John Wayne: The Life and Legend (58 page)

Jim Henaghan, Wayne’s publicist, was another one of the raucous Irish characters he enjoyed. Henaghan had been around a long time—he had been a columnist for
The Hollywood Reporter
, not to mention the first husband of Gwen Verdon, and he had also written some admiring articles about Wayne for the fan magazines—a fairly common way for a publicist to earn his keep since the silent days. (See, for example,
Modern Screen,
October 1954, and
Motion Picture,
November 1956.)

Reputedly, Henaghan could drink Wayne and just about anybody else under the table. Once, the two men were in Acapulco watching the cliff divers leap off a ledge and plummet two hundred feet, just missing the jutting rocks below.

Henaghan turned to his boss and said, “I bet you a round of drinks I could do that.” Wayne said it was impossible, that Henaghan would only get himself killed. Nevertheless, he took the bet.

Henaghan went down the steps, around a corner out of sight, found a diver and paid him to wear Henaghan’s swimming trunks. From a distance, all Wayne could see was a man with Henaghan’s build in Henaghan’s trunks climb out onto the ledge and make a perfect dive beyond the rocks.

After the diver swam back to shore, Henaghan and he switched trunks again. Henaghan jumped in and out of the water, then climbed back up the steps to be greeted as a conquering hero. “You son of a bitch, you really did it!” exclaimed Wayne, who bought drinks for everyone on the patio.

Howard Hawks and Wayne had both disliked Fred Zinnemann’s
High Noon
, the former for what he regarded as a lack of professionalism on the part of Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane, the latter for its liberal allegory. As Hawks put it, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him.” Hawks wanted to make a western with the precisely opposite point of view—a lawman who feels it’s a matter of pride to count only on other professionals.

It was a good idea for a western, especially since Hawks was coming out of a bad period. He hadn’t worked since the disastrous
Land of the Pharaohs
, Wayne hadn’t made a western since
The Searchers
, and his most recent films hadn’t exactly been a string of triumphs.

Rio Bravo
looked like money from the beginning, even though it took a long time to come together. The screenwriters were Leigh Brackett and the seventy-year-old Jules Furthman working in tandem—the latter contributed the name Feathers for the leading lady, also the name of the female lead in Furthman’s 1927 script for Josef von Sternberg’s
Underworld
—which, coincidentally, also involved a man attempting to sober up his best friend.

But the early script drafts weren’t a revision of the
High Noon
formula at all. The original story was called “El Paso Red,” and, while the opening sequence in the story is fairly close to the film, the plot itself is different from the finished film. The main character, Chance, and his sidekick—in the original story he’s named Eddie, not Dude—are bringing in a bunch of horses along with a wagon train from Mexico. The plot hinges on a prominent rancher who is killed and whose daughter goes missing, and a sheriff who is afraid to do anything until Chance and Eddie/Dude decide to help.

Leigh Brackett’s first draft retains most of the original story, but loses the Dude character. By the time of the estimating script the basic plot is in place. The script ends with the following:

146 Int. Feather’s Room Day

As Chance unlocks the door and comes in, Feathers is waiting . . .

*

(This scene was censored before it went to mimeo. Until we get another one, supply your own.)

Wayne was the only actor considered for John T. Chance, but the rest of the cast was up for grabs. For Dude, the choices, in order, were: Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Cary Grant, William Holden, Montgomery Clift, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, Dean Martin, and Richard Widmark.

For Colorado: Frank Gifford, Michael Landon, Earl Holliman, Richard Jaeckel, Rod Taylor, Murray Hamilton, Stuart Whitman. (Ricky Nelson, who played the part, was obviously an afterthought.)

For Feathers: Rhonda Fleming, Jane Greer, Martha Hyer, Beverly Garland, Carolyn Jones, Piper Laurie, Julie London, Sheree North, Janis Paige, Barbara Rush, Ruta Lee, Donna Reed. (Likewise Angie Dickinson.)

