by Scott Eyman
After Flame of the Barbary Coast at Republic—Joseph Kane again—Wayne began shooting Back to Bataan for RKO. It’s a story of the Philippine resistance, led by an American (Wayne) and a Filipino (Anthony Quinn, Hollywood’s all-purpose ethnic).
Even as it was being shot the picture was being written by Ben Barzman, a committed leftist who was eventually blacklisted. Writing just ahead of the camera is difficult not just because of the pressure but because of intensely practical concerns—there’s no room for an error in story construction, and you have to write scenes that will work for the sets that have already been built.
Barzman left behind a memoir in which he accused Wayne of subtle digs that were calculated to shatter whatever thin veneer of composure the writer could sustain in such frantic circumstances. One day Barzman delivered three pages that had to be shot immediately, and Wayne loudly announced, “Now, let’s see what kind of golden hero our boy genius has made me today.”
Barzman ignored the possibility that the sarcasm was directed as much at Wayne as at Barzman and retorted, “You always play a goddamn big dumb golden hero anyway!”
Wayne responded with a menacing look and began advancing on Barzman, who was half Wayne’s size. Grabbing a fire ax off a studio wall, the writer stood there trying to look like he knew what to do with it.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” said Wayne, “a fucking fire ax!”
“Come on you big bastard!” yelled Barzman. “I’d love to use it on you!”
“Why, I believe you would!” said Wayne.
There was an uneasy pause, then Barzman said, “Since I was smaller than most kids, I was taught in Canada to defend myself with anything I could lay my hands on.”
“Hurray for the Canadians,” said Wayne. Then he looked curious. “A fire ax? How could you have finished the goddamn film without me?”
Barzman threw the ax away and began laughing, as did Wayne.
Writers’ memoirs are full of scenes like this, and historians believe them at their peril. As Nora Ephron observed of the book written by her father, screenwriter Henry Ephron, he was always the hero and always telling Darryl Zanuck to go fuck himself. In the real world, writers who threaten movie stars have pronounced tendencies toward alcoholism and lengthy periods of unemployment.
But Barzman’s memoir does capture Wayne’s wry sense of humor, as well as his particular brand of conservatism. “He was far right, anti-Roosevelt, anti-spending taxpayers’ money for welfare, education, public health or practically anything,” wrote Barzman. “And he was staunchly anti-women’s rights when women were Wacs and Waves overseas and doing hard, often dangerous work in war factories.”
Despite all this, Wayne and Barzman developed a decent rapport. “You know what each cigarette costs me on account of that man in the White House,” Wayne asked Barzman one day. “Two dollars.”
“Hell, Duke, there’s a war on, and we all pay taxes.”
“Not two bucks for a smoke you don’t.”
Wayne was determined to do his own stunts. When Barzman suggested that Wayne and Quinn sink beneath a pond that had recently frozen over in a cold snap, Wayne refused to use a double. Wayne’s lips eventually turned blue, but he and Quinn did the stunt.
Also on the left was director Edward Dmytryk. Dmytryk liked Wayne, liked the way he “threw his . . . body around like a lightweight gymnast. His acting was honest, which is a good deal better than clever; he lived life with gusto; and he was already beginning to think of himself as some kind of political pundit, but we all make mistakes.”
Back to Bataan is a comparatively violent film for its period—children die—and it also has a surface realism. But despite the fact that it’s beautifully photographed by Nick Musuraca, and makes a concerted effort to portray the diversity involved in the war in the Philippines, the script has a boilerplate feel to it. Verisimilitude is further reduced by the fact that the narrator is the same man who breathlessly introduces the parodic Columbia serials directed by James Horne.
At the end of the movie, Wayne tells a Filipino child, “You’re the guy we’re fighting this war for”—a sentiment, and a line, that would be repeated nearly verbatim in a far more controversial Wayne movie about a far more controversial war several decades later.
