American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  The story plays better than it reads. Filmed near Big Bear Lake, Moon Ridge, and Bartlett Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, which stood in for the Missouri Ozarks (in the village that is now known as Branson, a live version of the original novel is still performed nightly in an outdoor arena), the film was an adaptation of a hugely successful 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright, with a screenplay by Grover Jones and Stewart Anthony. The script simplifies and improves the original novel.

  Shepherd of the Hills, Wayne’s first film shot in color (Technicolor), opened July 18, 1941, to great reviews and big box office.68 Its neoreligiosity was something of a departure for Wayne and, during production, gave him nightmares. He kept seeing his own father in his dreams; his death still affected Wayne deeply, especially since Wayne had never fully forgiven his father for “abandoning” his mother. Now, in his dreams, he found himself mirroring, or “doubling” the character of Matt, asking the spirit of his father for forgiveness. He also dreamed about being bullied by the other boys at high school, when he was still Marion Morrison, before his father and the father-figure firemen taught him how to fight and defend himself. All this turmoil was not helped by his ongoing feelings of guilt over his romance with Dietrich and his coming divorce from Josephine. Much of this emotional conflict found its way into Wayne’s performance, which, under Hathaway’s direction, remains one of his most unusual and complex, in an interesting, if offbeat film marred only by its reversion to violence as a resolution.

  Americans found reassurance in the film’s message of redemption and reconciliation and were moved by Wayne’s thoughtful, introspective performance. Critics, too, liked it. Allen Eyles, in his John Wayne and the Movies, wrote that the film was “a powerful one on the lines of Stagecoach but with a greater depth involving the kind of intense, interior conflict that [Wayne] could register powerfully.” The New York Times liked it less, while acknowledging Wayne’s performance: “Gifted John Wayne and Betty Field do their best against the inanities of their roles.”

  That fall, perhaps because of the personal difficulties he had making Shepherd, Wayne returned to Republic Pictures for one film, lured back by a $24,000 salary and a guarantee of the film’s gross, a percentage of the box-office sales before expenses were taken out. This type of deal was usually reserved for only the biggest stars, but Republic needed him and was willing to pay whatever it took to get him.

  The film he agreed to make for them was Lady for a Night (a.k.a. Memphis Belle), directed by Leigh Jason, a bit of fluff that finds Wayne again in the Mississippi riverboat milieu, playing another lawyer, with a plot that could apply to any one of a dozen Wayne movies. Shot in black-and-white, filled with leggy chorines and a tuxedoed Wayne, Lady ends in a huge slugfest that resolves all the film’s mundane plot twists on Old Man River.

  Scheduled for a holiday release, the opening had to be pushed back several weeks, to December 29, because earlier that month, on the seventh, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the next day Roosevelt declared war. The country changed overnight, united in patriot-driven rage and thirsty for revenge against the Japanese. Suddenly, Hollywood found itself with dozens of unreleased films that looked and sounded like they were made a hundred years ago, of which Lady for a Night was one.

  John Wayne had completed one more film before December 7, this one for Cecil B. DeMille, one of the earliest pioneers of Hollywood, best known for the kitschy, expensive movies he produced and directed. He wanted Wayne to costar in a $2 million extravaganza called Reap the Wild Wind. DeMille, via Feldman, agreed to pay Wayne $35,000 to costar with Ray Milland, a sophisticated, handsome British Hollywood transplant. Wayne and Milland formed the two male corners of a love triangle, with Paulette Goddard as the woman they both lust after. The film is set in the Florida Keys in 1840, against a special-effects-riddled background of storms, fogs, sinking and sunken ships and the salvagers who live off them, pirates, kidnappings, crooked lawyers, and a sea monster that conveniently kills off Milland. It was a kind of Gone with the Wind lite, with Goddard and Susan Hayward (two stars who tried and failed to land the role of Scarlett O’Hara), and Wayne miscast as an adventure-seeking salvager, the type of expansive but hollow spectacle that DeMille loved to make, complete with his own stentorian voice-over narration, his auteurist signature.

