American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Page 8
It was an unexpected and auspicious meeting for Wayne that began one of the greatest creative collaborations in all movie history. It would change everything about the movies they made, and the lives they lived.
Chapter 5
In 1936, to make room for his growing brood—Josephine had given birth to their second child, a girl they named Mary Antonia “Toni”—Wayne managed to save enough money to buy a two-story Spanish-style mansion on North Highland Avenue, not too far from Hancock Park, where Josie’s parents still lived. As soon as they moved in, Josie set about to decorate it. She wanted a stylish showcase, but her taste tended to run to nouveau riche, a choice Wayne especially disliked. It made him feel less like he was living in a real home and more like on some fancy movie set. One time coming home late and tired, he sat down on a new and elegant-looking chair in the living room Josie had bought; it collapsed under his weight and he wound up on the floor like the hapless victim in some two-reel comedy.
He insisted to Josie he had to have one room in the house for himself, what today would be called a man cave, one room of the house with big old comfortable chairs, a large wooden desk, and an oversize sofa he could stretch out on without having to take off his boots. In a house that otherwise had so much activity, with decorators and Josie’s parents and friends, and their own two little children running around, or screaming, or crying, Wayne increasingly sought comfort and solitude in that room.
Josie, meanwhile, became active in the elusive upper-crust strata of Hollywood’s non-moviemaking social set, and often insisted Wayne accompany her to the seemingly endless black-tie events, even if they went on well past his regular bedtime. He did so reluctantly, to keep peace in the family, even if it meant he didn’t get enough sleep for the next day’s early call.
Imbedded in Josie’s newly acquired social sophistication was her unspoken rejection of being married to a movie actor. Josie felt the need to compensate for his work in cheap movies by elevating her status, for the good of the both of them. Redecorating their home was the same as dressing up her husband in a tux to make him more acceptable. Wayne felt caught in the peculiar web of Josie’s double dissatisfaction, her need to appear to be the picture of the perfect wife in public, but in private her inability to disguise her revulsion for the field in which her husband worked. To Josie he was, as her father had warned her, just a struggling actor, and because of it a failure of a husband and father. Because of it, she no longer felt she should be with him in bed at night. There could be no reward for failure. Wayne was well aware that the passion had gone out of his marriage, like the air in a flat tire. He had no idea how to save it nor was he even sure he wanted to.
BOTH WAYNE AND FORD WERE both at a crossroads in their respective careers. While Wayne was trapped running on the gerbil wheel of western cheapies, Ford’s career felt stuck in second gear. He was hoping to make a filmed version of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, the story of an Irish Communist rebel, Gypo Nolan, who turns in a comrade for the twenty pounds’ reward during the Irish Civil War of 1921–23. The novel, with its Judas-like hero, had already been filmed once before in England, in 1929, but that version had never been released in America.
Getting The Informer made, Ford knew, was not going to be easy, and not just because of its controversial subject matter. He was having trouble getting any films produced. It was partly a sign of the times, and partly his own antiauthoritarian ways. With the arrival of sound, and as with so many other silent directors, including D. W. Griffith, one of the early giants of the industry whose career ended as talking pictures took off, Ford’s style of moviemaking was thought by many in Hollywood to be out of fashion, more suited to the days when pictures moved but didn’t speak, and Ford had no Birth of a Nation on his list of accomplishments. His best film to date had been 1928’s Mother Machree.
What made it even more difficult for Ford was his reputation as a troublemaker. He was known to be disagreeable on-set, to carry a gigantic chip on his shoulder when it came to studio executives, especially when they tried to butt into the production of his films and tell him how to make them better, meaning more commercial. And he was an alcoholic. His first all-talking feature, 1929’s The Black Watch, starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy, a spy thriller set in India during the early days of World War I, was not well received, making every project for him that much more difficult to get made.
