John Wayne: The Life and Legend (23 page)

While the terms of the divorce were negotiated, Wayne had to find someplace to live, and that place turned out to be the house of his friend and acting coach Paul Fix. At one point, Wayne and Fix were shooting
In Old Oklahoma
, so Wayne and Chata moved into Fix’s den, which had a pull-out sofa bed. Fix’s daughter Marilyn, who would later marry Harry Carey Jr., remembered that the guests stayed for months, with Wayne and her father regularly going off to work together.

“My mother got conned into packing their lunch every single day since they hated the commissary food. She made this huge lunch for them, and everybody on the set loved it, so it got bigger and bigger to the point where she was complaining, ‘You know, I have to get up at the crack of dawn and make all these sandwiches and put in fruit and cookies and all that.’ But she did it anyway. . . . Eventually, Duke and Chata moved to the Chateau Marmont.” Harry Carey Jr. nodded in agreement, then added, “A famous shack-up place.”

The negotiations over the divorce went on for a few years until it was finally granted in November 1944. It was final on December 26, 1945.

Wayne was hyperconscious of his image, and he knew that divorcing a universally respected woman like Josie was bound to make him the heavy. “Everyone in Hollywood considered me a heel for leaving four kids,” he grumbled. “They didn’t consider the fact that I gave her all I had and will continue to give it.” Wayne forked over the house and car, $100,000 in securities and insurance, 20 percent of his gross income, and $200 a month for a trust fund for their children. It was a stiff settlement, but Wayne didn’t complain. “She damned well deserves it. She’s done a wonderful job with the kids.”

For years after the divorce, Wayne would get up before dawn on the morning of December 25, drive to Josie’s house and wait outside so he could be there when the kids woke up. For a time, he was bitter, but eventually the bitterness wore off, and he always paid tribute to Josie’s aura of class and skills as a mother.

Wayne felt guilty about the divorce for the rest of his life. In later years he would admit to his children that he had made a terrible mistake: “I destroyed my first marriage. . . . I was a different man back then. I was much more selfish.”

Among other things, Wayne told friends that he believed his son Michael never completely forgave him. Yet, in some respects, things didn’t change that much. “I didn’t spend a great deal of time with [my father] while I grew up,” recalled Patrick Wayne. “My parents were divorced when I was four years old. I didn’t live with him. I probably spent as much time with him as I would have anyway [without the divorce] because he was always away working.”

Wayne’s agent had been Leo Morrison since his days at Mascot. Morrison’s best deal for Wayne had been $3,000 a picture at Republic. After making
Stagecoach
for John Ford on loan-out, for which he earned only his Republic salary, Wayne went right back to Republic and $3,000 a picture. He was furious, because he knew that opportunity had just knocked and, to all intents and purposes, nobody was home.

The most influential of Wayne’s co-stars was not Claire Trevor, not Maureen O’Hara, but Marlene Dietrich, simply because it was Dietrich who introduced Wayne to the man who would impeccably manage his career for the next quarter century: Charles Feldman.

Generally known as the Jewish Clark Gable—he combed his hair the same way and affected the same rakish mustache—Feldman was one of the crucial figures in Hollywood history, although the moguls of 1941 would have laughed at the description. Feldman was one of the first agents to package his clients: that is, he would take a couple of acting clients, a writing client, a directing client and sell them as a package to a studio to make a specific picture. Myron Selznick did the same thing, but Feldman took it a step further than Selznick by occasionally producing the pictures himself. Over the years, Feldman, credited or uncredited, would produce pictures as varied as
Red River
, Orson Welles’s
Macbeth, A Streetcar Named Desire
, and
The Seven Year Itch.

Born in New York in 1904, Feldman was orphaned, then adopted. After attending the University of Michigan and USC, in 1928 he set up a law practice in Los Angeles. By 1932, he was a rising young agent, the head of the company he called Famous Artists. Personally, he was charming, sophisticated, extremely smart, and made it a point never to tell any single person everything that was going on—an archetypal big-picture man, Vito Corleone
and
Tom Hagen.

Feldman correctly understood that for an independent, power could derive only from product; for that product to stand out in a crowded marketplace it had to have the imprimatur of quality. As a result, he dealt almost exclusively in high-end representation. “Charlie was very stylish,” remembered the actor-producer Norman Lloyd, “always immaculately dressed. He had an outstanding list of clients. . . . Charlie Feldman had the clout to pick up the phone and call a studio head on a first-name basis. He led a cosmopolitan life.”

In the mid-1930s, Feldman snatched the young actress Jean Howard away from Louis B. Mayer, then married her, which caused Mayer to temporarily ban him from MGM. In later years, Howard became one of Hollywood’s premier lesbians, but the two continued to live together even after they divorced. Nobody quite understood the relationship, but they certainly understood Feldman’s taste for exotic mistresses and an ever-growing client list.

