John Wayne: The Life and Legend (60 page)

On location in Louisiana, Pilar ran out of the pills and began an inadvertent drug withdrawal. Her mouth went dry, her breath was short, her heart began pounding wildly, she began to hallucinate. The episode culminated in Pilar slashing her wrists. Wayne hired a private airplane and nurses to get her back to California while he stayed in Louisiana. There was nothing else to do. There was a movie to be made.

“I liked Duke Wayne a great deal,” said Walter Mirisch. “A very decent, professional man, no nonsense. He came to work, he knew his lines. He was approachable, he didn’t throw his power or prominence around. And a tremendously underrated actor. He gave many extraordinary performances—
Red River, The Searchers
—but he had to wait until the end of his career for an Oscar.

“I thought he was good on script, although my only experience with him was through Ford, and his whole relationship with Ford was so screwy. I was on the set one day when Ford made some kind of disparaging remark to him: ‘Get over there, you dumb cluck’ or something like that. It bothered me, and later I said to Duke, ‘Why the hell do you let him talk to you like that?’

“ ‘Aw, that’s just the Old Man,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t mean it. Forget about it.’ But I didn’t like it.”

Nineteen fifty-eight had been devoted to three movies and to preparation for
The Alamo
. Nineteen fifty-nine would be devoted to one movie only. As Wayne wrote in August of that year, “my career, my personal fortune, and my standing in the business are at stake.”

By now, everybody in Wayne’s inner circle could list all the reasons not to make
The Alamo.
There were a dozen financial concerns Bö Roos could cite and John Ford had more objections: Wayne was too old, had never directed, and the story of the Alamo would be one hell of a complicated production to use as a learning experience. Wayne turned a deaf ear to all of this. He had made up his mind, and when he arrived at that point he could be every bit as focused as one of his obsessive characters.

In 1956, Batjac had outlined a distribution deal with United Artists in which UA would front $2.5 million of the budget in return for distribution rights. Batjac had to match the funds. Wayne had to abandon his plan to play a cameo as Sam Houston in order to play a major part and add some box office insurance. He chose Davy Crockett, then had to find someone equally commanding for Sam Houston. He eventually settled on his old contractee James Arness, now a huge TV star on
Gunsmoke
.

Wayne asked Andy McLaglen to set up a meeting with Arness, which he did. Wayne brought his entourage over to the
Gunsmoke
set after shooting one day to ask Arness to be in the picture, only to find that Arness had skipped out on the meeting. “Jim powdered,” remembered McLaglen. “He absolutely did not show up for the meeting. He totally powdered.”

Wayne was understandably furious, and never really forgave Arness for his flagrant disloyalty. “Get that other guy you work with,” he snapped at McLaglen, meaning Richard Boone, the star of
Have Gun, Will Travel
. So Richard Boone played Sam Houston.

Besides casting difficulties, there were money problems. The proposed budget of $5 million wasn’t anywhere near enough to make the movie Wayne was planning. In search of additional funding, he approached Texas governor Price Daniel, who introduced him to Texas businessmen who were anxious to counter the negative, nativist image that George Stevens had given the state in 1956’s
Giant
.

In June 1958, Clint Murchison agreed to invest $1.5 million in incremental amounts, under the condition that he was in line to get his money back after UA but before anybody else was repaid. He was also charging 6 percent per year interest, and demanded that Wayne receive no personal salary for making the movie. All this and 5 percent of the net profits. He also capped his investment at $1.5 million; any further monies were Wayne’s problem. What all this meant was that Batjac’s own investment could not be recovered until both UA and subsidiary investors got their money back.

Wayne would later estimate that besides Batjac’s contractual contribution, he dropped in $1.2 million of his personal funds—more or less all the ready cash that he had in the world.

Since 1956, he had been looking for a place to shoot his movie cheaply, which led him to consider Mexico and Peru. But those locations were submarined by the problem of finding sufficiently skilled professionals to staff the picture and the fact that distance added costs.

