John Wayne: The Life and Legend (95 page)

“I woke up the next morning to this masseur Duke had, an old ex-pug. ‘Rod, you can’t do this to the old man,’ he said. ‘He’s not as young as he used to be.’

“ ‘Fuck you! He handcuffed me to the fucking sofa until we finished the tequila!’ ”

Wayne’s age was finally beginning to show. He had what Taylor remembered as “lapses,” when the energy would flag and he would lie down in a dark room. “He was just kind of ill. If you walked in, he would say, ‘Who the fuck is there?’ Occasionally, there was a sense that he was harboring his energy. He would sometimes lose his balance on the set. I would say he was slightly infirm.”

Once Wayne said something about John Ford that struck Taylor as odd. “He seemed a bit disgusted about one thing—he believed Maureen O’Hara had fooled around with Ford. He was disappointed in her, not Ford. He said, ‘Jesus, that face, and that mouth, and his pipe . . .’ ”

Given his age, and medical past, many actors might have backed off a little, but Wayne was still scheduling pictures a year ahead of time. “I don’t think Duke had any alternative to making movies,” said Taylor. “In between pictures was not a pleasant time for him, which is why he would have had difficulty in a marriage—he could not get a lot of happiness out of just being together with a woman. His only answer to not having anything to do was to make another movie. He didn’t bet on the horses, didn’t have a baseball team that he liked. Making movies was exciting; in between movies was the boring part of life.”

Taylor found that, as with any actor, you had to get on a wavelength with Wayne. “You alter the game of tennis to suit your opponent, and he enjoyed that—the back and forth. With other people he could be very impatient—one day he told another actor, ‘Why don’t you learn your fucking lines?’ right on the set, in front of everybody—but he was fine with me, even if I changed things. And I think that was because I had been under the baton of Jack Ford, which meant that I knew what I was doing.”

The Train Robbers
was cameraman William Clothier’s final picture. He was seventy years old and had been thinking about quitting for some time. “I like turkey, I have it at Thanksgiving and New Year’s but I don’t want it seven days a week,” was the way he explained it. “If I’m working on a picture at Batjac, I’m picked up at six in the morning to go on location. Duke and I are either the first or second ones on the set. We work until the sun goes down, then I have to go into town to see the rushes. Hell, it’s strenuous to get up at 6 A.M. if all you do all day is sit in a rocking chair!”

Clothier’s decision also derived from a gradual disinclination to listen to any more of Wayne’s constant discontent. “Duke loves the movies but lately it just wasn’t fun making pictures. I went to Duke and said, ‘Goddammit, Duke, don’t yell at me.’

“ ‘I wasn’t yelling at you.’

“ ‘Well, you were looking at me while you were yelling.’

“ ‘I was yelling at that stupid goddamn director.’

“ ‘Well, go tell that stupid goddamn director and stop taking it out on everybody else.’ ”

Wayne and Clothier were like an old vaudeville team—they had been working together since
Fort Apache
, so long they could finish each other’s sentences, and they could also say things to each other that would have been mortally offensive had they come from anybody else. “Old Duke is like my brother . . . but it just wasn’t fun anymore.”

Also contributing was Clothier’s realization that the pictures Wayne was making were programmers, pure and simple; the creeping lack of ambition was irritating.
The Train Robbers
had an excellent cast and is beautifully photographed, but Mike Wayne realized the problem when he said, “I worked very hard on
The Train Robbers
to try to make it into something, when basically the story wasn’t that good. I was trying to make up for the story in production values and cast.”

So the beauties of
The Train Robbers
are far more physical than behavioral or emotional. And as with
Big Jake
, there’s an unpleasant atmosphere of enforced hero worship—the other characters are always admiring Wayne’s character, as if the star was feeling insecure. The film is only ninety-one minutes long, but feels longer.

The Train Robbers
cost a little more than $4 million and earned rentals in North America equal to its negative cost, with another $1.9 in foreign receipts. Adding in television brought the total rentals to $6.4 million. Warner Bros.’ calculations carried the film’s break-even at 2.5 times its negative cost, meaning the film had to return $10.5 million to break even. Add in the usual studio financial legerdemain, and Warners carried
The Train Robbers
as $7.57 million in the red.

As the scope of the failure became clear, Burt Kennedy, who wrote and directed the film, sent Mike Wayne a note: “Really feel rotten about ‘Train Robbers’ falling on its ass. Guess it just wasn’t any good.” In truth, the films that were making real money weren’t westerns.
The Godfather
had earned $86 million,
The Exorcist
$82 million,
The Sting
$78 million. There were no parts for John Wayne in any of these movies, or in the world they were about.

The Train Robbers
finished shooting in June 1972, and in November, Wayne was back in Durango for the eighth time shooting a film called
Wednesday Morning
, released as
Cahill U.S. Marshal,
directed by Andrew McLaglen. Wayne’s contract again reflected the studio’s insecurity about westerns. He was working for a percentage of the gross; on
Cahill
he got 10 percent of the gross up to break-even, 15 percent thereafter.

As with all Batjac productions,
Cahill
was a very smooth operation; budgeted at $4.4 million, after a little more than two weeks they were four days ahead of schedule, and the picture finished two full weeks under schedule and nearly $600,000 under budget. Unfortunately, audiences don’t go to movies to marvel at the efficiency of the production. A year and a half after it was released in the summer of 1973, Warners estimated the world rentals for
Cahill
as $6.2 million, including TV sales, which was even less than
The Train Robbers
estimate of $6.4 million.

