American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Wayne then signed a similar deal with RKO Radio Pictures, a move Howard Hughes encouraged him to make. Hughes was planning to take over RKO and wanted to ensure the studio would have at least one legitimate star in its stable. To induce Wayne to sign with the troubled studio, Hughes promised him he would have greater control and bigger budgets than he had ever had before.

  The first postwar film Wayne-Fellows produced at Republic was 1946’s Angel and the Badman (a.k.a. The Gun and Angel and the Outlaw), a western written and directed by James Edward Grant, a writer Wayne favored, who had scripted several of Wayne’s earlier B movies. Angel costarred the twenty-two-year-old raven-haired Gail Russell. During production, Russell developed an intense crush on Wayne, who, with his relationship at home with Chata not going well, reciprocated and began an intense physical relationship with the actress.

  Angel and the Badman was shot in black-and-white in Monument Valley, Wayne’s professional nod to Stagecoach and personal tribute to John Ford. The film tells the story of “the badman,” Quirt Evans (Wayne), who is wounded and nursed back to health by the granddaughter of a Quaker family, the aptly named Prudence, the “Angel” of the title, played by Russell. Also in the film is Harry Carey, who plays the marshal and ultimately saves Wayne from the other “badman” in the film, Bruce Cabot. Carey’s presence, Monument Valley, and Wayne’s better-than-usual performance in a western that was grittier than many of his recent previous ones led some to suspect that perhaps Ford had something to do with the direction, which was not true. It did, however, mark Wayne’s return to classic western form. It was, also, without question, the best work of Russell’s twenty-five-film career.73

  In an interview Wayne gave to Louella Parsons to promote the film he talked about the professional struggles he had gone through and the strong influence Ford had had on him, perhaps sending a message to Ford that he wanted to work with him again: “I started in three-day productions. I went in and out of those so fast that half the time I didn’t know their titles. I’ll bet I’ve survived more bad pictures than any other actor onscreen, but I was so disgusted with the lot of them that I would have gone back to being a prop man if it hadn’t been for Jack [John] Ford . . . Well, every time I’d get completely discouraged, Jack would insist that I hang on—that he’d yet find the right part and put me across.”

  Parsons asked him what it was like to be both producer and star, as he was on Angel: “It sure changes you when you’re the producer as well as the star. I used to be a little vague about when I reported to the studio mornings—but now I’m ahead of time. I know all my lines. I love all the other actors in the troupe, who don’t blow scenes . . . as a producer I want to give new people chances. If they click, I’ll feel that will be a sort of repayment for the brand of friendship and trust that Jack Ford has given me.”

  At the end of filming, Wayne threw a cast and crew party. According to Gail Russell, “Earlier in the day, James Brandt, director and writer, and John Wayne, producer and star of the picture, had surprised me by telling me they were presenting me with approximately $500 because they believed my salary had not been in keeping with the caliber of my work as feminine lead . . . John [Wayne] took me home after the party. He had celebrated too much and apologized to my mother for his condition. He called a taxi. My brother helped him into the taxi and he left about 1:00 a.m. The next morning he sent my mother a box of flowers with a note of apology for any inconvenience he might have caused her. I was contemplating marriage to Guy Madison at the time and was living with my family.”

  Chata, meanwhile, whose Hollywood film career had gone nowhere, began to suspect, along with and encouraged by her mamacita, that her husband was spending entirely too much time with Russell. One night during filming he didn’t come home at all, and she suspected her husband was at a hotel in Studio City with Russell.74 When he finally did come home the next night, after spending a few hours drinking with the boys, he discovered he was locked out of his house. He broke a glass pane of the front door with his fist, let himself in, and, still drunk, lay down on the sofa. A few minutes later, a drunk Chata came running into the living room holding a loaded gun. Her mother grabbed it and prevented her daughter from killing John Wayne.

  The next day she apologized and promised Wayne she would stop drinking and be a better wife to him. To do so, Wayne said, his mother-in-law would have to go back to Mexico, and Chata would have to share her bed every night with him. She agreed, but they soon fell back into a familiar pattern of arguing, drinking, arguing some more, fighting (sometimes physically), breaking up, and then entering a brief “honeymoon phase” before it all started again. It would be that way for the rest of their marriage.

  IN 1947, WAYNE APPEARED IN the first film under his new contract with RKO, although he did not produce it (Stephen Ames did). He was given $101,000 to star in Richard Wallace’s Tycoon, with a screenplay by Borden Chase and John Twist, adapted from the novel by C. E. Scoggins. The film is about the adventures of a couple of railroad tunnel-building engineers in Peru (Wayne and James Gleason), working for the film’s tycoon (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). During their off-hours, Wayne falls for his daughter (Laraine Day, a last-minute replacement for Maureen O’Hara) and marries her, while he continues to have problems with her father.

  At the time, Day, who was a Mormon, had just married baseball manager Leo Durocher, known to have a nasty jealous streak in him. The film was supposed to be filmed in Mexico, but due to budget problems was shot in California. Durocher often visited the set of Tycoon and became enraged whenever he saw Day embracing Wayne during a scene. Wayne reacted good-naturedly. “Every time I kiss Laraine, that guy’s face looks as if somebody on the other team had just stolen home.”

