American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  But when another reporter suggested he was a shrewd businessman, perhaps better at making money than movies, he just grinned, put his head down, moved his boot in the dust, and, with, his eyes still looking forward, said, “I’m just a guy trying to make a living in the movies.” He was even more insistent about his financial needs when he was interviewed about his exposure by Hedda Hopper, claiming he wasn’t just cashing in on his fame, but struggling to make ends meet, that that was the reason he was working so hard. “I have to make $2,600 a month to take care of my two families. I just have to keep jumping around . . . to make it.”

  DURING THIS PERIOD OF NONSTOP filmmaking, the newly-empowered Wayne stepped up his campaign to clean up Hollywood, to rid it once and for all of those he perceived were the bad guys. In 1949, his single-minded battle against Communist infiltration led him to publicly declare that, much to his dismay, the blacklist was ineffective because blacklisted writers were being hired without hesitation by the studios under assumed names. Wayne believed the Communists were a talented and powerful bloc in Hollywood and that the studios needed their talent to make movies, regardless of whom or what they believed in. Whether it was true—a case could be made for both sides—what’s important is that Wayne believed it was true and began to wonder if the studios he was so determined to protect were just as corrupt as those he was trying to protect them from.

  WAYNE’S NEXT RELEASE WAS SHE Wore a Yellow Ribbon, made for John Ford at his Argosy Pictures, on location in Monument Valley. It was written by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings, adapted from two short stories by James Warner Bellah, who had also provided the original source material for Fort Apache. Wayne had brought the Argosy project to his friend Howard Hughes’s RKO for funding and distribution.

  She Wore a Yellow Ribbon opens with a shot of the flag of the Seventh Cavalry and the words “Custer Is Dead” splashed across the screen. This informs the audience it is a follow-up to Fort Apache. When Ford suggested the Indian chief leader of the Kiowas, played by Noble Johnson, an African American actor, wear a bright red shirt, Hughes went ballistic. Ford said it was simply because the film was being shot in color, but Hughes insisted that somehow it meant that Ford was sympathetic to both the Indians in the film and the Communists in Hollywood. Wayne, who didn’t want to go against Ford, did believe he was pushing the limits with his red-shirted Indian. Ford was openly mocked for it later on by the hard right, who called his film He Wore a Deep Red Ribbon.

  The film produced another kind of excitement. Wayne was nearly killed during production when the cinch belt on his saddle loosened and he was thrown from his horse while filming a sequence in which he waves his blue coat at the Indians. “I hit the ground. Hit my head. Blacked out. Now there’s about fifty horses tear-assing at me. I came out of the blackout to hear the Old Man, Mr. Ford, yelling and there was general hysteria, but a wrangler with guts, he ran out and headed off the stampeding horses, which were within about a few feet of stomping me to death.”

  In the film Wayne plays the reluctant retiree, aptly named Captain Brittles, supported by a strong star-studded cast that included Ben Johnson, Victor McLaglen, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey Jr., Mildred Natwick, and Wayne’s old friend Paul Fix. Wayne’s performance smartly emphasizes the emotional pain the aging Brittles feels at the announcement of his reluctant retirement. Wayne was forty-three at the time the film was made, and once again willing to age himself, as he had in Red River, to give his character an even deeper and more complex gravitas.92

  The speech he gives at the end of the retirement ceremony, in which his troopers give him a silver watch and chain and he responds with his moving, humble, brink-of-tears farewell, is all the more impressive because it was not in the original screenplay, but entirely improvised during the shooting of the scene. It’s memorable “I’ll be back” recalled the famous “I shall return” of Douglas MacArthur, one of Ford’s heroes. (It also anticipates Kazan and screenwriter Schulberg’s “I’ll be back” at the end of Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront. Kazan idolized Ford, and many of his films echo Ford’s stylistic touches.) “It was an emotional reaction rather than a studied response,” Wayne said, later. “Pappy was very conscious of each actor that he had, their sensitivity, he knew the paint he was using when he put me in that scene. So he knew my reaction would be simplistic and deeply moving, which I think it was.”

