American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (36 page)

The Searchers
barely made money at the box office, but Wayne realized his recent movies weren’t breaking any records.
Blood Alley
managed to break even in its initial theatrical run.
The Conqueror,
released domestically a few months before
The Searchers,
had proved the disaster he knew it would be. It failed to turn a profit (not including the millions Hughes spent after it had finished its run to buy back the negative).
The Searchers
did okay, but it was not by any means a blockbuster. RKO then released the nearly eight-year-old
Jet Pilot
(reportedly Hughes owned that negative as well), and it proved another bomb, unable to make back its production costs. Suddenly, Duke the indestructible couldn’t buy a hit.

After
The Searchers’
critical failure, Sonny Whitney decided to get out of the film business. Whitney was a wealthy kid who treated movies the same way Howard Hughes did, like a toy. After
The Searchers
opened
,
Whitney was already in preproduction on
The Valiant Virginians,
with Ford in place to direct, when he suddenly pulled the plug on the project. He met personally with Ford to assure him it had nothing to do with the success or failure of
The Searchers.
He now wanted to buy a chain of television stations, a medium in which be believed it would be much easier to make a lot of money.

C. V. Pictures made only two more films, both in production and hard to pull the plug on without taking a financial bath. One was Jerry Hopper’s 1958
The Missouri Traveler,
a turn-of-the-twentieth-century coming-of-age story starring Brandon deWilde (the towhead from
Shane
), Lee Marvin, a Ford stock company member, Gary Merrill, and Ken Curtis. The other was Ted Tetzlaff’s 1959
The Young Land,
starring six-foot-one Patrick Wayne, who bore a remarkable resemblance to his father but was only seventeen years old and needed both his and Josephine Saenz’s written approval to work full-time (Wayne’s only condition was that his boy work as an actor in the summer and agree to return to school in the fall). Whitney had signed Patrick to a $200-a-week contract for forty weeks, or $450 a week if the picture took less time, whichever was the larger amount.
The Young Land
also featured Dennis Hopper, Yvonne Craig, and Dan Dailey. When the two pictures wrapped, C. V. Pictures was history.

Ford suffered a period of severe depression after the cancellation of
The Valiant Virginians,
during which time he wrote a letter to Wayne, saying the pleasure of making movies had left him. The business was changing, Ford said, and he felt lost in this new world of independent-driven moviemaking.

CHARLES FELDMAN QUIETLY BEGAN NEGOTIATIONS
with Twentieth Century–Fox’s production head, Buddy Adler, to secure Wayne a ten-year, minimum three-picture nonexclusive deal that would pay him $200,000 each year, with Feldman’s commission to be paid by the studio and Batjac having the option to produce any or all of the movies.

It was a big score for Wayne in an industry that was rapidly shrinking. When asked by one reporter how he had landed such a great deal, he turned back to the past as a way of explaining the future: “There are only a handful of big stars left . . . They won’t spend any money to make stars. They won’t take a chance on kids. And the new ones who have come along all go in for that mannered [Method] acting. They won’t take any direction.” It was Wayne’s defensive explanation of his own success; there was nobody left from the old days who was any good, and the new actors weren’t his, and presumably his audience’s, cup of tea. Wayne appeared to disregard his rather formidable contemporaries, including Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Taylor, Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Rock Hudson, and others who had come out of the system, as he had, and the younger crop of all studio-developed talent, including Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, and all of whom were turning out quality movies.

And there was something else. The power of the notorious blacklist was at last beginning to fade after the 1954 censure of Senator McCarthy, and over the next several years the majors began to relax their official ban on “Communists.” In addition, television was based on the East Coast and with close physical proximity to the theater, which was not vulnerable to Hollywood’s blacklist. The medium still suffered, mostly because the revived postwar foreign markets wanted films that ignored the blacklist on actors, writers, and directors and gave a lot of the best exiled American talent, names like Robert Rossen, John Berry, and Bernard Gordon, among them, a second chance overseas.