  The film went seriously over budget, with a final negative cost of $3.2 million, and when it was released, it failed to earn back its cost at the box office. Wayne was convinced it would have done better if he had produced. Here is his first explanation of why it failed, in what amounts to an early vision of what would, years later, be labeled auteurism: “I do believe that one man should serve as producer and director. Making a film is like painting a picture. If you were having your portrait painted, you wouldn’t have one artist do your eyes, another your nose, and still a third your mouth. That’s why I think, as nearly as possible, production control should be centered in the talents of a single individual.”

  But after repeated viewings of the film, something Wayne liked to do with all his pictures, he began to change his mind. It wasn’t the way the film was produced or directed that was the problem. It was the content. Tycoon was a sucker punch; it played right into the hands of those who believed that capitalism—the tycoon—exploited workers, with a love story as the sugarcoating meant to sell it. It had, Wayne believed, an anti-American message inside its story. The fault was not in the stars, Wayne was now convinced, but in the films they made.

  He decided he had to do something about it, to clean up Hollywood and rid it of his subversive element. To do so, he strapped on his symbolic six-guns and set about to shoot it out with those he believed hated America and were bent on destroying it.

  This town wasn’t big enough for both John Wayne and Communists.

  Chapter 12

  He may have arrived relatively late to the lynching party, but when he did, John Wayne aimed to be the head executioner. In 1948, the year that Wayne officially enlisted in the war against Communism, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) was steadily gaining membership and was determined to root out the Communists who had made significant gains in the industry’s unions and guilds. The Screen Actors Guild especially had a large number of members who were also members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), the latter having regained its lost popularity in Hollywood after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, when the United States and the Soviet Union became allies against the war on fascism in Europe. In 1944, the same year the MPA came into existence, so did the Communist Political Association, the Communist
Party’s new name, to separate it from the prewar CP. It was led by Earl Browder and had a growing following. Some of it was due to the feeling of friendship toward the Soviet Union, America’s allie during the war, and some of it was because the old problems between management and labor that had been there long before the war continued after with little progress.

  The MPA, draped in patriotic slogans, attracted the cream of the Hollywood conservative right, a membership that included Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Morrie Ryskin, Ward Bond, Donald Crisp, Gary Cooper, King Vidor, Norman Taurog, Victor Fleming, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, John Ford, Pat O’Brien, Robert Taylor, Irene Dunne, Dmitri Tiomkin, Cecil B. DeMille, union leaders Ben Martinez and Roy Brewer . . . and John Wayne, who had become a member in 1944. His enemy was Communism, and his army was the MPA.

  COMMUNISM IN HOLLYWOOD WAS NOTHING new. In 1936, the first stirrings of recognition and concern in Hollywood had come when Variety published an article that declared that “Communism is getting a toehold in the picture industry . . . among a crowd of pinks listed on studio payrolls as writers, authors, scenarists and adapters . . . most of the leaders of the literary-communist movement are easterners who have hit Hollywood during the past two years.”

  Variety had identified the link between the eastern, theater-based left and the growing liberalism in Hollywood, or as Variety identified it, Communism. The CP had always appealed to young performing artists and writers in New York and now in Hollywood because it seemed to be the best way for workers who felt exploited and believed in the right to organize its protests. According to Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, in their book The Inquisition in Hollywood, this organized opposition was something that infuriated Hollywood’s producers, who believed the industry’s trade unions were welcome harbors for the growing unrest for disgruntled workers, from writers to actors to scenery movers. The contradictory dualism of ’30s Communists was that they loved fighting for their rights and wanted to make as much money as they could doing it; to a certain, weird extent, these self-appointed heroes of the working class looked to get wealthy by exercising dialectic materialism. To them, wealth equaled influence, influenced equaled power, and in Hollywood, power equaled money.

  Some elements of the industry workers’ social discontent appeared in many of the biggest Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, most prevalent in films like Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), starring Paul Muni; William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (1937), with Muni again; and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), starring Henry Fonda. Even Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind, made in the run-up to World War II but set safely back in the Civil War, had elements of social unrest and political dissatisfaction.

  Ceplair and Englund: “Hollywood screenwriters and the American Communist Party were wedded in a marriage of convenience. The [Screen Writers Guild] union lasted because the party did not push the writer to jeopardize his position and the writer did not push the party into cinematic sophistication.” In other words, ’30s Communists in Hollywood were interested less in intellectual ideology than economic equality. The same contradictory existence of the desire for both equality and privilege was what united the unions and the Communists.

  And it was part of what drove Wayne to want to join management, as a producer. His goal was to make entertaining and profitable movies that promoted a fair and positive image of America, to transfer his patriotic zeal to the characters he portrayed, while separating them, and him, from the leftist activism.

