American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Not long after, Powell received word that Brando was beginning production work on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film version of the Frank Loesser musical smash Guys and Dolls. The truth was, that film was still in preproduction and had no start date; it was just an excuse Brando came up with because the young Method actor hated Millard’s stilted old-style fake-historical script. The bald and at the time immensely popular Yul Brynner also turned it down. With a shooting script ready and a director in place, a desperate Hughes called up Wayne, who had always been his first choice, and asked him to take the part as a personal favor. Wayne didn’t want to say no to Hughes, hoping he could still get him to produce The Alamo.

  WAYNE RECEIVED $250,000 (PAID AT a $1,000 weekly salary) to make The Conqueror, good money that he sorely needed. It was directed by Powell with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, not entirely Powell’s fault as he had Hughes hovering over him dictating every shot. Millard’s faux twelfth-century Far Eastern dialogue sounded as if Shakespeare had suffered a stroke just before writing it, with acting that made starch seem a softener (some actors’ dialects appeared to come and go without any reason), and throughout, Wayne sounded like someone reading aloud an instruction manual with some of its words missing.

  The very idea of Mr. Americana as an Oriental warrior might be laughable if the film weren’t so pathetic. The Conqueror is not one of those films that turns out not just as bad as one might imagine, a good piece of camp, but worse, plainly dreadful, a bad tooth of a movie that keeps throbbing with pain from start to finish. Wayne knew he had a dog on his hands, and to get through filming he popped Dexedrine pills four times a day, to help keep him awake and to prevent his weight from ballooning beyond his already brawny forty-six-inch chest, thirty-seven-inch waist, and seventeen-inch biceps. For the five long months it took to make the film, from March to August 1954, he kept to a strict diet of hard-boiled eggs, spinach, green salad, cottage cheese, and one steak or lamb chop a day and washed it all down with as much high-test champagne as he could pump into himself.

  The Conqueror became the last film Hughes ever produced. By 1953, RKO was hemorrhaging cash, and in late 1954, Hughes reluctantly sold out to General Teleradio for $25 million, a deal that included the rights to all of RKO’s negatives, not just the two dozen or so movies made during his tenure.

  The sale also meant the end of Hughes’s soft commitment to Wayne to make The Alamo. Soon after General Teleradio took over the studio, all productions were shut down and the physical lots were sold to Desilu Productions (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) for $6.1 million. With that sale, RKO, one of the “Big Five” studios of Hollywood’s golden age, ceased to exist.110

  One of the more interesting side stories to the making of The Conqueror that continues to haunt this cursed film is the large number of cancer deaths among the cast and crew. Of the 220 persons who worked on it, 91 had contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died from it, including Wayne, who died from stomach cancer, not lung cancer as is popularly believed (he first contracted lung cancer in 1964, claimed to have beaten “the big C,” and lived another fifteen years); his costar Susan Hayward; popular character actress Agnes Moorhead; and Dick Powell. It has never been proven (and probably never will be), but many attribute the source of the outbreak of cancer among the participants of the production to radioactive fallout from U.S. atom bomb tests in nearby Nevada. What clouds the facts are the other variables, such as the lifestyle of most Hollywood workers, both in front of and behind the camera. They lived hard, including heavy drinking and cigarette smoking (Wayne was a four-pack-a-day man). Most involved in the production apparently knew about the radiation and none took the threat that seriously (there’s a photo in existence of Wayne smiling and operating a Geiger counter during the filming).

  Ultimately, although researchers have failed to make any connection to the tests and the high rate of those who worked on the film, Hughes believed there was. He felt guilty about having caused the death of so many of his friends, which might have been one of the factors in his decision to withdraw The Conqueror from circulation after its initial run. It is said that during the last crazy years of his life, lived as a recluse on the top floor of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, he often screened it with a 16 mm projector and a portable screen for himself while lying propped up in bed.

  The film’s initial release itself was delayed two years because of postproduction problems—much of the desert sand had to be relocated to the RKO studios to try to make some scenes match the location shooting—because of the sale of the studio, and because of Hughes’s plain weirdness. He didn’t release The Conqueror until February 1956 (and Jet Pilot, which had wrapped in 1951, didn’t come out until fall of 1957).

