John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  The charge against Russell particularly infuriated Wayne, because he felt she was blameless. “I took her home from a set party because she had no other way of getting home. . . . Since when is it a crime to be gallant?” Russell’s version of the same event: Wayne and James Edward Grant had given her a $500 bonus for her work on Angel and the Badman. “John took me home after the party. He had celebrated too much and apologized to my mother for his condition. He called a taxi. My brother helped him into the taxi and he left about 1 A.M. The next morning he sent my mother a box of flowers with a note of apology for any inconvenience he might have caused her.” Russell said she was considering a lawsuit against Chata.

  Wayne testified that Chata regularly drank herself into a stupor and made his and everybody else’s life miserable. Wayne said that he had gotten a call at four in the morning. “Duke, please get up here and get your wife, she is dead drunk.” When he did nothing, he got another call at 5:30. “Duke will you come over here and get this woman out of my house?”

  Wayne also testified that he had found out that Nicky Hilton had spent a week at his house. Entered into evidence was a sheet of paper on which Chata had doodled “Esperanza Hilton,” “Chata and Nick,” “Chata Hilton,” and “Mrs. Nick Hilton.” When he was asked about his reactions to his wife’s doodlings, he replied, “I went into the bathroom and vomited.”

  Things were clearly accelerating toward mutual assured destruction, which seemed fine with both parties. “I should have my day in court,” Wayne told reporters. “She has done all she can do. If the case was settled now, people would think it was because of what she has said.”

  Finally, on October 28, mutual victory was declared, and both parties were granted a divorce, because, said the exhausted judge, “it seemed eminently proper.” The divorce terms were heavy. Wayne was obligated to pay Chata a total of $470,000—$150,000 up front, $20,000 to clear various debts, and $50,000 a year for six years. Chata signed quit-claims on two homes—Wayne’s residence at 4750 Louise Avenue in Encino and the house Chata had been living in at 4735 Tyrone Avenue in Van Nuys.

  Shortly after the divorce was granted, Mary St. John called Tom Kane one Sunday and asked if he had any plans. It seemed that Wayne’s lawyers had worked out a lump sum payment to Chata of $375,000 that would wipe out all his obligations. They needed someone they could trust to lug the cash down to Mexico. A couple of other people went instead of Kane, but that money, and the savings it represented of $100,000, was the end of Wayne’s relationship with Chata, who continued drinking until her early death in March 1961.

  Tom Kane wondered about Wayne’s reaction to his ex-wife’s death and asked George Coleman, Wayne’s driver. Coleman reported that Wayne never said anything about her death—there was no response whatever.

  Wayne’s vulnerability to an inappropriate, obviously predatory female like Chata when he was already middle-aged indicates a basic naïveté in his character. That character was formed early, as was his belief system. He was a hard-smoking, hard-drinking man by college, a conservative by the Depression, and his attitudes never altered by a millimeter. He tried marijuana but it didn’t do anything for him, tried opium but it didn’t affect him.

  After the divorce from Chata was final in October 1954, Wayne married Pilar a month later. They would have three children: Aissa in 1956, John Ethan in 1962, and Marisa in 1966. Their mother was over twenty-five years younger than their father.

  By the time Hondo finished shooting, public interest in 3-D had begun to fall off. Among other things, it was very difficult to maintain precise synchronization between two projectors running two reels of film, and if there was as much as a frame or two difference between the two projectors, the result would be audience eyestrain and headaches. Further complicating matters was the September 1953 premiere of The Robe in CinemaScope, an anamorphic widescreen process that didn’t replicate 3-D, but did excite audiences the way the 70mm projection of The Big Trail had more than twenty years before.

  Hondo was quickly edited and trade-screened in November. A studio minion reported back to Jack Warner: “Hondo screening last night drew excellent reaction. . . . These people plainly enjoyed the film and their appreciation and the good word they gave the picture at its conclusion seemed genuine. Picture played well throughout with no out of place laughs. [Geraldine] Page being accepted okay.”

