American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (44 page)

WHEN THE NOMINATIONS WERE ANNOUNCED
the morning of February 27, 1961,
The Alamo
had seven—Best Picture (John Wayne/Batjac, UA); Supporting Actor (Chill Wills); Best Film Editing (Stuart Gilmore); Best Sound (Gordon E. Sawyer, Fred Hynes); Best Score (Dimitri Tiomkin); Best Song (Dimitri Tiomkin and Fred Francis Webster); Best Cinematography (William H. Clothier). Sidney Skolsky, in his syndicated column, made fun of both Wayne’s campaign for Oscar, and its apparent success: “The biggest surprise . . . was the Best Picture nod for
The Alamo.
It appears more people voted for the film than have seen it.”

Wayne’s campaign seemed to be working, when Chill Wills, who was in the film only to provide some (much-needed) comic relief, went on a desperate campaign of his own for what likely would be his only chance at a coveted golden statuette. He wrote each member of the Academy a personal note, ending with: “You’re all my cousins and I love you all.” Groucho Marx, a voting member, published his response in the trades to Wills’s campaign: “Dear Mr. Chill Wills. I am delighted to be your cousin but I voted for Sal Mineo [for his performance in Otto Preminger’s
Exodus
].” At the Screen Writers Guild Awards dinner not long after, comedian Mort Sahl quipped that Groucho Marx should be given an Oscar for Best Ad.

The fact was, for all the joking about it, Wills’s personal campaign had turned off a lot of industry voters and by doing so hurt
The Alamo
’s overall chances. The day after Marx’s response to Wills ran, an infuriated Wayne placed an ad in
Variety,
denying he had known of, or given his approval to, Wills’s self-promotion campaign. Not long after, Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, who was disgusted with both Chill’s bone-headed actions and Wayne’s self-important public rebuke, and for that matter the film’s entire “vote for my film to prove you’re really an American” Oscar campaign, publicly referred to Wayne as a “poor old man” out of touch with the Hollywood of the poststudio era. That put Chill Wills in even hotter water with Wayne, who then took out
another
ad in the trades, insisting that he had had nothing to do with his own campaign, and blamed all the intimidating implications on Birdwell, which infuriated
him
, while all Hollywood ignored Wayne’s cop-out and continued laughing at Wills’s campaign and what was mostly viewed at Wayne’s pathetic attempts to somehow link voting for
The Alamo
with the Waldorf Statement.

THE ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONIES WERE
held on April 17 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, hosted by Bob Hope and televised in the United States over the American Broadcasting Company and seen all over the world. Wayne attended the Oscars with Pilar, he in black tie, she in full gown. In his opening monologue, Hope got the biggest laugh when he made fun of the brouhaha over Wills’s ill-conceived self-promotion: “The members of the Academy will decide which actor and actress has the best press agent. I didn’t know there was any campaigning until I saw my maid wearing a Chill Wills button!” Later, deep into the endless show, just before Hope brought on Eva Marie Saint to present Best Supporting Actor, he couldn’t resist taking one last shot at Wills: “There are five actors being held down by their psychiatrists and their cousins.”

Saint then came out, read the names of the nominees—Wills, Sal Mineo, Peter Falk for his performance in Stuart Rosenberg and Bob Balaban’s
Murder, Inc.,
Jack Krushen for Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment,
and Peter Ustinov for Stanley Kubrick’s
Spartacus
. Saint opened the envelope and a roar went up when she announced the winner—Peter Ustinov. Wills, in the audience, caught in close-up by a TV camera, looked deflated. Wayne, meanwhile sat stone-faced, showed no expression.

As the evening dragged on, it became clear that even if
The Alamo
had deserved to win, the Academy was not going to reward Wayne’s movie, not because it wasn’t a good film, but because of the misguided, politically offensive campaign he had waged for it. Except for one Oscar the film won for Best Sound, which went to a group of unnamed technicians from the Sam Goldwyn and Todd-AO sound departments,
The Alamo
was otherwise completely shut out. Best Picture went to Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment,
produced by the director and Mirisch/UA, Color Cinematography went to Russell Metty, for
Spartacus,
Best Song went to Manos Hadjidakis for the title song to Jules Dassin’s
Never on Sunday,
and Best Score went to Ernest Gold for
Exodus.

