American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Dietrich made one more Hollywood film during the war years, Kismet, costarring Ronald Coleman, which didn’t do well, after which she relocated to New York. Some believe that after she lost her box-office appeal, Feldman was responsible for studios turning cold on Dietrich so that Wayne wouldn’t have to see her around town or at premieres he had to attend.

  UPON COMPLETION OF PITTSBURGH, WAYNE took a trip to Mexico, at the time Hollywood’s favorite sex playground for male stars, where life was cheap, and women cheaper. Bö Roos suggested the idea to Wayne hoping it would help him get over Dietrich. A number of Roos’s clients came along for the cheer-up ride, including Ward Bond, Fred MacMurray, and Ray Milland.

  One night while out with the others in Mexico City, Milland introduced his Mexican “girlfriend” to Wayne: call girl to the stars and Mexican film bit player Esperanza Baur Diaz Ceballos, Chata for short (“pug nose” or “sweetie” in Mexican slang). Chata was a statuesque beauty with a come-hither smile. She then decided she preferred Wayne to Milland (he never talked to or worked with Wayne again). As Chata would later tell her friend Ruth Waterbury, her attraction to Wayne was immediate and visceral: “When I first see Duke in Mexico, where most of the men they are so short, I know it is good for me. I know that, when I, who am not so long, dance with him, his head will be above me which never happened to me before.”

  Chata had an initial erotic attraction for Wayne similar to Dietrich’s, although that was where the resemblance between the two women ended. Dietrich was German, blond, with flawless skin and the slim body and long legs of a model. Chata was Hispanic and short, with dark hair and bad skin. The only other thing the two women had in common was their high-octane sexuality, and the fact that both of them had worked, at one time or another, as professional “escorts.”69 Chata was married to and separated at the time from Mexico’s biggest star, the ironically named Eugenio Morrison.

  After that first trip, Wayne returned to Mexico every chance he got, using Chata to ease himself out of the pain he felt over losing Dietrich. Exhausted from his 1942 seven-pictures-in-a-single-year burst, he found warm relief in her comforting arms.

  In May 1943, after nine years, eleven days, and two months of marriage, Josephine made good on her threat to go through with her divorce from Wayne, but then couldn’t quite take that final step. At the last minute, she petitioned the Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles for a legal separation, which it granted.

  When he received the legal notice from Josephine’s lawyers, Wayne was filled with a combination of guilt, remorse, and relief. He understood now what a failure he had been as a husband. Josephine made arrangements for him to see the children on Sundays, and he was grateful for that much. They were delivered to him once a week and, when the visit was over, returned to her by chauffeur.

  According to Wayne, “Whenever I’ve been in trouble, [John Ford] has always been there . . . That’s what I call a friend.” Ford had gone through something similar with his wife but had managed to hold his marriage together. He wanted to be there for Wayne during his time of need. On Ford’s advice, Wayne made it his business to stay active in the lives of his children. “I’ve shared Josie’s anxieties when they needed their tonsils out, worried about the braces for Melinda’s teeth or glasses for Toni. I’ve taken Mike on hunting trips with me and on explorations into the desert. And Pat and I have gone away on fishing trips and scouted the coast of Catalina Island.”

  AFTER HAVING HIS HAND HELD for him by Ford, Wayne was relieved that all the charades could now be over. He didn’t have to pretend to be a bachelor anymore; he could be one. He started hanging out again every night with Ward Bond, who encouraged Wayne to enjoy his newfound and hard-fought-for freedom.

  One evening, while dining at Chasen’s with friends, the green-and-white restaurant that served catered to the golden age crowd, Wayne, with more than a few drinks in him, began to whine again, this time to the tall, dark, handsome billionaire playboy and already slightly eccentric filmmaker Howard Hughes, who was sitting next to him. Hughes liked Wayne, but he couldn’t stand hearing him moan about how upset he was about his failure as a husband in one breath and in the next how he missed this woman in Mexico, and how he wished there was some way he could just sneak away from everything and everyone and go to be with her.

