American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  COOPER’S NOMINATION WAS THE CULMINATION of their longtime professional rivalry, which through the years had included women (Dietrich) and films (The Virginian, The Big Trail, and especially High Noon). Wayne was plainly furious that this film was so lauded by audiences and critics alike. Here is what Wayne said about High Noon (and All the King’s Men), two decades after the fact, the smoke still visible coming off his heated words: “I knew two fellas who really did things that were detrimental to our way of life. One of them was Carl Foreman, the guy who wrote the screenplay for High Noon, and the other was Robert Rossen, the one who made the picture about Huey Long, All the King’s Men . . . High Noon was even worse. Everybody says High Noon is a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. So it’s got everything going for it. In that picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to the church and asks for help and the guys go, ‘Oh well, oh gee.’ And the women stand up and say, ‘You’re rats. You’re rats.’ So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. That last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having helped run Foreman out of this country . . .”104

  However, three years later, in 1974, in an interview he gave to BBC4, when asked about his participation in the blacklist, Wayne said this: “We were not blacklisting . . . we didn’t name anybody. We stayed completely out of it and said ‘We are Americans. If anybody wants to join us, that’s fine. We gave no names out to anybody at any time, ever . . . the radical Liberals were going to take over our industry . . . Larry Parks admitted to being a Commie and went on working.”

  Either way, no one ever said High Noon was great only because of the Tiomkin score (which was great) and the catchy, compelling plotline theme song sung by Tex Ritter, the winner of the Oscar for Best Song, any more than they praised John Ford’s stylish use of American western folk music and the Sons of the Pioneers, who sang many of them in his films. The “guys” in the church don’t go “Oh well, oh gee.” What they do debate is whether or not a gunfight will be good for the town’s future, while the “folks up north” were watching. As for Cooper stepping on the badge, no one, including Wayne, objected when Clint Eastwood did it at the end of Don Siegel’s 1971 Dirty Harry. Callahan was hailed as a hero for rejecting the hypocrisy of the system, essentially the same hypocrisy that prevents the town from helping Will Kane.

  Wayne’s vision was clearly blinded as much by professional jealousy as personal politics. Besides, the two films shared several storytelling aspects with Stagecoach. Both the Ringo Kid and Kane are tall, lean, tough, and as soft-spoken. Both come up against ruthless villains to settle old debts. Both have women who try to stop them from going through with the showdown—Claire Trevor the reformed prostitute in Stagecoach, Grace Kelly the virginal Quaker in High Noon. And both end the movie on a horse and buggy to ride their way into a future made better by having settled the moral bills of their past. And, oddly enough, both Wayne and Cooper were real-life lovers of Marlene Dietrich (which might account for some of Wayne’s fury at losing to Cooper).

  The differences between the two films are mostly stylistic. Ben Hecht and Dudley Nichols’s script is every bit as good as Carl Foreman’s, perhaps better, certainly with a greater scope. And Ford’s direction of Wayne charges the performance as he surrounds his actor with the grandeur of the Old West, often putting his camera at eye level or above Wayne, to place him in the context of the film’s mise-en-scène, and to underscore Ford’s invisible godlike superiority over his visible, mortal star. Ford’s camera looks down on Wayne, in a sense, diminishing him, keeping him human. Wayne’s youth is what makes his performance so poignant against the backdrop of the millennia of Monument Valley. Zinnemann shot Cooper mostly from below, to give him a stature that strengthens him and evens the playing field against the Miller gang. Youth is Ford’s strength in Stagecoach; age drives the tension in Zinnemann’s High Noon.

  Finally, High Noon’s lasting popularity is because of its cinematic qualities, not its political ones. It is a statement of personal bravery, a man defending himself against a gang of vengeful killers. It is, at its core, a conventional, if complex love story that ties together Kane, his wife (Grace Kelly, making a showing in her second film), his former lover Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), the leader of the gang looking for revenge, Frank Miller (Ian Macdonald), and Kane’s deputy (Lloyd Bridges). The concept of shooting the film in 124 continuous minutes of so-called real time, to increase the drama leading up to the climactic shootout, the editing techniques—all those clocks ticking as time runs out, the arrival of the train, one woman staying on it, one getting off, the action of the Miller gang, and the final, nearly silent twenty-minute final shootout—were all held together by Foreman’s original script.

