American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (28 page)

And then Hedda Hopper spoke and crucified Parks, and Wayne too, indirectly, for having asked for forgiveness for the broken actor, by attacking Wayne’s nonservice in the military. “I have read the papers,” she told the assembly. “I have listened to the radio. And then I was shocked as I read the statement of our president, John Wayne . . . Parks read the best script of his career [before HUAC . . . Wayne] says he felt he’d done nothing wrong. I feel sorry for [the both of them]. And I’m wondering if the mothers and families of those who’ve died and the wounded who are still living will be happy to know their money at the box office has supported and may continue to support those who have been so late in the defense of their country.” The audience leapt to its feet and enthusiastically applauded the columnist’s speech.

Not long after Hopper’s denouncement, Wayne issued a written statement that included the following: “It gives me a genuine feeling of satisfaction to have played a part in the tremendous job this industry does in creating entertainment on a scale no other medium can attempt. I like my job. I like the people I work with, and I have the highest respect for what the screen accomplishes, and what it stands for . . . We should express that pride in giving our best in the way of acting and technical performances, and in conducting ourselves as self-respecting members of a highly-respected industry. And if I sound like I’m on a soapbox, that’s the way I feel about the movies.”

Nonetheless, after Hopper’s diatribe, Wayne’s position as a leader of the conservative right was diminished. He was, thereafter, more of a figurehead than a player and as an act of self-preservation, every film he made now had a purposeful undertow that pulled the film’s themes into the deep waters of patriotism and allegiance.

RIO GRANDE
RETURNED WAYNE TO
the role of a romantic hero, something he hadn’t played for several pictures, by pairing him with the woman who would become the most familiar female costar of his career, the beautiful red-haired Irish beauty Maureen O’Hara. She had been a member of the Ford acting company since her moving performance in Ford’s towering
How Green Was My Valley
(1941), her eighth film and her first for Ford, for which he won an Oscar for Best Director, the film Best Picture (for Darryl Zanuck). It was during the making of that film that she first met Wayne at a dinner party at Ford’s home. As O’Hara later remembered, “It was to be the beginning of a deep and enduring friendship. We had such respect and love for one another and that continued to build throughout the years.”
¹⁰⁰

WAYNE REFUSED TO FACE THE
fact that his marriage was all over but the very loud shouting that was still to come. Not long after
Rio Grande
’s release, when Louella O. Parsons interviewed him for her syndicated column he commented on Chata and her constant visits with her mother to Mexico, something Parsons and everyone else in Hollywood knew about, since Chata was never with Wayne when he appeared at a function, and his excuse was always the same: she was in Mexico. “Esperanza is like every other person—man or woman. She thinks the doctors in her hometown are better,” he told Parsons when she asked where Mrs. Wayne was. “She is highly nervous, and she needs medical attention, so she goes home to Mexico . . . she knows that John Ford and I enjoy discussing our pictures and that I love to hunt and fish . . . you know, that’s a great woman. She understands me better than I understand myself. She knows that I am miserable when I am not working, and she never complains when I spend most of my time at the studio.”

Chata, meanwhile, had a few gems of her own she wanted to share with the world. To
Time
magazine, she complained about her husband’s single-mindedness, that he was “[o]ne of the few persons who is always interested in his business. He talks of it constantly. When he reads, it’s scripts. Our dinner guests always talk business. And he spends all his time working, discussing work, or planning work.” That much was true. Wayne got up at seven every day, had breakfast by himself, and left for the studio where he was working. Chata never arose before eleven.

The fact they didn’t have children was something else that troubled her greatly. With a film career that never materialized, not being a mother left her without any real purpose in her life. Because of it whenever they did spend any significant time together, the tension between them was always high and aggravated her chronic case of hives and psoriasis.

They were on a collision course that would prove impossible for either of them to escape.

Chapter 16

In 1950, Wayne made a hard right turn in his career and began work on Howard Hughes’s
Jet Pilot,
a combination of a (very) loose adaptation of
Ninotchka—
the West seduces the East—and a continuation of sorts of Hughes’s far superior 1930
Hell’s Angels.
Josef von Sternberg, who had not made a film in over a decade, directed
Jet Pilot
.

