John Wayne: The Life and Legend (12 page)

As the film scholar William K. Everson noted, it’s strange that Fox hadn’t handed
The Big Trail
to John Ford, who had already demonstrated great expertise with westerns; it might not have been a better picture, but it assuredly would have been better organized, hence less expensive, hence more commercial. The failure of
The Big Trail
affected Raoul Walsh’s career to the extent that Fox never again gave him that kind of budget. But the bulk of the movie’s failure fell on its young star.
The Big Trail
was the last A picture John Wayne would make for nearly ten years, as Fox quickly canceled his prospective starring vehicles.

Wayne next showed up in a Fox programmer called
Girls Demand Excitement
, directed by the choreographer Seymour Felix, which began shooting in November 1930 after the failure of
The Big Trail
was apparent. Wayne’s co-star was Virginia Cherrill, the leading lady of Chaplin’s
City Lights
.

Wayne always regarded
Girls Demand Excitement
as the nadir of his professional life. “I was the fellow who was sour grapes, who played basketball to try to get the girls out of school. Well, I want to tell you something, I never tried to get a girl out of school in my life. I’d want them right there. . . . [Felix] had girls and boys sitting in trees and sticking their heads out of class windows and hugging each other. It was just so goddamn ridiculous that I was hanging my head.”

Actually,
Girls Demand Excitement,
while innocuous, is not really as bad as Wayne thought; as Richard Roberts noted, had it been made a year earlier, or two years later, it would have made a good musical in the vein of
Good News
. Wayne plays a gardener who works for the family of the charisma-free Cherrill, a spoiled rich girl. In college, she and Wayne find themselves in a fraternity/sorority war. Wayne’s performance is relaxed and without mannerisms.

Variety
noted that “John Wayne is the same young man who was in
The Big Trail
and also is here spotted in a farce that does little to set him off.” Wayne’s next appearance for Fox came in May 1931, when he showed up in a small part in something called
Three Girls Lost.

Wayne was slinking around Fox, embarrassed about the failure of
The Big Trail
, utterly demoralized by
Girls Demand Excitement
, when he ran into Will Rogers, the biggest star on the lot. Rogers saw that Wayne was down and asked what the trouble was. Wayne explained his situation, and the sensible Rogers told him, “You’re working, aren’t you? Just keep working.”

Wayne always remembered that moment as “the best advice I ever got—just keep working and learning, however bad the picture . . . and boy, I made some lousy pictures.” For the rest of his life Wayne always put more stock in being a working actor than in biding his time waiting for just the right part in just the right movie.

Three Girls Lost
completed filming in mid-January of 1931, at which point Fox released the young actor. That made it official: John Wayne had been a white-hot new star at twenty-two, and he was washed up at twenty-three.

His time in the wilderness was just beginning, but that time would give him an image, a personality, and a technique. That time would prove his salvation.

1. That August, the trade papers added up Fox’s indebtedness and figured out that the company had $45 million in debt payments due within the next six months, not counting $7 million in creditor judgments. Receivership, not prosperity, was just around the corner.

After Fox dumped him, Wayne landed a six-month contract at Columbia.
Men Are Like That
, his first picture for the studio, was an adaptation of the Augustus Thomas play
Arizona,
which sounds like a western but isn’t. Wayne’s co-star was Laura La Plante, a charming leading lady of silent pictures who was equally charming in talkies. The script was by Robert Riskin, soon to start working with Frank Capra, the director the capable George B. Seitz.

Wayne plays a young football star/officer who loves the ladies then leaves them. The jilted La Plante marries Wayne’s commanding officer, whereupon Wayne starts up with La Plante’s sister. There are all sorts of racy possibilities, few of which are realized.

It’s a mediocre movie, but it captures Wayne in the chrysalis stage of his career, without an outdoor background to accommodate his rough performance. The mannerisms that would become familiar—the wrinkling of the forehead, the pauses in the middle of his lines—are absent, although he does clench his jaw to indicate anger. His inexperience is mainly demonstrated by the fact that he doesn’t really listen to the other actors, just waits for his cue.

The critics were harsher than they needed to be—the stink of
The Big Trail
was all over Wayne, and the dogs barked their condescension for a decade and more.
The New York Times
said that “[It is] hardly a film that can be characterized as good entertainment. . . . Miss La Plante is not convincing any more than John Wayne is in the part of Denton.”

Columbia boss Harry Cohn must have been unimpressed, because for the rest of the contract Wayne was given roles that were little more than insults—a corpse in
The Deceiver
, billing beneath Buck Jones and Tim McCoy in a couple of westerns. Complicating Wayne’s stay at Columbia was Cohn’s belief that Wayne was having an affair with a young actress whom Cohn regarded as his personal property.

“It was a goddamned lie,” Wayne told me, still furious more than forty years later. “I’d been brought up to respect older people, and he talked to me like I was a sewer rat.” At one point, Cohn screamed at Wayne, “You keep your goddamned fly buttoned at my studio!” Wayne reacted to the unjust accusation with a lifelong slow burn. Cohn began a process of harassment calculated to provoke Wayne to break his contract—unless he was scheduled to work on a given day, he was barred from the studio.

But the cowboy star Buck Jones decided to use Wayne in spite of Cohn. Jones would invite the younger man to go boating around Catalina whenever Jones was on the outs with his wife. Jones and Wayne had something in common—they had both worked for John Ford. Wayne never forgot the gesture that came at a time when he was increasingly desperate and thinking about trying boxing, because the movie business just seemed too tough. Buck Jones spent the rest of his life in B westerns, and Wayne always remembered him with affection: “Buck Jones was one of the real heroes of our business. He went back into that [Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in] Boston three times after people and the fourth time he didn’t come back out. But there’s no memorial to him, there’s no thought [for him]. Ours is the business of what did you do for me today . . . they certainly forgot old Buck.”

