John Wayne: The Life and Legend (43 page)

In December 1951, with Republic disappearing in the rearview mirror, Wayne and Robert Fellows formed Wayne-Fellows Productions. James Edward Grant was invited into the fold for a salary plus a percentage of the profits of each film he wrote, as well as 5 percent of overall company profits.

Their first hire was a young man named Tom Kane, a naval veteran of World War II who had served in the South Pacific. Kane had been working as a story analyst at Paramount, where his office was a cubicle with a sofa, a chair, and a typewriter on a desk. Paramount wanted very clinical descriptions of properties, much like high school book reports, and Kane wanted out. Kane’s sister in Evanston, Illinois, suggested he talk to an acquaintance of hers named James Edward Grant. Grant never returned Kane’s calls, but the analyst persevered and got Grant’s home phone number. They set up a meeting, and when Kane walked in, John Wayne was there, surrounded by scripts and books piled knee-high all over the room.

“Who’s going to read this crap?” asked Wayne rhetorically.

Kane was offered the job as story editor for the new company. At Paramount he was counseled to think long and hard before he left a secure job. Paramount wasn’t going to go out of business, but a crazy actor with an independent production company? They were likely to make one picture and fold.

On the other hand, Kane thought that working for a crazy actor would be a lot more fun and promise a lot more autonomy than Paramount. He took the job. Wayne-Fellows bought an office building right off Sunset Boulevard at 1022 Palm Avenue.

Tom Kane went to work for John Wayne in December of 1951. The first production meeting Kane attended made him wonder if perhaps the people at Paramount hadn’t been right. The meeting was at Wayne’s house in Encino; Fellows, Grant, William Wellman, and a few other people were there. Kane was anxious to see what a high-end production meeting was like, but the conversation began with the subject of bath towels—it seemed that the towels at the Lakeside Golf Club were good, but not as good as the ones at Hillcrest.

It would have been one thing if they were kidding, but they were serious, and the pressing matter of the absorption and comparative softness of the towels at various Los Angeles country clubs took up a lot of time before there was any consideration of a script. Kane found the entire experience both funny and relaxing; he realized that these were not gods he was dealing with, but people with quirks and eccentricities like everybody else.

He had to assert himself quickly. Kane was asked to read a new script by Grant. Kane didn’t like it and told Wayne so.

“You think you know more about scripts than Jimmy Grant?” asked Wayne.

“Well, if he thinks this is a good script for you, then I guess I do,” said Kane. Wayne gave him a dark look and Kane figured his days at Wayne-Fellows were numbered. But Wayne passed on the script, and Grant never did sell it.

Soon, Wayne-Fellows Productions arranged a financing and releasing agreement with Warner Bros.

The crazy actor was serious.

1. Republic, like all the B picture studios, was a thinly capitalized business, since B pictures were an economically marginal product—most of the money derived from flat-fee bookings. Throughout the 1940s, Republic’s annual profits, with the exception of a single year, stayed in a narrow range of about $500,000, in spite of the fact that the studio’s gross was steadily increasing. Republic would make money throughout the 1950s, but it took only two bad years, in 1957 and 1958, when the studio lost $1.3 million and $1.4 million respectively, to put it out of business.

1952–1961

“People identify with me, but they dream of being John Wayne.”

“Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don’t like ambiguity. I don’t trust ambiguity.”

In the early 1950s, John Wayne was everywhere. He would reliably appear in two movies per year, and from 1949 to 1955, there was also a line of John Wayne western comic books selling a million copies every month. Then there were the John Wayne cowboy pistols and western outfits marketed as competition for the Hopalong Cassidy/Roy Rogers/Gene Autry lines.

It seemed the whole world loved John Wayne, or at least the whole world that wasn’t politically liberal in its beliefs. Actually, a lot of liberals liked him, and even the occasional socialist.

The renowned film historian Kevin Brownlow was growing up in a London of relentless postwar deprivation. Despite their wildly different political views he said, “A lot of us austerity-struck blokes after the war would like to have
been
John Wayne. He was one of the most charismatic of the leading stars; even his voice was magnetic. He was admirable in the way he took John Ford’s bullying and emerged triumphant. And he had a splendid sense of humor. I loved John Wayne, and would happily watch him in anything.”

Brownlow pointed out how the richest characters of old Hollywood—wonderfully vital people right out of richly imagined fiction—were often incredibly right-wing. Merian C. Cooper, John Ford’s partner in Argosy Productions, once told Brownlow that “I would rather every man, woman and child in America die than live under a welfare state.” Brownlow’s sense of emotional allegiance to Wayne could be echoed not just in Europe, but in Latin America and Asia as well.

For the first ten years of his career, Wayne had been mostly unlucky and out of step with the prevailing trends in Hollywood. But his luck had turned, and decisively so; Henry Luce’s American Century now had an American hero to speak for it. Wayne’s projection of heroic masculinity neatly coexisted with Hollywood’s increasing commercial and—eventually—cultural dominance, not to mention America’s own increasingly expansive sense of itself.

Some of Wayne’s contemporaries in the movie industry didn’t necessarily share in the general enthusiasm. Paul Nathan, publicity man and later associate producer for Hal Wallis, read the script for an MGM western called
Vengeance Valley
and reported to his boss that the lead was “a typical John Wayne part. Slow-thinking, slow-moving and very heroic.” (Wallis contractee Burt Lancaster played the part.) But that was fine, because John Wayne wasn’t working for Hal Wallis, he was now working for John Wayne.

