by Scott Eyman
In one sense, it was Hughes’s picture, but on the set, Sternberg was in control. And Jules Furthman was Hughes’s messenger guy, a dear, sweet man with a porkpie hat. And he and Hughes ended up playing with that picture for seven years, so what had been innovative and new in terms of equipment and technology in terms of aerospace was old-hat. But whatever you think of the script, photographically it was very good.
Some idea of this exceedingly strange Cold War artifact can be gauged by its production history. Principal photography was done between October 1949 and February 1950. Additional scenes were shot between January 21 and February 9, 1951, and March 17 to April 2 of that same year. Aerial photography was done between August 30 and September 1, 1951, with additional aerial sequences shot by William Clothier between October 1951 and March 1953.
Clothier spent more than two hundred hours in the air and logged over thirty thousand miles while shooting 100,000 feet of Technicolor film in such locations as Edwards, Kelly, Eglin, Fargo, Great Falls, and Lowry Field Air Force bases, as well as March Field, and Hamilton Field in San Francisco. None other than Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane shown in the movie, as well as another plane for the drop and aerobatic sequences.
And when the picture was finally finished, Hughes sat on it.
In the summer of 1952, RKO’s distribution wing was desperately in need of something to distribute—Hughes had drastically cut back production—and announced the picture for September. But September came and went and there was still no Jet Pilot. Variety announced that the picture was being carried on the studio inventory at a cost of $3.9 million—a staggering amount for 1952.
By the time the picture was finally released in 1957—not by RKO, which had just gone out of business, but by Universal—the original budget of $1.4 million had probably quadrupled. Critics commented on the remarkably youthful appearances of its stars. Even though the film opened in more than four hundred theaters in one of the biggest releases of that era, audiences paid almost no attention—the picture had the stink of death about it.
It’s a strange picture, with strange billing: “Starring John Wayne, Janet Leigh, and the United States Air Force.” It’s played partially for comedy as a sort of airborne Ninotchka—at one point Wayne calls Leigh “a silly Siberian cupcake”—partially as an anticommunist tract, partially as a thriller. It’s unsuccessful in all aspects, although Wayne is reliably amusing when he gets flustered, and there’s a lot to be flustered about. At one point, Hughes dubs in the sound of jet whooshes every time Janet Leigh takes off a piece of clothing.
With all the overage required, Hughes paid Wayne $201,666.68 to make the picture. It was a typical piece of chaos theory on the part of the richest amateur filmmaker in history. During one break from the production, Hughes, his date Jean Peters—later his wife—and Wayne were in Las Vegas when Hughes refused to walk into the Desert Inn.
“Everybody will be looking at me!” he explained.
“You asshole!” said Wayne. “You’re with the most beautiful woman in the world! And John Wayne! And they’re gonna look at you?”
Despite the huge infusion of cash, which was going to come in handy very soon, Wayne doubted the part was worth it. During production, James Edward Grant cabled Wayne, “ACCORDING TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IF YOU JUST PAY NO ATTENTION IT WILL GO AWAY.”
At one point in 1949, opening a newspaper to the movie ads in Los Angeles was like looking at a John Wayne Film Festival. Red River was playing in Westwood, Wake of the Red Witch was playing in Hollywood, 3 Godfathers was in Beverly Hills, and Fort Apache was appearing elsewhere. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was in previews in Pasadena and bringing up the rear were reissues of Stagecoach and The Long Voyage Home. At the same time, some of the old Monogram pictures were already showing on the new invention called television.
The profusion of reissues was a function of a decade-long recession that hit the movie business in 1947. Movie attendance would plummet by 50 percent, four thousand theaters would go out of business, and the huge profits of World War II vanished. Mostly, this was because of television, but there was also a sense that the generation that had come back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific were finding the movies made under the restrictive Production Code a ridiculous evasion of the life it had seen firsthand.
The major studios coped by first reducing, then eliminating B movie production, which proved a godsend to fringe companies like Allied Artists—formerly Monogram—or (in a few years) American International. The studios also cut back on cartoons and newsreels and concentrated on making bigger and more expensive A pictures. For low-end talents, it got harder to make a living, but high-end talents were sellers in a market where the rest of the world was buying.
