American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  Belcher indicated that at trial his client would challenge Chata’s “mental cruelty” accusation and counter with an offer of $40,000 for two years, and $35,000 for the next seven years. When Wayne was asked by one reporter why he was contesting a divorce that both sides so obviously wanted, he said, softly, staring straight ahead, “A man has to have some self-respect. I’ve taken all I can take. I refuse to be a doormat any longer.”

  Wayne did not contest the year-long wait for the trial to begin. Pilar was pregnant and he needed to solve that “problem” first. If somehow Chata found out about it, she could cause serious damage to his case. After much reluctance, because she wasn’t married to Wayne, Pilar finally agreed to have a secret and illegal abortion.

  WHILE WAITING FOR HIS DIVORCE trial to begin, Wayne openly dated Pilar, who remained in Hollywood. She had managed to have her marriage to Weldy annulled, and he went back to work nonstop, mainly to replenish his bank account.105 Wayne starred in Island in the Sky for Warner Bros, produced by Wayne-Fellows and directed by William Wellman (Andrew Mclaglen, Victor’s son, was the assistant director). Island is a plane crash survival melodrama in which Wayne plays the pilot charged with keeping his crew and passengers alive until they can be rescued. It filmed from February to April 1953 near Donner Lake, in Northern California. (Big Bear, the original location, was scrapped due to an unusually light winter that year that left it without the sufficient amount of snowfall the script required.) The film also featured Fess Parker, still unknown before he created a phenomenon playing Davy Crockett in Walt Disney’s TV series, and Mike Conners (then known as “Touch” Conners), who would later become famous as the TV detective Mannix, a character he played for eight seasons on CBS.

  And Wayne-Fellows went immediately into their next John Wayne film, Hondo, a western directed by John Farrow, a veteran Warner helmsman, who shot it on location in Mexico at Jack Warner’s directive in the newest film fad, 3-D. When it opened a year later, November 27, 1953, a month after his divorce trial began, Life magazine raved about the new technique, calling it “[t]he best 3-D movie to come out so far. The film is beautifully photographed [by Robert Burks and Archie Stout] and with the added feature of depth will have theater audiences dodging spears, knives, horses, hatchets and Indians for whatever their lives are worth.” The film pitted Wayne, as Hondo Lane, against the Apaches. He only intended to produce the film through Wayne-Fellows, but audiences wanted to see Wayne in a western; he hadn’t made one since Rio Grande, but when Glenn Ford dropped out at the last minute Wayne agreed to replace him.

  Hondo proved an enormous hit, grossing more than $4 million off its shooting budget of $1.3 million. Wayne received a salary of $175,000, and Wayne-Fellows earned a hefty percent of the profits. Ford directed two scenes in 3-D for the film, uncredited at Wayne’s insistence. He didn’t want the the director’s name to overtake the production and turn it into a “John Ford Production.” According to Ford, “I went down to Mexico to visit Duke, so immediately he sent me out to do some trivial second-unit stuff, a few stunts.” Even with Ford downplaying his involvement with the film, when Wayne refused to officially list Ford in the credits, Ford replied, “Jesus Christ, don’t you people ever give me credit for anything?”

  WAYNE’S DIVORCE TRIAL BEGAN IN October 1953 and quickly turned into kind of Hollywood media circus that captures the attention and fuels the imagination of the entire country. Following the previous sensational filmland trials of Errol Flynn (for statutory rape) and Robert Mitchum (for smoking pot), Wayne’s promised to have a fair share of scandal, too.

  The first day, thousands crowded the courthouse, straining for a glimpse of their favorite movie star. Everybody showed up on time except Chata. The trial was set to begin at nine, but when she hadn’t shown up by ten thirty, the judge retired to his chambers to figure out what to do next. Chata finally appeared at eleven o’clock, and the judge demanded to know why she was late. She produced a speeding ticket she had gotten after being stopped by a highway patrolman, the reason, she said, for her missing the start of the proceedings. The judge shrugged and accepted her excuse, and the proceedings began.

