John Wayne: The Life and Legend (21 page)

Walter Wanger knew he had an art movie. He decided to double down, spending $50,000 to commission nine artists to paint scenes from the picture. Thomas Hart Benton chose a group scene of the
Glencairn
seamen; Grant Wood chose another group scene; James Chapin painted the death of Yank; Raphael Soyer painted the Limehouse sequence; Ernest Fiene did a portrait of Wayne. It didn’t help;
The Long Voyage Home
lost over $224,000.

Years later at Catalina, a young man walked up to Wayne and asked him when he was going to make another picture like
The Long Voyage Home
. “I’d like to make one tomorrow,” he replied.

“I was in the Merchant Marine when I saw it,” said the young man, “and you played that guy like you were one of us.” In 1949, Wayne cited it as the role he liked the best, although in later years he seldom mentioned it. When asked, he usually responded with the tale of his agony over the Swedish accent.

Within a year and a half after
Stagecoach
, Wayne made
The Long Voyage Home
for Ford,
Dark Command
for Raoul Walsh,
The Shepherd of the Hills
for Henry Hathaway, and
Seven Sinners
for Tay Garnett—completely different types of pictures for equally different but respected directors, in all of which he held the screen. And there were other opportunities, good ones, that he turned down.

In June of 1940, Hal Wallis and Warner Bros. pursued Wayne to play George Custer in
Santa Fe Trail
. Eighteen months earlier, Wayne would have lunged at a major part in a major picture from a major studio, but in mid-1940 he was uninterested.

“John Wayne was in this morning,” wrote Jack Warner’s assistant Steve Trilling to Wallis on June 24, “and . . . he was not keen about the part—did not feel it gave him enough opportunity to characterize it—that it was merely a straight part that just carried thru as a foil for J. E. B. Stuart [Errol Flynn].”

Ronald Reagan played Custer and spent the rest of his life complaining about how playing second lead to Errol Flynn was a recipe for professional oblivion.

Wayne’s co-star in
Seven Sinners
was Marlene Dietrich, who was also coming off a career-changing hit:
Destry Rides Again
. The first time Dietrich saw Wayne was in the commissary at Universal. She leaned over to director Tay Garnett and said, “Daddy, buy me that.”

Wayne had been trying to be a better husband, but he made an exception for Dietrich, as many did. It seems that Dietrich made the first move by inviting him into her dressing room. Wayne nervously looked around and said, “I wonder what time it is?” Dietrich lifted her skirt to reveal a garter with a watch attached. She looked at the watch, then moved toward Wayne, saying, “It’s very early, darling. We have plenty of time.”

Neither Wayne nor Dietrich attempted to conceal the affair. William Bakewell was acting in
Seven Sinners
, and he remembered that Wayne’s arrival on the set would be met by Dietrich leaping into his arms and wrapping her legs around him. “He’d stand there grinning sheepishly, you know?”

On particularly hot days, Dietrich would have ice-cold champagne brought to the set for the cast and crew, and to pass the time while the lights were being shifted she would play the musical saw. “She would open her legs,” remembered Bakewell, “put a regular saw in it and with a violin bow, play ‘Annie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ with a wow in it. She was an interesting woman.”

Wayne rarely spoke of what transpired behind closed doors with Dietrich, or with anybody else, but he retained fond memories of her. “She was great, just a German
hausfrau
. She used to cook pressurized beef to make beef bouillon for everybody. It may have been an act, but it brought her a great deal of enjoyment. ’Course, maybe one reason she enjoyed it so much was she didn’t have to do it all the time.”

As she grew older, it suited Dietrich’s ego to deny that she and Wayne had had an affair, probably because he didn’t fit in comfortably with her elite roster of European intellectual lovers—Josef von Sternberg, Erich Maria Remarque, Jean Gabin, etc. “My mother thought all [Hollywood] people were vulgar,” said her daughter, Maria Riva. “She thought
Lubitsch
was extremely vulgar.” Dietrich also cast aspersions on Wayne’s mind, although that had not been her main area of interest: “Wayne was not a bright or exciting type, [not] exactly brilliant, but neither was he bad.”

But Wayne’s co-workers knew they were having an affair, as did his friends, as did the FBI. Spurred by some barely literate letters claiming that Dietrich was a Nazi sympathizer—the truth was quite the reverse—the bureau began opening her letters and monitoring her bank accounts as well as her sex life. Besides Wayne, the FBI reported overlapping affairs with Gabin, Remarque, and Kay Francis.

Seven Sinners
was shot from July to September 14, 1940. Of the film’s budget of $739,000, $150,000 was going to Dietrich. When the picture was finished, Wayne wanted to contribute to the cost of the traditional cast party that the producer and stars front for the cast and crew, but Garnett and Dietrich refused because he was only making his Republic salary.

Dietrich is billed over the title, while Wayne gets “With . . .” billing. It’s a pleasantly ramshackle affair bereft of plot but with a passel of great character actors (Mischa Auer, Oscar Homolka, Billy Gilbert, and the silent star Antonio Moreno). Dietrich sings “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.”

What Steven Bach referred to as Wayne’s “leatherneck masculinity” provided just as effective a seasoning for Dietrich’s languid eroticism as Jimmy Stewart’s hesitant willfulness had in
Destry Rides Again
. The material is vaguely Sternbergian, but Tay Garnett directs it to imitate the rhythms of the hugely successful
Destry
.

