John Wayne: The Life and Legend (102 page)

“He couldn’t
stand
Siegel,” said Bacall. “He humiliated him in front of the [crew.] ‘
That’s
your setup?’ he would say.” Despite the bad temper, Bacall didn’t think any the less of either man. “Duke was a sick, dying man; Don was a damn good director.”

If Wayne wasn’t in the mood to talk, he would stay in his trailer and hunch over his chessboard, leaving the trailer door open. If he was feeling gregarious, he would interject himself into conversations or offer random opinions. Both his kindness and his bad temper were larger than life, as when a crew member walked between Wayne and a light as he was studying his script and he turned and roared, “Will you get the fuck out of the light?”

In many respects, John Bernard Books was a tricky part, and an unusual Wayne character—because the character is dying, he’s of necessity focused almost exclusively on himself. Wayne was very concerned about the character becoming maudlin. He was also concerned that Siegel was making the movie darker than it needed to be. Literally. Wayne was particularly irate over a scene where a couple of gunmen come through a window to try to kill Books. (One of the men was played by the director Robert Totten, Ron Howard’s directorial mentor.) “He thought it was all too dark,” said Howard. “He objected to both the lighting and the camerawork.”

As the pieces of the film were cut together, it became obvious that Siegel’s intimate approach to the picture was both intellectually and emotionally valid—he never lets us get very far from Books. John Ford would have undoubtedly been ideal, and would have given the film more poetry, but he was dead and Hawks and Hathaway were over-the-hill. Siegel’s decision to make the movie an intimate chamber piece gave Wayne and his character a compressed power.

For Howard,
The Shootist
became an opportunity he hadn’t expected. He had initially come to the picture a little dissatisfied with his part—he wanted to be a little less callow, a little tougher—but all that was swept away by a priceless learning experience.

“The only thing Duke told me about acting was something he said John Ford had taught him—not to take an emotion to its furthest extreme. Always leave the audience a percentage of the emotion to complete for themselves. If you have to cry in a scene, don’t feel that you as the actor have to completely fulfill it. Hold a little back. And pacing. He cared a lot about pacing. He was very aware of rhythm.”

Howard had already worked with other Golden Age stars such as Henry Fonda and Bette Davis, and, while he was a fan of Wayne he thought of him less as an accomplished artist than as a personality. But that changed.

When we ran lines, and he was sorting out his performance, sometimes there would be an awkward moment that was a little stilted—a speech that wasn’t quite landing. And he would say, ‘Let me try again.’ And he would put that hitch in, that pause that he had in his speeches, and the line would suddenly take on power. He understood how to work with the rhythms of speech, to find a surprising nuance in the moment of the dialogue.

I had always thought those hitches were him forgetting his lines. Not at all. The opposite. It was a very particular tool—it was a way of putting the focus on an aspect of a verbal moment. And it worked in different ways. When I saw more movies of his in later years, sometimes it made him funny, and sometimes it made him vulnerable.

It was interesting, and it was art.

The one thing that united Wayne with Fonda and Davis was a ferocious work ethic. “They were who they were because they worked harder than anybody else, even into their seventies,” said Howard. “Every scene was still important to them. Not in a neurotic, crazy way, but in a professional, caring way.”

In particular, Howard found the difference between Wayne and Fonda instructive. “Fonda was more of a working actor, less of a star. He expected a certain amount of respect, but that was easily given because he commanded that naturally—there was a lot to respect. Fonda’s attitude was, ‘My job is to do the scene and I’m not gonna tell you how to do your job.’ ”

One day word spread that Clint Eastwood was going to visit the set, and Wayne began talking about the pictures Eastwood and Siegel had made together. “I remember this great moment,” said Ron Howard. “Wayne wondered out loud what Eastwood’s politics were. He’d heard he was conservative, but then he’d also heard he was liberal. And Don Siegel told him, ‘He’s very conservative.’ And you could tell that Duke was much more excited about meeting him after that.”

