American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (68 page)

70
  No evidence was ever presented that Wayne had physically abused his wife, nor was that implied by her testimony. This was standard operating procedure for California divorce hearings. After, to make sure there was no misunderstanding that would give the Hollywood gossip press corps a chance to damage Wayne’s career (and her continued alimony), she issued this statement: “Because of my religion, I regard divorce as a purely civil action in no way affecting the moral status of a marriage, I am, however reluctantly, accepting the advice of counsel, and am seeking a civil divorce from my husband. I have received permission to do this from the proper authorities of my church. It is the only means of clarifying the position of my children, whose interests are of paramount importance.”—From the Citizen News, October 31, 1944, and the Herald Examiner, November 1, 1944.

71
  This film is not a sequel to Tay Garnett’s 1943 Bataan (MGM, executive produced by Dore Schary), but it does bring the story of the fierce battle to defend the Pacific from the advancing Japanese forces up to date.

72
  The Battle of Midway is in the public domain and is available for viewing in the United States in its entirety on YouTube, and it is also on DVD. Ford’s The Battle of Midway and December 7 both received Academy Awards, Battle for Best Documentary, a film that FDR declared that he wanted “every mother in America to see.” Ford was wounded at Midway, shot in both legs, and lost the use of one eye. He also participated in the China-Burma-India theater and witnessed firsthand the invasion of Normandy. By the end of the war he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander Ford.

73
  Wayne was not satisfied with any of Republic’s female contract players and personally paid Paramount $125,000 for the loan-out (she received $125 a week from Paramount). He considered the twenty-two-year-old the most beautiful actress in Hollywood. According to Hedda Hopper, Wayne became something of a father figure to Russell and had a heavy crush on her before he cast her. Russell later married actor Guy Madison, became an alcoholic, and drank herself to death in 1961 at the age of 36. Some information about Gail Russell is from Hedda Hopper’s column of January 29, 1956. Variety reported the details of Russell’s death October 26, 1982.

74
  Chata later claimed she called Russell’s mother’s home and was told by a servant that because of the late schedule Russell was staying at a motel.

75
  The CSU was made up of five member unions—the Cartoonists Guild, the Screen Office Employees Guild, the Film Technicians, the Machinists, and the Motion Picture Painters.

76
  The facts are these: Congress passed no laws regarding Communists in Hollywood. The Waldorf Statement was instituted by the studio heads, as noted above, on December 3, 1947.

77
  Zanuck cut about ten minutes from the film, mostly the comic relief sequences. A 1946 prestudio edited version has been preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art.

78
  Argosy is derived from the Italian, loosely translated to mean “a large merchant ship,” or “a fleet of ships,” or “a rich supply.” The other investors included former OSS colleagues Wild Bill Donovan, David Bruce, William Vanderbilt, and Donovan’s law partner and OSS right-hand man, Otto C. “Ole” Doering Jr. The original Argosy Corporation had been formed in 1940 for The Long Voyage Home, the only picture it produced.

79
  There is some question as to whether Fonda was blacklisted. According to his son, Peter Fonda, in his autobiography, Don’t Tell Dad: A Memoir (1999), Henry’s liberalism caused him to be gray-listed during the early 1950s, when he experienced a six-year layoff from films. After Fort Apache, he made one film in 1949, Jigsaw, and one in 1951, Benjy, which he narrated. Between 1949 and 1955, when he starred in Mr. Roberts, directed by John Ford, he was absent from the screen for nearly six years. During that time he appeared in the stage version of Mr. Roberts. Broadway was a dependable refuge from those who suffered blacklisting, and many who did left Hollywood for the bright lights of the Great White Way.

80
  The set remained standing after the completion of the film and was later used as the main setting for the early ’50s TV series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

81
  Wayne was paid $100,000 up front and deferred half of it of it for a percentage of the net profits. Fonda received the same salary without the deferment. Temple received $100,000 with no deferment. Bond received $35,000, no percentage, no deferment.

