My Life as a Mankiewicz (8 page)

4

The 1960s

Hollywood Off-Ramp

If my toilet's stopped up and the repairman shows me a card from the plumber's union, I have a reasonable expectation he can fix it. If someone shows me their Writers Guild card, I have no idea whether or not they can write.

—Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The Comancheros

(I work with the “Duke,” dance with the Navajos, get fired by Michael Curtiz, and lose my virginity)

I'm kind of a “third” assistant director on the film. Today's equivalent on a crew would be called a “trainee.” My first task is to go to the Burbank airport where the film company will take off in a chartered plane for Moab, Utah. I am to check everyone onto the flight. The night before I'm so keyed up I can't sleep, at least until about 3:00 A.M., when I finally do fall asleep, sleep through my alarm, and miss the flight. Hardly an auspicious start to a show business career. I drive to Fox to take my medicine from Doc Merman. He sees how horribly shaken I am and, thank God, doesn't rub it in. I'm put on a tiny, single-engine Cessna that day, flying to Moab with the raw film stock for the movie. The flight is interminable and bumpy. I think it will never end.

My boss is the first assistant director, Jack Berne. I'm working doubly hard to make up for my disastrous start, and thank goodness everyone seems terribly helpful in breaking me in. I bury myself in crew lists, schedules, and budgets and familiarize myself with all the local desert locations.

I start with the easiest of jobs. The first morning of shooting I'm to take a car driven by a teamster and pick up John Wayne at 6:00
A.M.
at the house he's renting nearby. By 5:00
A.M.
I'm already in the coffee shop of the Apache Motel, where most of the company is staying. I have about eleven cups of coffee, then check my watch: it's 5:40. I'd better get going. Suddenly, I hear a sound behind me: “clink, clink, clink…” I turn and look up into the iconic face of John Wayne, who is peering down at me. He's already dressed in his film wardrobe. His gun belt is on, boots, spurs, Texas Ranger's badge, the whole nine yards. From my position on the stool he seems nine feet tall and three feet wide.

“Are you the fella who's supposed to pick me up?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Wayne.”

“Well, I like to drive myself with my wardrobe and makeup guys. I know this valley pretty well by now. I'll get there.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Wayne, whatever you say.”

He nods, looks down at me, and notices a “Kennedy for President” button on my shirt lapel. “I'd take that button off if I were you. We don't advertise socialists on my set.”

I blush. He suddenly gives me that great, big, wide, wonderful John Wayne grin. I think he's trying to tell me he's kidding, but the Kennedy button never reappears for the duration of the film.

The picture starts shooting in the desert, and I drink in every minute of it. It's a wonderful experience to be out there with Wayne and his legendary stunt men from the John Ford stock company. This is, I am convinced, what making movies is all about. Wayne is the leader, there is no doubt. He's giving and kind to everyone, although he can be gruff and single-minded at times. His loyalties run deep, and it sometimes seems that many people working on the movie have done at least a dozen films with him. Anyone who's worked with Wayne before and been asked back can call him “Duke.” Until he lets you know, if he lets you know, it's “Mr. Wayne.” This stems from his days with John Ford. Everyone—I mean everyone—called him “Mr. Ford.” In the eighties, when I had dinner with Maureen O'Hara, who'd starred in five or six pictures for him, she still referred to him as “Mr. Ford.” John Wayne called him “Pappy.” He was the only one allowed to do that. If you tried to call Ford “Pappy,” you'd get a knuckle sandwich before he fired you.

A few weeks into shooting I came up to Wayne sitting in his chair on the set. “They're ready for you, Mr. Wayne.” He nodded and got up. As he started off for the camera, he turned and said: “Oh. By the way. Call me Duke.” My answering grin must have been a yard wide. When we wrapped in the hot desert afternoon, sometimes Duke would stay behind, break out a bottle of Cuervo Gold tequila, and swap stories with the stuntmen, wranglers, and some of the crew. I listened, laughed, drank, and thought: can life be any better than this?

A note or two about John Ford: He was obviously the seminal American director and a total autocrat on his films. Robert Wagner told me that when he was a young actor just starting out, he got a small part in
What Price Glory
, directed by Ford. They had wrapped locations and were back at the studio. R.J. was standing by his mentor, Spencer Tracy, as they listened to Ford talking to his cameraman on the back lot: “Shit, we took him out of frame in Utah going left to right, so he's got to come in right to left, and that fucking telephone pole is sitting there—”

R.J., being an eager young suck-up at the time, interrupted: “I've got an idea, Mr. Ford!”

