John Wayne: The Life and Legend (48 page)

Wayne quickly found out that producing was a lot of work, not to mention a lot of hassles, most of which couldn’t be delegated. When
Plunder of the Sun
got under way, Bob Fellows told him, “We’ve got a little problem here with [Glenn] Ford.” (Wayne was always having problems with people named Ford . . .)

It seems that Ford had asked, “What do you people plan on giving me for a present when the picture’s over?” This was an ominous question coming from a star who had a reputation for being extremely tight with his money. “What’s he mean?” asked Wayne, who came from a tradition that said your paycheck was the only gift that mattered.

Fellows went on to explain that Ford wanted some sort of offering indicating the beloved status he had within the company, and Fellows had a sinking feeling that it was supposed to be a major offering. “Well,” sighed Wayne, “we don’t want to start a picture with an unhappy actor. Ask him what he wants. Give it to him.”

Fellows went back to Ford, holding his breath during the conversation. What if he wanted a yacht? But Ford had decided he wanted a 16mm camera for home movies.

After the picture was finished, Wayne-Fellows had to send somebody over to Ford’s house to get his wardrobe back. Evidently the camera was insufficient.

The money continued to roll in . . . and roll right back out. Besides the Culver City Hotel, Bö Roos and Wayne now owned a piece of a tennis club in Beverly Hills and some oil wells in Texas. Wayne also started a shrimp business in Panama with Roberto Arias, the husband of Margot Fonteyn, and there was an import-export business in Peru, called Pasador—Spanish for shoestring.

On those infrequent occasions when he wasn’t making a movie, Wayne lived a life of relaxed conviviality. At John Ford’s house, there would be parties, and Wayne would have to sing for his supper, which was the occasion for much merriment because Wayne had to pretend he couldn’t sing. “He had to sing purposely off-key,” said Maureen O’Hara, “because that’s what Ford would enjoy. And everybody would scream with laughter. Duke would sing ‘Mary’s a Grand Old Name,’ and seeing him stand there hat in hand, with Ford making signs to listen for whenever he went off-key was all part of the game.

“Mary Ford would roll her eyes to the sky and say, ‘Lord, we’re gonna have an all-Irish night.’ She enjoyed it but always pretended not to, and overfed us all. Mary was a lovely, lovely, lovely lady. She took a lot of guff from him. Most every time I made a film for Ford, my name would be ‘Mary.’ ”

“Jack Warner was a very contradictory kind of character,” remembered the director Vincent Sherman, who worked at Warner Bros. for more than twenty years. “On the one hand, he would make poor jokes about everything and seem to be not very deep about anything. Jack was the clown of the family and they didn’t respect him. They liked him, but they didn’t really respect him. On the other hand, he had a good nose about what made a good story for a good film. In many ways, he was very clever.”

There was a great rivalry between Jack and Harry Warner, which was amplified by the death of their brother Sam in 1927. Sam had been equally respected by both brothers, but with him gone there was no one to be the arbiter, and Jack and Harry settled down to a war of attrition that lasted for more than a quarter century. Eventually, Jack euchred Harry out of the studio by negotiating a deal whereby they would both retire, then buying both his and Harry’s stock in a backdoor deal.

“Jack Warner was a rude, crude moneymaking fool,” snapped James Garner, who worked for him for years and heartily disliked him. “In most things, he had bad taste. He invited me to go to the Oscars and sit at his table. My wife is sitting next to him and he starts telling dirty jokes. He had a filthy mouth. So I got my wife and moved to another table. Bill Orr, his son-in-law, who ran television production for him, was at the next table and I told Orr that if his father-in-law ever again asked me to go to a function with him, I wasn’t going to go. ‘And,’ I said, ‘if you’re afraid to tell him, I’ll tell him.’ ”

Harry Warner’s hobby was real estate—he bought a lot of property in the San Fernando Valley. Jack’s hobbies were horses and girls. “There were times when Jack would reveal his humanity,” said Vincent Sherman. “During one of the labor strikes, I remember he said to me, ‘You can’t blame these guys. They come in, they bring their box of tools, they work hard, they don’t make much money and they see us come to work in limousines and make big money. You have to expect them to resent it.’

“Once, Jack said, ‘I don’t know why I go to all this trouble fighting with actors. My brother is in real estate, makes more money than I do and doesn’t argue with anybody.’ ”

Jack never found much to argue about with John Wayne. Wayne showed up sober and ready for work. He made his movies on time and more or less on budget, and they made money. But another part of the bond between the two men was their politics. When Roosevelt’s New Deal had been ascendant, Jack had been happy to run with the nimble foxes of the New Deal, but in the early 1950s Jack was happy to mount a horse and chase those same foxes.

“Once,” said Vincent Sherman, “Jack called me into his office during the Red Scare and told me that one of the committees had questioned him. I can’t prove it, but I think it’s one of the reasons he let me go. You were on a gray list and he was trying to get rid of everybody that was on it, even if the only thing you had done was vote for Franklin Roosevelt.”

Hedda Hopper was still acting as the Madame Defarge of the Red Scare, castigating her ideological opponents and coddling her friends. Hopper’s own belief system was revealed when Jackie Robinson was scheduled for an interview at her house, and she yelled out to her cook, “Maude, if you see a nigger around the house, don’t be scared. It’s only Jackie Robinson!” Robinson, who had arrived a few minutes early for his appointment, overheard her. A few years after that, she said that the protests against Disney’s paternalist—at best—
Song of the South
were the result of “several Commie groups,” and she led a successful effort to get a special Academy Award for James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus in the film.

