John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards personify the peculiarly American resistance to settling into the soft lap of family or community—in another time or place they might be outliers, living off the grid. But the genius of Wayne is that they don’t seem completely alien to us; rather, they’re part of us.

  Here, at his best, Wayne is something rare: a fearless actor exposing wildly varied aspects of himself with skill and energy. That so many people persisted in their sneering dismissal of Wayne’s acting ability is their shame—had they no eyes? As the critic David Overbey once observed, the naive and romantic Ringo Kid of Stagecoach is a long way from the sentimental and socially integrated Captain Brittles of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; the existential exile of Hondo has little in common with the disillusioned Tom Doniphon of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Likewise, the bitter Tom Dunson of Red River is a long way from the life-embracing gusto of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. All different men, with entirely different psychological foundations and behaviors.

  There is always a sense with most commentators on Wayne, even the favorable ones, that his politics are regarded as an embarrassment in relation to the power of his acting. But Wayne’s acting is not a thing apart; it is, rather, constantly informed by his politics. Wayne’s personal stubbornness and the authority of his belief system are the foundations for the obstinance essential to Dunson, Edwards, and Doniphon.

  Wayne is the anti-Brando—the latter’s knack for the unconventional choice, and his welcoming of the potential chaos of the improvisational moment indicate his deeply antiauthoritarian bent as much as ten labored biographies. As early as The Big Trail, Wayne’s character almost always has a sure and certain knowledge of the right thing to do, and is indifferent to or impatient with the squabbling that goes on all around him. Indeed, the central dramatic conflict of the last half of Wayne’s career was between his character’s rigid belief system and a society that rejects it.

  “Wayne was never—despite the endlessly repeated words of his eulogists—a vision of what Americans dreamed themselves to be,” wrote the critic Terry Curtis Fox. “He was a vision of what Americans wished their past had been. He was a man who had no place in the modern, psychological world, and every bit of his performing presence told us that. He needed age for this conflict to become apparent.”

  Wayne did all this without words. Indeed, words got in the way because they were too specific. There was always something going on behind Wayne’s assurance, something suggested by his physical grace, but it was never explicit. “He could suggest a past,” wrote Fox, “—through a glance, a turning of the head, a shying away of the body—but he would never reveal one.”

  Years later, musing about Ethan Edwards, Wayne touchingly theorized that the film’s power derived from the point at which Ford chose to end it. He even speculated with optimism about what happened after the door closes: “I don’t see any reason why Ethan couldn’t have snapped out of it. . . . I’m sure that he went off and got on his horse and went into town and had a few belts, and somebody said, ‘That land your brother homesteaded is getting close to—you know where the old burned-out building is?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, the railroad is right close to there now and it’s worth some money. Why don’t you go out there and start growing some wheat or put up some corrals and make a siding there and buy cattle and sell them.’ Somehow or another a man as strong as that man . . . isn’t going to quit.”

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  The Searchers is Wayne’s greatest acting achievement. If Brando’s triumphs were the external life of Stanley Kowalski and the internal lives of Terry Malloy and Vito Corleone, then Wayne combines all of them into Ethan Edwards. The sheer size of the part, and Wayne’s portrayal of it, also signaled a quantum change in his screen dynamic. Ethan Edwards is so implacable and menacing that he’s too large for any genre but the western at its most mythical.

  In so many ways, The Searchers is a summation for its director, for its star, and for the western. The question hanging in the air for Wayne, as well as for the genre he represented, was simple: What now?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In November 1955, Wayne wrote Ford a particularly chatty letter. Pappy was relaxing in Hawaii after finishing the editing on The Searchers, and Wayne had just seen the picture for the first time, calling it “just plain wonderful,” although he wasn’t crazy about Max Steiner’s score. He thought the picture featured great performances and had a raw brutality but his character never became what he dreaded creeping into his portrayals—petty or mean.

  Wayne had a great contractual opportunity at Warners, and another at RKO, but if he signed up with them he wouldn’t be able to do the picture Ford was planning at MGM about the aviator/screenwriter Frank Wead (The Wings of Eagles). “It’s more important for me to be in a picture with you, career-wise—for my health—and for my mental relief.”

