John Wayne: The Life and Legend (98 page)

After several nights at the Penta, Stacy eagerly accepted an invitation from Luster Bayless to go shopping at Harrod’s. Someone saw them leaving the hotel and word got back to Wayne, who promptly accused Stacy of having an affair behind his back. It wasn’t true, but Wayne was very sensitive about the possibility.

A few nights later, Wayne invited Bayless and Stacy for dinner, so he could size up their relationship. At the same time, Pilar was eyeing Stacy trying to figure out what the attraction was. The day before Pilar was to fly home, Stacy worked up the courage to tell Wayne that if he wanted to go back to his family, she’d understand. “Don’t ever talk about it again,” he snapped.

Wayne took a few days off from the picture and flew Stacy to Paris. He ordered her to get a room at the George V, but it was summer and all the major hotels were booked solid. With the noblesse oblige of a Star, he instructed the cab driver to take them from Orly to the George V, walked in, and was given a suite.

The time in Paris cemented the relationship. Stacy remembered that as a lover, Wayne was “affectionate, considerate and gentle. If there weren’t fireworks bursting in the air, we didn’t care. Neither of us was a kid.”

Brannigan
was originally written by Christopher Trumbo and Michael Butler as a TV pilot for Telly Savalas. Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner, the producers, got the script and thought it was too good for a TV show. “And that’s when the name John Wayne came in,” remembered Trumbo.

But Trumbo was the son of the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the producers thought that might be a problem for Wayne. They called Mike Wayne and asked him if his father would object. Mike said no, but Levy and Gardner were still nervous.

Mike told his father that Trumbo was the son of Dalton Trumbo. Did that make any difference? “I only want to know if he can write,” said Wayne. Wayne liked the script, but when revisions got under way—the story stayed the same, but the dialogue and some scenes were modified—Trumbo and Butler weren’t called in to do them. In fact, Christopher Trumbo never met John Wayne.

For many of the blacklistees, Wayne remained a lightning rod, which became clear when Carl Foreman wrote a scathing article for
Punch
in August of 1974, which was reprinted in the Writers Guild of America magazine that December. The piece was in response to an interview Wayne gave in London about Foreman and “his rotten
High Noon
.”

“A week or so ago,” Foreman began, “I was in the counting house, fondling the paltry residue of all that good old Moscow gold we used to get so regularly from Comrade Beria, back in those marvelous subversive Hollywood days.”

Foreman pointed out that when Wayne had handed Gary Cooper his Oscar for
High Noon
, he had said, “Why can’t I find me a scriptwriter to write me a part like the one that got you this?”

“He could have got me very easily, except that I was blacklisted in Hollywood and looking for work in England.”

Foreman went on to recall his one and only meeting with Wayne, at Bö Roos’s office on a Saturday morning. “We were alone, equally uncomfortable, like two teenagers in a whorehouse, and the meeting began with old world courtesy and tact. . . . Good old Duke had given up his Saturday morning solely to help me hit the sawdust trail to political salvation.

“All that was required were a few public confessions, complete with breast-beating, and a reasonable amount of informing on old friends, passing acquaintances or absolute strangers, for that matter. Just a little cooperation, that was all, and I’d be working again.”

Foreman refused, and Wayne said that if that was his final decision, he’d never work in films again. “It was a pity, he said, because obviously I wasn’t a commie bastard, really, just a dupe.” After calling the Motion Picture Alliance “a scurvy gang of character assassins,” and Ward Bond a man “who could smell a Jew-commie a mile away,” Foreman warmed to his task.

Ask him if there was ever a political blacklist in Hollywood, and he will look you in the eye and say, Oh, dear me, no, never. Or, if there ever actually was one, unbeknownst to old Duke, it was probably the commies who were trying to blacklist the real Americans, who naturally defended themselves and saved Hollywood, if not, for that matter, the nation itself. But no one was blacklisted, ever. . . .

Ask him what he thinks of Joe McCarthy, and he will tell you that, as near as he can remember, the Senator was a much vilified, much misunderstood, great, great American.

Ask him if it wasn’t indecent, if not to say vicious, to break Larry Parks, live on TV, and then destroy him forever in films and he will reply cynically (and untruthfully) that Parks, then at the height of his career, wasn’t working much anyway. Or, at least, not as much as old Duke. Ask him if it isn’t true that for quite a time you couldn’t work in Hollywood unless old Duke, Hedda Hopper, Ward Bond and a cheapjack union boss named Roy Brewer passed on your “Americanism” and he won’t remember any such thing. Or other things, such as suicides and broken homes and heart attacks and people dying long before their time, like John Garfield and Joe Bromberg and Robert Rossen and others.

Twenty-two years had passed, and Foreman had amassed huge success in England with
The Guns of Navarone
and
Born Free
, among others. He was still enraged. Wayne read Foreman’s piece and called it “a scathing attack,” although he also said that Foreman was “a helluva writer.”

Neither Wayne nor Foreman was about to forget, and forgiveness seemed a long way off. Not all of the blacklistees went to their graves hating their opponents. Dalton Trumbo was alive when his son got screen credit for writing
Brannigan,
but they never discussed it. Trumbo senior was a pragmatist, but that wasn’t the basis for his calm response.

“It wasn’t really a concern of mine or his,” said Christopher Trumbo.

Before the blacklist, all of those guys on both sides of the political question worked together. My dad worked for Sam Wood, the head of the Motion Picture Alliance, on

. They were ideological enemies, but you can work with your ideological enemies because politics doesn’t come up. It doesn’t belong there. It happened all the time then and it still happens. My father’s point about his work was always to appreciate what everybody brings to the project.

