John Wayne: The Life and Legend (97 page)

“He was one of those stars who came across on screen as the person he was,” said Adams. “Many stars of the studio system did, because that was part of what the studios wanted. I worked with huge movie stars like Tyrone Power and James Stewart, and they were not radically different from how they came across on-screen. Ty Power was terribly charming, with the most exquisite manners, and my idea of heaven was to go to work with Jimmy Stewart every day. Their images were congruent with who they were as people. In that era, you were expected to bring your own personality as part of your screen personality.

“But the scene for
McQ
was a psychologically real scene, so my preparation was to erase my idea of John Wayne, Movie Star and see him as this big cop I used to be married to. John Wayne, Movie Star was also a lovely man and a very good actor.”

The attributes of
McQ
were precisely those quiet domestic scenes between Wayne and Adams and Wayne and Colleen Dewhurst, the latter played for gentle affection. Then there was the hardware—the Trans-Am Wayne drove, the massive machine gun so big Wayne had to cradle it in his arms.

But
McQ
can be filed under the heading of too little, too late. Wayne’s cutting notes for the picture are perfunctory, as if he knew there wasn’t much to be done: “Trim any close-ups of McQ in the morning after scene in Myra’s [Dewhurst] . . . What does McQ see (his POV) as he looks from his car toward the hospital? . . .”

Even if the star had been a more modern figure such as Clint Eastwood, whose career was based on playing characters whose embrace of revenge had little or nothing to do with building or defending a tenuous civilization, in contrast to the pro-social heroism of Wayne; even if Wayne hadn’t looked every week of his sixty-six years and been far too old for the part he was playing,
McQ
would have been an ordinary picture. “John Wayne,” wrote Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
, “looks as if he should be celebrating his diamond jubilee on the force. . . . There’s a scene . . . in which Wayne is required to pick a lock and his massive hands are so gnarled from years on the range that you get the impression of a bear trying to tie a shoelace.”

Cheap, but not inaccurate.

Wayne no longer fit particularly well in contemporary stories. It wasn’t just his image, although that was part of it, but his own preferences for contrasts of black and white behavior and morality that increasingly consigned him to nineteenth-century settings.

Late in 1973,
The Harvard Lampoon
issued a challenge. James Downey, the president of
The Harvard Lampoon,
wrote Wayne a letter. “You think you’re tough? You’re not so tough. You’ve never pored through dozens of critical volumes on imagist poetry. You’ve never gotten your hands dirty with Corrasable Bond and corrector fluid. You’ve never had to do three papers and a midterm all for one course. The halls of academia may not be the halls of Montezuma, and maybe ivy doesn’t smell like sagebrush, but we know a thing or two about guts.

“We challenge you to come to Cambridge and premiere that new movie of yours smack dab in the middle of the most intellectual, the most traditionally radical, in short, the most hostile territory on earth.”

In his reply, Wayne wrote, “I’m sorry to note in your challenge that there is a weakness in your breeding, but there is a ray of hope in the fact that you are conscious of it. . . . I shall be most happy to stop by your campus on my way to London to visit the original college whose name you have assumed and whose breeding and manners you haven’t been able to buy. May the Good Lord keep you well until I get there.”

On January 15, 1974, Wayne showed up at the
Lampoon
’s headquarters on Bow Street, after first riding down Massachusetts Avenue in a tank borrowed from Fort Devens, manned by Army reservists from the 5th Cavalry. A few snowballs were tossed at him, but the crowd was friendly. He was wearing his toupee and a big smile.

At the ceremony, Wayne announced that “coming here is like being invited to lunch with the Borgias.” Downey—later a writing stalwart of
Saturday Night Live
—narrated an account of the good old days when Duke Wayne had been a family friend.

“I guess the thing I remember most is the way he would kid us. I guess every visit he’d come and punch us in the mouth. He’d take a length of rubber tubing and crack us with it. Once, I was quite young at the time, five or six, but it seems like yesterday, he put my fingers in a drawer and then he kicked the drawer shut.”

Sixteen hundred people gathered at the Harvard Square theater for an amusing Q&A:

“Is it true that since you’ve lost weight, your horse’s hernia has cleared up?”

“Well, the weight was too much for him, so we canned him, which is what you’ve been eating over at The Harvard Club.”

“They thought I was a horse’s ass,” he would say in retrospect, “but when they saw I was as honest about what I thought as they were about their beliefs, they came around. Then they went too far the other way. We stayed up all night drinking. I guess I was the father they never had.”

On the one hand, the Harvard episode showed that Wayne could take a joke; on the other hand, it served as a decent promotion for
McQ,
which needed all the help it could get. Made for purely commercial reasons,
McQ
cost $3.24 million, $274,000 under budget, but stalled out at slightly more than $4 million in rentals in North America and $2.5 million in foreign rentals. The film went into profit in 1980—a year after Wayne died. “He hated that picture,” said Cecilia deMille Presley. “He told me, ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ ” But shooting movies was better than hanging around the house.

Perhaps the stress of another failed marriage inspired another bad decision about a script. Shortly after Clint Eastwood made
High Plains Drifter
in 1973, Eastwood optioned a script by Larry Cohen entitled
The Hostiles
as a prospective vehicle for himself and John Wayne.
The Hostiles
involved a gambler (Eastwood) who wins 50 percent of a ranch owned by an older man (Wayne). The two men have to become partners, which is complicated by the fact that they can’t stand each other. There’s a battle coming that will destroy the ranch, so Eastwood, who knows about the situation, sells his half of the ranch back to Wayne, who’s innocent of the underlying situation. At the last minute, Eastwood returns to help the older man fight off the hostiles.