  It was.

  AFTER FINISHING THE PICTURE, WAYNE finally allowed himself a brief respite, during which he claimed to have gone hunting and fishing with Chata. In fact, he went sailing with Ford. He was depressed about the state of his second marriage and once again sought comfort from Ford aboard The Araner. The hard truth for Wayne was that he could no longer pretend it could be saved.

  The real trouble between him and Chata had increased during the filming of Fort Apache, shot on location in Monument Valley, Utah, and California. Instead of accompanying him, which she usually did, Chata traveled with her mother to Mexico, where they both went on an extended drinking binge. She later claimed she was lonely whenever her husband was away on location, but even though Wayne had told her she was welcome to come along with him, she preferred the company of mama. She didn’t return to L.A. until Wayne had finished the picture, and as soon as they were together they began to fight, or more accurately, to resume the one long, continuous fight they had been having since the day they were married. She never liked his long absences on the shoots and although Wayne could drink with the best of them, he didn’t like it when Chata drank. He didn’t think it was proper behavior for a wife, especially when he wasn’t with her. They were barely talking to each other by the time of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

  THE FILM GROSSED NEARLY $10 million in its combined initial domestic and international releases. It was another huge hit for Wayne, and for RKO, and signaled a strong comeback for Ford. Despite his well-received performance, Wayne now felt he had played too many older characters in overly complex films and wanted to make a simpler picture as someone closer to his own age, a rough, smack-in-the-face film that underscored his patriotic verve. That turned out to be The Fighting Kentuckian (a.k.a. Eagles in Exile and A Strange Caravan), a coonskin-cap romantic adventure that he produced through Wayne-Fellows for Republic. It was written and directed by George Waggner, an old and dear friend of Wayne’s, and costarred the blond and beautiful Vera Ralston, a Republic regular. Oliver Hardy was also in it, a rare solo turn for the rotund comic without his partner Stan Laurel, here playing Willie Paine, the usual Andy Devine sidekick role. Also in it was the Grand Ol’ Opry’s famed Roy Acuff. Republic claimed the film failed to make back its $1.3 million cost, one of the few failures Wayne had in this period, and the film is today considered one of the lesser films in his canon.93

  Undaunted, Wayne pushed ahead with his plan to make a film version of the story of the Alamo, the Texas mission near San Antonio where a relatively small group of heroic military men and civilians defended Texas in 1836 against a thousand Mexican soldiers ordered to reclaim the territory. Wayne wanted to produce the film and star in it as the then little-remembered Davy Crockett, five years before Walt Disney turned the political frontiersman into a TV folk hero, media sensation, and marketing phenomenon. Disney, like Wayne, had hit upon the notion that Crockett embodied the patriotic essence of the true American, and made his original 1954 TV series (and several sequels/prequels) to cash in on the popularity of the folk hero, and turned unknown Fess Parker, who played Crockett, into a national “hero.”

  Wayne wanted to produce his film about Crockett at Republic, but Yates had other ideas. He insisted that The Fighting Kentuckian had been a failure and wanted to take his studio in a different direction. Wayne blamed Yates’s obsession with Vera Ralston for the so-called failure of the film and believed that the real reason Yates wouldn’t agree to make The Alamo was that there wasn’t a starring role in it for her: “Yates was one of the smartest businessmen I ever met. I respected him in many ways, and he liked me. But when it came to the
woman he loved—his business brains just went flyin’ out the window.”

  Yates’s refusal to make The Alamo, even though he was making a fortune on TV syndicating old Wayne westerns, infuriated him. “[He] will have to make me a damn good offer to get me to do another movie with him. I’m fed up to the teeth with him. I wanted to do The Alamo under my own company, Wayne-Fellows, and just release it through Republic. Yates said I would have to [give up producing it with my own company and] make the picture for Republic. He said to me, ‘You owe it to Republic. We made you.’ How do you like that? I don’t owe them one thing. I’ve made plenty of money for Republic.”

