American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  With the backdrop of Monument Valley, the Ford company stands over the body of a dead Comanche.

  Wayne’s spectacular acting misfire as Genghis Kahn in Howard Hughes’s production of Dick Powell’s 1956 The Conqueror (with Susan Hayward). Rumors persisted for years that nearby earlier nuclear testing was responsible for the large number of cancer-related deaths suffered by those associated with the film, including, eventually, Wayne and Powell. Hughes pulled the film after a strong initial run and kept it out of circulation for years due to the cancer rumors. He didn’t want to be blamed for all the illnesses and deaths.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Reteaming with Ford for the director’s 1959 The Horse Soldiers, Wayne’s 139th film. Clark Gable had been Ford’s original choice for the role that eventually went to Wayne. The director had also wanted James Stewart for the role of the doctor that went instead to William Holden.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne reteamed with Howard Hawks for 1962’s Hatari!, Wayne’s 144th feature. The film was shot mostly in Tanganyika. Hawks originally wanted Clark Gable and Gary Cooper for the leads that eventually went to Wayne and Hardy Kruger. Paramount released it again in 1967 on a double bill with Ford’s lesser hit, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne and a small circle of friends, 1971. Left to right: Bob Hope, Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Publicity photo of an aging and ailing Wayne on the set of his 163rd film, Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys, 1972.

  Backstage at the 1975 Academy Awards, Wayne and Howard Hawks celebrating his Honorary Oscar for “A master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema.”

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  The film that finally won Wayne his only Oscar (and a Golden Globe) for Best Actor. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 True Grit was Wayne’s 158th film.

  Backstage, Wayne holding the Oscar just presented to him by Barbra Streisand.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Wayne at home proudly standing in front of a small part of his vast collection of awards and honors.

  (Rebel Road Archives)

  Chapter 21

  Wayne was shocked when he went to Roos to get the funds for The Alamo only to discover his financial manager had left him cash poor, and with almost no liquid assets. Wayne had never been very good at handling money, had showed no interest in what happened to his earnings, and trusted Roos, as long as he had enough cash in his pocket to pick up all the tabs and he could stay in the best hotels when he traveled with Pilar and Aissa. He believed that Roos had done a great job of watching his money.

  The first sign of real trouble began shortly after he visited Roos to arrange to move some money from his individual investment company into Batjac to make The Alamo. Roos then explained that some of Wayne’s investments had not made money, like the deal to raise cotton in Arizona that was currently bleeding dollars. And it wasn’t the only problem. Wayne had recently written a check on his private account that the bank had returned unpaid. Why, he asked Roos, would a check with John Wayne’s name on it be no good? That was when Roos finally told Wayne that he was broke. Besides the Arizona deal, Roos said, the substantial investment Wayne had made with the Arias family in Panama that dragged him unknowingly into the turbulent political scene had resulted in the loss of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars and that Wayne was now being investigated by J. Edgar Hoover for possible criminal activities. (He was eventually cleared of all charges.) The Acapulco hotel Wayne owned had been badly mismanaged, a situation made worse by Wayne’s open offer to all his friends that they could stay for free whenever they wanted. A lot of them did just that. He would eventually give the building away to the YMCA, for the tax write-off.

  The list went on and on. One bad investment after another, while Roos had treated himself to a lavish lifestyle paid for by his clients. For instance, when Wayne was on location in Japan for The Barbarian and the Geisha, Roos had joined him for a month, lived in an expensive penthouse, and spent thousands on food and geisha girls, all paid for out of Wayne’s funds. Now Wayne pressed Roos to tell him exactly how much he had left, and Roos replied, “It’s all gone. You’ve got the house, your personal possessions, and Batjac [without funds]. That’s all I could save.”124

  Wayne fired Roos on the spot and replaced him with someone he was sure he could trust, his own son-in-law Don LaCava, Toni’s husband.

