John Wayne: The Life and Legend (101 page)

Wayne didn’t really dig in his heels until the ending, which was the same as the ending of the novel: the young boy, to be played by Ron Howard, kills Books. “He’s mortally wounded,” remembered Self of the script conference, “dying of cancer, in terrible pain. He looks at Howard, knows that he’s always coveted his gun and says, ‘Take my gun . . . but first kill me.’ It was a mercy killing.

“We were all somewhat concerned about the ending—squeamish—but Duke was adamant. He felt the audience would react badly.” Also, he probably felt that his character was acquiescing to malignant fate—a man with a code being outstripped by events. The ending was changed—the Howard character kills the man who kills Books, then throws the gun away in a renunciation of violence.

Once Wayne came on board, the rest of the casting proceeded smoothly. “Old Hollywood came to the rescue,” said Self. “Jimmy Stewart came in and did his small part for Duke. We were not in a position to meet Lauren Bacall’s usual salary, but she did the picture because of Duke.” The reason was simple: “We all felt it might be his last film,” said Hugh O’Brian, who played the gambler who takes on Books in his last gunfight.

At Siegel’s suggestion, Wayne began to grow a mustache and a little patch under his lower lip. He hadn’t liked the idea, but agreed to try, and during preproduction Siegel received a Polaroid of Wayne that had been taken in Mexico. He was sporting two weeks worth of a bona fide mustache and the soul patch. Scrawled on the Polaroid were the words, “I can’t believe it. Duke.”

With a budget of $8 million, half from Paramount, half from De Laurentiis,
The Shootist
got under way in the second week of January 1976 with location work outside Carson City. As Miles Hood Swarthout said, “It was hammer and tongs from day one.”

“It started with a quote in the Carson City newspaper,” recalled Ron Howard. “Don Siegel had given an interview and we were walking around while Wayne was reading the article out loud. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Wayne is supposed to eat directors for breakfast. But if he tries to eat me, he’ll get indigestion.’

“Wayne folded up the newspaper and looked at me. ‘Why the fuck did he have to say that?’ he said.” That led into a long, fuming diatribe about how
Dirty Harry
wasn’t all that good, that Europe liked Siegel a lot more than Americans did, somehow arriving at the injustice of
The Apartment
beating out
The Alamo
for Best Picture.

Howard already knew he wanted to be a director and found himself in what he called “an unbelievably privileged situation. Duke always referred to me as ‘Old 21.’ He respected the fact that I had come out of TV. Early on, he said to me, ‘I came out of cheap westerns, and that was the TV of our time.’ He liked the unpretentious work ethic of television, where you have to finish it by Friday.”

Wayne and Howard had several important scenes together, and since Wayne was always willing to rehearse, Howard spent a lot of time in Wayne’s trailer. Siegel knew Howard wanted to be a director, so Siegel was always answering Howard’s questions about the craft. “I was in both of their good graces. And when the schism presented itself, I was afforded a little insight.”

The elevation was 3,500 feet. Wayne quickly caught a cold, which, as was often the case after his cancer surgery, turned into a bronchial infection. The film was supposed to open with shots of Wayne descending on horseback from the high country, but that proved to be a bad idea; his faltering lung capacity wouldn’t allow him to go any higher than the flatlands, so the film opened with unimpressive landscapes.

After an initial set-to when Wayne discovered that Frankovich and Self had hired a still photographer he hadn’t approved, Siegel began directing. He got the shot for the main title, but as they segued to the scene of an attempted holdup that began the story, Wayne simply took over and directed the sequence himself. “He didn’t do too badly,” remembered Siegel with dry humor. “I wasn’t welcome to have anything to do with it.” At the end of the day, Siegel was embarrassed and despondent.

The next morning, Wayne called Siegel and asked him to come to his hotel room, where he apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. “The trouble is simply this,” he said. “I have to work loose, or I’m no good.” For that day and several thereafter, Wayne was docile. “Mr. Siegel, there’s one director on this picture and thank God it’s you,” he announced to the cast and crew. “What’s your pleasure?”

