John Wayne: The Life and Legend (81 page)

Wayne and Bruce Cabot shared a house on location. On Saturday nights they drank. One night Cabot came back from a night out to find Wayne weaving through the house. “Sleep well,” said Wayne. “There’s very few of us left.” He went into his bedroom, then came back out again. “You know,” he said, “there weren’t too goddamn many of us to start with!”

Howard Keel was playing a comic Indian and remembered that his main problem was staying sober, while all about him the stuntmen were drinking and being serviced by hookers from a private house. After a month, Keel began to think longingly about being serviced himself, so decided to fly home to his wife for the weekend. Wayne didn’t like it, but he let him go.

In Keel’s memory, Wayne was the director and Burt Kennedy was strictly the writer. William Clothier remembered how Wayne took over on the set one day, grabbing Keel and showing him how he thought Keel should play a scene. Keel was struggling with dysentery and didn’t take kindly to being manhandled.

“I’m watching this,” remembered Clothier, “and Keel started to get pretty red. After the scene was over I went to Keel and said, ‘I saw your reactions . . .’ and before I could say anything [else] he said, ‘If he puts his hands on me again, I’m gonna clobber that son of a bitch.’ ”

The next day, word filtered down to Wayne that Keel had been upset and Wayne came over to him. “I think you’re a damned good director,” said Keel, “and I like and respect you. But I don’t like being pushed around. I’ll do anything you like, but don’t push me. I’ve got a bad temper. I’m not as good at brawling as you are. I only have one good arm, and if I lose my temper, I’ll not brawl with you, I’ll try to kill you.”

Wayne looked at Keel and said, “I’m sorry, kid. I understand.” Wayne and Keel ended up friends; Wayne would ask him to appear in
The Green Berets
, but Keel was booked for a theater tour and had to turn the job down.

Bill Clothier had seen Wayne manifest control before and understood it. “Duke doesn’t mean anything by it, it’s just the way he is. That doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t have any business putting his hands on people. When Duke’s working with Ford he comes up and says, ‘OK Coach, what do I do?’ Ford says, ‘You walk over to the horse, get on and ride out.’ Duke will then walk over to the horse, get on and ride out. When he’s working with another director, it doesn’t happen that way: ‘Goddamn it, I’m tired. I don’t want to get on the horse.’ That’s the way it works.

“Duke hasn’t patience with anybody. His own family, other actors, anybody. If you’ve got a big-name star, he’ll keep quiet. He wouldn’t think of telling [Robert] Mitchum how to play a scene. Bill Holden too. But you take another actor . . .”

Not all of Wayne’s suggestions had negative results. One day he was watching Kennedy shoot footage of six horses pulling the massive War Wagon down the street. He walked over to Kennedy and asked him if he remembered the ominous rumble that preceded the earthquake in the MGM movie S
an Francisco
. That sort of thing would be good for their picture. Start the wagon further back, before the camera picked it up, and the soundtrack could precede it with a low rumble. The suggestion was used in the picture to great effect.

Robert Walker Jr., the son of Jennifer Jones, Wayne’s co-star in
New Frontier
at Republic, was also appearing in the movie. The younger Walker had only been in movies a few years, and was a good friend of Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. He was part of a very different generation who would view Wayne with occasional hostility. Nevertheless, Wayne went out of his way to make the young man feel comfortable.

“He defined the word ‘professional,’ ” remembered Walker. “It was really the last of Old Hollywood. He was in control, but he didn’t micromanage things. I never felt intimidated by him, I felt comfortable with him. I felt he would take care of things and that things would be all right as long as he was around. He had confidence and security and he gave everyone that worked for him that same confidence.”

Walker remembered a slightly different chain of command than Howard Keel. “Duke was the boss, but he let Burt Kennedy set things. Burt consulted him on the setups. But the way it was written, it was almost as if the picture made itself, as if it didn’t need any direction, or even a whole lot of supervising. The cameraman, the crew, the costumers, they were all the best. The grips, the wranglers, the stuntmen, they all loved being there and they all respected Duke tremendously and loved him. He was the presence that kept it all together.”

For Walker, it was a kind of paid vacation. He would grab a horse and ride up above Durango and sit in the canyons and watch the lizards. Down below, the stuntmen chased the War Wagon. He’d sense when he was needed and he’d make his way down in time for his shot. Wayne was still climbing onto his horse, but if any serious riding was needed, Wayne’s double, Chuck Roberson, was called upon.

Wayne said kind things about Walker’s father, and commented about how much his son resembled him. “For me, John Wayne was a grandfather figure; he reminded me of my grandfather, Phil Isley—there was a kindness there, although there was no question that he was the boss. But Duke didn’t lord it over you or make you feel small or insignificant. He was very kind and supportive of everybody. He didn’t give advice. He just set an example by the way he behaved on a set. I always knew instinctively what to do, but if I hadn’t, I could have learned just by watching him.

“John Wayne? I had the pleasure, the honor of working with him.”

Kirk Douglas and Wayne had good chemistry on-screen, although Wayne was mightily irritated when Douglas was late to work one morning—a cardinal sin in Wayne’s theology. “We’re waiting for our star,” he said sarcastically.

It had to be difficult navigating between two alpha males, but Burt Kennedy did his best. “Duke was tough but he was good,” Kennedy said.

You had to go to the mat with him. On

, there was a shot where he’s at a bar, and it’s the first time the audience sees Kirk. Duke said, “You’ll never use this shot.” He didn’t want to do the shot, but he was just being contrary. The thing about John Ford that actors resented was that he was tough on them. But actors really love that. They’re like children—actors want discipline, and they want praise. Duke would get mad at me and say, “You never tell the actors they’re any good.”

