American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (37 page)

The Legend of the Lost
costarred Italian sex symbol Sophia Loren and Rossano Brazzi, both noticeably younger looking than Wayne; nevertheless he played the love interest to Loren, while Brazzi acted the villain. The story is centered around a hunt for a lost treasure that takes place largely in the blistering desert. While she was waiting for her husband, Carlo Ponti, to arrive, Sophia carried on an affair with Brazzi. Wayne didn’t approve (maybe he was jealous) and neither did Pilar, who thought it unseemly for the international beauty to be so obviously disrespectful to Ponti. It created extra tension between Wayne and Pilar, perhaps because she showed her more clearly what goes on between married costars on location when they are away from their spouses.

When Wayne was ready to move the production to Rome, hoping that would make things easier for Pilar, she told him she had had enough, that she missed their child and needed to go home. After arriving back in Los Angeles, she confessed to a friend the trip had left her an emotional mess. He sent her to a Beverly Hills doctor who prescribed tranquilizers to ease her anxieties. She started taking them and quickly became dependent, and by the time Wayne returned home, she was like a zombie. Don’t worry, Wayne reassured her, he was going to be home and for a long time and everything would to be better now.

WHEN
THE LEGEND OF THE
Lost
was released in December 1957, it proved another box-office disappointment and Wayne believed his career might be in serious trouble. Not long after the opening, despite his promise to Pilar, he left by himself for Japan to make his first feature for Adler and Fox, the jingoistic
The Barbarian and the Geisha
(a.k.a.
The Townshend Harris Story,
a.k.a.
The Barbarian
). Directed by John Huston, it is the story of the first American diplomat in Japan, sent by President Pierce, who arrives in “the forbidden empire” in 1856 to a hostile reception. A cholera outbreak occurs, and a love story is worked in between Harris and a geisha, Okichi, played by Eiko Ando, a twenty-three-year-old local burlesque dancer who Huston felt was perfect for the part. She has been hired to kill Harris but falls in love with him instead. The romance fails and the film ends with Harris marching triumphantly through the streets to the Imperial Palace, with Okichi watching mournfully from afar.

The fourteen-week location shoot in Kyoto and Kawana produced a lot of friction between Huston and Wayne. They had never worked together before, and despite their perfect fit on paper, they proved not a good creative match. Huston did not appreciate Wayne’s constant and unasked-for suggestions about directing, and Wayne felt that Huston’s choices of shots, cuts, and camera placement were all wrong (it was something Wayne never tried with Ford). Moreover, as he always did, Wayne depended on guidance for his acting from his director, but Huston offered him none. Wayne felt that Huston was more interested in how a shot looked than the performance of the actors in it. Moreover, Wayne wasn’t a regular part of the Huston “gang” of regulars, like Humphrey Bogart, whose rapport with Huston made it easier for both to “understand” each other. Moreover, Wayne felt out of place in this historical romance drama. If Huston knew it, he didn’t appear to care, about Wayne or the movie. He did care about Eiko, though.

During this production, Hughes decided it was finally the right time to release
Jet Pilot.
Wayne felt the film might make him look ridiculous costarring with Janet Leigh, especially since most people wouldn’t know the film was seven years old. He reacted to the film’s release this way: “My problem is I’m not a handsome man like Cary Grant, who will still be handsome at sixty-five . . . I may be able to do a few more man-woman things before it’s too late . . . [and I’ll look like a] silly old man chasing young girls, as some of the stars are doing.”

Pilar decided to fly to Japan for the duration of the shoot, and it gave Wayne a chance to confide his frustrations over this film and
Jet Pilot
to her, which made her feel important and needed in his life. Not long after she arrived, Wayne brightened considerably at the news that his good friend Elizabeth Taylor and her husband, producer Mike Todd, were going to be passing through Japan and would like to stop by to visit. Wayne found Taylor down-to-earth, fun, with a salty tongue and that singular beauty highlighted by those famous dollar-coin-sized violet eyes. Wayne was less well acquainted with Todd but sensed they were kindred spirits of a sort, men’s men, and he was eager to get to know him better. They instantly bonded and while Wayne chain-smoked and drank scotch, Todd puffed on the big cigars he loved; they spent hours swapping Hollywood stories, while Liz talked away the time with Pilar. It was a visit Wayne would not forget, for its ease, bonding, and relief, for both him and Pilar. He told Todd he hoped to see him back in the States and maybe work out a plan to make some movies together.