  Unions were, from the very beginning in Hollywood, and elsewhere in America, filled with ideologues and the CP encouraged them. However, in Hollywood it appeared they could have relatively little impact on the content of the films they wrote because screenwriters simply didn’t have that freedom, due to the strictly moral and patriotic story lines imposed on the studios by the Motion Picture Production Code—popularly known as the Hays Code, which was adopted in 1930 by Hollywood’s self-regulating organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). The MPPDA closely monitored everything that came out of the studios, and although it was created to keep censorship a private operation rather than one controlled by the government, the effect of the code was the opposite of what it was intended to be. The production guidelines that both limited what writers could write and what directors could direct ironically helped the development of the sophisticated language of visual suggestion and the power of cinematic metaphor that not only allowed more subversive messages to be delivered, but by doing so elevated film to a higher form of art.

  The conflict between workers and management continued to deepen. In 1940, Walt Disney’s studio suffered one of the largest and most contentious strikes in the history of Hollywood. The CSU (Conference of Studio Unions), led by Herb Sorrell, was well organized, Communist infiltrated, and meant business.75 The strike lasted until May, and when it was finally settled, Disney blamed the whole thing on the Communists not long after; he began to plan the formation of the MPA. Disney’s group quickly aligned with the House Un-American Activities Committee, formed in 1938 to investigate Communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the Great Depression. Disney and the other organizers of the MPA wanted HUAC to focus part of its investigation on Hollywood. There was a brief set of hearings that took place in Washington during the war that touched upon the problem of Communist subversion in Hollywood, but little interest could be generated while the United States was still officially allied with the Soviet Union.

  In 1947, the MPA once again urged HUAC to return to Hollywood to conduct a second, and more potent, investigation of Communism in film. On October 20, 1947, HUAC issued forty-three subpoenas, nineteen to suspected Communists, the rest to those who would become known as “friendly” witnesses. The hearings that took place in Hollywood quickly turned into a public kangaroo court, likened by some in the liberal national press to the Soviet hearings that prompted Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon; others, in the conservative press, saw it as long overdue, a much-needed step in the eradication of Communists from Hollywood.

  That same year, Wayne, who had not been subpoenaed to testify before HUAC, was approached by the MPA to run for president of the organization. It was a position he had turned down before, begging off and claiming he didn’t have the time to devote to such an important and demanding position because he was too often away on location, and anyway, he claimed, he was not a very good public speaker, surely nowhere as effective as the organization’s two previous presidents, Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery.

  Many of the MPA’s members were angry at what they saw as Wayne’s shirking of his responsibility—something he had done before—and talk began that perhaps he, too, was too soft on Communism or too far to the left, and they let him know it. Wayne later recalled his reaction to these personal attacks and political suspicions from the MPA that quickly spread throughout Hollywood and resulted in conservative columnist Hedda Hopper publicly denouncing him as “a damn fool” for not accepting the presidency of the MPA: “I was the victim of a mud-slinging campaign like you wouldn’t believe,” Wayne said in his own defense. “I was called a drunk, a pervert, a woman-chaser, a lousy ‘B’ picture western bit player, an unfaithful husband, an uneducated jerk, a tool of the studio heads. Well, that just made me determined to become the president of MPA if the members [still] wanted me.”

  Then he heard from the other side. “Charlie Feldman advised me not to stick my neck out, Bö Roos told me to stay out of it, and Herbert Yates told me, ‘Duke, you’re a goddam [sic] fool. You are crazy to get mixed up in this. It’ll put you on the skids in Hollywood.’ ”

  So he was a damn fool for joining and a damn fool for not, but Feldman, Roos, and Yates knew what they were talking about. Wayne was already not that well liked in Hollywood, due to his military service, or lack of it—both the Communists and the anti-Communists agreed that service in the military, especially in the anti-Fascist European Theater, was ma
ndatory—and conservatives were also outraged that he had divorced his American Catholic wife to marry a Mexican. They felt that sort of thing was not just un-Christian but un-American, the kind of sin only a Communist would commit.

  ON DECEMBER 3, 1947, AT a closed-door meeting held in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, the studio heads decided they had to take a position once and for all on the problem of Communism in Hollywood before the government did it for them and issued what would come to be known as the Waldorf Statement, a capitulation to the pressure on them brought by HUAC and the Supreme Court to get the studios to clean up their act, meaning to get rid of the Communists in their midst or else face the consequences. The Waldorf Statement declared that no major studio would knowingly hire anyone who its executives believed was a Communist.

  Thus was born the notorious blacklist that destroyed the careers not only of Communists in Hollywood, but of anyone suspected of being a Communist. Magazines were started solely to publish the names of “Communists.” The appearance of a name in these magazines, whether or not there was evidence to back up the accusation, was enough to get that person blacklisted. Fear and paranoia ran rampant throughout Hollywood, as some of the best and brightest, Communists or suspected Communists, overnight saw their livelihoods taken away from them.

  No one was immune from it. Wayne, weary and frightened of the suspicions from both sides of the political division, became one of the most outspoken anti-Communists in Hollywood. Not long after, Adolphe Menjou, a longstanding member of the MPA, praised the “eternal vigilance” of HUAC, and assured the MPA’s members, including Wayne and Ford, they were going to be given a free pass through HUAC.