John Wayne: The Life and Legend (87 page)

Back at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Richard Burton was depressed and made a gloomy prediction: “Thirty years from now, Peter O’Toole and I will still be appearing on talk shows plugging for our first Oscar.” As a matter of fact, Burton would die fifteen years later without having won an Oscar, and thirty years later O’Toole would still be plugging, until he received an honorary Oscar in 2003.

Hours after the ceremony, Wayne banged on Burton’s door, thrust the Oscar statue at him and said, “You should have this, not me.” (Actually, Burton was robbed for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
not
Anne of the Thousand Days,
as Wayne had been robbed for
Red River
and
The Searchers
, performances for which he wasn’t even nominated. Turnabout is fair play.) The two men spent the rest of the night drinking. Burton found him “very drunk but, in his foul-mouthed way, very affable.”

True Grit
was the right movie at the right time. It washed away the ideological bitterness wrought by
The Green Berets
and presented Wayne apolitically, as a beloved anachronism, creaky but indomitable. It was a role he would play, with some variations, for the rest of his life—not a culture warrior, but an old man dredging up enough strength for one last hurrah.

Wayne had certainly done more subtle acting than Rooster Cogburn, but few of his performances were quite as enjoyable—the actor’s pleasure transfers to the audience. And in the scene where he talks about his isolation from his family, the reason his only friends are a Chinese man and an insolent orange cat named General Sterling Price, he reveals a sense of loss that was all the more touching because it was usually concealed by masculine bravado—the same combination of elements that made Frank Sinatra a great singer.

True Grit
was an enormous commercial and critical success, earning rentals of slightly more than $14 million. As of September 1970, Wayne’s profit percentage from
True Grit
had earned him another $788,000 on top of his salary. It would be Wayne’s last massive commercial success, the reasons for which were contained in a brief exchange with a man from
The Hollywood Reporter
.

“Westerns are different today,” said the reporter, referring to
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
and
The Wild Bunch
.

“Not mine,” said John Wayne.

The only negative experience relating to
True Grit
was Paramount’s hasty decision to sell the film to television in September 1969, while it was still in the theaters and before Wayne got his Oscar. Joseph Hazen, Wallis’s partner, and also a participant in the profits, wrote a steely letter to the studio pointing out that there was a good chance that Wayne would win an Academy Award for the picture, in which case
True Grit
would have a substantially higher broadcast value than would otherwise be the case.

“There is nothing to be gained by making a sale of
True Grit
now,” Hazen wrote, further pointing out that the picture was going into profit only three months after release. “As 662/3% owners of the profits from the network telecast of
Grit
, it is our deep conviction and strong feeling that Paramount should neither offer nor sell
True Grit
to the networks at this time, and that it should definitely and positively await the results of the Academy Awards
before
it offers the picture for network showing.”

But Paramount sold the picture anyway, for $1.1 million, about the same as the first-run prices for
The Sons of Katie Elder
and
Rosemary’s Baby.
Wayne and Wallis were both incensed, and they continued to feel that way even after the license fee was increased to $1.54 million. Wallis, Hazen, and Wayne sued and eventually got a settlement for more money.

For those who knew Wayne,
True Grit
always had a special place. “Rooster Cogburn—that
was
Duke,” said Cecilia deMille Presley. “He was the kindest teddy bear in the world. Unless you did something wrong. Then you best step back.”

True Grit
also contained the prism that would slightly distort the final stage of Wayne’s career, in which he would be not only the star of his movies but their subject. With the marginal exception of
The Cowboys
and
The Shootist
, the succeeding Wayne films—
The Undefeated, Chisum, Big Jake
, etc.—were not movies with individual identities so much as they were John Wayne movies, in which the star’s persona was identical from film to film. This presentation suited Wayne, suited his ego and his idea of himself, and it also suited his audience.

“For my father, the studio and the producers were not the boss,” said Mike Wayne. “The fans were the boss. He felt he worked for his fans. He played bigoted, terrible guys, but bigoted, terrible guys with convictions. Every man he played had a code and never deviated from it during the film. If he was a mean son of a bitch, that’s what he was. And he would never trick his audience. Surprise yes; trick, no.”

That audience was extremely loyal, but it was also finite, and Wayne’s refusal to try to expand it meant that it would stay finite, before it inevitably began to shrink.

The Undefeated
had been purchased by Warner Bros. back in 1961. In the mid-1960s, there was a screenplay by the old hand Casey Robinson for director Henry King, but Warners sold the property to Fox, who ordered up a rewrite from James Lee Barrett. The picture was expensive—$7 million—partially because of its pricey co-star Rock Hudson, but coming on the heels of
True Grit
it seemed like a good bet.

Wayne’s co-star Lee Meriwether was lodged in a hotel in Baton Rouge, when most of the other major actors had houses. Marian McCargo found out and invited her to stay with her in her rented house. The two women threw a party for the cast and crew, which involved two days of cooking. Everybody pitched in—stuntman Hal Needham cooked chicken livers. Wayne ended up in the kitchen with a few friends—Ed Faulkner and Dobe Carey.

After everybody else had gone home, Rock Hudson stayed behind to help McCargo and Meriwether clean up. The women were washing dishes, Hudson was drying, and Wayne was sitting at the kitchen table finishing off his drink. With the dishes finished, Hudson said, “C’mon, Duke.” Wayne rose and staggered a bit. Hudson steadied him and the two went through the front door.When Wayne staggered again, Hudson put his arm around Wayne’s shoulder and the two men walked to the end of the block, while Meriwether watched and wished she had had a camera.

