John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Fellows explained to Jack Warner that part of the problem was that they had no prior experience in figuring out their overhead costs, which they had concluded ran about $100,000 yearly. Also, their ambitious production plans meant that the pictures had been hurled into production without accurate budgets, which accounted for the average 7 percent overrun.

  On the other hand, although Wayne-Fellows had no obligation to make two consecutive Wayne pictures, or to keep him exclusive, they had made three Waynes in a row, and he had refused all other studio offers. Not only that, but on one picture Wayne had cut his salary. (Fellows had been drawing only $21,000 salary per picture.)

  All this was fixable and more or less part of the movie business. Besides, the profits from Hondo and The High and the Mighty obliterated Jack Warner’s concerns. But a Wayne-Fellows production called Ring of Fear was a real problem, and so was the emerging alcoholic spiral of Jimmy Grant.

  Ring of Fear was a circus movie with the head-spinning cast of Clyde Beatty, Mickey Spillane, and Pat O’Brien. Spillane was a crude, bumptious hack who liked to sit around the Wayne-Fellows offices kibitzing. When he noticed some Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dos Passos books on the shelves, he said, “These guys are all bums.” Only half joking, he began reeling off his sales figures compared to Hemingway and Faulkner and triumphantly concluded by saying, “I’ve sold more than all those guys put together.”

  Spillane had gotten lucky with Mike Hammer, but that wasn’t enough; he wanted to be a movie star too, and Jimmy Grant took him on. “We felt by using James Edward Grant we would get a good script and a good job of direction for bargain prices—we got neither,” complained Fellows. The studio advanced $677,613 for the picture, and Grant spent $706,701. That wasn’t the primary problem—for their money, Warners had gotten a picture that was unreleasable.

  Fellows described the job Grant had done as “a bad job, or no job at all.” As Fellows wrote to Wayne, “his behavior has shaken . . . confidence in our judgment and made a dent of alarming proportions in the dignity and respect we had heretofore enjoyed in the industry. We have become the target of a certain amount of ridicule.” Fellows went on to point out that they had given Grant 5 percent of company profits for “finding available stories and ideas and proposing such stories and ideas be acquired, and performing such other services as the corporation may request of you. None of these services has he performed.”

  Grant had 3 percent of Big Jim McLain and 5 percent of Ring of Fear. Fellows suggested discontinuing Grant’s vice presidency and his overall 5 percent of company profits. Instead, give him 5 percent or 10 percent of Hondo, and pay him on a per job basis thereafter. Grant knew he was in trouble and responded with a letter to Wayne that he admitted was a rambling mess. He defended Ring of Fear, saying, “The picture may be bad but it is not nearly as bad as Bob has convinced you [it is.]” He went on to say that the only two pictures Wayne had loved in the cutting room were The Fighting Kentuckian and Island in the Sky—“both failures,” which wasn’t really true. He accused Fellows of being a “grade B Svengali” and said that if Wayne followed through on the plan to take away Grant’s title and percentage, “the man I thought was my best friend [would be] giving a perfect imitation of my worst enemy.”

  Wayne responded to Grant like a big brother exhausted by an errant sibling. “I feel that you have not been abused, but pampered,” he wrote, before accusing Grant of never finishing scripts. In twenty-three months with the company, Grant had doctored Big Jim McLain and written Hondo—the only two acceptable properties he had been connected with. He had talked Wayne-Fellows into buying White Gold, a story that had been done as a silent movie by its author, William K. Howard, a once promising director undone by alcoholism. Two years later, nothing had been done with the story.

  Wayne pointed out that Grant had five months to polish the script of McLain before they started shooting and was still writing scenes the day they finished the movie. Why? “You were out playing with dames and getting drunk.”

  On Hondo, Wayne judged Grant’s first draft to be “fair,” with about five great scenes, but then he dropped the ball, never writing an ending or a payoff scene for the girl. Wayne further pointed out that he had gotten Grant $25,000 from Warners and $35,000 from RKO for jobs that didn’t even figure into the money that the company had paid him.

