American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (47 page)

FOUR MONTHS AFTER WAYNE WENT
under the knife, he was back at work, on location in Durango, in the Mexican Sierras, where breathing was normally difficult, and which for Wayne meant having to use oxygen out of a can whenever he wasn’t filming; and in Chupaderas, Mexico, with interiors done at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. He was noticeably overweight, a good sign for his health, but not so for his screen image. The added pounds and the overall weakness he experienced recovering from surgery made it even more difficult, but somehow he got through the tough shoot. Directed by Hathaway and working with Dean Martin, his old pal and costar from
Rio Bravo,
Wayne toughed it through a very physical shoot. He knew his future in Hollywood depended on his completing this film.

The Sons of Katie Elder
opened July 1, 1965, to good reviews and great business. Off a budget of $2 million, it earned $16 million in North America in its initial run, and placed number 15 on that year’s top-grossing films.
¹³⁰
Wayne was paid $600,000 by Paramount, payable at $60,000 a week. To publicize the film, Wayne appeared on Dean Martin’s popular TV variety show, in which they both looked relaxed and healthy.

IN 1964, THE COUNTRY WAS
at war again. Until the Gulf of Tonkin incident the previous summer, few, if any, Americans had even heard of Vietnam. The enemy was an old and familiar one to Wayne. Communism. And once again he meant to do something about it. He determined to make a movie even bigger and more patriotic than
The Alamo.
He wanted to call it
The Green Berets
.

Chapter 24

On August 2, 1964, while the American destroyer USS
Maddox
was conducting a routine maneuver off the coast of North Vietnam and southern China, the United States claimed the ship was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats (the attack was later proved to not have taken place). In retaliation, a week later, what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by Congress giving President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to engage in limited conventional warfare in Southeast Asia.

It was a convincing victory for the unelected president, in power less than a year following the tragic assassination of JFK. Before his death, Kennedy had hinted that he was going to either limit or withdraw all U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. Johnson’s views were decidedly more hawkish, and the war, “his” war, along with the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, formed the platform that Johnson would run on that fall against the Republican candidate, Barry S. Goldwater. After his landslide election, Johnson put forth his “Great Society” of social reform and escalated the still officially undeclared war in Vietnam, outraging those young Americans eligible for the draft. The country was ill at ease.

The youth rebellion that followed reignited Wayne’s nationalistic fervor. Out of the past came the cinematic spirits of Sergeant Stryker and Davy Crockett, and they energized Wayne in a way that no traditional medicine could. He would take on the protesters and he would take on the enemy as he soon as could get his Green Beret movie green-lighted.

MEANWHILE, A BURGLARY AT THE
Encino house when no one was there prompted a disgusted Wayne to put it up for sale. With so many of the old gang gone, infirm, or out of touch, he had no reason to stay within card-dealing distance of Hollywood. He told Pilar to find a more suitable home for them, maybe in Malibu, or somewhere along the coast where they could have easier access to
The Wild Goose
. This was great news for Pilar, who felt it was a sign from her husband that he was warming up to her again.

She found a place she liked in Newport Beach, fifty miles south of Los Angeles. When she told Wayne about it, he directed her to buy it. He didn’t actually see it until the first day he walked through the door. Pilar wanted him to praise her house-hunting abilities. His response was less enthusiastic. He told her disapprovingly that the house needed a lot of work.

They both spent a bit of time with architects and contractors, but neither Wayne’s head nor heart was in it. He couldn’t wait to returning to filmmaking, and when Melville Shavelson approached him about starring in
Cast a Giant Shadow,
he jumped at the chance. Shavelson was a successful screenwriter, director, and producer. When he had read the bestselling book of the same name by Ted Berman, the “true” story of David “Mickey” Marcus, he immediately secured the film rights.

Marcus was a West Point graduate who had worked for a time in the Fiorello La Guardia administration of the ’30s, when the diminutive and extremely popular “Little Flower” was mayor of New York City. He became a colonel during World War II and participated in the D-Day invasion. After the war, the Jewish officer helped build the Palestinian Jews into a trained, disciplined army in their fight for the right to independence and the formation of Israel.