Then it was over. The lights came up, and everybody shot for the exits racing to get to the post-Oscar parties to follow. Wayne, not wanting to appear angry or disappointed, took Pilar. Going through the motions was something they were never good at, not just for the public, but in their relationship, in which, increasingly, they acted as if they were making a movie of their marriage for some invisible camera, rather than actually living it.

BY THE SPRING OF 1961,
Wayne was filled with emotions, none of them good. He was facing financial ruin because the public had not supported
The Alamo
. He was disgusted at the election of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon, the effective end of the blacklist, and felt ongoing grief over the death of Ward Bond.

Approaching fifty-five, bloated and balding, he felt over-the-hill. He was convinced no studio would ever hire him to direct another movie, and he was no longer in any position to finance one himself. Zanuck’s words haunted him like some hit song playing endlessly in his head that he couldn’t stop hearing.
Poor old man . . . poor old man . . . poor old man.

Chapter 22

Not long after wrapping production on
The Alamo
, Wayne had received a phone call from Charles Feldman with the news that the film they had done some scouting for in Alaska during the making of
The Alamo
had finally gotten a green light. Wayne was practically packing his bags before he hung up the phone. As it happened,
North to Alaska
was to be his next film for Fox, not
McLintock!
at UA. Wayne would still make
McClintock!,
they assured Feldman, just not right away.

Buddy Adler at Fox had had no such qualms when he was first approached by Feldman during the making of
The Alamo
. Alaska had just become the forty-ninth state and Adler thought the tie-in would assure the film’s success. As it happened, Feldman also represented Buddy Adler as well as two writers on
North to Alaska
(a.k.a.
Go North,
a.k.a.
Port Fury
)
,
John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin. Adler was recently divorced from actress Anita Louise and living with the French beauty Capucine, a discovery of Feldman. She was an actress whose career Feldman was not having much luck getting off the ground in America, and to do so he had introduced her to the head of Fox. American audiences usually wanted American actresses in their films. Few foreigners, except for the British, made the crossover easy. Dietrich was the big exception, but even she, at the height of her popularity, had to play either Nazis (Billy Wilder’s 1948
A Foreign Affair
) or Nazi sympathizers (Stanley Kramer’s 1961
Judgment at Nuremberg
), or exotic showgirls cast as some echo of Lola-Lola (George Marshall’s 1939
Destry Rides Again
). Language was the killer for most foreign actresses, no matter how beautiful they were. It was why Brigitte Bardot never made a successful American film. Feldman had assured Adler that Capucine could star in
North to Alaska,
and that Richard Fleischer, a veteran director whose career had taken off after Disney’s 1954
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
and 1959’s feature
Compulsion
for Buddy Adler at Fox
,
a fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb murders, was eager to direct. Adler was confident this project had all the right components to make a big hit.

And then a series of disasters struck. Before the film could begin production, Adler died from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one and Fox was taken over by Spyros Skouras, who was less than thrilled with the project. Fleischer then had second thoughts and for the first time said he wanted to see a script, but Mahin and Rackin had nothing ready. Fleischer had also had reservations about being able to direct Capucine as a prostitute. To him, she did not project a lot of heat. He wanted off the film now but didn’t want to offend Feldman. He consulted with a friend who told him the easiest way out was to simply call Feldman and tell him Fleischer didn’t think Capucine was right for the role.

Feldman released him and hired Henry Hathaway, another client, and more important, a director Wayne was comfortable with. Hathaway had already made a couple of films with Wayne, including 1941’s
The Shepherd of the Hills,
a film Wayne had liked, and 1957’s
Legend of the Lost,
and he was eager to work with him again.

