American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  The story concerns the plight of a group of officers and men on Corregidor, trapped by the Japanese and unable to be rescued. Madden (Wayne) orders his troops and the Filipino soldiers to resort to guerrilla resistance. When the Japanese arrive, they hang the Filipino school’s principal for refusing to lower the American flag. Eventually Madden’s guerrilla forces hang the Japanese officer responsible for killing the school principal. Meanwhile, Corregidor is surrendered by General MacArthur and the Filipino men revolt, strong enough to make the Japanese reconsider taking the island, and eventually give it back to the Filipinos. However, before that happens, Madden and his men make a daring attack on the Japanese and wipe out the remaining forces.

  Wayne is particularly good in this film, despite the fact that he had no use for Dmytryk, a former Communist who would later be blacklisted, with Wayne’s enthusiastic support. The screenwriter, Ben Barzman (who wrote the film with Richard Landau), would also later be blacklisted. During production, both Dmytryk and Barzman were verbally bullied by Wayne, and they retaliated by writing into the script increasingly difficult stunts they knew their star would insist on doing himself.

  Wayne liked to be up at 4 A.M., have a light breakfast, usually two eggs, two pieces of toast, and black coffee, read the papers, then go over his lines and be in makeup by six, ready to shoot at first light. However, Wayne wanted to put it to Dmytryk every opportunity he could, even shit on him, which, in effect is what he did. As Richard Fleischer recalled in his memoir, when he was given a tour of the RKO lot during the filming of Back to Bataan by his friend Sid Rogell he noticed something peculiar about the set. Fleischer remembered it was already 10:30 in the morning, a half day’s worth of potential sunlight shooting time, “And nothing was happening. The crew, and it was a large one, was lounging. Small groups were sitting around, talking in subdued tones, and playing cards.” The problem? John Wayne hadn’t taken a shit yet. When he emerged from his trailer, it was signal for everyone to get ready to shoot, that Wayne had moved his bowels and was ready to do some acting. He usually worked until 12:30, broke for lunch, returned at 2:00, and worked straight through to 6:30, after which he would go home, and have a big steak dinner, with potatoes and a side dish of Mexican food.

  Later, Wayne had this to say about the production: “Many of us were being invited to supposed social functions or house parties . . . that turned out to be Communist recruitment meetings . . . Take this colonel I knew, the last man to leave the Philippines on a submarine in 1942. He came back here and went to work sending food and gifts to U.S. prisoners on Bataan [when] the State Department pulled him off of it and sent the poor bastard out to be the technical director on my picture Back to Bataan, which was being made by Eddie Dmytryk. I knew that he and a whole group of actors in the picture were pro-Reds, and when I wasn’t there, these pro-Reds went to work on the colonel. He was a Catholic, so they kidded him about his religion. They even sang the Internationale at lunchtime. He finally came to me and said, ‘Mr. Wayne, I haven’t anybody to turn to. These people are doing everything in their power to belittle me.’ So I went to Dmytryk and said, ‘Hey, are you a Commie?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not a Commie. My father was a Russian. I was born in Canada. But if the masses of the American people want Communism, I think it’d be good for our country.’ When he used the word ‘masses,’ he exposed himself. That word is not a part of Western terminology. So I knew he was a Commie. Well, it later came out that he was.”

  The facts about Dmytryk, who died in 1970 at the age of ninety, never hid the fact that he had in his youth been a member of the Communist Party. When he was first subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late ’40s, he refused to cooperate and was sent to jail. After spending several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate with the committee and give them what they wanted, not just his admission that he was a Communist—that was already well known—but the names of his fellow members in the American Communist Party; he tried to minimize his own guilt by claiming that John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz, and others had pressured him to include Communist propaganda in his films. He didn’t work again in Hollywood for several years, but eventually returned to America and directed a hit movie, 1954’s The Caine Mutiny, about a fictional revolt aboard a naval vessel in which the men overthrow the captain.

  RKO RELEASED BACK TO BATAAN on May 31, 1945, when America’s attention had turned completely to the hated Japanese. The film tripled its negative cost of $187,000 in domestic ticket sales and broke all existing records in Manila, where it was released that same month.

