John Wayne: The Life and Legend (64 page)

By the second week of November, just as Wayne was to begin shooting the all-important battle scenes, a wire arrived from United Artists. The film was about to use up its budget, and the studio estimated that Wayne would need an additional $400,000 to finish the picture. UA refused to advance the money, which left Wayne no choice but to kick in more of his own money.

Cliff Lyons got credit for the second unit direction, but Dean Smith remembered that Wayne directed a lot of the battle. “Scenes like jumping horses over the barricade, Duke was right there. He was an action man and he knew every move the stuntmen knew. Duke Wayne wouldn’t ask a stuntman to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. We all liked him, we knew he wanted the best, and we loved and respected him.”

For much of the shoot, Pilar was there with the children; Bob Relyea thought the relationship seemed strong. One night, there was banging on Relyea’s door. It was one of the company saying he needed a plane to San Antonio. It seemed that he had said something negative about Pilar at dinner, or Wayne thought he did. The man’s nose was now resting on the side of his face.

Wayne seems to have been sensitive to Pilar’s isolation. Karen Sharpe, the ingenue of
The High and the Mighty
, was visiting her father in San Antonio, and the two drove over to Brackettville for a visit. After an exchange of pleasantries, Wayne asked Sharpe if she would take Pilar shopping. “You know how they treat Hispanics,” he said, the implication being that being accompanied by a beautiful blonde would insulate Pilar from racist exchanges. “I said I certainly did understand,” recalled Sharpe. “I could never stand Texas because it’s such a reactionary place.”

On December 15, after eighty-three days of production, seventeen days over schedule, Wayne wrapped principal photography on
The Alamo
. He had shot 560,000 feet of film and lost more than twenty pounds. Cliff Lyons spent a few more weeks shooting close-ups of the battle that would be spliced around scenes of the principals. With that, the film went into the cutting room for ten months of postproduction that featured Dimitri Tiomkin’s epic musical score spread over a running time that eventually encompassed three hours and twelve minutes.

“After it was all over,” said Relyea, “I liked Duke. It was hard not to. Being an assistant director on a picture like
The Alamo
, you worry about everything—shooting, what people do when they’re not shooting, everything else. But I could always count on Duke being prepared. Sometimes hung-over, but always prepared. And organized. And definite. It was always, ‘Yes,’ or ‘no.’

“Everybody took direction from him. You can tell when a director is organized and has a point of view. If he’s got that, unless you’re totally opposed to that approach, it’s a relief. The cameraman knows where to put the camera, the actors know where to stand. And you could tell he knew what he was doing. If Duke looked at a set and said, ‘We’d better go with the 75mm lens,’ he was always exactly right. People pick that up quickly and say to themselves, ‘Right or wrong, at least we have leadership.’ A film set is mainly about leadership, and Duke had that.”

Soon after returning to Hollywood for postproduction, Wayne unburdened himself of his anger about the diseased state of the current cinema in a windy statement that was probably written by Russell Birdwell: “Filthy minds and filthy words and filthy thoughts have no place upon any motion picture screen.” Wayne went on to enumerate the ways in which
The Alamo
would serve as the antidote:

I think we are all in danger and have been for a long time of going soft, of taking things for granted . . . [of] forgetting the things that made this a great nation.

The best reminder that has ever happened in the history of the world in my opinion is what took place at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. It was there that 182 Americans holed up in an adobe mission fought for 13 days and nights against 5,000 troops of the Dictator Santa Anna. These 182 men killed 1,700 of the enemy

before they were slaughtered because they didn’t think a bully should push people around.

I’m glad to play a part in the making of a motion picture that is true and real and which I believe will present some of the most inspiring and entertaining subject matter that has ever been put on the screen.

Postproduction on
The Alamo
was done at the Goldwyn studio on Formosa Avenue. One day, Laurence Harvey came in to wrap up his dubbing. After an hour or two, Wayne got bored and said, “Let’s go over to Lucey’s.” The autograph hounds sniffed out Wayne and before long he was signing menus, napkins, and all manner of scrap paper. While everybody was asking Wayne for his signature, nobody was making a fuss over Harvey.

“How come nobody ever asks you for your autograph?” asked an amused Wayne.

“If we were in London, it would be just the opposite,” said Harvey. “They’d be coming after me, and they’d say, ‘John Wayne? Eh . . .’ They’re
much
more sophisticated over there.”

“They had a great relationship,” remembered Tom Kane. “Larry wasn’t afraid of Duke. He’d tell him off and Duke loved that, instead of people kissing his ass all the time.” What was supposed to be a break from the rigors of the dubbing room turned into an all-night party, in which Harvey introduced Wayne to the brutal pleasures of the Bullshot—vodka, beef consommé, and lime.

On January 18, 1960, Wayne wrote a letter to UA president Arthur Krim informing him that Russell Birdwell—who was being paid over $200,000, counting expenses and office overhead, for a year of work between November 1959 and November 1960—was to be in charge of the publicity campaign for
The Alamo
. “The emphasis,” wrote Wayne, “is going to be on publicity and not on paid advertising.”

Krim grudgingly agreed, but UA’s ad and publicity budget for the picture had been set at $415,000, with $125,000 of that already spent. Birdwell’s close-to-the-vest style of operating meant that there would be unavoidable duplication of effort, not to mention much corporate irritation.

All of Wayne’s financial troubles didn’t lessen his belief in the picture he had brought back from Brackettville. In March 1960, Wayne received an offer to sell his percentage in the picture for what James Edward Grant called “a huge capital gain.” He turned the deal down. Grant had a percentage of the profits, and would also have made a sizable chunk of money from the sale, but said that he was happy with his friend’s decision. Grant wrote that he believed his piece of the action would bring in so much money that he would be able to afford to start drinking again, although he hoped “[I] will have some sense enough not to.” That same month, a production memo carried the negative cost of the picture at nearly $5.3 million, almost $800,000 over Wayne’s initial budget.