Eastwood’s Malpaso sent the script to Wayne’s Batjac, with a note saying that Eastwood thought the script promising, albeit needing some work. Wayne returned it with a “No, Thanks.”

Eastwood’s option ran out, and shortly afterward he moved his production company over to Warner Bros., where he again optioned the script and again pitched it to Wayne. This time, Wayne responded with a letter complaining about the portrayal of the townspeople in
High Plains Drifter
—they did not, he said, accurately represent the spirit of the pioneers who had made America great.

Eastwood didn’t write back, and once again the option expired, at which point Mike Wayne called Larry Cohen and asked if
The Hostiles
was available. “Are you kidding me?” asked Cohen. “You’ve held that script up for two years; if you want to buy it, buy it.” Mike said that his dad was going out on the
Wild Goose
over the weekend, and he’d once again pitch him the script. Cohen sent over a copy.

On Tuesday, Cohen called Mike. “Well,” Mike said, “Dad was sitting on the deck and he looked at the script for a few minutes and said, ‘This piece of shit again,’ and he threw it overboard.”

Cohen had a sudden vision of his script floating on the Pacific Ocean, taking with it his hopes of a movie starring the two preeminent masculine role models of their respective generations. There was no further explanation of why Wayne didn’t like the script, but that came during a conversation with Pat Stacy: “This kind of stuff is all they know how to write these days. The sheriff is the heavy, the townspeople a bunch of jerks; someone like me and Eastwood ride into town, know everything, act the big guys, and everyone else is a bunch of idiots.” Perhaps it was the idea of being rescued by another character, perhaps it was simply tradition’s discomfort with a more minimalist, modern star.

Soon afterward, Mike Wayne called Cohen with yet another offer. Would he be interested in working with Budd Boetticher on a rewrite of a script for Batjac? The money was okay, so Cohen agreed. The script, called
When There’s Somethin’ to Do
, involved Germans trying to infiltrate the Mexican military during World War I in order to build up a second front across the Rio Grande. Wayne’s character was to lead a party that went across the border to fight the German influence in the Mexican army.

“I went in and worked for a few weeks with Budd,” remembered Cohen. “He was a very affable guy, very desperate to get a picture, which he hadn’t had in years. Nobody would give him a job, and he was planning on directing the picture for Batjac.”

In later years, Boetticher would be ambivalent about Wayne, but when he and Cohen were working on the script, he was completely positive. “He thought Wayne was great on-screen,” said Larry Cohen, “because he was. He was a very good actor who didn’t get the credit he deserved.”

One day when Boetticher wasn’t there, Mike Wayne said to Cohen, “Budd’s not going to direct this picture.” Cohen was thunderstruck. “ ‘Why string him along?’ I asked. I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to tell Budd; he thought he was going to direct and that John Wayne wanted him to direct it. Every time I went into a meeting about the script I felt like I was betraying Budd. And I never did tell him the truth.”

Cohen and Boetticher completed their draft, but it never got made, by Boetticher or anybody else. Cohen believed that Mike wanted to make the picture—“He didn’t care what picture he made as long as he made something”—but that somehow a decision had been made that Boetticher would not direct.

Perhaps
When There’s Somethin’ to Do
would have been a good picture, but certainly
The Hostiles
would have been better than the standard-issue Wayne pictures of the period, if only because of the intriguing chemistry of Wayne and Eastwood. “Writing a John Wayne picture would have been the highlight of my career,” said Larry Cohen. “But he did dull fucking pictures like
Cahill
and
The Train Robbers
instead of a picture with Clint Eastwood. Can you imagine?”

It was becoming clear that for every recent great western such as
Once Upon a Time in the West
or
The Wild Bunch
, there was a comedy western such as
Cat Ballou
and
Blazing Saddles
that relentlessly ridiculed the genre.

As early as 1967, Richard Goldstein had written a prescient article about Wayne for the
Los Angeles Times
: “Duke sees the Western as an eternal form, solid and unchanging. He is dead wrong. The Western is a living mythology, and like all vital folklore, it evolves with the times. The American saga is a continuing story. The John Wayne hero is built to survive massacres, tidal waves and corruption. But it can never bear the erosion of style.”

Westerns might have been dying, but the machine still had to be fed. The fish-out-of-water cop story
Brannigan
was shot in the summer of 1974 in England. The picture had the dual benefits of qualifying for production subsidies under the Eady plan, and for getting its star out of the country at a time when he was restless. “He was getting away from Pilar,” said Gretchen Wayne, “and it was easy to go to England and make
Brannigan
at the same time.”

After he arrived in London, Pilar flew over with Marisa, Ethan, and Aissa. She initially told Wayne that the children missed him, but many people in the family believed that Pilar was trying to effect a reconciliation. Since Wayne was living with Pat Stacy while in London, the situation was a lot closer to Ernst Lubitsch than John Ford. Although Wayne admired Lubitsch’s films, he had no knack for equivalent social situations. He told Stacy that she had to move out of their rented house on Cheyne Walk and into the Penta Hotel, where the crew was staying.