John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Wayne was highly conscious of his coalescing screen image. He would occasionally compare himself to Robert Montgomery, who had carved out a pleasant, innocuous “tennis, anyone” career at MGM until he grew weary of it and decided to change his image by playing a psychopath in Night Must Fall.

  “He won an Oscar, but he lost his audience,” said Wayne. “He was wonderful in the film but he fooled the people who had been going to his movies because he was ‘a nice, bright young kid.’ Suddenly they said, ‘No, he’s a dirty, miserable killer, a maniac.’ [Audiences] become accustomed to you as an actor as they would a friend, and . . . you can surprise them but you can’t fool them.”

  There are several problems with Wayne’s premise. Although he was nominated for Night Must Fall, Montgomery didn’t win the Oscar—Spencer Tracy did, for Captains Courageous. And the public response was hardly catastrophic; Montgomery’s starring career continued without interruption for another thirteen years, through World War II and beyond, including the aforementioned strong turn in They Were Expendable. At that point, Montgomery got the directing bug, which increasingly occupied his time.

  Wayne was far more disturbed by Montgomery’s decision to play a killer than the public was—it was the sort of stunt casting in which he always refused to indulge. It was around this point that he began to think of the audience as an extended family and would turn down any part that he felt might violate their expectations of him.

  Wayne’s next picture was critically important to him in every way, for reasons that become clear with the opening title: “A John Wayne Production.” The Angel and the Badman was an interesting choice of material—a largely nonviolent western. The plot—a gunslinger is reformed by the love of a Quaker girl—and much of the development harks back not to John Ford but to the chiseled biblical morality of William S. Hart.

  Wayne plays Quirt Evans, a wounded gunfighter on the run who providentially falls into the healing hands of a Quaker homestead, personified by Gail Russell radiating serenity. After his fairly indiscriminate behavior as a young man, Wayne was cleaning up his act, but if he didn’t have an affair with Russell, he seems to have had a crush on her. He would pay tribute to her as having “wonderful possibilities; her eyes are very expressive. But I think her home studio [Paramount] has let her down in not giving her proper grooming and teaching her to be at her best, that is, how to handle herself. If it weren’t for that handicap, I’m sure she’d be one of our big stars.”

  Years later, after Russell died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-six, Wayne would get agitated at the very mention of her name. “Gail was just such a beautiful young girl that some of those fucking sons of bitches at the studios had taken advantage of her. You know about the old casting couch? She’d been there a number of times. Well, it didn’t happen with me. I gave her the part on her own merits. She was one person I never shouted at because I knew she was insecure. She had an anxiety problem, which I understood because I’d had that when I was just a kid. I felt all she needed was someone to show her some kindness.”

  Wayne’s secretary, Mary St. John, didn’t think that Wayne and Russell had an affair, and neither did Mike or Gretchen Wayne. “In the family gossip, I never heard that they had an affair,” said Gretchen. “What I did hear was that he felt sorry for her. She was really beautiful. I know that Michael swore that nothing happened, and Michael and Pat were on location when Angel and the Badman was shot in the summer.”

  Angel and the Badman revolves around its polar opposites in an effective way, although it’s slightly hampered by Republic’s habit of shooting many exteriors in the studio in front of a process screen. The mix of character and action is uneven, but the film has charm, takes the idea of nonviolence seriously, and, for a first film by director James Edward Grant, is fairly well made.1

  “It sure changes you when you’re the producer as well as the star,” Wayne observed in an interview on the set. “I used to be a little vague about when I reported to the studio mornings, but now I’m ahead of time. I know all my lines. I love all the other actors in the troupe who don’t blow lines. I think we’ve got a swell story—I found it myself. I even think it’s got a message. Anyhow, it’s one I wanted to do. James Edward Grant wrote it, and the only way he’d sell it to me was for me to give him the chance to direct it. So I did. As a producer, I want to give new people chances. If they click, I’ll feel that it will be a sort of repayment for the brand of friendship and trust that Jack Ford has given me.”

