John Wayne: The Life and Legend (49 page)

Wayne originally wanted Spencer Tracy for the part of the older copilot who brings the plane in against all odds, but the trade papers announced that MGM wanted $500,000 for Tracy’s services. This was a grossly inflated figure—MGM had just accepted $250,000, about double Tracy’s actual salary, for a loan-out to Fox for
Broken Lance
. Wellman said that he and Tracy had lunch, after which they shook hands on the deal. Then Tracy backed out of the picture.

It’s far more likely that Tracy simply didn’t want to work with Wellman—the two men had had a fistfight nearly twenty years earlier over a crack Wellman made about Tracy’s onetime lover Loretta Young. It’s also possible that Tracy was uneasy about working for Wayne, who may have been too closely associated with his Loretta Young period.

Wayne then tried unsuccessfully for Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda, after which he decided to play the part himself. Wayne cast Robert Cummings for the copilot role, more or less because Cummings actually was a pilot, but Wellman wanted Robert Stack and Wayne acquiesced. William Boyd turned down a part, and MGM wouldn’t loan out Keenan Wynn and Lionel Barrymore, so parts that had been intended for them were played by the less expensive alternatives of Sidney Blackmer and Wayne’s old pal Paul Fix.

In fact, the list of people who turned down parts in
The High and the Mighty
was extensive. Wellman took runs at eminent actresses such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Dorothy McGuire. Mostly, they rejected the film because the parts were too small. Claire Trevor and Jan Sterling got the jobs.

The High and the Mighty
had one great attraction as far as Jack Warner was concerned: it was going to be economical. Eighty percent of the film took place inside an airplane, and the exteriors were almost all second unit.

William Clothier was the cameraman on the aerial scenes, and captured the culminating shot of the runway lights forming a cross. “I didn’t know what I had until I saw it through my lens,” Clothier remembered.

It was a pretty good shot. Two nights later, Bill Wellman calls on the phone. “I have just seen the greatest goddamn shot that was ever made for any goddamn picture in the world.”

“Which shot is that?”

“That shot coming into the airfield! It’s going to make our picture! These people have come across the ocean, they’re flying on the vapor in the gas tanks and all at once the airfield opens up in the form of a cross.” He raved for five minutes. Then Duke got on the line. “Bill, it’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Playing the ingenue was a young actress named Karen Sharpe, whose credits consisted of a couple of five-day wonders at Monogram, the most successful of which was
Bomba and the Jungle Girl.
“Wellman directed my test,” remembered Sharpe. “I was very prepared, and we shot the scene, where I think I’m pregnant. Now, if Bill Wellman didn’t like you, everybody down the block knew about it. And if he did like you, the same people knew about that, too. And when we finished the scene, he said, ‘My God, Karen, where have you been? You’re it. This girl is fantastic!’ He never even looked at the footage.”

Sharpe remembered that
The High and the Mighty
“was a Wellman film all the way down the line. Duke may have been producing, but he was like any other actor on the set. He knew his lines, stepped in, and did it. He was very professional. I noticed that when I was working, he would come and stand close to the camera and watch me.” Soon after the film wrapped, Wayne signed Sharpe to a contract.

A young actor named William Campbell was featured as a brash young aviator who holds Wayne’s character in contempt. It was a difficult part for Campbell to play, simply because he was in awe of Wayne, and he had particular trouble with a scene where he had to humiliate Wayne for being old and passé. “I thought to myself,
Jesus Christ, I’m going to be tongue-lashing John Wayne
. And we did it in very close quarters. It just went phenomenally well. . . . When Wayne worked with you, he never would be, or could be, threatened by any other actor, unlike some others.

“Some actors weave a scene to make their character more important. Wayne never did that. He knew what he was doing, always knew his lines. . . . He had a problem in that he was so big, so overpowering. It didn’t matter who had the authority in a scene; Wayne was always bigger. That’s why he always seemed so comfortable lounging in the background, letting others have all the good lines. Inevitably the eye is drawn to him.”

Wayne was worried about his own performance, but Wellman wasn’t. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t think you were good in that?” Wellman asked after Wayne requested another take. “You couldn’t ask for anything better.”