  Wayne wanted to produce The Alamo through Wayne-Fellows not only so he could maintain creative control but also to be able to keep a closer eye on the money. Even with Bö Roos riding shotgun on his income, with all the alimony he was paying from his first marriage and Chata’s expensive spending habits, he still needed more money than he was making. He never seemed to have enough, despite the large number of movies he was making. Yates had a barrel of it, told Wayne to forget about The Alamo, and instead came up with a script idea he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist. Yates was right. Wayne agreed to make Sands of Iwo Jima, a World War II film that turned into one of the most memorable movies of his career. It was directed by veteran Allen Dwan (his eighty-fourth film, forty-eight of which he made in the silent era, when John Ford was his prop man) and coproduced by Edmund Grainger, from a screenplay by Harry Brown and Wayne favorite James Edward Grant.94

  The film is an unabashedly patriotic depiction of heroism that ran against the grain of all the angst and self-doubt of many of the majors’ postwar films. Wayne wanted to remind American audiences of the heroics of the U.S. Marines during World War II, and the steep price they paid defending freedom.

  The idea for the movie began after Grainger saw the historic Joe Rosenthal photograph of the planting of the flag on Mount Suribachi. He immediately bought the rights to it and set about building a film that would climax with a reenactment of that famous shot. The story couldn’t have been simpler—grizzled Sergeant John Stryker (Wayne) has to turn a bunch of soft young boys into tough marines. Although they hate him at first, by the time he dies at the end of the film, they idolize him and recognize the heroism of his ultimate sacrifice.

  The Marine Corps agreed to cooperate with the filming, despite some initial hesitation about Republic’s ability to make a film good enough to properly express the pride of the Corps. John Wayne’s late commitment to the project was the turning point, and the marines allowed much of the film to be shot at Camp Pendleton, a hundred miles south of Hollywood.95

  With a budget of a million dollars, Dwan was charged with bringing the story of Sergeant John Stryker to life, using as the backdrop the battles of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, and the final assault on Suribachi. Even with the full cooperation of the marines, the film’s budget inflated to nearly $1.4 million, making it the most expensive picture Yates and Republic had ever produced.

  Iwo Jima premiered December 14, 1949, and received rave reviews. Thomas M. Pryor wrote in the New York Times that “Wayne is especially honest and convincing, for he manages to dominate a screenplay which is crowded with exciting, sweeping battle scenes . . . the film has undeniable moments of greatness” and there was this from the then highly influential right-wing columnist Walter Winchell: “The original story was written in blood by the glorious United States Marines! John Wayne must be everybody’s idea of a good actor! He’s immense in Iwo Jima, the best of the war pictures!”

  Yates began an all-out campaign to get the film nominated for Best Picture (an award that would go to himself as executive producer) and Wayne for Best Actor, something Yates felt was long overdue, even in the divided and hostile atmosphere of the polarized Academy.

  He pulled it off. The film grossed just under $11 million in its initial domestic release and managed to get into “prestige” first-run houses that Republic’s films were rarely able to do. Sands of Iwo Jima was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1949, and earned the forty-two-year-old Wayne his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor.96

  The nomination caught Wayne off guard, but it was no surprise to Dwan, who later gave a one-minute analysis of why: “The great movie stars learned the technique and a few mannerisms and a few moves and become sort of public idols. They couldn’t do anything wrong if you liked them—no matter what they did; it wasn’t what they played. A fellow like John Wayne is the same in every picture, but you like him because it’s Wayne. And you like to see that strange walk of his and you’re satisfied. He can play certain scenes very well, his way, and you accept them his way. And if there are scenes he can’t play well, he just won’t do them.”

  THE AWARDS WERE PRESENTED MARCH 23, 1950, at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood, hosted by actor Paul Douglas. Wayne showed up smiling and compliant, with Chata on his arm, the two appearing very much the happily married couple. When asked by a reporter that night about his nomination, Wayne was effusive. “It was a beautiful personal story . . . ‘Mr. Chips’ put in the military.”

