by Scott Eyman
“My kindest regards to you and your father. Sincerely, Jack.”
In sum, The Green Berets was a reasonable commercial success, but a critical disaster that convinced most of the moviegoing audience under the age of thirty never to see a John Wayne movie.
But Wayne was more interested in pleasing the audience he had than he was in broadening it. “All I know,” he said, “is that it gave me great pleasure to pass [the financial success of the picture] on over to Universal where at the last minute they reneged. I let them off the hook, but they wouldn’t let it go at that. They kept telling everybody that the picture couldn’t make money, that it wouldn’t go foreign, that it was an unpopular war. What the hell war isn’t unpopular?”
The critics were right in that Wayne’s mind-set, the way he saw the movies and the audiences who paid to see them, had a way of reducing the moral grays of a strange war to black and white. “It’s Cowboys and Indians,” Wayne said. “In a motion picture, you cannot confuse the audience. . . . I’m not making a picture about Vietnam. I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that’s what’s true about Vietnam.”
Verbally, Wayne was always blunter than he was as an actor, or even as a producer; he knew full well that he had often depicted Indians, to take his own example, as complex, honorable men—Hondo, for instance. But when he was cornered by a press that he never entirely trusted, he disingenuously pretended, first, that his picture wasn’t political, second, that he was only following the simplifying traditions of the movies.
If The Green Berets hardened the hearts of many in the American moviegoing audience, in Europe there was a more modulated attitude. The French director Bertrand Tavernier enjoyed provoking his left-wing friends by telling them Wayne was a far more intelligent actor than the reliably left-wing Marlon Brando—that Brando, at the zenith of his Hollywood power, had specialized in terrible movies and ridiculous accents. Wayne, on the other hand, had consistently used his power to make good films, including some that nobody ever talked about, such as Wake of the Red Witch or Shepherd of the Hills.
Years later, after spending time with some of Wayne’s directors and many actors who worked with him, Tavernier would go even further. “I know he was right-wing and The Green Berets is lousy and embarrassing. But some of his opinions were more complex (about the treatment of the Indians, the Mexicans) than he was given credit for. Furthermore, many actors told me he was more open, more generous with other actors, including black people, than many ‘liberal’ stars. He was also more respectful of bit players, more democratic.”
In August 1968, Wayne spoke at the 29th Republican convention in Miami. On the fifth day he made a speech that was headlined “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.”
Looking dapper in a dark blue pinstriped suit, Wayne began by saying,
I’m about as political as a Bengal tiger. . . . I have a feeling that a nation is more than just government, laws and rules. It’s an attitude. It’s the people’s outlook. Dean Martin once asked me what I wanted for my baby daughter, and I realize now that my answer was kind of an attitude toward my country. Well, he asked me this on election day and the bars were closed anyway, so he had a lot of time to listen and I told him. . . .
I told him that I wanted for my daughter Marisa what most parents want for their children. I wanted to stick around long enough to see that she got a good start and I would like her to know some of the values that we knew as kids, some of the values that an articulate few now are saying are old-fashioned. But most of all I want her to be grateful, as I am grateful for every day of my life that I spend in the United States of America. . . .
I don’t care whether she ever memorizes the Gettysburg Address or not, but I want her to understand it, and since very few little girls are asked to defend their country, she will probably never have to raise her hand to that oath, but I want her to respect all who do.
I guess that is what I want for my girl. That is what I want for my country, and that’s what I want for the men that you people are going to pick from here to go shape our destinies.
The convention chose Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew to shape the nation’s destiny.
By now, Mike Wayne was running Batjac smoothly, and his father had grown to respect his eldest son. “I could get John Wayne to read a script without putting up a million dollar offer,” remembered Mike. “I was always in competition for him with other studios, but I could get a free read. He was used to seeing finished scripts; I would never give him anything unless it was a complete treatment, or a complete script. As far as his being the boss, he was the boss on any film he was on. In movies, the most important element eventually becomes known and gets his way. Running Batjac wasn’t any harder [for me] than it would have been for anybody else.”