Wayne had known Shavelson since 1953, when he had produced
Trouble Along the Way.
They remained friends despite their political differences; Shavelson was a die-hard liberal. When he first approached Wayne about being in
Cast a Giant Shadow
, Shavelson, a shrewd manipulator, pointed out the similarities between Marcus and Davy Crockett. Wayne was interested, but he soon found out what Shavelson already knew—that a movie about a Jewish American war hero was a difficult project to get made. Jews were almost never portrayed in Hollywood as characters on-screen, despite the industry being filled with Jewish talent, and of course the predominantly Jewish moguls. For a brief period, after World War II, there were several films made about Jews, including
Gentleman’s Agreement,
directed by Elia Kazan, in which Gregory Peck impersonated one to understand what being Jewish meant in mainstream, or gentile America. Despite
Gentleman’s Agreement
having won an Oscar for Best Picture, and one for Kazan, Jewish stories and subjects soon faded from Hollywood’s must-do lists of subjects and remained largely invisible on-screen. More often than not, Jewish leading men, like Kirk Douglas, played non-Jewish parts, like
Spartacus,
far more than they did “Jewish” roles. Audiences might accept Wayne as Attila the Hun (they didn’t), but as Mickey Marcus, there was no way. He still wanted to be involved in the film and agreed to take a much smaller role, that of General Mike Randolph, the American officer who lends his experience and support to Colonel Marcus.

Wayne also declined the chance to coproduce the film through Batjac. When Mirisch Company (Mirisch-Llenroc) offered to come in if Batjac did, Wayne changed his mind and invested in the production (Mirisch Llenroc Batjac). The film was directed, written, and coproduced by Shavelson. After Wayne came aboard, other big names followed. Kirk Douglas agreed to play Colonel Marcus, Yul Brynner and Frank Sinatra appeared in cameo roles, and Senta Berger and Israeli actor Topol filled out the rest of the cast. Wayne played a scene where he said “L’chaim” during a toast, about as close to anything Jewish he was associated with during production.

The film was shot from mid-May to July 1965, on location in Israel, utilizing eight hundred Israeli soldiers and over a thousand extras, with additional exterior scenes filmed in Rome and the Alban Hills, and interiors at Italy’s famed Cinecittà Studios. Wayne spent several months abroad prior to filming, to help Shavelson with preproduction, while Pilar remained in Newport Beach, blueprints in hand, pencil behind her ear, supervising the construction of their new home.

He returned home only once before filming was completed, and Pilar took the occasion to tell him she was pregnant again.

Wayne found it difficult to believe his body could still produce life, but he was happy to be proven wrong. At fifty-eight years old, he had fathered yet another child with Pilar. Marisa Carmela Wayne, his seventh, and third with Pilar, was born February 22, 1966. 2/22 was a very lucky number for Wayne and Pilar. Marisa shared the same birthday with John Ethan, born four years earlier.

The event was life-affirming to Wayne, a physical, psychological, and moral victory, but not for Pilar. What began as a postpartum depression didn’t subside, and after a few months Pilar began to emotionally withdraw. She felt something had changed in Wayne, that he had become more distant, and it made her even more depressed. It was true, his fuse was shorter. He could go into rages over the smallest of things that used to make him laugh. The doctors had warned her to expect some changes in his personality after what he had been through.
What he had been through? What about me?

With all that going on, after a brief stay at home, Wayne quickly took off to make another movie, leaving Pilar alone with John Ethan and the new baby. It further upset her that he would risk his health just to play another cowboy. She worried that if something happened to him on-set she would be left alone to raise not just Marisa, but the entire family by herself. Justified or not, her emotional demons this time threatened to end her marriage. She had, in her words, turned into “a virtual zombie.”

A nervous Wayne started chewing tobacco to calm himself down.

CAST A GIANT SHADOW
OPENED
March 30, 1966, to mixed-to-negative reviews. The
New York Times
’ A. H. Weiler came in on the downside: “A confusing, often superficial biography that leans a good deal on comic and extremely salty dialogues and effects . . . full of sound and fury and woefully short on honest significance.”
Variety
liked it better: “Overlong pic has some exciting action highlights, fine production values and other assets.” At two hours and twenty-two minutes, the film lost one screening a day, which significantly cut into its profits.