By this time, there was something of a schism in the Motion Picture Alliance. Leading one side was Hopper. On the other was Wayne. The screenwriter John Lee Mahin was a lifelong conservative and a member of the Alliance, and he put it this way: “You can’t get into any political situation without attracting a few crackpots, and we had our share of those. . . . I can remember the people that found a Communist behind every tree and under every bush, and it seems that half our time was spent calming these people down, saying, ‘Well, no, he’s not a Communist, he’s a liberal—a good, honest liberal. And there’s nothing wrong with that.’

“Duke, of course, was very liberal in his attitude toward people’s ideas. He would listen to anyone and draw his own conclusions. He came under attack, of course, because he was the president of the organization, but he was always the voice of reason and responsibility in the group.”

Mahin fingered the extremists in the Alliance as Ward Bond and Jimmy Grant. When John Ford was making
The Long Gray Line
in West Point, Ward Bond would head over to a bar across the street from the location and watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Bond knew McCarthy, and, according to Mahin, Wayne had Bond pass a message from him to the senator: “You’re going to have to name names because you’re just throwing out accusations and innuendo and not producing any facts, and you’re making everybody look bad.”

“I personally think McCarthy did more harm to the anti-Communist movement than anybody ever could have on the face of the earth,” said Mahin. “He was a fool, just an absolute fool.”

“Duke really went into the work of the organization,” remembered Borden Chase. “He became president [and] . . . he was no
front.
Duke had guts. We had a split in the group—The once-a-communist-always-a-communist group and the group that thought it was ridiculous to destroy some of those, who, say, joined the party in the ’30s in Nazi Germany. Duke and I were in the latter group.”

Ward Bond was still acting as a clearing agent for HUAC. “My agent at the time told me I had to go up and talk to Ward Bond,” recalled Vincent Sherman.

I got his address and made an appointment. He kept me waiting almost an hour. I told him that I’d never been a member of the Communist party, that I was a left-leaning Roosevelt Democrat. Perhaps I subscribed to some of the same causes, because I thought the cause was right, but not because it was communist in origin.

And Bond listened and said, “Well, it’s not only that. We’ve got quite a few things against you.”

“Well,” I said, “tell me what they are. I can tell you yes or no as to what I believed.”

He went on to say that one of the members of the party had said I had a great deal of influence, and that “you may not have been a card-carrying communist, but you had a lot of influence in the top echelon.” And I said that was ridiculous.

I didn’t get to know Bond too well; he didn’t behave very nicely, to me or anybody else.

John Ford’s place in all this is hard to ascertain. Ford loved Bond because he was the designated class clown, but he also thought Bond was on the dim side. Vincent Sherman, who knew Ford through the Directors Guild, said, “He was a very independent Irishman. I had the feeling that he didn’t really give a damn about politics. I certainly never heard him make any pro-McCarthy remarks, or anything like that.

“I also had the feeling that Wayne wasn’t that much in favor of some of the things that were going on; I think he was in over his head and knew it. I knew Wayne a little, and his attitudes were more liberal than many people thought. We were introduced by Howard Hawks, and I always got on well with Hawks, who was also right-wing, but not active about it. He was a good director and a straight shooter.”

During all this, Wayne publicly insisted that all the Alliance was doing was promoting a different point of view than “the excessively liberal one.” Wayne estimated the membership of the Alliance at about two thousand, and said that the group had no interest in being the “policeman of the industry. We merely want to inform the people how we stand.”

Budd Boetticher said that Wayne went so far as to have some of his co-workers vetted. “They were really American,” he said. “The only people they were against were the guys that weren’t in their group—everybody. The Jews, the Catholics, the Blacks, whatever—they were wrong, these guys were right. They fly the America flag and blow the bugle. And I mean, they were brutal.

“Of course, I never had anything to do with that . . . I only lasted two days as a Tenderfoot Scout. I never join anything.”

Boetticher went on to tell a story about a 6 A.M. phone call from Wayne. “ ‘Bood? The Duke.’ I said, ‘Hi, Duke, how are you?’ He said, ‘You’re clean.’ I said, ‘I’m what?’ He said, ‘You’re not a Communist.’ I said, ‘You son of a bitch. I hope it cost you $20,000 to find that out.’ ”

In later years, Wayne would say that “I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia. They’d have been taken care of over there and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first ones they’d take care of—after me.”

A friend of Wayne’s who sounds a lot like John Ford offered perhaps the pithiest summation of his politics: “Hell, Duke didn’t know anything about the menace of Communism. All he knew was that some of his friends were against them.”

1. The sole distinguishing moment in
Operation Pacific
arrived during production, when a repairman showed up to install a new air compressor on the set. It was Ralph Bushman, formerly Francis X. Bushman Jr., whom Wayne had doubled in his first movie appearance in 1926. “I know you, but I don’t expect you to remember me,” said Bushman. Wayne took a long look, then stuck out his hand. “Sure I do,” he said. “Your name’s Bushman and I doubled for you on my first movie job.”

William Wellman and John Wayne were united by vast stores of enthusiasm—each of them could get worked up over a story, an actor, a movie—their own or somebody else’s. Wayne was particularly gung ho about
The High and the Mighty,
a gripping story about a plane bound from Honolulu to San Francisco that develops a cascading series of mechanical problems culminating in a burned-out engine and the likelihood of running out of gas over the Pacific.