John Wayne: The Life and Legend (31 page)

A couple of Grant’s stories were adapted by Poverty Row studios, but he struck it big when MGM bought one of his stories and turned it into a Spencer Tracy–Myrna Loy vehicle entitled
Whipsaw.
Irving Thalberg suggested that Grant wander around the lot and pay particular attention to directors and editors at work. Thalberg was one of the few Hollywood people whom Grant liked: “He was the first man in Hollywood—in fact at that time he was probably the only one—who treated writers with respect.”

By that time, Grant had already acquired the drinking habits that would mark most of his life. “All the offices had bars,” he remembered of MGM in those days. “You started drinking when you got to the studio, and didn’t stop until you went to bed. If you went to bed. One writer I knew had a desk with eight drawers. Seven of them had nothing in them but liquor.”

After writing and directing
Angel and the Badman
, Jimmy Grant would, with occasional time out for alcohol-fueled explosions, shadow Wayne for the rest of his life as a house writer—an official or unofficial rewrite man, who could write dialogue that fit Wayne’s screen character comfortably.

“In my dad’s opinion, Jimmy was the best writer for him,” said Patrick Wayne. “My dad could just say his dialogue. Jimmy was a great character—a great friend, a smoker, a drinker. Eventually he stopped smoking and drinking, but by then it was too late. It was a great social and professional relationship.”

A sample of Grant’s humor is found in a mock studio bio he composed for himself a few years after he met Wayne: “James Edward Grant was born in a log cabin. . . . Splitting logs by day, he studied by night by the light of a log fire; this left very few logs for sale, so they were very poor.

“While clerking in a village store, he walked seven miles one night to return a three-penny overcharge to a lady customer; the broad did not succumb to this gambit, so he walked back the seven miles, unbanged.

“During this period, he wrote Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ ”

Shared political conservatism was yet another bond between the two. Grant and Wayne became not only best friends, but traveling companions; over the years, there would be trips to Mexico, South America, and Europe. “After my dad died, Duke said my old man was the best friend he ever had,” said Grant’s son Colin. “He was Irish, a storyteller. They thought alike politically, and my dad could write dialogue that sounded like Duke could say it and it sounded real.”

Most movies are adaptations, but Grant preferred to write original scripts. His working methods were those of an old newspaperman. He wouldn’t outline, wouldn’t organize. When the story was complete in his head and not before, he would get up between five or six in the morning, sit down at his electric typewriter—Grant was always one of the first with any new gizmo—and bang out the script with two fingers in a couple of weeks.

Grant was a good golfer—around a ten handicap—and was always up for chess or skirt chasing. “He was always playing around with somebody,” said Colin. “My mother was great, a real lady, but I can’t remember her ever hassling the old man about it. Once in a great while they would fight, but not much. Of course, she knew. Somebody once asked Robert Mitchum how he had stayed married to one woman for forty years in Hollywood. ‘A lack of imagination,’ he said.”

Grant knew how to write scenes that Wayne could play. Tom Kane, who would become Wayne’s story editor, outlined a classic Wayne setup: Wayne is camped by a river, his horse beside him. He’s making some coffee. His horse snorts and Wayne says, “I see him.” A man on a horse rides into the scene and starts to cross the river.

“I wouldn’t cross if I were you,” says Wayne.

“Why not? Afraid it’ll muddy up your coffee water?”

The man rides into the river, which turns out to be quicksand and both horse and rider struggle to get to the other side. Wayne never looks up, never offers help.

Fade out.

Wayne rides into town. The man on horseback is in the saloon playing cards. Wayne and he exchange glances, and Wayne smiles knowingly.

The essence of the emerging Wayne character was strength and a knowledge of the way the world works, communicated in as few words as possible. The trick was to do it without overasserting the actor’s natural dominance. Grant fit right in with Wayne’s core group, as he was cut from the same cloth: hard-drinking, conservative, pugnacious, and—mostly—Irish.

Around the same time Grant and Wayne made
Angel and the Badman
, Wayne became fascinated by the story of the Alamo, which fell to the Mexican dictator General Santa Anna on March 6, 1836, after a siege of thirteen days. Santa Anna referred to the battle as “a small affair,” but it had massive ramifications—Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto as a direct consequence, which resulted in Texas’s independence from Mexico and, eventually, its statehood.

Wayne saw the Alamo as more than another one of the presumably glorious martyrdoms that history throws up every so often—Thermopylae, Masada. He saw the Alamo as a moral tale about America’s perennial struggle for freedom from authoritarian influence.

The movies had dabbled in Alamo stories several times in the silent days and in
Man of Conquest,
a 1939 Republic picture with Richard Dix as Sam Houston. But they had all used the battle the way westerns used the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—as a convenient hook on which to hang melodramatic plot machinations. Wayne would conceive of an Alamo movie as more than a movie, more than folklore. It would be a rallying cry.

In 1936, Wayne had been just another western star at Republic, but by 1946 he was a certified movie star, with a production deal and control over his own movies. He believed he knew who was responsible. “I’d like to get up on housetops and shout out what I owe to [John Ford],” Wayne told Louella Parsons in 1946. “I simply owe to him every mouthful I eat, every dollar I’ve got, and practically every bit of happiness I know, that’s all.” This feeling of indebtedness never changed.