Wayne had wanted it to come in under two, but was overruled by Mirisch and Shavelson. The film failed to make back its negative cost of $4.3 million, but Wayne still liked the film’s statement, that under certain conditions war was noble and defending an ideal more important than anything. It was a message he hoped would resonate with a younger audience, and not just Jews, but all American youth now caught in the stranglehold of the Vietnam War. He had been surprised and disappointed when the nation’s young didn’t understand who the real enemy was. To Wayne, any country’s fight for freedom was a fight for the freedom of all countries. Why didn’t they see that?

LIVING IN NEWPORT BEACH ON
what amounted to a house on a pier, Wayne was so close to the water he could hop out of his back door and be on
The
Wild Goose
. That part wasn’t so bad, but Pilar’s continuing depression put a damper on what he hoped would be a new start for their marriage.

When it proved otherwise, Wayne couldn’t wait for his new film project to begin production. He needed space, and he needed money. The seemingly endless renovation was draining his cash, Batjac had taken a loss with Shavelson, and Pilar was making him crazy, so when Howard Hawks had come along with
El Dorado
before
Shadow
opened, Wayne jumped at it. Being home, amid the banging, the buzz sawing, the dust that aggravated his chronically sore throat, and Pilar’s behavior pushed him to leave as soon as possible for Tucson, Arizona, to join Robert Mitchum, who had, since the debacle of
Blood Alley
, become a friend, in Hawks’s paean to friendship, the Old West (the
real
Old West, according to Hawks), and getting old.

Hawks had recently made a series of films that were not up to his usual standards.
Hatari!
had been a box-office hit due more to Wayne’s star power than any great rush on the public’s part to see it because Howard Hawks made it. After two more films went nowhere, Hawks needed a real hit. He purchased the rights to a Harry Brown novel,
The Stars in Their Courses,
and assigned Leigh Brackett, Hawks’s favorite screenwriter, to adapt it. After several tries, the final script for
El Dorado
resembled nothing so much as a remake of
Rio Bravo.
According to Howard Hawks: “The Western takes, really, a couple of forms. One is how the West started, the formation of the great cattle herds. Actually,
Red River
started as the story of the King Ranch . . . [one is] the period of law and order.
Rio Bravo
and
El Dorado
fell into that. We had a lot of fun in writing
Rio Bravo.
Because we ran into so many good situations, we said, ‘We’ll save that for another picture.’ In making Westerns, I’ve worked practically just with John Wayne. He is by far the best . . . the young fellow in
Rio Bravo
was a really good shot. Ricky Nelson played him—in
El Dorado,
when we started to work on that, I said, ‘Let’s get a boy who can’t shoot’—and that was Jim Caan. And in
Rio Bravo,
Wayne was the sheriff and the deputy was a drunk; in
El Dorado,
the drunk was the sheriff. You just take opposites of everything . . . a sheriff who’s any good would say, ‘You better hope your friends don’t catch up because the first man shot is going to be you.’ [That line made it into]
Rio Bravo . . .
in
El Dorado,
we had a scene where the jailer said, ‘You better hope nobody comes in here, because you’re going to be the first one shot.’ ”

Wayne was happy to be working on a film again with Hawks, who was much easier to act for than Ford. Peter Bogdanovich met Wayne on the set of
El Dorado
and conducted a long interview: “We chatted for an hour and when he was finally called away he told me how great it was to have spent some time talking about movies. ‘All people ever want to talk about with me these days is politics and cancer,’ he said. Wayne’s rightwing politics had become notorious while his acting abilities were largely written off. He was considered for most of his career to be a one-trick pony. But he brought such strong personality to his roles and still tops polls of America’s all-time favorite movie stars. Wayne loved the process of acting. He couldn’t get enough of it. On a movie set he was like a kid in a candy store. On the set of
El Dorado
I watched him spend hours playing with props, talking with the crew and watching it all happen. He’d never go to his trailer. He was too excited to be around the film-making process.”