  Wayne followed Back to Bataan with Joseph Kane’s Dakota, costarring Vera Hruba Ralston, a Czech-born actress and former Olympic ice skater. Yates had had Ralston under exclusive contract since 1941, after she came to America to escape the Nazis and starred in a number of ridiculous ice-skating-themed films (Yates eventually married her). Dakota also featured Ward Bond. At first Wayne resisted working with Ralston, whose English was poor and acting even worse, but agreed to do it if his pal Bond could also be in the film. Dakota is a typical Republic western, filled with bad guys, complicated plots, and a fistfight resolution; it earned $145,000 for Wayne (including a piece of the back end), opened in November 1945, and was a big hit with audiences. With the war over, Americans wanted to be entertained by Wayne in his familiar guise as a cowboy, not, as his next picture would prove, a soldier. Dakota also marked the end of Wayne’s contract with Republic.

  Between December 1941 and the war’s end in 1945, civilian John Wayne made sixteen films. Back to Bataan was the 107th film of his career, and the 13th he made during the wars years. Of those, three were about World War II, and only one about enlisted soldiers. Flying Tigers told the story of American volunteers in China to fight the Japanese, and The Fighting Seabees civilian construction workers volunteering to fight the Japanese. Only in Back to Bataan did Wayne play an American enlisted man. And yet, during those years, he become Hollywood’s reigning symbol of the American fighting soldier.

  AFTER THE OBLIGATORY ONE-YEAR WAIT, Wayne’s divorce became final December 26, 1945. Exactly three weeks later he married Chata, in the Unity Presbyterian Church of Long Beach, the same church where his mother had married her second husband, Sidney Preen, a sewer inspector for the city of Long Beach, not long after Clyde’s death. The Reverend Johnson Calhoun performed the ceremony. Herb Yates gave the bride away. Harry Carey’s wife, Olive, was the matron of honor. John Wayne’s best man was Ward Bond, still on crutches after being hit by a car in Hollywood in July 1944, shortly after filming was completed on Tall in the Saddle. His leg had been so badly mangled it was about to be amputated, prevented at Wayne’s and MGM’s intervention, both insisting Bond be allowed to heal, no matter how long it might take. The hospital would not guarantee Ward would ever walk normally again. Noticeably absent from the wedding was John Ford.

  The reception was held at the California Country Club in Long Beach. Yates then paid for the newlyweds’ three-week honeymoon in Waikiki. Howard Hughes personally flew them there, the first civilian flight to Hawaii since the war ended. Perhaps as an omen of things to come, it rained every day they were in Oahu. That left them largely confined to their suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

  Upon their return to Los Angeles, Wayne bought a beautiful, and expensive, two-story Colonial ranch house in Van Nuys (4735 Tyrone Street), north of Hollywood, with a separate room for Chata’s mother. Soon after they moved in, Chata, frustrated by her meaningless contract with Republic, began pestering Wayne to use his influence to get her a real role in a real movie. Wayne was reluctant to do so. He didn’t want his wife to become a Hollywood movie star. He knew too well what they were like and insisted her place was in the home.

  Her reaction to his refusal to help her career was to begin drinking excessively, and for all intents and purposes, before too long she was a functioning alcoholic. Wayne began complaining to Bond that all Chata did at home was talk to her moth
er in Spanish. When he complained to Chata about it, his wife said, “Why don’t you buy me a bigger house?”

  She and her mother often drank together and always slept curled in each other’s arms in the same bed, and on those nights, when Wayne came home late he would sleep on the oversized sofa in the downstairs living room. Wayne was a physically big man who took pride in keeping himself in condition to always look good in front of a camera. But whereas Josephine had been, like him, bodily immaculate, Chata made no attempt to remove her facial hair (she had a bit of a mustache), bathed not nearly as frequently as Wayne would have liked, and refused to shave her legs, which drove him crazy. Whenever he asked her to do it, an argument would inevitably follow. They soon began arguing about everything. He often talked with Bond about his problems. One time he complained to him, “Our marriage was like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar.” Soon enough, Wayne confessed to his friend that marrying Chata was “the stupidest damn thing I ever did in my life!”