But as far as RKO was concerned, Back to Bataan was another raging Wayne success; it cost $1.2 million and returned domestic rentals of $2.2 million, earning a profit of $160,000 in its first year of release. Not long after the film was made, Robert Fellows invited Ben Barzman to a New Year’s party at his house. Wayne was there and threw his arm around Barzman. “You remember you once asked me what I thought was the reason for my success?” said Wayne. “And I told you I always wondered myself. I never kidded myself it was because I was a great actor.”
“Yeah, I remember. And you said some woman once stopped you for an autograph and told you why she thought all the women were nuts about you. But you couldn’t remember what she said.”
“I remember now,” said Wayne. “She whispered to me, ‘You have such wicked thighs!’ ”
MGM’s They Were Expendable wasn’t released until November of 1945, which undoubtedly damaged its commercial prospects—the picture had been in preparation since July of 1942, but MGM was never fast off the dime. Frank Wead worked on the script, as did George Froeschel and Jan Lustig, in concert with producer Sidney Franklin. Wead completed a partial script by April of 1943, shortly after which Norman Corwin began wrestling with the material. He didn’t quite grasp the possibilities.
“The story in none of its forms so far has much heart,” Corwin wrote in some notes on the project. “It lacks conviction and nobody gives a goddamn what happens to anybody. . . . There is no reason why this picture should not have a clear line of continuity: the telling of the short and hectic history of a squadron of men who knew they were doomed; the expensing of the expendables.”
Corwin was always interested in the macro, so he spent a lot of time pondering the characterization of the Filipino characters, even though they’re only a backdrop to the story of the PT boats. Corwin proposed a round-robin of narrators: “Thus Ensign Chandler might begin the story and carry us to the point where he is shot in the ankles and hospitalized. He could then apologize for not being able to carry the narration further and yield, let us say, to Reynolds. . . . Reynolds might then conduct the story until the time he gets it in the neck. Then perhaps one of the surviving four . . . might carry it through the end.”
It was an interesting theoretical idea, but narration as a baton being passed around was sure to keep the audience from focusing on the characters. Corwin was ambivalent about the material; at one point, he devised a document he called “Arguments for and Against Its Production.” In another memo, he wrote, “It is on the one hand a great, sprawling documentary about the fall of the Philippines in a strictly Naval sense—full of giant-sized incidents—and, on the other hand, the interwoven biography of four men—the canvas much smaller, tighter and more easily manageable.”
Corwin had stumbled on the approach that Frank Wead and John Ford would emphasize. They simply alluded to the larger situation via a few lines of dialogue, with Ford’s magnificently gloomy images as the foundational underpinning of a tight dramatic focus. Corwin was off the picture by the end of 1943 and Frank Wead was back on, finishing the script by November of 1944.
Ford shot the picture in and around Miami beginning in February 1945. It was an efficient shoot, enlivened by some glorious tropical nights. A young soldier named Bill Harbach, the son of the famed lyricist Otto Harbach (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”), was at a party with the cast.
“It was the first time I met Wayne,” said Harbach, who would come back into Wayne’s life a quarter century later. “I had Levi’s on, and he had his Six-Foot club around him—Ward Bond and the rest of his cronies were just about the same size as him. Anyway, he said, ‘Fellas, look, Levi’s!’ And he reached out and put his hands on my waist and lifted me up and swung me around to sh
ow the guys what I was wearing. I’m six feet and weighed about 160, and he handled me as if I was a bag of groceries. Amazing strength!”
Ford wisely chose to deemphasize his stars, because they were playing characters continually buffeted by circumstances out of their control. The narrative consists almost exclusively of military disasters, beginning shortly before Pearl Harbor, when PT boats couldn’t get any traction with the naval brass, continuing through Subic Bay, Corregidor, and Bataan. They Were Expendable begins Ford’s preoccupation with the contradictions of human history—the difference between actual events and the invariably more comfortable official version constructed over time, a central dynamic that motivates movies as varied as Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They Were Expendable is also the most mournful movie about World War II until Saving Private Ryan.
Ford had the great freelance cameraman Joe August shoot the film, probably because he didn’t believe that any of the MGM cameramen—used to glossy high-key lighting that illuminated every corner of every set—could or would give him the kind of images he wanted: shots of long, dark corridors peopled by small groups of grieving men.