  Hughes then told him he had a private plane at his disposal and suggested that they take a midnight flight to Mexico City. They left Chasen’s together after dinner and were in Mexico before daylight.

  Chata was thrilled at the flourish of his sudden appearance, and even more so when he promised her that he would find a way to bring her to America. He meant it. When he got back to Hollywood, he worked out a plan with Yates to do just that. Yates was understandably reluctant but wanted to keep Wayne happy and continuing to make movies for Republic, and arranged for Chata to get a visa to come to Hollywood and put her under contract at $150 a week, just enough to get her a permanent resident card. She never made a single movie for the $80,000 the studio wound up paying her over the next decade.

  Soon enough, Wayne was talking about marrying her, and Yates and others warned him that he should slow down, that he was still not legally divorced, and reminded him how much he disliked the restrictive married life. Yates was playing up his concern for Wayne’s welfare but he was also worried about his own, meaning the money Wayne made for him. He was already walking a professional tightrope over his military service, or lack of it; that kind of behavior had nearly killed the career of Lew Ayres, who had, ironically enough, become a star in 1930 for his performance in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Because of his conscientious objector status, Ayres’s career was nearly ruined, and he never recovered the star status he had enjoyed before World War II. A divorce, an interracial marriage, and no service in the armed forces, Yates feared, could mean professional suicide for Wayne, and conceivably bring down Republic Pictures as well. Wayne felt the pressure from Yates, but he was determined to marry Chata and also to take some of the heat off himself by at least making a real attempt to serve, in some capacity short of actual enlistment. He wrote to John Ford to see if there was any room left in Ford’s naval field photographic unit and was told via return registered mail that that unit was full but that the army’s similar unit had room; he included the forms necessary to get him in. He never filled them out.

  Wayne’s next picture was Albert S. Rogell’s 1943 In Old Oklahoma (a.k.a. War of the Wildcats) opposite Martha Scott and costarring Albert Dekker, a standard ’40s romantic triangle set against the booming Oklahoma oil business. It was a huge popular success, and the only film Republic produced that year that was among the top ten grossers, due mainly to Wayne’s ongoing popularity in a Hollywood where there were very few leading men for him to compete with.

  Yates offered Wayne a five-picture contract, with a starting salary of $3,125 a week, to increase with each picture. Yates then announced to the press that “John Wayne will soon be a triple-threat man in the industry. Already a top star, he will prove himself a capable producer and will eventually move into directing.” But even before he made his first film for Republic under his new deal, Yates loaned him out to RKO to make William Seiter’s A Lady Takes a Chance (a.k.a. The Cowboy and the Girl), a vehicle for Jean Arthur, produced by her husband, Frank Ross. The film was a bit of fluff about a young New York girl bored with her job who takes a fourteen-day vacation to “the West,” where she meets Wayne, who is working in a rodeo. They “meet cute” when he is bucked from his bronco and lands in her lap. Arthur had been a star since the silent era and had made some notable films in the ’30s, including appearing back-to-back in Howard Hawks’s 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings opposite Cary Grant, and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington opposite Jimmy Stewart. The film was a bit of a departure for Wayne, whose forte was never comedy, and he was paid $55,000 directly by Universal (Yates was paid separately). It was made on a budget of $664,000 and grossed over $6 million in its initial North Am
erican release, and was a solid hit for both stars.

  Then, in June 1944, a week after D-Day, the Allied invasion of France, all 3-A deferments were changed to 1-A, including Wayne’s, which meant he was immediately eligible for the draft. Yates once again stepped in and instructed Republic’s attorneys to file a new series of appeals, arguing that Wayne’s work in film was more important to the country than his actual service, and not long after, Wayne’s draft status was changed to 2-A “in support of the national interest.” He was able to maintain a 2-A status for the remainder of the war.

