John Wayne: The Life and Legend (18 page)

RKO passed on Wayne, as well as the hopelessly obscure George Smalley; they replaced O’Brien with a younger, cheaper contract actor named Tim Holt. With the advantage of hindsight, it’s easy to snicker at Depinet, but a survey of the western stars of 1937 shows that he was only betting probabilities. From the top, the most popular western stars of 1937 were Buck Jones, George O’Brien, Gene Autry, William Boyd, Ken Maynard, Dick Foran, John Wayne, Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson, and Buster Crabbe.

Only Wayne would get out of B pictures, which were usually like the Mafia—once you were in, you were in for life.

In 1938, John Wayne climbed back in the saddle at Republic. His new contract, signed on May 7, specified eight pictures for the first year, all westerns, but no serials. His salary was $3,000 per picture, each one to have a maximum shooting schedule of ten days. Wayne was being paid $24,000 for about eighty working days a year—not a bad deal for 1938, if you could overlook the fact that he was making half of what he had been making with Trem Carr and Universal.

The standard contract mandated only forty weeks of salary a year, but Wayne’s increasing domestic overhead forced him to ask for a check fifty-two weeks a year—$461.54 a week. There were four additional one-year options that would eventually raise his salary to $961.54 a week. Republic would supply costumes, but if Wayne were to be cast in a nonwestern—in which case the number of films he was required to make totaled only five—he had to supply his own wardrobe.

To sweeten the deal, Herbert Yates made a noncontractual promise that Wayne could star in a film about Sam Houston. But Yates lied—a motif at Republic. When the picture was made a year later, the star was Richard Dix. “You’re not strong enough,” Yates told Wayne.

Wayne embarked on a western series called “The Three Mesquiteers,” which had been in production for about a year. The stars had been Robert Livingston and Ray “Crash” Corrigan, with Syd Saylor as the alleged comic relief. Yates promoted Livingston out of the B westerns so he could be groomed for potential stardom, and Wayne replaced Livingston.

Republic was still Republic, and always would be—the studio got the cowboys to go all-out in their chases by offering a bottle of bourbon to the fastest rider. But Republic had its compensations, mainly an unpretentious air that was attractive to many who were put off by the impersonality of the major studios. Lorna Gray, who would later change her name to Adrian Booth, spent fifteen years at Republic and found it eminently preferable to Columbia, where she began her career.

“It was absolutely wonderful,” she remembered at the age of ninety-four. “I was very happy for all the years I worked there. The boss [Herbert Yates] would send me a bouquet of flowers whenever I started another picture. It was a delightful studio. Nobody was ever rude.”

The actress Peggy Stewart said that one of the main attractions of Republic was its hominess. “If you were shooting over on Stage One, you could see straight down the street, and you knew exactly who was working there. You’d yell down to some prop man and visit friends between scenes. There was so much kidding on that lot, because you were with those people six days a week.”

The downside of the family atmosphere was that the head of the family was terribly cheap. “They would paint the wall of a set to the height of the leading man,” said screenwriter Edmund Hartmann. “The top remained unpainted because they would only photograph to the height of the leading man. They didn’t waste a thing!”

Adrian Booth recalled:

We did have to work very hard. On the serials, sometimes we had a two- or three- or even four-way call, which meant that you had to be up on your dialogue for as many as four different scenes from four different chapters that would be shot on the same set on the same day. Not everybody liked it. You had to be on time and you had to know your lines. Republic was very disciplined.

I made a serial called

with dear Kay Aldridge. I played Vultura, and I was always doing terrible things to Nyoka. One

day Kay was standing on a ladder for a shot that involved her hanging by her wrists in front of some flaming thing. And the director said, “Now, honey, we’re going to take the ladder away for just a second.”

And Kay said, “Oh, Lord, send me a millionaire and make it soon.” And she ended up marrying three of them!

The second of Wayne’s Three Mesquiteers pictures was called
Overland Stage Raiders
, shot between August 6 and 15, 1938, and released late in September. It’s a fairly standard Mesquiteers picture, except for the fact that the leading lady was Louise Brooks, the luminous erotic icon of G. W. Pabst’s
Pandora’s Box,
who drank and talked her way out of a potentially great career. Brooks received $300 for her performance in
Overland Stage Raiders
. She was a prodigiously self-destructive woman who knew a B movie when she saw it, but she also appreciated a beautiful young man.

“At sunrise one August morning I was driven in a company car to location on the ranch where Republic shot all its Westerns. Where was I supposed to go, I wondered, after I got out of the car and stood alone in a cloud of dust kicked up by a passing string of horses. . . . Up the road a bunch of cowboys were talking and laughing with two men who stood slightly apart from them. When the company car honked for them to get off the road, the two men looked around, saw me and came to greet me. One was a cherub, five feet tall, carrying a bound script; the other was a cowboy, six feet four inches tall, wearing a lovely smile. The cherub, who was the director, George Sherman, introduced me to the cowboy, who was John Wayne. . . . Looking up at him, I thought, this is no actor but the hero of all mythology miraculously brought to life. . . . John was, in fact, that which Henry James defined as the greatest of all works of art—a purely beautiful being.”

Brooks clearly adored Wayne, and they seem to be enjoying each other on-screen, but the cast-iron mediocrity of Republic’s scripts forestalled interesting byplay between actors. Louise Brooks never made another movie.