It never happened. Todd was killed four months later in a plane crash.

In February 1958, with only two weeks left to shoot, the excitement and relief of Pilar’s visit had evaporated, and the tension between them became palpable, until Wayne suggested she go home and let him finish the film by himself. Pilar quickly agreed. One night, shortly after she arrived back in Encino, she was deeply asleep when the pet dog, Blackie, barked her awake
.
The house was on fire. She rushed down to the main floor, opened all the windows, got a fire extinguisher, went back upstairs to grab Aissa, wrapped her in a blanket, and then made a run for it back down the stairs and out the front door.

When Wayne found out, he promised to come home as soon as possible, and had Bö Roos send over a blank check to her to cover any immediate expenses. Pilar appreciated the gesture but wished Wayne had delivered it in person. She took the fire as an omen and wondered what would have happened to Aissa if she hadn’t flown home earlier to be with her when the fire broke out.

THE BARBARIAN AND THE GEISHA
was due to be released in the fall, and Wayne had hoped it would break his four-film slide, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

His instincts were correct. The film opened September 30, 1958, to mostly negative reviews—
Variety
’s expressed what Wayne had feld during filming. It praised the visuals but concluded that “the human story it tries to tell has been all but swallowed up by the weight of its production.” The picture failed to make back its $4 million negative cost. When Wayne complained to Hedda Hopper that Huston was the reason for the film’s failure, and she printed it, Huston returned the favor by publicly blaming Wayne for using his influence at the studio to make changes in postproduction that he, Huston, did not approve of.

It was the oldest story in Hollywood. Everyone takes credit when a film is a success, and everyone blames the other guy when it fails. In this case, whoever was right or wrong, the film flopped, and Wayne feared his career may have passed the point of no return.

He needed a hit, and he needed it fast.

Chapter 20

He got it with his next film, Howard Hawks’s
Rio Bravo
. Hawks had last directed Wayne in
Red River,
and continued to have a string of hits, until 1955, when he directed and produced
Land of the
Pharaohs
for Warner Bros, a sandals-and-robes epic that, despite the popularity of Henry Koster’s 1953
The Robe
, laid an atomic bomb. Warner Bros had advanced Hawks $2.9 million for the production and was not at all pleased the film failed to make back its investment, due mostly to the lack of star power, crucial in this genre. Jack Hawkins, a major star in England, voted its sixth-most-popular star in 1955, remained a familiar face without a real name or box-office draw in America.

Hawks was looking to return to form and decided the best way to do so was to make another western with John Wayne: “I came in and said to Jack Warner, I want to do
Rio Bravo . . .
and it started a whole cycle of [studio big screen] Westerns going again.”

As it happened, Wayne and Hawks had each sought out the other to use as a way to return to the top of their respective games. Separately, they had both agreed about how much they had disliked
High Noon
. Wayne had told Hawks on more than one occasion how much he hated the film, and Hawks promised him they would make a film to “correct”
High Noon
’s misleading image of Americans. He later talked a lot about how disappointed he was with Hollywood after
High Noon
and another western, Delmer Daves’s 1957
3:10 to Yuma,
not for their politics—
High Noon
had plenty,
Yuma
had little, if any—but for their “warped” portrayal of bravery. In Hawks’s words, “I don’t like
High Noon
. It’s phony. The fellow’s supposed to be good. He’s supposed to be good with a gun. He runs around like a wet chicken trying to get people to help him. Eventually his Quaker wife saves his guts.”

Putting aside the dramatic impact of that last act, it is interesting to see how long
High Noon
remained in the consciousness of Hollywood’s premier filmmakers, and how little of what was supposed to be its antithesis really appears in
Rio Bravo
. It would be surprising if it did, as Hawks’s films were never explicitly political, unless one may infer from his love of action a reverence for freedom, but either way he was not considered one of Hollywood’s polarizing politicos. In
Rio Bravo
audiences simply wanted to see Wayne back in action in a western and with
Rio Bravo
he had a hit.

