John Wayne: The Life and Legend (33 page)

Nunnally Johnson, who had written
The Grapes of Wrath
for John Ford, referred to the Alliance as “that Duke Wayne–Ward Bond outfit that passed on everybody. So many outrageous things went on that made me ashamed of the whole industry . . . think of John Huston having to go and debase himself to an oaf like Ward Bond and promise never to be a bad boy again.” Johnson always referred to the Alliance as “this Ku Klux Klan.”

Wayne would never apologize for the excesses of the period, for the hundreds of people who were blacklisted and exiled, many for unexceptional liberal sympathies. Nor did he think he had anything to apologize for.

According to his second wife, Chata, Wayne’s favorite songs were “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “Till the End of Time.” He liked to read in bed. He liked Cary Grant’s movies, and would watch anything with Victor McLaglen or Barry Fitzgerald.

For years, Wayne had a general assistant named J. Hampton Scott, an African American whom everybody called “Scotty” and who served as security guard, valet, and cook, although nobody but Wayne thought he was competent in the kitchen. “He’d give you a steak that looked like a big chunk of coal,” said one employee, “really burned, yet red on the inside, just the way Duke liked it.” Likewise, his services as a valet could result in Wayne wearing one red sock and one white sock. Wayne had come to the conclusion that Scotty was color-blind, but stuck with him because he liked him.

But Chata brought with her the servants she’d had in Mexico, as well as a general distrust of Wayne’s own group, who might not have the loyalty to her that she thought appropriate. She singled out Scott.

Wayne had to accommodate his wife, but he wasn’t about to can his friend, so he bought Scott a car wash on Central Avenue that provided him with a solid living, and the two men exchanged Christmas cards for years.

Chata was regarded with distrust by most of the people who survived the purge, not just because she liquidated people, but because she was so exhausting for the man who was their meal ticket. She was not without her good points. She made a genuine effort to relate to people, and always tried to find out what they liked, their hobbies and so forth, and customized Christmas and birthday gifts accordingly.

But it soon became obvious that the marriage was affecting Wayne negatively. At one point, his weight dropped to 170 pounds because of the constant nervous tension. “I know he loved her,” said one employee. “I know that. They used to fight, she’d go home to Mexico and he’d run and find her and bring her back and start the honeymoon over. She just could never figure out that he couldn’t chase her the rest of his life. Sometimes you’ve got to get down to business. You can’t do it forever. She didn’t have to go to work, but he had to.”

One of the possible reasons for Wayne’s absence from the political fray in the immediate postwar years was that he was engaged in making some of the best movies of his life.
Red River
began as a story by Borden Chase, a member of the Motion Picture Alliance who had worked on several films for Wayne by this time (
The Fighting Seabees, Flame of the Barbary Coast
). The director Vincent Sherman worked with Chase and characterized him as “anti-democratic and anti-liberal. . . . He felt Roosevelt was a traitor and that Hollywood was infested with Communists. . . . What amused me about him was that he seriously considered himself to be an important American writer, when the truth was that he was nothing more than a hack.

“He plotted his projects mechanically: get two men who love the same girl in a conflict about a big issue, have a fight here, a chase there, and a final big confrontation when the two men are reconciled. He thought the best love story was about two strong macho men. Women were merely sex objects.”

With a few minor variations, Sherman’s take does indeed describe a lot of Chase’s writing, up to and including
Red River
, but none of Chase’s other scripts was developed by Charles Feldman and Howard Hawks. Hawks paid Chase $50,000 for his story in January 1946—it wouldn’t be published until December and January 1947 in
The Saturday Evening Post
—and hired him at $1,250 a week to write the screenplay. In June 1946, Feldman sent Wayne the first ninety-five pages of the script. “I think it’s great,” Feldman wrote, “though I know Howard is still re-writing.”

Chase completed his script, at which point Hawks brought in a young man named Charles Schnee for a rewrite. Schnee would become a notable screenwriter in the next ten years, with credits that included
The Furies
and
The Bad and the Beautiful
. Schnee’s rewrite introduced the woman Tom Dunson leaves behind at the beginning of the film, cut a Civil War episode involving Matthew, Dunson’s adopted son, and also cut the death of Cherry Valance. Schnee added an Indian attack, and made the woman who comes between father and son a card sharp instead of a prostitute.

The scripted ending was hanging fire—Chase’s script ended with Matthew and Tess loading a wounded Dunson in the back of a wagon and taking him across the river to Texas, so he can die on American soil. But Hawks refused to kill off his main character, so Schnee’s rewrite had the three principals crossing the river with Dunson alive and kicking.

Hawks’s first choice for the part of Dunson was Gary Cooper, who turned it down because he thought the character was too ruthless. It was Feldman who suggested Wayne as the lead. Wayne’s salary was set at a fairly measly $50,000, half of what he was getting at Republic, although Feldman guaranteed him $10,000 extra per week past twelve weeks of shooting, and 10 percent of the profits, with a guaranteed $75,000.

The budget was set at $1.75 million, funded by a consortium of bank and private loans, with Hawks earning $125,000 and 57 percent of the profits and Feldman earning 24 percent of the profits. United Artists would take its distribution off the top, followed by the investors and the banks. Hawks’s and Feldman’s Monterey Productions was last in line.

A young actress named Coleen Gray was under contract to Fox and was interested in the crucial part of Fen, the woman who offers Tom Dunson her loyalty and her body but is rejected and dies offscreen, thereby sealing Dunson’s isolation.

