John Wayne: The Life and Legend (73 page)

“Wing had a big spread, and a hacienda type house in southern Pima County, near Nogales. He created a suite of rooms for Duke, reserved just for him. Duke would come there quite frequently; between pictures, Duke would loaf at Wing’s. We used to play gin rummy all day, drink some tequila, then go into Nogales and whoop it up at night. In the morning, he’d go off to work. A great professional.”

When he was in production in Old Tucson, Wayne would remain in the vicinity because he liked to stay at the same place as the crew. A Wayne picture shot six days a week, and there was usually some sort of activity planned for Sunday—Wayne’s idea of hell was an empty afternoon with nothing to do but watch television. There would be parties at Bob Shelton’s house, or the Arizona Inn, or the Tucson National Country Club. When Shelton’s stepson got married, Wayne went to the reception.

Being with John Wayne in Arizona, or, for that matter, anyplace, was not unlike being with the pope in Rome—everybody knew him and everybody that didn’t know him wanted to meet him. “He had a partner in Stanfield, Arizona, who was in the cattle business with him, a man named Johnson. Duke owned a couple of ranches. And we’d do trips to all these places just to say hello. I drove him all over hell’s half acre looking for locations. Everywhere he went, there were people he knew. And everywhere he went, people gravitated to him like you wouldn’t believe.”

“A man named Johnson” was Louis Johnson, a little beer keg of a man who was born in 1919 and who provided Wayne with one of his few lucrative investments. In 1958, Wayne borrowed money to buy four thousand acres of land south of Phoenix that was earmarked for cotton farming. Johnson owned land adjacent to Wayne’s, and Johnson was getting four bales of cotton out of an acre when everybody else was getting only two and a half—if they were lucky. The two men cut a deal to have Johnson manage Wayne’s fields. Johnson kept on making four bales an acre, so in 1960 the two men became partners.

Johnson was one of the few businessmen in Wayne’s life who was better than his word; at one point, at a time when Wayne was incommunicado because of
The Alamo
, Johnson personally guaranteed a $500,000 loan in order to bring in a bumper crop.

In 1961, Wayne and Johnson combined their acreage into a single operation and plowed all the profits back into the operation. The cotton was eventually replaced by the 26 Bar Ranch in 1964, where they became leading breeders of purebred Herefords on twenty thousand acres, with another thirty thousand acres rented from the Forest Service.

Both
Hatari!
and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
had been single-picture deals with Paramount. But now Wayne entered into a six-picture contract with the studio. There was talk in the trade papers of a ten-picture deal, with the money to be paid out up front, indicating Wayne was still in financial straits from
The Alamo,
but the contractual evidence indicates that the deal was for six pictures. The cash crunch, however, was real; Wayne was earning only $500,000 a picture—well below his already established market value.

The deal was for seven years, from August 6, 1962, to August 5, 1969. The first picture was
Donovan’s Reef
, with the producers being charged $750,000 for Wayne’s services, with $30,000 a week overage after twelve weeks. (The $250,000 difference per picture appears to have been Paramount’s guaranteed profit on the long-term deal.) The pictures (
Donovan’s Reef, Circus World, In Harm’s Way, The Sons of Katie Elder, El Dorado,
and
True Grit
) were, on the whole, a strong lot, and Paramount sweetened the deal by giving Wayne a share of the copyrights on
Katie Elder
and
True Grit.

The deal gave Paramount some much needed security, because the studio was in rocky shape and about to get rockier. The problem, according to studio head Howard W. Koch, was that Charlie Bluhdorn, whose Gulf & Western Corporation bought the studio in 1966, was “bright, funny, and liked broads” but didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted from a studio head.

Koch took the studio over from Martin Rackin, and would later be replaced by Robert Evans. As Koch remembered it, “I came into it for two years and three months and thought about committing suicide twice. I never met so many hateful people in my life.”

Koch was hampered by a lot of production deals that had been made before he took office. Jerry Lewis’s appeal was fading, but Paramount was committed to producing and releasing his pictures, each of which was grossing less than the one before. Worst of all, however, was the deal that had been cut with Otto Preminger just before Koch came on board. “Preminger—that dirty son of a bitch. He made seven pictures [actually five] for us, all losers. He took advantage; he looked down on me. He was totally unlike someone like John Ford, who was a leader, who got you involved. Ford was one of those guys with every scene in his mind, completely prepared.

“I looked at Preminger’s first picture, then looked at the contract. He could do any picture he wanted up to a certain budget point. Nobody could do anything to it. Even
In Harm’s Way
got fucked up and never did the business it should have. I should have just killed him.”

As Koch knew, directors come and directors go, but John Wayne went on forever.

The Romanian-born producer Samuel Bronston made a splash in 1961 with
King of Kings
, a remake of DeMille’s silent classic. That had been followed by
El Cid
(a great hit) and
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(a great flop), all of which were financed via country-by-country advances secured by money from DuPont interests. Now Bronston and Paramount had a deal for
Circus World.
Paramount’s share of
Circus World
amounted to an investment of $2.5 million (shades of UA and
The Alamo
!). Bronston wanted John Wayne, and Paramount was agreeable to making
Circus World
part of its overall deal.

There were problems from the beginning, because the failure of
The Fall of the Roman Empire
had put Bronston in severe straits. (Paramount was concerned when Bronston failed to make a contractual $5,000 pension payment for Wayne.) James Edward Grant had bought a ranch in Merced, near Yosemite—six hundred acres, four hundred head of cattle. What with ranching’s high overhead, Grant was always up for making some money. With Wayne’s deal for
Circus World
set—his co-stars were to be David Niven and Claudia Cardinale, but Niven was soon replaced by Lloyd Nolan—and the script in chaos, Wayne asked Grant to go over to Madrid, where the film was to be shot, and help. Grant didn’t really want to go—
Ring of Fear
seems to have permanently soured him on circuses. But Bronston upped the ante by offering Grant a three-picture deal. Grant instructed his agent to ask for a ridiculous amount of money, which Bronston gave him.