82
   Zolotow claims Wayne was eager to do it, that he wanted to play another hard character (Zolotow, pp. 219–20), while Roberts and Olson report on his reluctance to do so, claiming, “When Hawks talked to him about the part, Duke said he was not sure he wanted to play an ‘old man,’ to which Hawks was said to have replied, ‘Duke, you’re going to be one pretty soon, why don’t you get some practice?’ ”

83
  Red River “introduces” Harry Carey Jr., the fifth time he had been billed that way in a movie. Supposedly, Ford didn’t want him to use the “junior” in any of his films, but Wayne convinced Carey Jr. that there was nothing wrong with honoring his father that way.

84
  According to Roberts and Olson, from an interview with Wayne’s personal secretary, Mary St. John, p. 299.

85
  Dru was on loan from Fox. The studio initially refused to let her make the film, until she personally appealed to Darryl F. Zanuck.

86
  Wayne eventually earned a total of $375,000.

87
  For years after, Hawks would laugh when people would come up to congratulate Ford on directing Red River, especially when Ford always said, “Thank you.”

88
  In 1990, Red River was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In June 2008, AFI listed Red River as the fifth-best film in the western genre.

89
  A.k.a. Chistmas at Mojave Tank. Ford had made a silent version in 1919, starring Harry Carey, titled Marked Man. Ford always said it was his favorite of all the silent films he had made. No existing print of Marked Man is known to exist.

90
  The rights were originally owned by MGM, which purchased it for a Clark Gable feature. When Gable turned the film down, the studio sold its option on the Roark novel to Republic.

91
  He was number 2 according to The Showman’s Trade Review, ahead of Bing Crosby, behind Bob Hope.

92
  In Ribbon, Wayne played even older than he had in Red River. There are some, like Peter Bogdanovich, who feel that Ford was jealous of Wayne’s performance for Hawks in Red River and thus cast him even older in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

93
  Profit numbers are always suspect. In 1950, Variety’s annual roundup of the previous year’s films claimed The Fighting Kentuckian had made money. It was not unusual for studios to try to minimize profits for a number of reasons, including but not limited to profit participation and taxes.

94
  “I used to work for Wayne for nothing, because he wanted his pictures to be right. He would come to me with a script for a film long before he was famous and ask me if something couldn’t be done with it. We evolved a system of making him a sort of bystander in situations, instead of actively taking part in them. He would avoid acting. This pleased the other actors who worked with him, because they had every chance to ham it up with big scenes, while Wayne would just take his in stride.”—James Edward Grant, quoted by Edwin Schallert, The Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1951.

95
  Some reports claim Dwan wanted Kirk Douglas for the role. Others report that Wayne was Dwan’s first choice. Dwan: “I didn’t ask about Wayne—because I thought there were three or four actors who could play it: there’s no part in the world that only one actor can play. But Eddie [Grant] wanted Wayne, so I said, ‘Go ahead and get him—fight for him.’ But it was hard to get him to go to Yates . . . he didn’t feel secure enough. But he did and it worked. After the picture, Wayne was a kingpin—he’d go and tell him, ‘Mr. Yates, I like your office better than I do my dressing room. You go over to the dressing room, I’ll take the office.’ He became a big shot, because the picture was a big success for him, and I don’t think anyone could have been any better . . . but up until the day we started the picture, we weren’t sure we had Wayne.”—Dwan, quoted by Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It, p. 114.

96
  The top-five-grossing films of 1949 were Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, $25 million; William Wellman’s Battleground, $11 million; Henry Levin’s Jolson Sings Again, $10.9 million; Sands of Iwo Jima; Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride, $8.9 million.

97
  Neither John Ford (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) nor Allan Dwan was nominated for Best Director, and Yates was shut out for Best Picture. The five films nominated were All the King’s Men, William Wyler’s The Heiress, Joseph Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives, Twelve O’Clock High, and William Wellman’s Battleground. All the King’s Men won Best Picture, Mankiewicz Best Director. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was nominated and won for Best Color Cinematography (Winton Hoch). Sands of Iwo Jima was also nominated but didn’t win for Sound Recording (Republic Sound Department) and was nominated but didn’t win for Film Editing (Richard L. Van Enger). Among the films that weren’t nominated for Best Picture that year, besides Ribbon and Sands, were Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s On the Town, and arguably Raoul Walsh’s best film, White Heat.