  Chata was the first to take the stand, looking quite glamorous. Either her psoriasis had been expertly covered up by makeup, or its seriousness exaggerated. She wore an expensive dark blue tailored suit, pinstriped blouse, and white gloves. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. After she was sworn in, she began her testimony. She talked about her life before she had met Wayne, what it was like after, and said that she had indeed lived with Wayne for two years before his divorce from Josie was finalized.

  Under oath she testified about twenty-two specific acts of cruelty on her husband’s part, that Wayne was an alcoholic and got violent when he was drunk, which he was more often than he was sober, and that he had, on several occasions, slapped her and kicked her, trampled on her clothes and scarves, dragged her by the legs and the roots of her hair, and “clobbered” her many times, in Encino, Hawaii, Mexico City, Acapulco, Dublin, London, and New York. She testified that once, on Waikiki Beach, she had discovered Wayne having an orgy with other naked men and women, and when she asked her husband why she hadn’t been invited, he told her to go away and stop spoiling his fun, and that a similar incident had happened at a pool in Acapulco, that she had shown up with a bathing suit and been bawled out by Wayne because she wasn’t naked like the others. She had several witnesses, all friends or Mexican servants who worked for her mother, who corroborated her accusations.

  Wayne’s face visibly reddened when she told the court that a “strip-tease girl” once bit him on the neck during a stag party he had gone to and when he came home he had “a big black bite on his neck” (on cross-examination Wayne admitted he had been bitten but insisted it happened without his consent). And Chata told the story of how she had almost shot him that night when he broke into the home because he couldn’t find the key. She said she took a gun from a bedside table drawer and went to investigate the noise, accompanied by her mother, and was just about to shoot “the intruder” when her mother told her, “Don’t shoot, it’s your husband.”

  As Wayne told Hedda Hopper, “We had pretty good times except when she tried to kill me.”

  Chata also testified that Wayne had committed adultery with actress Gail Russell, that the time she almost shot him, he’d stayed out the night before at Russell’s home, and that a friend of hers had told her that her husband had bought Russell a car. Wayne stared out the large courtroom windows during this part of the testimony.

  After a conference in chambers, the judge ordered Wayne to pay an additional $2,000 to Chata for her court costs after she complained she couldn’t afford her attorney fees. When court was dismissed that day, Russell immediately retained counsel and threatened to sue Chata for libel, insisting that Wayne had not bought her a car, only given her a loan of $500 during the making of The Angel and the Badman because she wasn’t making enough money to get by.106

  After court that day, Wayne looked visibly angry that Russell was being “dragged into this” and bemoaned the fact to reporters the fact that he would “[h]ave to earn $20,000 [more] to pay that $2,000.”

  Walking into the courthouse the next morning, he stopped to sign autographs, mostly for squealing young girls who rushed at him waving pens and autograph books and pads. One carried a large sign on a stick that said: JOHN WAYNE, YOU CAN CLOBBER ME ANY TIME YOU WANT.

  Now it was Wayne’s turn to testify. The night before he had come down with the flu and was running a 102-degree temperature when he took the stand. Under oath, he testified that it was Chata who was the out-of-control drinker, not him, and he denied ever having sex with Russell. He denied every accusation that he had ever physically abused his wife. He claimed she was “reckless” with his money, giving expensive gifts to other men, lost thousands of dollars at the tables in Las Vegas, and that she had been carrying on an affair with hotel heir millionaire Nicky Hilton, the son of Conrad Hilton, and that Hilton had spent a w
eek at the Wayne home while he was away on location. To back up his story, he had Hilton subpoenaed to testify under oath.

  On recross, Chata denied the affair with Hilton.107 Once again, she talked about Wayne’s physical brutality. One time in Acapulco, they’d had a fight and “he threw a glass of water in my face. I grabbed a bucket of water and sloshed it at him. He then threw rubbing alcohol into my eyes and it burned and blinded me for a moment. I told Mr. Wayne that I was absolutely through with him.”

  When it was Wayne’s turn again, he said he had “swished” the alcohol at Chata to repel an attack—“she tore my neck open!”—and that for the last three years of their marriage, his wife found “every possible excuse to stay away from me.”

  During a recess the afternoon of October 21, 1953, Frank Belcher suddenly announced a possible settlement, telling reporters, “We are very close, but nothing has been signed yet. It’s like working a cross-word puzzle.”

