American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (33 page)

A crowd of native Hawaiians in traditional hula dress dancing to
pila ho’okani
played for family, friends, and about 150 members of the cast and crew of
The Sea Chase
at a reception in the garden of the house the studio had rented for Wayne for the duration of filming. To a friend, Wayne quipped, “I was married in the morning, divorced at lunch, and married at sunset.”

The next morning they flew via private plane chartered by Warner Bros back to Honolulu, where they were met by a mob of reporters. When asked where they were going to spend his honeymoon, Wayne graciously replied that having just finished
The Sea Chase,
he wanted to go home to Encino with his lovely bride and take it easy at home.

They were about to board a commercial Pan American flight to Los Angeles when gossip columnist Sheilah Graham managed to get Wayne on the phone at the airport. She asked him if he noticed anything unusual about the fact that this was his third marriage, and that all three of his wives were Latin American. Wayne said, “Some men collect stamps. I go for Latin Americans.”

FOR THE SECOND TIME, HE
had rebuilt his family. He had made a successful transition to his new production company. He was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He should have been content, but he wasn’t. There was still something missing.

He hadn’t yet been given a part that required more than his ability to throw a punch, or his squinting into the camera and reciting his lines in that familiar halting nasal rhythm. He wanted to make a movie with a role that would come from the inside. How he could express it before the camera, he had no idea.

Wayne was filled with self-doubt about his professional future and on a personal level, being able to fulfill his role as husband to his third wife, who was three decades younger than him. As he wrote in an article for the
Hollywood Reporter
in April 1954 in which he paid indirect homage to John Ford for discovering him (the piece was ghosted by Zolotow for “The Rambling Reporter”), “Once in a while I look into a mirror and wonder how long I’ll be an actor. I suppose for a few years yet. But one day I know my hair will abandon me completely. The wrinkles in my face will hold water when it rains. And I won’t be able to pucker up for the last reel. I may not have my poke, but I’ll be around. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be telling some youngster, still unknown, with a belly big as a mail sack that he can’t be a stunt man—and what time to come to work in the morning.”

He may have felt uncertain about where his career was going, but one thing he was sure of, Hollywood hadn’t seen the last of him.

He still had some bullets left in his gun.

Chapter 17

On December 30, 1954, Wayne was once more ranked as the number-one box-office star in America, according to the
Motion Picture Herald
poll. It was the third time he had reached the top spot, after falling out of it for two years, and the first time any star had ever regained the top spot—he held it in 1950 and 1951. This time Wayne bested Martin and Lewis, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Alan Ladd, William Holden, Bing Crosby, Jane Wyman, and Marlon Brando for the coveted number-one position, thanks in large part to the huge box-office successes of
Hondo
and
The High and the Mighty
.

ON MARCH 15, 1955, BATJAC
went into production on
Blood Alley,
directed by William Wellman, from a script A. S. Fleischman adapted from his novel of the same name. The story concerns merchant marine ship captain Tom Wilder, who has escaped from a “Red” Chinese prison and then agrees to help take the 180 villagers of Chiku Shan through the Formosa Straits—“Blood Alley”—to Hong Kong and freedom, via a stolen flat-bottomed stern-wheeler. The plot is less doctrinaire than
Big Jim McLain
(and therefore more entertaining) but no less anti-Communist. The story line is further complicated by the unlikely presence of Cathy Grainger (Lauren Bacall), whom Wilder reluctantly agrees to take along on the dangerous voyage to Hong Kong after her father, a doctor, is taken by the Communists and forced to operate on a party official and then killed. During the hazardous journey, filled with near calamities at every turn, Wilder falls in love with Cathy (the real reason her character exists is to add some romantic relief for the women in the audience taken by their ticket-buying men looking to see Wayne beat up some Commies).

The film was a difficult one to make, not just physically, but also for the chaos that took place behind the scenes. Wayne had wanted to take Pilar on the honeymoon he already had to postpone several times, and only wanted to executive produce
Blood Alley,
not star in it. It was originally intended as a vehicle for Robert Mitchum, who had turned down the lead in George Stevens’s
Giant
to be in it. (That role went instead to Rock Hudson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance.)