What made it remarkable was the concentrated quality of Wayne’s new pictures. Even Republic’s Wake of the Red Witch, which begins as The Sea Wolf and ends as Peter Ibbetson, with a strong dose of Reap the Wild Wind, has its haunting moments, as Gail Russell once again brings her strange, ethereal quality to the picture. Other actresses had to ramp up their aggression to come out on an equivalent basis with Wayne, but when Wayne worked with Russell he downshifted into a watchful swain who treated the delicate actress as if she might shatter.
This audience immersion in John Wayne would not hurt him; in most ways, he was immune from overexposure. When asked about what seemed to be hyperactivity, at least compared to most star rationing of a picture a year, or two every eighteen months, Wayne would explain, “To me, making a picture a year is like coming out of retirement every year, and that’s too hard on the nervous system. . . . For my money, nothing improves your work like work itself. I figure an actor, if he’s got any kind of role, should try to get better with each picture. The more pictures he makes, the more chance he’s got of achieving that.”
Mainstream papers such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune began to pay attention to Wayne. The Times quoted John Ford as saying Wayne’s popularity was simple: “Duke is the best actor in Hollywood. That’s all.”
Hedda Hopper quoted Wayne as saying his incessant activity was because he had to work for a living. “I don’t have a capital gains setup like some of these guys, and I’ve got two families to feed. My business manager tells me it costs me $2,600 a month. I don’t know where the money goes, but it’s an awful lot, and I’ve got to keep hopping from Republic to RKO to Argosy to make it.”
At this point, he had a deal with RKO for one picture annually, a similar deal with Warner Bros., and his Republic contract was still in force. Then there was John Ford, who always had right of first refusal on Wayne’s services. The Motion Picture Herald, which was doing a story on Wayne’s amazing ability to draw audiences at a time when the movie industry was hemorrhaging customers, noted that “Wayne talks less like an actor is supposed to than as a business man does.”
Wayne didn’t mind the reissues of the old Ford pictures, but he was uncomfortable with the Monogram westerns being exposed, pointing out that the movies were atrocious by the standards of 1949. Despite all that, the market seemed perfectly able to absorb as much John Wayne as there was to be had. “I hope he doesn’t kill himself with overwork,” said Ward Bond. “He used to say, ‘Let’s stretch out on a boat in the sun, tell a few lies and fish.’ He doesn’t have time to do that any more.”
After World War II, John Ford had taken the $300,000 he’d earned directing They Were Expendable and bought eight acres in Reseda he dubbed the Field Photo Farm. It served as a clubhouse/rehabilitation center for veterans of Ford’s unit, as well as damaged veterans who weren’t part of Ford’s operation.
Syd Kronenthal had been the supervisor of rehabilitation for the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles when he was hired to help Marlon Brando play a paraplegic in The Men. Kronenthal thought that Brando’s dedication was extreme and almost certainly excessive; he lived the part to such an extent that he defecated in his bed, just as paraplegics did.
Kronenthal spent months at the Field Photo Farm, w
orking with damaged veterans and watching the complex sociology of Ford’s extended family, which was often more benevolent than his actual family.
“When Ford’s daughter, Barbara, announced that she was marrying Robert Walker, Ford went at her in front of everybody,” remembered Kronenthal.
He thought Walker was a bum. While he was railing at her, she didn’t say much of anything. He berated her, she took it, he finished, then she left.
Ford wouldn’t get drunk at the Field Photo Farm, but the other guys got loaded. They were all very right-wing, and when they got loaded they’d start spewing anti-Semitic remarks. The worst of them was Victor McLaglen, and Ward Bond was anti-Semitic as hell. They either didn’t know I was Jewish or they forgot. I was just Syd, the supervisor of rehabilitation.
Wayne never said anything like that, but then he was close with Aaron Rosenberg, a producer who’d been an All-American at USC. Ford didn’t talk like that either. His pet at the Field Photo Farm was a guy named Herb Wolfe, a Jewish paraplegic.
Wayne, Bö Roos, and Red Skelton were partners in the Culver City Hotel, where the midgets had stayed when they were making The Wizard of Oz. The hotel was decrepit and Wayne thought it was a poor investment. “Krony,” he would ask Kronenthal, “how would you like to own a hotel?” Kronenthal begged off, but Wayne always made the place available for free if Kronenthal needed it for a fundraising event. “Anything I wanted, he would do.”
