John Wayne: The Life and Legend (17 page)

In 1936–1937, Wayne made a batch of six pictures at Universal. None of them was a western—one was an adaptation of Jack London’s “The Abysmal Brute.” The series was an obvious attempt to broaden his appeal and see if he had any commercial traction outside the genre he had already made his own. The subject matter varied from sports to adventure, the running times were all around sixty minutes, and the films were released between September 1936 and December 1937. All of them (
Sea Spoilers, Conflict, California Straight Ahead!, I Cover the War, Idol of the Crowds
, and
Adventure’s End
) are heavier on plot than on action. In other words, the films are a halfway house between the Lone Star westerns and the bigger things that were down the road.

None of this was accidental; as the
Motion Picture Herald
noted of
Adventure’s End
, “This production is another of the series of John Wayne starring vehicles which are presenting him as a strong, action type of hero, yet subtly over the course of time are investing in him as material for higher budgeted productions.”

At the time, Universal was mostly subsisting on B movies—the only big star the company had was Deanna Durbin. The Wayne vehicles were made by old friends Trem Carr and Paul Malvern, who had quickly sensed that Herb Yates didn’t want anybody running Republic except Herb Yates.

Trem Carr paid Wayne better money—Wayne got $6,000 a picture—and also made better pictures. The Universal pictures took between ten and fourteen days to make and cost between $60,000 and $75,000, with Universal absorbing about 90 percent of the cost and Carr paying the rest. The films were strong enough to play on either half of a double feature, and they were extremely ambitious from a production point of view, as is attested by a series of memos from Universal.

On
I Cover the War
, scheduled for eleven days of production, with five of them on location at Lone Pine and Red Rock, one M. F. Murphy wrote, “Considering the number of sets, both interior and exterior this story requires, I feel quite certain in stating that we could not turn out this show for $70,000, considering our overhead, if produced as written.” A month later, the script had been trimmed slightly and Murphy was still impressed. “We feel it should make a good buy for us at the $65,000 mark. Beyond question, this subject is really a more ambitious undertaking than the usual run of stories made at this price.” (In fact, Universal paid only $60,000 for the picture.)

Similarly,
Adventure’s End
, the last of the Universal pictures, scheduled for thirteen days of shooting, was characterized by the studio as an “exceptionally difficult one to produce. The attached budget, amounting to $82,120.50 which we have checked over, is most conservative. The physical problems connected with the making of a subject like this on our own back lot . . . will be numerous and unable to foresee. It fact, it is quite a gamble and we will watch with great interest the final results.”

Most of these films have effective locations—
Sea Spoilers
was shot around Catalina,
I Cover the War
at Lone Pine—and they’re ably photographed by Archie Stout, although the young Stanley Cortez does duty on the latter picture, in which Wayne plays an intrepid newsreel cameraman. And they’re a definite step up in that the exposition is delegated to supporting actors, not the star.

There are occasional fluffs that remind you that a ten-day picture is still a ten-day picture; in
I Cover the War
, Wayne begins some dialogue before his cue, backs off, then picks it up a moment later at the right time. In an A picture, this would have meant a retake, but Universal elected to keep it in, undoubtedly because of time—director Arthur Lubin rammed through as many as fifty-one shots per day on
I Cover the War
.

During
Sea Spoilers,
Wayne roomed with co-star William Bakewell, who had first met him when he was beginning to date Josie. “We had 4:30 calls in the morning,” remembered Bakewell. “We’d go out on the Coast Guard cutters to shoot, but rather than go to sleep early, he’d say, ‘Come on, let’s go down . . . and get a nightcap.’ ” After a week of getting to bed at two and getting up at 4:30, Bakewell was exhausted. “I thought, ‘My God, if this keeps up, I’ll look like the advance man for a famine.’ ”

A couple of the Universals are quite entertaining, notably
I Cover the War
and
California Straight Ahead!
, a trucking movie that predates Warners’
They Drive by Night,
not to mention
The Wages of Fear
. In all of these pictures, Wayne’s innate honesty makes you buy some pretty outlandish premises, not to mention a lot of stock footage. (At its best, acting, like fiction, is the lie that tells the truth, and Wayne was developing the knack of telling his lies with absolute sincerity.)

Director Arthur Lubin remembered that Universal decided to make
Adventure’s End
simply because the story matched up with a schooner on the Universal back lot. “That’s the way pictures were made,” remembered Lubin. “They said, ‘Well, what sets are up these days that we can make pictures on that won’t cost us much money?’ ”

The only real stiff in the bunch is
Idol of the Crowds
, in which Wayne plays a hockey star. The problem was, as Wayne remembered, “I’m from Southern California. I’ve never been on a pair of goddamn skates in my life.” He always remembered the experience with a sense of burning humiliation.

An ice skating rink had been rented for twenty-four hours, during which all the hockey scenes would be shot. Wayne’s memory was that he could not skate at all. “My ankles are rubbing on the ice, and I can’t even stand up, but they pushed me around. . . . I was in the hospital for two fucking days after that.”

Wayne did it, because “This was the Depression. If you wanted to work, you did what they told you to do.”

Actually, Wayne could skate a little, as long as it was in a straight line. If you’ve always wanted to see John Wayne on skates,
Idol of the Crowds
is the movie for you. But Wayne was a natural athlete, which is to say innately graceful, so he could perform almost any kind of physical activity.

But the retrospective anger is interesting—the Universals are much better pictures than the westerns at Monogram or Republic and he was making decent money in the bargain. But Wayne remembered only the embarrassment, probably because of the yawning chasm between the movies he wanted to make and the movies he actually was making. The fact that he was once again a member of John Ford’s extended family would only have made his frustration worse.

