American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Wayne liked the easy money and even easier work. Ford was too busy and time too short for the director to ride all over him. Wayne did one more of these cameos, right after How the West Was Won, but that one would take another three years before it reached the screen: The Greatest Story Ever Told, directed by George Stevens and David Lean (uncredited). This was UA’s version of the life of Jesus Christ, cradle to cross. Every studio made one. Wayne played one of the centurions who lead Jesus (Max von Sydow) to his crucifixion. “Truly this man was the son of God,” was Wayne’s single line of dialogue. He had to do it several times until Stevens was satisfied Wayne had captured enough “awe” in his reading. After one take too many, Wayne took a deep breath, looked up, and read his line in his own inimitable style: “Awwww, truly, this man was the son of God!” The director yelled cut and everybody laughed. They got it right on the next take.

  AT A DINNER PARTY IN 1962, Wayne happened to run into Edward Dmytryk, threw his arms around the director, and asked him why he’d done it, as if he had placed the wrong bet on a horse. Dmytryk was bewildered. Did Wayne mean why was he a Communist, or why did he betray his friends? Wayne’s peculiar compassion for those who repented, like Larry Parks, made it hard to tell. Dmytryk was less than thrilled by the hug the former president of the MPA gave him that night. Maybe Wayne was too big a man for Dmytryk. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  WAYNE WAS NOW WELL SUITED financially and he decided to replace his beloved boat, The Nor’wester, which he’d given up to help finance The Alamo, with a new, larger yacht, The Wild Goose, a 136-foot onetime minesweeper that had been refurbished for civilian use by its original private owner. The makeover was impressive: a master suite, three guest staterooms each with its own bath, a salon, a sixty-foot afterdeck for sunning, a dining room that could easily seat ten, a liquor cabinet and bar, and enough room for eight full-time crew members. Wayne added a fireplace and a projection room.

  It was around this time that the Republicans began looking for a new leader of the party. Kennedy’s election had shattered the party’s foundation, and they were searching for someone with the necessary leadership qualities to take the country back from the Democrats. Because of his presidency of the MPA, and his enormous popularity, Wayne’s name continually came up at meetings. When he was finally approached by representatives of the party, Wayne laughed at the idea. “I can’t afford the cut in pay,” was his famous replay. “Besides, who in the world would ever vote for an actor?” Eventually, the job went to Barry Goldwater, and after Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and Carter’s one term presidency, Ronald Reagan, actor and former head of SAG, in 1981 became president of the United States.

  IN 1962, WAYNE RETURNED TO feature filmmaking, with John Ford at the helm for what would be their final film together, Donovan’s Reef (a.k.a. The Climate of Love). Ford would make only three more films in his long and storied career (he would start a fourth, Young Cassidy, but not live long enough to complete it).

  Donovan’s Reef, made at Paramount, is decidedly minor Ford, and therefore minor Wayne. It is the story of two ex-navy men, played by Wayne and Jack Warden, who stay on a South Pacific Island after the war, operating a bar called “Donovan’s Reef.” Lee Marvin also stars in the film. All three actors are too old for their roles, their comic timing is leaden, and the physical fights border on the pathetic; they look like old men trying to regain their youth by punching each other out, and Wayne knew it. Elizabeth Allen, who plays the daughter of Jack Warden, snails the plot forward when Wayne becomes involved with her in what can in no way be described as a romantic coupling. Dorothy Lamour appears as breathing scenery. The production was plagued by Marvin’s out-of-control drinking, which, in turn, led Ford and Wayne to increase theirs.

  Wayne made the film partly for Ford, partly as an excuse to spend the summer with his family in Hawaii, and partly for $600,000 and a piece of the gross (which never materialized). According to Marvin, when Ford asked him to be in the film, he wouldn’t send him the script, knowing how bad it really was. “‘Look,’ Ford said, ‘don’t you want to spend eight weeks in Hawaii this summer?’ . . . he took all his old buddies to Hawaii to have some fun . . . it was kind of his goodbye to his boat, the South Pacific, and all the great days.” It was a dispiriting experience, a sad swan song for Ford and Wayne’s creative collaboration of spirit, talent, and brilliance.