The same year William Fox had begun what would be made his disastrous attempt to take over Loew’s Inc., Ford took the opportunity to have his contract negotiated, fearing his career would get lost in the reshuffle. Agent Harry Wurtzel successfully arranged for Ford’s new deal at Fox to be nonexclusive, a move that would prove crucial to his career.
Because of his new contract, Ford was able to make his first important sound film, 1931’s Arrowsmith, an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, screenplay by Sidney Howard, for independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, released through United Artists. However, during production, Ford had a falling-out with Goldwyn over the condition, in writing, that he would not drink while making the film. Ford failed to keep his part of the bargain and tried to rush the film to completion, partly to get Goldwyn off his back, but mostly to get his hands on more booze. The two butted heads continually during production, and despite the film’s becoming a huge commercial success when it was released, and earning four Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography), Goldwyn swore Ford would never work for him again. During filming, Ford had walked off the set and gone on an extended binge in Catalina. Goldwyn demanded that Fox Studio pay him the $4,100 fee he had paid them to use Ford. Fox paid it and promptly fired Ford, releasing him from any and all further obligations.
He then made films for Universal and MGM before being rehired by Fox in 1932, in a nonexclusive multiple-picture deal, the most important being the three films he made there with Will Rogers as his leading man (1933’s Doctor Bull, 1934’s Judge Priest, 1935’s Steamboat Round the Bend). Rogers, a witty, satiric figure in the mold of Mark Twain, was a natural for motion pictures, and, perhaps more significantly to Ford, was the actor he had been searching for since parting ways with Harry Carey, whom Rogers physically resembled. However, where Carey was reticent and wary, Rogers was folksy, funny, and homespun. Audiences loved him and Ford believed he had found his perfect on-screen other, until the actor’s tragic early death in a 1935 plane crash.
Even before then, because Rogers was not always available, Ford turned to his other favorite leading man, Victor McLaglen, the “Irish tough guy” side of Ford’s externalized self, darker and more self-destructive than the sunny Rogers, to make two pictures, the second being The Informer. The project was rejected at every studio before it landed at fellow Irishman Joseph P. Kennedy’s RKO Studios.41 Executive producer Merian C. Cooper, who had produced and directed King Kong there, had long urged Kennedy to sign Ford, even with his reputation. Cooper liked Ford’s films and believed that with the right material, despite his personal demons, Ford could make great movies. However, Kennedy sold out his remaining interest in the studio before Ford had made his first picture there. The Lost Patrol, released in 1934 before Rogers’s death, turned enough of a profit for the studio to green-light The Informer. The atmospheric drama was set in Dublin, and Ford wanted to film it there, but RKO’s new owners insisted that to save money it had to be done at the studio.
With Dudley Nichols as the screenwriter, and McLaglen as Gypo, The Informer was released in 1935 and proved a modest hit in America, until it brought Ford his first Best Director Academy Award, and one each for screenwriter Nichols, actor McLaglen, and musical score composer Max Steiner. The film was released and doubled its initial profit, and while it elevated Ford’s reputation as a director, it also identified him as a troublemaker of a different sort, a political rebel in a conservative industry.42
The Oscar presentations were held that year at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmor
e Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, with a banquet that preceded the radio broadcast of the handing out of the Awards. However, despite the urging of Frank Capra, the president of the Directors Guild, that Ford, the guild’s treasurer, attend the Awards as a demonstration of unity between the Academy and the guild, Ford begged off, claiming he was too busy with the guild’s contentious salary negotiations; besides, he told Capra, he felt he couldn’t in good conscience show up and rub shoulders with those on the other side of the hostile bargaining table. When Ford won his Oscar, Capra accepted it for him and delivered it in person a week later.
Nichols also refused to attend, but when he won his Oscar and Capra accepted it, the next day Nichols told Capra he didn’t want it at all. Capra then had the statuette sent to Nichols’s house, and he promptly returned it to Capra with a note saying, “To accept it would be to turn my back on nearly a thousand members [of the WGA] who ventured everything in the long-drawn-out fight for a genuine writers’ organization.” Capra sent it back to Nichols again, and again Nichols returned it. The statuette eventually found its way back to the Academy headquarters, where it remains this day.
