American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Godard’s critical love affair with all things Wayne continued with this movie: “Rio Bravo is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western.”

  Dave Kehr, writing about the revival of the film and its DCP (digital cinema package) release in the New York Times, said “the interaction among these characters [Dean Martin a drunk, Ricky Nelson a punk, Walter Brennan a grouch, Angie Dickson a lady gambler, and the local sheriff, John Wayne], as they come to form the group of people central to all of Hawks’ work, is so vivid and alive and fraught with moral purpose that this supremely relaxed film is completely gripping.”

  From a final negative cost of just over $3 million, Rio Bravo grossed an impressive $30 million worldwide. It is still a favorite today, considered one of Hawks’s better westerns. However, it does not compare to High Noon on almost every level and should not be measured against it. Hawks’s and Wayne’s private war with the Zinnemann film neither helped nor hurt Rio Bravo, but it did inspire it, and that is where any comparative discussions should end.

  BY THE TIME WAYNE RETURNED to L.A. in mid-July 1958, he barely had time to unpack before preparing for his next film, a Civil War drama to be shot on location in Arizona and directed by John Ford, called The Horse Soldiers. To get it made, Wayne had signed a complicated three-picture nonexclusive deal with United Artists (UA), which guaranteed what he was really after, part funding and distribution of The Alamo.

  This time, Pilar insisted she was going with him, and bringing Aissa. Wayne had no choice but to agree. Production on The Horse Soldiers was scheduled to begin that October, and Wayne was eager to keep in motion his newly energized career. He didn’t want any distractions and knew it would be easier to take Pilar and Aissa along than to have to go through all the pre- and postdrama that would take place if he didn’t.

  However, by late September, just before they were preparing to leave for Arizona, Pilar’s pill addiction had gotten out of hand. It came to a climax one night when she ran out of her supply of tranquilizers and couldn’t fight off the symptoms of withdrawal. When Wayne realized what was going on, rather than get her the refills she begged him for from the Beverly Hills doctor who had prescribed the pills, he threw away the empty bottles and insisted they could get through it together.

  At least, as it turned out, until it was time for him to leave for Arizona, which he did and by himself. Two days later, against her doctor’s advice, an insistent Pilar showed up, with Aissa, and without pills. Two days later she began to have hallucinations. Reportedly, she tried to slit her wrists. Wayne immediately sent her back to Los Angeles in a private plane and had her admitted to a hospital in Encino. Pilar’s father came up from South America to care for the baby while Pilar stayed in recovery.

  His wife’s problems weren’t the only ones that plagued Wayne during the making of The Horse Soldiers, one of his most beautiful and overlooked collaborations with Ford. The director was unhappy with the script by John Lee and Martin Rackin and rightfully so. Few who have seen the film remember many of the plot’s details, but no one can never forget Ford’s beautiful visual of soldiers riding their horses in single file and in shadows across the skyline horizon.

  In The Horse Soldiers, Wayne plays Colonel John Marlowe, assigned to lead his Union soldiers on a mission of serial terrorism in the heart of Confederate land. To play Major Henry Kendall, a doctor assigned to accompany the band of soldiers on their mission, Ford wanted Jimmy Stewart, but he had other commitments, and the director instead got William Holden, one of the most popular actors of the ’50s, whose career had peaked with Bridge on the River Kwai and was now beginning its slow slide into decline. Ford charitably gave “Hoot” Gibson, the great film cowboy, a small part. Gibson was broke, in bad health, and needed money. Ford had a small part written into the script for him.

  Unfortunately, the chemistry between Wayne and Holden was nonexistent (“Two Hellions” as the film’s coming attractions described them, something neither one came close to playing on-screen; their real-life differences were mostly philosophical). They didn’t work well together on-screen, nor did the mandatory love interest, played with sophistication by the gorgeous Constance Towers as a captured southern belle forced to accompany Colonel Marlowe on his mission until he can deliver her safely into the enemy’s hands somewhere near Louisiana. The film’s implied triangle between Wayne/Holden/Towers also doesn’t work, and the film feels at least a half hour longer than its 119 minutes.

  Some of the film’s problems were the result of Ford’s heavy drinking. Holden, who was a degenerate alcoholic, and Wayne needed little encouragement to join him in what became a booze-drenched set. Because of it, the film lacks Ford’s usual precise timing and the much-needed sexual spark between Marlowe (Wayne) and Hunter (Towers). He is a gentleman, she is a southern woman of means. Their attraction is complicated by her repressed feelings for Kendall (Holden), and his for her. There should have been more dramatic tension and the lack of it leaves The Horse Soldiers an action picture without much action. What real drama there was occurred off-screen, when Ford hired Fred Kennedy as a stuntman. Kennedy was out of shape and, tragically, was killed falling off a horse as he doubled a shot for Holden. After that, Ford’s already heavy drinking increased, so did Holden’s and Wayne’s, and they all lost any real interest in finishing the film.