“I knew nothing about Hawks or
Red River
or anything else, except that he was a famous, respected director,” remembered Gray. “He was a very nice man; soft-spoken and intelligent, which is a joy. Supposedly, they had tested three hundred people for Fen, so I came in late in the game, but I didn’t know about any of it. Hawks told me, ‘If you can get your voice down a couple of octaves, we’ll test you.’ This was on a Thursday or Friday, and he told me to go out in the hills and scream until I broke my voice.

“I said, ‘Yes sir,’ but I thought, ‘Over my dead body.’ I was a singer, and singers don’t do anything to ruin their voices. But Hawks liked Lauren Bacall and Joanne Dru, those girls with low growls. I left and did not go out and scream. But when I did the test, I lowered my voice the best that I could. And apparently that was good enough.”

Hawks chose Gray for the part, but there was a problem—Fox hadn’t cleared her to make the test. Rod Amateau, Gray’s husband, said, “When in doubt, go to the top.” So Gray made an appointment with Darryl Zanuck. “I had never met him, but I knew two things: he was from Nebraska and he was a womanizer. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do if he made a move at me.

“I went to his office and he shook hands and took me to his desk. I said, ‘I’m so glad to meet you. I’m from Nebraska—from Staplehurst, and you’re from Wahoo.’ And I think if he had any ideas, that set him back on his haunches. At any rate, he didn’t approach me. I was relieved, but also a little disappointed because I thought that meant he didn’t think I was sexy.

“I told Zanuck that Hawks’s picture was a grand opportunity and Fox wasn’t doing anything with me at the moment. And he said, ‘If Howard will call and ask for you, we’ll see.’ ”

Gray called Hawks, Hawks called Zanuck, Zanuck said yes. And, as Gray remembered it, “I earned the undying enmity of the lower echelon of Fox executives, because I’d gone over their heads.”

By the first week of September 1946, Gray joined the company on location in Elgin, Arizona, where filming began on a seventy-six-day schedule. But it rained in Elgin. “We sat around in our tents drumming our fingers and being restless,” remembered Gray, who ended up reshooting her scene back at the Goldwyn studio months later.

“Fox had sent me to the Actor’s Lab in Los Angeles to study the Method, and I was thinking about the part. I sat in the rainy tent with paper and pencil and decided to write out what I thought Fen had been like in her life up to the point we meet her in the film. That occupied some time and thought. And then I marched through the rain with my umbrella to Mr. Hawks’s tent, and he came to the door and I explained to him what I had done.

“ ‘Would you please read this?’ I asked him. ‘I want to know if I’m on the right track.’ He took it very quietly and solemnly and closed the door. And that was that. The next day it was sunny and we hadn’t shot the scene yet. I asked Hawks about the pages I’d given him and asked him if I was on the right track. ‘Yes, you are,’ he said and we never discussed it further. He must have gotten a chuckle out of it, but he always treated me with respect. His direction to me just before we shot the scene was ‘Be a woman.’ ”

The company was on location into early November before heading back to Hollywood, while Arthur Rosson stayed behind in Arizona, directing a second unit that put together the stampede sequence.

Gray found Wayne to be “very quiet, very polite, rather shy. He knew his lines and he was professional. It was my first movie, so I was in no position to judge anybody else. I didn’t say anything to him because I was terrified. I was a young girl from Nebraska, and in all my career in Hollywood I was never able to overcome a certain basic shyness about not speaking unless you’re spoken to. So he didn’t talk and I didn’t talk. We’d stand there kicking our toes in the sand. He did not seem to be a social person.”

Hawks didn’t shoot a lot of takes, and on Gray’s first close-up of her big scene, he called “Print!” whereupon she piped up with “I can do it better.” Hawks said okay, and Gray did it again. Hawks again said “Print!” and that’s the one in the film.

A young actor named William Self joined the company and noticed the improvisatory nature of Hawks’s method. “Something would catch his eye on the first take, and he’d throw things out, make some dialogue changes, and Wayne would do it easily. He wouldn’t always do that—it depended on his level of comfort with a director. But he and Hawks were remarkable together—they were nimble and confident of each other.”

But not always. Wayne had become extremely sensitive about his image, and he would complain in later years that Hawks “wanted to make me a big, blustering coward. ‘You’ll win an Academy Award,’ he said. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. Instead I played it as a strong man who was scared. After all, as a man you can be scared, but you can’t be a coward.”

Which is as succinct a summation of the John Wayne character as there is.

Hawks had a knack for choosing relatively inexperienced actors and matching them up with champions who forced the younger talents to raise the level of their game. He did it with Lauren Bacall on
To Have and Have Not
, with Dorothy Malone on
The Big Sleep
, and with Montgomery Clift on
Red River,
after first trying to get Jack Buetel, the young actor who had starred in
The Outlaw
. But Howard Hughes wouldn’t loan out Buetel, so Hawks settled on the young actor he had seen on Broadway in
You Touched Me.

Clift was interested but hesitant—he wasn’t sure he could handle the brutal fight with Wayne at the end of the picture. “You’re an actor, aren’t you?” asked Hawks. Swayed by that argument—and the $60,000 salary—Clift took the job.

Wayne wasn’t at all sure Clift was the right choice. When he and Clift met in Hawks’s office, Clift avoided looking him in the eye, which put Wayne off. He was also alarmed about the physical disparity between them—Clift was about six inches shorter than Wayne.