  When the film finally opened, in March 1942, with the country deep into the war, the women left behind flocked to see the romantic spectacle and it enjoyed a five-week run at Radio City Music Hall, where it broke all previous attendance records. It proved a huge moneymaker then, and again in 1954 when it was rereleased.

  Before America entered World War II, Wayne’s career had fully regained the momentum it had lost after The Big Trail and he had become a legitimate Hollywood star. He had paid more than his fair share of dues both before and after The Big Trail, and struggled for years until Stagecoach had made him bankable. He was thirty-four when the bombing of Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941, and he feared having to give it all up now by going into the army, which might put a permanent halt to his career. If the war dragged on another five or six years, he would likely be too old to still be an action-oriented leading man, and older character actors didn’t make the same kind of money as young ones. Besides, he had four young children to support. Who would look after them while he was gone? Josephine?

  Because he chose not to enlist, he became an even more valuable commodity in Hollywood’s sudden lack of leading men. Henry Fonda, a Naval reservist, who was thirty-seven, married with three children, was called to active duty. Thirty-three-year-old Jimmy Stewart, whose family had a proud military tradition, had been rejected when he tried to enlist because he didn’t weigh enough. He then went on a diet of candy, beer, and bananas until he was able to make the minimum weight, putting his Academy Award–winning career on hold while he flew dozens of missions over Germany. Thirty-four-year-old Gene Autry joined the Army Air Corps. Tyrone Power enlisted in the Marines. Robert Montgomery joined the army. William Holden joined the army. Following the death of his wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash during a tour selling war bonds, a distraught Clark Gable also joined the army. Ronald Reagan was the right age to be drafted and had to give up a career that was finally about to break—Jack Warner was considering him for Casablanca, a role that went instead to World War I veteran Humphrey Bogart. The list goes on and on, and it should be noted that not everybody went easily. Many celebrities were forced to join because of the pressure of patriotism, and the promise they would never see action. Others, like Laurence Olivier, a member of the expat group of “Beverly Hills Brits,” were threatened by their government with extradition and imprisonment if they didn’t immediately return home to do their duty.

  John Ford reported for active duty in September 1941. On June 8, 1943, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, Washington, DC, as Officer in Charge, Field Photographic Division, with additional duty as Director of Motion Pictures. The following August he had temporary additional duty as Technical Observer in the China-Burma-India theater. In April 1944 he would serve as Technical Observer with the Branch Office, Office of Strategic Services, London, England, in connection with the accomplishment of various reconnaissance flights in combat areas in preparation of strategic motion picture sequences from air.

  Ford was wounded filming the Battle of Midway, and for the invasion of Normandy, June 1944, he would organize the seaborne Allied photographic effort in the invasion and was the Commanding Officer of the United States Navy and Coast Guard, and the Polish, French, and Dutch camera crews. In November 1944, after his return to the United States, he was temporarily released from active duty to return to Hollywood to work with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on production and direction of the motion picture They Were Expendable, which portrayed PT boat activity in the United States Navy.

  In July 1945 he returned to active status in the U.S. Naval Reserve and served again with the Office of Strategic Services, Washington, DC, until October 1945, when he was again rele
ased to inactive duty. For his four years of outstanding services rendered the government of the United States, John Ford would be awarded the Legion of Merit.

  WHILE OTHER ABLE-BODIED STARS WERE fighting for their country, Wayne was fighting giant rubber eels. In his biography, Maurice Zolotow wrote: “Wayne had tried to enlist as soon as the war was declared. He was rejected because he was thirty-four years old, married, had four children, and a defective shoulder. He attempted to enlist twice more and once he flew to Washington to plead with [John] Ford, by now a lieutenant commander in the Navy, to help him get a post in the navy. He failed. This was a bitter disappointment to Wayne.”

  The story was a complete fabrication, the product of Zolotow’s uncomfortably close relationship with his biographical subject. Wayne never tried to enlist and never “pleaded” with John Ford to get him into the navy. It is, however, a bit of a stretch to describe Wayne as a draft dodger, as Gary Wills did in his book John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. Five months after war was officially declared and the United States joined the Allies in the European and Asian theaters, Wayne turned thirty-five years old. At this early stage of the war he was at the high end of the age range for eligibility. Most draftees were closer to twenty years old. His local board did call him in, and he claimed he was exempt because he was the sole supporter of his family, even though he was about to be divorced, which he didn’t mention. He also told the board that his old shoulder injury made him ineligible (although it didn’t seem to bother him much when he was working as a stuntman or riding horses or throwing punches). He was granted his first provisional 3-A classification “for family dependency reasons.”

