John Wayne: The Life and Legend (24 page)

In Jeanine Basinger’s words, Wayne as a romantic object was “embarrassed but effective. His style was to lean down toward the woman and offer her a straight deal. No love talk, just action. . . . Good or bad, he wanted a woman who was his equal. . . . When Wayne got serious, there was to be no fooling around, no coyness. He lunged toward his love and attacked her, not meaning to be brutal, but to make his intentions clear.” Wayne’s basic stance in a romantic comedy was not unlike the brusque transaction offered by Clark Gable, although Wayne was shyer and projected less tomcat.

Wayne’s career was now going from strength to strength, medium to medium. Tay Garnett created an NBC radio show for Wayne called
Three Sheets to the Wind
which starred Wayne as an alcoholic detective—“My good man, bring me a scotch and soda,” says Wayne’s character on the first episode. “And not too much soda.” The character was written to Wayne’s already established specifications—at one point someone refers to him as “that all-American Gargantua.”

The radio show was supposedly a stalking horse for a movie version, but that never happened. It had an interesting group of behind-the-scenes people; leading lady Helga Moray was Garnett’s disputatious wife, and among the writers were Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, later to become rich and famous as the co-authors of
Auntie Mame
and
Inherit the Wind.

The show lasted for only twenty-six weeks, beginning in February 1942, and the network seems to have blown it off—they ran it at the ungodly hour of 8:30 P.M. on Sunday nights on the East Coast, 11:30 P.M. on the West Coast.

It’s possible that either Garnett or Feldman supplied Wayne with an introduction to Robert Fellows, who was born in 1903 to a shipbuilding family in California but was more interested in the movies. He always claimed that he got his start in the business by acting as one of Cecil B. DeMille’s chair boys, who were delegated the task of following the director around on the set, and making sure that his director’s chair was beneath him when he finally deigned to sit down.

Fellows climbed the ladder and became an assistant to Garnett, and later a successful producer at Paramount and RKO, supervising pictures with major stars such as Alan Ladd, Bing Crosby . . . and John Wayne. In a few years, Fellows would partner with Wayne in Wayne-Fellows Productions.

What clearly attracted Wayne to Fellows was their similar backgrounds as movie journeymen. “What Bob doesn’t know about the business isn’t worth knowing,” Wayne would say. “He’s been a stage manager, actor, assistant cutter, prop man, writer and director. Just name it.” As always, Wayne had an innate distrust of the artiste—always excepting John Ford—and was attracted to the all-arounder, the pro.

DeMille’s original choice for the second lead in
Reap the Wild Wind
was Joel McCrea, but he had committed to a Preston Sturges picture. DeMille began pursuing the newly hot John Wayne to play against Ray Milland. DeMille and Wayne had a history, although DeMille may have preferred not to acknowledge it. During the preparations for DeMille’s 1936 epic
The Plainsman
, Leo Morrison got his client an interview for the part of Wild Bill Hickok. Wayne was on time, but DeMille was running late. When he finally emerged from his office he told Wayne he was going to lunch. Reminded of the interview, he asked the actor to come into his office.

“He said to me, ‘You were in
The Big Trail
, weren’t you?’ ” remembered Wayne. “ ‘I saw it and you did just fine. But a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.’ ” Wayne explained that he had been doing quickie pictures and that he had learned to read bad lines as well as anyone in the business, but he wanted a crack at better pictures. “I’ll get back to you,” said DeMille. That, said Wayne, “was DeMille’s way of turning me down. To him I was now just a minor star of mere B westerns.”

A few years later, right after
Stagecoach
, DeMille sent Wayne the script for
North West Mounted Police
; he was interested in Wayne for the part eventually played by Preston Foster. Wayne sent the script back with a note: “A lot of water’s gone under the bridge.”

Now DeMille sent him the script for
Reap the Wild Wind.
The actor stayed up all night reading it, then dictated his typically articulate reaction before he left on a trip the next morning. “I was disappointed in the lack of color and character in Jack Martin,” Wayne wrote.

However, I recalled the picture of Martin that Mr. DeMille painted for us in his office, so I disregarded the play of the character as painted by the writers. . . . At the entrance of Steve [Milland] into the story Jack becomes negative in all scenes that include the three principals. I think there is a possibility of developing him into a great character . . . [that] will add color to the script as a whole. . . . This can be done simply by making him an individualist played boldly and impulsively instead of being played as a plodding dullard. . . .

Jack should be brusque and sure of himself in all physical situations because of the station of life that he has reached at a youthful age. He doesn’t need to be a mental giant—maybe a little short on logic, but must not be dull—must possess a definite sense of humor to help him through two or three melodramatic situations that arise.

DeMille walked into the conference room where screenwriters Jesse Lasky Jr., Alan Le May, and Charles Bennett were working and read Wayne’s letter out loud. Wayne’s analysis of the script was focused, intelligent, and, given DeMille’s distaste for assertive actors, outrageous.

The writers waited for DeMille to explode and vow never to hire that young pup as long as he lived. Instead he looked at his writers and said, “If an actor can see what’s wrong and work it out, why couldn’t you?” It was the beginning of a close relationship between two alpha males.

