John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Adler pointed to Sayonara, a Marlon Brando picture that was just about to be released and would prove a smash hit. Sayonara had an interracial love story and a script by Paul Osborn that worked; the Townsend Harris script didn’t. Harris had evidently been an alcoholic, and Adler was fine with not making him an alcoholic, “but we have to make him something. What do we know about Harris in this script? Only that he has had a post in China; that he has no family or marital ties; that he has a quick temper; that he is brave and he is determined to do a good job. That is all very admirable but it is not enough.”

  A week later, Charles Grayson had done some rewriting that was an improvement, but Adler still felt the script lacked depth to go along with the premise and the setting. It’s probable that Huston felt that the gaps in the characterization would be filled by the presence of John Wayne; that, as is often the case, the personality of the star would make up for the impersonality of the character.

  As soon as he showed up in Japan, Wayne presented Huston with thirteen pages of notes about the script. He was evidently ignorant of the fact that Huston had recently walked off David O. Selznick’s production of A Farewell to Arms because of the unceasing flow of memos. Huston took Wayne’s notes, but never read them or referred to them.

  When Pilar arrived in Japan just before Christmas, she found her husband furious. “I ask him what’s on tomorrow’s shooting schedule,” Wayne groused, “and he’ll tell me to spend more time absorbing the beauty of the scenery and less time worrying about my part. When I tell him I can’t memorize the script unless I know what we’ll be shooting, the bastard says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll improvise.’ ”

  Wayne saw no reason to be discreet with reporters. “After a couple of weeks out here with no action, I had to make up my mind whether to quit and go home and let them sue me, or stay and trust in God and Huston.

  “I decided to stay. Anyway, I was in too deep to get out. . . . Mister Huston is on a Japan kick, and as I see it he wants me to walk through a series of Japanese pastels.”

  Wayne expressed his contempt in a letter to John Ford: “It’s a little frustrating trying to arouse the . . . sleeping talent of our lead, Mr. Huston, who wears the clothes of an Irish country gentleman. Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I’d say without the manner.” Wayne’s only consolation for what he was correctly convinced was a disaster in the making was the opportunity it gave him to buy some Japanese art, which decorated his homes for the rest of his life.

  Angela Allen, Huston’s script supervisor, ascribed the breach between the men to a complete lack of shared outlook. “They had nothing in common. John Wayne loathed him. He used to say, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ I said, ‘I’ll fix up the appointment, what time do you want to come?’ But he didn’t want to be left alone with Huston. He was very regimented and could only go in one way. Very professional, but he wasn’t that bright.”

  Huston was always a sucker for visual experimentation, and his original intent was to hire an all-Japanese crew so the film could reflect some of the beauty of Japanese films such as Gate of Hell. But Fox wanted the film shot in CinemaScope, and the studio wanted a cameraman experienced in the format. It wasn’t an excuse that made much sense, but Huston capitulated and used Fox’s Charles Clarke, who had worked in Japan before.

  By December 20, the picture was a whopping eleven and a half days behind schedule. Fox’s Sid Rogell wrote a letter to Charles Clarke imploring speed. “Anything you can do to speed things up or to suggest eliminations will, of course, be important steps in the right direction.” Besides the lagging pace, nobody could figure out what to call the picture. Wayne’s suggestion was Pine and Bamboo, symbolizing East and West, which Huston liked a lot. Buddy Adler and the sales department were horrified. Among the alternates were First Ambassador, East Is East, The Kimona Curtain, and Geisha!—the ideal title for a Samuel Fuller movie.

  When the studio came up with The Barbarian and the Geisha, Huston cabled Adler, “Are you serious? If so I am changing my name, too.” Huston assuaged his irritation by embarking on an affair with co-star Eiko Ando.

  Wayne spent his off-hours stewing and working on the script for The Alamo. When the unit returned to California, Wayne leaned on Buddy Adler, who ordered Walter Lang to reshoot five or six scenes in April of 1958. (The remade scenes: Harris explains about his credentials being in limbo; after Okichi has been ordered back to see Harris; Harris packing up to leave Japan; in the marketplace; Harris burns the house.) One scene was remade because Wayne thought his sideburns were unattractive, another because he thought he looked too old, and a couple were redone, explained producer Eugene Frenke to Huston, “to give [the character of Harris] some vitality.”

