John Wayne: The Life and Legend (22 page)

The Spoilers
was another hit, grossing nearly three times its cost.

Six months later, Wayne began his third and final film with Dietrich.
Pittsburgh
was again produced by Feldman, who sold Universal the script for a cheap $13,500, although the deal also involved the studio paying Feldman 12.5 percent of the first $240,000 in gross profits. (Feldman would eventually realize $147,843 as his share, a lot more than Wayne’s flat $50,000 salary, which was also outpaced by Dietrich’s $100,000 and Randolph Scott’s $65,000.)

It’s a very watchable picture, written by a mélange of mostly uncredited Feldman clients (Tom Reed, John Twist, Winston Miller, Robert Fellows) and directed for speed by the B movie veteran Lew Seiler, who took over when Arthur Lubin backed out.

The picture begins as capital and labor unite for the war effort, then flashes back to Wayne as “Pittsburgh” Markham, a coal miner who has no intention of working for anybody but himself. He’s a self-confident master of men, and his charm barely covers his ruthlessness—he even two-times Dietrich, who, unbelievably, plays a woman called Josie.

Pittsburgh grows arrogant and corrupt, eventually marrying a ritzy society dame with whom he’s uncomfortable. He’s a ruthless boor who loses everything, then redeems himself by diving into war work. Dietrich’s Josie ends up bringing the two warring men together in a deeply unlikely but commercially effective ending.

By this time, Wayne and Dietrich had, as you might expect, an easy rapport together. While the film could have been played as a heavy drama, Seiler paces it like a screwball comedy.
Pittsburgh
cost $630,782, and had world rentals of $1.9 million—a considerable success.

Wayne and Dietrich never worked together again, although there were occasional meetings. Wayne always broke into a fond smile when the subject of Dietrich came up, and his précis description of his experience both on- and offscreen was enthusiasm itself: “FANTASTIC!”

Throughout this period, Wayne’s Josie was relegated to the part of the suffering wife. “Josephine was a wonderful gal, a very nice person, a real lady,” remembered Carolyn Roos Olsen, the daughter of the man who would become Wayne’s business manager. “It was a shame they couldn’t have stayed together. But everybody’s assumption was that her religion was strict; she had four children and didn’t want any more, which meant that Duke’s access to her was heavily restricted. And he started playing around.”

Josie endured much, and she tried to keep the marriage together. It seems that she asked a Father McCoy to come to the house and counsel her husband about his extramarital adventures. Wayne could not have been thrilled about his wife’s reliance on priests for domestic advice, but he was suitably contrite and promised to stop seeing Dietrich if Josie would let the matter drop and never bring it up again.

Moments after the priest left, Josie was talking about the affair. “That’s when I knew the marriage was over,” Wayne said. Wayne had been indulging himself with actresses for years, but Dietrich was very near the last straw. Sally Blane, Loretta Young’s sister, said that she overheard Wayne telling a priest, “Father, you just don’t know what it means to really
screw
a woman!”

Wayne halfheartedly attempted to justify his behavior by emphasizing the disparity in their social standing. “We’d go to the fancy social night spots,” Wayne remembered near the end of his life. “Josephine was really into that. Hell, I was even in the Blue Book. I enjoyed some of these people, but a lot of them, I didn’t. Josie’s society crowd didn’t look down on actors and movies. I was accepted by them. But my work threw me with people they didn’t accept. When I had to tell Josie I was going out with this guy who spits tobacco, she just couldn’t deal with it. So I just went out by myself and finally it got so I couldn’t handle both worlds and Josie and I just sort of drifted apart.”

“Josie was the greatest,” said her daughter-in-law Gretchen Wayne.

But she had a temper. They each had tempers. Michael’s dad always said, “I wish I had waited; I wish your mother could have been more patient with me. I was a young man; I thought [infidelity] was part of the contract.”

Bob Hope’s wife was patient; Ray Milland’s wife was patient. When Grace Kelly went to work on a picture with Ray, Mal Milland knew the affair would be over when the film was over. Many Hollywood wives know that.

