John Wayne: The Life and Legend (52 page)

The next morning, Armendáriz asked an obviously exhausted Wayne what was the matter—he looked tired. Hadn’t he slept? “Ah, that damn dachshund ran away or something. Pilar’s all upset and had me up climbing around the hills trying to find him.”

Armendáriz and Kane got the dog out of the motel room and tossed him over the fence of the house where Wayne was staying with his family. The dog’s magical reappearance satisfied everyone, and neither Armendáriz nor Kane ever summoned the courage to tell Wayne the true story.

When
The Conqueror
was released, the publicity (“The Warrior Who Shook the World! This Tartar Woman Matches His Fury with Flame . . . Meets His Fire with Ice! . . . Mighty in Scope . . . Mighty as the Man Whose Conquests Changed the Face of the World!”) claimed that the film cost $6 million. Actually it cost $4.4 million, with Wayne earning $250,000 for the privilege of thoroughly embarrassing himself.

RKO mounted a huge advertising campaign, complete with color ads in the Sunday supplements and a Dell comic book adaptation. The picture eked out domestic rentals of $4.5 million. Amazingly, it actually got some good reviews: the Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner
said that “for sheer magnitude, wild beauty and thrilling action,
The Conqueror
stands in a class by itself!”

The only reason
The Conqueror
and
Jet Pilot
had even trace elements of commercial viability was Wayne’s presence. In later years, Wayne gave the impression that he put up with Hughes because he aroused the actor’s pity. “He used to call me up and say, Would I meet him . . . and then I would meet him and we’d go up for a ride and he’d talk about the studio and talk about a lot of things and ask my advice and I got to where I started feeling sorry for this guy.”

Then it dawned on Wayne that it was ridiculous to feel sorry for a man rich enough to do anything he wanted in a world eager to sell itself to the highest bidder. “He was a very, very shy man,” said Wayne. “I was conscious that he was embarrassed by people, [who] don’t embarrass me a goddamn bit.”

Wayne had gradually come to believe that Bill Wellman was the answer to Batjac’s problems, which were the same problems that every other independent in the business had: manufacturing reliable commercial films at a price so low that even expert bookkeeping couldn’t hide all the profits.

Other people at Batjac weren’t so sure. One day Tom Kane came into his office to find Wellman furiously opening and closing the drawers in Kane’s desk.

“Are you looking for something, Bill?”

“Yeah. I’m looking for some pipe tobacco. You got any?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Kane went over to the drawer where he kept his pipe tobacco and brought it out.

“Goddammit,” Wellman said, “I don’t want to be indebted to you, you son of a bitch.” He stalked out of the office without the tobacco.

“Wellman had a terrible temper,” said Michael Wayne. “One time at our office they were taking some publicity pictures with [stunt flier] Paul Mantz. Wellman and Mantz had known each other for years, but they were having some sort of disagreement, and Wellman suddenly sucker punched Mantz and knocked out a tooth. Wellman was scrappy—he would throw the overhand right. You never knew what Wellman was going to do.”

Wellman was assigned a Batjac production entitled
Blood Alley
that was to star Robert Mitchum and began shooting on January 2, 1955, after two months of preparation near San Rafael, California. Mitchum was again reuniting with Wellman, the director who had made him a star in
The Story of G.I. Joe
.

But Mitchum was drinking and feeling obstreperous. George Coleman, the transportation manager, refused Mitchum permission to take a bus full of people to San Francisco for a party. “Mitchum started bouncing on a gangplank and blew [Coleman] right off the plank,” remembered Michael Wayne. “After that, we couldn’t find Mitchum; he wasn’t at the hotel the next morning.”

Wellman was in no mood for such juvenalia. He overnighted a letter to the studio. There was a forty-five-minute meeting with Mitchum during which he refused to apologize. “Me? Push anybody? Who told you that?” he asked with a straight face.

So Mitchum was fired, which undoubtedly felt good, but was no joke with the picture about to start in a day or two and most other major leading men either working or with impossible schedules. Batjac tried for Humphrey Bogart or Gregory Peck, but neither was available. Wayne suggested Burt Lancaster, but no dice. William Holden? Not available. Kirk Douglas? Working. Fred MacMurray? Not big enough.

The clock was ticking—Wellman estimated he could stall for two weeks by using doubles for long shots or shooting around the leading man. “If we can’t get anyone else I suppose I’ll have to do it,” grumbled Wayne, “although I really don’t feel up to it.” He was battling a flu he had recently picked up in New York.

Wayne had little choice but to rush to San Rafael and step into the void, thereby upsetting Pilar, who had been looking forward to having her husband to herself. Lauren Bacall had been all set to work with Mitchum, and was nervous about the change in her leading man. She was an ardent New Deal Democrat, a fan of Adlai Stevenson, and Wayne’s reputation as a Red baiter preceded him. As it turned out, she didn’t have to worry.

“I was apprehensive, when I first met him, about what he might discuss politically,” Bacall remembered. “But of course . . . he never brought up anything. He never embarrassed me, he never inflicted his own thinking onto me, he never backed me against a wall and made me feel uncomfortable.”

A little more than a week after Wayne took over the lead in
Blood Alley
, he also had to take over the direction when Wellman got the flu. And a couple of weeks after that, there was a wild party at a Stockton bar that resulted in five members of the company being jailed, with one requiring hospital treatment. Wayne, who seems not to have been at the party, had to bail everybody out.