Without even looking, Ford whacked him in the side of the head, knocking him down, then spoke to the cameraman again. “Anyway, he exited left to right…”

No director could get away with that kind of behavior today. But that was then, and the director was John Ford. Henry Fonda told me that when he and Leland Hayward were making the film version of their Broadway hit
Mister Roberts
, they first hired John Ford to direct. His directorial style rubbed the entire crew the wrong way. He would chew out people mercilessly, and that sort of behavior was becoming out of date. After only a few days, several crew members were threatening to quit. Hank asked to see Ford in his motor home. He was the star and coproducer of the film. Hank said: “I told him, ‘Jack, you've got to ease up a little, you've just got to, they won't put up with it.' His face got red and he tried to punch me. I paused for a moment, then said what I had to: ‘I'm sorry, Jack. You're fired.' Ford stormed out. This was the man I owed my career to, the man who directed me in
Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln
, and
My Darling Clementine.
My eyes misted over. It was the toughest thing I ever had to do in my professional life.” Hank and Hayward hired their friend Josh Logan, who'd directed the play on Broadway.

Speaking of autocrats, Michael Curtiz is the renowned director of
Captain Blood, Robin Hood
, and the immortal
Casablanca. The Comancheros
is to be his last film. In his seventies, he's been diagnosed with cancer and is slowly dying. Wayne heard about it and decided to give him the job because no one seemed to want him anymore and he needed a payday. Curtiz has a reputation for being a somewhat objectionable human being. From what I can see, he certainly deserves it. He is rude to everyone, an arrogant prick with a thick Hungarian accent. Two days before filming, we have lunch with the mayor of Moab. Curtiz has to sneeze, and he does so into our tablecloth. I swear. He sunbathes nude at the tiny pool of the Apache Motel, not a pleasant sight, and outrages other guests, some of whom have children. The manager threatens to evict him. He stops.

Wayne doesn't seem to like Curtiz personally, and Curtiz definitely doesn't like the fact that Duke controls the production, but at his advanced age, feeble and sick, there's little he can do. In Moab during the summer, temperatures can reach 110 degrees. Curtiz usually falls asleep in his chair by early afternoon. We protect him with umbrellas to keep the sun off and put chamois cloths filled with ice around his neck. We all take salt pills. Once Curtiz is asleep, the picture is directed by Wayne. With seasoned actors such as Lee Marvin and Stuart Whitman, and the veteran Bill Clothier behind the camera, it all gets done effectively.

Toward the end of one particularly hot day, the late afternoon sun burns like a laser beam on the horizon. We have adjusted the umbrella behind Curtiz to shield him. Wayne is doing a scene with Lee Marvin. We've done the “over the shoulder” favoring Lee. I look over at Curtiz and ask, “Turn around on Mr. Wayne now, Mr. Curtiz?”

“Yes,” he mumbles. “Just don't turn me around.”

One hundred Navajo Indians are transported up from Arizona. They have worked in previous John Wayne westerns, and he is particularly fond of them. Indians are not allowed to drink in Utah, and no motel would give them rooms, so a tent village is set up out of town. I'm to pick up the Indians in the morning, put them on buses, and at night pay them each five dollars for their day's work. At the end of the first day I sit behind a table in the village with one hundred five-dollar bills and a list of names in front of me. The Indians get into line. The names are strikingly similar: Wolf That Smiles, Bear That Stands, Horse That Runs, and so on. I check them off as they give me their names. I dole out the hundred five-dollar bills and look up: there's still about twenty people in line. They start to argue with me: “No, no, you gave five dollars to Bear That Stands, I am Bear That Growls,” and so on. I realize I've been taken. I turn to the chief. “Listen, tomorrow morning I'm giving everyone a number from one to a hundred. At night they hand in their numbered slip and get their five dollars.”

The next morning the Indians get on the bus. I give them each a number, but at 98, there are no Indians left to board. “Chief, what's the deal? Where're the other two guys?” He tells me they were arrested in Moab last night, for drinking. I take a chance and swing the buses by the jail. The sheriff comes out.

“Sheriff, do you have two of our Indians?”

“Sure do.”