  That same year, Wayne joined the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), an organization formed by director Sam Wood, who was its first president, and Walt Disney, one of its vice presidents. This was the organization’s credo: “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crack-pots . . . We pledge to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth,” and to “turn off the faucets which dripped red water into film scripts.”

  Wayne’s membership in the MPA erased all notions anyone might have had that he was soft on Nazism. For the moment, at least, Wayne had managed to affirm his patriotism while avoiding service in the military, and he continued to make movies.

  YATES THEN CAME UP WITH a new script for Wayne that would allow him to fight for his country—on-screen at least. Edward Ludwig’s The Fighting Seabees (a.k.a. Donovan’s Army; Robert Florey was the uncredited codirector; he worked for one week on the picture). In the film, Wayne plays construction chief Wedge Donovan, who together with Lieutenant Commander Bob Yarrow (played by Dennis O’Keefe, another actor who benefited from the lack of available Hollywood leading men) creates a new branch of service, the Seabees, because civilian workers in the Pacific are not allowed to carry firearms. It was a standard formula picture loosely based on the adventures of the first group of Seabees, in the film a politically correct, ethnically balanced group of civilian fighters.

  Yates had several reasons to make this movie. The army division that approved military pictures was cracking down on films that were not accurate, or depicted the military as anything less than heroic. Yates wanted to make something unabashedly patriotic, not just to satisfy the army, but to cash in on the wave of patriotism that turned these films into big moneymakers.

  During the making of the film, Wayne made several appearances in USO shows in the South Pacific and Australia, his version of military service. According to press releases generated by Yates to publicize Wayne’s visits, “The boys are starved for news from home and that the biggest day in their lives over there is when the mailman hands them an envelope postmarked ‘United States.’ ” Wayne made it a point to deliver sacks of mail wherever he appeared, and he visited hospitals. “The kids are not thinking about any trouble at home because they are too busy fighting a war but they do want to be sure they have something to say when they get back,” Wayne told one reporter. “What the guys down there need are letters and cigars, more snapshots, phonograph needles, and radios . . . the G.I. bands need reeds, strings, and orchestrations . . . and if you have any cigarette lighters, send ’em along.” In addition to playing two shows a day and visiting out-of-the-way camps in New Guinea and New Britain, Wayne went to every hospital he could find. He told the press he felt he belonged at the fronts, with the boys. He had a few picture commitments, after which, he assured everyone, he would head straight back to Burma and China. Screen Guide magazine ran a story about his “extended” USO tour and showed him with pictures of his four children.

  He never went back. It was partly because he didn’t have the time, and partly because he had not been warmly welcomed by the enlisted men, most of whom had seen hard combat, and did not appreciate these visits by Wayne or any of the Hollywood entertainers who had not enlisted. The soldiers considered them coddled, spoiled, and looking for some good P.R. to promote their own careers and couldn’t care less about G.I.’s. Among those they treated similarly were Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Al Jolson, although these raucous booing sessions were not reported in the press. Wayne wasn’t the only one who got “the treatment” from soldiers.

  And there was another reason he did the USO shows; William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, needed a liaison to collect information from General Douglas MacArthur about how the war was proceeding. Wayne never met with MacArthur (who did not like Donovan) but upon his return from one tour of his poorly received USO shows he received a large, fancy plaque congratulating him for his service to the OSS. The plaque was sent to John Ford’s home. Wayne never picked it up.

  BY THE TIME THE FIGHTING Seabees opened in March 1944, Wayne was openly living with Chata in a penthouse apartment at the Chateau Marmont hotel, overlooking the Sunset Strip. The few nights he didn’t spend with Chata, Wayne and his pal Ward Bond roamed the bars of the Strip, at the time a relatively lawless, unincorporated literal strip of land, a mile-and-a-half-long stretch on Sunset Boulevard between the end of West Hollywood and the start of Beverly Hills that fell under no specific police jurisdiction. It was an anything-goes playground for Hollywood, a place where everybody could let off a little steam after a hard day’s work. Stars and crews openly mingled in the many storefront bars that dotted the Strip. Bond, who had recently left his wife, was living alone at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Unlike his pal, Bond was in no hurry to return to married life. He wanted to dip into Hollywood’s pool of the best-looking women in America, and Wayne sometimes accompanied him. If Chata let Wayne have his freedom, it was because there was little she could do about it. She was in America by the good graces of Duke and Herb Yates, and she knew that all Wayne had to do was pull the trigger and she would be back home in a Mexican minute.