After a lot of difficulties,
Blood Alley
finally got made and was released in October 1955. It’s not much of a picture—Paul Fix plays a Chinese elder—and Wayne has some impossible monologues addressed to God, whom he refers to as “Baby” when he’s imprisoned by the “Commies.” It’s a picture that would have been every bit as bad with Mitchum, and it’s just possible Mitchum decided discretion was the better part of valor.

Blood Alley
was a flop, with worldwide rentals of $3 million against a cost of $2.5 million. Wayne and Wellman never worked together again. “They were so much fun together,” remembered William Wellman Jr. “They were like two college boys, patting each other on the back, so excited about things. They had similar personalities in terms of their enthusiasm for the movie business. And similar senses of humor.”

But there had been some tension between the two men. With truculent patriarchs like Ford, Hawks, or Henry Hathaway, Wayne would listen to instructions, nod, and say “Yes, sir.” But increasingly, and for the rest of his life, with other directors it wouldn’t be that simple. The problem stemmed from Wayne’s ambitions.

“Wayne wanted to be the filmmaker,” said William Wellman Jr. There had been no problems on
Island in the Sky
, but there was a single incident on
The High and the Mighty
, when Wayne made some comments that Wellman interpreted as directorial in nature and that got his back up.

Wellman announced “If I try to do your job, I would look just as silly as you do trying to do mine. You’re bigger and stronger, but if you continue with this I will take your face and I will make a character actor out of you.”

Wellman wasn’t kidding. “My dad had a darker side than Wayne had,” Wellman Jr. said. “Wayne liked to get along with people; my father, not so much.” Wayne quickly backed down, the two men finished the picture, but Wellman held a grudge, as he was wont to do.

Wayne kept trying to get Wellman to make a picture with him for years, even after Wellman retired. He sent Wellman the script for
The Comancheros
, but Wellman didn’t like it. A few years later, when Wellman was thinking about coming out of retirement to make
The Flight of the Phoenix,
he had mellowed to the extent of calling Wayne and asking him to co-star with Joel McCrea. They both said yes, but the project fell apart and Robert Aldrich eventually made it with Jimmy Stewart.

To the end of his life, everything Wayne said about Wellman marked him as a fan. “He’s a wonderful old son of a bitch,” Wayne told me when the topic of Wellman came up. “He had a metal plate in his head [from World War I] and he’d go around belting all these big, tough guys, and they’d be afraid to hit him back for fear they’d kill him. Wild Bill Wellman, a wonderful old guy. A fine director. Didn’t delve into character as much as some.

“I’ll tell you the difference between directors: Hawks has tremendous patience with people. Ford won’t hire you unless he knows he can get it out of you. Wellman figures you’re a pro and doesn’t bother you as an actor. If you don’t deliver, he’ll simply cut the part down. It’s that easy.”

As for Wellman’s feelings about Wayne, well . . . “When I put a tribute together for my dad on
The Merv Griffin Show
,” remembered Wellman Jr., “I called Wayne and he gave me clips from
The High and the Mighty,
and he wasn’t giving those out to anyone. And on the show when Griffin asked my dad about John Wayne, he started talking about his ‘fairy walk.’ And I just shrank in my chair. So at the commercial break, I said something to him, and when they came back my father said he wanted to talk more about Wayne, and he called him the greatest star in the business.

“But the truth is that my father spent the rest of his life lambasting him. I would say, ‘Dad, look at the films you made together.’ But he held a grudge and I don’t know why. I just can’t believe it was that incident on
The High and the Mighty
all by itself.”

Wayne’s relationship with Mitchum was entirely free of such undertones. Despite having had to fire Mitchum, there was no animosity, and Mitchum would pop in and out of Wayne’s life more or less according to the state of his marriage to Pilar, who had a single ongoing complaint about her husband’s friends: they drank too much. “After a while, it got tiresome being around drunks,” she said.

In the late 1950s, Mitchum and his wife were invited to a party at Wayne’s house. Pilar was still angry at Mitchum for forcing her husband into eight weeks of unscheduled work on
Blood Alley
, but she was determined to be cordial. As Mitchum and his wife, Dorothy, came through the door, Pilar was there to greet him. “Boy,” Mitchum said, looking down the front of her dress, “do you need a new bra.”

Pilar hit the roof and ordered the Mitchums out of her house. When she told her husband what had happened, he managed to keep a straight face.

In early 1955, Wayne and Pilar were going to take a quick Mexican vacation, and then he would be back at Warners for a western for his Coach.

William Wellman called Wayne’s screen character “a nice guy with a special touch of nastiness.” That nastiness had been called on occasionally—
Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima
—but it was the Ford western that would make special demands, that would obliterate the actor’s innate likability and replace it with something far more dangerous.

The Ford picture was called
The Searchers
.

The middle and late 1950s were a golden period for Wayne—nearly everything he did made money, and, with occasional exceptions, almost everything he did was good, too. This was probably why he rejected a gilt-edged offer from William Paley to star in the TV version of the hit radio show
Gunsmoke.
The money on offer was about $2 million guaranteed, not to mention partial ownership of the show, but Wayne turned it down, instead off-loading Batjac contract actor James Arness onto the project. He was only being consistent; a few months earlier, NBC had offered him a deal to finance all or most of his pictures and give Wayne 100 percent of the profits in return for exclusivity for Wayne on NBC shows.