John Wayne: The Life and Legend (55 page)

Other Romina pictures also failed:
Escort West
($872,059 cost, $777,991 worldwide rentals); and
Gun the Man Down
($269,780 cost; worldwide rentals of $325,180).

It was clear that most Wayne productions that didn’t star Wayne trended toward loss. What made it worse was that Jack Warner’s accounting games had a way of turning small winners into big losers. William Wellman made a sweet little dog story for Batjac called
Good-bye, My Lady
, with Brandon De Wilde and Sidney Poitier. William Clothier photographed the picture and said that “Wayne got into a beef with Warner about the costs of a picture Wayne had made; Warners hung us on that one too. Warners promptly threw away the rest of the pictures . . . we got a good screwing, because of the way Warners released the picture.”
Good-bye, My Lady
cost $900,000, and had world rentals of $677,000.

Still, the profits spun off by
Hondo
and
The High and the Mighty
had given Batjac a comfortable war chest, and Wayne knew what he wanted to do with it. But Jack Warner was no more enthusiastic about
The Alamo
than Yates had been.

“Jack was funny,” said Angie Dickinson, who was under contract at Warner Bros. for a number of years. “He was funny because he wasn’t funny, but he was always trying to be funny, and that struck me as funny. As a producer, Jack didn’t have great vision; he could take care of himself and his studio, but he wasn’t Arthur Freed. Not long before he died, I saw him and told him, ‘Jack, you never knew what to do with me, did you?’

“And do you know what he said? ‘Well, you got an awful lot of red in your hair.’ ”

Batjac packed up and left Warner Bros., although Wayne and Warner maintained a friendly social relationship. A rundown of the Batjac productions reveals that Wayne was a careful, effective producer. He started the pact with the cheaply made
Big Jim McLain
, which, at $750,000, cost precisely half of what
Operation Pacific
, his previous film for Warners had cost.

The money continued to roll in with
Island in the Sky, Hondo,
and
The High and the Mighty.
Even the overtly arty
Track of the Cat
didn’t lose much money. But according to Warners’ bookkeeping,
The Sea Chase
lost money, as did the dismal
Blood Alley
, in spite of the fact that the former earned rentals of more than $7 million and the latter rentals of $3 million—very solid figures for the period. Consistent returns like this were why financiers would follow Wayne anywhere; good or bad, there was a financial floor beneath which a Wayne picture did not go—then or now, the most valuable thing a star can bring to a picture.

Despite the largely positive results of the Batjac-Warner alliance, Wayne always felt that he had been badly used by the studio; that some of his movies were far more profitable than the studio would admit. He was almost certainly correct. “Nobody came out with a sizable profit from doing any deal with Warners,” said the producer-screenwriter Niven Busch, who believed Jack Warner was the Zen master of double-entry bookkeeping. “They had the most foolproof, plate-steel accounting system in the world. I still don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else does, how they do it.”

The general feeling of being had was probably why Wayne turned down an overture from Jack Warner at the end of 1956 to buy out Batjac. Years later, Wayne and his son Michael were at the studio for a meeting, when they ran into Jack Warner. “You really oughta bring Batjac back to Warner Bros., Duke,” Warner said. “You should be here, where you can be fucked by friends.”

Wayne was an indulgent boss, but he was strangely absentminded. Every early-arriving employee of Batjac grew used to finding Wayne sitting on the steps of the Palm Avenue building, reading the morning paper and waiting for someone to let him in because he’d lost his keys.

John Ford was renting an office in the Batjac building, and every once in a while Katharine Hepburn would drop by to visit Ford, with whom she had a love affair in 1936–1937, during and after the production of
Mary of Scotland
. Hepburn always adored Ford, and he returned the favor, but that didn’t mean she was willing to suspend her strongly held views of social propriety.

“You people have no pride,” she announced one day to anyone that would listen. “That Venetian blind right behind you there. It’s broken! It hangs down. It’s never been fixed. If it wasn’t broken down you’d never find this place.” And with that, she stormed out.

Wayne was amused by Hepburn’s temperament, but he himself was much milder—unless the subject was politics. When it came to the public he always kept the lid on. Because of his image, drunks or belligerents would frequently challenge him to fights, which he always managed to avoid. Ray Kellogg, a stuntman and second unit director, was with Wayne at the casino on Catalina one time when a man standing next to them in the men’s room suddenly said, “I’ll can your ass.” Kellogg said the man would have to go through him first, but the guy persisted.

Finally, Wayne said, “You probably could knock me on my ass; I can see you’re a real tough mother. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll arm wrestle. How about that? We’ll arm wrestle first, see who’s stronger.”

The man said okay, so they tipped a wastebasket over to serve as the table. Unfortunately, the wastebasket was rusty and their elbows went right through the bottom. Both men’s arms got stuck until Kellogg pried some of the torn metal loose. The entire experience ended with the man offering to buy Wayne a drink, and Wayne accepting.