  There was a reason High Noon was so popular; it was a great film.

  LATE INTO THE EVENING OF the awards, presenter Olivia de Havilland presented the Best Director Oscar. John Ford won it and an elated John Wayne accepted it for him. He concluded his brief statement by reminding the audience that Ford was still, in his opinion, the best director in Hollywood and fully deserved the award: “Ford will place this Oscar on his mantel with his five other Academy Awards.”

  Not long after, Janet Gaynor presented the Best Actor Award to . . . Gary Cooper. Showing a bit of humor and looking to mete out a fair dose of humility, when Cooper knew he couldn’t be there he, too, had also asked Wayne to accept for him. Wayne graciously agreed. Now, holding Cooper’s Oscar in his hand, said into the microphone, “I’m glad to see they’re giving this to a man who has conducted himself throughout his years in this business in a manner that we can all be proud of him.” After the applause died down, he good-naturedly ribbed the film’s success: “And now, I’m going to go back and find my business manager, agent, producer . . . and find out why I didn’t get High Noon . . .since I can’t fire any of these very expensive fellas, I can at least run my 1930 Chevrolet into one of their big black new Cadillacs.”

  Wayne left the stage to easy laughter and loud applause. Bob Hope, who had been displaced by Wayne as the most popular actor in America, came out and commented, in his typically dry pseudo-ironic and self-deprecating fashion, “He gets pretty big laughs for a leading man!”

  ON JUNE 18, 1952, THE same week that a smiling Wayne appeared on the cover of Newsweek with an equally radiant Betty Grable, the top male and female movie stars in Hollywood, the fragile reconciliation that had held together his marriage to Chata collapsed once again. Not long after Chata let herself be seen having dinner and drinks in nightclubs all along Sunset Boulevard with Palm Spring native Quay Sergeant, who she always maintained was just a friend, Chata and her mother returned to Mexico and refused to have any further contact with Wayne.

  Louella Parsons broke the story of the Waynes’ latest split in her nationally syndicated column and gave this rather incoherent reason for the breakup: “I happen to know the real reason behind the rift. Mrs. Wayne is desperately jealous of John’s devotion to his four children by a previous marriage. Chata’s first annoyance started when John wanted to fly home from Honolulu [where they were on vacation] for [his son] Michael’s graduation from Loyola High School.” Without a shred of evidence or affirming comment from Josephine, Parsons then suggested that Wayne’s first wife, Josephine, who had never remarried, was looking to get back together with her ex-husband.

  Wayne then heard that Chata was in the hospital to treat a minor respiratory ailment and he thought it might be a good idea to visit her and see if they could reconcile. Accompanied by Beverly Barnett, his press agent, Wayne flew down to Mexico.

  According to one eyewitness, “Wayne went into his wife’s room and Barnett remained outside the door. Wayne was inside for a long time. Barnett then opened the door to remind his boss of another appointment. Wayne went crazy. It seems he’d almost
talked his wife into a reconciliation, which he badly wanted, but when she saw Barnett she concluded Wayne had been so sure of success that he’d stationed his press agent outside so as to lose no time in announcing the reconciliation to the columnists.”

  According to another witness, “Mrs. Wayne declared there was no chance of getting back together. Outside the room, Wayne behaved like a wild man. He flailed his arms and shouted for Barnett to keep his distance . . . Barnett went to a telephone booth to call a cab. Wayne went on raving.”

  THAT AUGUST 1952, JUST BEFORE the preliminary hearing for their divorce trial was scheduled to begin, the forty-five-year-old Wayne returned to filmmaking, to put some cash in his pocket to pay his legal fees and to reinforce his image as the nation’s number-one Commie fighter. The first project was one he had wanted to do for a while, Big Jim McLain, directed by Edwin Ludwig (The Fighting Seabees), produced by Wayne-Fellows, and distributed by Warner Bros.

