John Wayne: The Life and Legend (104 page)

In late 1977, the then burning issue of sovereignty for the Panama Canal came to a head. President Jimmy Carter wanted to hand the canal to the Panamanians, a move angrily denounced by right-wing Republicans, whose arguments could be synopsized as, “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” What difference did it make that the original agreement called for it to be given to the Panamanians?

On November 11, Wayne wrote a private letter to Ronald Reagan in which he accused his friend of spreading untruths about the treaty. “I’ll show you point by goddamn point in the treaty where you are misinforming people,” wrote an infuriated Wayne. “If you continue these erroneous remarks, someone will publicise your letter to prove that you are not as thorough in your reviewing of this treaty as you say, or are damned obtuse when it comes to reading the English language.” He signed the letter, “Duke” and copied it to President Carter.

Wayne then weighed in with a piece for
The New York Times
saying he thought the canal should be given to Panama. Wayne’s full article, which was edited by the
Times
, veered wildly off topic near the end: “Quite obviously, there are some Communists in General Torrijos’ administration as there have been and probably still are in ours. Back in the days of McCarthy, it was proven that a great number of people in our government were communists. For his high-handed manner with the use of the Committee, he was censored; but the truth of his findings were never questioned. . . .

“He does have his Escobar Bethancourt as we have our Andrew Young, neither of whom were elected. . . . A quarter century from now—when and if this agreement is carried out to the letter of the law . . . Escobar Bethancourt will be an old and forgotten character; and Young will probably be relegated to some posh job in our civil service from which he cannot be fired or taken care of by some liberal foundation as was [Alger] Hiss.”

There was a script called
Cattle Annie and Little Britches
making the rounds, about two adolescent girls who joined the Doolin-Dalton gang in the waning days of the Old West. The plan was to cast a couple of unknown girls in the title roles, which necessitated a star for the part of Bill Doolin. Wayne was an obvious possibility, but he wasn’t feeling up to it. The producers said they’d wait, but after a while began to canvass for other possibilities.

Features were getting harder for Wayne to make, but his overhead hadn’t changed. He began to fret about the IRS, the expense of the
Wild Goose
, his medical bills, his flagging cash flow, and how he believed his money had been mismanaged by Bö Roos and Don La Cava. Aissa was attending USC, and her father gave her only $200 a month for an allowance—barely enough to get by.

So Wayne downshifted and agreed to make a series of commercials for Great Western Bank. (There had been an earlier, brief series of appearances for Datril, a pain reliever, but Wayne hadn’t been happy with the ads and stopped making them.) As he told Aissa, “The truth is, I’m doing it for the money. . . . If Michael had been old enough to manage my money from the start, I’d never have had these problems. You’ve gotta find something you can fall back on Aissa. If I get sick, I don’t know what will happen to you kids. It’s not what you think it is, Aissa.”

Great Western agreed to pay Wayne $350,000 for 1977, $400,000 for 1978, and $450,000 for 1979, with two one-year options after that. Along with the money he was getting from ABC for the TV specials, it was enough to keep the wolf from the door.

The bank received about thirty letters condemning it for hiring someone that the letters referred to variously as a reactionary or a liberal—many paleo-conservatives were still enraged by Wayne’s support for the Panama Canal treaty.

The commercials started running at the end of 1977, and the bank was immediately gratified by the response. In December, the first month of the commercials, Great Western had a net savings gain of $8 million, even though December is traditionally bad for savings and loans because of Christmas withdrawals. January brought more good news, as Great Western recorded a $21 million net increase, most of it in over-the-counter passbook deposits from small investors.

What made the production of the spots particularly interesting is that most of them were directed and photographed by the great cinematographer and committed liberal Haskell Wexler. Wexler had a commercial company in partnership with Conrad Hall, and the two men had recently had success with ads for the Wells Fargo bank, which is how they got the job for yet another bank.

Wexler made a trip to Wayne’s house in Newport Beach to discuss the commercials and was pleasantly surprised by the environment. “It was not a big, plush Hollywood house,” said Wexler. “There was one room filled with awards; that room was a museum of a thousand awards. Otherwise, it was a homey, simple setup.”

Wayne was aware of Wexler’s politics. “He brought it up right off. He knew I’d been in Vietnam with Jane Fonda. ‘I know where you stand,’ he said. ‘And I’m absolutely in favor of standing by our agreement with Panama and I’m taking a lot of guff from the damn right-wingers.’ He gave me all his credentials of how he didn’t go along with the nutty right wing. And then he showed me his station wagon with a big bump in the roof so he could sit in the driver’s seat with his cowboy hat on.”

The two men got along fine that day, although there was one small dustup on the first day of shooting the first commercial. Wexler had placed a horse in the background of the shot, and Wayne looked around and yelled “Cut! What makes you think you’re a director, Wexler? That horse is a swayback. I don’t want a swayback horse in the background of my shot.”

Wexler was a good rider and knew a swayback when he saw one, but he had another horse placed in the background anyway. He could never figure out if Wayne was entirely serious or just asserting his authority.

