John Wayne: The Life and Legend (15 page)

He introduced himself to Carr and asked if he needed a publicity man. Carr said that he had just started Monogram Pictures, and they could indeed use a publicity man, especially one who could draw the ads. “Are you an artist?” he asked Parsons.

Parsons said he was. He promptly went home to get some sketches done by his uncle, who actually was an artist. Parsons got the job, figuring Monogram would do until something better opened up. Nothing better opened up, so he spent his life in the movie business.

One day Parsons went into Paul Malvern’s office where a screenwriter was complaining he had completely run out of ideas. Parsons rushed back to his office and batted out a four-page synopsis. “Later on sometimes I’d have to dictate these Waynes,” Parsons told Leonard Maltin, “so [my wife would] say, ‘Well, you sound just like John Wayne.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s [who] I’m writing for. . . . One of the reasons we got along so well was ’cause I could write dialogue he could talk.”

Parsons found that screenwriting paid better than publicity—Malvern paid him between $100 and $200 per script. It was the Depression, Parsons had a wife and child, so an extra hundred dollars for a week’s work was a godsend.

Parsons concurred with Paul Fix’s judgment about Wayne’s lack of self-confidence. “We’d be out on location, he’d do a dialogue sequence and he’d just cuss himself out terribly. He’d go off behind a rock and talk about how lousy he was.”

Many of these early B westerns were shot at Kernville, a little western town that eventually ended up at the bottom of a man-made lake. Failing that, they were made at Newhall, and the cast and crew would arrive before sunrise to build a bonfire to warm up the cameras so that the crew could start shooting the minute the sun came up over the hill—you couldn’t run cold cameras.

Lindsley Parsons remembered Robert Bradbury as “good enough to get by,” but if you were still middle-aged on Poverty Row, you were going to grow old there as well. The money was from hunger, but Parsons and everybody else tried to make the pictures as good as they could be, given the exigencies.

“Certainly I tried to get something different in the scripts,” said Parsons.

I would walk around the lot and try to find something distinctive. In one case, they had an old 1914 Ford touring car and I said, “I got to write this into a John Wayne picture.” I went in to see Paulie [Malvern] and I told him the opening I had in mind—John Wayne’s riding along on a desert trail someplace and then this old prospector

stumbles and just looks like he’s at the bitter end and he says “Look, my Sally is over the hill and I’ve gotta have some water.”

So John Wayne says sure, takes his canteen to go over the hill and Sally is the Ford. . . .

You had to think of something different. Sometimes it was a novel beginning. John Wayne stopping by a creek and taking a drink of water out of the creek and somebody sticks a gun in his back. Where do you go from there? Another one, where he drives up in front of a small town saloon, there’s practically nobody on the street, he hears the sound of a mechanical piano in there, and he goes in—everybody’s dead. . . . You cut to the wall and there are two eyes watching him. Good opening. All you needed was a good opening to get those things started off.

Wayne was bruised by failure and insecurity, but Parsons remembered him as soldiering on despite feeling “pretty low.” At that point, Wayne’s primary goal was to keep working—he too was a married man, and his son, Michael, was the first of what would become a large brood. “I was tall, curly haired, shy and a clod-kicker,” Wayne remembered from the vantage point of 1952. “I could say, ‘Reach for the sky, mister!’ pretty well, but beyond that I was the leading character in the nightmares of [acting teacher and character actress] Madame Ouspenskaya.”

“He wasn’t trying to perfect his acting,” said Lindsley Parsons. “He had no confidence in his acting, but he was coming across as a personality. . . . He had a steady home at Monogram and Lone Star and we became very well acquainted. I attended the christening of his first son, and we both got very drunk together. . . . We got loaded quite a few times; if you could get hold of whiskey you drank it. In fact, we had our own bootlegger and I still remember his phone number: Gladstone 8000.”