  Wrapping up his summation to the jury, Wayne said that Grant had received $184,359 in two years, not counting a salary for his secretary, and in that time he had written a couple of non–Wayne-Fellows scripts that went on the market and didn’t sell. Wayne concluded by writing, “You haven’t the talent of John Ford nor the charm of Huston. You’re no fun to be with any more because you’re bitter and vulgar and uninteresting in your conversation.”

  As castigating letters go, it’s a small masterpiece—rigorously logical and well argued, a reminder that Wayne’s early ambition had been to be a lawyer and a strong indication that he would have been a good one.

  Two days later, Grant wrote Wayne a rambling reply. He had spent seven weeks on Sands of Iwo Jima, and Yates had only paid him for two, etc. He reiterated his fears that once word got out that he’d been pulled off Ring of Fear he’d be dead in the industry, and again said that Wayne was being swayed by the evil machinations of Bob Fellows, who had become Grant’s designated bête noire.

  That same day Wayne, his patience clearly at an end, wrote back to Grant saying that “You take up too much of the time that should be spent in thinking of our business.” Robert Fellows then wrote Wayne a long letter that basically said, “It’s him or it’s me.” Grant had evidently compared himself to William K. Howard and Fellows thought that there might be something to the analogy. “Liquor got to Bill—and it seems to have pinned Jimmy down too. . . . Jimmy, like all hack writers, will work only when he is hungry. Creative writers do not kiss ass around Hollywood, sucking the life blood out of stars and friends: they go to out of the way places and spend a year or two or three writing. Often they miss, sometimes they hit—but always they WRITE. I for one am sick and tired of this horseshit of Jimmy being a creative writer. . . . It is my opinion that right now Jimmy is a sick miserable little man. It is further my opinion that he is mentally sick and needs the kind of help neither of us can give him.”

  And then Wayne caught Grant in a lie. Grant had said he only had liquor on the set of Ring of Fire one night. Wayne produced bills proving that liquor had been provided for sixteen nights on location in Phoenix, not to mention a $205 liquor bill at the hotel where the company was staying. Wayne followed that up with a memo noting that A. B. Guthrie, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Way West, had stopped in to pick up a check for a story he was working on for Wayne-Fellows and told Wayne that he had been unable to work with Grant for three weeks because he was “very disturbed and drunk.”

  The company drafted a severance agreement giving Grant 5 percent of the net profits of Hondo. He would be advanced $500 a week, said sum to be deducted from his percentages, and the company gave him back the rights to the story he had been working on. Wayne-Fellows even gave him 5 percent of the net profits on Ring of Fear, assuming there were any. His 5 percent of the company’s overall net profits would be discontinued, however. None of this was to be made public.

  As was his wont, Grant took all this very dramatically. He wrote a note to Wayne, apologizing for suddenly bolting from a dinner engagement. “I knew suddenly that if I stayed for one more fraction of a second I was going to make a fool of myself. A line of dialogue had sprung full-born into my mind and I knew that if I didn’t run away I would say it just as I turned to you. The line was, ‘Almost all men have shaken hands with their pallbearers; very few with their embalmers.’

  “Jimmy.”

  Grant maintained his office at Wayne-Fellows headquarters, but he and Wayne stopped speaking. Instead, they wrote insulting letters to each other. Grant’s were full of literary allusions, and Wayne would call on Mary St. John or Tom Kane to help him spice up
his responses.

  Jimmy Grant would eventually climb back into Wayne’s good graces, largely because he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking. Grant dated his sobriety from his firing but it was evidently intermittent until about 1957, when he gave up alcohol once and for all with the help of a psychiatrist. Wayne never truly wavered in his devotion, but others believed that Grant didn’t really bring much to the table besides camaraderie. “The most remarkable thing about Jimmy Grant,” said the stuntman Jack Williams, “was that he played chess with Wayne for over twenty years, and managed never to win a game! That was the genius of Jimmy Grant.”

  After Wayne-Fellows signed Karen Sharpe, she made one picture for the company, Man in the Vault. After that, she sat around collecting her paycheck and getting restless. “I knew I was never going to work with Duke, because I was too young, or too much the ingenue, or too something, and they were paying me for no work. So I went to Duke and said, ‘Can I ask you something? I’m too young to play opposite you and I would like to do something that’s not acceptable as things stand. I’d like to do some live TV. I’m getting offers for it, and I’ve done a lot of theater and I would love to get a chance to explore things. Would you let me go?’

