by Marc Eliot
Maker of Men (1931) [Actor . . . . Dusty Rhodes]
The Range Feud (1931) [Actor . . . . Clint Turner]
The Deceiver (1931) [Actor . . . . Richard Thorpe as a corpse]
Arizona (1931) [Actor . . . . Lt. Bob Denton] a.k.a. Men Are Like That—USA
Three Girls Lost (1931) [Actor . . . . Gordon Wales]
Girls Demand Excitement (1931) [Actor . . . . Peter Brooks]
The Big Trail (1930) [Actor . . . . Breck Coleman] a.k.a. Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail—USA (complete title)
Cheer Up and Smile (1930) [Actor . . . . Roy] (uncredited) [property assistant uncredited)
Rough Romance (1930) [Actor . . . . Lumberjack uncredited, (props uncredited)
Born Reckless (1930) [Actor . . . . Extra uncredited]
Men Without Women (1930) [Actor . . . . [Radioman on Surface uncredited]
The Forward Pass (1929) [Actor . . . . Extra] (uncredited)
Salute (1929) [Actor . . . . Midshipman Bill] (uncredited) (costumer, uncredited)
Words and Music (1929) [Actor . . . . Pete Donahue] (as Duke Morrison) [property assistant uncredited]
The Black Watch (1929) [Actor . . . . 42nd Highlander uncredited] [props uncredited] a.k.a. King of the Khyber Rifles—UK, USA working title
Speakeasy (1929) [Actor . . . . Extra uncredited[
Noah’s Ark (1928) [Actor . . . . Flood Extra uncredited]
Hangman’s House (1928) [Actor . . . . Horse Race Spectator/Condemned Man in Flashback uncredited]
Four Sons (1928) [Actor . . . . Officer uncredited, props uncredited)
Mother Machree (1928) [Actor . . . . Extra uncredited, props uncredited]
The Drop Kick (1927) [Actor . . . . Football Player/Extra in Stands uncredited]
Annie Laurie (1927) [Actor . . . . Extra uncredited]
The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926) [Actor . . . . Extra uncredited, property boy uncredited]
Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) [Actor . . . . Guard uncredited]
Brown of Harvard (1926) [Actor . . . . Yale Football Player uncredited]
ALSO BY MARC ELIOT
Michael Douglas: A Biography
Steve McQueen: A Biography
Paul Simon: A Life
American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood
Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America’s Favorite Borough
Reagan: The Hollywood Years
Jimmy Stewart: A Biography
Cary Grant: A Biography
Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World
Take It from Me: Life’s a Struggle, But You Can Win (with Erin Brockovich)
To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles
Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs
Kato Kaelin: The Whole Truth
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince
Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music
Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen
Copyright
AMERICAN TITAN: SEARCHING FOR JOHN WAYNE. Copyright © 2014 by Rebel Road Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-226900-3
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062269034
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Footnote
1 Wayne was married three times, divorced twice, and had seven children. He had four with his first wife, Josephine Alicia Saenz (1933–1945)—Michael Wayne, Mary Antonia “Toni” Wayne, Patrick Wayne, and Melinda Wayne. He had no children with his second wife, Esperana Baur (1946–1954). Wayne married Pilar in 1954 and had three children with her, Aissa, John Ethan, and Marisa. They separated in 1973.
2 Wayne sometimes varied this story. To Pete Martin, of the Saturday Evening Post, he said that he had gotten the nickname after acting the part of a duke in a high school play. He also liked how close Duke sounded to Doc.
3 Both films are considered “lost,” due to neglect and deterioration. A “lost” film is defined as a film for which no known prints exist.
4 Brown of Harvard is available on DVD.
5 Thought lost after MGM destroyed the negative over a contract dispute, in 2006 a nearly complete print of Bardelys the Magnificent was found in France, missing only reel three. It was restored using production stills and footage from the film trailer to stand in for the missing reel. It was made available in 2008 for U.S. theatrical and DVD release.