98
  Walsh was paid another $2,500 when Ford sold the idea to Republic in 1951, and $3,750 when the film finished production. Perhaps because he feared making a film that was too political, Ford eliminated much of the part of the story that deals with the IRA’s struggles.

99
  Parks starred in Stanley Donen’s Love Is Better Than Ever in 1950, at MGM, opposite Elizabeth Taylor. The film was held back from release for three years, until Taylor used her star power to force them put it out. It had a very limited release and grossed under a million dollars. Parks returned to the big screen in John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion, in 1962. He died in 1975 of a heart attack at the age of sixty, never able to regain the momentum or the stardom of his pre-HUAC-testimony years.

100
  Wayne and O’Hara made five films together: Rio Grande, Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), Ford’s The Wings of Eagles (1957), Andrew McLaglen’s McClintock (1963), and George Sherman’s Big Jake (1971). O’Hara: “Once in a while a great thing happens in the film industry. A special chemistry between an actor and actress develops and ‘it is magic.’ Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, and Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne . . .”—“Remembrance,” John Wayne, the Legend and the Man, p. 122.

101
  The salary was actually $301,000, the extra dollar insisted upon by the eccentric Howard Hughes and which made it Wayne’s highest salary for a picture.

102
  To get the picture made, Wayne had to take a pay cut and accept $100,000 and no percentages. Yates was hoping he could get Robert Ryan, a former boxer, to play the lead in the film for less money than he would have to pay Wayne. Ford, however, wanted only Wayne, whose star power, he believed, was far stronger than Ryan’s and would help fill seats in theaters. Maureen O’Hara, the female lead, was paid $75,000.

103
  Best Picture went to The Greatest Show on Earth, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Gary Cooper won Best Actor for Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. Shirley Booth won Best Actress for Daniel Mann’s Come Back, Little Sheba. Best Supporting Actor went to Anthony Quinn in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! Best Screenplay went to Charles Schnee for Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful. Best Color Art Direction to Paul Sheriff and Marcel Vertes for John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Best Sound Recording to London Films Sound Department for David Lean’s Breaking the Sound Barrier. Best Director went to Ford.

104
  According to Foreman, he fled to England before the film came out, because he was afraid of being sent to jail, like the other writers, the infamous “Hollywood Ten,” when he could find no support for Stanley Kramer’s leaving off Foreman’s name as one of the producers and thereby denying him his Best Picture Oscar: “My associates were afraid for themselves—I don’t blame them—and tried to get me off the film, unsuccessfully. They went to Gary Cooper and he refused [to go along with them] . . . There are scenes in the film that are taken from life. The scene in the church is a distillation of meetings I had with partners, associates and lawyers. And there’s the scene with the man who offers to help and comes back with his gun and asks, ‘Where are the others?’ and Cooper says, ‘There are no others . . . I became the Cooper character.’ ” Cooper was not Kramer’s original choice to play Will Kane. He wanted Brando or Clift, but they turned him down and he went to Cooper. “When Foreman, a former member of the Communist Party, was called before HUAC in 1951 while still writing the script for High Noon, he declined to name names and was thereafter considered an ‘uncooperative witness’ by the HUAC, despite Kramer’s urging him to do so. Kramer then tried to have the studio remove Foreman from the production until Zinnemann, Cooper, and others stepped in and insisted Foreman’s name be retained as writer. He was eventually blacklisted after Harry Cohn of Columbia, the studio that made the film, refused to stand by Foreman. John Wayne’s only direct involvement was that he was the head of the MPA, which chose not to defend Foreman after he was blacklisted.”—Anthony Holden’s Behind the Oscar, p. 201.