John Wayne: The Life and Legend (93 page)

It was not a wise thing to do. Everybody was there, everybody was watching and he was humiliated.

He looked at me and went back to his spot and I rolled the cameras

and he did the scene. And then he got in his car and drove back to Santa Fe. And as the camera crane came down, the crew filed by me and shook my hand, as if they were saying goodbye.

That night at the production office, there were four calls from Wayne. I thought Andy McLaglen was going to be there the next day. I may have been producing and directing, but he was John Wayne. One call to Warners and I was gone. So we met and had dinner and that’s when he told me that the only people that treated him that way were me and John Ford. He was very respectful.

In retrospect, I was wrong; I shouldn’t have lost my temper and shouted at him in front of everybody. But he ultimately respected the fact that I had stood up to him.

He was extremely competitive and, in his way, a very private man. Bruce Dern and Roscoe Lee Browne were younger, hotter actors, and he was damned if he was going to be thought of as any less than they were. He wanted to make sure that I understood that, in his mind, he and Gary Cooper had developed realistic acting in westerns.

One day on the set, he and Roscoe were trading lines of poetry from Keats and Byron. I was amazed at his erudition. He loved Roscoe and told him, “You’re the first nigger I’ve ever met with a sense of humor.” It sounds bad in the telling, but it was said jokingly, lovingly, one friend to another.

In the end, he gave a great, loving performance. His feeling for children surprised me; he was amazing with them, and he encouraged them. It taught me a lesson: how many people with whom you agree politically are jerks? And how many people with whom you disagree politically are attractive human beings? He knew I hated his support of the blacklist and was much more liberal than he was, and he laughed about it.

Wayne liked Rydell but thought the picture could have been better. “I was too strong for this young man,” he said a few years later. Specifically, Wayne felt that Rydell botched Wil Andersen’s death scene. “He played everything off the heavy, and I had no chance to show the audience that what I was doing was trying to save these kids’ lives. . . . Give me an
opportunity
to play the scene. Those kids were crying when I played the scene, but the audience wasn’t crying with them because they weren’t in the mood for the scene when it started.”

It wouldn’t have taken much to fix the scene, and Wayne made his suggestions, but he said that there were “so many sycophants around [that] had said, ‘Oh, I think it’s great, it’s great, it’s great.’ When a guy is directing a picture, that’s his picture. I can only tell him what I think, and if he wants to do it the other way, then goddamn, I’m getting pretty good money to do what he says. Only one man can paint the picture.”

A good picture, not a great one,
The Cowboys
cost $4.8 million and brought back domestic rentals of $7.4 million, with Wayne receiving $1 million and 15 percent of the profits.

Wayne had thought about writing a memoir for a number of years and got as far as a series of reminiscences with the fan magazine writer Maurice Zolotow that were later cannibalized for a biography. In 1971, Wayne again made tentative steps toward a book when he began dictating to Wayne Warga.

They got as far as fifteen hours of tapes and five chapters before Wayne began to get uncomfortable, specifically about the chapter devoted to John Huston and
The Barbarian and the Geisha
. He wanted his anger to show, but he also wanted the chapter to be funny and he didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. He threw the chapter out because, “If there’s one person out there who might think it’s petty of me to pick on Huston, then I don’t want it in the book.”

Wayne would invite Warga on the
Wild Goose
for what were supposed to be working vacations on a book that was tentatively titled
What Hat, Which Door and When Do I Come In?
Not a lot of work got done.

“I want you to see what it’s like to be around me, and don’t worry about the goddamn book,” said Wayne. They were somewhere in British Columbia when Warga casually mentioned that he’d never seen a glacier. Nothing would do but that Wayne charter a seaplane that landed by the
Wild Goose
. Off they flew to take pictures of a glacier from the air.

Wayne told Warga that he always wanted to be Fred Astaire, and he demonstrated by launching into “Putting on the Ritz.” He danced, remembered the writer, “with all the grace of a freight elevator.” He also told Warga that he’d like to make something besides westerns, but people didn’t come to him with those kinds of stories, and he’d accommodated himself to the industry’s perception.

Warga was being paid $10,000 plus 25 percent of the royalties, but Wayne pulled away and the project gradually atrophied. Warga found him “a richly complicated man, far more intelligent than he was given credit for, easily hurt, very witty, very literate, naturally friendly, and often in conflict with the world’s image of him. He worshipped his children. He was a very bad businessman and a very loyal friend.”

Ultimately, he shyed away from the memoir for the same reasons he shyed away from
The Streets of Laredo
. “He . . . felt,” wrote Warga, “that the day he wrote The End for his book it might also mean the beginning of the end of John Wayne.”

Wayne had known for decades that to stay in the business at a high level required constant vigilance. Robert Relyea, the assistant director on
The Alamo
, became a producer later in the 1960s, notably on
Bullitt
and other pictures made by Steve McQueen’s Solar Productions. One day on the Warners lot, as Wayne was preparing
The Cowboys
, he sidled up to Relyea and put his arm around him. “You got a project?” Wayne inquired. “Well, when you’re looking for an actor, think of your old friend.”

