American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  He was not familiar with taking business meetings and was nervous about meeting Kingston. A few minutes into their conversation, Wayne broke down in tears as he recounted the sad story of his professional downward spiral. Kingston listened patiently, used to the emotional high wires that actors walked. Kingston saw in this weeping giant the potential for bigger things than bit parts at Columbia, and decided to take him on. His first objective was to get his client out of the prison of Columbia Pictures. At the end of the next six-month cycle, Kingston informed Cohn that Wayne was not going to renew. After finishing up his last B for the studio, D. Ross Lederman’s Texas Cyclone, at the start of 1932, Wayne was free to work for any studio that wanted him.31

  The problem was, none did. It took several months for Kingston to secure a modest, nonexclusive deal for Wayne with B movie and serials maker Mascot Pictures, fifteen hundred dollars for three serials. Kingston convinced his reluctant client to take it. He knew that Wayne’s strength was his physical abilities, which would be put to ample use in an action-cycle adventure, and his weakness was expressing his emotions (his best performance to date had been in Kingston’s office that day).

  Mascot Pictures, the brainchild of Leo Levine, was so sparely run it made Columbia seem luxurious by comparison. In 1926, Levine had caught a wave with “chapter pictures,” or “serials,” Saturday morning supplements that helped build a following among teens in a time period that had previously left movie theaters almost empty until the early evening. Levine had put together a troupe of actors composed of hopefuls, veterans, and has-beens that included Yakima “Yak” Canutt, whose superior physical abilities were crucial for the action-packed serials that depended upon a “death-defying cliff-hanger”; Harry Carey, John Ford’s former leading man; and a talented dog named Rin Tin Tin, to which he now added John Wayne.

  Duke went to work as the star of a new Mascot serial, Shadow of the Eagle, playing Craig McCoy, a stunt pilot, with an endlessly loyal, beautiful, faithful, and chaste girlfriend named Jean, played by Dorothy Gulliver.32 In the serial, Jean doesn’t know it, but she is the daughter of McCoy’s nemesis, Nathan Gregory, a.k.a. “the Eagle” (Edward Hearn). Shadow of the Eagle was written and directed by Ford Beebe, who would also go on to direct the greatest serial of all, 1940’s Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Following the sensational transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh, pictures about heroic pilots had become the newest craze.

  The first day of shooting of Shadow of the Eagle, on location in Antelope Valley, Levine sat in the backseat of his Packard and had the driver pick up Wayne in Beverly Hills at four in the morning, with a bagged breakfast of coffee and Danishes to make the three-hour traveling time easier. By the time they arrived at the set the crew was set up and ready to start filming. Levine demanded and got seven-day weeks and fourteen-hour days from his cast and crew, and more than a hundred camera setups each session. Afterward an exhausted Wayne skipped the long ride back home with Levine, zipped himself into a sleeping bag, and slept under the stars, a bottle of Irish whiskey his only company. The shoot took twenty-one days at a cost of $50,000, mostly at Antelope, with a few scenes shot in Bronson Canyon, in Griffith Park. This quickie serial was the best film work Wayne had done to date. Kingston had gotten it right: remove the dialogue and increase the action for an actor like Wayne was a winning combination.

  The first episode of Shadow of the Eagle was released to theaters February 1, 1932, and received unexpectedly good reviews. It proved a hit, grossing $60,000 in rentals, a 20 percent profit for Mascot.

  That July, Wayne began work on his second serial for Mascot, The Hurricane Express, directed by Armand Schaefer and J. P. McGowan, playing an entirely new hero, Larry Baker.33 Baker’s father, a railroad worker, has been murdered during a robbery, prompting Baker to find and apprehend the killers, who happen to work for a competing train company. Early on, the audience learns the “mastermind” behind the crime is “the Wrecker,” played by Conway Tearle, whose secret and evil identity is only revealed to the others in the twelfth and final episode, after an endless series of misdirections, false leads, and red herrings. Shirley Grey, with whom Wayne had previously appeared in Texas Cyclone, plays the faithful, loyal, and chaste girlfriend, the daughter of one of the men falsely accused by the police of being “the Wrecker.” All twelve chapters were shot in three weeks on location in Newhall, Saugus, and at Palmdale, California, with the same $50,000 budget Shadow of the Eagle had. When it was released, it earned ten times what Shadow did, and, perhaps more important, for the first time confirmed that Wayne could star in a film, or at least twelve minifilms, that made money.