Parsons remembered that Wayne would be very formal at times, even with his peer group. He always called Parsons “Mr. Parsons” when there were other people around, and “Lin” when they were alone. They only quarreled “when we were drinking, which was quite often. I used to delight in teasing him and arguing with him. He had adopted this very strict, Republican, conservative attitude even in those days and I would fight with him. I know that he wanted to hit me but he couldn’t because I was so small. I can remember one time we were coming back on the bus with a bunch of the [Monogram] exchange men and he got so mad at me he picked me up and put me up on the luggage rack on the bus.”

Wayne wasn’t the worst actor among the B movie cowboys, but he wasn’t the best either. He was taller than Bob Steele—everybody was—but at this stage in their careers, Steele was a better actor. Wayne was sexier than Hoot Gibson, but Gibson was a better rider. What Wayne had was charm, great good looks, a wonderful smile, and the beginnings of technical and physical assurance to go with the assertiveness that was written into the characters, if not always the performances.

Throughout these pictures, Wayne is always at least adequate, and sometimes more than that. The very real physicality is there—in
West of the Divide
, he does a backward somersault—and so is a strength of personality fascinating to watch in embryo form. He’s occasionally gauche but always sincere and winning; he’s not a natural actor by any means, but he is a natural star, and you can watch him working at both polishing and transcending his innate gifts. He’s incrementally assembling the pieces, working on presentation, working on movement, working on dialogue, and always being a good co-worker.

“He was pretty tall and skinny,” remembered Cecilia Parker, who was the leading lady in one of the Lone Stars for $125 a few years before she became part of the Andy Hardy ensemble at MGM. “I liked him. He was a real nice young man. He was tall and slender and he was on his honeymoon—he had just gotten married. He was late to work many mornings—he drove a little Ford convertible. But he was a real nice young man.

“He was a natural, a typical western gentleman. Very easy to work with. And yet he had enough—I don’t know how to put it—moxie to make you believe that he could take care of a situation.”

The picture Parker worked on was called
Riders of Destiny
—the picture where Wayne plays “Singin’ Sandy” Saunders, who is, a bystander informs us, “the most notorious gunman since Billy the Kid.” Aside from the narrative incongruity of a singing gunfighter, there was a technical problem: Wayne couldn’t sing. Nevertheless, Singin’ Sandy strides down the street while Wayne mouths a song whose lyrics proclaim, “There’ll be blood a-running in town before night . . .” Unfortunately, the singing voice doesn’t sound anything like Wayne’s speaking voice.

“That was Paul Malvern’s idea,” said Lindsley Parsons. “The reason he thought he could get away with it was that [Bob Bradbury’s] other son . . . was a doctor or a dentist but a beautiful singer. So we figured that John Wayne would be fiddling with this guitar and singing but back in the brush there we’ve actually got Bradbury’s other son doing the singing.”

Wayne’s acute discomfort is palpable. It was one more humiliation for a man who was becoming all too accustomed to them—Singin’ Sandy is the clip that’s always dragged out to illustrate the ignominious beginnings of Wayne’s career. It was awful and he knew it, but he also knew he couldn’t refuse to do it. As he would tell a co-star forty years later, “I was one step up from being a stuntman. It was a big step. I didn’t want to go back.”

The working conditions of the Lone Stars were not appreciably better than the working conditions on the Warners or Mascot pictures. “It wasn’t glamorous,” said Cecilia Parker. “It was dirty work. I mean you got dusty dirty. And you were tired, you worked from sunup to sundown. And we had a production manager who said, ‘Let’s go boys, the light is getting yellow.’ And that meant hurry up. No mistakes because there were hardly any retakes. You did it, and if it wasn’t done right . . . you just cut it out, eliminated it.”

The tackiness didn’t affect Wayne’s mood. Sammy McKim, a child actor who worked with Wayne in three westerns in the mid-1930s, said that he “was pleasant, always had a smile and a ‘good morning’ for you when you met on the set. He kept to himself pretty much at that time, he wasn’t flamboyant. . . . He was a quality person.”