Hudson is the most famous example of a closeted movie star, and he was still working at it. Meriwether remembered that Hudson was “the best dancer ever,” and came over to her at a party. “Are you happy?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you happy at home?”

“Why, yes I am,” she replied.

“He was flirting with me,” remembered Meriwether. “I honestly didn’t know he was gay.”

Wayne did know, and was flummoxed by the vagaries of sexual identity. “Look at that face,” he said admiringly to his daughter Aissa, who was visiting the set. “What a waste of a face on a queer. You know what I could have done with that face?” To someone else he would say about Hudson, “It never bothered me. Life’s too short. Who the hell cares if he’s queer? The man plays great chess.”

The gay man flirted; the straight man didn’t. “It was all business,” says Meriwether. “Duke was a journeyman film man. He was very relaxed and didn’t need to rev up for a scene. When it was time to act, he just started acting. He knew what he wanted to do with a scene, and he did it.

“It was a fantastic lesson in film acting. Natural, comfortable, easy. He was comfortable in his own skin and he didn’t have anything to prove. He tended to be the same take to take, but if something was thrown at him, he could go with it. He didn’t ad-lib much, but he could adapt; he was flexible.”

On the set, someone asked Wayne the secret of acting. “Listening,” he said. He was as good as his word. “He didn’t show you he was listening,” says Meriwether, “he just listened.”

In spite of the goodwill on the set and a pleasant atmosphere,
The Undefeated
didn’t return its investment, running up a $2.4 million loss for Fox. Part of the reason was a sequence involving a stampede of horses. Horses are generally easy to control in a staged stampede because they’re run toward a corral and they’re usually not bright enough to head off on their own. But on
The Undefeated
, the stampede was staged with three thousand horses. “When we got through shooting the stampede, we had 2,940,” said William Clothier. “Somewhere we lost 60 horses. . . . Those damn horses took off like goats. We had horses all over Mexico.”

The first time Andrew Fenady saw John Wayne was in 1951. He was newly arrived in Hollywood and drove around town to see all the studios—“Even Monogram. I was wondering if I would ever get into any of those places.” One day on Barham Boulevard, right by Warner Bros., a large man was walking across the street against the light and was nearly run down by Fenady.

“You dumb bastard, watch where you’re going,” yelled John Wayne.

Years later, after Fenady had hits on television such as
The Rebel
, the editor Otho Lovering came to Fenady’s doorway with John Wayne in tow. “Ya see, Duke, there it is,” said Lovering, pointing to a large poster of Wayne as Hondo with Sam the dog, curving down from the ceiling to the floor of Fenady’s office. Wayne nodded and said, “That’s one of my favorite pictures. It comes back to me in three years.”

The two men were favorably disposed toward one another, so Fenady began working on a story based on the career of the cattle baron John Chisum while Wayne made
Hellfighters, True Grit
, and
The Undefeated
.

When Fenady was finished, he had both a ten-page outline and a forty-page treatment. Mike Wayne read the ten pages, as did Tom Kane, the Batjac story editor. Both liked it, and Fenady was told, “Duke wants to talk to you about it. Tell him the story. He doesn’t want to read it.”

So Fenady trooped onto the
Wild Goose
and began telling the story. “Mind if I smoke?” asked Fenady. “Not if you blow it my way,” said Wayne. After five or six minutes of Fenady’s recitation, Wayne stood up and walked out of the salon, saying “Turn ’em loose.” Mike whacked Fenady on the shoulder. “You’re in,” he said. “He wants you to do it.”

Chisum
is a typical example of Wayne’s producing style in the final phase of his career. Fox signed an agreement to make the picture in July 1968, but the preliminary budget came in at $5.3 million instead of the agreed-upon $4.5 million. Mike Wayne cut $450,000 out of the budget, but Fox passed anyway. This was in July 1969, and
The Undefeated
wasn’t released until October, so Fox’s lack of enthusiasm couldn’t have been based on that film’s failure.

Richard Zanuck told Mike that Fox’s situation had changed considerably in the year since they had made the deal—New York was giving him a hard time about making deals on which Fox had only a marginal chance of making money, and things just generally didn’t look good.

Luckily, Warner Bros. had been happy with the financial results of
The Green Berets
, and Mike moved
Chisum
there in a matter of weeks.
Chisum
went into production in October. Mike Wayne and Andrew Fenady made
Chisum
for $4.5 million on a forty-five-day schedule. $1 million of the budget was apportioned to Wayne, with Fenady getting $100,000 and a percentage for his script and production. The picture came in five days under schedule. “It was a textbook production,” said Fenady. “We made a lot of money.”

Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher was acting in the picture, and Wayne’s affection for the father rubbed off on the son. One day, Wayne rode up to Christopher Mitchum and said, “You know, you should have played Billy the Kid.” (Geoffrey Deuel was playing the part.)

Wayne soon invited Mitchum to play chess, but the younger man couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “He had huge hands,” remembered Mitchum, “and for the first couple of days we were playing, he’d reach out to move a piece with his fingers, and his thumb would slide a rook over. And I’m looking at this thinking, ‘My God, the man’s cheating at chess.’ I didn’t know what to do. And of course, he was creaming me because he was getting two moves to every one of mine.”