  While Wayne was busy resurrecting his film career, Warner Bros had decided to remake some silent Ken Maynard westerns they owned as the result of their acquisition of First National studios. Maynard had been a hugely popular film star whose career was irrevocably hurt by his long-term addiction to alcohol. When he proved unable to star in the remakes, Kingston suggested Wayne to the project’s producers, Sid Rogell and Leon Schlesinger (the latter would eventually head Warner’s animation division after selling his own cartoon studio to them). The idea was to use as much footage from the original silent Maynard films as possible and substitute an actor for close-ups and dialogue scenes. Rogell tested Wayne and loved him (he bore a slight resemblance to a young Maynard), telling Kingston they could start as soon as Schlesinger agreed on the deal.

  However, before it could happen, Rogell reversed himself and killed it, telling Kingston Warner Bros would never hire an actor who was a drunken womanizer. When Kingston relayed the message to Wayne, he became enraged. He knew immediately where that story had to have come from, a vengeful Harry Cohn. When Kingston went back to Rogell, who had no love for Cohn (nobody in Hollywood did), he changed his mind again and, with Schlesinger’s approval, signed Wayne up for six Maynard remakes, at $1,500 per picture.

  Duke was thrilled. Not for the work, which was great, but because for the first time he would have enough money to go back and ask Josephine to marry him. He believed there could be no way now Dr. Saenz could say no.

  He didn’t. As 1932 came to a close, Wayne officially asked Dr. Saenz for his daughter’s hand in marriage and he reluctantly agreed. Because the wedding couldn’t take place in church, Loretta Young, who had befriended Wayne during the making of Three Girls Lost, and who Wayne always referred to by her real first name, Gretchen, offered her mother’s house in Bel-Air, with its enormous garden area, for the wedding. Josephine initially rejected it. She wanted her wedding to be steeped in social propriety, a respectable societal event rather than a garish Hollywood spectacle. However, upon visiting the locale, she changed her mind. It was, she told Wayne, the perfect place for their wedding after all.

  They tied the knot June 24, 1933. Wayne’s ushers were his former teammates from USC. His brother Robert was the best man. The ceremony was conducted by Monsignor Francis J. Conaty, a longtime Saenz family friend who had given Josie her First Communion.34

  The newlyweds skipped a formal honeymoon and went directly to their new home, a Spanish-style three-room garden apartment rental on Orange Grove Avenue, along the edge of the socially acceptable Hancock Park, close enough to Hollywood for Wayne to continue his early studio hours. He would have preferred living either in Hollywood or even Beverly Hills, but knew Dr. Saenz would never allow his daughter to live in those neighborhoods. Hancock Park was the first of the many suburbs that would emerge to provide decent housing for the film industry, what Westchester would become to Manhattan in the postwar years. Dr. Saenz insisted she be within walking distance to them.

  Barely nine months after their wedding, Josie proudly announced to the world that she was expecting a baby.

  THE COMING OF FATHERHOOD COINCIDED with Wayne’s career taking another and unexpected step down from the already low rung on Hollywood’s ladder of success. Having finished the Ken Maynard remakes, he learned that Kingston had been let go by the Morrison Agency and would no longer be repr
esenting him or any other client. Morrison was a shrewd handler of talent but also a degenerate gambler whose losses resulted in his having to close part of the agency.

  Wayne continued to get up early every morning, as if he were going to work, and instead he went to what was then (and now) known as Gower Gulch, “home of the Bs,” a small stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that serviced the needs of the nearby studios with costume shops and prop outlets. It was also the favorite meeting place for the so-called Gower Gulch cowboys, as the actors who hung out there were called, with its coffee shops, luncheonettes, bars with western motifs where beer substituted for coffee, and the Columbia drugstore—booths in the front, counter in the middle, apothecaries in the back, until late afternoon when the liquor flowed freely. This mild deception Duke was pulling on Josie echoed his father’s difficulties earning a living and his mother’s preoccupation with status in the community. Wayne had married a woman just like the one who married dear old dad, and now he was turning into him.