However, three days into the shoot, on location in San Rafael, California, Mitchum abruptly quit the picture after a falling-out with the always short-fused Wellman. It began when Mitchum shoved assistant director George Coleman into the ice-cold San Rafael Bay after he had refused to provide a bus to take Mitchum and his friends on the crew to San Francisco for a party. They went anyway and five of them, including Wayne’s frequent traveling companion Ernie Saftig, were arrested later that night in a bar for being a little too rowdy. They all had to be bailed out by Batjac.
¹¹²
Mitchum (who had not been arrested) then refused to return to the film, despite the fact that Wellman had given him his first starring role in 1945’s
The Story of G.I. Joe
.

Wellman had to call Wayne, who was honeymooning in Manhattan with Pilar, to tell him the news. Wayne desperately tried to get another star to replace Mitchum, but after being turned down by Gregory Peck, who said he had other commitments, and Humphrey Bogart, who wanted $500,000 to take over the role, Wayne flew back to the coast and took over Mitchum’s part himself. It was a replay of what that had happened with
The High and the Mighty,
when Wayne had to step in for Tracy. He hoped it was an auspicious turn of events, that
Blood Alley
would turn out to be as big a hit as
Mighty
.

It wasn’t. It opened in June 1955 and barely broke even.
Newsweek
’s film critic summed it up best when he wrote, “Good ship, shallow draft.” Wellman defended his star’s performance by saying, “Wayne is a nice guy with a special touch of nastiness.”

The year was saved for Wayne by the release of
The Sea Chase
a month earlier, in May. It would go on to be the tenth-highest-grossing film of 1955, earning just under $7 million (international) off a budget of $3 million.
¹¹³

WITH BOTH FILMS OPENED AND
his promotional commitments to them finally done, the forty-eight-year-old Wayne, his face puffy from drink, his hair thinner, his back perennially sore, his belly starting to sag, and his throat dry from the hundred Camels he smoked each day, didn’t want to even look at another script. He only wanted to complete his honeymoon, That is, until Pappy called. He had a new project he wanted Wayne to star in.

As tired as he was from making
Blood Alley,
and fed up from all the abuse he had taken over the years from Ford, when the director told him Kirk Douglas was lobbying heavily to play the lead role of Ethan Edwards in a new western written by Frank Nugent, Wayne nonetheless agreed to meet with Pappy and at least talk about it.

The Searchers
was to be his twelfth collaboration with Ford, in what would become not just the best western ever made, but the greatest role of John Wayne’s career, the one he would most be remembered for in his long and storied career.

Chapter 18

After 1952’s
The Quiet Man,
Ford had moved to Twentieth Century–Fox to direct a proposed musical remake of Raoul Walsh’s 1928 silent World War I melodrama
What Price Glory?
Ford used Jimmy Cagney in the original Victor McLaglen role. Done as a straight film, it did just all right at the box office as audiences showed little interest in it or the war it takes place in. Flag-waving World War II films were on the decline and Hollywood’s prolonged victory cry was somewhat muted by the new and dreary Korean conflict, about which far fewer war films were being made. Wars without happy endings tended to do less well at the box office, and World War I films were considered no longer viable in Hollywood, a fact
What Price Glory?
underscored.

Ford then returned to Republic to make a comedy from a script he liked, called
The Sun Shines Bright,
even as his company, Argosy Pictures, was embroiled in an ongoing financial dispute with Yates. Ford had accused Republic of cooking the foreign books on
The Quiet Man,
believing the film had earned more money than was reported. After he won the Best Director Oscar for the film, Ford tried to settle with Yates, because he had wanted do a new picture for Republic,
Three Leaves of Shamrock
. When that didn’t happen, he made
What Price Glory?
at Fox instead
,
and then, after some sort of a settlement was reached, returned to Republic to film
The Sun Shines Bright.
Yates made peace with Ford because he hoped the director’s new film would help turn his failing studio around. In the spring of 1953, Republic entered
Bright
in the Cannes Film Festival, where it wasn’t well received; Yates then cut ten minutes from the original 100-minute running length. Ford was furious and vowed never to work for Yates again.
¹¹⁴