Cahill
is about a marshal with mildly delinquent kids who are blackmailed by a hardened criminal. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible either. Mainly, it’s listless and crudely characterized. Wayne knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been: “The theme was a good theme,” he said. “It just wasn’t a well-done picture. It needed better writing. It needed a little more care in the making.”

Andrew McLaglen’s relationship to Wayne was complicated. “Andy was a great big guy, a wonderful man, but very unassuming and laid-back,” said William Wellman Jr. “He wasn’t at all like Wayne. On the set, it appeared that Wayne was in charge, and, in fact, Wayne was in charge. But at the same time he respected Andy and liked him and they got along. But you knew who was the boss.”

Perhaps it would be fair to say that McLaglen, Burt Kennedy, and the other men who directed Wayne for Wayne’s own production company knew they were there to serve their star. Conversely, on a picture directed by Ford, Hawks, Hathaway, or Wellman, Wayne was there to serve the director and, by extension, the picture.

“I’m amazed by actors who can direct themselves,” said Mark Rydell. “It’s oppositional; the two skills are in direct contrast to one another. An actor has to live in the moment. If he’s really good, he doesn’t know what happened during a take. On the first day of shooting
On Golden Pond
, Henry Fonda and Kate Hepburn turned to me after the first take with faces like nineteen-year-old kids. They had become lost in what they were doing, and were unable to evaluate what happened. Which is the appropriate way for an actor to work. If they’re judging themselves, then their concentration is not where it belongs.”

Mostly,
Cahill
is product, and it shows the extent to which the declines of Ford, Hawks, and Hathaway adversely affected Wayne’s career—they had always demanded more of him than he demanded of himself. Without them to nudge him forward, he was content to bask in the familiar, and the familiar won’t sustain the career of a sixty-five-year-old movie star. Westerns were dying precisely because of movies like
The Train Robbers
and
Cahill.

It was while Wayne was wrapping up
Cahill
at the studio that he ran headlong into what might have been. Mel Brooks was at Warners working on the final draft of
Blazing Saddles
, which at the time was called
Black Bart.
Walking through the commissary, Brooks saw John Wayne having lunch and realized Wayne would be hilarious as the Waco Kid—the part eventually played by Gene Wilder. Brooks walked over, introduced himself and asked Wayne to read the script.

“He knew who I was,” remembered Brooks, “he had seen and loved
The Producers
. Before he could change his mind I slammed the script on the table and said, ‘Please read it at your convenience—like in the next hour.’ ”

Wayne said he’d read it that night and Brooks could meet him at the commissary the next day. “I met him at the same table at the same time the next day, and he said, ‘I read it and found myself actually laughing out loud. It’s much too rough and raw. I could never be in a movie that used the N-word, or that had such low-down dirty talk. I’m sorry I can’t be in your movie but I promise you I’ll be the first one in line to see it.’

“And that is the true story of Mel Brooks, John Wayne, and
Blazing Saddles
.”

Cahill U.S. Marshal
was Wayne’s last picture at Warner Bros. The association that had begun in the early 1930s with the Leon Schlesinger productions constructed around old Ken Maynard footage and had slammed into high gear with the hugely successful Batjac productions of the 1950s limped to an end. There was no recognition of all that Wayne had meant to the studio. Even a few months after
Cahill
was released, in the executive meetings presided over by John Calley, John Wayne’s name never came up. It was as if he had never existed.

There was clearly a gradual erosion in Wayne’s box office. Simply put, the public would come out for something perceived as special—
True Grit, The Cowboys
—but bread-and-butter westerns such as
The Train Robbers
were now difficult to make profitably.

There have been dozens of theories to explain the apparently permanent decline of the genre. The writer-director Larry Cohen had a novel take: “What killed the western? Burt Kennedy and Andy McLaglen killed the western. They made dozens of them, one after the other, none of them very successful, none of them that good.”

While Wayne had moved effortlessly from picture to picture, John Ford sat in Bel Air and stewed. “Ford used to like me,” said Burt Kennedy. “He would say, ‘You and Duke had some rough times. Duke’s got the big head now.’ Ford wasn’t bitter, he was angry. But that’s what they do to you in this town. You make two bad pictures, it’s over. It happens to all of us. You get to the point where you don’t make as many pictures and you have too much time on your hands. You’re not retired, you’re just not hired.”

Early in 1973 it was announced that Ford would be the recipient of the first American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. There was really no other choice—for one thing, he was the only director to have won six Oscars, universally recognized for his great accomplishments. For another, he was dying of cancer.

All the surviving Ford actors and crew attended. Publicly, they all paid tribute to the Old Man, but some of them hadn’t forgiven him. “He kept sending me messages that weekend that he wanted to do a picture with me,” remembered Charlton Heston, the chairman of the American Film Institute. “But Hank Fonda told me, ‘You wouldn’t have liked it. He was a mean son of a bitch.’ ”

Wayne thought about the best way to pay tribute to his mentor and father figure, and decided on a full-page ad in
Variety
. In Wayne’s looping, graceful handwriting, the message read, “Dear Coach, Thanks for a wonderful and eventful life. Duke. John Wayne, 1973.”