6 The sets were built one-eighth smaller than in real life, to make Mix look bigger.
7 Available on DVD and instant download from several video outlets.
8 Released in 1928, produced and directed by John Ford (unaccredited as director). Of the more than sixty silent features Ford made, few survive. Of the thirty-six he made before 1920, at Universal, Ford’s resident studio before he moved to Fox, only ten survive. Mother Machree was a Fox transition-to-sound film, with a song performed in it to show off the studio’s ability to produce sound. Only five of its seven reels remain in existence. Wayne worked as an animal wrangler on the film.
9 Prior to Mother Machree, Wayne appeared in Jack Conway’s Brown of Harvard as an unbilled football player, King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent as an unbilled swordfighter, Lewis Seiler’s The Great K and A Train Robbery as an unbilled extra in the Tom Mix feature, John S. Robertson’s Annie Laurie, released in 1927, as an extra in one scene wearing kilts; Millard Webb’s The Drop Kick, released in 1927, as an unbilled football player. He and ten other college football players from Stanford, USC, and UCLA all appear as stand-ins and extras during the film’s climactic game.
10 Francis Ford, John’s older brother, began as a stage actor before heading to Hollywood to become a movie star. One opening night in New York, the lead actor got drunk, and Francis, the understudy, went on in his place. The actor’s name was Ford. According to John Ford, “From then on he could never get rid of it; neither could I.”—Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978, revised edition.
11 Thirty-three years later, in 1947, the university made Ford an honorary doctor of humanities. Later, the school named its Dramatic Arts division after him. He jokingly told reporters that if the school had treated him better when he was a student, he never would have left and gone to Hollywood.
12 “Eventually, Wayne bonded with his stepsister, who later became Nancy Marshall, and with his stepmother, and he played an important role in their lives. As gracious letters from Nancy Marshall to John Wayne indicate, he quietly provided financial support for his stepmother’s medical bills in her declining years, and he gave Nancy Marshall occasional work reading and evaluating novels for possible motion picture consideration. . . . Wayne’s actions reflect his abiding sense of basic loyalty.”—Goldman, John Wayne: The Genuine Article, p. 28.
13 In 1973, Wayne gave a speech to the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame, in which he claimed it was his leg that had been broken, not his shoulder. There is no evidence that it was his leg, and all other accounts say it was a shoulder injury.
14 Four Sons was thought to be lost for seventy years until a print was found in Portugal that was restored by the Film Archive at the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Fox. The Duke’s face is plainly visible in the restoration. Ford claimed it held the attendance record at New York’s Roxy when it was first released.
15 The only existing print of Strong Boy is believed to be in a private collection in Australia.
16 Speakeasy is considered lost, although som
e of its sound track is believed to have survived on Vitaphone-style disks.
17 Words and Music still exists but may not be currently available in complete form.
18 The Black Watch is occasionally shown on Turner Classic Movies.
19 Salute is available on DVD.
20 The Forward Pass is believed to be lost, but some elements exist at UCLA’s Film and Television department. The Lone Star Ranger was the third remake of a popular novel. Ford’s version was billed as “Zane Grey’s first all-talking picture.” A print exists in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Men Without Women exists as an international sound version held by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City.
21 Cheer Up and Smile is available on DVD. Rough Romance is available on DVD.
22 There are several versions as to where Wayne got his trademark walk from. Later on, Wayne would give the credit to Enos Edward “Yakima” or “Yak” Canutt, a former rodeo rider and stuntman, who, when he realized he could get paid for being thrown from a horse in the movies, became one of the most sought-after stuntmen in Hollywood, especially for western films. Canutt also taught Wayne how to fall from a running horse without getting hurt, the physical techniques of staged barroom brawling, and the right way to draw and shoot a gun. Wayne gave Canutt a fair measure of credit for helping develop the famous stylistics of his familiar stance: “I even copied Yak’s smooth-rolling walk. And the way he talks, kinda low and with quiet strength.”—John Wayne from Don Allen, The American Weekly, November 30, 1957. Also influential in helping Wayne to “screen fight” were stuntmen Allen Pomery and Eddie Parker. Harry Carey Jr. claimed Wayne’s walk didn’t fully develop until nearly a decade later, and that it was Paul Fix who helped Wayne find his trademark trot: “Duke was kind of heavy-footed and used to trudge more than walk. Paul told Duke to point his toes when he walked, and the ‘John Wayne walk’ was born . . . When Duke first did it [in Stagecoach], it was ballsy as hell. As the legend began to form, the walk became more pronounced.”—Harry Carey Jr., Company of Heroes, pp. 72–73.
