John Wayne: The Life and Legend (27 page)

The new contract was signed on October 25, 1945, and called for seven pictures over the next six years beginning January 15, 1946. Wayne was to receive 10 percent of the gross on each picture, with a guarantee of at least $100,000 per film and no cap on the amount that Wayne could receive. Minimum cost on each picture was set at $800,000 and Wayne and Yates had mutual approval of story, cast, director, cameraman, and associate producer. Also, Wayne had the option of taking a producer credit on any of the seven pictures. There was no longer any loan-out clause—Wayne made his own deals and kept all the money from pictures at other studios, and he also had the option of canceling the contract if Yates sold out or lost control of Republic.

All in all, it was a deal of unheard-of richness for the little studio in the valley, and it didn’t stop there. Republic took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on its prime asset, and it was during this time that Wayne began to amass a collection of his films on 16mm, for which Republic billed him $100 a print. Once he moved from Van Nuys to Encino, and his projection equipment changed from 16mm to 35mm, Wayne upgraded his collection at a much greater cost—his 35mm print of
The Quiet Man
would cost him $1,039.

People who worked with Wayne loved the Encino house. The property was on the corner of Rancho and Louise, covered five acres, and had a long, curving driveway framed by huge oak trees that set the stage for the entrance of someone special—a star. Besides the house itself, which contained twenty-two rooms, there were stables and a two-bedroom pool house for guests or anybody who might have had a few too many. Wayne built a high brick wall around the property for security and also added an electric gate.

At this point, Wayne’s enthusiasm for Yates and Republic knew no bounds, and he began to serve as Republic’s agent in an attempt to lure John Ford to the studio. While Ford was shooting
They Were Expendable
for MGM at the end of 1944, Wayne tried to get the director together with Yates, but Ford demurred. “He said that if you had tried to contact him at MGM there would have been a message to that effect,” Wayne cabled Yates, who in turn insisted that he had indeed called Ford. “I want to get you two together before they talk him into getting tied up someplace else,” wrote Wayne. “He keeps saying there is plenty of time—that he is still in the Navy but I want to see you two get together.”

Aside from the fact that he was indeed still in the Navy, Ford also owed Darryl Zanuck a picture on his old prewar contract at Fox before he would be free to form the independent company he was planning with Merian C. Cooper. When Ford and Cooper finally formed Argosy Productions, they allied themselves with RKO. But Wayne and Yates kept circling, and they were persistent.

As Lindsley Parsons had found in the early 1930s, Wayne’s politics were set quite early. When he was shooting
Flying Tigers
at Republic in 1942, his co-star was Anna Lee, a beautiful blonde newly arrived from England. As they were filming a dancing scene, Wayne asked her, “Are you a Republican?” But Lee thought Wayne had said, “Are you a publican?” that is, the operator of an English pub.

“No,” she replied, “but I’m very fond of beer.”

Wayne thought the non sequitur was hilarious, and he and Lee became friends. She would soon be a member of the John Ford stock company.

Wayne’s conservatism became part of the larger Hollywood scene with the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The stimulus for the Alliance seems to have been a conference held at UCLA in early October of 1943. Mostly, it was attended by writers from South America, but among the attendees were Thomas Mann and Theodore Dreiser. Walt Disney was appalled at what he took to be the Red tint of the gathering, as was James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative Irish screenwriter and producer at MGM who had attempted to undermine the Screen Writers Guild in the mid-1930s by forming a company union called the Screen Playwrights. Shortly after the UCLA conference, McGuinness hosted a dinner for like-minded friends upset at what they saw as the leading edge of Communist infiltration in Hollywood, right behind unions. McGuinness’s dinner led to a meeting at Chasen’s for thirty others of similar political persuasion.

On February 4, 1944, two hundred people attended a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire, where Sam Wood was elected president of the newly christened Alliance, and Cedric Gibbons, Norman Taurog, and Walt Disney were elected vice presidents. Aside from the board, there were seventy-two other people listed as founding members of the organization, among them Clarence Brown, King Vidor, Hedda Hopper, Robert Taylor, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Ward Bond, and Richard Arlen.

With the formation of the Alliance, the uneasy cooperation between left and right that had formed after Pearl Harbor, much as a flimsy marriage might be held together for the children, collapsed.

The Alliance was immediately hailed by the Hearst press—no surprise there. Also chiming in with loud support was the
Los Angeles Examiner
, which said that “the subversive minority in the industry has connived and contrived to produce a long succession of insidious and evil motion pictures to the discredit of the industry and to the detriment of the country. . . . It has made pictures glorifying Communistic Russia, ignoring the oppressive and tyrannical character of Bolshevism and inventing virtues for it that have never existed.”
¹

The Alliance, said Sam Wood, was “for everyone in the motion picture industry, regardless of position . . . none of us are ‘joiners.’ None of us are professional organizers or ‘go to meeting’ types.”

Wood was a successful commercial director who was fond of employing the great production designer William Cameron Menzies to gussy up his utilitarian visual sense. Wood’s most recent hit had been
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
which had been carefully denuded of Hemingway’s political foundation—James Agee wrote that the movie gave the impression “that Gary Cooper is simply fighting for the Republican Party in a place where the New Deal has got particularly out of hand.”

