John Wayne: The Life and Legend (51 page)

Ring of Fear
was still hanging fire. Wayne knew that it needed extensive retakes to make it releasable; he and Bob Fellows estimated that said retakes would cost another $115,908 on top of the $700,000 that had already been overspent. Wayne persuaded William Wellman to do the retakes, not for his usual $10,000 a week, but for free. He also promised to cut Wellman in on Wayne-Fellows’ profits if he could somehow make a facsimile of a silk purse out of a genuine sow’s ear.

“My father wasn’t really a director,” said Colin Grant, “and he would have been the first to tell you. DeMille’s
The Greatest Show on Earth
had made a fortune, and my dad thought he could make a fortune with another circus movie. He really wanted to make the movie; I don’t think Duke wanted to make it at all.”

Wellman sailed in with a writer, rewrote the script and reshot a lot of the picture without credit. The picture actually made money and Wayne showed his gratitude by giving Wellman 10 percent of the profits for eight years.

On June 1, 1954, Wayne-Fellows Productions became Batjac Productions—the name of a trading company featured in
Wake of the Red Witch.
In the film, the name was spelled Batjak, but, as Michael Wayne explained, “one of the legal secretaries who was examining the documents thought that there was a typo in the word ‘Batjak.’ She wondered if it should be ‘Batjack,’ so she called Robert Fellows and said, ‘Is there a “c” missing from the company title?’ And he said, ‘No c.’ But she thought he said, ‘No, c.’ So she typed it ‘Batjac.’ ”

When the document was prepared, the mistake was noticed, but Wayne said, “I liked it better with a ‘k’ but leave it as it is. It’s no big deal.”

A month after the name change was official, Bob Fellows began agitating for better terms from Warner Bros., specifically on foreign receipts. Batjac’s contract with Warners was due to expire in March 1955, and at this point Batjac’s pictures were financed 100 percent by Warners, with profits split 50-50 after the studio recovered a liberal interpretation of its costs. But unhappiness with the way Warners was allocating money from foreign markets led Fellows to start sniffing around for other releasing deals.

And then there was the matter of
The Alamo
. Wayne was still determined to make it, although it hadn’t been a quid pro quo when the Warners deal had been negotiated. Quietly at first, then more vocally, Bob Fellows began to agree with Herb Yates and Jack Warner. Why not get Ford, or Hawks, or someone with experience in massive action scenes to make
The Alamo
? Jesus Christ, Bill Wellman was right across the hall! Fellows probably saw the company’s cash surplus disappearing overnight on a picture nobody but Wayne was sure Wayne could direct.

Fellows’s opinion rankled his partner. Then there was Fellows’s behavior around the office. He fell in love with his secretary and told his wife he wanted a divorce. She turned for support to Wayne, who didn’t believe it was any of his business. As far as Eleanor Fellows was concerned, that meant Wayne approved of his partner’s behavior. He didn’t, but neither was he about to get in the middle of someone else’s domestic meltdown, having just survived one of his own. Eleanor kept hounding Wayne until he halfheartedly agreed to attend a mediation session with the couple, but he left early after telling them that they had to solve their problems themselves.

Fellows got his divorce in 1955, and to pay for it he had to sell half of his interest in the films he and Wayne had made together, an amount estimated as $500,000. Fellows would be out of the company as of January 1956, after which John Wayne would be in total control of both Batjac and his career.

In the breakup Fellows got 10 percent of the net income from the company’s pictures to the extent that said income exceeded $2.34 million. He also got the contract of Anita Ekberg, as well as two scripts:
The Quality of Mercy
by Ben Hecht, which was never made, and a Burt Kennedy adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story that became
The Tall T.
After Fellows left Batjac, he produced only two more movies:
Screaming Mimi
and
The Girl Hunters
, in which Mickey Spillane made another bid for stardom.

Wayne redoubled his efforts to set up
The Alamo
. It wouldn’t be for Republic, and it wouldn’t be for Warner Bros. But make it he would.

William Wellman’s
Track of the Cat
emerged as a strange, attractively arty western shot in color but with only Robert Mitchum wearing anything other than earth tones.

Wayne liked Mitchum, even though the actor was not a producer’s best friend. The locations for
Track of the Cat
were in Olympia, Washington, where a high school girl interviewed Mitchum for the school paper while some of the Batjac people stood by.

“Do you have any hobbies, Mr. Mitchum?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, what would you say is your principal hobby?”

“Hunting.”

“Well, what do you hunt in particular?”

“Poontang.”

A rustling sound from the Batjac people.

“I never heard of that.”

“Well, it’s an elusive, furry little animal.”

Wayne was hired to play Genghis Khan in
The Conqueror
for Howard Hughes, but not before the usual series of charades that always attended anything requiring Hughes’s signature. A fleet of seven Chevrolets pulled into the Batjac offices on Palm Avenue. They were all the same, with the backseats ripped out and no whitewalls. Hughes got out of the third Chevy from the front and came into the office. “Everybody’s got to get out of here, got to get out of the building before we can complete the negotiations,” he announced.