  In short, Wayne took over postproduction. When Huston wrote his memoirs over twenty years later, he was still angry at being outweighed by a movie star: “When I brought it back to Hollywood, the picture, including the music, was finished. . . . It was a sensitive, well-balanced work. . . . John Wayne apparently took over after I left . . . and when I saw it, I was aghast.” Later, Huston told a writer, “It was really a fucked-up proposition.”

  The film was a miserable financial failure, earning $2.5 million in domestic rentals against a cost of $3.4 million, although it can be viewed with considerable pleasure as one of Huston’s visual experiments (Moulin Rouge, Reflections in a Golden Eye). Dramatically, it feels garbled; after all of Buddy Adler’s complaints, Townsend Harris still seems to appear out of nowhere, with no backstory and no motivation for coming to Japan. And there are bewildering continuity gaps—the scene that moves the geisha Okichi from the status of spy to mistress is nonexistent.

  Years later, Wayne said that John Huston was the single biggest mistake of his career in terms of directors, and grew agitated at the mere mention of Huston’s name. “I found it impossible to make any contact at all. When I look back at his career, Bogie and his dad helped him get started. Outside of Moulin Rouge and Asphalt Jungle, I don’t think he’s made anything worthwhile when they weren’t there to help him.”

  Wayne thought Huston wanted him to play Harris with the stiff demeanor that Gregory Peck brought to Ahab in Moby Dick. “There was no life in [Peck]. Then I started to work with Huston and found out that was how he was going to have me play this drunken, riotous man, Townsend Harris, who had a great love of people. He had me started out dressed like Abe Lincoln and everybody knows I’m John Wayne. He had scenes where the Americans caused an epidemic of typhoid—wonderful chances to have me be something more than a textbook illustration. But no.

  “There was a scene where the Japanese won’t sell us food, so I wanted to go out and come back with fish. The kids ask me where I got it, so I take them out and show them how to fish. There were all sorts of things he could have done to make us human beings, but he was only concerned with his tapestry, which he thought was more important than the human story. Huston? You can have him!”

  In June 1958, Wayne made a live appearance on the NBC series Wide, Wide World for a segment about the western. John Ford, Ward Bond, James Arness, James Garner, and a dozen other stars past and current were scheduled to appear on the show that was being broadcast from a western set in New-hall built decades earlier by Trem Carr and that Wayne knew all too well.

  The night before the show Wayne had been drinking with friends. Seven A.M. came, and no Wayne; eight o’clock, and no Wayne. Finally, at nine, Wayne showed up, hungover and struggling.

  Ford was furious and berated Wayne for being unprofessional and holding up rehearsal. Wayne just kept his head down, scuffing his toe in the dirt and saying, “I’m sorry, boss.” “You’re going to pay for this and you’re going to pay for it hard all the way,” Ford snarled. He ordered Wayne to go all the way to the end of the western street and walk toward the camera while delivering a speech about westerns.

  Wayne was searching for the words on the first rehearsal, so Ford ordered another rehearsal. Back they went to the end of the street. And again. This went on for about six
long, hot rehearsals. About twenty minutes before the show was to go on the air, Ford took Gene Autry aside and told him to help Wayne out a little, but under no circumstances was he to tell Wayne that Ford had suggested it.

  Autry was no stranger to carousing and always had a supply of adult beverages on hand. He brought Wayne a Coke that had a little something extra in it. Wayne didn’t want a Coke. Autry insisted he try the Coke. “He took it and said, ‘Not bad, not bad.’ So we went ahead then and did the show and after it was all over, Wayne came over and he said, ‘Look, you saved my life. I don’t know whether I could have made it or not.’ ”

  Wayne’s four children from his first marriage were starting their own lives. Twenty-year-old Toni married Don La Cava, a Loyola graduate, in May 1956. Wayne gave the bride away, then sat in the second pew with his former wife Josie. Pilar did not attend the wedding. Officiating was Cardinal McIntyre, who read an Apostolic Benediction from Pope Pius XII. Attending were such notables as Bob Hope, Ray Milland, and Ward Bond.