  The night of the Hondo preview Wayne, Bob Fellows, Jimmy Grant, and Tom Kane were at Lucey’s restaurant, adjacent to Paramount. It became apparent that Wayne was no longer listening to the conversation. Everybody followed Wayne’s gaze and saw a teenaged Mike Wayne escorting his mother into the restaurant.

  “That’s the finest woman I’ve ever known,” Wayne said. He would never forgive himself for selfishly blundering into divorce, especially considering how his second marriage turned out.

  In order to maximize revenue, Warners announced that Hondo would be available in conventional prints as well as 3-D. Hondo was released at the end of November 1953, and was an enormous hit in both formats. Produced for $1.32 million, it returned worldwide rentals of $5.9 million—one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

  Contrary to the general belief that it played most of its engagements in conventional 2-D, Hondo seems to have been among the last 3-D films to be widely exhibited in that format. Until February 1954, almost all bookings of Hondo were in 3-D; after that, it began playing smaller suburban theaters and drive-ins that were not equipped for 3-D. It was the second-highest-grossing 3-D film of the 1950s, after Warners’ House of Wax.

  The film begins with an arresting, quintessential Wayne image: a lone man carrying a saddle, accompanied only by his dog, walking out of the desert. Wayne is lean and looks spectacular. (“I was physically and mentally at my best when I was 45,” he would say decades later.)

  Hondo Lane is an Army scout who has an uneasy relationship with creatures with two legs, a marginally easier one with creatures with four legs. “Sam’s independent,” he says of the dog. “He doesn’t need anybody. I want him to stay that way. It’s a good way to be.” Self-reliance is the keynote of his belief system; he’s a libertarian: “I let people do what they want to do,” he says.

  Hondo doesn’t own Sam, but has more of a partnership with him. He appraises the Indians as having “a good way of life, but it’s gone now.” End of discussion. You get the feeling that if Sam were to get a better offer, it would be fine with Hondo.

  But Hondo is also the story of how a man who thinks he doesn’t need anybody realizes that he just might need a family. He finds one ready-made after he has no choice but to kill the husband of Angie Lowe, a sturdily unglamorous frontier wife.

  “I am fully aware that I am a homely woman, Mr. Lane,” says Geraldine Page (playing Angie), who wasn’t homely at all, just not a prodigious beauty, which in Hollywood means you’re homely. The line might seem cruel if it wasn’t part of the overall clinical nature of Hondo—the character as well as the film. It’s why the film is probably the best movie Wayne ever made that wasn’t directed by John Ford or Howard Hawks.

  Page, who is as out of her element as her character, is one of the reasons the film works as well as it does. If Maureen O’Hara had come striding furiously out of a sod hut, the narrative would have been obvious, but Page gives the film an emotional credibility that would have been lacking if the part was more conventionally cast.

  James Edward Grant’s primary flaw as a writer was a lack of subtlety—he tended to clobber story or character points with a sledgehammer—but the script for Hondo is not just lean and epigrammatic, it’s also graceful. Grant expertly communicates the mingled attraction and repulsion Angie feels for the Indian chief Vittorio, played by the Australian actor Michael Pate. He also captures the respect between Hondo and Vittorio—two men bound by a ferocious, mutually shared sense of honor.

  The film runs a lean eighty-three minutes—a short running time minimized reel changes, which was important in a dicey system like early 3-D. The probl
ems that plagued the production are occasionally obvious—some shots have a fuzzy focus, and the heat of the location was made worse by fill lights used to fully illuminate faces for 3-D effect.

  Shortly after Hondo was released, Mad magazine came out with a parody of the movie. Bob Morrison, Tom Kane, and Mike Wayne were sitting in the office chortling at the magazine when Wayne walked by. He looked at the magazine and said, “There’s nothing funny about this. You guys make your living on western films.”

  So much for Mad magazine; so much for laughter. Wayne generally enjoyed poking fun at his own image, but could get touchy when other people did it. “He was very tenacious about protecting his identity as a western, macho he-man,” said the photographer Phil Stern, who became a good friend for a number of years. “He would not allow anyone to make fun of that except himself.”