23 Some but not all the scenes for the American version were shot only in Grandeur and then trimmed to fit the standard format. There were actually several more foreign versions made of the film. Fox jobbed out the shooting script to France, where it was directed by Pierre Couderc. The Spanish version was directed by Walsh, David Howard, and Samuel Schneider. There was also a separate Italian version. In the early 1980s, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired the original 65 mm nitrate camera negative for The Big Trail and wanted to restore the film, but the negative was too fragile. They then took it to Karl Malkames, a cinematographer and a specialist and pioneer in film reproduction, restoration, and preservation. He designed and built a special printer to handle the careful frame-by-frame reproduction of the negative to an anamorphic (CinemaScope) fine grain master. A two-disc DVD version of the restored film was released in the United States on May 13, 2008, followed by a Blu-ray edition in September 2012.
24 Girls Demand Excitement exists in an unreleased print held by UCLA.
25 Three Girls Lost is available on DVD.
26 Originally called CBS Film Sales Corporation, and disparagingly referred to as “Corn beef and cabbage” among the other studio heads, Brandt left over differences with the brothers. Harry Cohn then became the sole head of the renamed Columbia Pictures.
27 Also known as Arizona, the title of the August Thomas Broadway play it was based on. Riskin would go on to write many of Frank Capra’s Columbia films and marry Fay Wray, of King Kong fame. No DVD is currently available.
28 In his biography of Wayne, Zolotow claims his friend was innocent of any philandering and that the unnamed starlet had made up the stories about her affair with the Duke to make Cohn jealous.
29 Jones had toiled in a series of westerns at Fox that were considered secondary to the Mix films they made. The low point of his career is generally considered to be the films he made at Columbia. Range Feud may be downloaded for free from the Internet.
30 A.k.a. Yellow. Makers of Men is available on DVD.
31 Texas Cyclone is available on DVD.
32 All twelve episodes of Shadow of the Eagle may be seen on YouTube.
33 The Hurricane Express is available for free download at the Internet Archive, FreeMooviesOnline.com, Amazon, and YouTube.
34 Josephine became Josie Morrison, as “John Wayne” was not his legal name.
35 They include Stephen Roberts’s Lady and the Gent, 1932 (Paramount Pictures); D. Ross Lederman’s Two-Fisted Law, 1932 (Columbia Pictures); Fred Allen’s Ride Him, Cowboy, 1932 (Warner Bros); Tenny Wright’s The Big Stampede, 1932; Tenny Wright’s Telegraph Trail, 1932 (Warner Bros); William Wellman’s Central Airport, 1933 (First National); Philip Whitman’s His Private Secretary, 1933 (Showmen’s Pictures); Mack V. Wright’s Somewhere in Sonora, 1933 (Warner Bros); Armand Schaefer and Colbert Clark’s The Three Musketeers (a.k.a. Desert Command), 1933 (Mascot Picture Corporation); Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face, 1933 (Warner Bros); and Mack V. Wright’s The Man from Monterey, 1933 (Warner Bros).
36 A.k.a. The Kid’s Last Fight. The film was remade in 1938 as the better-known They Made Me a Criminal, directed by Archie Mayo, starring John Garfield. Life of Jimmy Dolan is in the public domain and available on DVD.
37 Riders of Destiny is available on DVD, and from several download sites on the Internet. It is also available as part of a recent collection of John Wayne westerns, The John Wayne Western Collection (2009), that includes: Blue Steel, Winds of the Wasteland, The Dawn Rider, Randy Rides Alone, The Lawless Frontier, Paradise Canyon, Sagebrush Trail, The Star Packer, The Trail Beyond, The Man from Utah, Mclintock! (Widescreen Edition), Angel and the Badman, Rainbow Valley, Riders of Destiny, The Lucky Texan, Hell Town, ’Neath the Arizona Skies, West of the Divide, The Desert Trail, and Texas Terror.
