John Wayne: The Life and Legend (10 page)

While Walsh and Evarts were constructing their story, the studio began buying and building thousands of props—yokes, wagon covers, a host of other articles. An old cowhand named Jack Padjan was sent to Wyoming to select Indians from the Arapaho tribe, and a batch of them set up headquarters across the street from the Fox administration building.

Fox issued a press release about their new star, and the process was so hurried that most of it was actually true: “John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, on May 26, 1907. The son of Clyde Leonard Morrison and Mary Brown. Educated in the George Washington Grammar School of Keokuk, Iowa and later at the Lancaster Grammar School in Lancaster, California, to which place his parents moved when he was at an early age. Graduating from the Lancaster School, he entered Glendale High School in Glendale, California, and from there he entered University of Southern California in Los Angeles . . .”

The press release asserted that he broke his ankle in his junior year which cost him the season, and that he left college and “decided to learn to make motion pictures. Secured a position as prop boy and propped on
Mother Machree, Speakeasy, Strong Boy, The Black Watch
and
Louis Beretti
[the production title of
Born Reckless
]. . . .

“Wayne brought to the part of Breck Coleman absolutely no stage or screen experience other than appearing while at the University of Southern California in a couple of college dramas.”

All in all, pretty close to the truth, although no mention was made of his parents’ divorce, which was finalized on February 20, 1930. By that time, Clyde was spending time with Florence Buck, a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée with a daughter. A few weeks after the divorce was final, Clyde and Florence got married. The marriage would prove to be a success, and Clyde’s drinking moderated, although his difficulties with steady employment remained. A few years later, his situation stabilized, and he eventually became president of the Beverly Hills Lions Club.

It was now the spring of 1930. The studio quickly took some stills of their young star examining guns in the studio prop room along with Dan Clark, who had photographed Tom Mix for years, and Louis Witte, who was in charge of the equipment.

They also began papering the country with the story of his discovery, and characterized him as “a youth who bids fair to prove the screen sensation of 1930 . . . a smile that is one in a million, a marvelous speaking voice, a fearless rider, a fine natural actor and he has everything the femmes want in their leading man. Less than two years ago Wayne was playing football at USC. Watch this boy go.”

Not everybody thought Wayne was a good bet. One trade paper columnist said, “I can’t see how anybody could stretch their imagination so far as to gamble $2 million on a novice to make good in a picture that cries for an actor with years and years of experience.”

To which Raoul Walsh replied, with considerable insight into his new leading man’s essential character, “I selected Morrison, whose name, by the way, will be John Wayne from now on . . . primarily because he is a real pioneer type . . . but most of all because he can start over any trail and finish.”

As the script was finalized, Walsh told the newly christened John Wayne to keep letting his hair grow—pioneers weren’t neatly trimmed. And one other thing: learn how to throw a knife without camera trickery. Wayne went to an expert knife man named Steve Clemente, who worked with the young man for several weeks. Clemente explained that in theory it was simple: throw the knife so it makes one revolution in twelve feet, or two revolutions in twenty-four feet. More revolutions or fewer increase the likelihood that the knife will land handle-in and fall with a clatter rather than pierce the wood target with an impressive
thunk!

In practice, it was not so simple, but he learned. A few weeks later, hair shaggy, armed with a knife he knew how to throw, John Wayne was off to make his first western.

William Fox was the lone wolf among the founding generation of movie moguls, one who was always reaching for authentic innovation. Other studios brought over great European filmmakers, but they tended to hobble them by forcing them into the Hollywood mold. Fox brought over F. W. Murnau from Germany and gave him carte blanche to make
Sunrise
, thereby creating one of cinema’s great glories, and one with a synchronized musical score on the soundtrack—also one of Fox’s imported innovations.

Along with a soundtrack, Fox wanted an image of equivalent grandeur, which is why he called his new 70mm widescreen process Grandeur—the impetus for
The Big Trail
was visual, not narrative. Fox had been personally financing development of the process since 1927 along with partner Harley Clarke, who was involved in the manufacture of 85 percent of the country’s projection equipment.

In essence, Grandeur was 70mm film shot by a specially designed Mitchell camera and projected onto a larger than normal panoramic screen. 70mm film had been around since cinema’s infancy, but had always been a novelty because of its unwieldy nature.
The Big Trail
would be Fox’s third and final attempt at promoting 70mm widescreen production, a mini-boomlet that encompassed more than ten features made by six different movie companies (Fox, Warners, RKO, Paramount, Universal, and United Artists all experimented with 70mm films released between late 1929 and the end of 1930).

Grandeur was just one component of Fox’s attempt to corner the American film industry. He owned Grandeur personally, also personally owned the cameras and film perforators that made the 70mm projection possible. While he was developing Grandeur, Fox was also buying the controlling shares in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Loew’s theaters from Marcus Loew’s widow. The purchase was made mostly on credit, and was slowly unraveled by the 1929 stock market crash that led Fox into the financial abyss, but until then William Fox came closer than any single person ever has to financial and creative hegemony over an art form.

The studio’s first release in Grandeur,
Happy Days
, had been favorably reviewed by the critics and made a profit of $132,000 on a budget of $584,000—not really much more than the average Fox budget. In the spring of 1930, just as production of
The Big Trail
was getting under way, Fox ordered forty additional Grandeur cameras.

In most respects, Fox kept the possibilities for disaster to a minimum. The Grandeur cameras were reliable Mitchells, the film inside them was reliable Eastman Type Two Panchromatic. The main difficulties were in finding lenses that could do justice to the increased range—cameraman Arthur Edeson did tests of at least ten identical lenses before he found one that met the increased optical standards of the format—and a slight tendency of the 70mm stock to buckle. The latter was a serious problem—a jam of 70mm film not only damaged the camera but burned out the motor, and the middle of the Grand Tetons is no place to wait for a shipment of motors from the studio.