Kronenthal found that “Ford and Wayne were both very sensitive to veterans. I came to believe that Wayne had a little compulsion about not having gone into the service. It was the same with Joe DiMaggio, who I knew. Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, and Ted Williams signed up and went to war, but not DiMaggio.
“Wayne would sit and talk to the guys; he was very compatible, and he had a conscience. He didn’t shy away from anything. After talking to the guys, he would come over and ask me questions—did they have feelings below the chest, or below the waist? Could they have a normal relationship with a woman? I would usually have to say no, and he would say, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ.’ He was just appalled.”
After a few years of working at the Field Photo Farm, Kronenthal became recreation director in Culver City. Eventually, he helped Wayne out with the Culver City Hotel by putting him in touch with the YMCA, which bought it to use as a senior center. It’s still there.
In March 1950, Wayne was reelected president of the Motion Picture Alliance at the annual meeting at the American Legion building on Highland Avenue. Other officers serving with Wayne were Charles Coburn as first vice president, Hedda Hopper as second vice president, Morrie Ryskind as third vice president, and Clarence Brown as treasurer.
At the same time, he embarked on a series of movies that spun off the relentless persona of Red River. George Waggner, who wrote and directed a couple of minor Wayne vehicles (The Fighting Kentuckian and Operation Pacific) explained how screenwriters made Wayne a sympathetic heavy: “The trick is to make him seem ruthless in his pursuit of a mission, but at the same time fix it so his fans will sympathize with the urge that drives him. It’s also up to his writer to stick in a plot gimmick that will show him the error of his ways before the house lights go on.”
As Waggner well knew, these characters were comfortable for Wayne to play because he was himself a man of relentless focus, perfectly capable of achieving any objective he set, no matter how long it took. Like, for instance, the next John Wayne Production. Or The Alamo.
A few years after World War II, Wayne’s hair began to thin out; by 1950 he was wearing a toupee. He wasn’t vain about it and ignored the condition offscreen. There are hundreds of family snapshots and home movies of a balding Wayne lying around like a lazy bear, or even out in public, although at those times he often wore a hat or baseball cap. Without the toupee, he looked older, and, somehow, less like John Wayne.
The toupee symbolized the transition he hoped to make in his career—to a position where he wouldn’t have to bother wearing one at all. In 1950, he launched another production at Republic, this one for a promising young writer-director named Budd Boetticher, who had written a script that Republic was inauspiciously calling The Bullfighter and the Lady. As a very young man, Boetticher had been a bullfighter and he was enthralled with the drama of the corrida. He devised a script about an American who enlists the aid of Mexico’s greatest matador to help him become a bullfighter. No movie had ever caught the world of bullfighting, he believed; indeed, no movie would ever catch it better than the one John Wayne was to produce.
But it wasn’t easy.
“[Wayne] heard about the screenplay that I had written,” remembered Boetticher. “I met James Edward Grant, who eventually became the head of Alcoholics Anonymous in Los Angeles, and you have to really be a drunk to get that far. Duke hired him to write, in seventy-eight pages, the story of my life. He might as well have written the story about tennis.” Wayne put Grant to work on supervising a rewrite of Boetticher’s script. Boetticher diplomatically cabled Grant on April 26, 1950, “DEAR JAMES HAVE JUST FINISHED SCRIPT EXCITED ABOUT SOME DISAPPOINTED ABOUT SOME ELSE. FEEL IT IMPERATIVE THAT YOU JOIN ME OLD BOY.”
“IF YOU ARE DISAPPOINTED I AM DELIGHTED,” replied Grant, who was irritated by what he believed were Boetticher’s affectations. On the back of another telegram from Boetticher, Grant typed out a scathing response: “DISAPPOINTED ARE YOU? DO YOU RECALL HEARING EACH SCENE READ? END QUESTIONS BEGIN ANALYSIS. YOU WROTE TELEGRAM WHEN SOMEBODY GUESS WHO WAS LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER AND YOU WERE ANXIOUS TO ACT LIKE JOHN FORD WHOM THANK GOD YOU AIN’T. MEET ME ELEVENTH AT AIRPORT.”