But Granny wouldn’t put up with it. She just didn’t have the patience for philandering. It put her in a terrible position. In those days you had to go downtown to the cardinal for a divorce. A marriage meant something.

The two lovers now enacted a sex-reversed “Pygmalion,” as Dietrich introduced Wayne to Bö (pronounced “Boo”) Roos, her business manager. Roos ran the Beverly Management Corporation, which had a roster of thirty clients that included Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, Red Skelton, Johnny Weissmuller, Ray Milland, the Andrews Sisters, and Fred MacMurray.

Roos was a man’s man, a ladies’ man. He was born in 1903, made a fortune in the California real estate boom of the 1920s, and segued into money management. He sported a fedora, good suits, had a beautiful smile and blue eyes that women regarded as sexy. His standard fee was 3.5 percent of net return, and he usually invested his own money alongside his clients’. There was no written contract, because, said Roos’s daughter, Carolyn Roos Olsen, “Movie stars are a different breed of cat. They’re emotional, and the lack of a contract made them feel that they could come and go as they pleased. And it formed more of a friendship than a strictly legal arrangement.”

Roos’s wife was the daughter of a Beverly Hills builder, and Roos believed devoutly in real estate, partially because it was the easiest entity on which to get tax deductions. Roos and Fred MacMurray built several apartment buildings that still exist, one on Olympic, one on Spaulding. They also purchased the California Country Club in West Los Angeles, which did very well—Roos’s (mostly correct) instincts were that golf would always be more popular than tennis, because tennis was too much like work.

Wayne was comfortable in business relationships that were also personal friendships—a quirk that would cost him a great deal of money over the years. He and Roos soon became buddies, with equivalent passions for the Republican Party and Mexico. “They should have had dual citizenships,” said Olsen. They traveled together, bought a boat together—the
Nor’wester
, a big, wooden seventy-six-foot ship—drank together, played poker together.

But Roos still had to struggle with his most famous client, simply because once Wayne made up his mind, no further discussion was necessary. Even if Wayne got good advice, he was perfectly capable of ignoring it. Saying no to Wayne was not only not easy, it could be counterproductive.

“Duke was a man’s man all the way,” remembered Olsen. “He loved being with the guys, playing cards, drinking and smoking. That was the Duke. He talked that way too, and was forever apologizing to my mother for his language.”

One story indicates the level of trust Wayne had in Roos; it also indicates his level of generosity. Roos had opened a place called the Cabana Club, a swimming pool/bar/getaway, but the timing was wrong—when it opened, the backyard swimming pool was common in Hollywood. One night, Roos glumly observed that the Cabana Club was in trouble. Wayne took out his checkbook and handed it to Roos. “Write in any amount you need to keep this place going and I’ll sign the check.”

As a friend, admirable; as a businessman, disastrous.

“I always thought Duke was an intelligent man,” said Olsen, “but vulnerable when it came to the really nice guy con man type.” Wayne was, with good reason, becoming optimistic about money—any temporary financial shortfall could be solved by doing another movie.

But other disasters wouldn’t be so easily fixed. The woman who became Wayne’s second wife was Bö Roos’s fault. In August 1941, Roos took a group of clients to Mexico to see about an investment in a movie studio. Wayne, MacMurray, Milland, and Ward Bond were staying at the Hotel Reforma when Milland introduced Wayne to a young woman named Esperanza Baur Díaz Ceballos, known as “Chata,” or “pug-nose.” Wayne was immediately taken, despite the fact that Milland had been taken some time before, and she was generally regarded as Milland’s private port of call.

Chata began flirting, Wayne responded and soon he was telling Roos that the great thing about Latin women was that they liked the simple things–marriage, family, children, a home. Roos was appalled. For one thing, Chata was quite obviously the woman you took to bed, not the woman you married, and he didn’t believe that Chata—or her omnipresent mother—were remotely capable of being Hollywood wives.

