American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (9 page)

With the Fox studio in disarray, and little in the way of a big-name talent pool, early in 1931 the studio finally threw Wayne a bone. He was cast in his twentieth film as the lead in
Girls Demand Excitement,
another college campus coed comedy romance, with Wayne in the lead and Marguerite Churchill as his female counterpart
.
Teaming them together again in this B movie spoke volumes about what the studio thought about both of them. Also in the film was Charlie Chaplin’s discovery, Virginia Cherrill, the blind flower girl from
City Lights.
Wayne told his friend and biographer Maurice Zolotow he had had a brief but intense affair with Cherrill during the making of
Girls Demand Excitement
.
²⁴

Variety
quickly dismissed
Girls
and Wayne this way: “John Wayne is the same young man who was in
The Big Trail
and also is here spotted in a farce that does little to set him off.” In the film, the male students want all the female students thrown out of their college (try selling that script today!). Wayne always considered it the silliest film of his career. He probably wasn’t wrong. And if he needed any more proof that his star, however brief, had fallen, the
Variety
review provided it. One day he ran into the great Will Rogers (“Oklahoma’s favorite son”) on the lot, and Rogers, who hardly knew Wayne, patiently listened as Duke spilled his guts to him. When he finished, Rogers smiled, put a hand on the young actor’s shoulder, and reminded him how lucky he was to be working at all in these hard times. The chance meeting with Rogers gave Wayne a boost. He only had one more film left on his Fox contract, and after that if he worked again, he would do it, as Rogers told him to, with his chin up.

Fox next put Wayne into
Three Girls Lost
(1931), produced and directed by former jazz musician and vaudevillian Sidney Lanfield, who would go on to direct a number of Bob Hope comedies, about as far away from Wayne’s world as possible. In
Three Girls Lost,
from a script by Bradley King, and costarring Loretta Young, Wayne played a gentleman architect in something resembling a western drama. He was woefully miscast and knew it. After the film’s failure at the box office, the studio declined to renew his contract and cut him loose.
²⁵

The only thing going right for him was his relationship with Josephine, and it wasn’t going well at all. They had been dating now for five years (with that brief breakup when he quit school), since they first met when she was sixteen and he nineteen. Because of Wayne’s busy schedule, and her father’s strict rules regarding Josephine’s social life, they only saw each other one night a week. The first face he saw whenever he came by to take her out was that of the unsmiling Dr. Saenz, which was also the last face he saw when he brought her home. Dr. Saenz continually made it clear he didn’t like Wayne. He had no use for actors, especially unemployed ones, especially this one. Wayne may felt some measure of guilt for not being able to remain true to Josephine with Virginia Cherrill, and his flirtation with Churchill, and dealt with it by deferring to Dr. Saenz’s hard rules. Maybe the good doctor was right; maybe he wasn’t good enough for his daughter.

WITHIN A MONTH OF HIS
contract being up at Fox, in the spring of 1931 Wayne signed with Columbia Studios. Its founder was the “I don’t get ulcers, I give ’em” Harry Cohn, a former streetcar conductor who had worked for a time at Paramount before starting Columbia Pictures in 1922 with his brothers and Joe Brandt.
²⁶
Cohn liked Wayne’s looks, thought he had some talent but had never been used correctly at Fox. Cohn was willing to take a chance on Wayne because it wasn’t that much of a risk; he signed him to a five-year contract, at $250 a week, with six-month out-clauses for each side.

Located on North Gower Avenue in Hollywood, the “Poverty Row” of moviemaking studies, Cohn was looking to expand his stable of actors by signing other studios’ discards on the cheap. Some were available because their previous pictures hadn’t done well, as was the case with Wayne; others wanted more say in what pictures they made and thought they could get it going freelance, like Cary Grant, who signed nonexclusive deals with Columbia and RKO after a bumpy start at Paramount. Already acquired by Columbia were Katharine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, and Humphrey Bogart.