Hollywood had changed, the movies themselves had changed, but one thing hadn’t changed: John Wayne needed to do what he had been doing for more than fifty years—work at the craft he loved more passionately than anything besides his children. A reporter asked him about his refusal to quit, and he said, “To stop would be to surrender. To give up.” He understood his situation and had no illusions. “You don’t beat it, friend,” he said of cancer. “You stand it off.”

Beset by shaky health, by a director he disliked, and by a picture that was leading him into places he wasn’t entirely sure of, Wayne could be pettish but always there was his willingness to extend a hand.

“Anyplace I go in the world they treat me like a friend,” he said, with satisfaction and some wonder. But now he found that one depressing subject—politics—had been replaced by another—his health. “I
hate
it. It’s so
damn
irritating to feel bad when you haven’t felt bad all your life. I have been abnormally healthy. Even when they told me I had cancer, I hadn’t had any pain . . .
nothing
. They took the lung out and I was well again. Felt fine.

“But this last year, it’s been one thing after another. . . . That’s the worst thing about getting old—having to use your will power to drive yourself instead of natural physical energy. Before, it all came so easy. Now I have to push.”

The bronchial infection was still plaguing Wayne and he began to wear down. Some days, it was a struggle to walk twenty feet. Again, he had to have his back pounded to clear his lungs. As Siegel moved into the crucial scene of the final gunfight, the set became increasingly tense. Wayne wasn’t happy with Siegel’s staging of his entrance into the saloon, but acquiesced. At one point, Wayne said, “You’re really fucking this up,” loudly, in front of everybody.

Siegel shot the beginning of the gunfight, but ran out of time and called a wrap. Wayne was visibly exhausted and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to wrap the moment I got here. See you all tomorrow. Don’t drink up all the booze.”

But when tomorrow came, Wayne wasn’t there. Mike Frankovich told Siegel that Wayne was ill and they weren’t sure when he would be back. The words “if ever” were hanging in the air. Frankovich wanted to know how much could be done without Wayne.

“A few days,” Siegel replied.

“I heard Don say, ‘We’ll shoot around him,’ ” said Ron Howard. “And then he said, ‘Of course, I have to root for his recovery.’ ”

So for a few days, Siegel staged the action with the other people in the scene: Hugh O’Brian, Richard Boone, and Bill McKinney. “He brilliantly shot around him,” said Howard. “He staged that entire shootout, and covered everybody first, including me, without John Wayne. Sometimes there was a double, but mostly there wasn’t. He staged the whole scene without the protagonist.”

Hugh O’Brian’s death scene involved Books shooting him in the forehead as he peeked around the end of the bar. The bullet was to enter directly above the bridge of his nose. It was as harrowing an experience as any the actor ever had.

Today the shot would be done with CGI, but at the time the studio hired a marksman to shoot O’Brian with a rifle firing a red pellet that flattened on impact and resembled a bullet hit. The marksman was situated to the right of the camera, about ten feet away from O’Brian. They rehearsed the shot a couple of times, after which O’Brian went to Siegel and told him they better get it on the first take, because there wasn’t going to be a second take.

“If he missed, he could put my eye out,” remembered O’Brian. “The director knew it, I knew it, the marksman knew it. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. But he didn’t miss.”

And then shooting was suspended. There were some scenes still to be done—between Wayne and Bacall, between Wayne and Howard—but they couldn’t be done without Wayne. This was all unheard of; Wayne worked hungover, he worked sick, he worked on impossible locations, he worked on pictures where the script was an embarrassment, he
worked
.

But not this time.

“It wasn’t easy keeping his illness quiet,” said William Self. “None of us talked about it, there was no gossip. It didn’t get in the trade papers. And at this point it became obvious that this picture could be it for him.”