  Being a movie star was hard enough, but Wayne was also doing quality work as a producer. In later years, Batjac became essentially a service organization for John Wayne, but in the 1950s the company made quality pictures that didn’t star the owner.

  Take, for instance, Seven Men from Now, a great little western directed by Budd Boetticher and written by Burt Kennedy, who was brought to Batjac by Paul Fix.

  Seven Men from Now was a far superior script to everything Wayne was making around the same time, with the single exception of The Searchers, but Wayne farmed it out anyway. He was just finishing the Ford picture and didn’t want to do another western about revenge.

  Initially, the script went to Gary Cooper, but Cooper passed. At that point, Wayne developed a strange enthusiasm for Richard Egan, telling Jack Warner “this is the most manly guy I’ve seen on the screen since Gable.” Fox wanted $50,000 for Egan’s services, and Wayne felt it was a good deal, if only because in five years the picture could be rereleased when Egan was an even bigger star.

  But Jack Warner had a better eye for leading men than Wayne and downplayed Egan. He thought that Seven Men from Now had the potential to be another High Noon “if you can get the right lead” and counseled a cool head until the right ingredients were assembled. The script was finally accepted by Randolph Scott.

  “Duke [gave] me a beautiful script called Seven Men from Now,” said Budd Boetticher. “I read 35 pages of it at lunch and I had never read anything this good. I walked back and John Ford and a very handsome young man and John Wayne were sitting on Mr. Ford’s couch. I was allowed to call [Ford] Jack; everybody else called him Jesus or Coach. Terrifying man. I walked on the set and said, ‘Duke this is the best thing I’ve read in my life. I want to do it.’

  “He said, ‘Well, you couldn’t have read much of it in an hour for lunch.’ I said, ‘I read 35 pages, I don’t have to see another thing and I would give anything in the world to meet this author.’ He said, ‘Mr. Burt Kennedy, Mr. Budd Boetticher.’ ” It was the beginning of a superior group of westerns written by Kennedy, directed by Boetticher, and starring Scott. As Burt Kennedy remembered, “I wrote ’em for Duke, but Randy made ’em. They pretty much shot the scripts. Sometimes things would happen, someone would hit their head or do something by mistake and they’d leave it in and call it a director’s touch.”

  For the leading lady, Wayne hired Gail Russell. She hadn’t worked in several years—there had been some arrests for drunk driving—although she still looked lovely. If Boetticher was initially resistant, he was soon won over. “I think [Wayne] was more fond of Gail Russell than any of them,” Boetticher said. “And I think Duke had a crush on her. I think she was the one leading lady that he really cared about in anything but a professional way.”

  Russell behaved during production, but got terribly drunk at the wrap party and disappeared. Budd Boetticher believed that Andy McLaglen was in love with her; McLaglen spent three days traveling around Hollywood trying to find her. By the time she was located, Russell’s stomach was so swollen it looked like she’d swallowed a football. Seven Men from Now was Gail Russell’s last movie; s
he died in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, in an apartment surrounded by empty liquor bottles.

  At Batjac, Burt Kennedy learned the business under the loose tutelage of Jimmy Grant, who was once again in Wayne’s good graces. “I stole so much from Jimmy that people thought he stole from me.” Kennedy started off at Batjac for close to nothing and rose to $1,000 a week. “After I had a few successes under my belt, Duke would loan me out to Warners and to Fox, and Duke and I would split the overage. It worked out fine.

  “Duke . . . always said he cut his throat because he didn’t make [Seven Men from Now]. Despite the fact he gave Budd two big breaks, he and Budd weren’t buddies. If Duke liked you, he could be rough with you. If he didn’t like you, he’d dismiss you. He learned everything he knew from Ford. Duke spent his whole career getting even with directors as revenge for the tough times that Ford gave him.”