In truth,
Rio Bravo
resembles nothing so much as a dry run of Wayne’s vision of
The Alamo—
plenty of action based upon a premise that a small, tough, and dedicated group can hold off a much larger band of evil attackers.

Wayne left Encino on May 4, 1958, to begin filming
Rio Bravo
on location in Old Tucson, Arizona, leaving Pilar behind to “redecorate,” or more accurately, clean up the mess left behind from the fire and supervise the construction crews. It was not a chore she wanted, and it left her with the feeling that she might be able to rebuild the house, but not so easily her relationship with her husband. She could not escape the sense of having been abandoned once again. Wayne made no pretense about what he wanted and needed to do; the unreal excitement of filmmaking was where he lived, not in a home with a moody wife and a crying baby.

As soon as he left, she began taking pills again.

RIO BRAVO
WAS STUDDED WITH
costars. Besides Wayne, the film had adult idol Dean Martin, teen idol Ricky Nelson, Wayne’s pal Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, who had been Wayne’s sidekick in
Red River
, and newcomer Angie Dickinson to provide some female heat.
¹²³
According to Dickinson, “The scenes we were in were long and complex and Duke was used to ‘All right, get up, and I’ll hit you again . . .’ Usually, he had very short, tough [action] scenes in his movies. Ours went on for pages, for minutes, and they were very difficult. They ended up great, but it was hard work.”

Wayne was paid $750,000 to appear in the picture, while Hawks only received $100,000 to direct.

Rio Bravo
was released February 17, 1959, and played to sold-out audiences everywhere. Audiences loved it and so did critics, from its opening, wordless action sequence, which sets the tone and the pace for the rest of the film.
Variety
called it “[a] top-notch western . . . Wayne delivers a faithful portrayal of the peace officer.” After the film opened, Andrew Sarris was among the first American critics to acknowledge the importance of Wayne’s body of work to American movies. In his paper “The World of Howard Hawks” for the
New York Bulletin
in 1961, Sarris wrote, “[Wayne] has always been an underrated screen personality, and if one does not accept the preeminence of Wayne as the incarnation of the Western hero, one will have difficulty in fully appreciating the stature of Ford and Hawks’ westerns.”

Godard’s critical love affair with all things Wayne continued with this movie: “
Rio Bravo
is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western.”

Dave Kehr, writing about the revival of the film and its DCP (digital cinema package) release in the
New York Times,
said “the interaction among these characters [Dean Martin a drunk, Ricky Nelson a punk, Walter Brennan a grouch, Angie Dickson a lady gambler, and the local sheriff, John Wayne], as they come to form the group of people central to all of Hawks’ work, is so vivid and alive and fraught with moral purpose that this supremely relaxed film is completely gripping.”

From a final negative cost of just over $3 million,
Rio Bravo
grossed an impressive $30 million worldwide. It is still a favorite today, considered one of Hawks’s better westerns. However, it does not compare to
High Noon
on almost every level and should not be measured against it. Hawks’s and Wayne’s private war with the Zinnemann film neither helped nor hurt
Rio Bravo,
but it did inspire it, and that is where any comparative discussions should end.

BY THE TIME WAYNE RETURNED
to L.A. in mid-July 1958, he barely had time to unpack before preparing for his next film, a Civil War drama to be shot on location in Arizona and directed by John Ford, called
The Horse Soldiers.
To get it made, Wayne had signed a complicated three-picture nonexclusive deal with United Artists (UA), which guaranteed what he was really after, part funding and distribution of
The Alamo
.

This time, Pilar insisted she was going with him, and bringing Aissa. Wayne had no choice but to agree. Production on
The Horse Soldiers
was scheduled to begin that October, and Wayne was eager to keep in motion his newly energized career. He didn’t want any distractions and knew it would be easier to take Pilar and Aissa along than to have to go through all the pre- and postdrama that would take place if he didn’t.