Wayne-Fellows gave its main partner an office to go to, which was a good thing as he increasingly needed to get away from Chata—her drinking was spiraling out of control. “The longer they were married, the more of a problem it became,” said Mary St. John. “The mother was long past saving, and Chata was not far behind. I don’t know if it was the drinking, but she seemed to age unusually fast. Her complexion got worse, and she lost that quality—a kind of innocence—that she had in the mid-forties.”

Problems with Chata had accumulated during 1951. She and Wayne separated in December of that year after a set-to in Acapulco that began—she said—when he threw a glass of water in her face, she retaliated with a bucket, and he responded with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Around that same time—he said—Chata passed out on the beach after a midnight swim and had to be carried to a nearby café, where she spent the night on the floor covered by a tablecloth.

The marriage finally hit the rocks in May of 1952, following an argument at a luau in Honolulu that involved Robert Fellows and a sportswear manufacturer. Wayne threw a couple of pillows at her, and she flew back to Los Angeles. A day or two later, Wayne was sitting on the bed to lace up his shoes when he noticed a little sliver of gold at his feet. There he found a pin from Hilton Hotels. Putting two and two together, he deduced that Nicky Hilton had also been sitting in the same place doing the same thing and had lost the pin from his sport coat.

Game on!

If the marriage to Chata was a train wreck, it was a train wreck that attested to Wayne’s remarkable powers of compartmentalization. During their marriage, he made
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, Red River,
and
The Quiet Man
—a good portion of the movies that constitute his best work as an actor.

Chata hired Jerry Geisler to handle her end of the divorce. Wayne’s first offer was 15 percent of his gross earnings, $14,000 in bonds, their home in Mexico, half the proceeds from the sale of the Encino house, a $12,000 bank account, a piece of his oil leases, and two cars. All told, she would be up for about $80,000 in the first year after the divorce, and $35,000 to $40,000 thereafter. She turned it down flat. Then he offered about $325,000 paid out over nine years. Chata countered with $12,500 a month for the rest of her life. No deal.

Chata’s complaints were specific:

1. Wayne had a temper and was liable to yell, swear, and bang doors when in bad humor. Once, enraged because there weren’t enough towels in the bathroom, he heaved towels all around the stairway and corridor.

2. In Mexico, after a party, he had called her “an obscene name” and threw a glass of water in her face, followed by the bottle of rubbing alcohol.

3. At Budd Boetticher’s house in Mexico City, Wayne and his cronies departed for a stag party. Wayne returned with a large hickey on his neck.

At one point, Chata even accused Wayne of hitting her. He denied it. “I have never in my life struck Mrs. Wayne. But there have been many times when I have had to protect myself from her temper. I have held her hands and I have held her feet, but only to protect myself.”

With the newspapers full of competing tales of marital abuse, the rest of the family was mortified. (It’s not hard to imagine satisfied “I told you so’s” on Josie’s part.) Michael would show up at school and the other kids would ask him, “Why is your father treating your mother that way?”

“She’s not my mother,” Michael would say through tightly compressed lips.

So the Wayne-Fellows office became a get-away as well as a boy’s clubhouse for cronies from the old days, the men who had worked with Wayne when he was making $150 a week and a sandwich per day. Bob Steele and Grant Withers were always around, and usually left with a check—around the office, this was known as “shaking the money tree.” An old directorial hand of no distinction named D. Ross Lederman, who had made a couple of Wayne’s early B westerns, was also hovering and would eventually be made associate producer—actually second unit director—on a Wayne production entitled
Ring of Fear
.

One day, after Grant Withers left with a check, Wayne asked Tom Kane how much a pair of alligator shoes cost. “About $150,” said Kane. Wayne exploded. “How come that son of a bitch wears fucking alligator shoes? I never had a pair of alligator shoes in my life and I make a lot of money. I just can’t see it. Now, here he is around here getting dough off me wearing his alligator shoes. There’s something the matter with the whole frickin’ setup.”

Wayne’s instructions to Tom Kane about suitable script material were basic. Wayne was more interested in movies with Wayne than he was in movies without Wayne. He told Kane to look for westerns, but whatever he found, “don’t make me ordinary. Just don’t make me ordinary.”

“I didn’t know exactly what he would do,” remembered Kane, “but I knew pretty well what he wouldn’t. He didn’t like long speeches, not because he couldn’t deliver them, but he didn’t like that. He would let the other guy have that . . . lay off this crap on co-stars. They liked having a lot of dialogue.”

First among equals was Jimmy Grant. “The Grants lived right around the corner from us,” remembered Gretchen Wayne. “[Mike’s dad] was in Encino, but Jimmy and his family were in Toluca. There was a country club called Lakeside, and Jimmy belonged, Mike’s dad belonged, Bogart, Howard Hughes, Bob Hope, a lot of the actors from Warners and Republic.”

But Jimmy Grant was not a good golfer—his temper kept getting in his way. “He was terribly irascible,” said Gretchen Wayne. “He’d throw his clubs. He’d break his clubs. Of course, now everybody is so piss-elegant they don’t think of doing that, but that’s the way Jimmy was.”

On March 21, 1952, Wayne-Fellows contracted with Warner Bros. for two pictures:
Big Jim McLain
, a Wayne vehicle based on a
Saturday Evening Post
story entitled “We Almost Lost Hawaii,” and
Plunder of the Sun
, an adventure movie that was slotted for somebody else.
Big Jim McLain
was made cheaply and quickly—the picture started shooting April 27, 1952, and was in theaters by Labor Day in order to guarantee a profit.

Fellows gave an interview outlining the philosophy behind the new company: “Our format is basically the same simple one that originally made our industry the greatest entertainment medium in the world. We start with a story that’s about something tangible. We’re not going to make outdoor dramas necessarily, but we do recognize the fact that film fans want to break through the confines of four walls when they are seeking entertainment.