  The reviews were, by and large, excellent. Variety said, “John Wayne gets off to a spectacularly successful stint in his producing-starring deal at Republic . . . classes as a western but could aptly be called romantic drama . . . under any tag it is top quality film . . . and is a sure BO hit anywhere.” Philip K. Scheuer wrote that the film was “very probably Republic’s sweetest western. . . . John Wayne, who stars in it with Gail Russell, also produced it and on both counts he has done himself proud . . . told with sentiment, spunk and a leavening humor as well as commendable insight.” The film had been budgeted at $948,035, but ended up costing $1.3 million. Domestic rentals alone were almost $1.8 million, but Republic claimed it lost $249,784 on the picture.

  Angel and the Badman was Wayne’s first collaboration with Grant, a former Chicago newspaperman who had all the virtues and vices of that largely vanished breed. Born in 1902, Grant was slightly stocky, very articulate, highly gregarious, generally alcoholic. By the age of twenty-one he had a column called “It’s a Racket” about organized crime. He began writing stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Redbook, and the like, right on down the periodical food chain to Detective Fiction Weekly, where he wrote a gem called “Dames Are Such Suckers.”

  A couple of Grant’s stories were adapted by Poverty Row studios, but he struck it big when MGM bought one of his stories and turned it into a Spencer Tracy–Myrna Loy vehicle entitled Whipsaw. Irving Thalberg suggested that Grant wander around the lot and pay particular attention to directors and editors at work. Thalberg was one of the few Hollywood people whom Grant liked: “He was the first man in Hollywood—in fact at that time he was probably the only one—who treated writers with respect.”

  By that time, Grant had already acquired the drinking habits that would mark most of his life. “All the offices had bars,” he remembered of MGM in those days. “You started drinking when you got to the studio, and didn’t stop until you went to bed. If you went to bed. One writer I knew had a desk with eight drawers. Seven of them had nothing in them but liquor.”

  After writing and directing Angel and the Badman, Jimmy Grant would, with occasional time out for alcohol-fueled explosions, shadow Wayne for the rest of his life as a house writer—an official or unofficial rewrite man, who could write dialogue that fit Wayne’s screen character comfortably.

  “In my dad’s opinion, Jimmy was the best writer for him,” said Patrick Wayne. “My dad could just say his dialogue. Jimmy was a great character—a great friend, a smoker, a drinker. Eventually he stopped smoking and drinking, but by then it was too late. It was a great social and professional relationship.”

  A sample of Grant’s humor is found in a mock studio bio he composed for himself a few years after he met Wayne: “James Edward Grant was born in a log cabin. . . . Splitting logs by day, he studied by night by the light of a log fire; this left very few logs for sale, so they were very poor.

  “While clerking in a village store, he walked seven miles one night to return a three-penny overcharge to a lady customer; the broad did not succumb to this gambit, so he walked back the seven miles, unbanged.

  “During this period, he wrote Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ ”

  Shared political conservatism was yet another bond between the two. Grant and Wayne became not only best friends, but traveling companions; over the years, there would be trips to Mexico, South America, and Europe. “After my dad died, Duke said my old man was the best friend he ever had,” said Grant’s son
Colin. “He was Irish, a storyteller. They thought alike politically, and my dad could write dialogue that sounded like Duke could say it and it sounded real.”

  Most movies are adaptations, but Grant preferred to write original scripts. His working methods were those of an old newspaperman. He wouldn’t outline, wouldn’t organize. When the story was complete in his head and not before, he would get up between five or six in the morning, sit down at his electric typewriter—Grant was always one of the first with any new gizmo—and bang out the script with two fingers in a couple of weeks.

  Grant was a good golfer—around a ten handicap—and was always up for chess or skirt chasing. “He was always playing around with somebody,” said Colin. “My mother was great, a real lady, but I can’t remember her ever hassling the old man about it. Once in a great while they would fight, but not much. Of course, she knew. Somebody once asked Robert Mitchum how he had stayed married to one woman for forty years in Hollywood. ‘A lack of imagination,’ he said.”