  As part of the promotion for Hondo, Wayne made what seems to have been his first extensive television appearance other than a brief bit on Art Linkletter’s House Party. Wayne appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour in October 1953. The show was a big-budget, all-star spectacular with revolving hosts: Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Donald O’Connor, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello.

  Wayne’s episode is gleefully under-rehearsed, rather in the manner of the later Dean Martin show. Wayne comes on and looks thoughtful while a voice-over tells us his thoughts à la Strange Interlude: “Why does [Durante] want to see me? Probably wants me to be on his television show. Why did Gary Cooper have to be out of town?”

  Later in the skit, after a long pause, Durante asks him, “Who’s got the next line, you or me?” Wayne breaks up and says, “You! We gotta work together.”

  Throughout the show, Wayne carries on manfully even though he seems to have only the vaguest idea of what he’s supposed to be doing, which turns out to be singing a little, then switching his body language to the feminine when his voice becomes a soprano. The critics weren’t impressed—Variety’s review said, “[Wayne] was unsure of himself and awkward in his lines and movements but Durante covered his nervousness by making a few fumbles with him. But with JD a goofed line is always good for a big laugh.”

  During that same trip to New York, he made an appearance on the Milton Berle show, during which he insisted that he was not one of those actors who go on TV just to plug a new movie. Every time he turned around, there was a big electric sign on his pants flashing HONDO.

  “It got big laughs, but I felt embarrassed, kind of humiliated” said Wayne in retrospect. “I thought I had made a fool of myself. I felt I was basically a movie actor. I didn’t belong in television.” Wayne didn’t feel secure playing comedy unless he had rehearsed it with a director he trusted. That, and TV’s habit of burying the director in the control room a mile away from the actors, unnerved Wayne.

  Besides that, there was the issue of prestige; at this point, TV had the aura of the B movies in which he had been mired for a long, long decade.

  Wayne-Fellows was set up as a complete studio operation. Aside from associate-producer/brother-of-the-star Bob Morrison, the company had its own art director (Al Ybarra), production manager (Nate Edwards), and cameramen (Archie Stout and William Clothier).

  Clothier had worked for Bill Wellman as far back as Wings in 1927. John Ford had offered Clothier a lieutenant’s commission in his unit during the war, but Clothier had taken a captaincy in the Air Force instead, where he shot The Memphis Belle for William Wyler. Unusually, Ford didn’t hold the rejection against Clothier and hired him to shoot second unit on Fort Apache, where he told him he was “too good to be a second cameraman.”

  Wayne would hire Clothier as a cameraman for reasons both personal and professional. “Bill Clothier was like my father,” said Michael Wayne. “He was independent, wasn’t a joiner. For a long time he didn’t belong to [the American Society of Cinematographers], and to get nominated for an Oscar you had to be a member. But Bill could do anything you wanted. He could get beautiful shots and keep to a schedule. A lot of cameramen take days to get their shots, but that’s not filmmaking, that’s waiting for shots.”

  In 1953, Wayne told reporters that in three years’ time he intended to be producing four pictures a year and starring in only one. He was even signing contract players—James Arness, for instance. By that October, he was angling to sign Ronald Colman to star in The High and the Mighty.

  Wayne had adopted some of John Ford’s production grace notes for his own; as on Ford’s films, Danny Borzage would serenade the cast and crew with his accordion during breaks. Otherwise, Wayne demanded a high standard of professionalism. “The men around me are doers, not talkers,” he said. “I won’t tolerate a free loader.” Unless, of course, the freeloader happened to be named Bob Steele, Grant Withers, or Bruce Cabot, who could turn the Wayne-Fellows offices into something resembling fraternity row.

  Wayne quickly found out that producing was a lot of work, not to mention a lot of hassles, most of which couldn’t be delegated. When Plunder of the Sun got under way, Bob Fellows told him, “We’ve got a little problem here with [Glenn] Ford.” (Wayne was always having problems with people named Ford . . .)

  It seems that Ford had asked, “What do you people plan on giving me for a present when the picture’s over?” This was an ominous question coming from a star who had a reputation for being extremely tight with his money. “What’s he mean?” asked Wayne, who came from a tradition that said your paycheck was the only gift that mattered.