What my father always tried to zero in on was this: who was responsible? What power did individuals have? Nobody wanted to go before the committee and answer the questions positively or negatively. When people quit the Communist Party, they didn’t rush off to the papers and offer up the names of the other people in the party. They were compelled to do that by a congressional committee who had the power to throw them into jail.

The informer is far down the food chain; my father wanted people to remember who the enemy really was. He didn’t like informers, but the idea of focusing attention on the informer is a mistake.

One way or another, he was always trying to operate from principle, and when you do that you take the longer view. People focus on Elia Kazan, they don’t focus on the Committee. Kazan didn’t want to inform. Robert Rossen, same thing. Those men didn’t change overnight; they didn’t become different people.

Wayne replicated the certainty of his screen character by refusing to admit he might have been wrong or at least overenthusiastic in his participation in blacklisting through the Motion Picture Alliance. Those things he deeply regretted—his marital failures, his failure to serve—he kept resolutely private.

And he did indeed try to justify the Alliance’s behavior on retributive grounds. “It was the commies who did the first blacklisting,” he insisted, pointing to Morrie Ryskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner for
Of Thee I Sing,
and longtime screenwriter (
A Night at the Opera, My Man Godfrey,
among others). Ryskind, Wayne insisted, was blacklisted by Dore Schary at MGM because of his anticommunist activities.

Schary responded by saying that Ryskind had been up for a job at MGM only once during Schary’s tenure as studio head. Schary was willing to pay him $2,000 a week, but Ryskind asked for $3,500. Schary thought that was too much and the deal was never made.

In fact, MGM contract files show that Ryskind was employed by MGM twice: once in 1934 and once in 1935 to work on
A Night at the Opera
, along with an undated deal from the 1930s to buy the title
Strike Up the Band
. Ryskind was never employed at MGM during the 1940s, and had his last screen credit for adapting the Ginger Rogers vehicle
Heartbeat
in 1946—before the blacklist wave broke.

Everybody wants to be the victim.

But unlike many on the political right, the personal always trumped the political for Wayne. Several years after Foreman’s magazine piece, Wayne went to the popular Los Angeles restaurant Dan Tana’s for dinner, and there was Foreman. The two men looked at each other, then quickly embraced as if they were old friends. Foreman called over his English wife and young child and introduced them to his antagonist.

Later, after they sat down to dinner, Foreman’s wife asked him about the sudden change of heart. “He was a patriot,” said Foreman. “I was a patriot. He didn’t do it to hurt me.” As with Dalton Trumbo, Foreman made a distinction between those who acted out of political principle, and those who acted out of personal expediency.

The shifting alliances, residual anguish, and attempted moral equivalencies of the blacklist era are far more interesting and worthy of passionate response than
Brannigan
. Wayne’s budgets had been averaging around $4 million, but
Brannigan
was made for $2.5 million, with Wayne getting $750,000 of that plus 10 percent of the gross after $7.5 million. The total script costs for four writers were a minute $50,000, Richard Attenborough got $60,000 to co-star, and director Douglas Hickox, primarily a director of commercials until he had made the entertaining
Theatre of Blood
in 1973, got only $50,000.

Wayne did some halfhearted promotion for
Brannigan,
hosting journalists at his house dressed in a natty blue blazer despite the fact that he had just gotten out of a dentist’s chair. The tequila was uncorked, and the journalists responded by baiting the tired old bull. They asked him about Cambodia, they asked him about a recent biography that had (wrongly) suggested he was conceived out of wedlock.

“If my mother was alive, she’d have taken a horsewhip to the big stupid son of a bitch and run him out of town. And if I hadn’t offered to do it for her, she’d have turned the whip on me.”

When one of the reporters suggested suing, Wayne warmed to his core issue—the gap between the world he inhabited as a young man and still inhabited as an actor, and the world he saw around him. “That’s the trouble with you people—you
sue
people. I think you ought to take it out in pieces of their body. We’re becoming a nation of who-can-you-sue instead of what is decent and graceful and nice and clean. I just don’t know how to think anymore. I don’t know who I’m talking to or which one of you is a person who believes in a completely different world than the one I was brought up to believe in.”

Finally, he tried to turn the subject back closer to the ostensible subject at hand—show business as a celebration of grace and style. He picked a book off the coffee table and began flipping through the pages. “Here is the most beautiful person I’ve known in my whole life,” he said, pointing to a picture of Margot Fonteyn taking a bow after a performance of
Swan Lake.

The tub thumping for
Brannigan
entailed an appearance on the popular CBS sitcom
Maude
. The premise wasn’t bad—Maude, played by Beatrice Arthur, was a loudmouthed feminist, and the idea of her sparring with Mr. Conservative promised some laughs, somewhat in the manner of Sammy Davis Jr. kissing Archie Bunker on
All in the Family
. But the writers didn’t follow through and had Maude go weak in the knees at the sight of him.

“I’ve spent thousands of hours in dark theaters loving you, Duke,” she says.

Wayne looks roguish. “Was that you?” The writing, and the undying sitcom mannerism of braying the lines to the furthest reaches of the balcony submarined the show.

Brannigan
offered the unappetizing sight of an apparently demoralized, overweight sixty-eight-year-old man playing a cop under the undistinguished aegis of a British B movie director. It was pure hackwork, and it got what it deserved. The North American rentals on
Brannigan
came to only $2 million—a flat-out flop.

With his own commercial appeal clearly on the wane, Wayne kept a wary eye on younger actors who were siphoning off his audience. He gave two primary rivals respect, if not enthusiasm. “I like most of what [Steve] McQueen has been doing and I think Eastwood has a chance. Peckinpah? Well, our business is all about getting attention. Peckinpah got the attention of the public by throwing away what I still think pictures are all about—illusion. He brought in realism. Capsules of exploding calf’s blood for when a guy gets shot. Not my cup of tea.”