“He was partially kidding, but, in his John Wayne way, he was also partially serious,” said Relyea. “At the time, his private helicopter was parked on a pad right outside my office window.”

About this time there came to be a sense within the youthful population of the industry that Wayne was falling behind the times. Strictly speaking, it was true.

Tom Kane told a story about a time when Wayne was fishing on the
Wild Goose
in Mexico when Lee Marvin pulled up alongside him. “Hey Duke!” Marvin yelled. “Did you ever go fishing with a Jew?” Marvin was referring to his fishing partner Keenan Wynn. Wayne began talking about a nice little part in an upcoming picture that would be good for Marvin, and the younger man chuckled.

“What are you laughing about?”

“You said it’s a nice little part. I don’t do little parts anymore, Duke.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Christ, I’m a big star like you are. I get a million dollars a picture.”

“You what?”

“Yeah. I did
The Dirty Dozen
and it made more money than anything in the last 20 years. I was the lead and that’s what I get now.”

Wayne was puzzled by this and thought Marvin was pulling his leg. “What did we pay him on that Randy Scott picture we made?” he asked Tom Kane.

“$16,000,” replied Kane, who got the distinct impression that Wayne never believed Marvin got a million dollars a picture.

If Wayne was falling behind the times in some aspects, he was still susceptible to majestic filmmaking. “I loved
The Godfather
,” he enthused. “It was just terrific. It had such a wonderful feeling [for] Sicilian or Italian family life even though it had the murderous stuff in it. Marlon Brando was just great. The way he played with his grandson, Jesus, he looked like he was ninety years old. He used that light make-up over the beard to get that sallow effect. Great. But his attitude was what made it.”

In 1972, Tom Kane got a phone call from a friend at MGM. The studio had just bought a bestseller called
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
, and there was a part in it that was perfect for John Wayne—a man who gets out of prison after twenty years for killing his wife, an Indian squaw.

Kane read the book and agreed that it was a perfect upper-range vehicle for Wayne. He made some calls, and found that not only had MGM not discussed Wayne, they weren’t interested. MGM wanted a younger, more au courant star—they eventually made the picture with Burt Reynolds.

Kane never told Wayne about the book, because he didn’t want Wayne to say, “I love it,” only to have him find out that MGM didn’t want him. “I was never going to put him in that position,” remembered Kane. “And I didn’t.”

Many of Wayne’s friends felt similarly protective of him on the personal level. They thought he was utterly devoted to his children, but many had come to the conclusion that he was badly used by his wife. Cecilia Presley respected Pilar as a mother, but was less enthusiastic about other aspects of her personality.

“The difference between them—well, there were a lot of differences between them, but the main one was that he had a wonderful sense of humor about himself. You could make fun of him and he’d take it. She had no sense of humor about herself. None. She was the sort of woman who didn’t want to go on the
Wild Goose
because she’d get her hair mussed. If he liked you, Duke didn’t care if you were a busboy or the president of the United States. He was not a snob . . .

“The problem was that he couldn’t have fun with Pilar. But he loved her and wanted to keep the marriage going and really tried to be a good husband. He would follow her around and sit there while she played tennis or shopped, and she loved to shop. It was kind of pathetic.”

Cecilia and Wayne would sit and drink and talk and drink. One day she asked him who had been the greatest one-night stand in his life, the single most exciting sexual episode. “Oh, Christ, Citzie . . .” he demurred. But she kept after him and finally he cast his mind back and smiled. “Rome. The Excelsior Hotel. Dietrich. I took her on the staircase.”

Wayne tried to be a family man, and mostly succeeded, but there were rumors for years about a single affair with a legendary co-star. “He and Maureen O’Hara had a long affair,” said one good friend. “They would meet in Arizona, at the ranch he owned with Louis Johnson. It went on for years, before and during his marriage to Pilar.”

Other people scoffed at that possibility, among them Harry Carey Jr. “Maureen and Duke offscreen didn’t have anything going on like the attraction between Duke and Gail Russell. They were good friends, that’s all . . . Duke took marriage seriously.” Likewise, Andrew McLaglen, who said that “I think [Wayne and O’Hara] respected each other a great deal. I think they liked each other. There was nothing personal ever between them, but that’s the way it is sometimes—that makes the best screen relationships, people that don’t really know each other on a personal level, but they can sure act it.”

O’Hara always denied any romantic connection with Wayne, but Christopher Mitchum, who worked with them both in
Big Jake
, asserted that “Duke was truly in love with that woman.”

But if Wayne and O’Hara had an offscreen connection every bit as strong as their on-screen connection, why didn’t he marry her when he had the chance?

“Because Maureen was strong and tough and he probably didn’t think he could control her. He married women he thought he could control. Then he found out he couldn’t.”