There were a fair number of relatives on the Batjac payroll, although, with the possible exception of his brother, Bob, they all had to earn their positions. Bob was there only because of Mary Morrison. As far as the relationship between Wayne and his mother, nothing had changed.

“Mary was salty and sharp and tough,” said Gretchen Wayne.

They were actually a lot alike. He could never please her. He tried, but he couldn’t. With his mother, it was always, “Why isn’t Bob making more money? Why isn’t Bob producing your pictures?” Bob was her baby. Bob would take off for Mexico and go drinking. Bob was Bob; you couldn’t help but love him, and everybody did. He was one of the boys, a great sense of humor, never a nose-to-the-grindstone type of guy. And that’s okay—someone has to be the lifeguard, and in that family the lifeguard was Bob’s older brother.

He was always crazy about his father, always said he was the kindest, gentlest, nicest man. But Mary. . . . She was

. I’m sure she just ground the hell out of Clyde. I never heard about Clyde drinking, but he didn’t have any drive, while Mary worked for the phone company, Mary worked for political campaigns, Mary smoked, Mary drank. I think Mike’s dad was intimidated by her. But then, he was never aggressive with women. He was respectful; he was reserved. He never bounded into the room and played the Star.

In June of 1956, Wayne signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to make three pictures for a total fee of $2 million, the money to be paid out at the rate of $200,000 per year for ten years for tax reasons. Not only that, but Fox agreed to pay Charlie Feldman’s commission. Wayne had director approval—a partial list of approved directors included Henry King, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Walter Lang, and, interestingly, Edward Dmytryk. This deal, the highest flat fee ever negotiated for a movie star up to that time, set off the usual chest clutching among executives and gullible journalists about whether the industry could afford such salaries. (Only actors’ salaries are questioned, never executives’.)

What was not generally known was that there was also an agreement with Fox for a fourth picture, with Wayne’s compensation set at $175,000 against 50 percent of the gross, which, had it been publicized, would have undoubtedly caused aneurysms. Actually, the money was not far out of line with what was being paid to comparable names. Bob Hope was getting $200,000 and 50 percent of the profits, Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck were both asking for 75 percent of the profits of their pictures. “How much further can it go?” asked
The Hollywood Reporter.

As it turned out, quite a bit.

The signing of the deal with Fox got a lot of attention, especially from traditionalists such as Sam Goldwyn, who decried the increasing industry reliance on the star as the single most important component of the industry. Wayne didn’t feel a bit guilty.

“After 30 years in this business, the pendulum finally has swung to the actors—and everybody hollers,” he said. “We’re only getting the money that used to go to the relatives of the studio bosses. . . . When I used to turn out those old westerns you see on television every day, I was getting $75 a week and doing my own stunts. The pictures cost about $11,000 and made big profits. Those same profits built Beverly Hills mansions for a lot of people who would have been on relief if their uncles hadn’t been movie moguls.”

But Wayne never got on a high horse where Charles Feldman was concerned. Through all the years that Wayne was the biggest box office star in the business, meetings with his agent were always conducted at Feldman’s office, never at Wayne’s.

The Wings of Eagles
is one of John Ford’s strangest pictures. Initially a labored, drably shot service comedy in which everybody is twenty-five years too old for their parts, it slowly morphs into the story of an absent father and an alcoholic mother who are oddly characterized as the salt of the earth despite their huge character flaws, finally ending as a genuinely moving story of personal regeneration. It’s less like the carefully plotted stories we’re used to seeing in the movies than the messy, random progressions of life itself.

James Stewart was first considered as the star of a biography of Frank “Spig” Wead, a Navy pilot during World War I who helped devise the “baby” carriers and revitalized the Navy’s air operation between the wars. After a fall, Wead was rendered a paraplegic and became a screenwriter for John Ford (
Air Mail, They Were Expendable
) among others, until his death in 1947. In outline, it was a story of personal heroism transmuted into professional heroism.

Early correspondence about the script indicates some of the problems. “There is no love story,” complained one writer, “and that is the problem. Mrs. Wead, soon after she knew his back was broken and he would remain a hopeless cripple, took her two daughters and left him. The men in the Navy are bitter about this and feel it is better left unsaid, although Mrs. Wead is dead now.”

Dore Schary’s MGM was bedeviled by declining attendance and corresponding budget cuts. In the early stages of development, the studio was considering using black and white stock footage, tinting it and blowing it up into CinemaScope proportions, in the hopes it would get by. When John Ford came onto the picture, corner cutting was over.

The script and some of Ford’s direction can be criticized, but there can be no criticism of Wayne’s performance in the latter half of the picture. He even goes without his toupee, although his performance is so intense that few people notice. (When Maureen O’Hara has a late-film reconciliation scene with Wayne, she affectionately kisses his bald spot.) If, after
The Searchers
, there remained any question about Wayne’s bona fides as an actor, you need only look at this garbled, touching movie—a textbook example of the credibility a great star can bring to a part.