  In this quickie, along with James Arness, a Wayne discovery, two enforcers track down “Operation Pineapple” in Hawaii, where “Commies” are up to no good, in league with some local doctors. One of them, Dr. Gelster, happens to have a young and beautiful assistant, played by Nancy Olsen, who provides whatever romantic subplot may be uncovered by viewers (more hidden than the actions the Commies are plotting). At the film’s climax, there is a knock-down, drag-out fistfight, after which Wayne and Arness watch helplessly as the suspects invoke “The Fifth,” a not-so-subtle reference to the HUAC hearings, making the dubious point that anyone who refused to cooperate on constitutional grounds was a Communist. The film was a hack production with a political message audiences were growing weary of being hit over the head with. Its characters, both good and bad, were clichés, with lots of name-calling, and no real assessment of a conflict, or solution. It is one of the more ludicrous films made about one of the darkest periods in American history.

  Big Jim McLain did just okay at the box office, while being savaged by the critics. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Wayne is rugged and genial . . . but the over-all mixing of cheap fiction with contemporary crisis in American life is irresponsible and unforgivable. No one deserves credit for this film.” Time magazine said, “the film has some pleasingly authentic Hawaiian background, but the action in the foreground is implausible and fumblingly filmed. Leathery John Wayne lopes through all the mayhem with the expression of a sad and friendly hound.”

  Wayne as usual had no comment about the critics’ opinions of his film, except to say: “I have been described by newspaper writers as a man with a leathery skin and blue eyes, like a sad and friendly hound. I do not know if this is a compliment. I am fond of dogs.”

  Wayne was paid $150,000 for Big Jim McLain from Wayne-Fellows, which had spent $826,000 to make it. To finance the film, Warner Bros got 30 percent of the gross before anything went to Wayne-Fellows, which meant that the studio made its money back first. The film grossed about $2.5 million in its first international release, and after promotion, fees, and other costs, it barely made its money back. It ranked twenty-seventh on the list of top moneymakers of 1952, a year that saw fewer studio films made than any other since the end of World War II. It did provide a valuable lesson to Wayne about this new decade of moviemaking: films that overtly preached politics were less effective than those that entertainingly illustrated the American way of life. Americana trumped American. It was a lesson he would not forget.

  His next film, Trouble Along the Way (a.k.a. Alma Mater), had no political message, either explicit or implied. Warner’s best resident director, Michael Curtiz, helmed it. Yet another college football saga, this one concerned the fate of St. Anthony’s, in dire financial straits when it hires ex-college coach Steve Williams (Wayne), whose career has been ruined by gambling, to put together a winning team for the school. Williams reluctantly takes the position to show he has a steady job and sufficient income to retain custody of his eleven-year-old daughter. Donna Reed played the sympathetic caseworker who helps Wayne get the job. When the film was released in 1953, it did fairly well at the box office, but no one mistook it for Academy Award material. It was commercial product, pure and simple. There is one bit of trivia about this film that makes it memorable for reasons having nothing to do with the production. A new young actor out of New York live TV has a small, uncredited role, an extra in a scene that takes place in a chapel. His name is James Dean.

  TROUBLE HAD WRAPPED IN 1952, and anticipating a difficult divorce trial, on the advice of friends, the forty-five-year-old Wayne decided to take a break from everything, to clear his head and recharge his batteries. He turned down John Ford, who wanted him to star in The Long Gray Line opposite Maureen O’Hara. The role went to Tyrone Power. Instead, Wayne flew down to Peru, the trip paid for by Howard Hughes under the guise of a working vacation. Hughes supplied his personal plane for transportation and a hotel room for Wayne and one for Hughes’s friend and adviser, Ernie Saftig, his job to make sure Wayne had everything on the trip he needed. Hughes, who never did anything without some sort of string attached, wanted Wayne to star in The Conquerors for RKO. He hinted at the possibility of producing The Alamo as part of a special two-picture deal. Hughes told Wayne that if he was up to it he should scout some locations for The Alamo while in Peru, even though there was no actual deal set for the film.