The film starred Janet Leigh as a Russian pilot who lands in Alaska seeking asylum. Hughes, one of Hollywood’s legendary womanizers, had a scene added to the Jules Furthman script (Furthman also produced) that had Lieutenant Anna Marladovna (Leigh) strip off her clothes and reveal her shapely body while being searched for concealed weapons, after which the reluctant Colonel Shannon (Wayne) is assigned to be her guardian. Somehow they wind up in Palm Springs, and Leigh is subsequently filmed in very Western-style negligees. She falls in love with Shannon and sheds her allegiance to Communism.

The only production problem with the film was the same old problem for Hughes: he couldn’t finish. It was not a financial problem (obviously) but a psychological one;
Jet Pilot
had become his latest neurotic fetish, an anti-Communist piece of political propaganda, costarring Leigh’s body and equally great aviation footage. He would to continue to play with this toy for years, until, with several additional aerial sequences shot and added, he eventually released it in 1957.

After filming the bulk of his scenes, Wayne returned to filming more Cold War propaganda, where the characters he played were less material and more message-bearing. The opening credits to
Operation Pacific
included this line: “When the Pacific Fleet was destroyed by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, it remained for the submarines to carry the war to the enemy. In the four years that followed, our undersea craft sank six million tons of Japanese shipping including some of the proudest ships of the Imperial Navy. Fifty-two of our submarines and thirty-five hundred officers and men were lost. It is to these men and the entire silent service that this picture is humbly dedicated.”

Operation Pacific
is a World War II Pearl Harbor vengeance submarine drama, filmed on location in Hawaii and at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, where a full-size replica of the submarine
Thunder
was reconstructed. The film was written and directed by George Waggner, produced by Louis Edelman, and costarred Wayne’s buddy Ward Bond and the lovely Patricia Neal. The sophisticated Neal was in real life deeply in love with Gary Cooper, and perhaps that was one reason she did not get along at all with Wayne during production of a war picture in which Wayne gets to play action hero and broad-shouldered lover.

The film was made under the personal supervision of Jack Warner, with technical adviser Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, who had been the commander of submarine forces in the Pacific during World War II. With Korea heating up, World War II pictures once more became less complicated and more patriotic, the perfect propaganda machine, to stir up support for America’s next conflict in Asia. With
Operation Pacific
Wayne began a new seven-year nonexclusive contract with Warner Bros at a minimum base salary of $175,000 per picture and an automatic $50,000 payment each time it was rereleased.

Released in January 1951,
Operation Pacific
was not well received by critics.
Time
magazine called it “[a] tiresome love versus duty romance . . . Actor Wayne’s flinty authority as a man of action crumbles under the trite situations and dialogue ashore . . . what should be
Operation Pacific’
s strongest point proves its major disappointment: the action at sea.”
Variety
liked it better, but not by much: “Marquee weight of John Wayne’s name in the action field and other good selling points offset the rather formula conception and give it sturdy chances . . . Wayne registers with his usual punch.” Audiences disagreed. Made for $1,465,000, the film grossed just under $9 million worldwide. Even with less than great material, Wayne was still box-office boffo, as
Variety
would say.

He then went directly into RKO Radio Pictures’
Flying Leathernecks,
produced by Howard Hughes and finished reasonably on time. It was shot in glorious Technicolor and released, while
Jet Pilot
remained trapped in the sociopathology of Hughes completion issues for another six years.
Flying Leathernecks
was directed by the very un-Hughes-like Nicholas Ray, the second of five straight films he’d make for Hughes, and who would, a few years later, gain new fame as the director of James Dean in 1955’s
Rebel Without a Cause
.

Flying Leathernecks
was shot at Camp Pendleton Marine Base and at the RKO-Pathé studios at a negative cost of just under $1.2 million and grossed nearly six times that. It was another financial hit in this burst of Wayne films that continued to feature a mythic military Wayne World War II hero who floats through them like a revisionist apparition, reinforcing his good-guy soldier image as an all-American hero (in this film he is in charge of the battle against the Japanese at Guadalcanal). In 1951, Wayne for the second year was voted the most popular star in Hollywood, according to the all-important
Motion Picture Herald
annual poll of exhibitors.