Robert Stack remembered that “Wellman scared the shit out of me; he scared the shit out of everybody. But he was a marshmallow. He was working on a scene with Doe Avedon, and he said to her, ‘Jesus Christ, can’t you walk straight?’ ‘Mr. Wellman,’ she said, ‘you’ve got me so scared my knees won’t work!’ And he said, ‘Oh, don’t take me seriously.’ Wellman was never cruel, but he kept enough pressure on me, particularly in the scenes in the cockpit, for the realism of the situation to always come through.”

Sharpe remembered the picture as “a very happy set, except for the fact that people were scared of Wellman because he could be very boisterous one way or the other.” Wayne had Wellman’s director’s chair embroidered with the ironic words, “Sweet William.”

Wellman had a habit of photographing the first rehearsal, and a lot of times there was never a take beyond that. “One take and that was it,” said Sharpe. “He loved everything I did, and every shot I was in was the first take.” One critic visiting the set called Wellman the fastest director since W. S. Van Dyke II, and, among A list directors it was probably true.

Wellman was gung ho about the picture, about CinemaScope, about WarnerColor. “If we’re gonna make ’em bad, we’re gonna make ’em bad with everything there is,” he bellowed. This gusto explains how Wellman was able to shoot a very long film (147 minutes) in little more than six weeks, from November 25, 1953, to January 11, 1954, including a week in San Francisco, the Goldwyn studios for interiors, followed by two nights of wrap-up work at the Glendale Airport.

Pilar was hanging around the set, and Wayne asked Sharpe if Pilar could stay in her dressing room. Sharpe was from Texas and had numerous Hispanic friends, so she and Pilar got along famously.

As the picture went into the cutting room, Wayne supervised the editing himself, eventually cutting five close-ups of himself that he thought were unnecessary. Warners was very high on the picture, and so was Wayne. Billy Wilkerson of
The Hollywood Reporter
caught Wayne and Wellman at their best after the two men watched the final version of
The High and the Mighty
for the first time. His description of the conversation captures the bond between the two men, as well as the personal qualities that enabled them to sustain forty-year careers.

Wilkerson ran into them at a restaurant and they adjourned to Wayne’s house, where the conversation lasted until 3:30 in the morning. Wilkerson didn’t “remember a more entertaining and inspiring evening since the old days of Henry’s on [Hollywood] Boulevard, when most of the picture-makers used to sit around at night and talk—pictures.

“Both Wayne and Wellman have been around a long time, both have been successful. However, from their conversations you would think they were two kids just starting out in the business, fighting and pushing every minute to get ahead, revealing in their seeming amazement the wonderful accomplishments of others and hoping to match those accomplishments. They had praise for every name brought into the gab and, above all, praise for the business that made it possible for unknowns to become great personages in such a short span. They had logical excuses for some failures—theirs and others—with never a knock, never derision,
always
enthusiasm.”

When
The High and the Mighty
was released in May 1954, the critics were impressed.
The Hollywood Reporter
called it “highly entertaining, widely appealing and handsomely mounted . . . one of the great pictures of our time.” The studio gave it a lavish premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Wayne invited Karen Sharpe, who was thrilled to be the date of Tab Hunter. “I met Tab for the first time in the limousine on the way to the premiere. When we got out of the car, the fans went nuts for him, and he introduced me to the world of Hollywood premieres. I had no idea how lucky all this was. And at the end, when the lights went down and the movie started, Tab looked at me and said, ‘Loved meeting you, I gotta go. I’m making a film and I have to get back to the studio.’ So Robert Fellows escorted me to the party at Ciro’s, where I sat between him and Jack Warner.”

Wellman’s directorial gusto led him astray, and the forcefulness he usually brought to scenes of elemental struggle or combat was pitched a bit too high for a character-driven emotional drama. What
The High and the Mighty
needed was some of Howard Hawks’s terseness. Wayne stands out because everybody else is lunging for an Oscar nomination and he’s playing a calm professional in a calm, professional manner. The dramatic problem at the core of the film is basic—the plane either has enough fuel to get to its destination or it doesn’t—but the script invents personal crises for each and every character, which doesn’t ratchet up the tension so much as get in the way.

