John Wayne: The Life and Legend (65 page)

The deal with Seven Arts would have wiped out all the debt and given Wayne $1 million in the bank, but he didn’t pull the trigger. Batjac was a large part of his identity—it meant he was more than an actor for hire, and losing it would have meant far more than an acknowledgment that his idée fixe had cost him his company.

Instead of selling out, he handed the company over to his son Mike, who embarked on a strategic and successful series of maneuvers that kept the company alive. Wayne maintained Batjac as a production entity for the rest of his life.

By the fall of 1960, the publicity drumbeats for
The Alamo
would have terrified the bravest man behind the mission walls. United Artists sent out what was believed to be the world’s largest press release—actually the film’s production notes. They ran to 184 pages and weighed in at two and a quarter pounds. Ten thousand of them cost $14,752 to print and $3,500 to mail.

The Alamo
premiered in spectacular fashion in San Antonio on October 24, 1960, as the culmination of three days of Alamo-centered hullabaloo. There were round-the-clock appearances by Wayne and the rest of the cast, uniformed high school bands, a symphonic concert of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, a group of trail riders from 130 miles away, and a column of U.S. Marines who reenacted the seventy-mile march of Alamo reinforcements with a banner that read “Come And Take It.” There was also a three-hundred-foot-long cake in the shape of the Alamo, which Wayne helped cut with a Bowie knife.

ABC aired a special entitled
The Spirit of the Alamo
that amounted to a one-hour commercial. There was a tour of the set in Brackettville, Laurence Harvey recited Shakespeare, Frankie Avalon and Chill Wills sang, and Wayne and Richard Boone extolled the virtues of Texas in particular and America in general. There was even an interview with the ninety-two-year-old John Nance Garner that
Variety
termed “rather painful.”

A couple of days before the premiere, Wayne admitted to Hedda Hopper that he thought the picture was too long. He also said that the picture could wipe him out. “When I say we spent $12 million, I’m leveling. I’ve got everything I own in it. I borrowed from banks and friends. Take a look at one scene and you’ll never be able to count the thousands of people. . . . But I’m not worried. This is a darned good picture—it’s a real American history, the kind of movie we need today more than ever. It’ll make money for years to come.”

Wayne did press in Los Angeles, he did press in Texas, he did press in New York. For Wayne, all the publicity was worthwhile, because he felt compelled to speak out on politics and, increasingly, movies. There were more and more movies—
On the Beach
and Robert Rossen’s
They Came to Cordura
—that aroused his ire. He told
The Hollywood Reporter
that he objected to a “trend in certain quarters of Hollywood to glorify all that is degrading in a small percentage of disreputable human beings.”

Warming to his subject, he said he didn’t see how they got Gary Cooper to make the Rossen picture—Coop was always going off the reservation and making a movie about fear instead of resolution. By comparison, there was
The Alamo
, “a film made up of men and women who believed that in order to live decently one must be prepared to die decently.”

Also upsetting him was the way he felt America tentatively addressed other world powers. “Why don’t both our presidential candidates emphasize that this is the greatest nation in the history of the world?” he asked. “When the world was flat on its back, what brought it back? American money and American energy, our humanitarianism and our sense of social responsibility for friend and foe alike.”

The reviews of
The Alamo
began rolling in, and they were good, not great. Opinions were not radically different than they have been ever since—a splendid physical show with majestic battle scenes marred by too much didactic palaver. “His action scenes are usually vivid, his talk scenes are long and unusually dull,” wrote Bosley Crowther of
The New York Times
, while
Variety
said, “The picture is too talkative at times. . . . In undertaking production, direction and thespic participation, Wayne may have spread his talents out too thin for best results.”

“A great deal that goes on in the first two-thirds of the film,” wrote Philip Scheuer of the
Los Angeles Times
, “might have been scissored to advantage—not so much because it is incompetent, irrelevant or immaterial as because it is corny.”

The Alamo
received the signal honor of a parody in
Mad
magazine, in which “John Wayde” narrates the story of the making of the movie: “As we all know, the longer the picture nowadays, the greater it is,” says Wayde by way of introduction. “Well, we had a greatness problem right from the start. Namely, how to add three hours to an exciting half-hour assault on the Alamo by the Mexican army. One way was to pad the time with lengthy speeches about freedom . . .”

As far as Wayne’s friends—and quite possibly Wayne himself—were concerned, all this was delayed retribution for the activities of the Motion Picture Alliance. “The word of mouth was that [
The Alamo
] was a dog,” said Borden Chase. “This was created by the Communists to get back at Wayne. Then there were some bad reviews inspired by the Communists. Of course, I wouldn’t say that all criticism of
The Alamo
was Communist-inspired, but some of these movie reviewers, who are only liberals, have some best pals who are Communists.”