As the days passed by, the producers quietly floated the idea of using a double for Wayne in order to finish the picture. Siegel hated the idea, but he was contractually obligated to make the movie with or without its star. Siegel finished shooting the gunfight with Chuck Roberson doubling for Wayne, which meant that you couldn’t see Wayne’s face as he engaged in the gunfight and as he died. The sequence would cut together, but the picture was obviously going to suffer from the substitution.

After two weeks, Wayne finally came back to work. He was pale but otherwise all right. When he asked what had been done in his absence, Siegel knew he was in trouble. They offered to take up part of the lunch hour by showing him the gunfight as it had been edited. Wayne nodded to Hugh O’Brian and said, “Watch the rushes with me.”

The two men trooped off with Siegel, who must have felt like he was marching to his execution. “Duke agreed with the majority of the stuff he saw,” remembered O’Brian. “The only thing that startled him was the way Siegel had shot the scene with the guy played by Bill McKinney, the town braggart. Duke—or Duke’s double—shot him in the back as he’s trying to get out the door of the saloon. And when he saw that, Duke jumped up. ‘Wait a goddamn minute! I’ve never shot anybody in the back and I’m not going to start now.’ ”

For a man who had spent a lifetime personalizing his screen character, this was a negation of his belief system. “He was very clear that he felt this would violate his reputation as he meant to preserve it on film,” said O’Brian. Siegel argued, but Wayne was adamant. Siegel finally gave in after saying that Wayne’s insistence on the primacy of his image was “ridiculous and senseless.”

Siegel and the producers agreed to reshoot the sequence so that McKinney was shot in the chest, and to remove the shots of Wayne’s double. (Two shots of Chuck Roberson remained in the picture, because there was no way Wayne could do them himself: when Books vaults over the bar, and when he’s shot in the back and tumbles to the ground.)

Although Siegel agreed to reshoot anything that Wayne wanted reshot, Wayne was clearly still angry. Siegel asked if Wayne would prefer another director. The actor ignored the question. “Let’s shoot the dying scene first,” said Wayne. “I’ll go over this list of shots you’ve made and make up my mind what we should re-shoot.”

Siegel carefully talked Wayne through his close-ups in the gunfight and his death scene, all of which went smoothly. A few less strenuous scenes followed, on an abbreviated work schedule. “The director and the producers were wise enough not to push Duke for a full day’s work,” said Hugh O’Brian. “They let him go home early, because they wanted to finish the film.”

The picture finally struggled to its close on April 5, 1976, with Wayne and Siegel exhibiting the mutual exhaustion of two fighters who have pummeled each other for fifteen rounds without a clear decision. A few weeks later, Mike Frankovich brought a rough cut to Newport Beach for a screening. Wayne provided an audio commentary as the picture unreeled, a stream-of-consciousness ramble about the sets, the photography, and anything else that occurred to him.

He was pleased with the picture and his own performance, but his daughter Marisa began to cry during the ending and didn’t stop when the lights came up. “Stop acting so silly,” snapped Ethan. “It’s only a movie. Dad is sitting right here next to you.”

Paramount released the picture in July—too quickly. Wayne was angry, because he felt that
The Shootist
needed a more thoughtful publicity campaign. “Those people are putting all their damn time into
King Kong
,” he told Pat Stacy, referring to the De Laurentiis remake that Paramount was also releasing. “They think the Wayne movie will make it on its own. Well, it won’t. People don’t go to see a movie just because my name is on the marquee. Those bastards don’t understand that. It used to be the case, but it’s not the case anymore.”

The reviews were mainly laudatory.
Variety
said that “the entire film is in totally correct balance, artistically and technically” and said that it was one of “John Wayne’s towering achievements and his very best since
True Grit
.”

The
Newsweek
critic summed up the consensus by citing Wayne’s “richness that seems born of self-knowledge; he lends the film a tremendous sense of intimacy and a surprisingly confessional mood.
The Shootist
is, in its own reserved way, John Wayne’s singleminded statement about both the burden and the triumph of being John Wayne.”