Wood went on to say that the Alliance wanted only to calm troubled waters. “Those highly indoctrinated shock units of the totalitarian wrecking crew have shrewdly led the people of the United States to believe that Hollywood is a hotbed of sedition and subversion, and that our industry is a battleground over which Communism is locked in death grips with Fascism. . . . We intend to correct that erroneous impression immediately, and to assure the people of the United States that . . . Hollywood is a reservoir of Americanism.”

Variety
welcomed the Alliance with an enthusiastically illiterate editorial with the unintentionally humorous headline “Heading Right Way”:

In times like these, the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals is most essential and necessary, as well as highly commendable . . . they are people of intelligence who can smell subversive propaganda as easily as limburger cheese, but not as tasty, and devise means to eradicate it from screen messages in any and every form. Also, they must see to it that regardless of religious belief, creed or color, there is no discrimination, and that hatred in this direction becomes extinct. . . .

It is time for films to return to their original function—ENTERTAINMENT.

Immediately, the Alliance members began fanning out to enlist like-minded members of the community. King Vidor tried to recruit the screenwriter William Ludwig, who had just written
American Romance
for him. “I know what the Alliance is against,” said Ludwig, “but what are they for? . . . What is your organization for, King?”

There was a long pause, and Vidor said, “I’ll have to talk to Sam Wood about that.” He got up and left the office.

The anticommunist labor leader Roy Brewer remembered that the dominant person in the early years of the Alliance was James Kevin McGuinness, whom Brewer called “the spiritual leader. He made a statement once that I’ve never forgotten; it was that every person was a child of God, and could never be any man’s slave.”

For those on the left, the Alliance was the vanguard of a warped, paranoid obsession with nonexistent traitors; for those on the right, it was an overdue reaction to the Soviet Communism that was a direct and insidious threat to the United States. The latter were immeasurably aided by the quick-change Russian turnaround from enemy to ally. The Alliance also became a home for those with a reflexive opposition to the New Deal—some of the first hearings of the newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s were designed to “expose” the communist influences behind the WPA, the Federal Theater Project, the Art Project, and Writers’ Project.

The left gradually became alarmed. The liberal New York newspaper
PM
quoted an Alliance spokesman to the effect that “There is no intention to attempt to deprive any worker of employment by reason of his known leanings toward Communism, Fascism, or other un-American beliefs, although it is among the purposes of the group to notify the employer of any such worker regarding the worker’s tendencies.”

It soon became obvious that a blacklist was not inadvertent collateral damage; rather, it was a goal. In March 1944, the Alliance sent a letter to Senator Robert Reynolds (D-N.C.), a noted conservative who had once informed the Senate that “Dictators are doing what is best for their people. Hitler and Mussolini have a date with destiny: it’s foolish to oppose them, so why not play ball with them?” The letter pointed out the allegedly “flagrant manner in which the motion picture industrialists of Hollywood have been coddling Communists” and how “totalitarian-minded groups” were working to disseminate un-American ideas within the film industry.

Congressman John Rankin (D-Miss.) added to the tumult by accusing Hollywood movies of sending coded messages about German air raids so Communist spies and sympathizers in Europe would be unharmed. In April 1944, representatives of the House Committee on Un-American Activities appeared in Hollywood to begin taking statements.

Besides
Mission to Moscow
and
The North Star,
among the pictures the Motion Picture Alliance would eventually indict for spreading left-wing propaganda were
The Best Years of Our Lives, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, A Medal for Benny, The Searching Wind, Watch on the Rhine, Pride of the Marines
, and
Margie.

Margie
?

The Alliance was (intentionally?) overestimating both the possibilities for subversion in a highly industrialized system of production and the number of Communists in the movie business. One solid estimate toted up about three hundred Communists in the industry—fifty to sixty actors, fifteen to twenty producers, and around 150 writers—about 1 percent of the workforce.

Roy Brewer was the international representative of IATSE, the major Hollywood guild union. Brewer remembered that it was Ayn Rand, the original antigovernment libertarian, who wrote the Alliance’s declaration of principles. Brewer enjoyed chafing Rand: “Well, what about the streets, Ayn? Is it all right for the government to make the streets?”

Brewer was joking, but Rand was not noted for her sense of humor and took the question seriously. A few weeks later, she told Brewer, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, and I kind of believe that maybe there is a place for the government to build streets.”

Rand wrote a pamphlet for the Alliance, entitled
Screen Guide for Americans
, which featured chapter headings such as “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System,” “Don’t Deify the Common Man,” and “Don’t Smear Industrialists.” The pamphlet asserted that “All too often, industrialists, bankers and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers and exploiters,” then outlined the Alliance’s modus operandi:

The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication.

The principle of free speech requires that we do not use police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas—which

means that we do not pass laws forbidding them to speak. But the principle of free speech does not require that we furnish the Communists with the means to preach their ideas, and does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense.

Within a few months,
Variety
was modifying its initially positive reading of the Alliance.

Let the Alliance name these “totalitarian-minded groups” it states are working to the detriment of the picture business in Hollywood. Tomorrow, the next day, or next week the Alliance can have without charge as many “Variety” pages as is needed to name these individuals and groups it maintains are un-American and subversive. And every individual and group that the Alliance names will be offered an equal opportunity to answer whatever charges are made. . . . Never mind going outside. Come down to Hollywood and Vine.