by Scott Eyman
“He was pretty tall and skinny,” remembered Cecilia Parker, who was the leading lady in one of the Lone Stars for $125 a few years before she became part of the Andy Hardy ensemble at MGM. “I liked him. He was a real nice young man. He was tall and slender and he was on his honeymoon—he had just gotten married. He was late to work many mornings—he drove a little Ford convertible. But he was a real nice young man.
“He was a natural, a typical western gentleman. Very easy to work with. And yet he had enough—I don’t know how to put it—moxie to make you believe that he could take care of a situation.”
The picture Parker worked on was called Riders of Destiny—the picture where Wayne plays “Singin’ Sandy” Saunders, who is, a bystander informs us, “the most notorious gunman since Billy the Kid.” Aside from the narrative incongruity of a singing gunfighter, there was a technical problem: Wayne couldn’t sing. Nevertheless, Singin’ Sandy strides down the street while Wayne mouths a song whose lyrics proclaim, “There’ll be blood a-running in town before night . . .” Unfortunately, the singing voice doesn’t sound anything like Wayne’s speaking voice.
“That was Paul Malvern’s idea,” said Lindsley Parsons. “The reason he thought he could get away with it was that [Bob Bradbury’s] other son . . . was a doctor or a dentist but a beautiful singer. So we figured that John Wayne would be fiddling with this guitar and singing but back in the brush there we’ve actually got Bradbury’s other son doing the singing.”
Wayne’s acute discomfort is palpable. It was one more humiliation for a man who was becoming all too accustomed to them—Singin’ Sandy is the clip that’s always dragged out to illustrate the ignominious beginnings of Wayne’s career. It was awful and he knew it, but he also knew he couldn’t refuse to do it. As he would tell a co-star forty years later, “I was one step up from being a stuntman. It was a big step. I didn’t want to go back.”
The working conditions of the Lone Stars were not appreciably better than the working conditions on the Warners or Mascot pictures. “It wasn’t glamorous,” said Cecilia Parker. “It was dirty work. I mean you got dusty dirty. And you were tired, you worked from sunup to sundown. And we had a production manager who said, ‘Let’s go boys, the light is getting yellow.’ And that meant hurry up. No mistakes because there were hardly any retakes. You did it, and if it wasn’t done right . . . you just cut it out, eliminated it.”
The tackiness didn’t affect Wayne’s mood. Sammy McKim, a child actor who worked with Wayne in three westerns in the mid-1930s, said that he “was pleasant, always had a smile and a ‘good morning’ for you when you met on the set. He kept to himself pretty much at that time, he wasn’t flamboyant. . . . He was a quality person.”
On Saturday nights, when the picture had to be finished even if they had to work till sunrise on Sunday, the pick-me-up was something called “graveyard stew,” which was a bowl of hot milk with chopped-up bread. It doesn’t sound like much, but Cecilia Parker remembered that “at midnight, it tastes good.” Of course, some of the actors spiked their graveyard stew with something besides milk.
Not even child actors were exempt from the push to complete films on time. Children were supposed to work only five hours of an eight-hour day, with three hours held over for schooling, but Sammy McKim remembered that on the last day of one of the Lone Stars, the production manager told McKim’s grandfather that they had about two more hours of work and needed Sammy.
McKim’s grandfather was instructed to take Sammy out of the studio, say good night to the schoolteacher and get in their car, then wait for the schoolteacher to leave the premises. At that point, they were to drive around to an alley, and knock on a metal door in the back of the western street set. “I worked ’til ten or 11 o’clock that night—and I enjoyed it. It was part of the picture and these were my friends I worked with.”
McKim touched on a major point that made the circumstances bearable—a camaraderie that came as a natural by-product of a small unit pulling together. McKim spoke of “a closeness . . . that came about. And it was genuine, and I don’t care if it was one of the smaller players, or a stuntman. . . . He was accepted just as much as the assistant cameraman and somebody working in the prop wagon. It had a family feel about it.”
