John Wayne: The Life and Legend (28 page)

Lay it on the line, or get off and stay off the line.

Other journalists began to throw whatever weight they had behind
Variety
’s point of view. “According to [an] MPA spokesman the film industry is being perverted by the infiltration of communist propaganda,” wrote Virginia Wright of the Los Angeles
Daily News
. “By no amount of ‘insidious purpose’ could a writer get something on the screen that did not meet with the approval of the front office. . . . So what the MPA actually says is that communist propaganda is coming from the men who run the studios—Zanuck, the Warners, Goldwyn, Mayer, Cohn, DeSylva, Koerner and the rest . . . we can only assume the alliance thinks studio executives are merely puppets in the hands of writers.”

In the years to come, the Alliance and its allies would make much of guilt by association, but few people applied the same tactics to them. The columnist Hedda Hopper, for instance, was a founding member and committee member of the MPA, as well as a braying horror who had been an ardent isolationist in the years before Pearl Harbor. She expressed strong animosity toward FDR, unions, the Democratic Party, and civil rights long before she climbed aboard the anticommunist bandwagon.

Nor was Hopper shy about using her media access—at one point she had a syndicated readership of 32 million in a nation of 160 million people—to proselytize for her beliefs. A March 1945 column contained nine items, only three of which were about the entertainment world. She was one of those people far more alarmed by Communism than Fascism; when Leni Riefenstahl came to Hollywood in 1938, Hopper defended her in several columns: “Leni’s only here to sell her picture!” she wrote.

Inside and outside the film industry, it was widely believed that the MPA was mostly anti-Semitic (one of the few Jewish members was the writer Morrie Ryskind). One FBI agent reported at the time of the group’s formation that “There is every possibility that persons anti-Semitic will attempt to rally around the MPA, making that organization definitely an anti-Semitic group.”

Increasing this perception was the presence of James Kevin McGuinness, who had been widely regarded as anti-Semitic since the mid-1930s, when he exploded in a racist diatribe about Irving Thalberg. In March 1944, David Selznick confronted Sam Wood about his organization’s bias, calling McGuinness “the biggest anti-Semite in Hollywood,” and accusing McGuinness of presiding over a group called the Hundred Haters at the Lakeside Golf Club, where McGuinness was president.

So the outlines of the blacklist were forming while World War II was still being fought. Interestingly, throughout the first years of the Motion Picture Alliance, the name of John Wayne is nowhere to be found, while any statements by Wayne in support of anticommunism went unrecorded.

For the time being, nothing much happened. Congress was still controlled by largely liberal Democrats, so the Alliance’s spadework promoting an investigation was stymied by political reality and FDR’s enormous popularity, not to mention the pressing business of winning the war—with the help of the nation’s Russian ally.

But Roosevelt would not live to see victory, and the Alliance was playing a long game.

It could afford to wait.

1. Actually, there wasn’t “a long succession of insidious and evil motion pictures” espousing the Communist line. There were two: Warners’
Mission to Moscow
and Goldwyn’s
The North Star
, both of which were made at President Franklin Roosevelt’s urging to sway the public to the side of our new Russian allies, but which went out of their way to portray Stalin’s Russia as a cozy place radiant with benign social welfare.

Republic filmed
The Fighting Seabees
with an unusual roster of talent. The credited director was Edward Ludwig, but the stylish Robert Florey took over for a week, while the screenwriter was Borden Chase, who would gain a measure of fame with his original story and script for
Red River.
Ludwig would work with Wayne several times in the future, among them the underrated
Wake of the Red Witch
.

Wayne’s rising status in the industry as well as at Republic is made clear in a memo written to him by associate producer Albert Cohen. Cohen forwarded the first three quarters of the script for
The Fighting Seabees
along with an explanation for the problems that were apparent:

Dear Duke, When you read the first 98 pages of the attached . . . script, please bear in mind the following changes that we are now making in the front part of the script. . . .

Donovan [Wayne’s character] being an intelligent construction engineer, listens attentively and remarks that what Yarrow says makes sense and that as soon as he gets back to the states he will take it up with Washington and put the idea over in 24 hours.

Yarrow patiently explains to Donovan that the Navy doesn’t function that way—that the entire setup will have to be worked out in detail then sent through the usual channels, which may take several months. This again prompts Donovan to shoot off his mouth about ‘Navy red tape’, etc. . . .