It’s essentially a decent blood-and-thunder melodrama whose primary attributes come down to William Clothier’s aerial photography and Dimitri Tiomkin’s thundering score, which even lends a spiritual dimension to the proceedings. But commercially speaking
The High and the Mighty
was the right movie at the right time and one of the biggest hits of its year—a cost of $1.4 million, world rentals of $8.1 million, and a lot of money in the pockets of Wayne, Fellows, and Bill Wellman, who had a third of Wayne-Fellows’ profits. With the exception of a single TV broadcast in the late 1970s, Wayne kept the film out of circulation for decades, which gave the film the patina of a lost classic that it didn’t really deserve.

The huge back-to-back hits of
Hondo
and
The High and the Mighty
put Wayne at the top of his profession, not just as an actor, but as a producer. The only problem to be found in their first two years of Wayne-Fellows’ operation was that the company was having trouble controlling costs. Warners had advanced $750,000 to make
Big Jim McLain
, which ended up costing $825,544; likewise,
Island in the Sky
cost $66,815 more than the $900,000 Warners had advanced, despite the fact that Wellman had shot the picture in twenty-six days—a full ten days under schedule. After four starring pictures (
Big Jim McLain, Island in the Sky, Hondo, The High and the Mighty
, and the non-Wayne film
Plunder of the Sun
), Wayne-Fellows had spent $258,859 in excess of studio advances.

Fellows explained to Jack Warner that part of the problem was that they had no prior experience in figuring out their overhead costs, which they had concluded ran about $100,000 yearly. Also, their ambitious production plans meant that the pictures had been hurled into production without accurate budgets, which accounted for the average 7 percent overrun.

On the other hand, although Wayne-Fellows had no obligation to make two consecutive Wayne pictures, or to keep him exclusive, they had made three Waynes in a row, and he had refused all other studio offers. Not only that, but on one picture Wayne had cut his salary. (Fellows had been drawing only $21,000 salary per picture.)

All this was fixable and more or less part of the movie business. Besides, the profits from
Hondo
and
The High and the Mighty
obliterated Jack Warner’s concerns. But a Wayne-Fellows production called
Ring of Fear
was a real problem, and so was the emerging alcoholic spiral of Jimmy Grant.

Ring of Fear
was a circus movie with the head-spinning cast of Clyde Beatty, Mickey Spillane, and Pat O’Brien. Spillane was a crude, bumptious hack who liked to sit around the Wayne-Fellows offices kibitzing. When he noticed some Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dos Passos books on the shelves, he said, “These guys are all bums.” Only half joking, he began reeling off his sales figures compared to Hemingway and Faulkner and triumphantly concluded by saying, “I’ve sold more than all those guys put together.”

Spillane had gotten lucky with Mike Hammer, but that wasn’t enough; he wanted to be a movie star too, and Jimmy Grant took him on. “We felt by using James Edward Grant we would get a good script and a good job of direction for bargain prices—we got neither,” complained Fellows. The studio advanced $677,613 for the picture, and Grant spent $706,701. That wasn’t the primary problem—for their money, Warners had gotten a picture that was unreleasable.

Fellows described the job Grant had done as “a bad job, or no job at all.” As Fellows wrote to Wayne, “his behavior has shaken . . . confidence in our judgment and made a dent of alarming proportions in the dignity and respect we had heretofore enjoyed in the industry. We have become the target of a certain amount of ridicule.” Fellows went on to point out that they had given Grant 5 percent of company profits for “finding available stories and ideas and proposing such stories and ideas be acquired, and performing such other services as the corporation may request of you. None of these services has he performed.”

Grant had 3 percent of
Big Jim McLain
and 5 percent of
Ring of Fear
. Fellows suggested discontinuing Grant’s vice presidency and his overall 5 percent of company profits. Instead, give him 5 percent or 10 percent of
Hondo
, and pay him on a per job basis thereafter. Grant knew he was in trouble and responded with a letter to Wayne that he admitted was a rambling mess. He defended
Ring of Fear
, saying, “The picture may be bad but it is not nearly as bad as Bob has convinced you [it is.]” He went on to say that the only two pictures Wayne had loved in the cutting room were
The Fighting Kentuckian
and
Island in the Sky
—“both failures,” which wasn’t really true. He accused Fellows of being a “grade B Svengali” and said that if Wayne followed through on the plan to take away Grant’s title and percentage, “the man I thought was my best friend [would be] giving a perfect imitation of my worst enemy.”