John Wayne: The Life and Legend (37 page)

Red River
was an immediate hit when it was released in September 1948. It returned domestic rentals to United Artists of $4.5 million, making it the third most popular film of the year, after the Hope-Crosby
Road to Rio
and the MGM musical
Easter Parade
. Another $2 million came in from the rest of the world.

Wayne’s guaranteed share of the profits was $75,000, but Hawks kept him, along with a long list of other creditors, waiting until 1952. Charles Feldman kept Wayne on the reservation by making interim loans to the actor. Over the years, Wayne ended up receiving about $375,000 in salary and profit sharing.

As for Coleen Gray, in the years to come she would occasionally see Wayne at events around town, and she always gently kicked him in the shins and said, “Duke, you should have taken me with you!”

“He’d throw back his head and laugh,” she remembered.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
was released eight months later, in the summer of 1949 and proved a critical and commercial success. Wayne’s expert portrayals of three widely varied characters—an obstinate warrior, a good bad man, and the gentle Nathan Brittles—cemented his reputation as a skilled actor, at least for anybody who wasn’t predisposed toward disliking him.

Stagecoach
began Wayne’s career as a star, but the twin smash hits of
Red River
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
capped his ascension to the top of the movie firmament. As the decade ended, Wayne was on a comparable level with Clark Gable and Gary Cooper—but he was making better movies.

1. Wayne’s opposite number is played by Chief John Big Tree, a Seneca Indian who had worked for Ford in
The Iron Horse
and
Stagecoach
, as well as a couple of films for DeMille. Big Tree was reputedly one of the Indian models for James Fraser when he designed the buffalo nickel.

In early 1949, John Ford set up a theatrical production of
What Price Glory?
as a fundraiser for the Order of the Purple Heart. Ford put together a spectacular cast—Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Gregory Peck, Ward Bond (as Captain Flagg), Pat O’Brien (as Sergeant Quirt), Forrest Tucker, Ed Begley, Wallace Ford, Robert Armstrong, Harry Carey Jr., Larry Blake, James Lydon. Everybody worked for free, the sets were designed and built for free, and Western Costume donated the show’s clothes.

For the part of the innkeeper, Ford originally cast Luis Alberni, but he turned out to have a case of stage fright amplified by alcoholism, so he was replaced by Oliver Hardy, who responded with a performance that James Cagney said was “the funniest thing I think I have ever seen. Roland Winters and I had to hang onto each other, we were laughing so much.”

Ford supervised, Ralph Murphy directed, and the rehearsals were held at the Masquers Club in Hollywood, which was also the site of the dress rehearsal on February 21, 1949.
Variety
was there, and paid tribute to the excellence of the two leading men, and the “provocative, sultry” performance of Maureen O’Hara as Charmaine. Wayne was lumped in with Gregory Peck and Harry Carey Jr. for the “well-handled” smaller parts.

The next night
What Price Glory?
began its six-city, six-night tour in Long Beach. “The audience would just applaud when Ward [Bond] and [Pat] O’Brien came on stage,” remembered Harry Carey Jr. “When Wayne made an entrance, they’d just gasp. . . . With Greg Peck, it was like Frank Sinatra. He was such a heartthrob, the girls would just start squealing when he came on stage.”

Wayne was playing Lieutenant Cunningham—a small part, but it was the first time he’d been onstage since high school so his nerves were unsettled. “Duke and I dressed with Oliver Hardy, and it was a ball,” remembered James Lydon. “Wayne was a little nervous at first, because he was unaccustomed to the theater, but I was raised in it, and Babe Hardy had toured all over the world. Babe and I were in the first act, and Duke worked at the end of the second act, and then the three of us would sit around until curtain calls.

“Duke and I would sit there as total acolytes, listening to Babe’s stories. He was a great raconteur, and Duke was very much in awe of the great Oliver Hardy. It showed a side of Duke that very few people knew: he was a student of show business. He was always echoing his master, John Ford, and saying things like, ‘I’m not an actor, I’m a reactor,’ and other things he wasn’t really sure of. Anything Ford said was gospel. But Duke loved Babe Hardy.”