Cohn wasted no time putting Wayne to work in George Seitz’s
Men Are Like That
. Seitz was a journeyman director who had made his reputation directing Pearl White Saturday morning serials.
Men Are Like That
was a remake of a remake, this version written by Robert Riskin, a young and successful Broadway playwright Cohn had brought to Columbia to write scripts for the studio.
²⁷
Men
went into production that May, a five-day shoot to be ready for release in August. In it, Wayne plays an army lieutenant in yet another college-football-based romantic comedy, this time opposite silent film sensation Laura La Plante, who was trying to make the transition to sound.
Men Are Like That
was produced for very little money and managed to turn a profit, but Wayne fell flat on his face at Columbia when Cohn thought his new leading man was sleeping with the same actress that he was. Cohn angrily confronted Wayne. “When you work for this studio, you keep your pants buttoned,” he said pointing his finger in Wayne’s face as he did so. Whether or not he actually slept with one of Cohn’s many paramours, Wayne apologized and promised it wouldn’t happen again.
²⁸

In his next film for Columbia, Louis King’s 1931
The Deceiver,
Wayne played a dead body. After, Cohn called Wayne into his office and sarcastically told him it was his best performance yet.

Despite Cohn’s fury at Wayne, at the end of his first six months Wayne asked for and got a renewal and a raise to $350 a week. Cohn agreed to the extension and the raise to punish Wayne. The star of Fox’s grandiose
The Big Trail
was permanently reduced to making cheapies, and was humiliated by having to appear in them. He did D. Ross Lederman’s 1931 sixty-four-minute
Range Feud,
made for all of $25,000 (at Cohn’s directive, all B movies had to run no longer than an hour), to keep production costs to a minimum. The film’s star was the dark-haired, square-jawed Buck Jones.
²⁹
In the film, Jones is the sheriff. Wayne is the son of a rancher falsely accused of killing a rival rancher. He is redeemed when Jones finds the real villain, the bank robber/cattle rustler/murderer.

In his next assignment, Edward Sedgwick’s 1931
Maker of Men,
³⁰
Wayne’s role is little more than a bit part, a dishonest college athlete in bed with gamblers. The film is notable for featuring former Olympic swimming champion and the future Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe and Wayne USC teammate Ward Bond (who had by now dropped the “en” from his first name).
Makers of Men
was yet another college football film, a genre that still had some low-test left in its gridiron tank, set in mythical Western University, a thinly disguised version of USC; Wayne felt uncomfortable with the studio’s publicity tour that touted his and Bond’s successful careers playing football together at USC as a way to add a touch realism to the film.

On the advice of friend and fellow actor George O’Brien, who had come up with Wayne through the Fox system and had also signed with Columbia, Wayne met with Al Kingston, a former Hollywood beat reporter now an agent for the Leo Morrison Agency, located in the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. The Morrison Agency had a talented crop of players, including Jean Harlow, Buster Keaton, Francis X. Bushman, and a young up-and-comer by the name of Spencer Tracy.

He was not familiar with taking business meetings and was nervous about meeting Kingston. A few minutes into their conversation, Wayne broke down in tears as he recounted the sad story of his professional downward spiral. Kingston listened patiently, used to the emotional high wires that actors walked. Kingston saw in this weeping giant the potential for bigger things than bit parts at Columbia, and decided to take him on. His first objective was to get his client out of the prison of Columbia Pictures. At the end of the next six-month cycle, Kingston informed Cohn that Wayne was not going to renew. After finishing up his last B for the studio, D. Ross Lederman’s
Texas Cyclone,
at the start of 1932, Wayne was free to work for any studio that wanted him.
³¹

The problem was, none did. It took several months for Kingston to secure a modest, nonexclusive deal for Wayne with B movie and serials maker Mascot Pictures, fifteen hundred dollars for three serials. Kingston convinced his reluctant client to take it. He knew that Wayne’s strength was his physical abilities, which would be put to ample use in an action-cycle adventure, and his weakness was expressing his emotions (his best performance to date had been in Kingston’s office that day).

Mascot Pictures, the brainchild of Leo Levine, was so sparely run it made Columbia seem luxurious by comparison. In 1926, Levine had caught a wave with “chapter pictures,” or “serials,” Saturday morning supplements that helped build a following among teens in a time period that had previously left movie theaters almost empty until the early evening. Levine had put together a troupe of actors composed of hopefuls, veterans, and has-beens that included Yakima “Yak” Canutt, whose superior physical abilities were crucial for the action-packed serials that depended upon a “death-defying cliff-hanger”; Harry Carey, John Ford’s former leading man; and a talented dog named Rin Tin Tin, to which he now added John Wayne.