One man was convinced that the movie needed to be made in Texas, and that man was James T. “Happy” Shahan, the mayor of Brackettville, Texas, a town of 1,800 hardy souls one hundred miles west of San Antonio. It just so happened that Shahan owned a 22,000-acre ranch in Brackettville that he believed had all sorts of possibilities.

Parts of
The Last Command
, Herbert Yates’s underhanded attempt to preempt Wayne’s dream project, had been shot in nearby Fort Clark, although the set Republic built was only a small L configuration on the ranch of Louis Hobbs—the Alamo chapel itself had been a matte painting. Shahan believed that Brackettville was the perfect location to build a more expansive set.

At this point, Wayne was planning to shoot in Durango, Mexico, where he had already set the local people to work making authentic adobe bricks to use in constructing the sets. But beginning in 1955, Shahan set siege to Wayne. As he put it, they started talking in the spring of 1955, “and we argued until September, 1957.”

That summer, Wayne sent Nate Edwards, the Batjac production manager, to examine Shahan’s ranch. Edwards arrived in late June, and Shahan took him around Kinney County. Edwards liked Fort Clark, because it could billet a large crew, but they needed something more for the actual Alamo set. After several days of looking, Edwards hadn’t seen anything that would work.

On the last day of Edwards’s visit, Shahan had to double back to his ranch to cut out some cattle. Shahan and Edwards pulled into the ranch as the sun was setting. As they drove past Shahan’s house and onto the flatland where the cattle were corraled, Edwards told Shahan to stop his truck. Why, he wanted to know, had Shahan not brought him here before? On July 1, one week after Edwards returned to Hollywood with photographs of the proposed location, Wayne called Shahan and told him he was on his way to Brackettville.

“When?” asked Shahan.

“Tomorrow,” said Wayne. After Wayne saw the location, negotiations were quickly accomplished. He would make his movie in Brackettville. What seems to have closed the deal was Shahan’s willingness to serve as the construction ramrod on the project. “All I want is an architect, your art director and that’s all,” he told Wayne. “I can do the rest.”

Wayne thought it was an empty promise until Shahan introduced him to a round little man named Chato Hernández, whom Shahan said could handle the construction. Wayne drew himself up to his full height and said, “Chato, can you build an Alamo?”

“Mr. Wayne, can you make a movie?” replied Hernández.

Set construction got under way in February 1958, with production planned for September. Eventually, the sets spread over four hundred acres of land. Wayne had hired Al Ybarra as the Batjac art director because of the work Ybarra had done for Ford on
The Fugitive
in 1947. “When John Wayne saw it,” Ybarra told the film historian Frank Thompson, “he was in love with the picture, the way it was done. He liked particularly the fade-out scene, and I designed the fade-out scene. . . . He says, ‘Look, one day I’m gonna do a story on the Alamo. I want you to be my art director.’ ”

Ybarra was the art director on
The High and the Mighty, Hondo
, and all the other Batjac productions while he kept working on
The Alamo
. When it finally came time to start building the set, Ybarra had the benefit of nearly ten years of thinking and planning.

The facade of the Alamo was built of stone, with most of the wood cannibalized from derelict buildings at Fort Clark. Only the chapel was reproduced to exact scale—the rest of the compound was constructed at about 75 percent actual size—and even then Ybarra cheated a little. The humped gable on the facing of the chapel wasn’t actually there when the battle was fought, nor were two upper windows that were added in 1850.

Ybarra went down to Mexico and bought old handmade iron hardware, then brought in 150 Mexicans from across the border to make adobes. Four months after construction began, a rainstorm washed away fifty thousand adobe bricks that had been drying in the sun. Parts of the set representing old San Antonio also disappeared. After the rains, Ybarra had his crew dig drainage ditches around the entire set.

Even with the flash flood, Ybarra was on schedule, but the September 1958 production date came and went because Batjac had a cash shortfall that resulted from buying out Robert Fellows’s share of the company. Wayne realized that the filming had to be postponed for an entire year. Wayne called Shahan and told him to stop building the set, but Shahan said he couldn’t stop. He decided to take over financial responsibility for the construction himself, and got a loan for $100,000 that was co-signed by Wayne.