  Grant knew how to write scenes that Wayne could play. Tom Kane, who would become Wayne’s story editor, outlined a classic Wayne setup: Wayne is camped by a river, his horse beside him. He’s making some coffee. His horse snorts and Wayne says, “I see him.” A man on a horse rides into the scene and starts to cross the river.

  “I wouldn’t cross if I were you,” says Wayne.

  “Why not? Afraid it’ll muddy up your coffee water?”

  The man rides into the river, which turns out to be quicksand and both horse and rider struggle to get to the other side. Wayne never looks up, never offers help.

  Fade out.

  Wayne rides into town. The man on horseback is in the saloon playing cards. Wayne and he exchange glances, and Wayne smiles knowingly.

  The essence of the emerging Wayne character was strength and a knowledge of the way the world works, communicated in as few words as possible. The trick was to do it without overasserting the actor’s natural dominance. Grant fit right in with Wayne’s core group, as he was cut from the same cloth: hard-drinking, conservative, pugnacious, and—mostly—Irish.

  Around the same time Grant and Wayne made Angel and the Badman, Wayne became fascinated by the story of the Alamo, which fell to the Mexican dictator General Santa Anna on March 6, 1836, after a siege of thirteen days. Santa Anna referred to the battle as “a small affair,” but it had massive ramifications—Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto as a direct consequence, which resulted in Texas’s independence from Mexico and, eventually, its statehood.

  Wayne saw the Alamo as more than another one of the presumably glorious martyrdoms that history throws up every so often—Thermopylae, Masada. He saw the Alamo as a moral tale about America’s perennial struggle for freedom from authoritarian influence.

  The movies had dabbled in Alamo stories several times in the silent days and in Man of Conquest, a 1939 Republic picture with Richard Dix as Sam Houston. But they had all used the battle the way westerns used the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—as a convenient hook on which to hang melodramatic plot machinations. Wayne would conceive of an Alamo movie as more than a movie, more than folklore. It would be a rallying cry.

  In 1936, Wayne had been just another western star at Republic, but by 1946 he was a certified movie star, with a production deal and control over his own movies. He believed he knew who was responsible. “I’d like to get up on housetops and shout out what I owe to [John Ford],” Wayne told Louella Parsons in 1946. “I simply owe to him every mouthful I eat, every dollar I’ve got, and practically every bit of happiness I know, that’s all.” This feeling of indebtedness never changed.

  Michael Wayne would come to believe that his father would have made it anyway—he was so determined, so focused. But Wayne knew that luck matters as much as talent, as much as determination, as much as anything. Wayne had executed the part of the Ringo Kid beautifully, but it was a great part in a great film—the showcase had made all the difference.

  Wayne’s on-the-record references to Ford over the years are consistently adoring, although in conversation he could be considerably more objective. But Ford was always a grudging personality, a father figure who maintained authority by withholding overt displays of affection, at least as far as outsiders were concerned. Gene Autry enjoyed telling a story about running into Ford in the steam room of the Lakeside Golf Club.

  “I went in and he happened to be sitting there. So I was in the next day and he was there again. So I said, ‘You gonna make a picture, John?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna make a picture with ol’ Meathead.’ I said ‘Who’s that?’ and he said, ‘Wayne. I’m gonna make a picture with Wayne.’ ”

  Despite the condescension, Wayne believed that Ford was the ultimate in savvy and artistry. “He’s a man whose judgment you can trust implicitly. When I’m working under him all I ask is ‘What kind of clothes do you want me to wear?’ The rest I leave up to him. He directs instinctively, rather than sticking to a book of set rules. If a scene comes off in a different manner than he’d planned, he’s liable to say ‘Print it!’ He knows quality when he sees it.”

  Wayne had been making movies for more than fifteen years and had developed theories of moviemaking that would never really change, theories that in large part stemmed from ten years of making crummy pictures rather than five or six years of making quality pictures. He defined the difference between B pictures and A pictures as the difference between action and reaction, between a quick punch to the jaw and the expression on a face. Wayne preferred to emphasize the eyes over the fist.

