John Wayne: The Life and Legend (39 page)

In 1948, Hughes bought a controlling interest in RKO. Wayne already had a loose arrangement with the studio, where he had made
Tall in the Saddle, Back to Bataan, Tycoon
, and, for Ford,
Fort Apache
and
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
. Wayne and Hughes were alike in some respects—anticommunists—and unlike in others—Hughes was a promiscuous isolate.

The pictures Hughes produced for Wayne are among the most bizarre in the annals of Hollywood. They include
Flying Leathernecks—
a gung ho World War II movie directed by Nicholas Ray, of all people;
Jet Pilot
—a movie shot between December 1949 and May 1950 that wasn’t released until 1957, directed by Josef von Sternberg, of all people; and
The Conqueror
, the legendarily terrible movie in which Wayne plays Genghis Khan, directed by Dick Powell . . . of all people.

Flying Leathernecks
—the title sounds like a Mel Brooks parody of a war movie—was designed by Hughes as a test of Nicholas Ray’s political and professional loyalty. Ray and Robert Ryan were liberal and Wayne and most of the rest of the cast weren’t, which made for some interesting lunchtime discussions.

“Wayne would close all political discussions with ‘You’re full of shit!’ ” remembered Rod Amateau, the dialogue director. Despite that, the company grew fond of its star. “Wayne was always a very prudent, careful man,” said Amateau. “He was kind to everybody. And he felt sorry that Nick made a lot of enemies. The reason Nick made enemies wasn’t because he was a bad person, he honestly wasn’t, he was a good, decent person. But he was so intense about his work. If nothing matters but the work, you’re going to make enemies.”

Ray was an acolyte of Elia Kazan and lived and breathed emotional conflict. Like his mentor, he brought something new and authentic to Hollywood. He was fascinated by Wayne’s clarity of character, and stimulated by what he believed were untapped dramatic reservoirs. “I thought the Broadway drugstore critics who hadn’t yet been asked out to Hollywood were just terribly imperceptive about him,” said Ray. “He was a much better actor than most people gave him credit for being, almost daily full of nice surprises. But he was not flexible about himself. He couldn’t conceive that I would be serious in wanting him to do O’Neill’s
A Touch of the Poet
.”

Flying Leathernecks
and
The Conqueror
fall into known genres.
Jet Pilot
is something eccentrically homemade, something . . . insane. The narrative is conventionally anticommunist: a female Russian jet pilot seeks asylum in America, but she’s a double agent intent on discovering American secrets. Marriage to Wayne and an immersion in American consumer culture turn her around.

Story aside, it’s actually a movie about airplanes, and a lot of it is played for laughs. Von Sternberg hadn’t directed a film in nearly ten years—his icy, arrogant personality and a string of flops had undone the reputation established by his string of gloriously photographed films with Marlene Dietrich. Before
Jet Pilot,
he had worked as an uncredited assistant to King Vidor on
Duel in the Sun.
Hughes seems to have hired him at the behest of producer-writer Jules Furthman, who had worked with the director in his salad days at Paramount twenty years earlier.

Wayne’s ears pricked up when von Sternberg noted Wayne’s chessboard and made a remark about the excellence of his own game. “I played him without looking at the board,” said Wayne. “And I beat him. Pure luck. He was livid.”

“
Jet Pilot
was the first time I ever used a four-letter word on a movie set,” remembered Janet Leigh.

It wasn’t the last time, but it was the first. Von Sternberg was a very frustrating man. It’s not that he yelled; it was his attitude. He was used to working in the days when you could be Hitler, with Marlene

in complete thrall. He was talented, no question, but his way had gone.

Von Sternberg was a little man, very short. Slight. Duke was a giant. And strong. And Sternberg directed him to act as if Duke was the size of von Sternberg. In one scene he had me knocking Duke out! Sternberg directed him as if he was a little man instead of the big man he was.

I asked Duke, “Why don’t you say something?”

And he said, “I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

Von Sternberg was never abusive, just aggravating, and controlling. He didn’t think the camera operator could operate the camera, he had to do that. He had to light the scene—no one could do anything but him. It was strictly a solo flight; he wasn’t a group player.

In one sense, it was Hughes’s picture, but on the set, Sternberg was in control. And Jules Furthman was Hughes’s messenger guy, a dear, sweet man with a porkpie hat. And he and Hughes ended up playing with that picture for seven years, so what had been innovative and new in terms of equipment and technology in terms of aerospace was old-hat. But whatever you think of the script, photographically it was very good.

Some idea of this exceedingly strange Cold War artifact can be gauged by its production history. Principal photography was done between October 1949 and February 1950. Additional scenes were shot between January 21 and February 9, 1951, and March 17 to April 2 of that same year. Aerial photography was done between August 30 and September 1, 1951, with additional aerial sequences shot by William Clothier between October 1951 and March 1953.

Clothier spent more than two hundred hours in the air and logged over thirty thousand miles while shooting 100,000 feet of Technicolor film in such locations as Edwards, Kelly, Eglin, Fargo, Great Falls, and Lowry Field Air Force bases, as well as March Field, and Hamilton Field in San Francisco. None other than Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane shown in the movie, as well as another plane for the drop and aerobatic sequences.

And when the picture was finally finished, Hughes sat on it.