At the same time, Wayne, who had once felt compassion for those he felt victimized by the blacklist and the HUAC hearings—which he pulled back from when he feared becoming a victim himself—now began once more to harden his stand against the left, a form of self-enshrinement he felt he deserved for all he had done on the front lines of the war on Communists. While more and more blacklisted actors began to find work, and writers and directors had kept working under assumed names, and those who had instigated or supported the blacklist were either dying off or fading from power, Wayne remained uncompromising in his anti-Communism (some of his criticism of the new crop of talented youth who wouldn’t “take orders” was Wayne’s veiled accusation of their lack of respect for the industry, to him a step below a lack of respect for the country). His resistance to change was granite hard and the more doctrinaire he became, the more out of fashion he appeared. While the rest of the industry looked to survive by moving forward and changing with the times, to Wayne, the future was the enemy of the past.

ADLER HAD FULLY EXPECTED WAYNE
to start immediately producing motion pictures for Twentieth Century-Fox. Wayne, however, demurred, telling Adler he needed a break. He said he had just become a new father and wanted to spend some quality time at home. Adler said he understood how Wayne felt, and that he should do what he needed to do.

He did—and decided to go out on tour to promote the long-delayed overseas opening of
The Conqueror
at the personal request of his good friend Howard Hughes.

Wayne had reasons to want to go. He had never been a doting father type, and the shift in dynamic from romance to rock-a-bye just wasn’t doing it for him. And there was family trouble. It began before
The Searchers
ended, when Mary Antonia “Toni” Wayne, his nineteen-year-old daughter from his first wife, learned her father’s new wife was going having a baby just three weeks before she, Toni, was to marry twenty-seven-year-old law student Donald La Cava. Toni asked Wayne to walk down the aisle and give her away, and after, sit next to Josie at the church. To make things worse, Pilar was not invited.

Wayne had tried to reason with Toni. He asked her to change her mind about excluding Pilar, saying that she was his wife, but Toni absolutely refused. And then Pilar insisted he not go without her. He went to the wedding over Pilar’s objections, and threw a reception for 750 invited guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Crystal Room. Among his friends there to celebrate the occasion were Ward Bond, Ann Blyth, Bob Hope, Ray Milland, and Loretta Young.

WAYNE FLEW WITH HUGHES ON
his private plane to Paris, Rome, Italy, and Berlin for the premieres of
The Conqueror
. He loved the overflowing crowds of screaming fans fighting each other to get a glimpse of him. And he loved running around Europe with Hughes, whose taste for women was almost as strong as his taste for money. Together, they made a formidable team, a pair of modern-day conquerors. On the way back to L.A. they stayed in New York for a week before Hughes convinced Wayne not to go home but instead to fly with him to Africa, ostensibly to scout locations for the next run of Batjac films.

Despite his promise to Pilar that this time he would get it right, the new John Wayne behaved a lot like the old John Wayne.

WAYNE’S FIRST FILM AFTER
THE
Searchers
was made at MGM rather than for Fox, where his new deal was nonexclusive. It was a film biography of Ford’s good friend, screenwriter Frank W. “Spig” Wead. Ford was reluctant at first to do
The Wings of Eagles
. As he told Peter Bogdanovich, “I didn’t want to do the picture because Spig was a great pal of mine. But I didn’t want anyone
else
to do it. I knew him first when he was deck officer, black shoe, with the old Mississippi—before he went into flying. I was out of the Navy then and I used to go out and see him and some of the other officers. Spig was always interested in writing and I helped him a bit and encouraged him. We did a couple of pictures together. He died in my arms . . . Everything in the picture was true. The fight in the club—throwing the cake . . . when they all fell into the pool . . . and the plane landing in the swimming pool—right in the middle of the Admiral’s tea—that really happened.”