But Wayne continued to have trouble breathing. Several mornings he had to lie across a table while a physical therapist pounded his back to try to loosen the phlegm that was collecting in his lungs—the same therapy cystic fibrosis patients have to endure. A couple of times he needed assistance to stand up.

Occasionally he was racked by spasms of coughing, and his voice was raspy from the cold and elevation. His stamina was not what it had been; he had to lie down in his trailer for twenty minutes at lunchtime. “I just don’t seem to have the charge anymore,” he grumbled. “But damn it, I’m 69 in May.”

Contributing to the general malaise was a salt-free diet he’d adopted in an effort to get his weight down. He was also taking Lasix, a drug given to heart patients to drain water out of the system. The result was that everything was tasteless—“the goddamn lettuce tastes like grass,” he complained. He was a virtual prisoner in his suite on the eighth floor of the Ormsby House hotel. He ventured down into the casino area precisely once, and managed only about three minutes at the craps tables before a crowd assembled and made further play impossible.

“He had one lung, and had trouble breathing at any altitude whatsoever,” said Miles Hood Swarthout. “He had a nurse assigned to him twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes between takes he would take a hit from an oxygen tank.”

The feeling was that once production got out of the cold and back to Hollywood the star would get his equilibrium, but until then everything was a chore. Wayne was irascible, and he lashed out at cameraman Bruce Surtees, who was supervising the laying of track for a moving shot: “You’d do a damn sight better if you concentrated on the lighting instead of fucking around with dollies, making the cast look like zombies.”

At dinnertime, the conversation was about old times and old friends—Bogart, Hepburn, Tracy, Pappy Ford. One night, Wayne told Lauren Bacall about his salt-free diet, and she promptly snatched the olive out of his martini. During the day, Wayne groused about his age (“I don’t mind being old, I just mind not being able to move”) and advised Don Siegel on his camera angles.

On Sunday, Wayne invited Siegel and Carol Rydall, his script supervisor, to his suite to watch a football game and they shared some clams that a friend of his had just flown in from Seattle. But after Wayne advised them to bet the Steelers over the Cowboys, he said he wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed.

“Wayne wasn’t particularly reflective, at least not with me,” remembered Bacall. “He loved to enjoy life, but he wasn’t feeling well. One day he said to me, ‘God, I can’t drink, I can’t smoke, life’s no fun anymore.’ But he was still feisty, ornery in a way. A very sweet man, actually. We got along very well.”

Even though the company was working short days, often quitting around 3 P.M. Carson City was hard for Wayne. “They were resting Duke,” said Ron Howard. “He never complained, except to say once, ‘I only have the one lung.’ ” The company made it through the location work without any further trouble. There were no more explosions from the star, and his performance was consistently excellent. But the producers were worried.

“He was physically uncomfortable,” remembered Self. “A lot of the animosity toward Siegel was due to Wayne’s health. He would get tired, and say to Don, ‘It’s good enough.’ And Don would say, ‘I want another one.’ That became an issue at times. Wayne thought we were over-covering a scene, doing too many takes. Duke would want to move on to another scene and Don would want to keep working. And Wayne being the professional he was, he would do it again.”

The picture moved to the Warner Bros. back lot, where Robert Boyle converted a run-down western street into a thing of beauty for less than $300,000. James Stewart came in to do his scene, and seemed glad to be back in the saddle, however briefly. But Stewart hadn’t made a movie in five years, and his hearing was badly compromised. He couldn’t pick up his cues quickly, which in turn threw Wayne’s timing off. The two old pros rallied and pulled the scene off beautifully, but it was yet another reminder that the making of the movie was in some sense a mirror image of the story of the movie.