  Fellows went on to explain that Ford wanted some sort of offering indicating the beloved status he had within the company, and Fellows had a sinking feeling that it was supposed to be a major offering. “Well,” sighed Wayne, “we don’t want to start a picture with an unhappy actor. Ask him what he wants. Give it to him.”

  Fellows went back to Ford, holding his breath during the conversation. What if he wanted a yacht? But Ford had decided he wanted a 16mm camera for home movies.

  After the picture was finished, Wayne-Fellows had to send somebody over to Ford’s house to get his wardrobe back. Evidently the camera was insufficient.

  The money continued to roll in . . . and roll right back out. Besides the Culver City Hotel, Bö Roos and Wayne now owned a piece of a tennis club in Beverly Hills and some oil wells in Texas. Wayne also started a shrimp business in Panama with Roberto Arias, the husband of Margot Fonteyn, and there was an import-export business in Peru, called Pasador—Spanish for shoestring.

  On those infrequent occasions when he wasn’t making a movie, Wayne lived a life of relaxed conviviality. At John Ford’s house, there would be parties, and Wayne would have to sing for his supper, which was the occasion for much merriment because Wayne had to pretend he couldn’t sing. “He had to sing purposely off-key,” said Maureen O’Hara, “because that’s what Ford would enjoy. And everybody would scream with laughter. Duke would sing ‘Mary’s a Grand Old Name,’ and seeing him stand there hat in hand, with Ford making signs to listen for whenever he went off-key was all part of the game.

  “Mary Ford would roll her eyes to the sky and say, ‘Lord, we’re gonna have an all-Irish night.’ She enjoyed it but always pretended not to, and overfed us all. Mary was a lovely, lovely, lovely lady. She took a lot of guff from him. Most every time I made a film for Ford, my name would be ‘Mary.’ ”

  “Jack Warner was a very contradictory kind of character,” remembered the director Vincent Sherman, who worked at Warner Bros. for more than twenty years. “On the one hand, he would make poor jokes about everything and seem to be not very deep about anything. Jack was the clown of the family and they didn’t respect him. They liked him, but they didn’t really respect him. On the other hand, he had a good nose about what made a good story for a good film. In many ways, he was very clever.”

  There was a great rivalry between Jack and Harry Warner, which was amplified by the death of their brother Sam in 1927. Sam had been equally respected by both brothers, but with him gone there was no one to be the arbiter, and Jack and Harry se
ttled down to a war of attrition that lasted for more than a quarter century. Eventually, Jack euchred Harry out of the studio by negotiating a deal whereby they would both retire, then buying both his and Harry’s stock in a backdoor deal.

  “Jack Warner was a rude, crude moneymaking fool,” snapped James Garner, who worked for him for years and heartily disliked him. “In most things, he had bad taste. He invited me to go to the Oscars and sit at his table. My wife is sitting next to him and he starts telling dirty jokes. He had a filthy mouth. So I got my wife and moved to another table. Bill Orr, his son-in-law, who ran television production for him, was at the next table and I told Orr that if his father-in-law ever again asked me to go to a function with him, I wasn’t going to go. ‘And,’ I said, ‘if you’re afraid to tell him, I’ll tell him.’ ”

  Harry Warner’s hobby was real estate—he bought a lot of property in the San Fernando Valley. Jack’s hobbies were horses and girls. “There were times when Jack would reveal his humanity,” said Vincent Sherman. “During one of the labor strikes, I remember he said to me, ‘You can’t blame these guys. They come in, they bring their box of tools, they work hard, they don’t make much money and they see us come to work in limousines and make big money. You have to expect them to resent it.’

  “Once, Jack said, ‘I don’t know why I go to all this trouble fighting with actors. My brother is in real estate, makes more money than I do and doesn’t argue with anybody.’ ”

  Jack never found much to argue about with John Wayne. Wayne showed up sober and ready for work. He made his movies on time and more or less on budget, and they made money. But another part of the bond between the two men was their politics. When Roosevelt’s New Deal had been ascendant, Jack had been happy to run with the nimble foxes of the New Deal, but in the early 1950s Jack was happy to mount a horse and chase those same foxes.