  Hanging out at the Gulch sometimes led to work. If a studio needed a “cowboy” for a day job all the unemployed actors rushed to dress themselves up in boots and bangles and ten-gallon hats and try to land the gig before anyone else. Wayne became good enough at the game to find intermittent work, mostly on westerns with Tim McCoy, a cowboy whose career would be resurrected in the ’50s when many of his B features were recycled for television. It was something, but not steady enough to provide a decent income, and despite the many films Wayne appeared in at this time for several different studios, one even back at Columbia, they didn’t pay very much and he was almost always running out of money.35

  His good friend Loretta Young helped Wayne, desperate to find steady employment, land his first decent job after the Maynard cycle, a week’s worth of work playing a prizefighter in a big-budget Warner Bros film Young was starring in opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Sylvan Karp’s 1933 Life of Jimmy Dolan.36 In the film, Wayne plays a prizefighter, a small but good role in a larger story about a couple (Fairbanks Jr., Young) who want to help save a sanatorium for orphans, raising money by sponsoring winning fighters. The film gave Wayne a much-needed break from making B westerns and also gave him a chance to show off his solid physique and bare chest. Wayne’s fighter in the film foreshadows another movie where he would play a prizefighter, Trem Carr’s 1936 Conflict, and his role as the retired boxer with a dark past in John Ford’s 1952 The Quiet Man.

  He didn’t make any real money from Life of Jimmy Dolan. Desperate, he called Kingston to ask him to represent him again. The problem, Kingston explained, was that Wayne was still tied to the Morrison Agency by contract for seven more years, even though Morrison was no longer active. Kingston said he would be willing to represent Wayne if he could get Morrison to let him go.

  Wayne set up a meeting with them and, not surprisingly, they refused to let Wayne out of his contract. Kingston himself then called Morrison and agreed to split any money he made. Morrison agreed.

  Almost immediately, Kingston found Wayne work, with Trem Carr and Leo Ostrow, two producers who had formed a new Poverty Row studio, Monogram Pictures, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It had only one soundstage to turn out all the B-movie westerns and action adventure films they could make. Kingston took Wayne over to meet the two mini-moguls and he left with a deal for eight westerns a year at a salary of $2,500 per picture. It was the most money Wayne had ever made in his life. To seal the deal, Carr and Ostrow gave him a one-thousand-dollar advance. It was money he sorely needed. He was seriously behind in his rent and also owed the phone company, the electric company, and the local grocery that knew Mr. Saenz and had extended credit to the newlyweds.

  The studio put Paul Malvern in charge of Monogram’s division of westerns, Lone Star films, and once again Wayne found himself in another cycle of similar and forgettable films. The first was Riders of Destiny.37 Written and directed by Robert N. Bradbury, the film’s story was about the battle for water rights for ranchers—a film with an actual plot—told in fifty fast and action-packed minutes. It was shot in August 1933 on location in Palmdale and nearby Lancaster with a budget of $15,000. In it, Wayne hooked up for the first time with an actor who would become one of his lifelong friends, George “Gabby” Hayes, who played the heroine’s father. He would appear with Wayne in fifteen Lone Star westerns, always as the cranky sidekick, a role he would play in one form or another for the rest of his career. The “beautiful girl” in the film, Fay Denton, was played by Cecilia Parker, whose first and only kiss with Wayne comes, with Papa Denton’s approval, at the end of the film as a kind of reward for saving her ranch and her water rights. Parker was a young blonde who resembled Jean Harlow and she would go on to play Mickey Rooney’s older sister in the Andy Hardy films. “Yak” Canutt played one of the villains. In the film, Wayne is undercover government agent Singin’ Sandy Saunders, first seen riding into town on a white horse strumming a guitar and singing a song.