It was on one of the Lone Star pictures that Wayne ran into Pardner Jones, one of Hollywood’s legendary characters. Jones was the best sharpshooter in the business, a man John Ford had used as far back as The Iron Horse. The scene called for Wayne to be tied up with a shelf full of clay pots around him that were to be shot off.
Wayne had initially felt quite secure about the scene because he had heard all about Pardner Jones, but when he came on the set he was startled to find that Jones was a bald-headed old man reading a newspaper with the help of a magnifying glass the size of a shaving mirror.
After Wayne was tied up, the director called out “Pardner?” and the old man grabbed a 30/30. The director explained the shot and Jones said, “Turn ’em over.” He quickly blew away three of the clay pots, with the shards falling all over Wayne. Jones went back to reading his newspaper.
“I was about ready to call wardrobe,” said Wayne.
For the rest of his life, Wayne sought to replicate this kind of congenial team atmosphere on his sets. Actors reappeared for decades, sometimes from the John Ford stock company, sometimes from Wayne’s own group. Then there were the behind-the-camera personnel—makeup men, stuntmen, wranglers, second unit directors.
Because a film company takes its emotional temperature from the star and the director—and in B westerns the star was usually more powerful than the director—Wayne would usually be right in the middle of the joshing and the camaraderie. The atmosphere was family, and there was no question who the big brother was.
Most of the people who worked with Wayne in these days never dreamed that he would eventually become an airport, a postage stamp, and a congressional medal. Cecilia Parker was the exception. “He had something about him. He had a certain aura about him. You knew he was going to go somewhere.”
But Louella Parsons spoke for the majority when she wrote that whenever Wayne was spotted at a Hollywood party he looked bored, unhappy, and sleepy. “Well, I was sleepy,” he retorted. “Nobody realized that I was making six day epics then, one right after the other, and riding and doing what I hoped was acting in every minute of them.”
These were blue-collar movies, made by blue-collar personalities. In The Trail Beyond, Noah Beery Sr. and Jr. shared screen time with Wayne. Beery Sr. got into a disagreement with Paul Malvern, and Malvern asked Yakima Canutt if, as a personal favor, he would beat the hell out of Beery in an upcoming fight scene.
“I’d be glad to,” replied Canutt, “if you’ll make him say to me the things he said to you.”
On another of these one-week wonders, Wayne’s co-star was a precocious fifteen-year-old named Ann Rutherford. “I thought he was a very nice man,” she remembered seventy-five years later.
He was off with the guys all the time, while I was trying to figure out which side of the horse to get on.
We worked twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. The locations were usually Victorville or Lone Pine, or someplace else where there was no noise at all, just the noise we made making the picture. They could work you till midnight and then you’d have a 6 A.M. call. They told you not to look at the klieg lights, but you always did and you’d get klieg eyes and they’d put cool sliced potatoes on your face. The potatoes would help, although you looked like an idiot.
The cowboys rode over the hills very fast aiming and shooting, and after the director yelled “Print!” everybody got off the horses, went to makeup, and became an Indian. So you could easily spend the day shooting at yourself. That was the way they shot westerns. I was making $150 a week.
Rutherford’s memories of Wayne were of a man happy to be working.
He’d had a brief flurry, then nothing. He looked on this as another shot. He did anything they asked of him; he was gung
ho. But he was already married and had a kid or two. The crew all loved him. And what was not to like? You’ve got to like anybody who walks around like they’re clutching a diamond in their rear end and makes it pay.
He was absolutely a man’s man. They all stood around with their knives whittling on a piece of wood. They made themselves very happy in their own peculiar way. The directors were fresh from being someone’s second assistant. I don’t think they timed lunch. If we were on location, a food wagon came around with stuff whenever there was a break. I made about fourteen of these in seven months, so I don’t remember the names.