  Wayne’s oldest son, Michael, married Gretchen Deibel in 1958. They had met when they were both fifteen, on a blind date at Gretchen’s school, Immaculate Heart, where Toni—a friend of Gretchen’s—was also a student. (Mike was going to Loyola.) It was a square dance, but neither of them could square dance, so they sat there the entire night and talked. From then on, remembered Gretchen, “We were off and on sweethearts. I spent my life with him; I knew my father-in-law when I was a teenager.”

  In those early days, Gretchen always addressed Wayne as “Mr. Wayne,” which was fine, but once she and Mike were married, something else seemed to be called for. “Call me Dad,” he suggested, but she was too intimidated by his size and presence. “Call me Duke” was the next suggestion, but Gretchen couldn’t manage that either.

  In short order Gretchen got pregnant and presented Wayne with his first grandchild. At that point, he told Gretchen, “Call me Granddaddy,” which sounded all right to her. She called him Granddaddy for the rest of his life.

  Jim Henaghan, Wayne’s publicist, was another one of the raucous Irish characters he enjoyed. Henaghan had been around a long time—he had been a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter, not to mention the first husband of Gwen Verdon, and he had also written some admiring articles about Wayne for the fan magazines—a fairly common way for a publicist to earn his keep since the silent days. (See, for example, Modern Screen, October 1954, and Motion Picture, November 1956.)

  Reputedly, Henaghan could drink Wayne and just about anybody else under the table. Once, the two men were in Acapulco watching the cliff divers leap off a ledge and plummet two hundred feet, just missing the jutting rocks below.

  Henaghan turned to his boss and said, “I bet you a round of drinks I could do that.” Wayne said it was impossible, that Henaghan would only get himself killed. Nevertheless, he took the bet.

  Henaghan went down the steps, around a corner out of sight, found a diver and paid him to wear Henaghan’s swimming trunks. From a distance, all Wayne could see was a man with Henaghan’s build in Henaghan’s trunks climb out onto the ledge and make a perfect dive beyond the rocks.

  After the diver swam back to shore, Henaghan and he switched trunks again. Henaghan jumped in and out of the water, then climbed back up the steps to be greeted as a conquering hero. “You son of a bitch, you really did it!” exclaimed Wayne, who bought drinks for everyone on the patio.

  Howard Hawks and Wayne had both disliked Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the former for what he regarded as a lack of professionalism on the part of Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane, the latter for its liberal allegory. As Hawks put it, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him.” Hawks wanted to make a western with the precisely opposite point of view—a lawman who feels it’s a matter of pride to count only on other professionals.

  It was a good idea for a western, especially since Hawks was coming out of a bad period. He hadn’t worked since the disastrous Land of the Pharaohs, Wayne hadn’t made a western since The Searchers, and his most recent films hadn’t exactly been a string of triumphs.

  Rio Bravo looked like money from the beginning, even though it took a long time to come together. The screenwriters were Leigh Brackett and the seventy-year-old Jules Furthman working in tandem—the latter contributed the name Feathers for the leading lady, also the name of the female lead in Furthman’s 1927 script for Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld—which, coincidentally, also involved a man attempting to sober up his best friend.

  But the early script drafts weren’t a revision of the High Noon formula at all. The original story was called “El Paso Red,” and, while the opening sequence in the story is fairly close to the film, the plot itself is different from the finished film. The main character, Chance, and his sidekick—in the original story he’s named Eddie, not Dude—are bringing in a bunch of horses along with a wagon train from Mexico. The plot hinges on a prominent rancher who is killed and whose daughter goes missing, and a sheriff who is afraid to do anything until Chance and Eddie/Dude decide to help.

  Leigh Brackett’s first draft retains most of the original story, but loses the Dude character. By the time of the estimating script the basic plot is in place. The script ends with the following:

  146 Int. Feather’s Room Day

  As Chance unlocks the door and comes in, Feathers is waiting . . .

  *

  (This scene was censored before it went to mimeo. Until we get another one, supply your own.)

  Wayne was the only actor considered for John T. Chance, but the rest of the cast was up for grabs. For Dude, the choices, in order, were: Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Cary Grant, William Holden, Montgomery Clift, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, Dean Martin, and Richard Widmark.