  When the film wrapped, and after a monthlong rest in Encino, Wayne, Pilar, and Aissa headed for Arizona so he could begin shooting the long-promised McLintock!, a Batjac Production for UA. Wayne’s son Patrick was one of the stars, Aissa had a small part, and the chore of directing fell to Andy McLaglen, Victor’s son. It signaled the start of the final phase of Wayne’s film career, where, with rare exception, he chose to make low-budget films to cash in by playing “John Wayne.”

  For Wayne, the best thing about McLintock! was the chance to make another movie with Maureen O’Hara, in a James Edward Grant screenplay that was a takeoff on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. During one fight O’Hara stabs Wayne in the butt with a hairpin. The film’s plot deals with George Washington McLintock, cattle baron, banker, and leading citizen of the town of McLintock, whose wife (O’Hara) has left him because she suspected him of being unfaithful. She is determined to divorce him; he is determined to win her back. A good old-fashioned spanking on her pantaloons brings her to her senses (of course), and they live happily ever after in that fantasy world that the Hollywood studios loved so much—that love/hate relationship that is really a love/love relationship. This being the early ’60s, nothing gives a man back control of his wife better than a good couple of whacks on her bottom, especially if she struggles and squeals. The centerpiece of the McLaglen film involves forty-two cast members who wind up battling each other in a mud pit.

  O’Hara later remembered, “When I read the script, I thought, by God, they wrote this for the two of us! Duke sent me the script and said, ‘That’s it, you’re doing it . . .’ There isn’t another woman I know of who could have played those scenes . . . he was a naturally macho human being. I think God made him that way.”

  The film, released in the fall of 1963, was a huge hit, with a gross of $11 million in its initial domestic release, from a budget of $2 million. Audiences loved seeing Wayne and O’Hara together again on-screen. The rights to McLintock! eventually reverted to Batjac, and the film continues to be a big earner for the Wayne estate.

  Wayne then took an extended vacation with Pilar and Aissa aboard The Wild Goose, making occasional stops in various ports to socialize with friends. Their hiatus ended when Wayne received a call from Henry Hathaway and Paramount that he was wanted back in Hollywood as soon as possible to start Circus World, his next film for the studio under his ten-year contract, to be shot in a new single-lens version of Cinerama. He promptly left for Barcelona, where the production was located from September 1963 through February 1964, with interiors later shot in London. Circus World is the story of an American circus traveling through Europe, and one of the least known of Wayne’s ’60s films. There is a missing-mother plot, and not much else besides the luminous presence of Claudia Cardinale, and Rita Hayworth, whose best days on and off film were behind her.

  The last day of shooting involved a scene in which the circus burns down. Wayne, who insisted he wanted to do the scene without a double, was slightly injured during filming, his hair burned and his lungs scorched from smoke. After, he developed a nagging cough.

  It was early in production of Circus World that word reached Wayne that John Kennedy had been assassinated. He cried openly in front of the entire cast and crew.

  After the film was completed, Wayne, Pilar, and Aissa returned to The Goose, as they called it, for an extended stay in Acapulco, to give him time to recover. But he would have little time to do so, because Wayne was called by Paramount and told to leave immediately for Hawaii to film Otto Preminger’s World War II epic In Harm’s Way, about the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor. His costar
in the film was his good friend Patricia Neal, recovering from a near-fatal stroke, with whom he had worked together before on Operation Pacific, and Kirk Douglas, his longtime friend despite their political differences. Preminger, true to his reputation, played the director-as-tyrant role to perfection and made no friends as he worked his cast, stars, and extras alike, in a merciful, relentless fashion under the hot Hawaiian sun. The only one to whom Preminger deferred was Wayne, who in this film did his best work in years.

  By the time the production wrapped, in late August 1964, the fifty-seven-year-old Wayne, tipping the scales at 260 and with that persistent cough that got so bad, filming of several of his scenes had to be stopped several times, was exhausted and sick. He refused to see a doctor until the producers of his next scheduled film, The Sons of Katie Elder, forced him to have a complete medical checkup prior to the start of filming. It was performed at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla.

  Pilar went with him and later recalled what happened when she came to see him in his room after all the tests were completed. “I’ve got a little problem,” he said to her, averting his eyes. “The doc says I’ve got a spot on my lung.” After four decades of 120 cigarettes a day, excessive drinking, poor dietary habits, and a rugged physical career, time and age had caught up with him. After five more days of tests, chest X-rays, and endless tubes of blood taken, followed by two weeks of detailed analyses, the doctors gave him the bad news.