Left unsaid was the fact that it wasn’t any easier either. “The fact that he was so professional made it easier, but there was never any doubt about where the muscle was. That was the good thing and the bad thing about John Wayne: he dominated everything he was associated with because of his charisma, his star energy.”
John Wayne was gold-plated as far as the Hollywood studios were concerned because he guaranteed a bottom—something very few stars can do. A Wayne picture rarely did less than $4 million in domestic rentals and could go much higher. Since Wayne films rarely cost more than $4 million to shoot, there was almost no downside risk. “He wasn’t a guarantee of success,” said Mike, “he was a guarantee against failure.”
His price for the pictures he made after The Green Berets was $1 million against 10 percent of the gross. First up was a project he had wanted to produce himself. Batjac was after it but so was Hal Wallis. Wayne didn’t care who produced it because he knew that nobody could play the main character better than he could—a one-eyed lawman named Rooster Cogburn.
* * *
1. Of the $12.5 million, Warners wanted to allocate $9.8 million for distribution fees and expenses, leaving a grand total of $2.7 million to apply to the negative cost they tallied at slightly more than $7 million. This meant that Wayne’s great-grandchildren might have been able to collect his 10 percent of the profits, but nobody else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The word about True Grit was spreading even before the novel was published. “Dad was on vacation on his boat,” remembered Mike Wayne, “and he came back into town. I had just gotten the galleys of True Grit. He was in my office, and I was just about to hand him the galleys when the phone rang. It was Henry Hathaway. Before I handed him the phone, I put my hand over the phone and said, ‘I’m on this True Grit project. Don’t commit to it.’
“Hathaway started talking to him about True Grit; he and Hal Wallis were bidding on it and so forth. When the conversation was over, I handed him the book. He read it and told me, ‘I think it’s great, and I hope you get it. But no matter who gets it, I’m gonna play that part.’ ”
Author Charles Portis chose Wallis for two reasons: he had liked some of Wallis’s westerns, and Wallis upped the ante by also buying Portis’s novel Norwood. “I bid $300,000 and Wallis bid $350,000,” said Mike Wayne. “I was out-moneyed. I was paying my father a million against 10 percent, and he did True Grit for $500,000 [actually $750,000] against one third of the profits. And I asked him, ‘Why are you taking less money from Hal Wallis than from me?’ And he said, ‘Because Wallis is a better producer than you, and I’ll make more money with a third of the profits.’ And he was right, but I didn’t want to hear it.”
Wallis was determined to make the movie, with John Wayne or without. (Some thought was given to Robert Mitchum or Walter Matthau for the role.) But Paramount, where Wallis made his pictures, was leery, especially at such a high cost for what was, after all, a western, not to mention giving Portis 2 percent of the gross in excess of $10 million. Wallis promptly took the project to Fox, which impelled Paramount to reconsider, which led Wallis to back out of Fox with apologies to Richard Zanuck.
For the part of Mattie Ross, Hal W
allis wanted Mia Farrow against Hathaway’s preference for Sally Field. But Wallis felt Field’s Flying Nun background (she was the eponymous main character of this television program) worked against her. Wallis ran through some other options including Jaclyn Smith (“Too pretty”), Jennifer O’Neill (“Tall, inexperienced”), and Geneviève Bujold (“if Mia Farrow turns it down”).
Farrow had more or less agreed to take the part, then went off to London to do Secret Ceremony with Robert Mitchum and Elizabeth Taylor. She told Mitchum that her next picture would be for Henry Hathaway, and he told her to avoid the experience at all costs—Hathaway was a son of a bitch and she would hate him. Farrow then made the outlandish request that Wallis replace Hathaway with Roman Polanski. When Wallis rejected that idea outright, she bailed. Time was short; by this time, Wallis only had about a month before the start of production. Then he saw Kim Darby on a TV show and hired her quickly, paying her $75,000—the same money he was paying Glen Campbell to play the Texas Ranger.