And then the Screen Writers Guild went out on strike and Hathaway and company had to make the movie without a finished script. The SWG had been the hardest hit during the height of the blacklisting. The strike proved just how dead blacklisting really was, if the writers were willing to risk staging a walkout to protest wages, residuals, credits, and other things they felt they deserved.

WAYNE’S NEXT ACTING JOB
was
Hatari!
made for Paramount Pictures, and directed by Howard Hawks.
Hatari!
had been filmed in 1960, but not released until 1962. It was a purely action film, light on plot, heavy on action. According to Hawks, “
Hatari!
in a way was a Western . . . We never knew in the morning what we were going to do that day—we had three or four spotting airplanes, and just as dawn broke, they would go up and radio back to us. One would say, ‘I found a really good herd of rhino,’ and by that time we’d be on our way . . . we had fun.” The film was, ostensibly, about big game hunting in Africa, but really about the special joy of male bonding past the age of adolescence (or at the prime of an extended one). Much of it was filmed in Tanganyika and was long on macho and short on meaning; it was nonetheless highly entertaining, and upon its release well received by critics and audiences, and further helped replenish Wayne’s depleted coffers. Much of the dialogue was improvised, according to Bogdanovich: “ ‘Well,’ Hawks said, ‘you can’t sit in an office and write what a rhino is going to do . . . we had to make up scenes in an awful hurry.’ ” Wayne had flown to Africa in November, just weeks after completing
North to Alaska
.

He next appeared in 1961’s
The Comancheros,
directed by Michael Curtiz at Fox (made after but released before
Hatari!
). At fifty-four, he had gotten too old to play a romantic hero and wisely let others be the lovers in his movies, here the younger, virile Stuart Whitman
.

Wayne wanted to be surrounded by families and friends while making the film. William Clothier,
The Alamo
’s brilliant cinematographer, was back behind the lens, and two of Wayne’s children had roles in the film, his son Patrick and his daughter Aissa. Pilar came along for the duration of the location shoot that took place in the part of the Mojave Desert that reached into the southern tip of Utah. In the film, Wayne plays a Texas Ranger trying to stop a gun-running band of renegade Comancheros.

Curtiz was sick during filming, and Wayne directed most of the picture, unaccredited out of respect for Curtiz, who passed shortly after the film was finished and before its release.

Not long after they returned home from Utah, Pilar announced she was pregnant again. If anyone thought it odd that Wayne was still having children at his age, he had the same answer for all questioners, should any have the nerve to ask: “The difference in our ages is not a problem! And if it ever gets to be one, I’ll just have to find a younger woman!”

Pilar was excited about having another baby. One night late in her pregnancy, watching
The Searchers
together on TV, she suddenly turned to Wayne and asked if they could name their child Ethan if he was a boy. He happily said yes.

An hour later, on the morning of February 22, 1962, she went into labor and an hour after that gave birth to John Ethan Wayne. Wayne had two grandchildren older than his new baby boy.

Wayne was reenergized by this new round of fatherhood, and his productivity showed it. In the year that followed he made
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, Donovan’s Reef,
the long-delayed
McLintock!, Circus World,
and
In Harm’s Way,
an output of films ranging from awful—
Circus World
—to one of the finest films of his career, John Ford’s
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
.

When
Valance
was released in 1962, it appeared to critics and whatever audiences who saw it as something of a throwback, a black-and-white western with three actors all too old for their roles—Jimmy Stewart as a young lawyer, Wayne as a gunfighter—and Andy Devine back in the Andy Devine comic-relief role. It also had one over-the-top villain, the title’s ironically named Liberty Valance (valiant liberty?), played with high-end menace by Lee Marvin, who had been a member of the Ford stock company for years without being able to land the right role to turn him into an A star. Although
Valance
didn’t do it, a few years later in Elliot Silverstein’s 1965 western spoof,
Cat Ballou,
he cleverly sent up his role of Valance and won a Best Actor Oscar for it, an award overdue, won, at least in part, to Wayne’s insistence to Ford that Marvin play the murderous villain in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.