The tension between Wayne and Siegel continued. Wayne told Tom Kane that Siegel didn’t know how to cover a scene, that he was a TV director—over-the-shoulder close-up, cut to another over-the-shoulder close-up. He complained to reporters about what he felt to be the unnecessary claustrophobia of Siegel’s vision. “Jack Ford used to tell me, ‘Give ’em scenery, give ’em a scene, and give ’em action. Do it in any order you want, but don’t try to give ’em a scene and scenery at the same time, and don’t try to play action at the same time.’ I can’t tell you how many fellas I’ve worked with didn’t realize that.”

“Siegel had a short man’s complex,” said Swarthout. “He was a little guy, and very feisty—a little bit of a martinet who wanted to do things his way: to follow the script he had laid out. Wayne didn’t like to work that way. He wanted to improvise, change his lines, have a say in the casting. They were just complete opposites in the way they approached movies.”

“The reality was that outside of one or two moments, I didn’t actually witness much of anything,” said Ron Howard. “But they simply weren’t comfortable with each other. Siegel staged it, he directed it. He didn’t abdicate and Wayne didn’t mutiny, outside of a couple of flare-ups.”

One of those flare-ups remained permanently engraved on Howard’s memory—a scene between him and Wayne in a barn.

It was an important scene. Duke walked in. There were two things: the camera was on the floor looking up at Duke, who was supposed to be sitting on a bale of hay. The camera was on a dolly and there was going to be a microphone between his feet.

Duke sat down and looked at the camera and looked at Siegel. And sighed. And said, “Well, hell.” And then he looked at the dolly grip and stared swinging his arms around. The grip didn’t know what to do. Duke kept swinging his arms around, telling him to move the camera without actually saying it. And finally the grip moved the camera over in front of Wayne. And then Duke started moving his arm upward, telling him to raise the camera off the ground, so it wouldn’t look up his nose and jowls.

And when that was done, he said, “Now let’s shoot the goddamn scene.” Throughout all of this, Don Siegel just stood there and didn’t say a thing. I felt terrible for him. And after we’d done the scene and Duke had left, Siegel said to me, “The reality is that you bring everything you have to a movie, but three weeks into the picture you’re a captive of the star. If they fire anybody, it’s going to be the director. You have to make the decision.”

That was the only time I saw Wayne take over completely. And ever since then, I’ve wondered what I would do if an actor did that to me.

Mostly, the relationship between Wayne and Siegel was like a bad marriage that neither partner wants to completely destroy. “There were these little flare-ups, and both guys were angry,” said Howard. “Privately, I suspect there were words. They never kissed and made up, but both of them respected the work. It never held us up.”

Despite Wayne’s ongoing dissatisfaction, despite his physical problems, the picture was on schedule. “He was on time, he knew his words, he was ready,” said Hugh O’Brian. “There was no bullshit with Duke; he was absolutely professional.”

Wayne played chess a few times with “Old 21” and beat the hell out of the young man. “He was
so
aggressive,” said Howard. “I played him well, but I couldn’t come close to beating him. Dave [Grayson], his makeup man, could beat him, and Duke would stomp around and curse about it, but he wasn’t really mad; he loved a good game.”

Even though Wayne knew that cancer had him in its sights again, he moved resolutely forward, playing even the most dangerous scenes without a trace of self-pity. “Every now and then we would just be standing next to one another and he’d kind of just hold my hand,” said Lauren Bacall. “One of the crew mentioned that it was a beautiful day, and he said, ‘Every day you wake up is a beautiful day.’ ”

There were no such gentle reflections with Siegel, who became the target for all of the star’s dissatisfactions and fear. After a while, Siegel began to look pale and beaten. He had worked with recalcitrant actors before, but never someone this formidable. Wayne would tell anyone who asked that Siegel was too rigid, that he was blocking scenes instead of letting them flow. Burt Kennedy or Andy McLaglen would have capitulated, but Siegel dug in his heels and the film settled down to a grinding series of disagreements and mutual bad temper.