A week after that, for accepting his Oscar, the Directors Guild admonished Ford for sleeping with the enemy and voted him out of office.43
Ford’s and Nichols’ difficulties with the Academy and the Directors Guild that year marked a turning point in Hollywood’s burgeoning civil war, a battle between management and workers that had existed since the earliest days of filmmaking. Movies were a product of the Industrial Revolution, a technological marvel greatly enhanced by Thomas Edison, who envisioned film as an instrument of information rather than entertainment. Once the novelty became big business, the so-called factory of dreams, those who made the movies were treated as workers in that factory, including actors, writers, directors, and all ancillary help. The writers were the first to form a guild to fight for better wages and working conditions. To counteract the growing union movement, the studio heads formed a house union, the Academy, and to reward their workers, instead of pay raises, conceived an annual awards ceremony. As more guilds formed, the DGA and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) made considerable gains against the studios. In retaliation, the studios redefined the financial battle as a political one, accusing the unions of being anti-American, having been infiltrated and influenced by the Communist Party.
With the impending outbreak of World War II, John Wayne, a young, quiet, polite, hard worker and one of the least political actors in Hollywood throughout the ’30s, would become one of the leaders in the industry’s battle against the unions, putting him on the opposite side of Ford and Nichols, believing, as the studios did, they were all Communist fronts using films to deliver subversive messages to the American public and thereby posing a threat to the very democracy that allowed them to do it.
FOR NOW, THOUGH, FRUSTRATED AFTER each day’s shoot, just like the one yesterday and the one tomorrow, and in no rush to go back to his expensive, noisy, and well-appointed but supremely uncomfortable new home, Wayne increasingly chose to spend his nights out drinking with a regular crowd of rough-and-tough buddies who called themselves the “Young Men’s Purity Total Abstinence and Snooker Pool Association.” They met regularly at the Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. The group included craggy character actor Paul Fix, one of those familiar faces-without-names who most often played tough guys, who also fancied himself a playwright; former competitive swimmer and the movies’ newest Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller; stuntman extraordinaire Yak Canutt; and Wayne’s closest and oldest friend in Hollywood, former USC teammate Ward Bond. Wayne and Bond hunted and fished together and also loved to let off steam by getting drunk and fist-fighting each other. They didn’t do it in a ring, with gloves, and rounds or referees; it wasn’t anything as formal as that. They liked to street fight like a couple of wildcats, for fun, not sport, pulling no punches, hitting each other as hard as they could, just to see how much the other could take.
They had a brawl one night at the Hollywood Athletic Club that became legendary when it spilled out onto the streets and back inside again, all because of a disputed pool shot. According to one witness, “Duke knocked Ward into a row of lockers, then Ward got up and knocked Duke down, and after that everybody else let them have the place to themselves until they were finished.” When it was over, Wayne and Bond laughed, shook hands, hugged each other, chipped in to pay for the several thousand dollars’ worth of damage they had caused, and went home to sleep it off.
In 1935, Wayne’s non-exclusive contract with Republic expired, and Yates offered him a second renewal at $24,000 to make four more westerns. The money was tempting, and with all the spending Josie did it seemed he never had enough, but he turned it down because he was burned-out. He couldn’t face the idea of having to make any more cowboy cheapies.44 To earn fast cash and to impress his wife and father-in-law, he briefly took a position at a brokerage firm where both he and they hoped to cash in on his fame. Neither did, and he turned to real estate, but again he failed to make any big scores. He then decided to become a professional prizefighter, and even had a few professional matches in California and Nevada under the name “Duke Morrison.”