Wayne ordered everyone out, except for the woman at the switchboard. “What about her?” asked Hughes. “She’s got to answer the phones,” said Wayne—an exception Hughes accepted. Hughes and Wayne went into an office for about twenty minutes. In the meantime, everyone except the woman at the switchboard cooled their heels in the parking lot.

Finally, the two men came out and Wayne got in the third Chevy with Hughes. The fleet went west on Sunset, then made a hard right into the hills and was lost to sight. The next day the office was clamoring to know where the caravan had gone.

“You won’t believe it,” said Wayne, who seemed resigned to the madness. “We went up in the hills and then came down out of the hills and headed for Culver City. We eventually went down some alley there and in the back door of an abandoned laundry that Hughes must own. Anyway, his people had a key to it, and we went in there and that’s where we signed the contract.”

Wayne had estimated that RKO’s constant postponements of its commitments to Wayne had cost him around $1 million, because he had held himself ready for weeks every year for three consecutive years and turned down a lot of work. Hughes agreed to pay his star an extra $100,000, but there were still more postponements, which led to problems with the schedule of
The Sea Chase
, which led to Warners threatening to charge Wayne for the delays.

Now Wayne was really angry. He wrote Hughes a letter saying that “$100,000 does not even start to make the necessary adjustment.” Hughes wanted to settle up after
The Conqueror
was shot, but it wasn’t Wayne’s first rodeo. He sent a wire to Hughes at his headquarters on Romaine Street in Hollywood, with two more copies addressed to Hughes at RKO saying that “I insist it be done right now.” He must have gotten what he asked for, because
The Conqueror
went into production that same month.

Although the picture was shot between May and August of 1954, the release was held up when Hughes sold off RKO and its library to General Tele-radio for $25 million in July of 1955. For a time, Wayne harbored feverish fantasies about buying RKO from its new purchasers for $5 million, with the two unreleased Wayne pictures costing another $5 million. Charlie Feldman talked sense to him, but Wayne always had a burning urge to be wealthy and he kept returning to the RKO idea.

In January 1956, Hughes bought back
The Conqueror
and the still unreleased
Jet Pilot
for a whopping $12 million.
The Conqueror
was released in February 1956,
Jet Pilot
in October of 1957—nearly eight years after it had begun shooting.

In 1957, Wayne again told Feldman to look into a deal to buy RKO, which had just closed. Feldman took the time and trouble to write a detailed two-and-a-half-page single-spaced letter about why that was a very bad idea: “Everything points to RKO getting further out of the business rather than getting into active production.”

The Conqueror
is one of those unusual pictures that really is as bad as its reputation. It features some of the most jaw-dropping dialogue in movie history. Nothing is clearly stated, but inverted to the point of gibberish. Instead of “I don’t doubt it,” the line becomes “I doubt it not.” As Genghis Khan, Wayne is defiantly miscast, but the dialogue would defeat anybody: “Know this woman: I take you for wife,” announces Wayne just before he forces himself on Susan Hayward, who spends the movie heaving her admittedly enticing chest while looking sullen. Clearly, she had read the script.

In outline, and probably in intent, the film is a throwback to a Jon Hall/Maria Montez epic of the 1940s, except on a much larger scale and played for complete seriousness. Hughes’s sense of scale always trampled his nonexistent taste, so the film, like all of his later productions, is a leaden howler, dismally dull whenever the cast isn’t struggling with the dialogue.
The Conqueror
is completely unaware of its own absurdity as the world’s biggest Ed Wood movie.

Hayward decided a location affair was the perfect antidote to the script and the boring location of St. George, Utah. One night, after drinking too much, she stumbled across the street to the house where Wayne and Pilar were staying and challenged Pilar to a fight. Later, while shooting a love scene, Hayward stuck her tongue in Wayne’s mouth. All this didn’t stimulate Wayne; rather, it irritated him. “That goddamn bitch just stuck her tongue halfway down my throat,” he raged to Mary St. John, while never saying a word to Hayward.

Wayne seems to have known what he was involved with; he referred to the film as his “Chinese Western,” but otherwise plowed through manfully. “His camaraderie impressed me very much,” said the actor Gregg Barton, who was in the film. “He played hard, he worked hard, and was very responsible.”

He probably played too hard. For one of the few times in his career, his carousing affected his mornings. Gregg Barton remembered that at breakfast Wayne’s hands were shaking so badly he had to rig a handkerchief around his neck as a pulley to raise his coffee cup to his mouth. Wayne made jokes about it, but must have realized it wasn’t really a joking matter, as it didn’t reoccur.

The sole bright spot of
The Conqueror
was the presence of Pedro Armendáriz, a close friend since
Fort Apache
, who was playing Genghis Khan’s blood brother. Armendáriz and Tom Kane cooked up a practical joke based on Armendáriz’s firmly held belief that Pilar had the upper hand in Wayne’s marriage. Armendáriz objected to Pilar’s dachshund having the run of the Wayne house, up to and including sleeping on the bed. “Dogs are great,” Armendáriz proclaimed, “but you don’t have them in the house. They stay outside. You play with them in the yard.” Armendáriz decided to steal the dachshund. With the dog stashed in a room at a motel, Armendáriz and Kane went back to the bar, confident in the inevitability of the explosion.