Wayne’s nineteenth-century attitudes reared up only once. The location was Oregon, and Wexler, as was his wont, had hired a couple of female camera assistants—he believed in integrated crews. One of them, Kristin Glover, had been working regularly in production for five years.

The crew had to cross a muddy field to get to the location, and Wexler decided he wanted to carry the Arriflex camera, which he owned, rather than delegate the job to one of the other crew members. Normally, the camera assistant would have carried it, but it was Wexler’s camera and he was the boss. Wayne observed the director lugging the camera, but said nothing.

When he noticed that the crew included women, Wayne muttered, “Does the crew still shower together?” Once they began working, Wayne completely ignored Glover, even when she was standing right next to him with a tape measure to check focus. Throughout the first day of the shoot, he refused to acknowledge her existence. “I was a nonentity,” she recalled. “I just did my job and figured that was the way he was.”

That night, Wayne invited Wexler and the crew to dinner. Kristin Glover was the first person to arrive at the restaurant, and Wayne was alone at the table. “Well,” he announced, “I see that you can’t carry a camera, so what are you good for?”

“Why Mr. Wayne, how rude,” said Glover, teasing him. The rest of the crew came in, including a female assistant Glover was paying out of her own pocket.

During dinner, Wayne began baiting Wexler. “What we need is another good war,” etc. Wexler figured the dinner was an extension of the shoot; since it didn’t pay to antagonize the star, he didn’t take the bait. Wayne then began a diatribe about women on film sets, specifically women who couldn’t do the job, who took jobs away from men who needed to feed their families, and so forth. Glover sat there until she couldn’t take it anymore.

“I have something I’d like to say,” she announced.

“Well, go ahead,” said Wayne.

“I was hired because I’m capable of doing my job. I take it seriously. I love it, I care about it, and I’m good at it.” At this point, Glover’s voice cracked. “And besides,” she continued, “you’re really hurting our feelings.”

“I didn’t cry,” she remembered, “but I was on the verge.”

Wayne’s entire demeanor shifted. “I am so sorry,” he announced to the crew, specifically to the women members of the crew. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I apologize.”

The next day, in front of the entire crew, Wayne came up to Glover and put his arm around her “so sweetly. He was a huge man, he just towered over me.”

“I hope you’re not still mad at me?” he asked her.

“I couldn’t possibly have stayed mad at him,” she said. “He was a chauvinist, and he couldn’t help himself.
But he heard me
. I realized that he loved to start arguments, loved to debate, loved to tussle with people and challenge them. The rest of the time he treated me as an accepted member of the crew, worthy of being spoken to. I would have to call him a charming chauvinist.”

“He was a great guy to work with,” said Haskell Wexler. “It was a very important situation in Kristin’s life to see a man of that stature in the film business who did good interactive things that showed in the work. It was good for her. After that initial dustup, he was charming to the girls. He responded to them, and they responded to him.

“I thought he would be tougher, and maybe a little mean. But my expectations were colored by prejudice. And I think maybe it goes with my getting older or maybe just being more mature. I don’t think there are too many people I’ve come across that are all bad or that I hate. All of us have something to say that’s worth listening to and paying attention to and acting well with. It doesn’t mean we don’t have principles of our own, it just means that it’s not worth fouling up relationships.

“Kristin says Wayne was a charming chauvinist? I would have to say he was a principled reactionary.”

Although the commercials didn’t tax Wayne’s endurance—a couple of them were completed in one take—he was very much cognizant of a health situation that was not apparent to anybody else: he was beginning to lose weight for no apparent reason, and was drinking protein drinks during the shoots.

“He was aware that his days were numbered,” said Wexler. “It was nothing overt, but he would say things. I remember he told me, ‘As lousy a director as you might be, Wexler, you might be the last one I work with.’ ”

The Great Western commercials turned out to be simply but elegantly produced, and surprisingly emotional. The messages are all heartfelt, the mood is intimate and gently retrospective, the sell is soft and dependent on Wayne’s status as a trusted friend of the audience.

In one, Wayne stands among redwood trees, wearing his familiar vest and cowboy hat and having lost a fair amount of weight. “These trees have been around for a thousand years,” he says. “It’s a nice feeling to be around something that’s been here a long time and is going to last.” Another one shows him in front of the mountains of Lone Pine. “I rode out here about 50 years ago on a little dun horse and started a film career. A picture called
The Big Trail
. . . . In those days, a Great Western Savings Account would have come in pretty handy.”

“I have a picture of the two of us,” said Haskell Wexler. “Part of [the inscription] is that quote from Wayne: ‘What makes you think you’re a director, Wexler?’ Thirty-odd years later, Kristin will still say that to me out of the blue. Whenever I see the people from that crew, we still talk about the experience of working with him.”

For the first time in forty years, Wayne had time on his hands, so he looked around for make-work projects. When
The People’s Almanac
asked him to rate the five best movie actors and five best movies of all time, he thought about it, then made his choices. For actors, he listed (from the top) Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Kathrine (sic) Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, and Lionel Barrymore. For the best pictures, he went with
A Man for All Seasons, Gone With the Wind,
Rex Ingram’s
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Searchers
, and
The Quiet Man
.