Once again, Hawks pillaged what had worked for him before. The indolent young gun Colorado was yet another riff on Billy the Kid in
The Outlaw
and Cherry Valance in
Red River.
But, as Todd McCarthy wrote in his wise and authoritative biography of the director, Hawks was still on top of his game: “The dialogue in the finished film is uniformly smarter, more assured, and insolent than that in the final screenplay.”

Hawks also devised the great opening sequence that so brilliantly defines the characters and the situations without dialogue: A sweaty, bedraggled Dude (Dean Martin) sidles into a bar looking for a drink. A man disdainfully throws a coin into a spittoon. Dude is thinking about going after it when Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) stops him. Chance turns to deal with the man who threw the coin in the spittoon. The humiliated Dude slugs Wayne from behind. Burdette (Claude Akins) beats up Dude while others hold him. When someone tries to stop Burdette, he shoots the man down in cold blood.

Two minutes have elapsed, not a word has been spoken, and we’re already deep into foundational conflicts about which Hawks is so secure he spends half the picture ignoring them—an extraordinary economy that couldn’t have been devised by anyone who hadn’t worked in silent film.

Once his cast was set, Hawks shot his movie in sixty-one days, six days over schedule, from May 4 to July 23, 1958. Under the contract he signed on April 1, Wayne was paid a flat $750,000 for his services, spread out in one payment of $250,000, two payments of $175,000, and one payment of $150,000—one payment a year for four years, from 1958 to 1961. (Spacing out the money was a means of avoiding the heaviest income tax percentage.)

For the rest of the cast, Dean Martin got $5,000 a week for ten weeks, with two weeks added for postproduction. If Hawks had known how Martin felt about John Wayne westerns he could have gotten him for free. “I remember third shows at the Copa where [Dean would] speed up so as not to miss the three A.M. showing of John Wayne in
Red River
or
Stagecoach
,” remembered Jerry Lewis. “In fact, I’ll swear: as much as Dean loved the ladies, when the fun was done, he preferred being left alone to watch his westerns or read his comic books. Women always seemed to need the kind of attention he wasn’t much interested in giving.”

Ricky Nelson got $3,500 per week with a ten-week guarantee, and Angie Dickinson got $833.33 per week with a twelve-week guarantee. The two payroll surprises were Walter Brennan, who got $10,000 a week for five weeks, and Ward Bond, who got $3,333 a week for six weeks, even though his scenes could easily have been photographed in a couple of days.

Wayne’s salary for
Rio Bravo
represented a financial diminishment, since he had been getting a percentage of the proceeds since Republic. He was willing to take less money when working for Ford; it’s possible that he was doing the same thing because of his affection for Hawks, whose Armada Productions was in for 30 percent of the profits.

After Martin was cast, Wayne began to think seriously about his character. “Martin gets all the fireworks, doesn’t he?” he asked Hawks, who had to agree. “What do I do?” he finally asked.

“What would happen to you if your best friend had been a drunk and he was trying to come back—wouldn’t you watch him?” asked Hawks. Wayne knew all about working with drunks; he thought about it, nodded and said, “OK, I know what to do.”

As he moved into the latter stages of his career, Wayne would often express the same basic anxiety, especially with complex scripts—that he was the hub of the wheel but didn’t actually have a lot to do, or even much of a character to play, and just how the hell was he supposed to be interesting for 120 minutes? It was basic actor’s fear, the rough equivalent of Spencer Tracy’s neurotic attempts to try to back out of nearly every movie just before shooting started. It was also somehow touching in that Wayne seemed unaware of the compelling strength he could project without trying—the innate quality that Hawks and Ford relied on.

Hawks chose Arizona’s Old Tucson for the primary location, and did a lot of construction, building an entirely new main street about four blocks long that bisected the old, pre-existing pueblo structures and included twenty-six buildings, not counting the large warehouse that was blown up in the film’s climax.