  “And Duke said, ‘Absolutely, I think you should do it.’ And gave me my release. And I had some wonderful experiences on the Hallmark Hall of Fame and other shows. And that was typical of him—I liked him a lot, even if he was a conservative Republican. I never felt I had to have an appointment to talk to Duke; he was a very generous man, very down-to-earth. I admired him for that, and still do. And I admire him because he stood up for what he believed and made no bones about it. His beliefs were the opposite of mine, but he always had the courage to take a stand.”

  Wayne-Fellows found that maintaining a large contract list was fraught with peril. Among the other contractees was the pneumatic Anita Ekberg. She was only earning about $10,000 a year, but the company spent a lot of money on Ekberg’s publicity, dental work, clothes, etc. In three years, from 1954 through 1956, the company spent $72,186 on Ekberg, and in that same time period she earned about $70,000 for her professional services.

  For the rest of 1954, Wayne-Fellows had planned Track of the Cat (a Wellman movie with Robert Mitchum), Blood Alley (an adventure movie with Wayne), The Sea Chase (another adventure movie with Wayne), and The Quality of Mercy, a script by Ben Hecht for which Wayne wanted Kirk Douglas. But when Hecht’s script came in, Wayne was appalled. “It reads like a poorly written B picture script to me,” he told Warners.

  At that point, Wayne was in Hawaii making The Sea Chase with John Farrow, and his sour mood wasn’t helped by a return of the nasty ear infection that he had picked up years before on Reap the Wild Wind. Also irritating him was the fact that the studio had booked him into a hotel rather than his preferred private residence. Wayne estimated that the hotel had a hundred guests, and the first night he must have had his picture taken with twenty-five of them, and signed at least sixty autographs. He was tired and needed a house. “Perhaps some actors can walk away from people and not be friendly and gracious,” he wrote. “I cannot—not only because of my own personality, but business-wise I cannot afford it.”

  The Sea Chase ended up proving something that every filmmaker finds out the hard way: you work just as hard on mediocre pictures as you do on the good ones—sometimes harder. The picture had been written and rewritten since 1951 by: Bolton Mallory, James Warner Bellah, Andrew Geer (the author of the original novel), Frank Nugent, and John Twist. Wayne was never completely happy with the script, as is evidenced by some undated notes he dictated:

  “Long dialogue at the beginning was just words and didn’t give real character to the people. . . . Criticized Ehrlich [Wayne’s character] being so unnecessarily ruthless . . . shouldn’t be such a stickler for little things and doesn’t like his petty remarks and actions toward Kirchner. . . . He really is an unromantic bore . . . just a cold, commercial guy.”

  Five weeks of locations off Hawaii were followed by more weeks in the studio at Burbank. When the picture wrapped, it had cost $3 million, but it got out alive; domestic rentals totaled $6 million, with a further $1.7 million from foreign markets, making it one of the ten highest grossing films of the year.

  The Sea Chase was hampered by a lack of chemistry between . . . everybody. Wayne’s co-star was Lana Turner, and their relationship was no more than polite. “The sparks often fly between leading men and their leading ladies,” said Tab Hunter, who was co-starring, “but I felt a layer of wool between them. Wayne wasn’t like Bob Mitchum, who had that twinkle about him and was a devil with women. Wayne was more like Gary Cooper, who was always very professional.”

  Wayne told Hunter that he liked his performance, and for a time there was some talk of Wayne-Fellows taking over Hunter’s contract from Warner Bros., which would have been fine with Hunter—as he put it, “Wayne-Fellows was doing good projects and I respected Wayne.”

  Hunter observed Wayne as a producer before he worked with him as an actor and found him “the quiet producer, not a producer in your face. In meetings, he would state what he wanted and expect things to be carried out, as they usually were.”

  Hunter respected Wayne—up to a point. “He was a consummate pro, which I admired, but . . . at bottom, a football jock. . . . I don’t like macho bullshit. But with Wayne, what you saw was pretty much what you got. He was a straight shooter, similar offscreen to what he was on-screen, which is what makes a great screen personality. Great stars never entirely lose their identity, they just expand or contract the balloon according to the character and the performance.”