Walsh’s crew encompassed two hundred people, with 185 wagons and ninety-three speaking parts. There were thirty-eight men in the camera crew alone. The roster was swelled by the fact that the studio was shooting Spanish, German, French, and Italian versions of the dialogue scenes, replacing the American actors with native casts. (The same long shots would be used in all the versions; the future director Fred Zinnemann wrote the dialogue for the German version.) All this resulted in an enormous production, with a five-month shooting schedule and a premiere that was scheduled to follow right on the heels of the last shot.

Raoul Walsh began shooting
The Big Trail
on April 20, 1930, and finished on August 20.
¹
The first shot was of two hundred wagons, 1,700 head of cattle, and forty people breaking camp just before making their trek across the plains and the mountains. It had been precisely two days since Walsh showed up on location, and the shot was completed by 10:30 in the morning. Day after day, the cast and crew were up at 5 A.M., while the stockmen were up a half hour before that. Dinner was generally held off till about 8 P.M.

Almost the entire picture was shot on location, with the only movie artifice being some studio close-ups of Wayne riding, and a few matte shots. Initially, Wayne was afflicted with the
turistas
—diarrhea. For a few days, he was flat on his back and unable to work, but he was eventually motivated by the suggestion that some other $75 a week actor could be enlisted to play the part.

Despite the loss of eighteen pounds, Wayne struggled to his feet and began working. “My first scene was carrying an actor named Tully Marshall, who was known to booze it up quite a bit,” remembered Wayne. “He had a big jug in his hand in this scene, and I set him down and we have a drink with another guy. They passed the jug to me first, and I dug back into it. It was straight rotgut bootleg whiskey. I’d been puking and crapping blood for a week and now I just poured that raw stuff right down my throat. After the scene, you can bet I called him every kind of an old bastard.” (In the film, Wayne never drinks from the jug; he must have been referring to an earlier take.)

Marguerite Churchill, the film’s leading lady, didn’t much like acting, and didn’t like the movies at all; she retired soon after she married George O’Brien. In later years, their son Darcy O’Brien always noticed a strange undertone in his mother’s behavior whenever she was around Wayne—the normally severe woman became slightly awkward and girlish. Darcy came to believe the two had had an affair during production of
The Big Trail
.

Besides the stars, there was the usual amount of pairing off between the crew and the locals, and a little bit more. Co-star Ian Keith was spending a great deal of time with Raoul Walsh’s wife. One night there was a fight between Cheyenne Flynn, a cowboy, and Charlie Stevens, who was Geronimo’s grandson. Flynn accused Stevens of cheating at cards, and Robert Parrish, a fourteen-year-old who was working as an extra, heard Flynn say, “I’m going to bite your ear off, you goddamn half-breed.” There was the sound of a scuffle, and a diminishing whine as Stevens beat his retreat. The next morning, Parrish found a bite-sized piece of Stevens’s ear covered with ants. Parrish put a piece of rawhide through the hunk and hung it as a decoration on his cabin door.

The Big Trail
was one of those movies whose production replicates the experiences it depicts. When Walsh and company showed up in Yuma, Hal Evarts was amazed to find that an entire frontier town had been built and was ready to be photographed, complete with costumes and props for five hundred actors, bit players, and extras.

Walsh had audaciously cast a movie with leading actors who were all basically inexperienced. Tyrone Power Sr., who was playing the heavy, had been on the stage for decades and had appeared in silent movies but had never made a talkie. In June 1930, while on location, he wrote his son, the future matinee idol, that “The picture is coming along, and I do believe is even now considered by the experts in the studio to be a marvel. I am fortunate to be associated with such a fine type of screenplay. I find that the work has but very little to do with stage acting, as I know it. The scenes are strikingly brief, and take hours to
shoot.
The episodes do not follow each other, and sometimes I do not comprehend where we are. . . . Well, one day you will see it, and see what an infernal blackguard your father is, and hear him growl and roar over the plains and mountains.” (Power collapsed and died in his son’s arms soon after the film was completed.)

There were twenty-six days of shooting around Yuma, eight weeks around Jackson Hole, as well as Yellowstone and Sequoia national parks. For a riverboat scene, the crew moved to Sacramento. They traveled by rail: eight Pullman cars full of actors and crew, fed by two dining cars, preceded by twenty-one cars of baggage, props, wardrobe, wagons, horses, oxen—the paraphernalia needed to outfit a wagon train.

The movie carried an unusual sense of physical authenticity, a stark, semidocumentary flavor. A reporter who visited the set noted an even dozen cameras being used for the long shots, three of them Grandeur cameras. A mudhole sequence, with the wagons stuck amidst thunder, lightning, and torrential rains, was possible only because hydraulic pumps drew a million and a half gallons out of the Colorado River every day for seven days.

Hal Evarts was a trapper, guide, and surveyor of the Indian territory who knew the reality of the people and the times. Besides
The Big Trail
, Evarts also wrote William S. Hart’s valedictory film,
Tumbleweeds
. He would die young in 1934 at the age of forty-seven, but he left behind a manuscript entitled “Log of The Big Trail” that is more or less a diary of the film’s gestation and production.

Evarts was very much under the sway of Frederick Jackson Turner’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny; just as our ancestors weren’t afraid of Indians, Evarts wasn’t afraid of overwriting: “A sturdy race of pioneers, they were not to be daunted by hardship or privations. Devastated by cholera, parched by the blazing sun, numbed by shrieking mountain blizzards, assailed by savages, tortured by thirst or soaked by flood, gaunt from hunger, the land-hungry horde marched doggedly down the path of the setting sun—no more to be deterred than swarming locusts.”