John Wayne: The Life and Legend (92 page)

One day Dobe was snoozing on his lunch break when he was awakened by the
thunk
of a large body landing in an adjacent chair. He looked over to discover Wayne sitting there. “Jeez, I miss your dad,” he said. “I loved that old man. Even if he was a Democrat.”

One Sunday night at sunset, Wayne was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the house where he was living when Mike Wayne came bustling by. “Come up here, sit down and look at this sunset,” Wayne said. Mike said he couldn’t, there were things he had to straighten out for the next day’s shooting. “Let me tell you,” Wayne said, “the work will be there. This sunset isn’t going to be there. It will never be there again.” In telling the story, Mike Wayne concluded, “He had balance in his life. He was in sync with the world around him.”

Mike Wayne was always proud of the deal he made for
Big Jake
, and it’s easy to see why. The film was fully financed by CBS for its theatrical arm Cinema Center Films, at a budget of $4.3 million, but Batjac owned the picture. Mike called it “the best deal I ever made in my life, and it also made the most money. Just phenomenal. The script was better than the film, but it really played.”

The cast budget for the picture clearly shows that special consideration was given to actors in the Batjac family. Wayne got his usual $1 million and a percentage, Patrick Wayne got $25,000. Dobe Carey got $1,000 a week, Bruce Cabot got $2,000 a week with an eight-week guarantee, and Maureen O’Hara got $30,000 for the small part of Wayne’s estranged wife, a character originally offered to Susan Hayward, who had a scheduling conflict. Richard Boone got $90,000, with $5,000 of that salary diverted to a school he helped support in Hawaii. (Wayne knew that the roster of actors who could go up against him was not large; the second choice for the part appears to have been Gene Hackman.) Ethan Wayne, in his first screen role, earned $650 a week, with his father signing the contract for the minor. As for the crew, the venerable William Clothier got $2,250 a week.

A very interesting casting choice that didn’t happen involved Jeff Bridges playing Wayne’s son. Mike Wayne and George Sherman decided on Bridges after what Mike remembered as “fifty-five interviews, twenty-three readings, and three tests.” Batjac agreed to pay Bridges $1,750 a week for eight weeks, but he ultimately turned down the film. CBS didn’t like Chris Mitchum, Bridges’s replacement, but Batjac lobbied until the studio agreed. Production began on October 10, 1970, and wrapped fifty-five days later, three days under schedule, at a cost of $4.39 million.

The most startling thing about
Big Jake
is its violence—at one point, Jake’s dog gets hacked to death, and a man takes a pitchfork to the face—but it was somehow rated PG. At times, the self-reliance of the Wayne character coarsens to something approaching the ugly—when he’s not slugging his sons for insubordination, he’s humiliating them.

But the audience didn’t mind. The casts of these later pictures were mostly the same, the saloon brawls were from central casting, and so were some of the character beats: Jacob McCandles is as relentless as Tom Dunson, he’s embarrassed when he has to put on his reading glasses, just as Nathan Brittles was in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, and when somebody tells him, “I thought you were dead,” he responds with “That’ll be the day.” It’s also a little sloppy; at one point, Wayne mispronounces “ostentatious” as “ostentious.” There was no retake.

Despite all of this,
Big Jake
was a success, returning domestic rentals of $7.9 million. In 1971, the sixty-four-year-old Wayne was the number one box office star in America, in front of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and George C. Scott.

Big Jake
was released in May of 1971, and Chris Mitchum and Wayne went on
The Tonight Show
to promote the picture. Mitchum had been working for the passage of Proposition 13, an environmental initiative to clean up Los Angeles harbor and set pollution controls. Wayne preceded Mitchum on the show, and when Mitchum brought up his work for the environment, Wayne and Mitchum engaged in an apparently playful back-and-forth about the supposedly left-wing politics behind the movement. The exchange resulted in a flurry of publicity and letters to the editor to the general effect that being conservative does not have to mean turning your back on the environment.

Wayne never spoke to Mitchum again. “I don’t know if he decided I was a Commie, or if he was just mad that he’d gotten involved in something with me and because of it received some negative fallout,” remembered Mitchum. He wrote Wayne several notes trying to repair the damage, and when Wayne fell ill a few years later sent him a letter saying he was only an hour away and was ready for a chess game anytime. There was never a response.

“It really hurt me, because the man was more of a mentor and a father to me in the business than my own father was. . . . He did nothing but give me support. He took me from a two or three line role to co-starring with him. He basically made my career. And to have it end that way has always been a great sadness in my life.”

For his next picture, Wayne opted for something more demanding than the pictures he had been making, something closer to the epic.
The Cowboys
began life as a novel by William Dale Jennings, an Army veteran who in 1950 co-founded the Mattachine Society, the first modern gay organization in America.

Jennings’s novel concerned Wil Andersen, a Montana rancher who has 1,500 head of cattle that he needs to get to the rail head at a time when every available hand is off pursuing a gold strike. His only alternative is to hire a crew of kids, ages ten to fifteen, to help him drive the cattle four hundred miles. Andersen’s brand of tough love gets the boys started on the maturation process. He and his crew are waylaid by trail scum and he’s killed, but the boys summon their resources to take revenge on the killers and finish what Andersen started.

It’s a good, often poetic novel that spins off the traditional movie convention that certain problems can only be solved by slaughter. It quickly sold to the movies because of its interesting combination of ingredients—a little bit of
True Grit
, a little bit of
Hondo,
quite a bit of
Lord of the Flies
.

Jennings wrote several drafts of the script, which was then punched up by the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. What Jennings did not want was for it to be made into a John Wayne western—he had written it with George C. Scott in mind. In this, he was of the same mind as the film’s director.