  Cameraman William Clothier didn’t think much of the picture, or of John Farrow, who spent a lot of time trying to get Lana Turner into bed—not really such a lofty ambition. “Bill Clothier was a very honest, direct, talented man,” said Hunter, “and he had Farrow’s number immediately. Farrow had a lecherous quality; there was something seedy about him. I wasn’t mad for him; as a director he didn’t stand out, although he knew his shots and knew what he wanted. With the exception of Bill Wellman, who I loved, the directors that were the most important to me came out of live TV—Frankenheimer and Lumet.”

  Wayne’s demeanor on the set was neither overly respectful to Farrow nor overtly disrespectful. “Wayne would do what he would do and he did it damn well,” said Hunter. “Gary Cooper was more gentle, more of a quiet soul—but I found Wayne fascinating. He knew what he wanted and you had to be on your toes. He was a good man to be around for young kids starting out. He was friendly, but all business—a powerhouse actor.”

  The Sea Chase permanently soured Wayne on John Farrow; Wayne said that “He took a great story and made a dime novel spy story.” Jack Warner appears not to have cared for The Sea Chase either; his notes are cuttingly brief: “Speed it up.”

  Ring of Fear was still hanging fire. Wayne knew that it needed extensive retakes to make it releasable; he and Bob Fellows estimated that said retakes would cost another $115,908 on top of the $700,000 that had already been overspent. Wayne persuaded William Wellman to do the retakes, not for his usual $10,000 a week, but for free. He also promised to cut Wellman in on Wayne-Fellows’ profits if he could somehow make a facsimile of a silk purse out of a genuine sow’s ear.

  “My father wasn’t really a director,” said Colin Grant, “and he would have been the first to tell you. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth had made a fortune, and my dad thought he could make a fortune with another circus movie. He really wanted to make the movie; I don’t think Duke wanted to make it at all.”

  Wellman sailed in with a writer, rewrote the script and reshot a lot of the picture without credit. The picture actually made money and Wayne showed his gratitude by giving Wellman 10 percent of the profits for eight years.

  On June 1, 1954, Wayne-Fellows Productions became Batjac Productions—the name of a trading company featured in Wake of the Red Witch. In the film, the name was spelled Batjak, but, as Michae
l Wayne explained, “one of the legal secretaries who was examining the documents thought that there was a typo in the word ‘Batjak.’ She wondered if it should be ‘Batjack,’ so she called Robert Fellows and said, ‘Is there a “c” missing from the company title?’ And he said, ‘No c.’ But she thought he said, ‘No, c.’ So she typed it ‘Batjac.’ ”

  When the document was prepared, the mistake was noticed, but Wayne said, “I liked it better with a ‘k’ but leave it as it is. It’s no big deal.”

  A month after the name change was official, Bob Fellows began agitating for better terms from Warner Bros., specifically on foreign receipts. Batjac’s contract with Warners was due to expire in March 1955, and at this point Batjac’s pictures were financed 100 percent by Warners, with profits split 50-50 after the studio recovered a liberal interpretation of its costs. But unhappiness with the way Warners was allocating money from foreign markets led Fellows to start sniffing around for other releasing deals.

  And then there was the matter of The Alamo. Wayne was still determined to make it, although it hadn’t been a quid pro quo when the Warners deal had been negotiated. Quietly at first, then more vocally, Bob Fellows began to agree with Herb Yates and Jack Warner. Why not get Ford, or Hawks, or someone with experience in massive action scenes to make The Alamo? Jesus Christ, Bill Wellman was right across the hall! Fellows probably saw the company’s cash surplus disappearing overnight on a picture nobody but Wayne was sure Wayne could direct.

  Fellows’s opinion rankled his partner. Then there was Fellows’s behavior around the office. He fell in love with his secretary and told his wife he wanted a divorce. She turned for support to Wayne, who didn’t believe it was any of his business. As far as Eleanor Fellows was concerned, that meant Wayne approved of his partner’s behavior. He didn’t, but neither was he about to get in the middle of someone else’s domestic meltdown, having just survived one of his own. Eleanor kept hounding Wayne until he halfheartedly agreed to attend a mediation session with the couple, but he left early after telling them that they had to solve their problems themselves.