Within a single year, Fox had washed its hands of Wayne and he was let go at Columbia. If he wanted to keep working, if he wanted to maintain any standing at all in the eyes of Josie’s parents, he had little choice except to become one of the all-purpose jobbing actors haunting Poverty Row, the area around Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Toward the end of 1931, Wayne signed to do three serials for Mascot, a small company run by a man named Nat Levine.

The salary on offer was $2,000—not $2,000 apiece, but $2,000 for all three serials, $2,000 for six-day weeks, twelve- to sixteen-hour days for the eighteen to twenty-one days it usually took to make one of Levine’s serials. To get the films made on time, two directors worked simultaneously, one on interiors, one on exteriors. Working for Mascot meant that you weren’t paid for acting, you were paid for endurance and for the willingness to work cheap.

The money was terrible, but it was the pit of the Depression, and Wayne was damaged goods twice over. There was only one catch: it was Levine’s intention to start shooting a serial called
Shadow of the Eagle
the very next day. Was Wayne willing to start shooting tomorrow, for that money and not a dime more?

The next day at four in the morning, Levine picked up Wayne in his chauffeur-driven Packard. He had thoughtfully brought breakfast so they could save some time. While Wayne ate his danish, Levine outlined the story of the serial Wayne was about to start shooting as soon as the sun came up.

“We were asked to be on location
before
sunup, so that shooting could start as soon as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon,” remembered one Mascot veteran. “We would sit there, poised—the cameras ready, performers on their horses. When the earliest rays broke across the valley, the director would jump up and yell ‘Roll ’Em,’ and away we’d go.” When the sun went down, flares would be lit and held by crew members so close-ups could be shot.

Mascot had been formed by Levine in 1927, when he was only twenty-eight years old. He had been the personal secretary for theater magnate Marcus Loew, then went to work for the distributor of the Felix the Cat cartoons. Levine operated on the states-rights fringe of the movie business and specialized in making features for $30,000, serials for $40,000. As with everybody on Poverty Row, Mascot was thinly capitalized. Much of Levine’s running debt was absorbed by Herbert Yates, who ran Consolidated Film Industries, the company that did the lab work for Mascot as well as most other Poverty Row outfits.

Mascot’s headquarters were above a contractor’s warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard, just down the street from Hollywood Memorial (now Hollywood Forever) Cemetery. To keep costs down, the only generators used were for cameras; Levine didn’t use lights for exteriors, only reflectors. In fact, he didn’t even have a studio of his own until 1933, when he leased the bankrupt Mack Sennett lot in North Hollywood (today it’s CBS Television City). Levine rented everything, including his sound equipment, which he got for so much per day from Walt Disney.

Shadow of the Eagle
, Wayne’s first Mascot serial, began shooting in December 1931, with Wayne playing a stunt pilot working for a small carnival who tries to clear the name of the owner, who has been a father figure. Wayne had gained some assurance since
The Big Trail
, although considering the caliber of the filmmaking around him it wasn’t really necessary.

Except for the credits, there’s no music—too expensive—and a lot of the exteriors have no sound at all, which saved the company money because they only rented the sound equipment for interiors. There were very few second or third takes.

In the serial’s final chapter, Wayne trips and nearly falls, but director Ford Beebe keeps the footage. Wayne remembered one day when they didn’t finish until midnight, after Beebe had made 114 shots. They had to be ready to go just eight hours later, so most of the company slept in their cars rather than drive back home.

The cast of
Shadow of the Eagle
is notable only for the presence of Yakima Canutt, who would become Hollywood’s greatest stuntman, not to mention a close friend and working companion of Wayne’s, and Billy West, the leading Chaplin imitator of silent films, here playing the small part of a clown.

Canutt had been hired to double Wayne in addition to playing a henchman. Canutt called a friend who had already worked with the star to find out what kind of man he was. “You’ll like him,” said the friend. “He’s really great. And when it comes to ribbing, he’ll hold his own—even with you.”

The practical jokes began early. An actor named Bud Osborne told Wayne that Canutt was a spy for Nat Levine—everything that went on would be reported back to the producer. For a few days, Canutt pretended to be writing in a little black book, and Wayne reacted by giving him dirty looks and keeping his distance.

Then Osborne took Wayne behind the set for a quick drink, and Canutt came around the opposite corner. Canutt checked the time and wrote in his little black book. Wayne lost his temper and went for him, but Osborne and a few others grabbed him and let him in on the joke. Wayne thought it was hilarious, and the picture proceeded as smoothly as it could considering the endless hours necessary to get the picture shot on schedule.

Wayne remembered that it was the shared pain of the Mascot experience that sealed his friendship with Canutt. One terrible day, the company worked till midnight shooting dialogue scenes at the studio, then had a 5 A.M. call at a rock quarry in the San Fernando Valley. Wayne had no car and the buses didn’t run that early, so he asked Levine for help. Levine let him have a Chevy convertible to drive home for a few hours sleep in order to guarantee that he’d be on location on schedule.

When he got to the rock quarry, it was still dark, but one man had beat him to the location and had built a fire. Wayne went over and knelt down by the fire to get warm. “It doesn’t take very long to spend all night out here,” said Yakima Canutt. Canutt pegged their friendship from those minutes of mutually shared weariness.

Making these serials was the movie equivalent of a forced march, and Wayne was always slightly embarrassed about them. They were more humiliation than he preferred to remember, and more exhaustion than he expected to endure. On one of the Mascot serials, he worked for twenty-six straight hours—not abnormal for a low-end production in the pre-union days.