The script encored the central dynamic that DeMille had used on
Union Pacific
and
North West Mounted Police
: a stalwart hero (in
Reap the Wild Wind
he does origami), and a lusty, semiheroic figure who, through a single weakness of character, turns bad but atones by dying nobly (Robert Preston in the earlier films, Wayne in the new one). Nobody lovingly mounted dramatic clichés like DeMille . . . and in Technicolor! At the end of the picture, a giant squid is staked through the eye, and the explosion of ink envelops the divers. Simultaneously, on the surface of the ocean, a tsunami hits.

For DeMille, too much was never enough.

DeMille even allowed Wayne to select his own costume, including a show-stopping orange scarf. The Technicolor consultant decreed the orange scarf off-limits, but DeMille stepped in and said if Wayne wanted to wear an orange scarf, then by God he would wear an orange scarf.

“Wayne was one of the few actors DeMille never yelled at,” remembered Jesse Lasky Jr. “DeMille liked Wayne so much that he invited him to join him for lunch every day, which was an honor for any actor.” When a group of exhibitors was touring the set the day a shipboard donnybrook was to be filmed, DeMille interrupted the rehearsal. “John, I want you to show them how to play this scene,” he announced over the microphone.

Wayne demonstrated for the visitors how actors threw and took punches, then placed the actors and stuntmen and choreographed the fight scene. DeMille liked what he saw. “Action!” he called.

In Old California
shows Republic trying to class up the Wayne franchise. He plays a dude druggist from Boston in a top hat and cane who says “Excuse me, pardon me” as he moves through the crowd. But he’s not a man to be messed with. When he orders a glass of milk, he says, “Plain. No rum. And no comments,” as he bends a coin between his fingers. Albert Dekker, as the boorish heavy, pushes him around not just once, but twice. Already the slow-to-anger Wayne persona is in place; we sit back comfortably, knowing that payback is coming.

The film functions as a sort of gentle parody of the image that was already beginning to coalesce. The script is unusually good for Republic, and most studios would have been happy to make it. Movies like
In Old California
show that while Republic didn’t do Wayne any favors, they didn’t do anything to hurt him either, mostly because his personality was unkillable.

Case in point:
Reunion in France
, for which Wayne was lent to MGM the same year as
In Old California
, in and of itself a hell of a note. As was normal for MGM, the script went through half a dozen hands, including Jan Lustig, Marvin Borowsky, Marc Connelly, and Charles Hoffman. One of the scripts ends with Wayne’s character skywriting “COURAGE” in the air over Occupied Paris. Despite direction by Jules Dassin and an uncredited guest bit by Charles Laughton, it’s a grievously awful film in which Joan Crawford plays a society butterfly in Paris (“Darling, my train leaves in less than an hour. Come with me to Biarritz!”) just before the Germans march in and spoil the social season. Because of the Germans, Crawford quickly converts to the cause of selflessness and French nationalism.

Wayne, playing a downed American flier, doesn’t make his entrance until the movie is forty-three minutes old. He seems to be enjoying himself, as well he might be—he’s at MGM, and a crummy movie at MGM was worth more than the unlikely possibility of an excellent movie at Republic.

In the crucial year of 1942, Wayne made a picture for Cecil B. DeMille, two pictures with Marlene Dietrich (
The Spoilers
and
Pittsburgh
), a picture at MGM, and two at his home studio of Republic:
In Old California
and
Flying Tigers
, a patchwork script about Claire Chennault’s air group that featured some of the best miniature work Hollywood could produce. They all made money, in some cases a great deal of it. It was in 1942 that Hollywood and the public came to the simultaneous realization that John Wayne was more than John Ford’s protégé; he was a genuine leading man.

1. One version appeared in
Motion Picture
magazine in December 1952: “Josephine is a very devout Catholic, a woman wrapped up in church work and more charities than she is really able to find time for or afford. John is not a Catholic, and while many of his wife’s projects were dear to him, and he admired her staunch religious fervor, he became an outsider in his own family and, like any man will, he drifted.”

Hugh Krampe was seventeen when he enlisted in the Marines in 1943. He was in boot camp in San Diego when he began participating in the Friday night fights called “smokers”—tobacco companies handed out two and three packs of cigarettes to each soldier attending the fights. Platoons would put sixty-four pieces of paper in a hat, with one marked “boxer.” The man that drew the fatal slip would square off against another guy in another platoon who drew the same slip.

Krampe was six foot one and 155 pounds, lean and mean, so he felt pretty confident when he drew the slip marked “boxer.” Then he climbed into the ring that had been erected on an outdoor stage and saw his competition: “He was about six-five, 255 pounds, black, a former tackle on the Texas A&M football team. A giant.” Krampe quickly began to calculate his rapidly increasing risk of mortality.

The announcer proclaimed that the assembled Marines had a special treat; that there would be a guest referee for this first round only, the well-known movie star John Wayne.

“John Wayne climbed into the ring and got between us. He looked at me, then he looked at the other guy and took it all in. ‘Do you want to fight Queensbury rules, or John Wayne rules?’ he asked us. Well, what choice did we have? We said ‘John Wayne rules.’ And he said ‘Good.’ And then he gave me a little wink, got out of the ring and sat down and hit the gong to start the round. In other words, there was no referee.

“He knew what I knew—that my only hope of surviving was not to fight but to outrun that big son of a bitch, which is what I proceeded to do. And he wouldn’t let the timekeeper hit the gong to end the round. The round just kept going on and on.”