Some of Wayne’s frustrations could have been absorbed by a focus on family, but weren’t. Duke had maintained his close relationship with his father. Clyde Morrison and his second wife had been present when Wayne married Josie, and Duke and Josie often brought their kids to their grandfather’s house for dinner. Nancy Morrison, Clyde’s stepdaughter, said that Wayne and his father always hugged when getting together, and Wayne would often kiss his father, whom she called “the most honest of men.” Clyde never talked about his first marriage.

On March 4, 1937, Clyde Morrison drove his stepdaughter to school, said he didn’t feel well and went home to lie down. A few minutes later he died of a heart attack. Wayne, his stepmother, and Josie went to the school to tell Nancy Morrison that her stepfather had died. “Duke was heartbroken, sobbing in the car as I was. He hugged me and we cried some more.” Clyde Morrison was buried at Forest Lawn.

Whatever grief he felt about his father’s death, Wayne had already developed that ability to compartmentalize familiar in high achievers. Decades later, he went to the funeral of an employee at the same cemetery. He looked around and said, “My dad’s buried up here someplace. I’ve never been back since the funeral.”

As far as the industry was concerned, the pictures Wayne made at Universal were B movies, but looked at with the benefit of hindsight they’re B plus movies, with a fair amount of wit. In
I Cover the War
, Wayne and a friend are sent to a country called Samari, to which Wayne brightly replies, “Ah, an appointment in Samari!” Trem Carr was not about to leave any commercial stone unturned—
Conflict
combines a boxing movie with a logging movie, and ends with Wayne adopting an orphan!

The critics were a little kinder to these programmers than they had been to Wayne’s past efforts.
Variety
wrote about the despised
Idol of the Crowds
that “A new John Wayne is revealed. He has a breezy role that definitely suits his personality and appearance. He carries off the part in an appreciable style, making the character thoroughly likeable and believable.”
Variety
also liked
Adventure’s End
and its star (“John Wayne gives another of his likeable heroic performances. However, the Wayne torso is given more display and is shown to better advantage.”), but the
Motion Picture Herald
noted of
Sea Spoilers
that it was “reviewed at Loew’s Ziegfeld Theater, New York, where a matinee audience gave no audible manifestation of reaction.”

Despite the increasing budgets and salary, according to Lindsley Parsons, Wayne was miserable at Universal: “Poor John is wandering around dolefully and just wondering whatever is going to become of him.” The studio seemed to regard him as little more than cannon fodder. “Universal had a kid by the name of John Wayne under contract,” remembered Joseph H. Lewis, who began directing at Universal in 1937. “They thought he was horrible.”

Wayne would come to feel that the Universal movies were a strategic mistake: “I had lost my stature as a western star—and got nothing in return,” he told one reporter.

As the Universal deal drew to its end, Lindsley Parsons called Wayne and told him, “ ‘If you’re not working, I think I can make another deal with Monogram that’ll do us both some good.’ He said, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t think of anything better,’ ” but then told Parsons that he had just signed another deal with Republic.

But before he went back to Republic, Wayne did a quickie for Paramount:
Born to the West,
shot in late August of 1937, a remake of a Zane Grey novel of the same title that had been made as a silent in 1926. It was a cheap picture, but a cheap picture at a major studio had a budget a cheap picture at a cheap studio could only dream of—Paramount spent a whopping $157,958 on the picture, or about ten times the budgets of the westerns Wayne had been making at Republic. Wayne’s co-stars were Johnny Mack Brown and a great deal of stock footage; director Charles Barton had a better feel for the slam-bang Abbott and Costello comedies he would begin directing in a few years.

Johnny Mack Brown had a brief vogue in the late silent/early sound period—he’d been Mary Pickford’s leading man in
Coquette
—but would spend the rest of his career in B westerns. Lurking in the nether regions of the cast was another star of the future: Alan Ladd.

“It was a few weeks over seventy years ago,” remembered Marsha Hunt, Wayne’s leading lady in
Born to the West
. Hunt was twenty years old at the time and recalled Wayne as “a pleasant man, awfully good with a horse, and he moved well, as an athlete does.

“I had no sense of difference between him and Johnny Mack Brown, who was a bigger name at the time, even though Wayne won the girl at the end of the story. Johnny had been an All-American at Alabama. The auditorium at Birmingham has his name engraved on a plaque. He’s revered.”

Hunt said that the film was given “time and attention. There was no sense that we were working on a poor relation vehicle. Wayne didn’t treat what we did as anything special. It was a job, it was pleasant, it went well.

“We had games we played at night. We’d sit around dinner for an hour or two and call out a number. Everyone’s seat had a number. If you were in the number four seat, you had to instantly yell out another number if four was called. Otherwise, you went to the end of the line, or we all shifted. It was just a matter of presence of mind and reflex, but we played it and played it and played it. It was a compatible company. Wayne was not flirtatious in the slightest; he was very respectful, but he didn’t take any special interest in me.”

Born to the West
was just another western for two people who were both on their way to bigger and better things. Their paths would cross again in twenty years, when they would be at diametrically opposite stages in their careers, and in their politics.

While all this was going on, RKO was mulling over a replacement for its cowboy star George O’ Brien. Wayne’s name came up in the conversation, which prompted Ned Depinet, the company’s head of distribution, to send frantic stop signs to the company president: “[We] believe would be mistake to distribute John Wayne westerns. He is in same category as dozen others with disadvantage having been sold cheaply and our opinion little prospect of gaining popularity. . . . He is one of poorest of so called western stars, seems miscast and his pictures [are] doing little at Universal. We believe we would be better to go ahead with George Smalley who has not been identified with cheap western pictures and with whom we would have chance building worthwhile singing western star like Autry.”