In the summer of 1952, RKO’s distribution wing was desperately in need of something to distribute—Hughes had drastically cut back production—and announced the picture for September. But September came and went and there was still no
Jet Pilot
.
Variety
announced that the picture was being carried on the studio inventory at a cost of $3.9 million—a staggering amount for 1952.

By the time the picture was finally released in 1957—not by RKO, which had just gone out of business, but by Universal—the original budget of $1.4 million had probably quadrupled. Critics commented on the remarkably youthful appearances of its stars. Even though the film opened in more than four hundred theaters in one of the biggest releases of that era, audiences paid almost no attention—the picture had the stink of death about it.

It’s a strange picture, with strange billing: “Starring John Wayne, Janet Leigh, and the United States Air Force.” It’s played partially for comedy as a sort of airborne
Ninotchka
—at one point Wayne calls Leigh “a silly Siberian cupcake”—partially as an anticommunist tract, partially as a thriller. It’s unsuccessful in all aspects, although Wayne is reliably amusing when he gets flustered, and there’s a lot to be flustered about. At one point, Hughes dubs in the sound of jet whooshes every time Janet Leigh takes off a piece of clothing.

With all the overage required, Hughes paid Wayne $201,666.68 to make the picture. It was a typical piece of chaos theory on the part of the richest amateur filmmaker in history. During one break from the production, Hughes, his date Jean Peters—later his wife—and Wayne were in Las Vegas when Hughes refused to walk into the Desert Inn.

“Everybody will be looking at me!” he explained.

“You asshole!” said Wayne. “You’re with the most beautiful woman in the world! And John Wayne! And they’re gonna look at you?”

Despite the huge infusion of cash, which was going to come in handy very soon, Wayne doubted the part was worth it. During production, James Edward Grant cabled Wayne, “ACCORDING TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IF YOU JUST PAY NO ATTENTION IT WILL GO AWAY.”

At one point in 1949, opening a newspaper to the movie ads in Los Angeles was like looking at a John Wayne Film Festival.
Red River
was playing in Westwood,
Wake of the Red Witch
was playing in Hollywood,
3 Godfathers
was in Beverly Hills, and
Fort Apache
was appearing elsewhere.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
was in previews in Pasadena and bringing up the rear were reissues of
Stagecoach
and
The Long Voyage Home.
At the same time, some of the old Monogram pictures were already showing on the new invention called television.

The profusion of reissues was a function of a decade-long recession that hit the movie business in 1947. Movie attendance would plummet by 50 percent, four thousand theaters would go out of business, and the huge profits of World War II vanished. Mostly, this was because of television, but there was also a sense that the generation that had come back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific were finding the movies made under the restrictive Production Code a ridiculous evasion of the life it had seen firsthand.

The major studios coped by first reducing, then eliminating B movie production, which proved a godsend to fringe companies like Allied Artists—formerly Monogram—or (in a few years) American International. The studios also cut back on cartoons and newsreels and concentrated on making bigger and more expensive A pictures. For low-end talents, it got harder to make a living, but high-end talents were sellers in a market where the rest of the world was buying.

What made it remarkable was the concentrated quality of Wayne’s new pictures. Even Republic’s
Wake of the Red Witch
, which begins as
The Sea Wolf
and ends as
Peter Ibbetson,
with a strong dose of
Reap the Wild Wind
, has its haunting moments, as Gail Russell once again brings her strange, ethereal quality to the picture. Other actresses had to ramp up their aggression to come out on an equivalent basis with Wayne, but when Wayne worked with Russell he downshifted into a watchful swain who treated the delicate actress as if she might shatter.

This audience immersion in John Wayne would not hurt him; in most ways, he was immune from overexposure. When asked about what seemed to be hyperactivity, at least compared to most star rationing of a picture a year, or two every eighteen months, Wayne would explain, “To me, making a picture a year is like coming out of retirement every year, and that’s too hard on the nervous system. . . . For my money, nothing improves your work like work itself. I figure an actor, if he’s got any kind of role, should try to get better with each picture. The more pictures he makes, the more chance he’s got of achieving that.”

Mainstream papers such as
The New York Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
began to pay attention to Wayne. The
Times
quoted John Ford as saying Wayne’s popularity was simple: “Duke is the best actor in Hollywood. That’s all.”

Hedda Hopper quoted Wayne as saying his incessant activity was because he had to work for a living. “I don’t have a capital gains setup like some of these guys, and I’ve got two families to feed. My business manager tells me it costs me $2,600 a month. I don’t know where the money goes, but it’s an awful lot, and I’ve got to keep hopping from Republic to RKO to Argosy to make it.”

At this point, he had a deal with RKO for one picture annually, a similar deal with Warner Bros., and his Republic contract was still in force. Then there was John Ford, who always had right of first refusal on Wayne’s services. The
Motion Picture Herald
, which was doing a story on Wayne’s amazing ability to draw audiences at a time when the movie industry was hemorrhaging customers, noted that “Wayne talks less like an actor is supposed to than as a business man does.”

Wayne didn’t mind the reissues of the old Ford pictures, but he was uncomfortable with the Monogram westerns being exposed, pointing out that the movies were atrocious by the standards of 1949. Despite all that, the market seemed perfectly able to absorb as much John Wayne as there was to be had. “I hope he doesn’t kill himself with overwork,” said Ward Bond. “He used to say, ‘Let’s stretch out on a boat in the sun, tell a few lies and fish.’ He doesn’t have time to do that any more.”