  “One man should serve as producer and director. Making a film is like painting a picture. If you were having your portrait painted, you wouldn’t have one artist do your eyes, another your nose and still a third your mouth. That’s why I think, as nearly as possible, production control should be centered in the talents of a single individual.”

  Because he had worked in both large and small parts, he believed in the ensemble rather than the relentless star close-up. “Give the scene to whom it belongs, even if it’s an extra. If I call a guy a bad name the audience is not interested in my reaction, which is already known, but his. So give him the camera angle.”

  As for content, he wanted depth of character when he could find it. “You go to a good track meet and see some fine action; you’re amused for the time being, but the effect doesn’t stick with you. A conversation with George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, will.” What he looked for, he said, was “an unusual viewpoint on the familiar.”

  And there was one other thing: Wayne was beginning to say that if he ever washed out as an actor, “I wouldn’t mind directing.” He never washed out as an actor, but, as dozens of directors would find out, that didn’t stop him from directing anyway.

  When FDR died in April 1945, his aura of spiritual and political authority died with him, and in the 1946 elections the Republicans took control of Congress. That April the Motion Picture Alliance began publishing a monthly newsletter entitled The Vigil. The first issue featured informational questions and answers:

  Q: Why not Fascism?

  A: We haven’t yet found any Fascist Front organizations in our sector of the American scene, which is motion pictures. We’re watching for them. If any Fascist groups do appear, we’ll be in there swinging at them. . . .

  Q: Are [there any Communist Front organizations] presently active?

  A: Active indeed.

  Q: What do you propose to do about it?

  A: Inform you. It’s a long list, but in time, you’ll have the name of every one of our local Communist Front organizations, what it is, what it is doing, where it came from, and where it is going to go.

  The Motion Picture Alliance helped bring about the first wave of congressional investigations of the movie industry in 1947, facilitated by Eric Johnston, who had taken over the Motion Picture Association of America from Will Hays in 1945. Johnston declared, “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads. We�
�ll have no more films that show the seamy side of American life.”

  In May 1947, J. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.) the new chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, came to Los Angeles and set up shop at the Biltmore Hotel, where he conducted preliminary interviews with many witnesses who would later be categorized as “friendly.” Thomas, a fierce enemy of the New Deal, asked for names from the FBI’s lists of suspected subversives. “Expedite,” J. Edgar Hoover wrote on Thomas’s letter. “I want to extend every assistance to this committee.”

  Most of the witnesses who testified at the Biltmore were members of the Motion Picture Alliance: Robert Taylor, James Kevin McGuinness, Adolphe Menjou, Richard Arlen. Jack Warner also testified, naming every person on his payroll that he suspected of being a Communist.

  Some of the testimony leaked—Rupert Hughes reported that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists” and Ginger Rogers’s mother testified that her daughter had refused to speak one obviously Communistic line: “Share and share alike.”2

  The congressman returned to Washington and a nervous summer silence descended on Hollywood. At the end of the summer, it was announced that HUAC would open hearings on the “Hollywood situation” on September 23, 1947.

  While all this was going on, Ward Bond was extremely busy; always in demand as a character actor, he now began to function as a self-appointed Inspector Javert, checking out the anticommunist bona fides of various actors, writers, and directors. Bond was capable of either clearing suspects or hurling them into the darkness. In 1947 Anthony Quinn had a part in a film fall through at the last minute. Quinn was a member of the Actor’s Lab, an offshoot of the Group Theatre, where Morris Carnovsky moderated the classes. The Alliance considered the Actor’s Lab a clubhouse for Communists, and someone told Quinn that he needed to be cleared of subversion. “See Ward Bond,” he was told.

  Quinn made an appointment and showed up at Bond’s house, but there didn’t seem to be anyone home. Calling out, he heard a voice from the back of the house: “Yeah, Tony, I wanna talk to you. I’m in the john, come on in.”