Duke went to work as the star of a new Mascot serial,
Shadow of the Eagle,
playing Craig McCoy, a stunt pilot, with an endlessly loyal, beautiful, faithful, and chaste girlfriend named Jean, played by Dorothy Gulliver.
³²
In the serial, Jean doesn’t know it, but she is the daughter of McCoy’s nemesis, Nathan Gregory, a.k.a. “the Eagle” (Edward Hearn).
Shadow of the Eagle
was written and directed by Ford Beebe, who would also go on to direct the greatest serial of all, 1940’s
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe
. Following the sensational transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh, pictures about heroic pilots had become the newest craze.

The first day of shooting of
Shadow of the Eagle
, on location in Antelope Valley, Levine sat in the backseat of his Packard and had the driver pick up Wayne in Beverly Hills at four in the morning, with a bagged breakfast of coffee and Danishes to make the three-hour traveling time easier. By the time they arrived at the set the crew was set up and ready to start filming. Levine demanded and got seven-day weeks and fourteen-hour days from his cast and crew, and more than a hundred camera setups each session. Afterward an exhausted Wayne skipped the long ride back home with Levine, zipped himself into a sleeping bag, and slept under the stars, a bottle of Irish whiskey his only company. The shoot took twenty-one days at a cost of $50,000, mostly at Antelope, with a few scenes shot in Bronson Canyon, in Griffith Park. This quickie serial was the best film work Wayne had done to date. Kingston had gotten it right: remove the dialogue and increase the action for an actor like Wayne was a winning combination.

The first episode of
Shadow of the Eagle
was released to theaters February 1, 1932, and received unexpectedly good reviews. It proved a hit, grossing $60,000 in rentals, a 20 percent profit for Mascot.

That July, Wayne began work on his second serial for Mascot,
The Hurricane Express,
directed by Armand Schaefer and J. P. McGowan, playing an entirely new hero, Larry Baker.
³³
Baker’s father, a railroad worker, has been murdered during a robbery, prompting Baker to find and apprehend the killers, who happen to work for a competing train company. Early on, the audience learns the “mastermind” behind the crime is “the Wrecker,” played by Conway Tearle, whose secret and evil identity is only revealed to the others in the twelfth and final episode, after an endless series of misdirections, false leads, and red herrings. Shirley Grey, with whom Wayne had previously appeared in
Texas Cyclone,
plays the faithful, loyal, and chaste girlfriend, the daughter of one of the men falsely accused by the police of being “the Wrecker.” All twelve chapters were shot in three weeks on location in Newhall, Saugus, and at Palmdale, California, with the same $50,000 budget
Shadow of the Eagle
had. When it was released, it earned ten times what
Shadow
did, and, perhaps more important, for the first time confirmed that Wayne could star in a film, or at least twelve minifilms, that made money.

While Wayne was busy resurrecting his film career, Warner Bros had decided to remake some silent Ken Maynard westerns they owned as the result of their acquisition of First National studios. Maynard had been a hugely popular film star whose career was irrevocably hurt by his long-term addiction to alcohol. When he proved unable to star in the remakes, Kingston suggested Wayne to the project’s producers, Sid Rogell and Leon Schlesinger (the latter would eventually head Warner’s animation division after selling his own cartoon studio to them). The idea was to use as much footage from the original silent Maynard films as possible and substitute an actor for close-ups and dialogue scenes. Rogell tested Wayne and loved him (he bore a slight resemblance to a young Maynard), telling Kingston they could start as soon as Schlesinger agreed on the deal.

However, before it could happen, Rogell reversed himself and killed it, telling Kingston Warner Bros would never hire an actor who was a drunken womanizer. When Kingston relayed the message to Wayne, he became enraged. He knew immediately where that story had to have come from, a vengeful Harry Cohn. When Kingston went back to Rogell, who had no love for Cohn (nobody in Hollywood did), he changed his mind again and, with Schlesinger’s approval, signed Wayne up for six Maynard remakes, at $1,500 per picture.