  Nonetheless, he somehow managed to raise the $5 million to put The Alamo into production. Where it came from nobody is certain, although speculation has always pointed to Hughes, who became a silent partner in the project.125 There was, however, another investor who likely put up at least part of the money. That investor was John Ford. McBride says Wayne raised the money “from Texas millionaires,” who wanted the story of what happened at the famous fort told again, but other sources point to Hughes and Ford as being Wayne’s primary silent-partner investors.126

  PRODUCTION BEGAN ON THE ALAMO September 22, 1959, blessed the first day by a Catholic priest at the film’s chosen location, Brackettville, Texas, where an exact duplicate of the original Alamo was built at a cost of $1.5 million. The company was huge, over two thousand actors, extras, and crew people. John Ford was there and ready for the first setup, a presence that confused everybody and upset Wayne, who felt that Ford was trying to take over and turn The Alamo into a John Ford film.

  Wayne wanted to ask Ford to leave, but couldn’t. Besides the director’s (probable) financial interest in the film, Wayne could never forget what Ford had done for him. But he had waited a long time to make this film, and he intended to make it his way. After conferring with his cinematographer, Bill Clothier, his son, Michael Wayne, the “assistant to the producer” on the film, and Cliff Lyons, the second-unit director, Wayne agreed to offer Ford the second unit by telling him that Lyons couldn’t handle the job by himself. Ford took the assignment, for a fee of $200,000, a big bite out of Wayne’s own pocket, money he really didn’t have. Ford was hedging his own investment and gaining more influence on the making of the film.

  While directing, Wayne began to take on Ford’s more obnoxious characteristics, barking at his actors, belittling his stars, remaining distant and unapproachable. And his drinking increased.

  Exactly how much of The Alamo Ford directed remains open to question. According to Wayne, none of the Old Man’s footage made it into the final cut. According to Ford’s own notes, however, he directed several key scenes, including some with Wayne that were definitely not second-unit stuff. When the film eventually opened, Ford called it “[t]he greatest picture I’ve ever seen.”

  Whatever Ford’s contribution really was, the film that resulted was the one Wayne wanted to put in movie theaters. Throughout the ’50s, Wayne’s films—and the characters he played—had become more political, or patriotic, with The Searchers being the major exception. Although they were made in a different order than they were released, Jet Pilot, Big Jim McLain, The High and the Mighty, Blood Alley, The Conqueror, The Wings of Eagles, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Rio Bravo, and The Horse Soldiers all contained elements that not just promoted, but glorified “the American way.” Big Jim McLain is certainly the most obvious, followed by Blood Alley and The Wings of Eagles, but even films like The High and the Mighty may be seen as parables demonstrating the might and right of the Christian American way of life; Dan Roman’s quiet courage and low-key profile bring him miraculously to the landing strip that looks like a giant cross. In The Horse Soldiers, Wayne’s portrayal of Colonel John Marlowe is a display of courage combined with reverence that was a pre-Alamo culmination of Wayne’s carefully cultivated image of the American hero. Dave Kehr, writing about the film’s DVD release in the New York Times, called it “an important, personal film . . . in the context of Wayne’s career . . . By the time of The Alamo, John Wayne didn’t play Davy Crockett, Davey Crockett played John Wayne.”


  WAYNE HAD PROBLEMS CASTING THE film’s other key roles. He had originally wanted Clark Gable to play William Travis, but Gable, who had no love for Wayne ever since the time years earlier that Wayne had made a mean-spirited comment about Gable’s ears being bigger than his brain, claimed he had to turn the role down because he was already committed to The Misfits for John Huston. The role of Travis went instead to British actor Laurence Harvey, a choice that didn’t sit well with some of Wayne’s Texan investor friends, but Wayne assured them Harvey could bring something valuable to the role, a sense of dignity that would elevate the heroic element of the story of the men of the Alamo. Burt Lancaster was Wayne’s first choice to play Jim Bowie, but Lancaster was already committed to Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry. The role went instead to Richard Widmark, a committed liberal Wayne personally disliked but who, with time running out, he figured was the best screen tough-guy actor available.