The Shepherd of the Hills
had already begun shooting in and around Big Bear Lake while
Seven Sinners
was wrapping up. Wayne went right from one set to another, a pattern that would become close to normal during World War II, when he would become one of the most popular, as well as most bankable, of Hollywood stars.

The Shepherd of the Hills
was a remake of a successful silent film about moonshiners and prodigal fathers, this time in stunning pastoral Technicolor. It’s essentially a Christian parable of forgiveness and by 1940 the material was verging on the archaic, but it had one advantage—the 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright had sold more than a million copies. The director was a temperamental wild man named Henry Hathaway, who would play a major part in Wayne’s career. Hathaway had directed
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
, a similarly groundbreaking Technicolor picture, a few years earlier, so the assignment was logical.

“A funny thing about Wayne,” said Hathaway. “Wayne is more particular about the pants he wears than anything in the world. . . . Unless he gets the thinnest kind of material, it drives him crazy. And I [told him], ‘You’ve got to wear homespun. You can’t wear cotton gabardine, for Chrissakes, or poplin or something. You’ve got to wear homespun.’ ”

Nearly twenty-five years later, Wayne walked into Hathaway’s office at Paramount to discuss
The Sons of Katie Elder.
On Hathaway’s wall was a still from
The Shepherd of the Hills
—Betty Field clothed in the homespun Hathaway had insisted on. Wayne stopped dead and stared at the picture. “Do you remember those damn pants?” Wayne asked.

Trailing Wayne to the location at Big Bear was Dietrich, who stayed at Arrowhead, about twenty miles away. One morning a panicked Ward Bond sought out Harry Carey’s wife, Ollie. Duke was missing, said Bond, and he didn’t want to even think about what Hathaway would do to a star who failed to show up.

Ollie Carey knew very well where Wayne was. She got in her car and headed for Arrowhead. Snow had fallen the night before, and she was driving slowly when she came around a bend and saw a man walking toward her, “a tall, lanky figure, and of course, it was Duke.” He quickly got in the car and she asked what happened.

Wayne explained that he’d started back from an evening with Dietrich, but his station wagon had hit a slick spot in the road and gone over an embankment. Wayne had jumped out before the crash, and had set out for Big Bear on foot. They got back to the location just as Hathaway was setting up his first shot. “I don’t think he ever knew what was going on between Duke and Marlene,” said Ollie Carey.

But Hathaway knew. “They had quite a thing going,” he remembered in 1980. “I don’t think he realized that I knew the extent of their relationship, but I was aware of what was going on.”

In later years, Hathaway tended to push past images to story, which accounts for an impression of brusqueness and lack of personal style. But in the first decade of his career, Hathaway was a visually graceful director—he had been an assistant to von Sternberg and it showed. In
Shepherd of the Hills
, he pulls off some stunning shots—Marc Lawrence trying to catch dust motes in a ray of sun, or a powerful scene of Beulah Bondi lighting her dead child on fire in a backwoods Viking funeral.

The picture provided Wayne’s first opportunity to work with a boyhood idol, and unlike Tom Mix, Harry Carey wasn’t a disappointment. If John Ford was the tough, demanding coach whose approval Wayne craved, Carey and his wife, Ollie, were surrogate parents who offered something approaching unconditional love. Their temperaments were well matched: Harry Carey was calm and good-humored, Ollie Carey was salty and plainspoken. (It’s no wonder that Ford cast her as a succession of flinty pioneer women.)

It was Ollie Carey who gave Wayne a piece of advice that became crucial in his career.

“Harry Carey always wore a good hat, a good pair of boots, and what he wore in between didn’t matter too much,” remembered Wayne.

He had a style of acting that has now become the way of acting in our business. He tried to play it down a little and be kind of natural. You have to keep things going and try and get your personality through, which is what Harry could do. I loved him, because I’d known him for years, and I was a young man and he was an older man.

Anyway, he and his wife were around . . . and I was talking about how I wanted to play every kind of part. The big hero that did everything, the heavies, everything. I wanted to play it all.

And Ollie Carey said, “Well, you big dumb son of a bitch.”

I said, “What’s the matter?”

She said, “Do you really mean what you said? That you’d like to play every kind of part? You think you’re Sydney Carton?”

And I said, “Yes, I’d like to get the chance to play all those things.”

And Harry was just standing there, and she said, “Do you want Harry Carey to be any different than he is in the movies?”

And I said, “No, of course not.”

And she said, “The American public [have] decided to take you into their homes and their hearts. They like the man they see. Forget all this other junk. Be like Harry.”

That was something I never forgot.

Duke Morrison had incrementally put together the pieces of a screen character over ten long years—a voice, a name, a walk that would grow more pronounced in the future, an overall attitude. He would continually analyze himself, as well as other actors, but Ollie Carey’s advice served as a defining shot to the chops from a woman he loved and respected.

Maybe he needed to rethink his hunger for character parts; maybe he should concentrate on developing and playing John Wayne.

The relationship with Dietrich continued for another year and a half. Early in 1942, Wayne and Dietrich were reunited on a remake of
The Spoilers
. Dietrich’s agent, Charles Feldman, had bought the remake rights to the Rex Beach novel for $17,500 in July 1941, packaged it, and turned around and sold it to Universal five months later for $50,000 and 25 percent of the profits.

Ollie Carey was amused by the affair. “You can tell—the way they look, the way they talk to each other, the way they flirt. Of course, Marlene was double-gated, you know. She had a very masculine-looking young woman that hung around the place a lot. But even so, Duke was quite taken with her and I could tell that Marlene was taken with him as well.”