As if all this wasn’t enough turmoil, at the end of 1958 Wayne terminated his professional relationship with Bö Roos’s Beverly Management Corporation. Although Wayne would always claim Roos had cheated him up, down, and sideways, after a thorough investigation nothing illegal was found. Most of the money Wayne had given Roos to invest had been flushed down the toilet of bad real estate, overpriced Mexican hotels, dry wells, and management fees. Lots of management fees.

Another financial hit came with the Panamanian investments Wayne had made through Roberto Arias, the husband of Margot Fonteyn and the son of the former president of Panama. Arias was, first, a charmer, and, second, a rogue. Rampant infidelity was not unusual for a Latin male, but Arias took it a step further. In April 1959, Arias fled Panama, which led to Fonteyn being arrested for purportedly plotting against the government. Wayne claimed that “Tito” (Arias’s nickname) “never talked politics and I never heard him say anything about overthrowing the Panamanian government.”

What made it awkward for Wayne was the discovery of Arias’s suitcase that held an envelope with Wayne’s address. Inside the envelope was a memorandum to Wayne outlining a “schedule of funds totaling $682,850 given to or drawn by Tito Arias in connection with his Panamanian operations in which you are involved.” The memorandum went on to specify that $525,000 had been turned over to Arias personally.

The implication was that Arias had diverted some of Wayne’s investment monies into political activities against the Panamanian government. Wayne said that the charges against Arias were “ridiculous.”

Before all this happened, Wayne estimated that he, Arias, and Arias’s brother Tony had about 70 percent of the shrimp business in Panama locked up. It all came tumbling down when Tony Arias was killed in an airplane crash, and his brother fled the country. Wayne estimated that he lost $500,000 in the resulting debacle.

While Wayne went off to make
The Barbarian and the
Geisha, Rio Bravo
, and
The Horse Soldiers
in rapid succession, Al Ybarra and Happy Shahan kept going. The Alamo set eventually took more than a year to build out of wood, limestone, and thousands of handmade adobe bricks. Ybarra had to install ten miles of wiring, and Batjac fronted the cost of fourteen miles of gravel and tar roads, as well as a four-thousand-foot runway at nearby Fort Clark, where the unit would be housed.

The isolation of the location forced Wayne into great expense. At the height of the production, about 2,500 people would be living and working around Brackettville, so Batjac had to have deep-water wells dug and twenty miles of sewage lines laid into mammoth cesspools. In addition, a series of dikes and dams were constructed to turn a lazy prairie creek into a decent sized river. Giant corrals were built to house the one thousand horses and three hundred longhorns needed for the production.

The longhorns posed a particular problem; they were practically extinct by 1959, and the herd had to be put together in small numbers. Each animal had to be insured for $1,500, and they were driven to Brackettville from ranches elsewhere in Texas.

Throughout 1959, Wayne made a series of visits to the Brackettville location to check out Ybarra’s set as it grew. During his final walk-through before production, Wayne noticed that Ybarra had placed a small cross on the very tip of the chapel. Wayne stared at it for a while, then said, “Take that down.” After it was removed, he stared at the front of the chapel some more, then said, “Gimme something allegorical. We need something up there—maybe a larger cross.”

Ybarra thought about it for a few minutes, then told the crew to place a large cross on top of the chapel, only at an angle, as if it had fallen over. Ybarra wasn’t happy about the substitution—he felt the fallen cross was out of scale—but Wayne wanted something allegorical, and he got something allegorical.

Ybarra didn’t attempt to accurately reproduce the San Antonio of 1836. Although Mexican towns of the time were constructed around plazas, Ybarra’s San Antonio is more or less a conventional western town, with dusty streets and parallel lines of buildings.

Wayne’s passion for the picture continued to lead him into a series of bad deals. Besides the fact that UA’s investment was small considering the overall budget, and both UA and the additional investors were due their money before Batjac could recoup, the set he was building at great cost became Happy Shahan’s property when the picture was finished. (No wonder Shahan was happy.)

But Wayne believed that the picture had to be done right if it was going to be done at all, and he wasn’t about to let niggling financial considerations derail him. He even laid a railroad track into Shahan’s property to drop hay for the horses and feed for the livestock.