  Both sides met for an hour in the judge’s chambers, and when they emerged, it was officially announced that a settlement was reached, ending the lurid, national headline-grabbing trial, and the marriage.

  The headline in the New York Daily News screamed: WAYNE, WIFE END SIZZLING TRIAL; SETTLEMENT REACHED.

  The following week, both Chata and Wayne testified on matters relating only to the financial settlement, but it quickly turned into more of the same. While he was on the stand, Wayne testified he had found doodles on a napkin in his house that his wife had scribbled: “ ‘Chata Hilton,’ ‘Mrs. Nick Hilton,’ and ‘Esperanza Hilton.’ ” And with his voice trembling, again he hotly denied any hint of misconduct with Gail Russell and finished by calling his wife a “heavy drinker,” possessing a “fishwife temper,” and being the instigator of “various acts of violence.”

  On October 29, 1953, Judge Rhodes granted a divorce on the grounds of cruelty (the rough equivalent of today’s no-fault divorce; this was more accurately a both-fault divorce). Wayne agreed to pay his wife $50,000 for six years, take care of all her current debts (about $20,000), and make a onetime cash payment of $150,000.

  Outside the courtroom, Wayne told reporters that despite the $502,891 his wife had testified he had in the bank, he was now broke (he actually had about $60,000 in cash) and had had to borrow money to pay his taxes, all because of the extravagances of his wife. Some of it was true—he was in bad financial straits—but not all of it was Chata’s fault. Wayne had continued to make bad investments, remained an easy touch to friends, and still loved to pick up the tab no matter how many people in the party. And he did go out with other women and liked to lavish them with cash and gifts. Here is Wayne complaining about how taxes kept him broke: “The minute I became a success, the government began auditing my income tax returns . . . I wanted desperately to be rich, but like the fellow who mistook the hen house for the privy in the dark of the night, I never quite achieved my intended goal.”

  After the settlement, Chata hired a new lawyer, S. S. Hahn, who threatened to reopen the case if he could find any discrepancies. He couldn’t; Chata insisted they appeal anyway and it was thrown out, after which she left Los Angeles for good, moving in with her mother in her house in Mexico City. Very quickly, she ran out of all the money from the settlement. After her mother died, Chata sold the house and moved to a Mexico City hotel. She rarely left her room, barely ate, and subsisted mostly on brandy. She eventually died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-five in the winter of 1961.

  JUST BEFORE THE START OF the divorce hearings, Wayne had been voted the most popular overseas male film star for 1952 by the Foreign Press Association (Susan Hayward was the number one female star), but he now feared that after all the bad press from the divorce, nobody would want to see him again in the movies.

  He was also suffering from stomach ulcers.

  He needn’t have worried. Shortly after the trial ended, Wayne filmed The High and the Mighty. It was shot in Warner Color and CinemaScope. The film reteamed Wayne and director William Wellman (Island in the Sky) in another flight drama. Wayne was offered the part of the pilot after Spencer Tracy, Wellman’s first choice for the role, quit the film. The High and the Mighty revitalized the emergency-landing genre and set the standard for such ensemble-cast air disaster films, each character played by a (usually) late-in-the-day star with a story of their own who learn a few “life-lessons” after their near brush with death. Robert Aldrich’s 1965 James Stewart vehicle, The Flight of the Phoenix, was one. The most enduring of the lot was George Seaton’s 1970 Airport, based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Hailey, which starred Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, and a host of famous-face cameos.

  The High and the Mighty premiered May 17, 1954, with a gala, red carpet, klieg light affair at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, and went into national release the next day. It became the biggest hit yet for Wayne-Fellows and one of the highest-grossing films of Wayne’s career. It grossed over $100 million from a $10 million budget and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Score for Dmitri Tiomkin’s whistly theme that floats through the entire film. Dan Roman (Wayne) whistles it one last time after he lands the plane and walks off into the sunset. His costars in this ensemble drama were Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, Jan Sterling, Phil Harris, Robert Newton, and longtime friend Paul Fix. At Oscar time the following winter, Wayne was once again overlooked as Best Actor.108

  Despite its success, The High and the Mighty was the last film produced by Wayne-Fellows. In January 1954, shortly after completing production on the film, Wayne was forced to end his partnership with Robert Fellows, after Fellows fell in love with one of the company’s secretaries and asked his wife for a divorce. The distraught Mrs. Fellows went to Wayne and pleaded with him to talk her husband out of ending their marriage over some meaningless affair. Wayne politely refused, claiming Fellows’s private life was nobody’s business but his own. Not long after, when it became clear Fellows intended to go through with the divorce, he needed to liquidate as many of his assets as he could and offered to sell his half of the company to Wayne, who quickly agreed to the deal.