To get him to make this film, Hughes renegotiated Wayne’s nonexclusive contract with RKO. Wayne asked for and received $300,000 (paid out at $1,000 a week) because Hughes wanted to keep making movies for him.
¹⁰¹
He was willing to do anything for him except produce Wayne’s long-standing pet project, a film about the Alamo. In fact, not just RKO but no studio in Hollywood showed any interest in Wayne’s pet project, even with him producing and directing as well as starring in it.

JOHN FORD, MEANWHILE, HAD MADE
Wagon Master
(1950) with Ward Bond and Ben Johnson, which failed at the box office and ended Argosy’s relationship with RKO. Ford had wanted Wayne for the film, but knew that he was not eager to return to the fold after the throttling he had taken from the director during
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Even when Ford managed to sign Maureen O’Hara to be in it, Wayne wouldn’t bite.

Ford then set out on a public path of reconciliation. He wrote an usually laudatory piece about Wayne for the popular movie magazine
Photoplay,
after he’d agreed to accompany him to Reno, Nevada, to take part in the festivities for “John Wayne Day,” during which the star received that city’s annual award—“Best Western Performance of the Year”—for
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
. Ford’s piece for
Photoplay
amounted to nothing less than a public apology, in the form of a ghostwritten love letter that appeared in the magazine that March, in which “Ford” declared: “I can’t think of a better time than now—when Duke Wayne is sitting on the top of the heap—to say that he’s my boy. Always has been; always will be.” After recapping his own (rightful) importance in Wayne’s career, Ford then declared, “In all of the adventure films which he has made for me . . . Duke’s power as a man has contributed immeasurably to the integrity of those films . . . I don’t believe there is an honor, a testimonial, or an award which Duke cannot bear in good grace, and like the true gentleman that he is beneath the roughneck exterior. Years ago, just before we made
Stagecoach,
I told Duke that he had a great future ahead of him. If it were not already so obvious, I would tell him the same thing today.”

TO MAKE
THE QUIET MAN,
the 123rd film of Wayne’s career, Yates gave Ford a $1.4 million budget (Ford had wanted $1.75 million, but Yates would not go that high).
¹⁰²
Wayne agreed to make the picture to help out Ford’s career. Even if it failed, which everyone associated with it except Ford expected it to do, Wayne believed it wouldn’t hurt his career. As Ward Bond, also in the movie, put it, “There is no other actor than Duke who ever survived so many bad pictures.”

Production began in June 1951, on location in Ireland, and after six weeks filming was completed in July in Hollywood, nearly half the film shot on Republic Studios’ main lot. This was the only Republic picture ever shot in Technicolor (rather than the studio’s own Trucolor, which did not compare in quality, and whose prints tended to quickly fade to a purple tint).

Yates, who was present for the duration, often and loudly complained to Ford about every aspect of the production, beginning with its title. He wanted Ford to change it to
The Fighter and the Colleen.
Ford said no. Yates complained after viewing the dailies that the film looked too “green.” Ford ignored him. The location cinematographer, Winton C. Hoch, would go on to win an Oscar.

IT WASN’T ONLY AS A
favor to Ford that Wayne agreed to make the picture. He was desperate to get out of town. The tension between him and Chata had become unbearable and he also wanted to get away from horses and uniforms for a while and give himself time to formulate a new plan of attack for his stalled Alamo project. As he told one interviewer: “I want to get out of the saddle and away from the uniform. When I do
The Quiet Man
for John Ford in Ireland that will be different. I [will] play a prize-fighter who has killed a man in the ring and doesn’t want to fight anymore. He becomes involved in a fight when he goes to Ireland, a fight that goes on in field, town, pub, and everywhere else. The fighters go in and have drinks and start fighting all over again. That should be a riot, as Ford will do it. I like the idea of the comedy possibilities.” It also gave him opportunity to work again with his favorite costar, Maureen O’Hara.