When he wasn’t fighting, which was most of the time—he wasn’t that good against real opponents—he would make his way out to Catalina, to meet up with Ford and Bond at the Christian’s Hut. Wayne quickly became something of a legend at the bar. Although probably apocryphal, the story goes that he could drink sixteen martinis at one sitting and never fall down or throw up.45
Wayne, Bond, and a few others sometimes would join Ford on The Araner, for longer trips, the only rule and the main attraction being that no wives or girlfriends were allowed. Ford’s favorite destination was Mazatlan, where he and whoever else happened to come along would cavort among the natives.
Wayne loved killing time hanging out with the boys, but the hard truth was he needed money. He was offered and accepted a role in a stage production, even though he had never acted professionally before a live audience. Wayne’s friend and vocal coach, Paul Fix, had written a play called Red Sky at Evening, set on the docks of San Francisco, staged for pennies outdoors in downtown Los Angeles, at a time when that was the biggest skid row in the country. Fix wanted to produce the play there because he thought it approximated San Francisco’s atmosphere.
But Wayne couldn’t handle it, and during rehearsals he developed a hard case of stage fright that built up until opening night, when he asked his brother, Robert, to bring him a bottle of scotch and he finished most of it before curtain time.
During the production, his costar Sally Blane was supposed to hit him in the head with a vase. When she really did, Wayne looked confused, upset, and out of character. The stunned audience sat in silence staring at Wayne, whose eyes became glassy and unfocused. From the fifth row center came a ringing voice of criticism for his being drunk. It was Josephine, yelling at her husband as if they were in the privacy of their living room, “Duke, you are a disgrace! You are just a disgrace!”
“Duke was so frightened of live theater that he overdosed on booze and made a total ass out of himself,” Harry Carey Jr. later said of the incident. Wayne never acted in another stage production.
IN 1936, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TREM Carr left Republic for Universal, a much better organized studio with far deeper pockets. One of the first things Carr did was to call the out-of-work Wayne and offer him a deal similar to the one he had tried to get for him to re-sign with Republic, $6,000 per picture for six films, but with one big difference. Knowing Wayne did not want to do any more cowboy movies and that Republic still held that option, Carr promised that none of the six films he would make over the next two years would be a western. Wayne was eager to get back into the movies and took the deal, hoping for one more chance to make an important film, the dream he had been chasing ever since the failure of The Big Trail.
It didn’t happen. Of the six films he made for Universal, not
one proved a breakout hit. In Frank Strayer’s 1936 The Sea Spoilers, he played the commander of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter assigned the unglamorous task of battling seal poachers who have also kidnapped his girlfriend, played by Nan Grey (who later married singer Frankie Laine). Variety dismissed it as “Dimly realized . . .” and it quickly died at the box office.46 That was followed by David Howard’s Conflict, in which Wayne played a lumberjack and a member of a gang that conducts fake prizefights. He meets Jean Rogers (of Flash Gordon serial fame), who gets him to see the light. He wins the fight and her.47
Conflict was better received than The Sea Spoilers. Variety called it “a very satisfactory program offering . . .” and “An ideal vehicle for John Wayne . . .” Next came Arthur Lubin’s California Straight Ahead, a remake of a silent film, in which Wayne plays a truck driver who has to complete a delivery before a labor strike shuts down the train awaiting his goods.48 Louise Latimer played his love interest. It was another turkey. After that came Arthur Lubin’s 1937 I Cover The War, in which Wayne plays a newsreel cameraman.49 In this one his love interest is Gwen Gaze, making her film debut. The film had better production value than the previous three but like the others, still failed to make any noise at the box office. Next was Arthur Lubin’s 1937 Idol of the Crowds,50 in which Wayne played a member of a professional hockey team pressured to throw the championship game. This film gave the Wayne a chance to show off his physical prowess. Variety called it “Old-fashioned hokum . . .” Wayne’s leading lady was Virginia Brassac, who would go on to make sixty films in her career. His sixth and final film at Universal was the aptly named Adventure’s End, another 1937 Lubin-directed production.51 In it, Wayne plays a Pacific Isle pearl diver who marries the captain’s daughter, who is pursued by the evil first mate. Diana Gibson is his love interest.