As production got closer, Wayne got jumpy—he didn’t have a handle on how to play Rooster Cogburn. For one thing, there was the matter of the eyepatch. “I’m not gonna wear that patch on my eye,” he told Henry Hathaway. “No way will I wear a patch.”
He was, of course, nervous because the part was out of his comfort zone and hadn’t been specifically tailored to his screen character by one of his in-house screenwriters. (Hal Wallis had assigned the script to Marguerite Roberts, a good writer married to the blacklisted John Sanford.)
Hathaway knew how to gentle the fractious old stallion. He wasn’t simply going to tell Wayne what to do—only John Ford could do that. He got some clothes from wardrobe for Wayne to try on in front of a cheval mirror. Hanging on the hinge of the mirror was an eyepatch.
Wayne went through the fitting, eyeing the patch, saying nothing. When it was all over, he said, “You’re a pretty smart son of a bitch. No way, no way.”
At the second fitting, the patch was still there and Wayne was still calling Hathaway a smart son of a bitch. “The trouble with—you put that on and you can’t see anything, and on a horse . . .”
Hathaway said, “Look, Duke, if you try it on, you’ll see that instead of it being a patch, I’ve got black gauze there. You can see through it perfectly. It’s almost as if there was no patch. On top of that, for the closer shots, I have a finer gauze. Not until I take a big close-up will I use one that’s completely blank. So you can see at all times.”
“You got gauze in there?” Wayne asked, gingerly putting on the patch. He turned and looked at himself in the mirror, then turned around to Hathaway. “Shall I try on a coat?” he said.
“He got to kind of like it,” remembered Hathaway.
Hathaway wanted to make the picture a fairy tale, so certain key things needed to be elevated to physical perfection. “I looked for weeks, literally, for that natural arena surrounded by aspen trees where the final shoot-out takes place,” remembered Hathaway. “I shot it from up high on purpose, so it looks like . . . knights jousting. . . . It worked. It was a fantasy that I couched in as realistic terms as possible.”
For Charles Portis, the script was wrong, Wayne was wrong, and the locations were wrong. Portis thought that the dialogue needed rewriting because the book’s dialogue—a lot of which had been transplanted into the script—was from the point of view of an old woman telling the story retrospectively. Portis also disliked the beautiful Colorado locations because it wasn’t his native Arkansas, where he had set the story.
With the tact that endeared him to hundreds of actors, Hathaway thoughtfully responded to Portis’s concerns: “In Arkansas, nobody’s been ten miles from their house in their whole fucking lives. And when they see the picture they’ll be happy to know that some part of Arkansas looks like that.” Wallis and Hathaway stayed with Marguerite Roberts’s adaptation.
Wayne had never been a conventional leading man, i.e., one dependent on his looks. He had at times been fatherly through most of the 1950s and 1960s, but True Grit would enable him to slide comfortably into the role of a feisty grandfather for the final stage of his career—men who were getting old, were admittedly past their prime, but still possessed of sufficient skills to do the job—any job.
Henry Hathaway asserted his authority on the first day of production, when he gathered the company around him and announced that there would be only two hard and fast rules: no discussions of politics, and no discussions of cattle. (Wayne’s successful Hereford operation meant that he disputed the quality of any competing breed.)
It wasn’t long before someone from Texas announced that longhorns were preferable to Herefords. Wayne thought that was a highly debatable point, but the debate was quickly cut off because Hathaway fired the Texan immediately.
Off the set, Hathaway was a charmer who drank good wine, knew art and architecture, lived in a gleaming white modern house, and could talk knowledgeably about nearly any subject. He had been married to his wife, Skip, for a long time, and his secret burden was her alcoholism.
But on the set, Hathaway remained a martinet who had developed an unholy hatred for plastic cups. In Hathaway’s mind, a gust of wind might blow a plastic cup in front of the camera and ruin a take. Holding a plastic cup on a Hathaway set was like holding a live hand grenade on anybody else’s.
“Old Henry would eat anybody’s ass out,” remembered stuntman Dean Smith, who was doubling Robert Duvall on the picture. Smith was covering for Duvall during the shot in which the wounded Duvall slowly slides off his horse. But Smith caught his chaps on the saddle horn and got hung up.