“I did not want John Wayne for
The Cowboys
,” said director Mark Rydell. “But Warners was heavily invested in John Wayne, with whom I was at polar opposites politically and emotionally and every possible way. I did not admire him. But he seduced me mercilessly. ‘I promise you I will do the best job I possibly can,’ he said. ‘Let’s not talk about anything but acting. Not politics or religion, just acting.’ He completely won me over and I agreed he should play the part.”

Wayne compared the film to
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and
Sands of Iwo Jima
—an older man molding young men, although in the case of
The Cowboys
it was unwillingly.

“He came on board and didn’t talk politics or religion or any anti-Semitic horseshit,” said Rydell. “But I consciously surrounded him with a different crew and actors than he was used to. None of his cronies were on the picture. I cast Roscoe Lee Browne. Allyn Ann McLerie, who played his wife, had been blacklisted. It was my private joke. I wanted him not to be comfortable because I didn’t want a standard Wayne performance; I wanted to agitate him off the mark of his usual performances.”

For the boys, Rydell split the cast down the middle; half the kids were skilled horsemen who had never acted before, and half were actors who had little experience with horses. Preproduction was largely given over to teaching young actors how to ride and young riders how to act.

From the first, Wayne was happy with the script and the cast. “He sensed competitiveness from the actors and that made him competitive,” said Rydell. “He was the first on the set and the last to leave. The kids adored him, climbed on him as if he was a playground. And in the end he impressed me tremendously.”

One day John Ford and his grandson, Dan, showed up after making a special trip via the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Santa Fe. Ford dropped by the set in a limousine and gave Rydell one crystalline bit of advice: “Don’t let ’em give you any shit.”

Wayne was living in a large ranch house with a couple of hippie girls he had picked up hitchhiking on the drive to New Mexico. “Duke was not known for being a particularly tolerant man,” said Dan Ford, “but he asked these two good-looking girls if they wanted jobs, so they took care of the house and cooked for him. They were great-looking and funny, and he enjoyed having them around.” Also staying at the house was Wayne Warga, a writer for the
Los Angeles Times
, who was ghosting a prospective autobiography for Wayne.

On a Saturday afternoon, Ford and Wayne sat around reminiscing about old times. Wayne complained to Ford about the considerable wind on the location, and the old director perked up. “I hope they’re using it,” he said. Wayne said they were using so much of it that it took him most of the night to get the dust out of his eyes.

Amid random fulminations about the Teamsters from Wayne (“I think Hoffa’s organization was designed to fuck up a scene in the picture”), inevitably the subject of Ward Bond arose. Ford asked if Wayne had ever gotten back the guns stolen from his house in a recent robbery. “I got everything but the good shotgun,” said Wayne.

“The one that shot Ward in the ass?”

“That’s gone . . . I wish he was around so I could shoot him again.”

Ford was slowly recovering from a broken hip incurred by tripping over some laundry on the back porch of his house in Bel Air. He wasn’t very mobile and wasn’t feeling well. Wayne invited Ford and his grandson to go out for dinner with him. Ford passed because he was tired, so Wayne asked Dan if he wanted to come alone. But Dan said he was going to play some cards with his grandfather.

A little shadow moved over Wayne’s face—he wasn’t used to being rejected. The real reason Dan skipped the dinner was that he had recently returned from Vietnam and had no interest in talking about any aspect of the war, which emphatically included
The Green Berets
, a film that he and every other Vietnam veteran he knew thought “was a complete piece of shit.”

The set for
The Cowboys
was about eight miles outside Galisteo, a one-horse village with two shops, a gas station, and a dirt floor bar called La Fonda that was locally famous for their margaritas. Wayne was in fine fettle, listening to Frank Sinatra’s “September of My Years” in the car on the way to the location, arriving at least forty-five minutes before his call. Referring to Rydell’s
The Reivers
, Wayne told the director, “I can’t believe it took you 100 days to shoot a picture with two guys, a kid and a car.”

“I can’t believe it either,” said Rydell.

Occasionally, the elevation caused him to feel tightness in the chest and he would cough. “God, I hate not to feel good,” he would say. As was obvious by the repeated playing of the Sinatra album, age and time were on his mind. His ghosts were gathering, and he knew it.

After the shooting day was done, there was a shower, a massage, one big drink, and dinner. On several occasions he went into the kitchen and mixed up a spicy chili soufflé. He went to bed early, and was again working his way through the writings of Winston Churchill, whom he could quote from memory. If he wasn’t reading Churchill, he was browsing through mail order catalogues.

Dealing with the young actors in the picture brought out the gentleness and consideration that modulated his temper. “It’s never easy for a young man to talk to an old man unless the old man paves the way,” he said. “It’s much easier for me to start a conversation with a younger person than the other way around. I try to communicate sooner than other people do.”

But Mark Rydell didn’t grasp Wayne’s patriarchal imperative. On the day they started the cattle drive scene, Rydell gave the stuntmen a 5:30 A.M. call. Wayne arrived on the set an hour later and was upset to find everyone else in gear. “I want to have the same damn call as the stunt guys,” he told Rydell.

That was the day Wayne chose to challenge Rydell. “There were the kids, the stuntmen, hundreds of head of cattle, five cameras, and I’m up on a camera crane,” remembered Rydell.

You don’t start cattle by saying “Action!” you start by pushing them, and cattle move slowly. I didn’t want to waste a lot of film by rolling before the cattle started moving, but Wayne was impatient and had decided that it was time to go. He called for the camera to start, and I just lost it and started screaming.