38 Wayne’s voice was originally dubbed by a baritone studio singer, an uneasy fit and an obvious poor match due to Wayne’s naturally high-pitched speaking voice. Autry had also worked for Mascot and had had a successful recording career before he became Hollywood’s favorite singing cowboy.
39 Wayne finished out his original contract with Monogram for eight films, averaging one a month, and then reprised his “Singing Sandy Saunders” in at least one more film (for some reason, Sandy became Randy), 1934’s Randy Rides Alone, directed by Harry Fraser, costarring Gabby Hayes and Yak Canutt. For reasons not clear, but likely had to do with Wayne’s attraction to Cecilia, Alberta Vaughn was a last-minute replacement for Parker as his fade-out love interest/kiss partner. After Republic bought out Monogram, Yates continued to use Gene Autry as his studio’s resident singing cowboy. John Wayne never sang atop a horse again.
40 In 1934, Ford was appointed a lieutenant in the United States Reserve, and it is believed he used The Araner to help gather intelligence for the navy under the guise of its being a pleasure boat.
41 Kennedy formed RKO in 1928 with David Sarnoff.
42 Although The Informer won Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenwriter, and Best Score, it was widely believed that the vengeful Louis B. Mayer used his influence within the Academy to have them give the Best Picture Oscar to his Mutiny on the Bounty.
43 There are conflicting reports about what actually happened. According to Dan Ford, the director’s grandson and biographer, it happened; according to McBride, Ford kept his post until 1938, when he was elected to the SDG board of directors, and remained a major figure in the guild for the rest of his professional life. The guild’s records are unclear about whether or not Ford was actually voted out of office.
44 Technically, Yates retained the option exclusive rights to use Wayne in westerns only for Republic.
45 Zolotow points out that Wayne’s drinking also served as something of an escape from his increasingly unhappy marriage to Josephine, who considered him not just a failure, but a failure in a field that was unworthy of her.
46 A.k.a. Casey of the Coast Guard, the film wa
s shot in two weeks on a budget of $75,000 ($65,000 was put up by Universal, Carr Productions put in the last $10,000). The Sea Spoilers is available on DVD.
47 A.k.a. The Showdown. Based on the Jack London short story “The Abysmal Brute,” shot for $75,000. Conflict is available on DVD.
48 California Straight Ahead is available on DVD.
49 I Cover the War is available on DVD.
50 A.k.a. Hell on Ice, Idol of the Crowds is available on DVD.
51 Adventure’s End is not available on DVD, but may be seen in its entirety on YouTube.
52 “Boule de Suif” is de Maupassant’s most famous short story. Published in 1880, translated as “Dumpling,” or “Butterball,” or “Ball of Lard,” it was one of his collection of stories set in the Franco-Prussian War. Ten residents of Rouen, recently occupied by the Prussian Army, decide to escape, by covered wagon, to Le Havre, still free. The wagon’s passengers are a microcosm of French society. De Maupassant’s story is itself loosely derived from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Ford was already familiar with “Boule de Suif” and had wanted long wanted to make a film of it, but couldn’t come up with workable concept until Haycox’s adaptation appeared in Collier’s. Some have questioned “Boule de Suif” as the source of the Haycox story and suggest it is actually derived from Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” a story Ford first adapted into a silent western in 1919, starring Harry Carey.
53 The eleven-year gap was the largest in Ford’s filmography without a western. Of the more than two hundred feature films Ford directed, fifty-four, fully a quarter, were westerns.
54 Stagecoach is available on DVD and may also be seen in its entirety on YouTube.
55 Wanger put up $250,000, a little more than half the film’s budget. Universal put up the rest, in return for distribution rights.
56 Cooper’s price in 1939 was $150,000 a picture.
57 In an undated profile of Yakima Canutt, AP writer Bob Thomas wrote about Canutt’s stunt work in Stagecoach: “The stunts . . . had the beauty and precision of a ballet filled with danger.” According to Zolotow, Wayne did some of the stunt work as well. When Walter Wanger saw him jumping onto the top of the stagecoach, he was, reportedly, horrified. Wayne later told a reporter, “Hell, he didn’t know I’d been doing stunts like that for years, just for eatin’ money.”—quoted by Dick O’Conner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 5, 1954.