On Saturday nights, when the picture had to be finished even if they had to work till sunrise on Sunday, the pick-me-up was something called “graveyard stew,” which was a bowl of hot milk with chopped-up bread. It doesn’t sound like much, but Cecilia Parker remembered that “at midnight, it tastes good.” Of course, some of the actors spiked their graveyard stew with something besides milk.

Not even child actors were exempt from the push to complete films on time. Children were supposed to work only five hours of an eight-hour day, with three hours held over for schooling, but Sammy McKim remembered that on the last day of one of the Lone Stars, the production manager told McKim’s grandfather that they had about two more hours of work and needed Sammy.

McKim’s grandfather was instructed to take Sammy out of the studio, say good night to the schoolteacher and get in their car, then wait for the schoolteacher to leave the premises. At that point, they were to drive around to an alley, and knock on a metal door in the back of the western street set. “I worked ’til ten or 11 o’clock that night—and I enjoyed it. It was part of the picture and these were my friends I worked with.”

McKim touched on a major point that made the circumstances bearable—a camaraderie that came as a natural by-product of a small unit pulling together. McKim spoke of “a closeness . . . that came about. And it was genuine, and I don’t care if it was one of the smaller players, or a stuntman. . . . He was accepted just as much as the assistant cameraman and somebody working in the prop wagon. It had a family feel about it.”

It was on one of the Lone Star pictures that Wayne ran into Pardner Jones, one of Hollywood’s legendary characters. Jones was the best sharpshooter in the business, a man John Ford had used as far back as
The Iron Horse
. The scene called for Wayne to be tied up with a shelf full of clay pots around him that were to be shot off.

Wayne had initially felt quite secure about the scene because he had heard all about Pardner Jones, but when he came on the set he was startled to find that Jones was a bald-headed old man reading a newspaper with the help of a magnifying glass the size of a shaving mirror.

After Wayne was tied up, the director called out “Pardner?” and the old man grabbed a 30/30. The director explained the shot and Jones said, “Turn ’em over.” He quickly blew away three of the clay pots, with the shards falling all over Wayne. Jones went back to reading his newspaper.

“I was about ready to call wardrobe,” said Wayne.

For the rest of his life, Wayne sought to replicate this kind of congenial team atmosphere on his sets. Actors reappeared for decades, sometimes from the John Ford stock company, sometimes from Wayne’s own group. Then there were the behind-the-camera personnel—makeup men, stuntmen, wranglers, second unit directors.

Because a film company takes its emotional temperature from the star and the director—and in B westerns the star was usually more powerful than the director—Wayne would usually be right in the middle of the joshing and the camaraderie. The atmosphere was family, and there was no question who the big brother was.

Most of the people who worked with Wayne in these days never dreamed that he would eventually become an airport, a postage stamp, and a congressional medal. Cecilia Parker was the exception. “He had something about him. He had a certain aura about him. You knew he was going to go somewhere.”

But Louella Parsons spoke for the majority when she wrote that whenever Wayne was spotted at a Hollywood party he looked bored, unhappy, and sleepy. “Well, I
was
sleepy,” he retorted. “Nobody realized that I was making six day epics then, one right after the other, and riding and doing what I hoped was acting in every minute of them.”

These were blue-collar movies, made by blue-collar personalities. In
The Trail Beyond
, Noah Beery Sr. and Jr. shared screen time with Wayne. Beery Sr. got into a disagreement with Paul Malvern, and Malvern asked Yakima Canutt if, as a personal favor, he would beat the hell out of Beery in an upcoming fight scene.

“I’d be glad to,” replied Canutt, “if you’ll make him say to me the things he said to you.”

On another of these one-week wonders, Wayne’s co-star was a precocious fifteen-year-old named Ann Rutherford. “I thought he was a very nice man,” she remembered seventy-five years later.