  For Colorado: Frank Gifford, Michael Landon, Earl Holliman, Richard Jaeckel, Rod Taylor, Murray Hamilton, Stuart Whitman. (Ricky Nelson, who played the part, was obviously an afterthought.)

  For Feathers: Rhonda Fleming, Jane Greer, Martha Hyer, Beverly Garland, Carolyn Jones, Piper Laurie, Julie London, Sheree North, Janis Paige, Barbara Rush, Ruta Lee, Donna Reed. (Likewise Angie Dickinson.)

  Once again, Hawks pillaged what had worked for him before. The indolent young gun Colorado was yet another riff on Billy the Kid in The Outlaw and Cherry Valance in Red River. But, as Todd McCarthy wrote in his wise and authoritative biography of the director, Hawks was still on top of his game: “The dialogue in the finished film is uniformly smarter, more assured, and insolent than that in the final screenplay.”

  Hawks also devised the great opening sequence that so brilliantly defines the characters and the situations without dialogue: A sweaty, bedraggled Dude (Dean Martin) sidles into a bar looking for a drink. A man disdainfully throws a coin into a spittoon. Dude is thinking about going after it when Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) stops him. Chance turns to deal with the man who threw the coin in the spittoon. The humiliated Dude slugs Wayne from behind. Burdette (Claude Akins) beats up Dude while others hold him. When someone tries to stop Burdette, he shoots the man down in cold blood.

  Two minutes have elapsed, not a word has been spoken, and we’re already deep into foundational conflicts about which Hawks is so secure he spends half the picture ignoring them—an extraordinary economy that couldn’t have been devised by anyone who hadn’t worked in silent film.

  Once his cast was set, Hawks shot his movie in sixty-one days, six days over schedule, from May 4 to July 23, 1958. Under the contract he signed on April 1, Wayne was paid a flat $750,000 for his services, spread out in one payment of $250,000, two payments of $175,000, and one payment of $150,000—one payment a year for four years, from 1958 to 1961. (Spacing out the money was a means of avoiding the heaviest income tax percentage.)

  For the rest of the cast, Dean Martin got $5,000 a week for ten weeks, w
ith two weeks added for postproduction. If Hawks had known how Martin felt about John Wayne westerns he could have gotten him for free. “I remember third shows at the Copa where [Dean would] speed up so as not to miss the three A.M. showing of John Wayne in Red River or Stagecoach,” remembered Jerry Lewis. “In fact, I’ll swear: as much as Dean loved the ladies, when the fun was done, he preferred being left alone to watch his westerns or read his comic books. Women always seemed to need the kind of attention he wasn’t much interested in giving.”

  Ricky Nelson got $3,500 per week with a ten-week guarantee, and Angie Dickinson got $833.33 per week with a twelve-week guarantee. The two payroll surprises were Walter Brennan, who got $10,000 a week for five weeks, and Ward Bond, who got $3,333 a week for six weeks, even though his scenes could easily have been photographed in a couple of days.

  Wayne’s salary for Rio Bravo represented a financial diminishment, since he had been getting a percentage of the proceeds since Republic. He was willing to take less money when working for Ford; it’s possible that he was doing the same thing because of his affection for Hawks, whose Armada Productions was in for 30 percent of the profits.

  After Martin was cast, Wayne began to think seriously about his character. “Martin gets all the fireworks, doesn’t he?” he asked Hawks, who had to agree. “What do I do?” he finally asked.

  “What would happen to you if your best friend had been a drunk and he was trying to come back—wouldn’t you watch him?” asked Hawks. Wayne knew all about working with drunks; he thought about it, nodded and said, “OK, I know what to do.”

  As he moved into the latter stages of his career, Wayne would often express the same basic anxiety, especially with complex scripts—that he was the hub of the wheel but didn’t actually have a lot to do, or even much of a character to play, and just how the hell was he supposed to be interesting for 120 minutes? It was basic actor’s fear, the rough equivalent of Spencer Tracy’s neurotic attempts to try to back out of nearly every movie just before shooting started. It was also somehow touching in that Wayne seemed unaware of the compelling strength he could project without trying—the innate quality that Hawks and Ford relied on.