  IN OCTOBER 1954 WAYNE AND Pilar traveled to Honolulu, sparking rumors they were about to be married there. Wayne denied all of them. He said, “Unless there is some delay in The Sea Chase [his new movie, the official reason they were there] I won’t be free to marry before my return. I certainly hope to marry Pilar when I am free—that is, if she will have me. There are two sides to this, you know.”

  The Sea Chase was made for Warner, shot in Warner color and CinemaScope, and produced and directed by John Farrow. Jack Warner, the film’s executive producer, eager to sign Wayne to a new long-term contract, threw a huge, star-studded welcoming party on the beach, highlighted by an appearance of MGM star Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband, British actor Michael Wilding.

  THE SEA CHASE IS A World War II at-sea drama based on a 1948 novel by Andrew Clare Geer that Warner Bros had bought the rights to in 1950. In it Wayne plays the captain of a ship hunted by the Nazis, with Lana Turner as a German spy somehow on board and undetected as the enemy, to supply some much-needed, if highly improbable, sexiness to the story. Warner had to pay MGM $300,000, to borrow Turner. Before they signed her, at Wayne’s suggestion they tried to get Virginia Mayo or Susan Hayward for the role. When they couldn’t get either, they signed Turner and paid MGM. Wayne hadn’t wanted her because he couldn’t stand her and she abhorred him. Wayne thought she was cheap-looking, and she considered him Hollywood’s biggest hick. The two didn’t say a word to each other off-camera the entire shoot. The cast also included Wayne’s good friends James Arness, Paul Fix, and Alan Hale Jr. The Sea Chase was a familiar genre for Wayne and gave his audience what it wanted, a simple, nonpolitical action thriller with Wayne the larger-than-life if two-dimensional movie hero.

  WAYNE AND PILAR TIED THE knot on November 1, 1954, in Kailua, before they left Hawaii after Wayne received the phone call he had been waiting for, from Frank Belcher, informing him that the final divorce papers had been delivered to him that morning. “You’re a free man,” Belcher told Wayne, laughing as he did. Wayne put the phone down, turned to Pilar and said, “How would you like to get married today?” Pilar scurried to find a wedding dress, aided by Wayne’s longtime personal assistant, Mary, while Wayne used his influence to bypass all the necessary papers and blood tests. District Magistrate Norman Olds agreed to waive the mandatory three-day waiting period.

  The wedding took place at sunset, a civil ceremony held in the palatial former home of King Kamehameha III. Mary was the maid of honor, and Francis Li Brown, a wealthy sportsman and former Republican senator from Oahu, the best man. Director John Farrow, who had just wound up production on The Sea Chase, gave away the bride. Also in attendance were three of Wayne’s children, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda, who had come to Hawaii while their father was making the film.

  Pilar, twenty-six, wore a pink organza dress with matching hat, orange blossoms in her hair, and held a bouquet of native flowers as the two exchanged vows.111 Wayne, forty-seven, wore a dark suit, white shirt, black tie. The ceremony lasted ninety seconds. The word Obey was omitted by mutual agreement. After he kissed the bride, Wayne said, “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’ve had a lot of wonderful things happen, but this is the best.”

  A crowd of native Hawaiians in traditional hula dress dancing to
pila ho’okani played for family, friends, and about 150 members of the cast and crew of The Sea Chase at a reception in the garden of the house the studio had rented for Wayne for the duration of filming. To a friend, Wayne quipped, “I was married in the morning, divorced at lunch, and married at sunset.”

  The next morning they flew via private plane chartered by Warner Bros back to Honolulu, where they were met by a mob of reporters. When asked where they were going to spend his honeymoon, Wayne graciously replied that having just finished The Sea Chase, he wanted to go home to Encino with his lovely bride and take it easy at home.

  They were about to board a commercial Pan American flight to Los Angeles when gossip columnist Sheilah Graham managed to get Wayne on the phone at the airport. She asked him if he noticed anything unusual about the fact that this was his third marriage, and that all three of his wives were Latin American. Wayne said, “Some men collect stamps. I go for Latin Americans.”