  When Widmark was cast, Wayne couldn’t resist taking out a full-page ad in the trades that shouted, “Welcome aboard, Dick.” The double-entendre jab wasn’t lost on Widmark, who made it a point of telling Wayne the first day on-set, in front of everybody, that he was nobody’s “Dick,” that his first name was Richard. A few days into production, Widmark threatened to quit the film if Wayne continued to ride him. The little insult game they were playing threatened to become physical. Because of the size of his part, Widmark’s departure would likely have shut down the entire production. Wayne knew it and tried to bite the bullet but eventually during one scene the two went after each other. Widmark was strong, and it would have been an interesting brawl, but it never happened. The two men were quickly separated, sent to their neutral corners, and the shoot continued with no further clashes between them. Neither talked directly to the other for the remainder of filming, but the damage was done. On-screen, their characters’ friendship has zero chemistry.

  Wayne wanted Sammy Davis Jr. for the role of Jim Bowie’s slave, but Davis, extremely popular at the time as a nightclub performer and a member of Frank Sinatra’s swaggering “Rat Pack,” was embroiled in a controversy that had arisen over his relationship with Swedish blond actress May Britt. Davis’s penchant for beautiful white movie-star blondes, a no-no at the time, was well known in Hollywood. He had been romantically linked a few years earlier with Kim Novak, Harry Cohn’s and Columbia’s answer to Marilyn Monroe (with whom Davis was also said to have had an affair). The Novak situation had led to Davis being physically threatened by Cohn, who had her under contract at Columbia and feared she would not be able to make films releasable in the South if she continued to see Davis. The versatile performer, who had lost one eye in a car crash a few years earlier, was told by Cohn he would lose the other if he continued to see Novak. Davis ended it but his next relationship, with Britt, cost her any chance of having a sustained film career in America, and Davis a role in The Alamo. The tabloid hysterics over Davis’s relationship with Britt, especially when he announced they were planning to be married that November, was too much for Wayne to overcome, especially with his investors still upset over the Harvey casting. The part of Bowie’s slave went instead to Jester Hairston.

  Wayne, as Ford had always done, cast many of his friends and family. Ken Curtis was in the film; so was Patrick Wayne, Duke’s son. Aissa, four years old now, played a small part as one of the children living at the fort. Even Pilar had some camera time. Her addictions behind her, she had agreed to accompany Wayne to Texas and stayed for most of the eighty-three-day location shoot. To add some youthful allure to the cast, Wayne, taking his cue from Hawks’s successful casting of pop singer Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, found a part for teen idol Frankie Avalon.

  Wayne hired cinematographer William Clothier to film The Alamo. The two had first worked together on The Sea Chase, after which Wayne signed him to a long-term contract with Batjac. Wayne had originally wanted to shoot The Alamo in Cinerama, the wide-screen process that used three synchronized projectors to show one gigantic image on specially made screens, but Clothier convinced him not to, because so few theaters were equipped to play the film in that format. Instead, Wayne went with Todd-AO, a 70 mm film 2:220:1 aspect ratio process that required no special equipment for the film to be played in theaters.

  That bit of practical thinking on Clothier’s part saved Batjac a lot of money, but Wayne was not into counting pennies on this film. The payroll included four thousand extras and fifteen hundred horses, and Wayne upgraded the portable toilets and insisted every actor and crew member could have access to them. The lengthy shoot—from mid-September to mid-December—inflated the production cost to $17 million, or $90,000 a day. Wayne was desperate to find the extra money he needed to finish the film and at one point was about to announce the suspension of production when he managed to secure a considerable pledge from, of all places, the Yale Foundation.

  It was still not enough. He gave up his salary, took out a second mortgage on the house in Encino, a second mortgage on an apartment he owned at the Hampshire House in Manhattan, sold off whatever property he still had in Mexico, and took out bank loans using his cars and The Nor’wester for collateral. The Alamo would now have to gross $4 million for him to recoup his personal investment in it. At one point during production, Wayne commented wryly, “I have everything I own in this picture—except my necktie.”