I say, “I realize this is asking a lot, but we need them. Do you think they could work on the movie during the day, and at night I'll swing by and return them to you?”

The sheriff says, “That's great with me. The other prisoners don't like Indians, and it'll save me a couple of lunches.”

That night, we go by the jail. Two Indians get up, but I can see right away they're not the same two who were arrested. The sheriff is in front as they get off.

“Sheriff, I have to warn you, those are not the Indians you arrested.”

He says, “Makes no difference to me. I arrested two Indians, I just need two Indians.” For the rest of the film, two different Indians get off each night.

The female lead is played by Ina Balin, a young stage actress doing her first big part in a film. She arrives two weeks into shooting and is driven out to the desert to start work. It's a small scene with Wayne. She says something like, “Ranger Jake, Ranger Jake, they've got my father!” Duke says, “Let's go!” That's the whole scene. Curtiz is asleep in his chair, but we're lit and ready to go. Duke says, “Let's shoot it.”

Ina says, “Excuse me, aren't we going to rehearse first?”

“What's to rehearse? You say, ‘They've got my father,' and I say, ‘Let's go.'”

“Well, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm from the stage and I'm used to rehearsals.”

“Let me tell you something, little lady: I've worked with stage people before. I've worked with Miss Geraldine Page of the New York stage, best goddamn part she ever had—
Hondo.”
He turns to Jack Berne. “Shoot the rehearsal.”

We roll. Ina runs into the shot: “Ranger Jake, Ranger Jake, they've got my father!” Duke says, “Let's go!” They run out of the shot. Jack Berne says, “Cut it.” Wayne says, “Print it.”

He turns to Ina. “See how easy this is?”

There's a frequent poker game during shooting usually attended by stuntmen and other members of the crew. I've been in the game twice and both times lost my weekly paycheck. I'm so thrilled to be playing poker with these guys that I don't care. The actor Jack Elam plays one night; he's one of the villains in the film. Elam is known for his crazed look and cocked eye. (He later becomes a favorite in Sergio Leone's westerns.) He's also nuts. The next day we're going to shoot a scene in which Wayne and Stuart Whitman are staked out on the ground with two vultures in a tree looking down. The birds have been brought up from L.A. along with their wrangler, the person who trains and owns them. The “Vulture Man” plays in the poker game. It's table stakes. On one particular hand that he's sure he's a lock to win, he puts up his vultures as collateral. He loses them to Elam.

The next day on set we're prepping the first shot. It's already about a hundred degrees. Stand-ins have been staked out to represent Whitman and Wayne. I see the Vulture Man nearby and say, “It's time to put the birds in the tree.”

He looks at me sadly: “They belong to Elam now. They're in his trailer. Better talk to him.”

I knock on Elam's trailer door. He opens it. I can see both vultures behind him, eating some God-awful-looking food from a large bowl. “Jack, we've got to get those guys in the tree.”

Elam: “How much do my birds get?”

“Geez, Jack, I don't know. We don't have a budget out here.”

“Find out how much the birds get.”

I go to Jack Berne and explain the situation. This gives him Excedrin Headache #70. We use a mobile phone to call the production office in Moab. I return to Jack's trailer. “Jack, they get a hundred dollars a day, each.”

He grins: “My birds don't work for less than two hundred fifty.”

Suddenly, a station wagon pulls up and Duke gets out, dressed for action. “Christ, it's hot. We ready to go?”

“Duke, we're waiting for the vultures.”

“What the hell's wrong with the vultures?”

I explain. Duke strides over to Elam's trailer and bangs on the door. Jack opens it. “You get those goddamn birds up in that tree right now or one of their heads is gonna be sticking out of your mouth and the other head out of your asshole!”

Elam: “Putting them in the tree right now, Duke; they're moving even as we speak.”

One day the principals wrap in the morning. We're going to shoot second unit in the afternoon. A minor cattle stampede. A couple hundred of Wayne's own Texas longhorns have been shipped up for the scene. The second unit director is Cliff Lyons, a veteran of many Wayne and John Ford westerns. Curtiz tells him he wants the cattle to be driven into a nearby draw with about a five-foot drop. They'll have to scramble up the other side. Cliff tells him that some of the cattle will break their legs going in and others might break their legs trying to climb over them and up the other side. Curtiz snaps, “Don't argue with me, just do it!” He walks off.