In late July 1941, Wayne stopped paying commissions to Leo Morrison, who didn’t take it lying down. Morrison filed a complaint with the Artists and Managers Guild against Feldman, charging that Feldman’s discussions with Wayne, whom Morrison had represented since 1932 and whose contract had another year to run, was a clear violation of industry rules, not to mention etiquette.

In September, Morrison sued Feldman and Dietrich for inducing Wayne to break his contract, charging that Dietrich “used undue influence to weaken and undermine the mental capacity of actor John Wayne.” This got into the newspapers, clearly implying Dietrich’s relationship with Wayne. An internecine trade dispute had expanded to embarrass Wayne.

In response, Wayne said that he had been dissatisfied with Morrison for more than a year, that he had been negotiating on his own behalf for some time, and that “such negotiations, on at least two occasions, resulted in my obtaining offers in excess of the offers obtained by Leo Morrison.” Furthermore, Wayne asserted that he had discussed representation with a number of other agents, and that he had been willing to compromise with Leo Morrison, who was always “arbitrary.”

Wayne gave a deposition, as did Dietrich. Leo Morrison asked $150,000 for damages (after giving it some thought, he upped the damages to $225,000). On December 15, Morrison dropped both Feldman and Dietrich from the lawsuit in exchange for a token settlement of $2 apiece. That same day, Wayne signed—as both “Duke Morrison” and “John Wayne”—an agreement stating that he would continue to pay Morrison commissions through June of 1942.

Behind the entire affair was the realization that, after
Stagecoach,
Wayne was moving up to the big leagues and needed an agent who could negotiate on equal terms with the Mayers and Warners. Of the five or six agents qualified to do so, Feldman was first among equals, and Wayne never had cause to regret his decision.

On January 23, 1942, Wayne notified Republic that he had changed his representation to Charles Feldman. On May 3, Feldman completed negotiations with Republic on a new deal for Wayne. The contract called for five pictures over three years, with the first two pictures earning Wayne $25,000 apiece, and the last three bringing $35,000 apiece. Wayne was guaranteed star billing and the services of Paul Fix as dialogue director at $200 a week. There were no budget minimums on the first two pictures, but the negative costs on the last three were pegged at a minimum of $450,000 each. Finally, Republic could loan out Wayne to other studios, but not without his approval, and the studio agreed to give Wayne half of any salary overages they received.

It was a very good deal, not quite a great deal; Feldman’s influence was mainly felt in factors such as budgetary minimums—no small thing at a B picture studio like Republic. Clearly, Feldman saw Wayne as a franchise in the making, and his upgrading of Wayne’s status had the desired effect. By 1944, Wayne was number twenty-four in the top twenty-five box office stars in the movie business; by the end of the decade he was number one. Simultaneously, Feldman began nudging Wayne toward producing, and by 1947,
Angel and the Badman
was billed as “A John Wayne Production.”

Next to John Ford, Charles Feldman was the most crucial professional relationship of John Wayne’s life.

These were busy years for Wayne. When he wasn’t running from picture to picture, there were weekends on John Ford’s yacht
Araner
, which provoked either envy or dismay, depending on how people felt about clannish Irishmen.

“Ford liked Duke,” said Lindsley Parsons, “he liked Ward Bond and there were quite a few of them that would go out in that rotten boat of his, the
Araner
, that everybody thought the bottom was gonna fall out of. We’d see him over at the Isthmus. The whole group would go up and build a big pit and somebody would go out and shoot a wild pig and they’d barbeque it. Ward Bond professed to be the cook.”

Around town, Wayne became known for his conviviality and willingness to stand a round for the house. One of his favorite places was a restaurant on the Sunset Strip called Eugene’s. During the war, with curfews imposed, it was a bottle club, run more or less like a speakeasy during Prohibition—you had to knock on the door and be recognized.

Wayne told a story about a time when he was having a drink at Eugene’s and there was a loud banging on the door. The maître d’, a man named Al Murphy, who later went to work for Wayne, went to check it out and came back to Wayne.

“It’s Bogart.”

“Well, let him in.”

“No. He owes us six hundred bucks. He won’t pay us.”

“Let him in, I’ll take care of it.”

Bogart came in, slightly the worse for wear, and took the stool next to Wayne. At the time, Bogart was married to the actress Mayo Methot; they formed a pair of violent alcoholics known as the Battling Bogarts. Wayne looked over and saw something sticking out of Bogart’s back—an apple corer, stuck in up to the hilt.

Wayne said, “Oh, my God,” and tried to pull it out, but it was stuck. He couldn’t get it out until he put his foot on Bogart’s back for leverage. After that, they took the actor to the hospital to get stitched up.

During the war years, Wayne developed a sideline in romantic comedies, largely because actors with a more native proficiency were unavailable by dint of service in the military. Whether working with Dietrich in
Seven Sinners, The Spoilers,
or
Pittsburgh
—the dynamic was similar: masculine forthrightness tamed European decadence. Working with Jean Arthur in
A Lady Takes a Chance,
Claudette Colbert in
Without Reservations
, or even Joan Crawford in
Reunion in France
, Wayne tended to play an innocent American in over his head with this love business.