Wayne made two more Mesquiteers pictures at Republic on equivalent schedules and budgets before his ship finally came in.
Santa Fe Stampede
, the first of them, was a vigorous little western co-starring William Farnum, a great roaring hero of the silent days. Republic is slowly becoming aware of what they have; Wayne is clearly The Star—the other two Mesquiteers are given virtually nothing to do.

Otherwise, the film is noticeable for the blood-curdling prevalence of the Running W, a trip wire used to bring horses down in a tumbling heap that killed more animals than hoof-and-mouth disease. Lorna Gray/Adrian Booth was paired up with Wayne and the Mesquiteers for a film called
Red River Range
, which was shot in October 1938 and released in December. She had told the studio that she knew how to ride, which was a baldfaced lie. The day before shooting started she rented a horse and spent the day in Griffith Park. The result was that on the day the picture started she was so sore she could barely move.

“Duke could see I didn’t know what I was doing. But he was terribly, terribly nice to me anyway. He was a man who was interested in his career. He didn’t play around. And I was scared to death; I was just hoping my shaking wouldn’t show on camera. But he helped me get through it, and on the strength of
Red River Range
I did a lot more pictures for Republic.”

Late one afternoon, Wayne and his leading lady were about to shoot a scene that called for them to walk across a porch and down a couple of steps. Before the director called “Action,” Wayne leaned over to Gray and said, “I’m going to stumble over a nail. Then I’m going to do it a couple more times. Pay no attention.”

“He stumbled over the nail, and Georgie Sherman reset the camera and he tripped a couple of more times, and I wondered why he was doing this—it was a simple scene. And then I realized he was stalling to kill the five minutes it would take for the extras to go into overtime. That’s the kind of man he was—a wonderful man.”

The Mesquiteers films aren’t bad; they usually match Wayne with Ray Corrigan, a good all-around-hero type, and Raymond Hatton, a veteran of the early silent days with Cecil B. DeMille, playing the grizzled old-timer/comic relief. But they were still cheap westerns, and Wayne had taken a pay cut in exchange for long-term security. By this time, he must have been wondering if he’d ever get out of the B picture swamp.

For Wayne, these were grim years. Not in terms of income—he was making a decent living—but in terms of thwarted ambition. Month after month, year after year, Wayne was imprisoned in cheap westerns, with titles that all ran together—then and now. The budgets may have risen from $10,000 to $30,000 or $40,000, the lighting and supporting actors may have improved, but the schedules were still short and the dialogue was still from hunger. The frustration must have been enormous, and it began boiling over on the set.

George Sherman directed the last batch of B westerns that Wayne made at Republic, after which their careers diverged. Wayne would bring him back near the end of both their careers to direct
Big Jake,
or more precisely, to stand there while Wayne directed
Big Jake
. By that time, Wayne was famously peremptory on the set, and somebody asked Sherman if he had always been this way.

“Absolutely,” said Sherman. “Just the same as he is now. The only difference is that nobody listened to him. He always knew everything. ‘Oh, no, no, put it over there! Get a white horse!’ Exactly the same. Right out of USC but nobody paid a goddamn bit of attention. But now he’s John Wayne and they’ve gotta pay attention.”

Wayne had incrementally risen from three-day pictures to six-day pictures to ten-day pictures, with corresponding increases in salary but very little increase in prestige. “I kept nagging at Ford,” remembered Wayne. “ ‘When is it my turn?’ He’d say, ‘Just wait. I’ll let you know when I get the right script.’ And he did.”

Right after Wayne finished shooting
Red River Range
, Ford found the script for Wayne. It was
Stagecoach
.

John Ford and his partner Merian C. Cooper first presented their western to David Selznick in June 1937, but Selznick was not enthusiastic about the genre and bridled at featuring downmarket talents like John Wayne and Claire Trevor in a Selznick production. He insisted on Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich. Ford and Cooper took their project and went home.

Ford nurtured
Stagecocach
while directing
The Hurricane
for Sam Goldwyn, and
Four Men and a Prayer
and
Submarine Patrol
for Fox. Finally, in the summer of 1938,
Stagecoach
found a home with producer Walter Wanger, who believed in John Ford and in the recurring nature of film cycles. Large-budget westerns had been out of style since the early 1930s and the simultaneous failures of
The Big Trail
and King Vidor’s
Billy the Kid,
but Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Plainsman
had been a big hit in 1936, and Frank Lloyd had made the similarly successful
Wells Fargo
in 1937.

“It was Ford who worked with Dudley Nichols in creating a fine script; and John Wayne as the Ringo Kid was also Ford’s idea,” said Wanger. On October 31, 1938, Ford started shooting his movie.

In the years to come,
Stagecoach
would become known almost as much for its locations as for its star. Unless you’d seen every western since Broncho Billy, you’d never seen locations like this before—a Garden of the Gods called Monument Valley.

There’s not a lot of footage of the valley in
Stagecoach
—the crew spent no more than four days there—but each shot is majestically composed and emphatically placed, with swelling music behind it. In years to come, the question of who stumbled upon Monument Valley would become a hot if irrelevant topic, proving only that in the movie business, success has a thousand fathers, while failure is the proverbial redheaded stepchild.