  Boetticher and Kennedy remembered Randolph Scott as a tremendous gentleman with a dry sense of humor. And rich. Very rich. “One day at Lone Pine I walked out to get on horseback and exercise,” remembered Boetticher. “Randy had a rocking chair that he didn’t need. . . . He was rocking back and forth reading The Wall Street Journal. And I walked out and he said, ‘Budd, the most terrible thing happened to me.’ And I said, ‘What happened Randy?’ He said, ‘Three of my new oil wells blew out.’ I said, ‘How many came in?’ He said, ‘Eleven. But damn it, you shouldn’t lose an oil well with today’s technology.’ ”

  Burt Kennedy said, “[Randolph Scott] was wonderful for Budd to work with because Randy liked the way he came off the screen in Budd’s pictures—as a tough guy, which he wasn’t.” The later Boetticher-Scott pictures were made for budgets of around $400,000 to $500,000. “They were fourteen-day pictures,” said Kennedy. “I wrote them to the money, for very few interiors because interiors cost money. You have to rent space and decorate the sets, and that was money we didn’t have.”

  But Seven Men from Now was made under Batjac’s deal at Warners and they could spend more money. It cost $719,000 and amassed world rentals of $1.6 million—a decent profit-making venture. Around this time, Batjac also started up a subsidiary corporation called Romina that produced a couple of pictures for United Artists, among them China Doll, directed by Frank Borzage—another one of the great old-timers that clustered around Wayne hoping for a last hurrah. But Borzage hadn’t made a picture in ten years and China Doll was fairly expensive—$1.14 million for the negative, prints, and advertising, with world rentals of only $860,592. “Borzage had been hanging around the studio for a long time,” said Bill Clothier. “I think Duke had promised him something. It was a lousy picture, but it was a pleasure working with [Borzage].”

  Other Romina pictures also failed: Escort West ($872,059 cost, $777,991 worldwide rentals); and Gun the Man Down ($269,780 cost; worldwide rentals of $325,180).

  It was clear that most Wayne productions that didn’t star Wayne trended toward loss. What made it worse was that Jack Warner’s accounting games had a way of turning small winners into big losers. William Wellman made a sweet little dog story for Batjac called Good-bye, My Lady, with Brandon De Wilde and Sidney Poitier. William Clothier photographed the picture and said that “Wayne got into a beef with Warner about the costs of a picture Wayne had made; Warners hung us on that one too. Warners promptly threw away the rest of the pictures . . . we got a good screwing, because of the way Warners released the picture.” Good-bye, My Lady cost $900,000, and had world rentals of $677,000.

  Still, the profits spun off by Hondo and The High and the Mighty had given Batjac a comfortable war chest, and Wayne knew what he wanted to do with it. But Jack Warner was no more enthusiastic about The Alamo than Yates had been.

  “Jack was funny,” said Angie Dickinson, who was under contract at Warner Bros. for a number of years. “He was funny because he wasn’t funny, but he was always trying to be funny, and that struck me as funny. As a producer, Jack didn’t have great vision; he could take care of himself and his studio, but he wasn’t Arthur Freed. Not long before he died, I saw him and told him, ‘Jack, you never knew what to do with me, did you?’

  “And do you know what he said? ‘Well, you got an awful lot of red in your hair.’ ”

  Batjac packed up and left Warner Bros., although Wayne and Warner maintained a friendly social relationship. A rundown of the Batjac productions reveals that Wayne was a careful, effective producer. He started the pact with the cheaply made Big Jim McLain, which, at $750,000, cost precisely half of what Operation Pacific, his previous film for Warners had cost.

  The money continued to roll in with Island in the Sky, Hondo, and The High and the Mighty. Even the overtly arty Track of the Cat didn’t lose much money. But according to Warners’ bookkeeping, The Sea Chase lost money, as did the dismal Blood Alley, in spite of the fact that the former earned rentals of more than $7 million and the latter rentals of $3 million—very solid figures for the period. Consistent returns like this were why financiers would follow Wayne anywhere; good or bad, there was a financial floor beneath which a Wayne picture did not go—then or now, the most valuable thing a star can bring to a picture.