  Wayne then formed a new company, “Batjac,” named after the fictitious Dutch shipping company in one of his favorite films, Wake of the Red Witch. It was his eldest son, Michael, who suggested the name. Wayne liked the way it sounded like bat crap. It was originally supposed to be “Batjak,” as it is spelled in the movie, but a typographical error put into the incorporation papers substituted a “c” for the “k,” thus “Batjac.” On June 1, 1954, the incorporation was complete, Batjac opened new offices on Hollywood and Beverly Boulevards and immediately began work on several unmade Wayne-Fellows properties included in the buyout.

  WAYNE AND PILAR MOVED INTO a new house in Encino, which quickly became a never-ending salon for Wayne’s friends, including Bond, Ford, McLaglen, and Feldman. For them, especially, the door was always open and Ford showed up at all hours of the day and night, usually drunk, the only friend of Wayne’s whom Pilar disliked, but she wisely decided not to make an issue of it. For his part, Wayne always welcomed Ford, no matter what time and now matter what condition he was in. If Ford was drunker than Wayne, he was always ready to drink a few to catch up with Pappy.

  When the house wasn’t filled with his friends, Pilar and Wayne often went out by themselves for dinner and entertainment, most often at Charlie Morrison’s and Felix Young’s West Hollywood South American–styled Mocambo, where his favorite maroon leather banquette was always ready for him.109 One time the house reporter asked if he could take their picture together. It was before the divorce had been finalized. When he asked Wayne what the occasion was, he replied, “We’re celebrating the fact that it’s a great world!”

  Late into the night, Wayne loved to snuggle with Pilar on the sofa, use his custom remote controls to lower the TV from the ceiling, snack on salami sandwiches Pilar would make, chain-smoke his beloved Camels (he went through four packs a day and did print and TV ads for the brand), and wa
tch TV shows or old movies until he fell asleep. On weekends, they would relocate to Wayne’s boat, The Nor’wester. It was a form of at-home happiness Wayne had never had before, and he cherished it, as well as Pilar for giving it to him.

  But her friends cautioned he would never marry again. “Duke’s too much of a man’s man,” one friend told her. “He’s too fond of his freedom. He likes to carouse too much.” Another talked of how he had trouble playing the role of a husband. “When he takes off his clothes, he will throw his shirt and pants on a chair and his socks on the floor. He is constitutionally opposed to ashtrays. He hates [domestic] schedules. He likes to eat when he feels like it, drink when he wants to, and stay up until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.” They slept in a specially made king-size bed to accommodate his size and both loved the luxury of the roominess. He always wore only bottoms at night.

  FOR THE LONGEST TIME, HOWARD Hughes had wanted Wayne to make a film about Genghis Khan. Two years earlier, Dick Powell, the former film juvenile who had grown up and into rough-and-tough guy roles and become a savvy producer, had been hired by Hughes to direct the film. Hughes, never a speedboat, was finally ready to make it, which meant everybody had to be ready.

  Given the green light, Powell’s first choice to play the lead had been Marlon Brando, and when he told Hughes, he did not say no. As it turned out, Brando was under contract to Warner at the time, and they wouldn’t loan him out. Hughes was convinced he could get them to change their mind, no matter how much he had to pay. He hired British-born screenwriter Oscar Millard, who had relocated to Hollywood after World War II, to custom-fit a script for the actor. The screenwriter, however, ignored Hughes and wrote it his own way, without considering Brando at all. According to Millard, “I decided to write it in stylized, slightly archaic English, mindful of the fact that my story was nothing more than a tarted-up Western. I thought this would give it a certain cachet and I left no lily unpainted. It was a mistake I never repeated.”