Michael Wayne would come to believe that his father would have made it anyway—he was so determined, so focused. But Wayne knew that luck matters as much as talent, as much as determination, as much as anything. Wayne had executed the part of the Ringo Kid beautifully, but it was a great part in a great film—the showcase had made all the difference.

Wayne’s on-the-record references to Ford over the years are consistently adoring, although in conversation he could be considerably more objective. But Ford was always a grudging personality, a father figure who maintained authority by withholding overt displays of affection, at least as far as outsiders were concerned. Gene Autry enjoyed telling a story about running into Ford in the steam room of the Lakeside Golf Club.

“I went in and he happened to be sitting there. So I was in the next day and he was there again. So I said, ‘You gonna make a picture, John?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna make a picture with ol’ Meathead.’ I said ‘Who’s that?’ and he said, ‘Wayne. I’m gonna make a picture with Wayne.’ ”

Despite the condescension, Wayne believed that Ford was the ultimate in savvy and artistry. “He’s a man whose judgment you can trust implicitly. When I’m working under him all I ask is ‘What kind of clothes do you want me to wear?’ The rest I leave up to him. He directs instinctively, rather than sticking to a book of set rules. If a scene comes off in a different manner than he’d planned, he’s liable to say ‘Print it!’ He knows quality when he sees it.”

Wayne had been making movies for more than fifteen years and had developed theories of moviemaking that would never really change, theories that in large part stemmed from ten years of making crummy pictures rather than five or six years of making quality pictures. He defined the difference between B pictures and A pictures as the difference between action and reaction, between a quick punch to the jaw and the expression on a face. Wayne preferred to emphasize the eyes over the fist.

“One man should serve as producer and director. Making a film is like painting a picture. If you were having your portrait painted, you wouldn’t have one artist do your eyes, another your nose and still a third your mouth. That’s why I think, as nearly as possible, production control should be centered in the talents of a single individual.”

Because he had worked in both large and small parts, he believed in the ensemble rather than the relentless star close-up. “Give the scene to whom it belongs, even if it’s an extra. If I call a guy a bad name the audience is not interested in my reaction, which is already known, but his. So give him the camera angle.”

As for content, he wanted depth of character when he could find it. “You go to a good track meet and see some fine action; you’re amused for the time being, but the effect doesn’t stick with you. A conversation with George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, will.” What he looked for, he said, was “an unusual viewpoint on the familiar.”

And there was one other thing: Wayne was beginning to say that if he ever washed out as an actor, “I wouldn’t mind directing.” He never washed out as an actor, but, as dozens of directors would find out, that didn’t stop him from directing anyway.

When FDR died in April 1945, his aura of spiritual and political authority died with him, and in the 1946 elections the Republicans took control of Congress. That April the Motion Picture Alliance began publishing a monthly newsletter entitled
The Vigil.
The first issue featured informational questions and answers:

Q: Why not Fascism?

A: We haven’t yet found any Fascist Front organizations in our sector of the American scene, which is motion pictures. We’re watching for them. If any Fascist groups do appear, we’ll be in there swinging at them. . . .

Q: Are [there any Communist Front organizations] presently active?

A: Active indeed.

Q: What do you propose to do about it?

A: Inform you. It’s a long list, but in time, you’ll have the name of every one of our local Communist Front organizations, what it is, what it is doing, where it came from, and where it is going to go.

The Motion Picture Alliance helped bring about the first wave of congressional investigations of the movie industry in 1947, facilitated by Eric Johnston, who had taken over the Motion Picture Association of America from Will Hays in 1945. Johnston declared, “We’ll have no more
Grapes of Wrath
, we’ll have no more
Tobacco Road
s. We’ll have no more films that show the seamy side of American life.”

In May 1947, J. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.) the new chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, came to Los Angeles and set up shop at the Biltmore Hotel, where he conducted preliminary interviews with many witnesses who would later be categorized as “friendly.” Thomas, a fierce enemy of the New Deal, asked for names from the FBI’s lists of suspected subversives. “Expedite,” J. Edgar Hoover wrote on Thomas’s letter. “I want to extend
every
assistance to this committee.”

Most of the witnesses who testified at the Biltmore were members of the Motion Picture Alliance: Robert Taylor, James Kevin McGuinness, Adolphe Menjou, Richard Arlen. Jack Warner also testified, naming every person on his payroll that he suspected of being a Communist.

Some of the testimony leaked—Rupert Hughes reported that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists” and Ginger Rogers’s mother testified that her daughter had refused to speak one obviously Communistic line: “Share and share alike.”
²

The congressman returned to Washington and a nervous summer silence descended on Hollywood. At the end of the summer, it was announced that HUAC would open hearings on the “Hollywood situation” on September 23, 1947.

While all this was going on, Ward Bond was extremely busy; always in demand as a character actor, he now began to function as a self-appointed Inspector Javert, checking out the anticommunist bona fides of various actors, writers, and directors. Bond was capable of either clearing suspects or hurling them into the darkness. In 1947 Anthony Quinn had a part in a film fall through at the last minute. Quinn was a member of the Actor’s Lab, an offshoot of the Group Theatre, where Morris Carnovsky moderated the classes. The Alliance considered the Actor’s Lab a clubhouse for Communists, and someone told Quinn that he needed to be cleared of subversion. “See Ward Bond,” he was told.