’ve got to get somebody else to take your place.’ So, with a loss of eighteen pounds, I returned to work while I puked and crapped blood for a week.”

  In the end, the biggest problem with the film’s star was not his health but his acting. Wayne’s lack of real-life experience showed in his on-screen lack of authority. Breck Coleman is the key character of the story, a star turn, the one who keeps all the plot strands of the film together. Much of Wayne’s acting comes off overly stiff, with exaggerated hand gestures and facial expressions meant to “show” what he was thinking, instead of illustrating what he was feeling. And when it came to the love scenes with Marguerite Churchill, the uptight Wayne had absolutely no idea how to approach her or them. Some of the other actors giggled at his attempts to be romantic (as audiences would when the film opened). They came off tentative, imitative, and artificial.

  Walsh realized too late that the big difference between John Wayne and Gary Cooper was something all the lessons and lenses in the world couldn’t fix. Cooper sizzled on-screen, a quality that got him through the most ridiculous of scenarios, like Morocco, but Wayne had plainly no heat. He acted at room temperature, and it would keep him from ever becoming a romantic leading man.

  As visualized by Walsh, The Big Trail was a metaphor for the journey of life, with its Chaucer-like multiplicity of stories that emerge from under the one umbrella theme of progress. However, with too many writers to make it a unified whole, and with the limitations imposed by having to shoot in Grandeur, the momentum of the Great American Dream is viewed only from an external viewpoint, too much vista, too little vision.

  The Big Trail premiered November 1, 1930, a noisy, flashing, lavish spectacle of a night, complete with klieg lights rotating in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, followed the next day by awful reviews and after that, mediocre box office. Walsh was, at this point in his career, still directing with an actor’s eye rather than a director’s, and it limited his ability to construct a convincing mise-en-scène.

  Wayne, too, had to share some of the blame. He had not had enough training or experience to carry a major motion picture. His acting was full of exaggerated motions he had learned watching silent film. He didn’t yet know how to do more in front of a camera by doing less, to trust that the camera could look into rather than just at him.

  THE RECRIMINATIONS FROM THE FILM’S failure ran deep. The Big Trail all but ended Marguerite Churchill’s run as a movie star. She never again starred in a major motion picture. It was Tyrone Power Sr.’s only “talkie” and his last film. He died the next year of a heart attack, in his star-to-be son’s arms. After finishing out his contract with Fox, Walsh moved to Paramount and floundered for nearly a decade before he next landed at Warner Bros and found his auteurist soul directing The Roaring Twenties in 1939, with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney as the yin and yang of Depression-era crime.

  The Big Trail was seen in its original intended Grandeur form in only two theaters, the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s in Los Angeles. The rest of the country and the world saw it in standard 35 mm, which is to say they didn’t really see it at all. After the film’s brief run ended, William Fox w
arehoused all his Grandeur equipment, and widescreen 70 mm would not be used again until the early ’50s, when it was revived as part of the dying industry’s attempt to combat the ubiquitous but small television screen.

  The film’s financial failure signaled the end of William Fox’s career as a Hollywood mogul. He eventually served six months in jail for perjury, having to do with the government’s antitrust lawsuit. When he was released, he declared bankruptcy and retired from the film business. In 1935, under new management, the studio was taken over by Twentieth Century in what was politely called a merger. Under the leadership of Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century Pictures became Twentieth Century–Fox. William Fox moved back to New York City and died in obscurity in 1952 at the age of seventy-three. No Hollywood producers came to his funeral. (In his unpublished memoirs, Wayne graciously gave William Fox and his studio credit as the person and institution that gave him his first big opportunity in Hollywood.)

  With his star turn a bust, Wayne didn’t appear in another movie for a year and a half. Zanuck finally put him in a movie after demoting him to the Bs, the cinematic dead end for has-beens or never-wases. The whole experience left him bitter and broke: “So I was the star of a super-spectacle $3 million picture. What a laugh. My salary was all of $75 a week.”

  Without money, without a future, and without a dream, he did what any twenty-three-year-old would do in his situation.

  He decided it was the perfect time to think about setting down and getting married.

  Chapter 4

  “I can’t act and I couldn’t learn in a thousand years,” Wayne warned Raoul Walsh when he cast him in The Big Trail, and he had made good on his prediction. After, whenever anybody asked him why the film failed, he manned up and refused to blame anyone else for the film’s failure, citing only his own inability. That was his way.

  He determined to better himself. According to one friend, “He was obsessed with the idea of becoming a good actor.” After The Big Trail, he tried to repair the real damage that had been done to his career. Sheehan and Wurtzel ignored him whenever they passed Wayne at the studio, as if he didn’t exist.

  With the Fox studio in disarray, and little in the way of a big-name talent pool, early in 1931 the studio finally threw Wayne a bone. He was cast in his twentieth film as the lead in Girls Demand Excitement, another college campus coed comedy romance, with Wayne in the lead and Marguerite Churchill as his female counterpart. Teaming them together again in this B movie spoke volumes about what the studio thought about both of them. Also in the film was Charlie Chaplin’s discovery, Virginia Cherrill, the blind flower girl from City Lights. Wayne told his friend and biographer Maurice Zolotow he had had a brief but intense affair with Cherrill during the making of Girls Demand Excitement.24

  Variety quickly dismissed Girls and Wayne this way: “John Wayne is the same young man who was in The Big Trail and also is here spotted in a farce that does little to set him off.” In the film, the male students want all the female students thrown out of their college (try selling that script today!). Wayne always considered it the silliest film of his career. He probably wasn’t wrong. And if he needed any more proof that his star, however brief, had fallen, the Variety review provided it. One day he ran into the great Will Rogers (“Oklahoma’s favorite son”) on the lot, and Rogers, who hardly knew Wayne, patiently listened as Duke spilled his guts to him. When he finished, Rogers smiled, put a hand on the young actor’s shoulder, and reminded him how lucky he was to be working at all in these hard times. The chance meeting with Rogers gave Wayne a boost. He only had one more film left on his Fox contract, and after that if he worked again, he would do it, as Rogers told him to, with his chin up.