“Even the horse was trying to help me,” he remembered. “And you could hear Hathaway hollering for a thousand miles. Duke was laying there with a horse on his leg, and he looked at me and said, ‘Pay no mind to that son of a bitch.’ ”
Wayne was used to Hathaway, but Robert Duvall wasn’t, and Duvall had a large hunk of true grit in him. He didn’t like being yelled at, and one day he blew sky high at Hathaway, screaming, “I can’t do this goddamn scene like Martha Graham!”
“Duke was sitting there with his mouth open,” remembered Dean Smith. “We all were. God, Bob erupted right in Hathaway’s face. It was something!”
“You have to have discipline,” Hathaway asserted near the end of his life in explaining his theory of running a set. “It’s like a father with a big family. What do you do if a kid gets out of line? You’ve got to whip him or pretty soon all the kids are wild. Well, making a picture involves a mighty big family, and there’s a lot of money involved, so I don’t let things get very far out of line.”
When Kim Darby started shooting the picture, she had just given birth to her first child and was simultaneously beginning divorce proceedings against her husband. Naturally, she was distracted. Hathaway hadn’t wanted Darby, which was bad enough, but on top of that he didn’t particularly like her.
“My problem with her was simple. She’s not particularly attractive, so her book of tricks consisted mostly [of] being a little cute. All through the film, I had to stop her from acting funny, doing bits of business and so forth.”
Complicating things was the fact that Darby was scared of horses; Hath-away had to use stuntwoman Polly Burson wearing a Darby mask for most of the picture. Darby estimated that she was actually on a horse for perhaps five minutes of the finished picture.
Surrounded by an angry director, a nervous actress, and the inexperienced Glen Campbell, Wayne took the reins between his teeth the same way Rooster Cogburn does in the climax of the film. “He was there on the set before anyone else and knew every line perfectly,” said Kim Darby.
Joining the picture for seven days to play a doomed heavy was Dennis Hopper, who was taking a break from editing Easy Rider. Hopper had come to love the director who had driven him to distraction on From Hell to Texas. “I studied his films when I began directing, and I realized he was a very pure filmmaker.” Working on The Sons of Katie Elder in Durango five years before had given Hopper th
e idea for The Last Movie. “For the movie, Henry had built fake facades in front of real houses! And people there were still riding horses, and they still wore guns. And I wondered what they would do when they walked past these facades once the film crew had gone.” Hopper would eventually offer Hathaway the part of the director of the film within the film in The Last Movie, but his doctor wouldn’t let him work at the high elevations in Peru. Hopper hired Sam Fuller instead.
Near the end of his own life, Hopper took pride in a couple of things: when Henry Hathaway died in 1985, Hopper went to the funeral of a man who had first been a tormentor, then a mentor. “I was one of about seventeen people at the Rosary. He wasn’t a beloved man, and he had outlived most of his peers.”
That and one other thing: “In both of the films I made with John Wayne, I died in his arms.”
Five weeks into the shoot, Wayne wrote Hal Wallis a letter from his quarters at the Lazy IG Motel in Montrose, Colorado. There was a general feeling that the film was working well and was going to be a hit, and Wayne had heard rumors of a possible reserved seat release. He asked Wallis to think about it before a summer general release. He closed by saying that he didn’t really know much about distribution, but was throwing the idea out on behalf of a picture he believed in. “I’m sure this one is going to make those theater owners ‘fill their hands.’ ”
The locations in Montrose were nearly six thousand feet above sea level, causing Wayne his usual difficulty with his breathing, but he didn’t flinch, except for the day they were shooting his mounted charge against Lucky Ned Pepper’s gang. For his close-up, with the reins between his teeth, twirling and cocking his rifle one-handed as he bore down on the outlaws, Wayne was not sitting on a horse, but on a saddle mounted on a camera car. The still man took some shots of Wayne on the contraption, and the actor stopped, leveling his rifle and the pistol at the still man and firing blanks at him.