  He was up against some tough competition. Broderick Crawford was nominated for his performance in Rossen’s All the King’s Men, the role that Wayne had turned down; Kirk Douglas for his star-turn performance in Mark Robson’s fight picture, Champion; Gregory Peck in Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High, another solid World War II movie; and Richard Todd for The Hasty Heart, which featured future president Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, in a supporting role. It was a look at the war and its aftermath from the British point of view.97

  Wayne lost Best Actor to Crawford. After the ceremonies, Wayne said, with a hint of bitterness, “After twenty-five years in the business, this does not keep me tossing in my bed at night.” When one reporter pressed him on whether he was disappointed, he said, “I worry about it the way Aga Khan worried where his next meal is coming from. What’d I want with an Oscar, anyhow? It’d just clutter up the mantel.”

  When the dust cleared, at the top of the box-office heap that year was not Todd, or Crawford, or Douglas, or Peck. It was John Wayne.

  Chapter 15

  As the new decade began, John Wayne was not just one of the biggest movie stars in the world, he had evolved into a real actor who could play complex roles in A movies made by great directors. He had also gone from being a supporter of FDR to one of the toughest and most unforgiving political soldiers in Hollywood’s war on Communism. Wayne had turned into something of a real-life version of Tom Dunson, from Red River, unyielding to the reality of the changing times, willing to throw out the baby, or the cream of Hollywood’s talent, with the bathwater of their perceived politics. At the age of forty-two, he was, more than ever, wanting to rid Hollywood of the Communist menace once and for all, and hopefully by doing so win the respect of the Academy, if, indeed, these were two separate goals. Despite what he told the press, friends knew, it continued to rankle Wayne not just that he hadn’t won the Oscar for Sands of Iwo Jima, but that he had not even been nominated for Stagecoach, They Were Expendable, Fort Apache, or Red River. He was convinced now it was the Communist faction in Hollywood that had prevented him from getting the gold statuette he deserved.

  His unforgiving battle against subversives was deeply affected by a confrontation that took place between John Ford, who never completely trusted the tactics of those who forced others to testify, to name names, and then have to suffer the punishment of blacklisting, and Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood’s self-appointed demagogic anti-Communist enforcer. Wayne had been a big supporter of DeMille’s, admired his guts, and was inspired by his example to do his part to help the industry-wide purge in any way he could.

  The hunt for Communists in Hollywood had taken on a life of its own and had increasingly become a regular part of doing business. Wayne understood that, but he was, nonetheless, surprised and disturbed when DeMille set his sights on John Ford and publicly questioned his loyalty. Even if it was only for
the liberalism in his films, DeMille’s public distrust of Ford could prove extremely damaging. Careers were being routinely destroyed by innuendo. Nobody was safe, not even Ford, and it was something Wayne didn’t like.

  The incident that finally moved Wayne to some degree of compassion for those accused of being Party members was one that pitted Ford directly against DeMille over the question of the MPA’s right to demand that every member of the Screen Directors Guild sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath or else be barred from working in Hollywood. DeMille, a high-ranking member on the Motion Picture Industry Council, urged the members of the SDG to sign it to prove their allegiance to America, this despite a non-Communist affidavit that was already a requirement of all guild officers. DeMille wanted every member to sign this new oath.

  The guild was split over it. SDG president Joseph Mankiewicz refused to sign (even though he had already signed the officers’ special requisite oath), a push-back that raised eyebrows all over Hollywood. Merian C. Cooper also refused, and Ford backed both of them. The guild’s infighting made it to the front page of Variety, and DeMille felt he had to call for Mankiewicz’s resignation. At a general meeting of the SDG that October 1950, DeMille, who had assumed the mantle of anti-Communist spokesperson for Hollywood, complete with halo above his head, read the names of all those who refused to sign the oath. When he got to Billy Wilder, a Jewish German refugee who had fled Hitler, William Wyler, born in Alsace to Jewish parents who fled the country after World War I, and Fred Zinnemann, a German Jew who had studied alongside Wilder in Germany before coming to America, DeMille pronounced their names “Billy Vilder,” “William Vyler,” and “Tzinnemann.” Much to Saint DeMille’s surprise, his toxic mockery drew loud boos from the membership.