Robert Montgomery gives the most effective performance in his post-juvenile period, and Wayne is self-effacing in a performance keyed not to action or heroism but to loss—the dramatic high point is Wayne’s recitation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” over two coffins: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea . . .”
Wayne’s Rusty Ryan is the second in command to Montgomery’s Brickley. Ryan is an impatient man only tempered by duty and his love for Sandy, a nurse on Corregidor, played by Donna Reed in a pitch-perfect performance. Ford is at his best capturing the exquisite gallantry of the officers at a dinner party where Sandy is the only guest. But the relationship never takes flight; in the end Sandy is lost to the war. She might be hiding in the hills, she might be a prisoner of the Japanese, she might be dead. We never find out. Either way, the work of the war has to go on.
It’s a beautiful, understated picture about coping with a war of attrition—men die, their boats are destroyed, and the sailors are faced with a succession of fiascoes, culminating in the officers getting airlifted out while their men are left stranded. The film’s great strength derives from the fact that it was conceived and executed by Ford and Wead—filmmakers who had been soldiers and who knew that war is about loss.
This magnificent, melancholy film earned great reviews and mediocre box office; for the audience, it was an unwelcome reminder of the worst days of a war that had just been won. Nevertheless, Wayne was recognized as a major contribution to the film’s artistic success: “John Wayne registers the greatest acting job of his career,” wrote one reviewer. “If anything, he is the film’s standout.”
Christmas of 1945 was taken up by a series of welcome-home parties that Mary Ford staged at the Ford house on Odin Street. After that, Ford went upstairs and drank himself into oblivion. For some reason, he grew obsessed with a record of Mexican revolutionary songs, and played them over and over. His daughter, Barbara, took care of him during the day, and Wayne came over at night, in full makeup and costume from Without Reservations at RKO. “I’ll take my turn,” Wayne told Barbara as he trooped upstairs, where he found Ford wrapped in a bedsheet surrounded by empty bottles. The two men whiled away the hours talking, with the Mexican war songs grinding away; whenever the record ended, Ford would start it over again.
There was nothing to do but wait for the storm to run its course.
Without Reservations was an entertaining if overlong romantic comedy directed by Mervyn LeRoy that paired Wayne with Claudette Colbert. The premise is creative: an author (Colbert) writes a novel about a man named Mark Winston that becomes more of a movement than a book. (Ayn Rand, anyone?) The book is purchased for the movies, which leads to Cary Grant turning the part down in a funny guest appearance (Jack Benny also shows up unbilled). The studio starts looking for an unknown.
On the train to California, Colbert meets Wayne, who embodies all aspects of her fictional hero. (Wayne’s character is a rugged individualist who doesn’t believe in social engineering.) He’s asked to test for the movie, and his face assumes an expression of unbounded disgust. “An actor??!!” he exclaims. Eventually, the stubborn, uncorruptible American gets corrupted, but on his terms.
Throughout the movie, Wayne underplays the comedy, and he expresses a winning appreciation for his co-star—he drinks her in. He’s sexy, romantic, obtainable. On the other hand, although Colbert was an actress with something approaching perfect pitch, here she seems a little overly flustered for such a soigné creature, especially one outfitted by Adrian.
Without Reservations would be one of Wayne’s few overt attempts at a romantic comedy, and he acquits himself well. The audience enjoyed it, as did the studio and producers Jesse Lasky and Mervyn LeRoy—the profit topped $700,000. Wayne and Colbert liked each other a great deal; at the time, she was thinking about directing a picture, but hesitated because the producers wanted her to act in it as well.
“I guess what it really comes down to is that I didn’t have the guts,” she remembered. But Wayne thought she could direct, and he offered to work for her. “I knew he meant it,” Colbert said. “I really cherish that remark. I mean, from the he-man of all time.”
After years of push-pull across the U.S.-Mexican border, Wayne and Chata were finally married on January 17, 1946, at the Unity Presbyterian Church in Long Beach. Mary Ford and Olive Carey were matrons of honor, and Ward Bond was best man. Herbert Yates gave the bride away, and Wayne’s mother hosted the reception at the California Country Club.