  On nights Wayne was out on the town with Bond, Chata stayed in their suite at the hotel and lit candles for both their souls. And for her mother. And for Yates to make her a star.

  Chapter 10

  On November 25, 1944, thirty-five-year-old Josie sued for divorce, charging her husband with repeated acts of “cruel and inhuman treatment, and grievous physical and mental suffering . . . absenting himself from home several nights a week, refusing to explain his activities” and “daring” his wife to check on his movements. Testifying before Superior Judge Jess E. Stephens, Josephine said she had found a “lady’s coat,” not her own, in the actor’s car upon his return from a trip to a resort. Wayne’s lawyer cross-examined her and asked if she had gone through his pockets at a nightclub party. Josephine replied, “I told him he would have to mend his ways or I’d have to do something. He said, ‘Hurry up and get it over with.’ ” Judge Stephens granted Josephine an interlocutory decree of divorce, to be made final after one year, and she got sole custody of their four children, Michael, ten; Tony, eight; Patrick, five; and Melinda, four.70

  Wayne later told one interviewer, “When we split up [were divorced], I took just one car and my clothes and Josie got all the rest of it, including every cent I saved.” In addition to the $75,000 Wayne had in the bank, Josephine got the house and everything in it. Wayne also agreed to turn over 20 percent of the next hundred thousand dollars he earned, and 10 percent of everything after that, for as long as he lived, or until Josephine remarried, which he knew was out of the question. He also set up separate individual trust funds for his children.

  It would take years for Josie to get beyond the acrimony, but eventually she and Wayne would become friends. Then he would often come by the house, the same one they’d lived in as husband and wife, to talk to her about his career, spend time with the kids, and just to relax in familiar surroundings. Twenty years after his divorce, Wayne acknowledged he and Josie were much closer and better friends after their marriage than during it.

  THROUGHOUT THE WAR YEARS, WAYNE continued to turn out movies. In 1944, he made Tall in the Saddle,
a frontier western directed by Edwin L. Marin, in which he was loaned out by Yates to RKO. This was a western, costarring the beautiful Ella Raines, Ward Bond, and “Gabby” Hayes. The story concerns Wayne, a ranch foreman who reluctantly goes to work for the female heir to the land and livestock of the KC Ranch. Through a series of adventures, he winds up falling in love with a competing female ranch owner. Much of this is resolved with fistfights and horse chases. The film received high praise from the critics. Variety compared it to Stagecoach for its “gutsy approach and spirit.”

  It was followed by Joseph Cane’s Flame of Barbary Coast, filmed in July 1944 but not released until May 1945, because Yates wanted to hold it until Wayne’s divorce became final. It was touted as the crowning achievement of Republic’s first ten years. It costarred Virginia Grey (after Wayne once again vetoed Claire Trevor). The story concerns the romantic adventures of a cattleman who comes to San Francisco to collect the fee for delivering his herd and is filled with gambling, fights, shoot-outs, and showgirls, which all comes to a climax as the famed earthquake of 1906 hits.

  IN MAY 1945, THE WAR had ended in the European Theater but continued on for another three months, until America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. During that time, at RKO, Wayne was drafted for one more wartime propaganda film, Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan (a.k.a. The Invisible Army), which went into production in November 1944 while the war was still raging, and ended in May 1945. It was filmed at RKO’s studios in Arcadia, which doubled as Bataan, and at the Baldwin Estate.71 Wayne received $87,500 for working on the film, while Anthony Quinn, his co-star on loan from Fox, earned $15,500.