I never saw the guy blow a line. Ever. As big as he was, Duke never forgot making those five-day westerns, and he had an entirely different attitude about work as a result. He was like Bill Clothier, the wonderful old cameraman. You want a cameraman who’s inventive,

but not too inventive. Bill was great, and he was in his 60s when I worked with him for the first time; his camera operator was ten years older than he was. And they both could go longer than the young guys. Young crews are spoiled; the first thing they say is, “Are we gonna work late?” You never heard that from Bill or Duke.

Kennedy came to believe that Wayne had superb instincts about movies, knew when a scene wasn’t working and often knew how to fix it. “It was uncanny how he could put a finger on something.” The problem, however, was that while he may have always been right about the problem of a given scene, he could be very wrong in the way he
presented
his argument. If you didn’t agree with him, you were wrong.

“I remember, after
The War Wagon
, he went to make
The Green Berets
. People asked me, ‘Are you going to direct
The Green Berets
?’ And I said, ‘I’d rather
join
the Green Berets.’ ”

Dean Smith, who was working on the picture as a stuntman, said that the problem was really very basic: “If you were directing Duke, you had to be smarter than him. That’s all. He was an aggressive guy who knew what he was doing. He was so stout in his own character, and a lot of people are not that confident. My grandmother had a saying that applied to Duke: ‘He had a steel backbone and a wire tail.’ He was tough. He would stay out there all day with us stuntmen. He’d rather work with the stuntmen than be at the hotel. He loved making pictures and he liked the people. He expected you to be just like him and do what was expected of you. But I’ll tell you, if you’re going to ride into a battle, you want to ride with Duke.”

Another stuntman, Hal Needham, noticed that by this time Wayne had to husband his energies, especially for fight scenes—the cancer surgery had left him with a limited energy. “He just couldn’t do a whole bunch,” said Needham. “If we did a fight scene and needed a close-up, he could do a half dozen punches and do them well, but after that . . .”

The War Wagon
emerged as a quintessentially brawny entertainment, the essence of late-period Wayne, complete with a thundering Dimitri Tiomkin score and an unusually strong supporting cast that included Keel, Walker, Keenan Wynn, and, as the heavy, Bruce Cabot, half of whose $1,000 weekly salary was garnished by Los Angeles marshals, for reasons that remain unclear.

The War Wagon
cost $4.2 million, a couple of hundred thousand over budget because of weather. It returned domestic rentals of about $5.5 million and it went into profit in mid-1973, when it passed $10.7 million in worldwide rentals—two and a half times negative cost.

Overall,
The War Wagon
was a good-sized hit, but Wayne knew the picture’s value precisely. “It isn’t a cold picture, but it lacks any real warmth, any getting inside the characters. But there are some tremendously funny scenes in the picture and Kirk Douglas is great in it. . . . There is a nice little love story, but outside of that we’re just two big roughhouse characters. But . . . that sort of thing did all right for Victor McLaglen for quite a few years, you know.”

Although Howard Hawks’s
El Dorado
wasn’t released until the summer of 1967, it was made in late 1965 and early 1966. Leigh Brackett believed that her script was the best of her career, but there were several problems. Hawks was coming off two dismal flops (
Man’s Favorite Sport?
and
Red Line 7000
), and John Wayne’s character died in the end. Hawks, as had been conclusively proven by
Red River
, was allergic to unhappy endings and retreated to something he knew would work, if only because it had worked before: he had the script rewritten until it became an uncredited remake of
Rio Bravo
.

Although Wayne had fired Robert Mitchum off
Blood Alley
ten years before, there were no hard feelings. Hawks called Mitchum to offer him the part. “Bob, how about a western with Duke Wayne?”

“Sounds great. Where are you going to shoot it?”

“I thought we’d do it in Old Tucson.”

“Good—I like that too. What’s the story?”

“Oh, no story, Bob. Just character. Stories bore people.”

“You never knew which Mitchum was going to show up,” said the writer-director Andrew Fenady, who made pictures with both Wayne and Mitchum. “If Mitchum was with people that didn’t know what they were doing, or weren’t pros, he’d say, ‘OK, I’ll hit the marks and say the lines.’ If he was working with someone he thought had depth and character and know-how and cared about what they were doing, he’d give a performance. Mitchum was a mirror; he reflected what was around him. He was highly intelligent, wrote poetry, and was a fine writer as well. He could discourse on almost any subject, from cattle to Communism. He was an interested party, as long as you didn’t bore the shit out of him.”

It was a pleasant production but a ragged one, because Hawks was making a lot of it up as he went along. Johnny Crawford remembered the pace as “totally relaxed and ponderous.” One day, when the company was preparing to shoot Crawford’s death scene, Hawks looked up at the sky and said, “It looks like the sun’s going to be behind the clouds for quite awhile.” He and Wayne promptly jumped into a car and headed for Nogales. The rest of the company stayed on location, just in case, but nothing else got shot.

Wayne still liked Hawks and Hawks still liked Wayne. Hawks told one journalist that the two best actors he ever worked with were Wayne and Cary Grant. “Duke is the easiest to work with; Cary Grant is facile. Duke and I have a lingo—I want to do things his way. With Cary, we change things. Duke knows when something is wrong; he’s got an instinct. . . . It took him so long to realize he was a good actor. Mitchum and Ann Sheridan were the same way, but they didn’t get really good pictures. You have to be lucky.