John Wayne: The Life and Legend (41 page)

By the time they drove back through the mountains, neither Wayne nor Colin Grant was feeling any pain. Wayne wasn’t done drinking, and ordered Colin to stop at a ramshackle old building that looked like a bar. “The place looked closed,” remembered Grant. “But Duke got out of the car, went over and kicked open the door. He looked in and there was nothing there but cobwebs. And then he turned to us in the car and said, ‘The son of a bitch is closed!’

“All I could say was ‘I told you.’

“He was very funny—a cool guy.”

Despite Barry Goldwater’s rational attitude toward Dwight Eisenhower, Wayne’s heart and mind usually went toward the most conservative candidate, so in 1952 he stayed a Robert Taft supporter. During the primary season, he went to a party carrying a bag full of Taft buttons and began handing them out. One of his employees refused to put one on, and Wayne said, “You must have some reason.”

“Yeah, I do,” said the man. He explained that Taft had voted against a bill that provided amputees from World War II with special equipment that would enable them to drive cars. “I couldn’t vote for a man like that,” said the man. “I couldn’t vote for him if he was running for dogcatcher. Being a veteran myself, that stuff is still pretty close to me, and that’s just the way I feel.”

Wayne nodded, said he understood, and nothing else was said about the matter.

Wayne’s standing deal with Warner Bros. guaranteed a budget of at least $900,000—he was always on guard against sliding back into cheap pictures—while his compensation was set at $17,500 a week for ten weeks. In December 1949, the contract was extended for another year at the same terms, and in 1951 the contract was extended yet again, with a new feature: he would get a percentage if any of his Warners movies was rereleased within four years of American and Canadian release, or five years of release overseas—Wayne and Charles Feldman’s response to Republic’s habit of quickly reissuing any picture that was even a marginal hit.

The first picture under the deal with Warners was
Operation Pacific,
a submarine picture co-starring Patricia Neal. Wayne’s reputation as a genial working companion preceded him, so Neal was surprised to find him “abrupt and unfriendly,” not just with her but with the entire company. Gradually, word got around that he was in the midst of a bad situation with Chata, and the company gave him a wide berth. Wayne’s marriage was entering its terminal phase.

For the next ten years, Wayne would center his movie activities around Warner Bros., which was run by the uneasy partnership of Harry and Jack Warner. Jack ran the studio, Harry ran the company. Harry’s granddaughter Cass Warner Sperling remembers him as “the man gathering the money and keeping the studio alive for over fifty years. Jack? Jack was like a mosquito on a hot night.”

The standard line on the brothers was that Harry was brilliant and honorable—he was the first movie mogul to pull his company out of Nazi Germany—and that Jack was a devious clown, but Harry was not without his deceptive side as well; his granddaughter remembers him talking about the early years of the company, when he planned stockholder meetings in the middle of winter in Podunk towns so as to minimize the number of attendees, as well as their complaints.

Jack was the classic youngest child in a large family, continually playing the Look-At-Me card in order to get attention. Warner and Wayne would develop a jocular, teasing relationship, helped by the fact that it was hard for either of them to stay angry. Jack frequently threw William Wellman and Howard Hawks off the lot, but he would always bring them back for another picture. His benevolence toward talent ended with Judy Garland, whose behavior threw
A Star Is Born
far over budget and cost the studio any chance of financial success; years later, he adamantly refused to cast her as Mama Rose in
Gypsy.

On the emotional level, Jack Warner has always been an enigma; the man who could cheat his brother out of the studio and disinherit his son also had, alone among the founding generation of moguls, the capacity to continually reinvent his studio. Mayer, Zukor, and the rest were slamming into old age and irrelevance in the 1950s, while Jack was coming up with James Dean, Natalie Wood, James Garner, and Warren Beatty. They didn’t like him any more than Errol Flynn or Bette Davis had, but Jack Warner had the knack of finding star personalities. Some he developed; some, like John Wayne, he rented.

The first few pictures Wayne made at Warners were programmers; for another classic, he was once again blessed by John Ford, who finally managed to get his long-dreamed-of production of
The Quiet Man
off the ground at Republic.

In 1944, Maureen O’Hara was making
The Spanish Main
at RKO when John Ford came to visit. He was wearing her father’s old battered hat, a new pair of pants that Mary Ford had bought him and he had aged by burning cigarette holes in the material. (“She went out of her mind trying to get him respectable,” remembered O’Hara.)

A new cop was working the studio gate and wouldn’t let Ford in the studio. Ford was enraged and left. He called a man he knew at RKO named Joe Nolan, who told O’Hara that Ford was furious. She called Ford and told him to come to RKO the next day, that there would be a red carpet from the gate to the set. The idea of the red carpet was attractive, so Ford grudgingly consented.

The reason for the visit was an agreement that Ford wanted O’Hara, Wayne, Victor McLaglen, and Barry Fitzgerald to sign. It was for a film called
The Quiet Man
. O’Hara signed, Frank Borzage witnessed.

For the next six years, every major studio in Hollywood turned down
The Quiet Man
. Every time John Ford made an art movie, audiences stayed away. And this was an Irish movie, for God’s sake, and in Technicolor. “For years,” said O’Hara, “Duke and I would go to see him and say, ‘C’mon Pappy, let’s make it already, or Duke will be playing McLaglen’s role and I’ll be playing the widow woman.’ ”

Herbert Yates didn’t like the script—“It’s a silly little Irish story that won’t make a dime,” he said. The first budget Ford prepared for
The Quiet Man
came in at $1.75 million, which was more than Republic had ever spent on one picture—a lot more. Ford got the budget down to $1.4 million, although weather delays would boost the actual outlay to $1.6 million. Even though Yates had agreed to finance the picture if Ford first made a western (
Rio Grande
), he tried to kill it with a backdoor approach, telling Wayne that
The Quiet Man
was a mistake, that it would hurt his career. He also told Wayne that he wanted nothing to do with it—the responsibility was all Ford’s.