  He had lung cancer.

  CHARLES FELDMAN URGED WAYNE TO keep his diagnosis a secret, and issued a statement that Wayne was having an operation to fix a long-standing ankle injury. At the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. John E. Jones headed the treatment team. Wayne pleaded with the doctor for some alternative other than being cut open, as he had a film to shoot and didn’t want to hold up the start of production. Dr. Jones quietly spelled out the situation to him. He was going to have to take out the left lung and perform a number of biopsies to see if the cancer had spread.

  Wayne called Hal Wallis, the Paramount executive in charge of Katie Elder, who agreed to try to shoot around him as much as he could, to make it easier to replace him if it came to that. Henry Hathaway, the film’s director and himself a cancer survivor, spent long hours visiting Wayne in the hospital, holding his hand and telling him he could beat it.

  The morning of the big operation, September 17, 1964, Wayne was surrounded by his children as he was wheeled into the operating room. Pilar had been there the night before and gone home exhausted. During the six-hour surgery, Dr. Jones cracked open Wayne’s chest and removed several ribs and most of what remained of his deteriorated left lung. The operation left a permanent twenty-eight-inch scar from Wayne’s chest to his back. When he awoke post-op, his body had tubes coming out of every orifice. He suffered severe head and neck swelling that kept his eyes shut for days. An infection had set in and Wayne’s condition turned critical.

  After a few more rough days, he began to improve, and Dr. Jones gave him the good news—the cancer had not spread. With any luck, and a lot of rest and recuperation, he had a very good chance of pulling through. Wayne stayed in the hospital another three weeks, and was finally released October 7, 1964, wearing a fedora on his head, a heavy coat buttoned up, and a scarf around his head to avoid being recognized by the press. He was barely able to make it home before the reporters started to call, wanting to know about his condition. Later that same day, Wayne told one reporter from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, “There’s nothing wrong with me that getting out of the hospital won’t cure. I haven’t had a heart attack and I don’t have cancer.”

  His recovery proved more difficult than he had hoped. He was frail and congested. He suffered from shortness of breath and extreme nicotine withdrawal from having to give up his beloved cigarettes. Sometimes he would hold one unlit between his fingers and smell it.

  No matter how much he tried to deny the story, rumors persisted in Hollywood that Wayne had cancer. To do some damage control, he invited one of his good friends from the newspaper business, James Bacon, to tell his version of the truth. The interview took place December 29, 1964, in Wayne’s Encino home. “Jim,” he said, “I’m going to tell you the truth about my operation, and you have permission to quote me. I had lung cancer, the big C, but I’ve beaten the son of a bitch. Maybe I can give some [other] poor bastard a little hope.”

  The story ran the next day in Bacon’s syndicated column with the headline “John Wayne Beats Cancer.” The reaction was overwhelmingly positive and reinforced Wayne’s image as the indestructible titan of Hollywood. What Rock Hudson would do for AIDS in the ’80s, Wayne did for cancer in the ’60s. He helped reduce the fear and the shame of having it and also proved it wasn’t an automatic death sentence. The bravery he showed going public was as great a real-life action as any of the heroics he performed in his long film career.

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER WAYNE WENT under the knife, he was back at work, on location in Durango, in the Mexican Sierras, where breathing was normally difficult, and which for Wayne meant having to use oxygen out of a can whenever he wasn’t filming; and in Chupaderas, Mexico, with interiors done at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. He was noticeably overweight, a good sign for his health, but not so for his screen image. The added pounds and the overall weakness he experienced recovering from surgery made it even more difficult, but somehow he got through the tough shoot. Directed by Hathaway and working with Dean Martin, his old pal and costar from Rio Bravo, Wayne toughed it through a very physical shoot. He knew his future in Hollywood depended on his completing this film.

  The Sons of Katie Elder opened July 1, 1965, to good reviews and great business. Off a budget of $2 million, it earned $16 million in North America in its initial run, and placed number 15 on that year’s top-grossing films.130 Wayne was paid $600,000 by Paramount, payable at $60,000 a week. To publicize the film, Wayne appeared on Dean Martin’s popular TV variety show, in which they both looked relaxed and healthy.