Although it would have made economic sense to make the pictures in groups of two or three—David Selznick did it at MGM with Tim McCoy in the late 1920s, and some of the later Hopalong Cassidy pictures were also shot two at a time—Rutherford remembered that the Wayne westerns were made one at a time.
The only time I felt I was in a factory operation was when they made serials. On serials, you wouldn’t even rehearse. I made one [for Mascot!] called Fighting Marines, with Grant Withers. They told me to drive past the camera, and I had to tell them I couldn’t drive. “No problem,” they said. “We’ll have a guy on the floor and if you get in trouble, just call him.”
I got in and happily drove past the camera and hit a bump and the guy on the floor bounced into the picture. “Print it!” they said. That’s the way they made serials.
Although these pictures got no respect, and didn’t earn any, there was a good amount of money to be made. To take just one group as an example: the six westerns Wayne made for Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros. were carried on the books as costing $28,000 apiece, which undoubtedly meant at least $10,000 of studio overhead was being tacked on to each picture, or Warners was paying Schlesinger $28,000 for each completed picture. None grossed more than $224,000, but none grossed less than $193,000. Cumulatively, the six pictures were carried on the books as having cost $168,000 and earning a total of $1.25 million, for a net profit that must have been in the vicinity of $850,000.
The Lone Star westerns wouldn’t have grossed anywhere near as much as the Schlesinger productions—Monogram’s distribution system was a wheezy old Locomobile compared to Warners’ streamlined Chevrolet—but even if they only grossed half as much, they cost a lot less than $28,000 apiece.
B westerns weren’t prestigious or well paid, but they were building John Wayne’s career.
In 1935, Herbert Yates proposed a deal to Nat Levine at Mascot and Trem Carr at Monogram: Merge both studios with Yates’s Consolidated Film Industries to form something called Republic Productions. This new entity would buy out a bunch of other Poverty Row players—Liberty Pictures, Majestic Pictures, Chesterfield Pictures. In essence, Poverty Row production would be centralized under one umbrella organization. Levine would run production, Carr would supervise, Yates would run the business.
It sounded like a good deal for all concerned—Levine thought that it was going to get harder and harder for independents to compete with the major studios, who had their own distribution chains and theaters. Levine and Carr took the deal. No more Monogram pictures were released until 1937, when the company was reorganized and picked up more or less where it left off until after World War II, when it was reorganized yet again as a more upscale entity called Allied Artists.
John Wayne’s career was now in the hands of Republic and Herbert Yates. Yates had been born in Brooklyn in 1880 and had spent his youth in the tobacco business, first working for the legendarily unpleasant George Washington Hill of the American Tobacco Company, later with Liggett & Myers. Yates got into the laboratory business during World War I, and in 1922 he created Consolidated Film Industries. By the early 1930s, Yates was extending as much as $500,000 in credit per year to Levine to process Mascot’s negatives, work prints, and release prints.
In retrospect, Herbert Yates would be nearly as important to Wayne’s career as John Ford although far less famous, not to mention far less talented. Yates was what Wayne termed “a shrewd businessman”—a nice way of saying that he didn’t have a creative bone in his pear-shaped body. For Yates, movies were a business, no more and no less. There was a lot of money to be made from the efficient manufacture of low-end goods, and Yates’s operation would quickly become expert.
Over the years, Yates would run dozens of handsome young men who could ride a horse through his B western mill. Only one of them would raise himself out of Republic’s corral. In time, Wayne would become to Republic what Clark Gable was to MGM—their biggest star, their symbol of masculinity, their annuity.
For several years after The Big Trail, John Ford cut Wayne dead. Wayne never even pretended to understand what was going through Ford’s mind, although resentment at a protégé making a lunge for success with another A list director might come pretty close. Ford was always probing for signs of premature abandonment, and always prepared to abandon someone else for years at a time.
But by the mid-1930s, Wayne was once more a part of Ford’s social circle; he, Ward Bond, and a few others were regular guests on Ford’s yacht, or over at his house for all-night poker sessions.