  Fox next put Wayne into Three Girls Lost (1931), produced and directed by former jazz musician and vaudevillian Sidney Lanfield, who would go on to direct a number of Bob Hope comedies, about as far away from Wayne’s world as possible. In Three Girls Lost, from a script by Bradley King, and costarring Loretta Young, Wayne played a gentleman architect in something resembling a western drama. He was woefully miscast and knew it. After the film’s failure at the box office, the studio declined to renew his contract and cut him loose.25

  The only thing going right for him was his relationship with Josephine, and it wasn’t going well at all. They had been dating now for five years (with that brief breakup when he quit school), since they first met when she was sixteen and he nineteen. Because of Wayne’s busy schedule, and her father’s strict rules regarding Josephine’s social life, they only saw each other one night a week. The first face he saw whenever he came by to take her out was that of the unsmiling Dr. Saenz, which was also the last face he saw when he brought her home. Dr. Saenz continually made it clear he didn’t like Wayne. He had no use for actors, especially unemployed ones, especially this one. Wayne may felt some measure of guilt for not being able to remain true to Josephine with Virginia Cherrill, and his flirtation with Churchill, and dealt with it by deferring to Dr. Saenz’s hard rules. Maybe the good doctor was right; maybe he wasn’t good enough for his daughter.

  WITHIN A MONTH OF HIS contract being up at Fox, in the spring of 1931 Wayne signed with Columbia Studios. Its founder was the “I don’t get ulcers, I give ’em” Harry Cohn, a former streetcar conductor who had worked for a time at Paramount before starting Columbia Pictures in 1922 with his brothers and Joe Brandt.26 Cohn liked Wayne’s looks, thought he had some talent but had never been used correctly at Fox. Cohn was willing to take a chance on Wayne because it wasn’t that much of a risk; he signed him to a five-year contract, at $250 a week, with six-month out-clauses for each side.

  Located on North Gower Avenue in Hollywood, the “Poverty Row” of moviemaking studies, Cohn was looking to expand his stable of actors by signing other studios’ discards on the cheap. Some were available because their previous pictures hadn’t done well, as was the case with Wayne; others wanted more say in what pictures they made and thought they could get it going freelance, like Cary Grant, who signed nonexclusive deals with Columbia and RKO after a bumpy start at Paramount. Already acquired by Columbia were Katharine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, and Humphrey Bogart.

  Cohn wasted no time putting Wayne to work in George Seitz’s Men Are Like That. Seitz was a journeyman director who had made his reputation directing Pearl White Saturday morning serials. Men Are Like That was a remake of a remake, this version written by Robert Riskin, a young and successful Broadway playwright Cohn had brought to Columbia to write scripts for the studio.27 Men went into production that May, a five-day shoot to be ready for release in August. In it, Wayne plays an army lieutenant in yet another college-football-based romantic comedy, this time opposite silent film sensation Laura La Plante, who was trying to make the transition to sound. Men Are Like That was produced for very little money and managed to turn a profit, but Wayne fell flat on his face at Columbia when Cohn thought his new leading man was sleeping with the same actress that he was. Cohn angrily confronted Wayne. “When you work for this studio, you keep your pants buttoned,” he said pointing his finger in Wayne’s face as he did so. Whether or not he actually slept with one of Cohn’s many paramours, Wayne apologized and promised it wouldn’t happen again.28

  In his next film for Columbia, Louis King’s 1931 The Deceiver, Wayne played a dead body. After, Cohn called Wayne into his office and sarcastically told him it was his best performance yet.

  Despite Cohn’s fury at Wayne, at the end of his first six months Wayne asked for and got a renewal and a raise to $350 a week. Cohn agreed to the extension and the raise to punish Wayne. The star of Fox’s grandiose The Big Trail was permanently reduced to making cheapies, and was humiliated by having to appear in them. He did D. Ross Lederman’s 1931 sixty-four-minute Range Feud, made for all of $25,000 (at Cohn’s directive, all B movies had to run no longer than an hour), to keep production costs to a minimum. The film’s star was the dark-haired, square-jawed Buck Jones.29 In the film, Jones is the sheriff. Wayne is the son of a
rancher falsely accused of killing a rival rancher. He is redeemed when Jones finds the real villain, the bank robber/cattle rustler/murderer.

  In his next assignment, Edward Sedgwick’s 1931 Maker of Men,30 Wayne’s role is little more than a bit part, a dishonest college athlete in bed with gamblers. The film is notable for featuring former Olympic swimming champion and the future Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe and Wayne USC teammate Ward Bond (who had by now dropped the “en” from his first name). Makers of Men was yet another college football film, a genre that still had some low-test left in its gridiron tank, set in mythical Western University, a thinly disguised version of USC; Wayne felt uncomfortable with the studio’s publicity tour that touted his and Bond’s successful careers playing football together at USC as a way to add a touch realism to the film.

  On the advice of friend and fellow actor George O’Brien, who had come up with Wayne through the Fox system and had also signed with Columbia, Wayne met with Al Kingston, a former Hollywood beat reporter now an agent for the Leo Morrison Agency, located in the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. The Morrison Agency had a talented crop of players, including Jean Harlow, Buster Keaton, Francis X. Bushman, and a young up-and-comer by the name of Spencer Tracy.