Then Yates began working on Ford to cut the budget. While Wayne was enjoying a trip to South America courtesy of Howard Hughes, Ford wired him: “AFTER MUCH FUSS AND FEATHERS, MUCH WRANGLING, FIST-FIGHTS AND HARSH WORDS, THE BUDGET IS SET EXCEPTING, OF COURSE, FOR YOUR SALARY WHICH YOU WILL HAVE TO TAKE UP WHEN YOU GET BACK. I’M A NERVOUS WRECK.”

So Wayne gave up his contractually guaranteed 10 percent of the profits in exchange for a flat fee of $100,000. Pappy would be able to make his film. In Ireland. In Technicolor.

“Duke came to work,” said Maureen O’Hara.

He knew his lines. He worked like a dog. He tried to make each scene the best he possibly could. He wanted to satisfy the fans who were coming to see the film. . . . He was kind, he supported people. A good man.

Ford used to put people “In the barrel.” The one in the barrel would get hell all day long. Insults, just awful. Your heart would turn over for them, and you wanted to poke [Ford] in the nose. But it wasn’t them he was after, it was some other actor on the set. He wanted to make the other actor unsteady, ready to do a certain kind of scene. And the other actors would be totally involved with you, mad for you, unhappy for you. And then he’d shoot the scene.

He was a totally perverse human being. If you said, “That’s a green tree,” he would say, “What the hell are you talking about. Green? That’s purple.” I don’t know why he was like that, but he was. Roddy McDowall thought he was an angel, the kindest, most wonderful man that ever was. But for the rest of us. . . .

For instance, he pretended he couldn’t see very well, but he actually had eyes like a hawk. On

, I was to do a scene in a kitchen with Walter Pidgeon, and Ford said, “No. I want the shadow from the back of the chair on the wall.”

was lighting the scene, not the cameraman.

O’Hara approached her part of Mary Kate in
The Quiet Man
as if she were an earth princess. “What I aimed to do was keep her walking three feet off the ground. I wanted a suspended feeling, so that she’d never land on the soil.”

Andrew McLaglen, the assistant director on the picture, asserted that O’Hara and Ford had an affair during the production. O’Hara indignantly denied it, asserting, “The man was old enough to be my father!” But Wayne seems to have believed it as well—he told McLaglen he just didn’t understand how Maureen could kiss Ford, what with his pipe and his habit of chewing on a filthy old handkerchief.

O’Hara had favorite stories of the production that may or may not have had any relation to reality. “They did terrible things to me. Because I was a woman, they wanted me to cry foul. And I wouldn’t, by God, not once. They gathered up the sheep manure, so I’d be dragged through it. They’d kick it in, and my gang would kick it out, but Duke and Ward would kick it back in. And there’s no foul smell like sheep manure. Then Ford would give everybody instructions not to give me a bucket of water to wash up. And the odor would almost kill me.”

Others have pointed out that sheep manure didn’t have to be placed in the meadow, that it was there through a natural process, but O’Hara always persisted in her narrative of victimization.

The crucial scene of declaration in
The Quiet Man
is the love scene in the rain, where Thornton (Wayne) and Mary Kate (O’Hara) feel the tidal pull of desire. “Ford never really directed Duke or me,” said O’Hara. “He would put us in situations, talk to us about the situation and let you work your way out of it. It was never, ‘Put your hand here, raise an eyebrow, then wink.’ He never did that. He hired people he knew could give him what he wanted. All of us, Ward, McLaglen, George O’Brien, the people that knew him so well, before he opened his mouth, we knew what he wanted.”

O’Hara pointed to her oft-told anecdote about Ford shooting a close-up of O’Hara’s hair lashing her face on the beach.

The average director would have put the fan in front of me and blown the hair back from my face, but he put it off to the side so that the hair was lashing my eyeballs. Then he started yelling at me to keep my hands down and let the hair go across my face.

And I put my hands down and said, “What would a baldheaded old son of a bitch know about hair lashing across his eyeballs?” And I immediately thought, “Oh, God, what have I done. I’m going to be killed.”

And in the flash of a second, I could see him check every face on the crew, up in the lights. And I saw him make his decision about whether to kill me or laugh. And he laughed. And the whole crew was relieved. So people laughed for five minutes. But there was that split second when he took everything in and made his decision about how to handle it. And I thought, “

a great director.”

The company spent six weeks in Ireland in June and July of 1951. Screenwriter Frank Nugent said that most of it was spent in “a fine drizzle.” Nugent counted four days of unbroken sunshine, while cameraman Winton Hoch insisted that there were at least six. No matter. Ford and Hoch contrived to make it look like clouds never moved over Innisfree.

Maureen O’Hara asserted that was all nonsense. “[Ford] always gave interviews about the terrible weather in Ireland, and how we only had two days of sunshine. It just wasn’t true. It was one of the finest summers I ever saw in Ireland. I think we had one single day of rain on the location, and that day is in the film. When I run out of the cottage and through the stream and fall down, that was the only day of rain we had. And I wasn’t acting, I was blown down by the wind. But the rest of the film was glorious sunshine, blue skies and puffy clouds. But in interviews . . .”