  Wayne and Holden each received a hefty $750,000 for being in the film, while Ford received $200,000 for directing and a percentage of the profits that never materialized. Its negative cost was just under $4 million and the film’s net just matched it, off a gross of $10,200,000.

  AS THE DECADE DREW TO a close, Wayne wanted more than ever to make his cherished film about the Alamo. He had already begun preproduction back in the mid-1950s by personally paying for the writing of a script by James Grant, his favorite screenwriter, whom Wayne also made a coproducer on the film. He had then taken it to Yates, who optioned it but was no longer in a position to finance anything. Yates told Wayne at that time no studio would back the film. The script as written was too long, had no sexual heat, and an ending that, even though it was based on historical fact, was too downbeat for Hollywood. In 1955, about a year after he turned down Wayne, Yates released his own version of the Davy Crockett Alamo saga, The Last Command, directed by Frank Lloyd, and starring Sterling Hayden as Jim Bowie. This incensed Wayne, who felt that he had been stabbed in the back by Yates, and perhaps worst of all, that Hayden was in the film despite his having confessed to being a Communist in front of HUAC. Because he had named names he was able to continue working, although his career never regained the level of stardom it once had.

  Wayne then lost any shred of sympathy he had left for anyone caught in HUAC’s career-killing web. And he had no forgiveness in him for Yates, who he rightly believed had stolen his movie and given it to a Commie. Wayne never worked for Yates again.

  Wayne was more determined now than ever to get his own Alamo movie made. He may have lost this battle to Yates, but he was determined to win the war.

  Wayne went to Jack Warner in 1959 hoping he would agree to make it to fulfill part of his multiple-picture deal contract with the studio, but Warner was not at all enthusiastic about the project, and advised Wayne to let the whole thing go, that it was too expensive for any studio to make, and that the days of the western epic had gone out of fashion. Besides, Warner told him, he was too old to play Crockett. Wayne disagreed. He said at fifty-two, he was only two years older than Crockett was when he died at the Alamo. Maybe so, Warner told him, but Disney’s TV bio had officially lowered Crockett’s age to make it possible for Fess Parker to play him. Besides, Warner said, heroes in film were always portrayed younger than they were in real life, to bring in the youth market that did most of the buying of tickets these days.

  A disappointed and increasingly desperate Wayne then went to John Ford, who echoed Wa
rner’s (and Yates’s) comments. When Wayne insisted he was not only going to get it made, but he was going to direct, produce, and star in it, Ford told him he was flat-out crazy. He had no experience as a director and an epic like this, if he somehow did manage to get it funded, was not the project to start learning how to do it. The film, Ford concluded, had failure written all over it.

  Wayne next took the script to UA and asked for a budget and for $7.5 million to make it. The studio agreed to give him $1.5 million up front and a commitment to distribute. That meant he would have to find $6 million dollars elsewhere. He went immediately to Howard Hughes, who turned him down. The increasingly reclusive billionaire said he was out of the movie business for good.

  Furious, Wayne decided to put up the balance of the money needed himself and then hope to make his investment back by selling the negative to the highest bidder.

  There was only one problem. By the end of the 1950s, after thirty-four years in the business and 139 feature films, the man at the top of the popularity charts, whose name was synonymous with Hollywood heroes, discovered he was flat broke.

  Photo Insert

  Marion Morrison as a baby.

  Marion Morrison, USC football star.

  Two early studio publicity photos of young Marion Morrison (one autographed as “John Wayne”—the autograph added later by Wayne), star of a series of “B” college-football films, a popular genre at the time. Morrison failed to connect with the public through these films, most of them made before he changed to a “B” “cowboy.”

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Morrison’s “B” cowboy movie character, whom audiences would more readily accept.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  A rare studio PR photo as a generic cowboy good guy, before he had his teeth fixed by the studio.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Harry Carey, John Ford’s silent-film cowboy star, after whom Wayne modeled his own cowboy screen image. Wayne paid tribute to Carey at the end of The Searchers by grabbing one arm with the other hand, a familiar Carey gesture.

  John Wayne marries the Catholic Josephine Alicia Saenz, June 24, 1933, despite the strong reservations of her father about Wayne’s being a Presbyterian and a struggling actor. They were married in Wayne’s actress friend Loretta Young’s garden (Young is standing next to Josephine).

  Wayne’s first film after The Big Trail, Seymour Felix’s collegiate comedy, Girls Demand Excitement, co-starring Virginia Cherrill (in his arms).