  Wayne had to walk a fine line between politics and entertainment making The Alamo, and it wasn’t easy, with his political vision all over the script, threatening to smother the film’s dramatic action in a sea of verbal polemics. The Mexicans in the film represent the Communist threat that Wayne felt was still very real, the nineteenth-century Alamo a metaphor for the United States of 1960. The fierce, climactic battle in the film of the Texans fighting and defending their fortress against Generalissimo Santa Anna’s forces was Wayne’s metaphor, as he saw it, for America’s ongoing battle against the subversive forces that wanted to destroy the country’s way of life. Santa Anna’s soldiers are costumed in Communist gray uniforms decorated with red epaulets, resembling nothing so much as Mao’s Korean War “Volunteers.” The film’s opening narrative tells audiences that “Generalissimo Santa Anna was sweeping north across Mexico toward them, crushing all who opposed his tyrannical rule . . . The [men of The Alamo] now faced the decision that all men in all times must face . . . to endure oppression or to resist.”

  Crockett’s love interest in the film is Mexican, Graciela Carmela Maria “Flaca” de López y Vejar, a direct reference and a further blurring of the lines of between Wayne and Crockett. All three of Wayne’s wife had been of Latin heritage. Fifty-three years old during the making of the film in 1960, Wayne cast twenty-six-year-old Argentinean-born Linda Cristal to play Graciela (Crockett was married twice; neither wife was Latin).

  All during production, Crockett espouses “the American way.” At one point, he says to Lopez, as he tries to explain why he’s come to defend the Alamo: “I’m gonna tell you something, and I want you to listen tight. May sound like I’m talkin’ about me. But I’m not. I’m talkin’ about you. As a matter of fact, I’m talkin’ about all people everywhere. When I come down here to Texas, I was lookin’ for somethin’. I didn’t know what. Seems like you added up my life and I spent it all either stompin’ other men or, in some cases, gettin’ stomped. Had me some money and had me some medals. But none of it seemed a lifetime worth of the pain of the mother that bore me. It was like I was empty. Well, I’m not empty anymore. That’s what’s important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what’s wrong or to say a word for what’s right even though you get walloped for sayin’ that word . . . here’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re livin’. You do the other and you may be walkin’ around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.”

  During production, when he heard about it, Wayne publicly criticized Frank Sinatra for having hired Albert Maltz, one of the original Hollywood Ten, jailed for contempt in 1950 and subsequently blacklis
ted for years, to write the screenplay for a film about Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier executed by the U.S. military, for desertion during World War II. Wayne was outraged that Sinatra had hired a blacklisted writer without forcing him to use a pseudonym (the standard practice of the day). Not long after the completion of The Alamo, Wayne and Sinatra happened to be at the same restaurant shortly after Wayne returned from location, and the two men had to be separated before coming to blows.127

  Wayne wanted The Alamo to be a testament to America, to his America, how he wanted to define it and how he thought it should be. Davy Crockett died fighting to defend freedom from any and all enemies. That freedom was something Wayne was determined not to let anybody take away. His battlefield was as much Hollywood and the rest of America as it was San Antonio, Texas.

  EARLY IN MAY 1960, JUST two months after completing The Alamo, Wayne found himself back in front of a camera, where he stayed for the rest of the summer, filming the lightweight North to Alaska, his second film for Fox, costarring Capucine, Stewart Granger, Fabian (another teen idol inserted into a movie to attract younger audiences), Mickey Shaughnessy, a character actor who could also throw a convincing screen punch, and Ernie Kovacs as Wayne’s rival for the gold, an extremely popular actor and comedian and early TV pioneer, who would be killed a year later in a car crash. The film is notable for its theme song, “North to Alaska,” which became an enormous hit for Johnny Horton, also killed not long after in a car crash.

  Making the film, being back in the saddle as it were, lifted Wayne’s spirits. He had had nothing to do with producing it and after The Alamo, to chase Capucine around in her bustier and throw a few fists at Granger and Kovacs was not the worst job in the world.