  FOR THE SECOND TIME, HE had rebuilt his family. He had made a successful transition to his new production company. He was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He should have been content, but he wasn’t. There was still something missing.

  He hadn’t yet been given a part that required more than his ability to throw a punch, or his squinting into the camera and reciting his lines in that familiar halting nasal rhythm. He wanted to make a movie with a role that would come from the inside. How he could express it before the camera, he had no idea.

  Wayne was filled with self-doubt about his professional future and on a personal level, being able to fulfill his role as husband to his third wife, who was three decades younger than him. As he wrote in an article for the Hollywood Reporter in April 1954 in which he paid indirect homage to John Ford for discovering him (the piece was ghosted by Zolotow for “The Rambling Reporter”), “Once in a while I look into a mirror and wonder how long I’ll be an actor. I suppose for a few years yet. But one day I know my hair will abandon me completely. The wrinkles in my face will hold water when it rains. And I won’t be able to pucker up for the last reel. I may not have my poke, but I’ll be around. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be telling some youngster, still unknown, with a belly big as a mail sack that he can’t be a stunt man—and what time to come to work in the morning.”

  He may have felt uncertain about where his career was going, but one thing he was sure of, Hollywood hadn’t seen the last of him.

  He still had some bullets left in his gun.

  Chapter 17

  On December 30, 1954, Wayne was once more ranked as the number-one box-office star in America, according to the Motion Picture Herald poll. It was the third time he had reached the top spot, after falling out of it for two years, and the first time any star had ever regained the top spot—he held it in 1950 and 1951. This time Wayne bested Martin and Lewis, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Alan Ladd, William Holden, Bing Crosby, Jane Wyman, and Marlon Brando for the coveted number-one position, thanks in large part to the huge box-office successes of Hondo and The High and the Mighty.

  ON MARCH 15, 1955, BATJAC went into production on Blood Alley, directed by William Wellman, from a script A. S. Fleischman adapted from his novel of the same name. The story concerns merchant marine ship captain Tom Wilder, who has escaped from a “Red” Chinese prison and then agrees to help take the 180 villagers of Chiku Shan through the Formosa Straits—“Blood Alley”—to Hong Kong and freedom, via a stolen flat-bottomed stern-wheeler. The plot is less doctrinaire than Big Jim McLain (and therefore more entertaining) but no less anti-Communist. The story line is further complicated by the unlikely presence of Cathy Grainger (Lauren Bacall), whom Wilder reluctantly agrees to take along on the dangerous voyage to Hong Kong after her father, a doctor, is taken by the Communists and forced to operate on a party official and then killed. During the hazardous journey, filled with near calamities at every turn, Wilder falls in love with Cathy (the real reason her character exists is to add some romantic relief for the women in the audience taken by their ticket-buying men looking to see Wayne beat up some Commies).

  The film was a difficult one to make, not just physically, but also for the chaos that took place behind the scenes. Wayne had wanted to take Pilar on the honeymoon he already had to postpone several times, and only wanted to executive produce Blood Alley, not star in it. It was originally intended as a vehicle for Robert Mitchum, who had turned down the lead in George Stevens’s Giant to be in it. (That role went instead to Rock Hudson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance.)

  However, three days into the shoot, on location in San Rafael, California, Mitchum abruptly quit the picture after a falling-out with the always short-fused Wellman. It began when Mitchum shoved assistant director George Coleman into the ice-cold San Rafael Bay after he had refused to provide a bus to take Mitchum and his friends on the crew to San Francisco for a party. They went anyway and five of them, including Wayne’s frequent traveling companion Ernie Saftig, were arrested later that night in a bar for being a little too rowdy. They all had to be bailed out by Batjac.112 Mitchum (who had not been arrested) then refused to return to the film, despite the fact that Wellman had given him his first starring role in 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe.