The vast left-wing conspiracy helped to focus United Artists’ doubts that
The Alamo
was not really a road show (reserved seat) picture, if only because Wayne’s audience did not consist of sophisticates in big cities who traditionally attended such movies. Business the first week was very good, mostly sellouts, then started drifting downward. With grosses not holding firm, United Artists also wanted to cut the picture in order to squeeze in more shows per day.

Batjac wanted to stick with the road shows because it was to their economic advantage—UA’s distribution fee for the road show was only 15 percent versus 30 percent for general release. Conversely, UA wanted to rush the picture into general release because it was to
their
economic advantage. Then there was the fact that the film wouldn’t be able to break even without the premium pricing of reserved seats. Also contributing to the studio’s attitude was the unpleasant fact that UA’s investment was less than Wayne’s, which meant that UA had less of a commitment to maximizing revenue than did the star-director.

The other shoe dropped very quickly. On November 4, only a few weeks after the premiere,
The Hollywood Reporter
announced that Wayne was cutting the film to about two and a half hours for a general release, a trim of about thirty minutes—an admission that the film was too long and wasn’t pulling the desired audiences. Although UA announced that the shorter running time wouldn’t mean any change in the reserved seat engagements, everyone in the business knew that was only temporary.

Wayne had just left for Tanganyika to make
Hatari!
for Howard Hawks, so Mike Wayne and editor Stuart Gilmore cut thirty-one minutes out of the picture. It’s not uncommon to lop off the beginning and ending of scenes in such cases, in order to get to the drama more quickly, which Mike and Gilmore did. But they also changed the order of some scenes, and in the film’s final battle scenes there are several shots without dialogue that were also trimmed, probably because doing so wouldn’t upset the sound mix.

Some of the scenes that were cut take place just before the final assault, as the men contemplate what they know will be their deaths. Laurence Harvey had more screen time in the uncut version, and many of his scenes were truncated. Likewise, Wayne’s death scene is more protracted and slightly more violent in the uncut version. The primary difference between the two cuts is that the road show version is an authentic epic, while the edited version feels more like a very long western.
¹

Jimmy Grant wrote Wayne that UA was making contracts for the general release of
The Alamo
in March, and glumly noted that they didn’t seem to be planning any sort of campaign to counter the underwhelming business of the road shows. “We have no stick to threaten with, and we have no one on our side to wield it if we had one,” concluded Grant.

By December 12, the writing was on the wall, and in large letters. “There doesn’t seem to be any sense in my flailing the ghost of
The Alamo
,” Grant wrote Wayne. “I think you’ll agree with me that [United Artists] have no intention of letting the picture ever break even.”

It was becoming clear that
The Alamo
was going to be, at best, a lot like the battle it dramatized: a moral victory perhaps, but otherwise a bloodbath. Grant recommended hiring outside auditors in order to bring suit against United Artists. “It dawns on me that this is a morbid Xmas communication, but it ain’t only in Africa that things are tough.”

A day later, Grant talked to distribution executives at Paramount and others who told him that the general feeling in the industry was that
North to Alaska
(which Fox had unhelpfully rushed into release a few weeks after
The Alamo
) “is kicking hell out of us. The public can see Wayne for a buck, so why should they pay three or four?”

It was true; Charles Feldman wrote Wayne that “
North to Alaska
business is exceptionally good. . . . It was the hottest picture around the country during the Thanksgiving weekend.”

Wayne’s delight in the success of the Henry Hathaway picture must have been severely muted, but Feldman was doing the best he could for his friend. Fox offered Feldman 25 percent of the profits of
North to Alaska
for his packaging services, but he rejected that as “unsatisfactory.” Feldman wrote his client that whatever Fox paid him, the money would go to Wayne.

In the first week of January 1961, Jimmy Grant’s instincts about United Artists were borne out when UA’s Seymour Poe wrote Mike Wayne that there was no possibility of the Chinese Theatre, nor any other of the prestigious theaters on Hollywood Boulevard, for the general 35mm release of
The Alamo
.

UA was going to rush the picture into general release Easter weekend, with some territories—Florida, for instance—scheduled for the end of February. This meant that the road show would be pulled within two to three months of the premiere—a clear sign of failure. UA further cut the ground out from Wayne by telling
Variety
that this release pattern had been its preference all along, but they had gone along with the reserved seat engagements “on Wayne’s insistence.”

It was the first open acknowledgment of the internecine war that had been going on for nearly a year over the film’s publicity and release, which was only exacerbated when Russell Birdwell announced that the general release version had been cut. “In my opinion, this is absolute suicide, and every experience in the industry proves it,” wrote UA’s Roger Lewis to Birdwell. “You can’t tell people that they are buying the cut version even if you justify it by saying it has improved the picture. It merely plants the conviction that there was something wrong to begin with, or that they are not getting their money’s worth.”