The unspoken question was when, if ever, Ford would offer Wayne a part in a John Ford production. “I never expected anything from Jack,” Wayne would say. “He knew mine was a friendship. Very few people considered what a private man he was, but I was private, too.” Wayne would complain about the pictures he was making, and Ford would listen, then say, “Get all the experience you can, in anything you can get.”
He knew what he was talking about; Ford had spent nearly ten years directing cheap westerns and programmers before he got his big-budget break with The Iron Horse, and he was unwilling to promote his young friend beyond his level of competence. Besides that, Ford wasn’t making westerns in the mid-1930s, because westerns in that period were mostly relegated to the bottom half of double features—the movies Duke was making.
Working for Monogram and Republic was a long way down from working for Raoul Walsh at Fox, but Wayne was quickly learning the difference between A pictures and B pictures. Wayne would say that the important things he learned in these years involved the ability to deliver exposition, and the ability to do nothing. Most actors, he would say, can deliver extreme emotions—anger, fear, and so forth. What’s difficult is to convincingly deliver straight lines: “The cattle train is due at four.”
B movies embodied a different theory of storytelling than A movies, because they were often made for rural audiences or kids, where the narrative had to be broader than a picture made for relatively sophisticated adults. These movies taught Wayne how to attract attention without resorting to scene-stealing mannerisms.
As Wayne would later explain it to Peter Bogdanovich, “The quickie [pictures] . . . are those kinds of pictures in which you tell the audience what you’re going to do, then you go do it, and then you tell them what you’ve done, then you tell them what you’re going to do next.”
Watching Wayne in these pictures from the mid-1930s proves that he was watching and learning. The reactions that had once been far too large were increasingly unobtrusive. Wayne is listening, then reacting—he’s becoming a thinking actor.
In so many respects, Wayne was part of his own audience: a product of small-town Middle America, traditionally known as flyover country as far as New York and Hollywood are concerned. But it was in Middle America that Wayne found his audience, and it was for Middle America that he would still be making pictures forty years later.
In February 1937, Yates bought out Nat Levine for a reported $2 million. After a few unsuccessful stints as a producer at MGM and Grand National, Levine’s gambling careened out of control. He blew all of his money and in his old age managed a movie theater.
As for Herbert Yates, aside from being an effective corporate warrior, he would prove to have the inestimable attribute of reliably bad taste. He would have only one apparent vulnerability: his hopeless love for an ice skater named Vera Hruba Ralston, whom he spent
fifteen years trying to turn into a motion picture star at a terrible cost to Republic stockholders, not to mention her leading men—including John Wayne. For years, Yates took the back page of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and ran a picture of her captioned “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.”
“That old fool,” said Ann Rutherford. “We were all so sorry for her. They’d call lunch and she’d have to skip her meal and help him put his mittens on and help him skate in circles around the ice rink on the Republic lot.” It was some kind of great love affair.
But as far as Wayne was concerned, he could just as easily work for Herb Yates as Trem Carr or Nat Levine. He buckled down to the new combine. For the next several years, Wayne would make between four and seven B pictures per year. The last of his first batch of westerns at Republic was called Winds of the Wasteland, shot in eleven days in May 1936. It cost $16,700, and Wayne earned $1,750 for his labors. The director was Mack V. Wright, who had last worked with Wayne on the considerably better series at Warners in 1932. Except for a nice point-of-view tracking shot of an abandoned town as Wayne and Lane Chandler ride in, and a decent stagecoach race, it’s a film of minor interest.
But Wayne continued to work, and to learn. As he would note in a different context years later, Republic had a particularly nice ring to it.
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1. B westerns had a rigorous pecking order. The heavy was usually the saloon owner or the banker, a slick operator, often with a mustache, who could operate behind a veil of assumed decency. The dog heavy was the lead henchman, and was called the dog heavy because he was a crude, unshaven lout who would kick a dog or, alternately, hurt a horse in the beginning of the picture, firmly establishing his bad guy bona fides.