With Argosy mired in financial troubles, Ford engaged talent agency MCA’s Lew Wasserman to represent him. Wasserman quickly made a deal with MGM to have Ford remake Victor Fleming’s 1932
Red Dust,
a property the studio already owned. The remake was called
Mogambo
and starred some of MGM’s biggest stars, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, hot off the success of
High Noon
. (Gable had starred in the original as well, with Jean Harlow and Mary Astor.) Ford had wanted Maureen O’Hara for the Gardner role, but she turned him down. For now, she had had enough of Ford’s nastiness, drinking, and jealous rages.

Mogambo
proved a major box-office success, and Ford followed it with
The Long Gray Line
for Columbia, during which he became romantically involved with the star of the film, his new discovery, Betsy Palmer; it was an affair that infuriated Maureen O’Hara, who had reluctantly agreed to be in the film. She hated Ford going behind his wife’s back, and Ford was angry at her as well because he believed she was having an affair with one of the other stars of the film.

The Long Gray Line
was a commercial hit, and Ford then made
Mister Roberts
in 1954 for Warner Bros, as a favor to help Henry Fonda make a return to major studio filmmaking. Working again in CinemaScope, Ford produced another success and the film made a star out of newcomer Jack Lemmon, who won a Best Supporting Actor for his performance.

During production, at the U.S. Navy base on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean in September 1954, producer Leland Hayward arranged a meeting between Fonda and Ford to discuss changes Ford wanted to make in the original play to make it more cinematic. Ford, who was sprawled out on the sofa with a drink in his hand, sprang up and punched Fonda in the face. Ford’s drinking and generally hostile attitude, topped off by his punching Fonda, quickly became the talk of Hollywood. Their relationship was never the same after that and Ford left the film before it was finished. It was completed by Mervyn LeRoy, who shared screen credit with Ford, and Logan, who did not.

Despite this good run, stories of Ford’s increasing hostile behavior spread throughout Hollywood and as a result, few new offers came his way. At sixty-one, an alcoholic and in fragile health, half blind, and recovering from gall bladder surgery, he feared his long career might be over. Just to keep working, he agreed to direct two one-hour episodes of the TV anthology series
Studio Directors Playhouse,
the contents of which are better left forgotten (one featured Wayne).

And then he got a call from Merian Cooper, saying he was restructuring Argosy and partnering with “Sonny” Whitney’s production company.

IN LATE 1954 MERIAN COOPER
had accepted the offer from his good friend Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, heir to both the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes and the owner of a stable of Thoroughbred horses. Whitney had long been involved in the motion picture business. While still in his teens, with his cousin John Hay Whitney he became a major investor in the development of the original Technicolor process and then a majority stockholder in the Technicolor Corporation. They later had a hand in perfecting the technology of CinemaScope. The two Whitneys also provided much of the $3.5 million production money to David O. Selznick’s company to make his 1939 film classic
Gone with the Wind,
after every major studio had turned it down (it was distributed by MGM). The success of that film, shot in Technicolor, made the Whitneys major players in Hollywood.

Seventeen years later, in 1954, C. V. Whitney formed “C. V. Whitney Pictures” and offered both Ford and Cooper a stake in the company and a five-year deal to serve as its vice president and executive producer. Cooper had accepted the deal, but Ford turned it down. After all the problems he had had with Argosy, he said he preferred to just make movies freelance.

Whitney, who always loved westerns, then bought the film rights to two novels. One was a Civil War saga called
The Valiant Virginians,
by James Warner Bellah, who had written the short stories that Ford had used as the basis for his cavalry trilogy. The other was Alan LeMay’s 1954 western saga
The Searchers,
which had been serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post
.