  Herbert Yates of Republic Pictures had a strong hand in keeping Wayne out of the army. His continual requests for extensions of his deferment were not filed by Wayne himself, but an unnamed “other,” who was, in fact, Yates. According to Ford biographer Dan Ford, Wayne claimed the studio head threatened to sue him if he let himself be drafted, as preposterous an excuse imaginable. The government at war’s end destroyed most of Wayne’s and Yates’s service-related papers.

  One of the few revelations about Wayne’s war involvement (or resistance to it) was his supposed willingness to join the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the agency that later became the CIA, arranged by John Ford, who made one last attempt to get Wayne to commit to the war effort. According to Glenn Frankel, “The office sent Wayne a letter saying they were running out of places and urging him to sign on without delay, but Wayne claimed that Josephine hid it from him. ‘I never got it,’ he later told [Ford biographer and grandson] Dan Ford.”

  Wayne then changed his story, revealing to Dan Ford more than he ever had before about why he didn’t serve. “I didn’t feel I could go in as a private, I felt I could do more good going around on tours and things . . . I was America [to the young guys] in the front lines . . . they had taken their sweethearts to that Saturday matinee and held hands over a Wayne Western. So I wore a big hat and I thought it was better.” According to Pilar, his decision not to serve was the real reason he became, after the war, a “super-patriot for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying at home.” Whatever his true motivations, not serving in the military was a subject he was always reluctant to discuss in detail.

  There were some things and people Wayne was eager to be a part of. He was still clinging to his relationship with Marlene Dietrich, whom he once described to his future wife, Pilar, as “the most intriguing woman I’ve ever known.” To one close male friend he put it a little differently, describing Dietrich as “the best lay I’ve ever had.” He wasn’t quite ready to give her up for anything, even, perhaps, his country, even though Dietrich had already tired of him and begun a secret affair with George Raft.

  Wayne’s next picture was with Dietrich, a fourth remake of The Spoilers, directed by Ray Enright, about claim jumpers in Alaska, costarring Randolph Scott. In the film, Scott’s character has designs on a gold mine owned by Wayne and his partner, played by Harry Carey. Scott is also Wayne’s character’s rival for the affections of Marlene Dietrich, the owner of the local saloon. Things get more complicated, until, at the end, Wayne and Scott fight it out in one of the best, and longest, screen fistfights of Wayne’s career, something the film is most remembered for.

  The Spoilers, made in 1942, was produced by Charles Feldman, who was behind this Wayne/Dietrich film reunion, despite the fact that Dietrich had tried to persuade Feldman not to use Wayne. It was not just that their relationship had cooled. She was, in addition to seeing Raft, also having an intense affair with France’s biggest movie star, Jean Gabin, who had fled to America to escape the Nazi occupation of his country. Being an outspoken anti-German, Dietrich did not want to be so closely associated with Wayne, whom she feared might be seen as a Nazi sympathizer for his reluctance to join the armed forces. It was an opinion others shared about Wayne and gave her one more excuse to stop seeing him.

  The film was a huge hit, grossing over two million dollars in its initial domestic release (there was little in the way of foreign rentals until after the war, when it was rereleased in 1948 and again in 1949). For the six-week shoot, Dietrich received $100,000, Wayne $42,000, and Scott $40,000. A case could be made for the idea that defending one’s mine is a metaphor for defending one’s country.