  WAYNE AND SAFTIG WERE MET at the airport by Richard Weldy, an Irishman who occasionally conducted safaris up the Amazon. Hughes had hired him to accompany the two and to see to it they both had a good time.

  During dinner one night at the 91 club, a popular local restaurant, Wayne, Saftig, and Weldy got into a fight with a couple of locals who had been drinking and began making loud, unpleasant comments about Wayne, that he was “an Americano” and Americanos were not welcome in Peru. Just like in one of his movies, chairs flew, tables were overturned, and the three visitors got away just before the police arrived. On the way out the door, Wayne threw some cash at the owner to cover any damages. Weldy then suggested they all get out of town for a while. He knew of a film shooting in the jungle near Tingo Maria and volunteered to fly them all there.

  The film was Green Hell, which happened to be starring Weldy’s estranged wife, twenty-three-year-old actress Pilar Pallete, a popular Peruvian movie actress. Weldy was hoping his wife seeing him with John Wayne might somehow make her want to rethink their separation. The Peruvian movie star wondered what all the fuss was about when it was announced he was visiting the set. That afternoon, after filming a particularly sensual dance scene, she was formally introduced to the American movie star. As she later wrote in her memoir, “I was making a movie in the beautiful jungles in the Amazon, and the director told me John Wayne was here and he wanted to see us work. Well, I’d heard the name, and knew that he was a big movie star, but I couldn’t quite place him. Trying to be very sophisticated, I told him that he was wonderful in For Whom the Bells Toll. He said, you have me completely confused. You’re thinking of my friend Gary Cooper. I started laughing, so did he and that broke the ice . . . I had never been so immediately and powerfully affected by a casual meeting with a man the way I was by my meeting with John Wayne. It was much more than sex appeal or good looks, both of which he had in abundance, or his success and fame, of which I had been told. Something elemental about the man, a sense of great strength, appealed to me.”

  Pilar had separated from Weldy after she caught him cheating, but had hesitated to divorce him because in the male-dominated world of Peru, she feared it might adversely affect her status as a popular movie star. Now, however, after meeting Wayne, she decided to get her marriage to Weldy annulled.

  And marry John Wayne.

  Not long after his vacation ended, Pilar flew to Hollywood to do some dubbing on her film Green Hell, in preparation for its U.S. release. She was determined while she was there to meet up with Wayne. It happened while she was on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank. He was surprised and delighted to see her again and asked if she would
join him for dinner that night.

  EVEN BEFORE TROUBLE HAD COMPLETED production, Frank Belcher, Wayne’s lawyer, had filed for divorce in Los Angeles for Marion Morrison, accusing Chata of “mental cruelty.” Giesler, in turn, filed for divorce on behalf of Chata on the same grounds. On September 11, 1952, Giesler announced, “We are now in the process of a discussion stage and look forward to an amiable settlement.” In his interim complaint, Giesler indicated that Chata wanted a sizable chunk of Wayne’s estimated yearly salary of $500,000, and that his net worth was in excess of $1 million. She also wanted $40,000 for legal fees and $50,000 for auditors, appraisers, and private detectives, $12,571 in monthly expenses to be paid in perpetuity—$1,245 for household maintenance, $1,938 for household expenses, $3,654 for personal expenses and entertainment, $948 for auto upkeep and traveling, $1,518 for health and auto insurance, $650 for her mother’s allowance, $499 for furs, jewelry, personal effects, $1,023 for charities, $795 for travel fares, $301 for telephone.

  He also named sixty witnesses that included businesspeople, associates, Warner Bros, RKO, and others for the purpose of establishing Wayne’s income and financial status. She wanted the deed to the house in the Valley Wayne had rented out and all the accumulated proceeds from the rentals.

  Judge Orlando Rhodes, of the Santa Monica Superior Court, ordered Wayne to appear September 26 to show cause why a temporary restraining order to prevent him from molesting or annoying his wife should not be issued against him. He was also enjoined him from disposing of any property. Belcher managed to get that order thrown out, and trial was set for September 1953, Jude Allen W. Ashburn presiding.