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne appeared in all twelve chapters of The Three Musketeers serial. It was released in 1933, along with eleven other “B” features in which he appeared.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Mack V. Wright’s Haunted Gold, co-starring Wayne and Sheila Terry (Wright also acted in it) was a remake of Ken Maynard’s 1926 silent The Phantom City. It was Wayne’s thirty-sixth film, the seventh of seven films he made in 1932.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  The Man from Monterey, Wayne’s forty-fourth feature, directed by Mack V. Wright. A Warner Production, it proved a big hit. It was made for $28,000 and earned $175,000 in worldwide profits. It even had a one-day run at the then prestigious Loew’s New York theater in 1933.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach, Wayne’s eighty-second feature, similar in plot to The Big Trail but vastly superior. It was the picture that finally made Wayne a star.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne as the iconic Ringo Kid.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  With Claire Trevor, the Ringo Kid’s love interest. Her name appears above Wayne’s (first position) in the ensemble cast credit role that followed the opening title.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  1941’s The Shepherd of the Hills— the first of six films Wayne starred in that were directed by Henry Hathaway, and his first in color. He was cast as Matt Matthews after the studio tried and failed to get Tyrone Power, John Garfield, Robert Preston, Burgess Meredith, and Lynne Overman to play it.

  Based on the immensely popular Harold Bell Wright novel, the film, Wayne’s ninety-fourth, made at Paramount, marked Harry Carey’s thirty-third year making movies, and the first time Wayne appeared together with his idol on camera. Wayne with Carey, and Betty Field.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Pittsburgh, a 1942 Universal Picture directed by Lewis Seiler, veteran of silent films and “B” westerns. The film was produced by Wayne’s close friend and longtime agent Charles K. Feldman. It was Wayne’s hundredth feature, for which he was paid $50,000. His co-star, Marlene Dietrich, was top-billed and received twice that amount. She also began a blazing sexual affair with Wayne that lasted for more than two years before she coldly dumped him.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne on set, standing behind mentor John Ford during the making of They Were Expendable, Wayne’s 108th film. Ford had recently returned from service in the war, while Wayne stayed behind and made movies. Ford gave Wayne’s co-star, Robert Montgomery, an MGM star, first position in the credits (the film was made for MGM, where he was one of their biggest stars, while Wayne was on loan-out from Republic).

  Wayne’s 111th feature, 1947’s Angel and the Badman, was produced by Wayne himself and co-starred Gail Russell. Wayne had wanted Gary Cooper to play the lead. When Cooper turned it down, Wayne offered it to Randolph Scott, who also declined. He then took the role himself and it proved a big hit for him at the box office.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Hawks’s classic Red River deepened Wayne’s appeal by allowing him to play an older character and a villain. It was Wayne’s 114th released film, made in 1946 but not released until 1948. Before production began, Wayne was concerned his co-star, Montgomery Clift, was too small for the climactic fistfight between the two.

  A publicity photo released by Paramount Pictures after Red River to remind people Wayne was not really old. This is an image Wayne rarely projected onscreen—urban, intellectual, thoughtful.

  Wayne’s 114th release, Fort Apache, co-starred Henry Fonda in John Ford’s fictionalized version of the battle at Little Big Horn. Ford liked Wayne’s performance in Red River and wanted him to “age” in this film as well. Fort Apache (made two years after Red River, but released before it) was a massive box-office hit, despite war veteran Fonda’s emerging “graylisting” that would keep him out of features for several years.

  Wayne with his second wife, Esperanza Baur. They had a tumultuous marriage that began in 1946 and ended in 1954 with a front-page scandal of a divorce.

  Wayne and his wife Peruvian actress Pilar Pallete, leaving for Los Angeles just after being married in Hawaii. It was Wayne’s third marriage, Pallete’s second. Wayne, at forty-seven, was twenty-nine years older than his bride. They married November 4, 1954, the same day his divorce became final from his second wife. All three of Wayne’s wives were Latin.

  1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima, directed by Allan Dwan. It was Wayne’s 119th film, and earned him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination. His lack of military service and politically divisive anti-Communist activities may have cost him the win. The Oscar went instead to Broderick Crawford for his performance in Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men, a role Wayne had turned down because of its negative view of American politics. Rossen was later blacklisted.

  William Wellman’s 1955 Blood Alley, shot in CinemaScope, was Wayne’s 130th feature. He was on his honeymoon when Robert Mitchum, the star of the Batjacproduced film, had an onset fight with Wellman and quit. Unable to find anyone else to play the role of the riverboat captain in this anti-Communist propaganda film, Wayne stepped into it himself.

  Wayne, with Lana Turner, one of the many top female leading ladies he starred with. John Farrow’s 1955 The Sea Chase was Wayne’s 129th film, a top-grossing movie. Filmed in Hawaii, it completed just before Wayne married Pilar Pallete there.

  Wayne may be seen smoking cigarettes in virtually every film he made up
until 1964, when he was diagonosed with lung cancer. These are two commercial stills that show Wayne posing for cigarette ads and endorsements.

  John Ford’s masterpiece, 1956’s The Searchers, Wayne’s 132nd feature.

  John Wayne in his greatest role, the existential wanderer Ethan Edwards.

  A French poster for The Searchers. An international hit, the film was ignored by the Academy, dismissed by most critics as just another Western, despite the fact that many consider it the best Western ever made.