  IN 1942, A BROKENHEARTED WAYNE finally got the message from Dietrich herself that it was over between them. He then made another movie for Republic, William McGann’s 1942 In Old California (a.k.a. War of the Wildcats), about the California gold rush of 1848. Wayne received $43,229 to appear in the film, which co-starred Broadway actress Binnie Barnes, and Albert Dekker, assigned to play the heavy. In the film, Tom Craig (Wayne) is a pharmacist from Boston who heads west to go into business in Sacramento (a journey and a profession that evoked his father’s early life). On the way he meets a dance-hall singer named Lacey Miller (Barnes), who is engaged to Britt Dawson (Albert Dekker), the corrupt head of Sacramento politics. Dawson tries to keep Craig from leasing space for his pharmacy. The pharmacist is able to make a deal anyway and sets up shop in anticipation of the gold rush. A series of events follows and by the end of the film, Craig has Lacey, Britt is dead, and everyone lives happily ever after. It was a typical John Wayne western, lots of shooting, scenes of scantily clad women in saloons, fistfights, with a distinctive musical score (by David Buttolph and Cy Feurer). The New York Times called it a film with a “[g]ood story, excellent acting and fine photography that make this horse opry playable anywhere. The film hasn’t a dull moment. Wayne’s acting is tops throughout.”

  His next film, the low-budget Flying Tigers, made for Republic, was his first in a contemporary wartime setting, but not as an enlisted man. Instead, he plays a volunteer member of the famed group of mercenaries that went to China to help fight against the Japanese invaders. (Interestingly, there was very little outcry about American volunteers going to China the way there had been a few years earlier when the Lincoln Brigade had been formed to fight against Franco in Spain. Many Lincoln Brigadiers were later accused of being Communist sympathizers. The members of the Flying Tigers did not suffer the same fate.)

  In the film, directed by David Miller, squadron leader Jim Gordon (Wayne), understaffed and greatly outnumbered by the Japanese, leads his men in air strikes against the enemy. Gordon is tough, hard-edged, and suffers stoically when a new recruit steals Gordon’s girlfriend (Anna Lee). Even in the remoteness of China, American-style romance was a necessity in a Republic film. Wayne was paid only $8,400 for the production, with China approximated by Republic’s Russell Ranch in Chatsworth, California, and aerial footage shot over the Arizona desert. The film, seen by some as a cheap rip-off of Howard Hawks’s 1939 Only Angels Have Wings, was not just a huge success, but also the perfect vehicle to enhance Wayne’s image of the tough American who will fight for justice anywhere in the world. It was released in September 1942 and quadrupled its one-million-dollar negative cost in its first domestic release.
In England it became the third highest-grossing film of all time, just behind Gone With the Wind and Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve. It was rereleased after the war in 1948, again in 1949 on a double bill with The Spoilers that played around the world, and again as a single feature in 1954.

  During its initial run, the Japanese were making strong advances in the Pacific, and were the enemy Americans hated most, because of Pearl Harbor. The film played liberally with the facts, but Yates was not interested in giving history lessons, only in making an action war film that was entertaining and uplifting to American audiences, and on that level he succeeded, due in no small measure to Wayne’s gutsy performance. The Hollywood Reporter raved that “Wayne is at his peak” in this film.

  After its release, the film’s producer, Edmund Grainger, and director David Miller enlisted in the military. Wayne later claimed he toyed with the idea as well, but insisted Yates wouldn’t let him do it.

  Instead, he signed on to star in Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, a drama about occupied Paris in which Wayne plays a wounded RAF pilot who escapes from a prison camp and is rescued by a beautiful Frenchwoman (Joan Crawford), who falls in love with him and helps plan his escape out of Paris to unoccupied France. Unfortunately, there was zero chemistry between Wayne and Crawford; audiences sensed it and the film barely earned back its production costs.

  Wayne’s seventh and final film of 1942 reunited him one last time with Dietrich, something he was very much looking forward to, far more than she was. Made at Universal, Pittsburgh was produced by Feldman and directed by Louis Seiter. Randolph Scott was back as a character called Cash, and Dietrich’s was tellingly named Josie. Wayne’s name in the film is “Pittsburgh.” The story begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor, after which the two iron men forget their jealousy over Josie and devote themselves to turning out steel for the war effort. The film was pure propaganda and played like it, and the chemistry between Dietrich and Wayne was nonexistent. They barely talked to each other during production, and Gabin showed up frequently on-set. Marlene openly displayed her affection for the French actor in front of Wayne and frequently took Gabin into her dressing room and locked the door behind her. It drove Wayne crazy.