By the second performance, Wayne’s nervousness had subsided. Lydon remembered that some of the actors suggested that Wayne go out drinking with them, but he said, “No. If the Old Man smells booze, he’ll kill me.”

The troupe traveled to San Francisco by train, with Hardy sitting in the club car with four or five cast members gathered around him. Reliably, Wayne was always one of them, drinking in the stories—of Laurel and Hardy meeting Harry Lauder in Scotland and a very ahistorical account of how Laurel and Hardy formed their partnership.

The show’s final performance was at Grauman’s Chinese on March 2, 1949, after which the business manager absconded with $82,000 in profits. Ford made the money up out of his own pocket.

Although the blacklist had landed with a menacing crash, and the Motion Picture Alliance was at the height of their influence, Lydon never heard Wayne say anything about politics at all. “Duke was just a private citizen and he kept his beliefs private. Now, Ward Bond was a thickheaded loudmouth. He was a good friend of Duke’s, and he was the one screaming all sorts of things that nobody else cared about. But in my presence, Duke never said a word about any of that.”

Ford used Lydon in a movie he shot shortly after the run of
What Price Glory?
called
When Willie Comes Marching Home
. Even though Lydon was a cousin—Ford’s mother was Lydon’s grandmother’s sister—he ran into the same buzzsaw as Wayne, as every other actor.

He had done a long shot of Dan Dailey’s family waiting for the train to come in. Then we started work on a tracking shot that ran past the family while they waited. We’re rehearsing and the camera is pulling past and Ford says, “Stop.”

He gets off the dolly and says, “Jim, was your hair like that? And the tie?”

“Yes, Mr. Ford.”

“You look too damn comfortable.” And then he ran his hand through my hair and yanked the tie down and said, “That’s better.”

He turned around to go back to the dolly and that’s when I made a horrible mistake. I said, “It won’t match, Mr. Ford.” And there was dead silence. He stopped and turned around and glared at me for a full 30 seconds. Finally, he said, “Are you a cutter now?”

And he didn’t speak to me for two weeks. Not “Good Morning,” not anything.

Like everybody else, I was in awe of him.

Watching Oliver Hardy onstage made Wayne realize that there was no reason the great comedian couldn’t be working, so he offered Hardy a part in a film he was about to start at Republic called
The Fighting Kentuckian
—the second John Wayne Production. Hardy hesitated out of loyalty to his longtime screen partner Stan Laurel, who was inactive due to diabetes. Laurel told him to go ahead and make the picture, and Hardy proved to be a charming sidekick, with his Georgia accent proving particularly appropriate for a story taking place in the South of 1819.

Another creative infatuation of this period was between Wayne and Rex Ingram, the great director of such silent classics as
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and
Scaramouche
. Ingram was one of the great pictorialists of the movies’ early years, but he hadn’t made a picture since 1931 and had little interest in talkies.

Ingram didn’t need money, but he hovered around Wayne for a couple of years before his death in 1950. William Clothier, Wayne’s favorite cameraman, happened to be Ingram’s next-door neighbor and remembered that Wayne and Ingram spent a fair amount of time trying to find something to do together. This was part and parcel of Wayne’s great respect for directors who had earned their spurs in silent pictures, when Wayne fell under their spell—he had been a movie fan long before he had been an athlete or an actor.

For
The Fighting Kentuckian
, Wayne wanted a French leading lady: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Simon, perhaps Corinne Calvet. But Yates insisted that Wayne use Vera Hruba Ralston. “I don’t want to malign her,” Wayne said with a palpable weariness. “She didn’t have the experience. She talked with this heavy Czech accent [and] I was looking for a light Parisian type of speech. . . . It hurt the picture, because we now had to hire other Czech and Austrian actors to play French characters so her accent would be matched. . . . Yates was one of the smartest businessmen I ever met. But when it came to the woman he loved, his business brains just went flying out the window.” The film cost $1.3 million, earned domestic rentals of $1.75 million, and again Republic claimed a loss, this time $365,808.