  Chapter 11

  During the war, John Ford was making documentary films for the government. He shot 1942’s The Battle of Midway by hand, with one camera, while in the middle of the action, and it won him a special Academy Award.72 At one point Ford offered Wayne a chance to help make these movies. British sound director Robert Parrish later learned that Wayne had turned down the chance by not following through on joining Ford’s naval Field Photographic Reserve unit, and later remembered that “Ford remained furious at Wayne for years.” When the director heard that Wayne had divorced his wife and was marrying Chata, he couldn’t resist writing the actor a letter that mocked both him and his decision. It said, in part, “If you can take enough time from playing with those Mexican jumping beans, I would be very much interested in knowing what’s cooking, good looking!” Ford ended it by calling Wayne a “damn fool.”

  AS THE WAR WOUND DOWN, Ford was eager to get back to commercial filmmaking. In 1942, MGM had purchased the rights to W. L. White’s bestseller, the nonfiction military story They Were Expendable, about a squadron of PT boats in the early months of the Pacific Theater, intended as a populist war vehicle for Spencer Tracy. A year later Mervyn LeRoy was assigned to direct it. When that deal fell through, MGM assigned Frank “Spig” Wead to rewrite the script and when it was finished placed the newly-returned-from-action John Ford in charge of the production. Wead was fifty years old, a World War I veteran who in 1926 had fallen down a flight of stairs at his home and was partially paralyzed. Ford decided the film should, at least in part, glorify Douglas MacArthur, one of his heroes. In the film, the squadron leaders are ordered to evacuate by MacArthur, as the Japanese step up their attacks and force the retreat. Ford also wanted Ward Bond to be in it, even though he was still seriously impaired from his car crash and barely able to walk. After Robert Taylor turned down the role of the hot-headed Rusty Ryan, the director reluctantly decided to offer it to the last name on his possibles list, John Wayne, who quickly and eagerly accepted the assignment. It was the first film they would work on together since 1940’s The Long Voyage Home.

  At the initial production meeting, Wayne sat uncomfortably in his civilian clothes—gray flannel slacks, brown sports shirt, houndstooth sports jacket—while Wead, Ford, and Robert Montgomery all wore their military uniforms. With the war still officially on, this was the mandatory dress for all soldiers, abroad or at home. Montgomery, three years older than Wayne, had been a popular movie actor before the war, he then went into the navy and was part of the D-Day landing at Normandy. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and won a Bronze Star for his service. Before he entered the military his acting specialty had been light romantic comedy, on ample display in Alexander Hall’s 1941 Here Comes Mr. Jordan. With the war ending, Hollywood wanted to continue to glorify its heroes and their heroics; these films were popular and profitable.

  They Were Expendable, set early in the war, has an undeniable darkness to it, a film that anticipates the long and drawn-out affair World War II was before it ended in atomic fury, and like all American war movies made during this period, it had an inevitability to it that Andrew Sarris later described: “less history than mythology, the film can now be viewed as an elegy to doomed individuals in a common cause . . . Montgomery a wary Odysseus, as it were, to Wayne’s excitable Achilles.”

  When the meeting ended, and Montgomery and Wead stood up and left, Wayne went into the bathroom and began to cry. Ford, who could hear Wayne’s sobs, decided to go in and comfort him, and it was then that all the animosity between the two over Wayne’s decision not to serve was finally resolved. Ford held Wayne in his arms and let him get it all out. For these two, the war ended here.

  WITH EXTENSIVE COOPERATION FROM THE U.S. Navy, production began on They Were Expendable on February 11, 1945, in South Florida, near Miami and Key Biscayne. Donna Reed, a savvy beauty who projected an interesting combination of come-hither/girl next door, and who was fourteen years Wayne’s junior, played a naval nurse in a Manila hospital and his love interest in the otherwise mostly all-male script. She was paid $300,000 for her services, while Wayne got $75,000.