Boetticher resisted Grant’s changes and shot his own script. “Duke and I disagreed about a lot of things,” said Boetticher shortly before his death. “Everyone who really knows me knows that I truly love John Wayne. But if they know me well, they’ll also realize I really hated his guts.”
With Wayne hovering, with Jimmy Grant and John Ford circling, Boetticher somehow managed to shoot a good picture in Mexico, with excellent performances from Robert Stack and Gilbert Roland. For Republic, it was a medium-budget picture—about $400,000. Wayne threw in what he remembered as “close to $50,000 of my own money to insure it being made well.”
Boetticher acknowledged that without Wayne the picture would never have been made, but Wayne also interfered, sometimes overtly, sometimes after the fact. According to Boetticher, on the first day of shooting Wayne walked right in front of Boetticher, called “Cut” and began redirecting the actors, grabbing Robert Stack by the lapels and telling him, “Jesus Christ, Bob, if you’re going to say the line, say it with some balls.”
Called on it by Boetticher, Wayne backed off and stayed away until the last day of the shoot, when he showed up for the wrap party. “He consumed half a bottle of tequila and a full bottle, which he gave to me. We locked arms and began drinking. Duke was so drunk he fell off a veranda into a bush. Chata was with him, and we all went to a bullfight together. Then Jimmy Grant turned up with eleven whores. Chata turned to Duke and said, ‘If you even smile at those girls, I’m going to hit you.’ ”
Wayne didn’t like Boetticher’s cut of the film, which ran 124 minutes. “Wayne didn’t believe that we had a good picture,” said Boetticher. “They [Wayne, Grant, and Herbert Yates] referred to it as ‘That Mexican Hassle.’ ” Wayne showed the picture to John Ford, who thought that the relationship between Robert Stack and Gilbert Roland was “a lot of chi-chi shit,” after which Ford and Wayne cut thirty-seven minutes out of the film.
At any length, it’s a fine picture, although the longer version is better, but Republic was not the studio to handle a serious picture about bullfighting—or anything else. The Bullfighter and the Lady came out at the same time as a larger-budgeted picture by a higher-profile director (Robert Rossen) called The Brave Bulls. Wayne proudly remembered that Time magazine gave the Boetticher picture the better review, “although, naturally, they failed to give me any credit.” Wayne was already developing the
suspicion that nothing connected with him was going to be respected by the eastern journalistic establishment. Mostly, he was correct.
The Bullfighter and the Lady was the beginning of a difficult, mutually wary relationship between Wayne and Boetticher that lasted for twenty-five years. Wayne respected Boetticher’s talent, but the younger man was too much of an alpha male to be entirely accepted by Wayne, who certainly fell under that category himself and would have appreciated some deference from a director to whom he had given a break.
“Duke couldn’t box,” remembered Boetticher. “But . . . he was one of the strongest men I’ve ever seen in my life. And when we were drinking, he’d really hate my guts. He thought I was cocky and wasn’t as good as I thought I was.
“One time we were standing in front of a big new Electrolux refrigerator which was as tall as Duke. And he reared back to hit me . . . and telegraphed his punch. I was a boxer and slipped to one side and he hit my refrigerator and sprung the door. I gave the refrigerator to [actor] Walter Reed and that was the great thing in Walter’s house—[the imprint of] Duke’s fist was implanted in the refrigerator.”
Gail Russell remained a part of the extended Wayne filmmaking family. Colin Grant, James Edward Grant’s son, remembered attending one of Wayne’s parties at the Encino house in 1952. Russell was there, too drunk to drive home. Colin was delegated with the task and took her to her house off Ventura Boulevard.
Colin spent a lot of time around Wayne that year. He was at the Encino house shooting pool one day when they decided to go to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Wayne was sporting a big Taft for President button and told Colin he could drive his new Cadillac. It was a lot of car for a young boy, but Wayne told him to take the Cahuenga Pass and gun it.
They arrived at the hotel in one piece. Once they were seated, Wayne called his office staff to come over for lunch as well. At that point, a stranger was attracted by the Taft button and introduced himself to Wayne. The stranger explained that he was a campaign manager who had elected the first Republican in thirty years in the state of Arizona, but he was going to support Eisenhower because “he can get elected and Taft can’t.” His name, he told Wayne, was Barry Goldwater. The two men shook hands. They parted as friends, and would become even friendlier in coming years.