The film follows as closely as possible (as close as Hollywood film biographies do) the life of Spig Wead, who, along with his friend Lieutenant John Price, played by Ken Curtis in the film, helped to take the navy airborne. In the picture, Spig marries Millie, played by Maureen O’Hara. They suffer the death of their infant son, which changes the dynamic of their relationship. Spig’s constant traveling for the navy puts a further strain on their marriage. Millie pointedly stays behind with the children when he is sent to Washington. Upon his return, he tries to effect a reconciliation but suffers a horrible tragedy one night when he falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck. Diagnosed as paraplegic, Spig forces his wife and daughters out of his life and begins a long, difficult rehabilitation supervised by former navy mechanic “Jughead” Carson, played by Dan Dailey. Attempting to start a career as a writer, “Spig” teams up with a Hollywood director, based on Ford, played by Ward Bond, and gains some professional success and also the limited use of his legs. He reunites with his wife, and at the film’s end is paid tribute by a crew line on a carrier deck. The film is filled with classic Ford sentimentality, the male heroes almost always in his film much more memorable than his female ones. According to O’Hara, “Despite all the horrible things John Ford had done to me, I reported happily to the set of
The Wings of Eagles
in August 1956 . . . it was good to be home again . . . I played ‘Spig’s’ wife, Millie . . . the picture gave Duke and me some wonderful dramatic scenes, although much of my best work was left on the cutting-room floor. Millie Wead had slipped into alcoholism later in life, but, at the request of her children, Mr. Ford cut that wonderfully dramatic footage out of the picture
.
The edited picture was good, but not vintage Ford. Something was missing. Perhaps that old magic—the Ford-Wayne-O’Hara fire—had waned . . . I never worked with John Ford again.”

THIS TENTH COLLABORATION BETWEEN FORD
and Wayne was filmed in forty-seven days, from July to October 1956 on location in Pensacola, Florida, and finished at the MGM Studios in Hollywood. The finale was filmed on the aircraft carrier USS
Philippine Sea
. Pilar came along to the location with Aissa and remained with her husband for the entire shoot, except when he left for a few days to do an uncredited cameo in Hal Kanter’s
I Married a Woman
(a.k.a.
So There You Are
), a goofy comedy starring George Gobel, a TV comic hot at the time, and the voluptuous Diana Dors, England’s answer to Jayne Mansfield. Wayne had befriended Gobel and did the two-day shoot as a favor to him. In it, only Wayne is in color, the rest of the film remains in black-and-white.

The original budget for
The Wings of Eagles
was $2.79 million, but Ford was able to bring it in for a hundred thousand dollars less. It opened in 1957, and proved disappointing at the box office. MGM took a million-dollar loss. Audiences were not interested in a static story about a physically impaired hero and with a lot of overly narcisstic navel-gazing on Ford’s part. If David Lean’s
Bridge on the River Kwai
was the audience’s favorite war film that year, it was because audiences preferred their heroes young, physically active and handsome, and could forgive their moral imperfections. William Holden’s reluctant warrior would rather sleep with nurses than save the world, but in the final reel makes the ultimate sacrifice. Holden’s moral uplift at the end of
Kwai
was far more appealing than Wayne’s being physically lifted up at the end of
Eagles
.
¹²²

The commercial failure of the film confirmed to Ford that his times was over. The dialogue by Frank Fenton and William Wister Haines, based on the life and writings of Commander Frank W. Wead, had none of the snap and spark of Frank Nugent’s classic Ford screenplays. Ford’s filming of Spig’s true story of loss, deprivation, struggle, and redemption lacked any true diamond writing or directional wit.

IN FEBRUARY 1957, WAYNE BEGAN
production on Batjac’s
The Legend of the Lost,
coproduced by Panama, Inc. Knowing he was going to be away overseas on location for at least three months, he asked Pilar to come with him. When she told him the baby was too young to be inoculated and therefore couldn’t make the trip, Wayne suggested Pilar leave the baby in the care of a nurse. She refused, and Wayne reluctantly took off for Libya without her; they agreed to meet in Rome after the picture finished production at the famed Cinecittà Studios. He was gone less than a week when he sent her a telegram that he was sick, imploring her to come join him in Libya. She decided she had better go after all. After hiring a nurse, as Wayne had suggested, Pilar took off for North Africa. When she arrived, she found him in perfect health. He said he just wanted to share the glorious sunsets with her. The sunsets were great, but the accommodations were awful. Pilar was forced to share a mud hut with her husband (everyone involved with the production lived that way) and one communal toilet used by all.