Perhaps the most important by-product of
The Fighting Kentuckian
was that it brought Chuck Roberson into Wayne’s circle, then into Ford’s circle. Roberson was a tall, handsome stuntman who would become Wayne’s primary double. (Yakima Canutt had gotten too old and too wide.) Roberson was also a competent actor and did a lot of double-dipping over the years, playing small parts as well as doubling Wayne so expertly that it’s hard to tell them apart at thirty feet—Roberson could faultlessly imitate Wayne’s straight-backed style of riding, as well as his pigeon-toed run. Ford named Roberson “Bad Chuck,” because of his way with women and to differentiate him from Chuck Hayward, another stuntman, who was known as “Good Chuck.”

Sands of Iwo Jima
originated with Republic producer Edmund Grainger, who saw the line in a newspaper, and correctly figured that re-creating the backstory of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima would make an exciting war picture.

Grainger banged out a forty-page treatment about a tough drill instructor and the men he leads into combat, then hired Harry Brown, who had recently written the novel on which Lewis Milestone based his excellent
A Walk in the Sun
. Grainger was happy with Brown’s script, but those rare occasions when a good script showed up at Republic were always fraught—Herbert Yates might want it for Vera Hruba Ralston. “They handed me the script of
Iwo Jima
,” remembered Allan Dwan, “and I asked if there was a part in it for Yates’ girlfriend . . . because if there was, I wasn’t going to do the picture.”

At this point, the picture was supposed to cost around $250,000, with Forrest Tucker slated for the lead. “He [Yates] never mentioned Duke, because he wanted him for something else with Vera,” said Dwan, who thought Tucker was a terrible idea. “Tucker lacked that zing that Wayne had . . . it was like a bulldog underneath all that tranquility.” Dwan thought Wayne was the only man to star, as did Edmund Grainger, who was Michael Wayne’s godfather.

Finally, after a few calls from Washington, and from the Marine Corps, Yates agreed that Wayne should make the movie. It was a time of congressional committees looking hard at military appropriations; there was some thought being given to folding the Marines into the Army, and the Marines thought that a big gung ho movie would serve as good propaganda for maintaining a stand-alone Corps.

At Wayne’s suggestion, Jimmy Grant was brought in to polish the script. That same year, Grant earned $12,500 plus 10 percent of the profits for the screenplay of Republic’s
Rock Island Trail
, and still later that year Yates paid him $15,000 for a script for
California Passage
. By comparison, Harry Brown got only $5,000 for the story and treatment of
Sands of Iwo Jima.
(The lowly writers of Republic’s Roy Rogers westerns were lucky to get $3,000 per script.)

There was a good deal of friction between Grant, Brown, director Allan Dwan, and Grainger, but without Wayne there really wasn’t going to be a movie, at least not a movie the size of
Sands of Iwo Jima
, so the star got his way.

Sands of Iwo Jima
was shot in July and August of 1949. Republic paid some money to Camp Pendleton for their trouble, and in return had the use of an entire battalion for as long as it took to make the movie. The Marines gave the production a technical advisor, Captain Leonard Fribourg, who taught the actors how to handle their weapons, and who also ran interference with the brass to make sure that Republic got whatever it needed.

The actors remembered that the Marines of Camp Pendleton blended in with the actors staying at the Carlsbad Hotel. “There wasn’t a feeling that, you know, here’s an actor, and here’s a Marine,” said Wally Cassell. Leonard Fribourg remembered that the actors were appropriately gung ho. “They wanted to do it, wanted to cooperate. They wanted to wear the uniform right, the emblems, wanted to know what the stripes meant, wanted to know the Marine Corps lingo, and put the right words in the right place.”