  During production, Ford quickly reverted to form and continually needled Wayne about his acting. Ford was relentless, and one day it got so bad that Montgomery had to intervene and physically pull the ferocious Ford away from the much bigger but passive Wayne, who would not raise his fists against Ford.

  The film was the big Christmas picture at New York’s Capitol Theater, with a live stage show featuring Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra. It received generally good reviews, but lost money in its initial domestic release.

  By the time They Were Expendable opened, the thirty-eight-year-old newly divorced Wayne was rapidly losing his youthful appeal; his face was weathered and puffy and he had become noticeably heavier, partly due to his excessive drinking, and his hair was rapidly thinning. Knowing he could no longer play the young hero, he was hoping to phase out of acting in front of the camera and make the transition to directing. He had talked about it a lot with Ford. However, when the director became temporarily ill during the making of They Were Expendable, he chose Montgomery, who would go on to become a respectable Hollywood director, to take over the production while Wayne did not even appear in another movie directed by John Ford for nearly two more years. Perhaps Ford hadn’t fully forgiven Wayne after all.

  They Were Expendable’s disappointing box office was a good indicator of the subtle shift that had taken place in American audiences’ attitude toward pictures being made about the war. The gung-ho spirit of inevitable victory had given way to an uneasiness about what we had been fighting for. Was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe all that much better than Hitler’s? Was Mao’s surging forces and China’s rich oil supplies really what the Allied war against Japan was all about?

  The next year, Hollywood’s big “war” film would be William Wyler’s postwar The Best Years of Our Lives, a realistic film about the problems that faced veterans returning to civilian life. It was the most successful Hollywood film of the ’40s. Ford had always sought to sentimentalize the past, even when it produced films like They Were Expendable that audiences weren’t always able or willing to identify with. He described his own philosophy of making war films in Hollywood this way: “Any war I was in we always won . . . of course [the soldiers] were glorious in defeat in the Philippines, they kept on fighting.” Wyler’s film saw things differently (both thematically and stylistically). His film looked at the very real consequences of the war on American everyday life, and what it did to the individual G.I.’s who fought it.

  Now that Hitler and Hirohito were gone and the Soviet Union had devoured much of Eastern Europe, and Mao China, the Specter That Haunted the Continent soon began to hover over Hollywood, or at least it appeared that way to those who sought to stop it before it spread any further. Wayne regarded The Best Years of Our Lives as frankly anti-American, the public’s embrace of it disturbing, while the box-office sales of They Were Expendable were s
urprisingly disappointing. He believed the reason for the success of the former and the failure of the latter was a rising postwar disillusionment fueled by American Communism. He determined to play a larger role in the quickly polarizing politics of Hollywood and the nation, and he wanted everyone to know for certain which side he was on.

  This was a war in which John Wayne was more than happy to serve.

  WAYNE QUICKLY SIGNED A NEW seven-picture, nonexclusive contract with Yates at Republic. Upon their return, many of the actors who had left Hollywood to fight in the war were having more than a little difficulty finding work. Five years away from the camera was a lifetime in the film business. Most had aged out of the new youth market and missed the cultural postwar shift from the just-ended hot war to the beginning of the cold one. Younger audiences now wanted younger stars, like John Garfield and the newest and hottest kid on the block, Montgomery Clift, who’d made a big splash on Broadway before moving to the big screen. Wayne was one of the few able to age gradually (if not totally gracefully) because he did it in front of the camera rather than fighting on the front, and his continual presence in movies made during the war served as something of a security blanket for Americans. His deal with Republic guaranteed steady work and income he would need following his divorce.

  Wayne now wanted to make one film a year for Yates that he could also produce, a step toward directing. The real money in films, Wayne had learned, was in producing. Wayne set up his own production company with a writer friend Robert Fellows, Wayne-Fellows, and as part of his new deal at Republic got Yates to agree to let Wayne-Fellows make films on a nonexclusive basis, whenever the opportunity presented itself. To help run Wayne-Fellows, Duke hired someone he knew he could trust, his brother, Robert.