  Malvern wanted to cash in on the new singing cowboy craze. As Wayne later remembered, “They made me a singing cowboy. The fact that I couldn’t sing—or play the guitar—became terribly embarrassing to me, especially on personal appearances. Every time I made a public appearance, the kids insisted that I sing ‘The Desert Song’ or something. But I couldn’t take along the fella who played the guitar out one side of the camera and the fella who sang on the other side of the camera. So I finally went to the head of the studio and said, ‘Screw this, I can’t handle it.’ They went out and brought the best hillbilly recording artist in the country to Hollywood to take my place. For the first couple of pictures, they had a hard time selling him, but he finally caught on. His name was Gene Autry.”38

  THE CANADIAN-BORN CECILIA PARKER’S REAL-LIFE sauciness attracted Wayne off-screen as much as her character did on it. His desire for Parker was symptomatic of what was wrong with his outwardly idyllic marriage. At home he was John Morrison, reverent soon-to-be father and head of a household run by his strictly Catholic wife, who expressed no interest in his work other than the paycheck it produced, or in lovemaking for any other reason than to procreate. At work he was John Wayne, rough, tough protector of women, a good-looking movie actor who could have his pick of the prettiest women on the lot. Like Cecilia. It was an inner conflict Wayne suffered that only got worse after the birth of his child in November 1934, when he admitted to himself for the first time that his marriage was a restrictive trap rather than a loving and liberating retreat from the cold hard world outside.

  In his heart, he knew it was that cold hard world outside he preferred.

  AS THE GREAT DEPRESSION CONTINUED into the 1930s, to survive, businesses that made their living from film were forced to consolidate. Smaller, independent studios were gobbled up by bigger ones, and if they didn’t agree to be bought, they were forced out of business by a lack of distribution, which was by now controlled exclusively by the majors. Herbert Yates, a bald-headed, bulldog-faced, “dese, dems, and dose” Brooklyn-born New Yorker, sensed an opportunity. According to Ford biographer Joseph McBride, Yates was “a notorious philistine, [who] punctuated conversations by spitting streams of chewing tobacco” and the biggest film processor of movie film in Hollywood. His company, Consolidated Film Laboratories, oversaw the development of virtually every negative foot of film converted to print. Because both Monogram and Mascot were forever running short of money, Yates had willingly extended large credit lines to keep them in business, until the balances became too big for them to pay off. Then he pounced, taking control of Monogram and Mascot and merged them with several other struggling companies he had acquired in the same way into one conglomerate he named Republic Studios. He set up shop in the Fairfax section of Hollywood (where CBS’s Television City is today), believing he could push his independent studio to the same level of success as the majors by offering them a profitable distribution deal they wouldn’t be able to turn down.

  Through Kingston, he retained the services of John Wayne, whose on-the-cheap “cowboy�
� films were among the biggest moneymakers coming out of Hollywood. Yates offered Wayne a lot of money and promised him better scripts, because Republic could pay the best writers and directors in town. Republic’s pictures would still be Bs, only better. B pluses.39

  After signing with Yates, Wayne used part of his advance to buy himself a small boat and quickly came to love the peace and the solitude he enjoyed going out on the ocean by himself for a day. He mostly enjoyed traveling by himself to the small island of Catalina, twenty-six miles off the coast of Southern California, where he could get away from everyone and everything—the film business and his family—and cool out.

  It was on Catalina one Friday night in 1934, at Christian’s Hut, a popular island watering hole for industry people who, like him, wanted a place to go off the mainland to relax and unwind, that he ran into his old friend, the hard-drinking, womanizing film director John Ford. Ford owned his own boat, The Araner, a 110-foot ketch he’d purchased in 1926 named after the Aran Islands, where his wife’s family was originally from. It brought back to life his first love, sailing. He used to joke to friends that for every three films he made, one went to pay for and support The Araner, one was to pay the IRS, and one was to pay for everything else.40 Ford loved being at sea so much he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve on October 3, 1934, at the rank of lieutenant commander, what would be the start of a long and distinguished career of military service, both in peacetime and when the country was at war.

  PAPPY SPOTTED WAYNE FIRST, ALONE at the bar, and sent his eleven-year-old daughter over to fetch him. After several rounds, the two fell quickly back in sync, and Wayne soon became part of Ford’s inner circle of coworkers and friends that included Ward Bond, and the preternaturally lean and mean Henry Fonda, who a few years later would star in Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. Fonda was an actor Ford liked and hoped would turn out to be his next Harry Carey, a role that he still hadn’t been able to fill.