“Dad’s response to Chata was that Duke couldn’t afford her,” said Olsen. “How can I put this? She was a Mexican woman trained to be a friend to men. Oh, hell, she was a courtesan. I never thought she was attractive because she had blotchy skin; I couldn’t understand what Duke saw in her. Dad knew her history, and Duke knew her history, but Duke fell in love.”

Roos had several come-to-Jesus meetings with his client. In one room he was yelling at Wayne that he couldn’t possibly afford another financial burden. In the next room, Carolyn Roos was talking to Chata, saying it was a bad idea to marry a man with so many family obligations. Then there was the fourteen-year age difference. All of their combined arguments failed to make a dent.

There was always a great deal of on/off, back/forth with Chata. The affair was tempestuous, and it was a preview of coming attractions. “We kept trying to talk him out of marrying her,” said Olsen. “One time after a meeting at our house, he walked me out to my car and got in with me. He turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘Would you please call Chata and tell her I love her?’ ”

“Chata made a certain kind of sense,” said Gretchen Wayne. “Her mother was a madam, and she came out of the brothels of Mexico.” A man who had only recently been introduced to the further reaches of sensuality by Marlene Dietrich was now head over heels with his very own Mexican spitfire. Within a few months, Chata was in Hollywood, where she was put under contract by Herbert Yates. Chata became an accepted part of Wayne’s life. Victor McLaglen’s son Andrew remembered a night at John Ford’s house on Odin Street when Wayne got down on his knees and told Chata how much he loved her.

In a background document probably written by Bev Barnett, Wayne’s publicity man, the standard line for Wayne’s rapidly approaching divorce was devised. It was not inaccurate so much as deeply self-serving: “Josie . . . was a Pasadena society girl. Duke’s pals were Ward Bond and John Ford, both of whom she loathed. Duke liked to drink and raise hell; Josie liked to go to society parties in Pasadena. Wayne is not a tuxedo man. Duke always has said if he could make as much money propping, he would rather do that than act. Because a prop man can do as he pleases; a star can’t. Duke is a passionate guy; Josie was cold. When that was brought up in court, she pointed to her four children. Wayne said . . . ‘Yeah, four times in ten years.’ On the surface they lived happily for ten years; the fact is they should never have been married in the first place.”

Variations on this story appeared for years in newspapers and magazines.
¹
Wayne seemed oblivious to the fact that he was tossing aside a loyal woman—and the mother of his children—in order to justify his atrocious taste in mistresses. Typically, Josie said nothing, then or later.

The emphasis on Wayne’s discomfort with Josie’s religion is illuminating. “Michael’s dad always said he could be a Catholic intellectually,” said Gretchen Wayne, “and in fact he converted on his deathbed. He loved to talk to priests, liked to play cards with them and loved discussing religion with them.” But the urge toward Catholicism stalled when it came to actions rather than words.

Josie had kept quiet through Wayne’s various flirtations and relationships with his co-stars, but the twin hits of Marlene Dietrich and Chata were more than she could bear. “The cause of the split was Chata,” said Gretchen. “What happened was that Chata called him at home.
At night.
And he came home to find that Josie had piled all of his clothes out on the front lawn. That was it.”

On June 20, 1942, Wayne and his wife separated. Mary Ford was appalled and wrote to her husband, who was heading up a reconnaissance outfit for the Navy during World War II called the Field Photo Service. “Can’t you write and try to beat something into Duke’s head. . . . He has gone completely berserk over that Esperanza Bauer [sic] and cares for no one. Thinks he is the hottest bet in pictures and says he is madly in love and nothing else matters. It’s a damn shame that with a war going on he has to think about his lousy stinking tail. I only think of those gorgeous kids. It’s really tragic.”

Ford made a mild feint in Wayne’s direction, making a slighting remark in a letter about “Mexican jumping beans,” but Wayne wasn’t having any, writing Ford back that he didn’t “give a four letter word, if I can see my kids” and had had enough of “the local board of busy bodies”—obviously including Mary Ford.