Ahead lay more editing, the musical score, print costs, and a massive publicity campaign. More money was going to be needed. Accordingly, in April an agreement was set up with Bank of America for yet another loan, a maximum of $700,000 secured by the Batjac film library. Once again, Batjac agreed that all the other investors, including the Bank of America, were to be repaid before Batjac could recoup its own investment.

Attached to the loan application was an itemized list containing the purpose for each dollar of the loan. Included was $55,000 for Frankie Avalon and $25,000 for Richard Boone, both of whom had evidently done their stints without being paid. (
Variety
reported that Wayne bought Boone a Rolls-Royce for his contribution.)

Also budgeted was $117,000 for the writing and recording of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, and, oddly enough, $100,000 for John Ford. But Ford’s files don’t show him doing any preparation or research work, nor do they show any disbursements from Batjac. Dan Ford, the director’s grandson and executor, says, “Ford didn’t do enough to ask for money. I’m sure it was a cover,” i.e., the money designated for Ford was actually being used for other expenses.

Batjac was now in a nearly impossible financial position. At this point, the negative cost of the picture, plus prints and advertising, meant that it would have to return rentals—what the movie company gets after the theaters have deducted their share—of something like $15 million to reimburse the UA, the McCullough Tool Company, and the Bank of America loans, which didn’t even take into account the money Wayne had personally thrown into the bucket. (Clint Murchison had already been repaid.) Not only that, but Batjac had given away 10 percent of its net profits to McCullough and Murchison.

Essentially,
The Alamo
had to be one of the fifteen highest grossing pictures in Hollywood history or there was going to be a lot of red ink on Batjac’s accounting books.

The publicity drums began to beat in the summer of 1960. There was a hugely expensive ($152,000) three-page fold-out ad in
Life
magazine on July 4, headlined “There Were No Ghost Writers at the Alamo,” which made a tenuous connection between the flacks working for the two presidential candidates of 1960 and the lack of same at the Alamo. “There were no ghost writers at the Alamo. Only men. Among them Colonel David Crockett who was 50 years old, Colonel James Bowie, 40; Colonel William Barret Travis, 26.

“These men left a legacy for all who prize freedom above tyranny, individualism above conformity.” It was signed by Wayne and Grant, although it had been written by Birdwell.

In May, Wayne started shooting
North to Alaska,
another one of his 20th Century Fox commitments. In between shots, he worked on the final editing and release plans for
The Alamo
. Wayne ordered two hundred Bowie knives as gifts for reporters at the San Antonio premiere, and a series of full-page newspaper ads for thirty-five papers in twelve cities. The ad budget for the premiere cities alone was $353,393.

Wayne began screening the rough cut for friends and family. John Ford responded with a blurb for his pal: “This is the most important motion picture ever made. It is timeless. It’s the greatest motion picture I’ve ever seen. It will last forever—run forever—for all peoples, all families, everywhere!” The exclamation point was presumably Birdwell’s addition.

Director George Stevens came on board too: “When the roll call of the great ones is made,
The Alamo
will be among those few by which the films of the future will and must be measured. There are images in
The Alamo
that will haunt you and inspire you for a lifetime.
The Alamo
is among the screen’s finest literature—a classic.”

By August, Jimmy Grant had succeeded in hypnotizing himself: “I have to admit that I am now married to Birdwell’s estimate of an
Alamo
gross in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars,” he wrote. He asked Batjac to pay out his profits at no more than $50,000 a year, so as to avoid tax nightmares.

But by September, a month before
The Alamo
opened, Wayne was depressed about Batjac’s financial position. Everything Wayne and his company owned was either spent or mortgaged. On September 24, Grant wrote Wayne a long letter outlining his ideas for cutting back the company overhead so that the company could survive while waiting for the profits to roll in.

At this point, Batjac’s overhead was about $450,000 a year. Grant suggested that Wayne get rid of the accountant ($24,000 a year), then furlough production manager Nate Edwards ($26,000 a year), who wouldn’t be needed for at least a year—the company had no immediate production plans after
The Alamo
. Cut one or two other people, and for God’s sake knock off free coffee and phone service for out-of-work actors. As for Bob Morrison ($15,000 a year), Grant suggested cutting his salary in half, and letting him pick up work as an assistant director on television.

Then Grant kicked into high gear: sell the Batjac building, rent some space, keep Mary St. John, a few others, rent help when you need it, and lower the yearly costs to $75,000–$100,000 a year. Failing that, Grant suggested that Wayne make two Batjac pictures back to back that would at least cover the company overhead, preferably two scripts by James Edward Grant. (Grant’s was not a subtle personality.) Either way, Grant counseled speed: “The grave awaits much more suddenly than we ever expect . . .”

The fate of Batjac hung fire for several years, and Charles Feldman did a good deal of spadework to insure the company’s survival. At one point, there were conversations of varying degrees of seriousness with Columbia, Fox, and Seven Arts. The rough outline of the deal with Seven Arts was a purchase price of around $3 million for the Batjac assets—the film library, the company’s percentage of
The Alamo
—plus a four-picture deal with Wayne.

Feldman was having health problems, and he was worried about himself and his client. Wayne was in the middle of bouncing from
The Alamo
to
North to Alaska
to
Hatari!
to
The Comancheros
with hardly any time off between pictures, in order to replenish his cash reserves. “I am very concerned about you, Duke, and your not getting a holiday and working week after week practically for the past year. This must be remedied. . . . Please take care of yourself and again take care of your health.”