John Ford boycotted the wedding, and he didn’t mince words with his surrogate son: “Why’d you have to marry that whore?” he asked Wayne. The subject had to be closed between them, but in time Wayne would realize the wisdom of Ford’s question.
The couple honeymooned at Waikiki Beach, where the newspapers were full of stories about their presence on the island. One day as Wayne and Chata were sunning themselves in front of the Royal Hawaiian, four sailors from John Rogers Air Station were taking a day of liberty. They spotted “a tall, handsome guy lying on a blanket beneath a palm tree and wearing sunshades and swim trunks.” Next to him was a good-looking brunette clad in a white one-piece bathing suit and wearing dark glasses. Two of the sailors were from Texas and South Carolina respectively, and weren’t about to say anything, but one was from New Jersey and he piped up, “Mr. Wayne, can we look at your wife?”
Wayne sat up, removed his sunglasses, stared, then smiled. He reached over to Chata, removed her sunglasses and said, “Sure, fellows, help yourselves. I kinda like to look at her myself.” He stood up, shook hands with the sailors and thanked them for their service.
For a time, the marriage seemed to be in rough equilibrium. As Bev Barnett’s backgrounder said, “She likes to drink; she liked Wayne’s friends; they were happy in bed.”
Michael Wayne would say that Chata was cute. Nice shape, pretty legs, good with the kids. “She was like a kid herself,” said Mike’s wife, Gretchen. “She drank like a man and loved to play cards, so that would have worked for Michael’s dad. But the problem would be that if he was out playing cards, Chata wanted to be out playing cards too. She wasn’t going to stay home and make bouquets. They never had any children; Michael’s dad said it was because she was too mean.”
Besides her presumed virtuosity in bed, Chata could match Wayne drink for drink, which made for a household with a high degree of volatility; one writer noted, “No one has ever accused Wayne of being shy in going after the things he wants . . . but he displays an incongruous timidity when it comes to insisting that Chata comply with his wishes.”
Aside from her alcohol intake, there were other warning signs. Wayne was always fastidious about his hygiene and clothing, but Chata cut her own hair, bought her own clothes, and applied her own makeup. “She sometimes looked a bit peculiar and out of it,” commented Mary St. John, Wayne’s longtime
secretary. Not only that, but she didn’t like to shave her legs, which bothered Wayne a great deal although he didn’t harp on it until she showed up at Charles Feldman’s house for a Sunday brunch wearing a white tennis skirt, which emphasized her hirsute lower half.
But the main problem was Chata’s temper, which got worse when she drank, which was most of the time. In late 1946, Wayne came into his Republic office with an ugly gash on his cheek. He sheepishly explained to Mary St. John that Chata had objected when Wayne wanted to leave a party the previous night. Chata was drunk, and when he picked her up and carried her to their car, she gouged his face.
Things got worse. Chata’s mother moved in, and she drank nearly as much as her daughter. The women had expected a life of glamour, but Wayne worked very hard; he was in a brutal tax bracket; and there wasn’t all that much left over at the end of the year. Chata began complaining to anyone who would listen that Wayne was obsessed with “thee beezness,” that he didn’t love her or sleep with her, he loved and slept with the pictures.
The drinking stepped up. Not just after six, but during the day. The actor Mike Mazurki’s wife, Jeannette, remembered drinking with Chata one night while their husbands played cards: “She didn’t speak much English and I recall she was quite pretty. I was 25 and a new bride then. I didn’t have any children, and it was still the honeymoon stage for me. She had some tequila. We talked, but you really had to listen because her English wasn’t very good. So we got plastered.”
Mazurki found Chata pleasant and well meaning while sober, “but when she’d get half-looped she’d get so jealous she’d start throwing tantrums. She was a real alcoholic, as was her mother.”
Bö Roos was forced into the role of mediator and Wayne spent a lot of time at his house trying to decompress after the arguments with Chata. Roos arranged reconciliations, then a second honeymoon in Hawaii, but not a long one. Duke had pictures to make.