Once he got to Madrid, Grant saw that there was trouble afoot. Grant would go over to Bronston’s house for dinner, where he noticed that the producer’s collection of famous paintings was shrinking—Bronston was selling assets to raise short-term cash.

Grant found himself beset by all manner of problems: the script, the Bronston organization, and Frank Capra, the prospective director of
Circus World
.

Grant believed that Bronston “is an absolute genius at raising money and peddling pictures” but had comparatively little interest in their production. Grant found the Bronston organization a rats nest of competing interests, with everybody playing courtier to Bronston, the better to feather their own nest. Of all the problems, the worst was Capra.

Wayne had originally told Paramount to push hard for Henry Hathaway, with Capra as second choice. But Paramount wanted to hold Hathaway in reserve for a Paramount picture that, as it happened, was never made, so Capra was hired—a great director years past his greatness.

What set Grant off was Capra’s treachery over the script. “I, who should be inured to treachery, having worked with Hungarians, have just had a terrific shock. This prick Capra has been having daily singing sessions with my grandchildren and eating and sleeping at my house and at the same time has been putting a Sicilian stiletto between my shoulder blades.”

Grant discovered that Capra was writing the script behind Grant’s back, had circulated copies to the top brass, and had told the brass that Grant was on a free ride; that he didn’t actually write anything, just checked scripts for Wayne, who then forced the studio to put Grant’s name on the script.

Grant then found that Capra’s script actually incorporated some of the material Grant had been writing. “It’s as if you put shit and honey in a Waring blender. His stuff is so incredibly old-fashioned that Duke comes out sometimes as Harold Lloyd, sometimes as Oliver Hardy and sometimes as . . . Stan Laurel. When you read this thing it is easy to understand why this guy hasn’t had a hit since [screenwriter] Robert Riskin died.”

Grant went to Philip Yordan, Bronston’s production ramrod, whom he referred to as “my one-eyed Jew” (Yordan had eye problems), who banished most of Capra’s acolytes. But there was still the problem of Capra. During a meeting Capra informed Grant that no matter what he or anybody else put in the script, Capra was only going to shoot what Capra had written. If anybody didn’t like it they could take a walk. “It’s amazing that a guy with a track record of ten flops in a solid row can be so insanely egotistical, but he is,” reported Grant.

For his part, Capra looked at Grant and saw a familiar Shakespearean character. “I didn’t realize [that] when you took on Duke Wayne you took on a small empire,” wrote Capra in his memoirs. “And part of that empire was a personal writer by the name of James Edward Grant. Jimmy Grant was . . . a writer who attached himself to a male star and functioned as that star’s confidant, adviser, bosom playpal, baby sitter, flatterer, string puller and personal Iago to incite mistrust between his meal ticket and film directors, especially name directors.”

According to Capra, Grant announced that “all you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smash in the face every five minutes. In between you fill in with gags, flags and chases.”

This does sound like something Grant would say, but he was undoubtedly trying to make himself look like the only sane man in an insane situation—at one point he fantasized about Batjac taking over the Bronston organization. Then there was the hard fact that
Circus World
was ridiculous material for a director who was just trying to hang on, and, most recently, hadn’t been able to turn the trick with
A Hole in the Head
or
Pocketful of Miracles
—stories more or less in his wheelhouse. Capra was under the impression that it was 1940 and he was coming off
Lost Horizon, You Can’t Take It with You,
and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. But in the Hollywood—or Madrid—of 1963, John Wayne had far more power than Frank Capra.

Phil Yordan was willing to fire Capra, but only if it was absolutely necessary—for one thing it would cost $150,000 to make Capra go away; for another, Yordan was concerned that Wayne would take a walk unless they could land an acceptable replacement director. But Capra was gone from the picture in January 1963, and Henry Hathaway got a phone call from Wayne.
Circus World
needed a director. After what Hathaway remembered as a week’s work of rewrites with Ben Hecht, Hathaway flew to Madrid and found that he couldn’t stand Grant, whom he termed “a phony.”

Phony or not, Grant put his finger on the core problem of the Bronston organization when he observed, “These people are all promoters and are only anxious to get the show on the road and get on to the next promotional gimmick. They really don’t give a damn who’s in charge as long as somebody is making some kind of film and as long as there is huge production in it.”

While Hathaway and Grant frantically rewrote, Wayne sailed the
Wild Goose
across the Atlantic to Spain. He would always remember the trip as the biggest thrill of his nautical life. They went down the Baja coast, through the Panama Canal and the San Blas islands, with stops in the Caribbean. In Bermuda, a hotel mogul named Cooley came aboard and mentioned that he’d always wanted to make a voyage across the Atlantic.

Wayne knew a cue when he heard one, and told Cooley the only thing standing between him and his dream was a pair of deck shoes. Unfortunately, Cooley turned out to be a bad sailor, and the crossing encountered some miserable weather. “We had gale forces on us for four days,” remembered Wayne. “For 14 hours we were going to 45 degrees! This fella Cooley just lay back there in a blanket, the waves cleaning up after him. When we finally got to the Azores, and he put his foot on that ground, if they hadn’t had an airport on that place, he’d still be living there. I don’t think he’ll ever get on another ship as long as he lives!”