  Wellman had to call Wayne, who was honeymooning in Manhattan with Pilar, to tell him the news. Wayne desperately tried to get another star to replace Mitchum, but after being turned down by Gregory Peck, who said he had other commitments, and Humphrey Bogart, who wanted $500,000 to take over the role, Wayne flew back to the coast and took over Mitchum’s part himself. It was a replay of what that had happened with The High and the Mighty, when Wayne had to step in for Tracy. He hoped it was an auspicious turn of events, that Blood Alley would turn out to be as big a hit as Mighty.

  It wasn’t. It opened in June 1955 and barely broke even. Newsweek’s film critic summed it up best when he wrote, “Good ship, shallow draft.” Wellman defended his star’s performance by saying, “Wayne is a nice guy with a special touch of nastiness.”

  The year was saved for Wayne by the release of The Sea Chase a month earlier, in May. It would go on to be the tenth-highest-grossing film of 1955, earning just under $7 million (international) off a budget of $3 million.113

  WITH BOTH FILMS OPENED AND his promotional commitments to them finally done, the forty-eight-year-old Wayne, his face puffy from drink, his hair thinner, his back perennially sore, his belly starting to sag, and his throat dry from the hundred Camels he smoked each day, didn’t want to even look at another script. He only wanted to complete his honeymoon, That is, until Pappy called. He had a new project he wanted Wayne to star in.

  As tired as he was from making Blood Alley, and fed up from all the abuse he had taken over the years from Ford, when the director told him Kirk Douglas was lobbying heavily to play the lead role of Ethan Edwards in a new western written by Frank Nugent, Wayne nonetheless agreed to meet with Pappy and at least talk about it.

  The Searchers was to be his twelfth collaboration with Ford, in what would become not just the best western ever made, but the greatest role of John Wayne’s career, the one he would most be remembered for in his long and storied career.

  Chapter 18

  After 1952’s The Quiet Man, Ford had moved to Twentieth Century–Fox to direct a proposed musical remake of Raoul Walsh’s 1928 silent World War I melodrama What Price Glory? Ford used Jimmy Cagney in the original Victor McLaglen role. Done as a straight film, it did just all right at the box office as audiences showed little interest in it or the war it takes place in. Flag-waving World War II films were on the decline and Hollywood’s prolonged victory cry was somewhat muted by the new and dreary Korean conflict, about which far fewer war films were being made. Wars without happy endings tended to do less well at the box office, and World War I films were considered no longer viable in Hollywood, a fact What Price Glory? underscored.

  Ford then returned to Republic to make a comedy from a script he liked, called The Sun S
hines Bright, even as his company, Argosy Pictures, was embroiled in an ongoing financial dispute with Yates. Ford had accused Republic of cooking the foreign books on The Quiet Man, believing the film had earned more money than was reported. After he won the Best Director Oscar for the film, Ford tried to settle with Yates, because he had wanted do a new picture for Republic, Three Leaves of Shamrock. When that didn’t happen, he made What Price Glory? at Fox instead, and then, after some sort of a settlement was reached, returned to Republic to film The Sun Shines Bright. Yates made peace with Ford because he hoped the director’s new film would help turn his failing studio around. In the spring of 1953, Republic entered Bright in the Cannes Film Festival, where it wasn’t well received; Yates then cut ten minutes from the original 100-minute running length. Ford was furious and vowed never to work for Yates again.114

  With Argosy mired in financial troubles, Ford engaged talent agency MCA’s Lew Wasserman to represent him. Wasserman quickly made a deal with MGM to have Ford remake Victor Fleming’s 1932 Red Dust, a property the studio already owned. The remake was called Mogambo and starred some of MGM’s biggest stars, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, hot off the success of High Noon. (Gable had starred in the original as well, with Jean Harlow and Mary Astor.) Ford had wanted Maureen O’Hara for the Gardner role, but she turned him down. For now, she had had enough of Ford’s nastiness, drinking, and jealous rages.

  Mogambo proved a major box-office success, and Ford followed it with The Long Gray Line for Columbia, during which he became romantically involved with the star of the film, his new discovery, Betsy Palmer; it was an affair that infuriated Maureen O’Hara, who had reluctantly agreed to be in the film. She hated Ford going behind his wife’s back, and Ford was angry at her as well because he believed she was having an affair with one of the other stars of the film.