Wayne is relaxed, commanding, unflappable. In a direct riposte to
High Noon
, he wants no help from well-meaning amateurs. In one of the great dialogue exchanges of the movies, he outlines his meager troops:

1. A drunk.

2. A crazy old man.

“That’s all you got?” asks Ward Bond.

“That’s
what
I got,” says Wayne.

John T. Chance is a self-sufficient man who inspires others to rise above their own acknowledged shortcomings. Beneath the surface it’s a very democratic movie—a small community of friends in which each individual shores up the next. Crude readings of Wayne’s persona accuse him of mindless cheerleading for American might. It would be more accurate to say that Wayne embodies the American experiment far more than he does American power, if only because he never avoided dramatizing the potential that experiment had for going wrong.

Howard Hawks didn’t have a lot of ideas, but the ones he had were solid: play comedy as fast as possible, underplay drama as much as possible, make the girl as tough as the leading man. Mainly, Hawks believed that if something worked once, it would work at least three more times. Angie Dickinson has the same part that Lauren Bacall had in
To Have and Have Not
, complete with thinly paraphrased dialogue, and Ricky Nelson rubs his nose with one finger, just like Montgomery Clift in
Red River
. As for Wayne, in a charming in-joke, he wears a belt buckle that sports Tom Dunson’s brand from
Red
River.

Angie Dickinson had to test for the part, not opposite Wayne but opposite football player Frank Gifford, who was moonlighting from the New York Giants while recovering from an injury. Hawks gave Capucine, Charles Feldman’s mistress, pro forma consideration for the part of Feathers, but he didn’t want an accent in his movie. Also, Capucine had an aristocratic air that was at odds with Hawks’s taste in women. (Feldman would finally get his way when he stuck Capucine in
North to Alaska
a year later.)

Dickinson had already worked for Wayne indirectly when she made
Gun the Man Down
, the James Arness western that Andrew McLaglen had directed for Batjac a couple of years earlier. She had also done an unbilled bit with Wayne in a George Gobel vehicle at RKO entitled
I Married a Woman
.

None of these films was going to earn her a starring role opposite John Wayne. “I had done one good movie,
Cry Terror,
with James Mason,” remembered Dickinson. “It was made in ’57, came out in ’58 and I was damn good. I could see I had something to stick around for.” Auteurists might also point to Samuel Fuller’s
China Gate
, but Dickinson insisted that the Fuller movie was barely seen.

Dickinson actually got
Rio Bravo
through an episode of
Perry Mason
. Chris Nyby, who had been Hawks’s film editor as well as the credited director on
The Thing,
had been directing
Perry Mason
and told his former employer to take a look at the startlingly sensual young actress.

“Chris’s recommendation meant that I was more than actress #47 coming through the door,” said Dickinson. “It was serendipity.” Also working in her favor was the fact that Dickinson had a mind of her own. One day Hawks played a song that he liked called “Tiger by the Tail,” and asked Dickinson if she liked it.

“No,” she said.

“Everybody always says ‘Yes’ to me,” mused Hawks, but Dickinson could see that he was pleased by her refusal to acquiesce. “I think it surprised him; Howard liked to be surprised.”

Dickinson joined the company in Old Tucson, where Hawks, Wayne, and Dean Martin threw a dinner in her honor. When they got down to work, Wayne didn’t offer her any coaching, as he often did with young actors, because “with Hawks around he didn’t have to coach. But Duke was incredibly patient with me. My scenes were well written, but they were tough to play. It was on the page, but you don’t know how hard to press.”

Dickinson’s problem was that she was playing the sexual aggressor—a part she wasn’t used to. “Wayne is better when the girl is forcing the issue,” said Hawks, comparing it to the way Clark Gable forced the issue in a love scene. “If you’ve got a love scene in a Wayne picture, you adjust it to his personality. He just wouldn’t be effective if he were aggressive toward a woman. Partly that’s because of his size. He’s too big to be a Rover Boy like Gable was.”