  IN 1964, THE COUNTRY WAS at war again. Until the Gulf of Tonkin incident the previous summer, few, if any, Americans had even heard of Vietnam. The enemy was an old and familiar one to Wayne. Communism. And once again he meant to do something about it. He determined to make a movie even bigger and more patriotic than The Alamo. He wanted to call it The Green Berets.

  Chapter 24

  On August 2, 1964, while the American destroyer USS Maddox was conducting a routine maneuver off the coast of North Vietnam and southern China, the United States claimed the ship was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats (the attack was later proved to not have taken place). In retaliation, a week later, what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by Congress giving President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to engage in limited conventional warfare in Southeast Asia.

  It was a convincing victory for the unelected president, in power less than a year following the tragic assassination of JFK. Before his death, Kennedy had hinted that he was going to either limit or withdraw all U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. Johnson’s views were decidedly more hawkish, and the war, “his” war, along with the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, formed the platform that Johnson would run on that fall against the Republican candidate, Barry S. Goldwater. After his landslide election, Johnson put forth his “Great Society” of social reform and escalated the still officially undeclared war in Vietnam, outraging those young Americans eligible for the draft. The country was ill at ease.

  The youth rebellion that followed reignited Wayne’s nationalistic fervor. Out of the past came the cinematic spirits of Sergeant Stryker and Davy Crockett, and they energized Wayne in a way that no traditional medicine could. He would take on the protesters and he would take on the enemy as he soon as could get his Green Beret movie green-lighted.

  MEANWHILE, A BURGLARY AT THE Encino house when no one was there prompted a disgusted Wayne to put it up for sale. With so many of the old gang gone, infirm, or out of touch, he had no reason to stay within card-dealin
g distance of Hollywood. He told Pilar to find a more suitable home for them, maybe in Malibu, or somewhere along the coast where they could have easier access to The Wild Goose. This was great news for Pilar, who felt it was a sign from her husband that he was warming up to her again.

  She found a place she liked in Newport Beach, fifty miles south of Los Angeles. When she told Wayne about it, he directed her to buy it. He didn’t actually see it until the first day he walked through the door. Pilar wanted him to praise her house-hunting abilities. His response was less enthusiastic. He told her disapprovingly that the house needed a lot of work.

  They both spent a bit of time with architects and contractors, but neither Wayne’s head nor heart was in it. He couldn’t wait to returning to filmmaking, and when Melville Shavelson approached him about starring in Cast a Giant Shadow, he jumped at the chance. Shavelson was a successful screenwriter, director, and producer. When he had read the bestselling book of the same name by Ted Berman, the “true” story of David “Mickey” Marcus, he immediately secured the film rights.

  Marcus was a West Point graduate who had worked for a time in the Fiorello La Guardia administration of the ’30s, when the diminutive and extremely popular “Little Flower” was mayor of New York City. He became a colonel during World War II and participated in the D-Day invasion. After the war, the Jewish officer helped build the Palestinian Jews into a trained, disciplined army in their fight for the right to independence and the formation of Israel.

  Wayne had known Shavelson since 1953, when he had produced Trouble Along the Way. They remained friends despite their political differences; Shavelson was a die-hard liberal. When he first approached Wayne about being in Cast a Giant Shadow, Shavelson, a shrewd manipulator, pointed out the similarities between Marcus and Davy Crockett. Wayne was interested, but he soon found out what Shavelson already knew—that a movie about a Jewish American war hero was a difficult project to get made. Jews were almost never portrayed in Hollywood as characters on-screen, despite the industry being filled with Jewish talent, and of course the predominantly Jewish moguls. For a brief period, after World War II, there were several films made about Jews, including Gentleman’s Agreement, directed by Elia Kazan, in which Gregory Peck impersonated one to understand what being Jewish meant in mainstream, or gentile America. Despite Gentleman’s Agreement having won an Oscar for Best Picture, and one for Kazan, Jewish stories and subjects soon faded from Hollywood’s must-do lists of subjects and remained largely invisible on-screen. More often than not, Jewish leading men, like Kirk Douglas, played non-Jewish parts, like Spartacus, far more than they did “Jewish” roles. Audiences might accept Wayne as Attila the Hun (they didn’t), but as Mickey Marcus, there was no way. He still wanted to be involved in the film and agreed to take a much smaller role, that of General Mike Randolph, the American officer who lends his experience and support to Colonel Marcus.