  Despite the largely positive results of the Batjac-Warner alliance, Wayne always felt that he had been badly used by the studio; that some of his movies were far more profitable than the studio would admit. He was almost certainly correct. “Nobody came out with a sizable profit from doing any deal with Warners,” said the producer-screenwriter Niven Busch, who believed Jack Warner was the Zen master of double-entry bookkeeping. “They had the most foolproof, plate-steel accounting system in the world. I still don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else does, how they do it.”

  The general feeling of being had was probably why Wayne turned down an overture from Jack Warner at the end of 1956 to buy out Batjac. Years later, Wayne and his son Michael were at the studio for a meeting, when they ran into Jack Warner. “You really oughta bring Batjac back to Warner Bros., Duke,” Warner said. “You should be here, where you can be fucked by friends.”

  Wayne was an indulgent boss, but he was strangely absentminded. Every early-arriving employee of Batjac grew used to finding Wayne sitting on the steps of the Palm Avenue building, reading the morning paper and waiting for someone to let him in because he’d lost his keys.

  John Ford was renting an office in the Batjac building, and every once in a while Katharine Hepburn would drop by to visit Ford, with whom she had a love affair in 1936–1937, during and after the production of Mary of Scotland. Hepburn always adored Ford, and he returned the favor, but that didn’t mean she was willing to suspend her strongly held views of social propriety.

  “You people have no pride,” she announced one day to anyone that would listen. “That Venetian blind right behind you there. It’s broken! It hangs down. It’s never been fixed. If it wasn’t broken down you’d never find this place.” And with that, she stormed out.

  Wayne was amused by Hepburn’s temperament, but he himself was much milder—unless the subject was politics. When it came to the public he always kept the lid on. Because of his image, drunks or belligerents would frequently challenge him to fights, which he always managed to avoid. Ray Kellogg, a stuntman and second unit director, was with Wayne at the casino on Catalina one time when a man standing next to them in the men’s room suddenly said, “I’ll can your ass.” Kellogg said the man would have to go through him first, but the guy persisted.

  Finally, Wayne said, “You probably could knock me on my ass; I can see you’re a real tough mother. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll arm wrestle. How about that? We’ll arm wrestle first, see who’s stronger.”

  The man said okay, so they tipped a wastebasket over to serve as the table. Unfortunately, the wastebasket was rusty and their elbows went right through the bottom. Both men’s arms got stuck until Kellogg pried some of the torn metal loose. The entire experience ended with the man offering to buy Wayne a drink, and Wayne accepting.

  There were a fa
ir number of relatives on the Batjac payroll, although, with the possible exception of his brother, Bob, they all had to earn their positions. Bob was there only because of Mary Morrison. As far as the relationship between Wayne and his mother, nothing had changed.

  “Mary was salty and sharp and tough,” said Gretchen Wayne.

  They were actually a lot alike. He could never please her. He tried, but he couldn’t. With his mother, it was always, “Why isn’t Bob making more money? Why isn’t Bob producing your pictures?” Bob was her baby. Bob would take off for Mexico and go drinking. Bob was Bob; you couldn’t help but love him, and everybody did. He was one of the boys, a great sense of humor, never a nose-to-the-grindstone type of guy. And that’s okay—someone has to be the lifeguard, and in that family the lifeguard was Bob’s older brother.

  He was always crazy about his father, always said he was the kindest, gentlest, nicest man. But Mary. . . . She was tough. I’m sure she just ground the hell out of Clyde. I never heard about Clyde drinking, but he didn’t have any drive, while Mary worked for the phone company, Mary worked for political campaigns, Mary smoked, Mary drank. I think Mike’s dad was intimidated by her. But then, he was never aggressive with women. He was respectful; he was reserved. He never bounded into the room and played the Star.

  In June of 1956, Wayne signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to make three pictures for a total fee of $2 million, the money to be paid out at the rate of $200,000 per year for ten years for tax reasons. Not only that, but Fox agreed to pay Charlie Feldman’s commission. Wayne had director approval—a partial list of approved directors included Henry King, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Walter Lang, and, interestingly, Edward Dmytryk. This deal, the highest flat fee ever negotiated for a movie star up to that time, set off the usual chest clutching among executives and gullible journalists about whether the industry could afford such salaries. (Only actors’ salaries are questioned, never executives’.)