These changes, while they actually amount to only dialogue changes, will help strengthen the friction between our two leading men.

The point is not the actual alterations, but the deference that the production team is showing Wayne by running the changes past him. This attention to Wayne’s character development, not to mention acknowledging his already evident preferences in presentation, hadn’t been the case a couple of years earlier, when he had been grinding out Three Mesquiteers pictures in bulk, but it would become the norm at Republic, as well as at every other studio.

The Fighting Seabees
was yet another in the series of gung ho war pictures Wayne was making, ending with a kamikaze mission in which Wayne’s character is killed taking out a Japanese tank. Albert Cohen got a letter from a woman saying she had just read in the paper that the film would be shot at the Seabees base at Port Hueneme.

“I am glad,” she wrote. “My husband is in the Seabees and is at Port Hueneme. John Wayne is his favorite actor. He told me once that [he] is a ‘man’s man.’ I just want to tell you how much he would enjoy telling him, ‘Thank you for playing that part, John.’ I am thanking you for him and for me.’ ”

In mid-1944, Wayne went over to RKO to make a western entitled
Tall in the Saddle
. The script, co-written by Paul Fix, had a couple of good lines (“I like grumpy old cusses,” says Wayne at one point. “Hope to live long enough to be one.”) and some incidental pleasures—the presence of both Gabby Hayes and Raymond Hatton make the film a veritable Old Coot jamboree.

Wayne took some pride in the picture; as he remembered it,
Tall in the Saddle
“was the first picture in which I found the story and made a deal with a studio for its development. I worked at half price at RKO in order to have complete control, regardless of whose names appeared on the titles.”

Wayne remembered that nobody at the studio thought much of the project except Robert Fellows, the producer assigned to shepherd the production. Nevertheless, it was an extremely successful, if slightly dull movie. It cost only $565,754—Wayne’s salary was a flat $50,000—and returned rentals of $2 million for a profit of $730,000. RKO and Wayne were soon in partnership, and Fellows also produced
Back to Bataan
a year later.

Tall in the Saddle
would become the matrix for a particular kind of Wayne picture—modestly budgeted, but with the money on the screen, with the star front and center as the public liked to see him—all told, a guarantee of big profits.

Besides making money for everybody,
Tall in the Saddle
did one other thing: it broke up Paul Fix’s marriage. Although Fix was an unprepossessing figure, he was charming and was rumored to be extremely well endowed—his nickname was “Blackjack,” and it didn’t refer to skill with cards. Fix became involved with Wayne’s co-star Ella Raines. When Fix’s daughter Marilyn married Harry Carey Jr., Raines wanted to come to the wedding, but Fix said that was impossible, which led to an escalating argument that culminated in Raines throwing a martini in Fix’s face.

As Fix was leading his daughter down the aisle, the crowd at the church heard the unmistakable sound of someone leaning on a car horn outside. Nobody could figure out who would be that rude—nobody except Paul Fix.

Wayne had relied on Fix for acting advice for years, and was now turning to him for script advice as well. Between the demands of his career and the demands of his friends, quiet time was increasingly hard to find. Fix told a story about Wayne asking him to go away for a weekend, just the two of them, so they could work their way through the pile of scripts that were on offer. “People keep bugging me,” Wayne explained. “Ward Bond, Grant Withers, these guys keep coming around saying, ‘Hey Duke, lets’s go out and do this and do that . . . ’ I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to read some of these scripts. I’ve got to find something I want to do.”

They went down to Fallbrook, got there about noon, and at 4 P.M. there was a banging on the door. Ward Bond had tracked them down and was already drunk. Fix was not a drinker, but Wayne could never resist knocking a few back with “Old Ward.” Resolution gave way, and Wayne figured the only way to handle the situation was to pretend to be as drunk as Bond. Open a bottle, pretend to drink, let Bond actually drink and let him pass out. Some of the liquor did find its way to Wayne’s stomach, however, and he began to feel excessively convivial.

Soon, Bond was passed out on the floor. They picked him up and put him on the bed. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Christ, maybe he’s dying,” said Wayne.

“He’s not dying,” replied Fix. “I’ll unbutton his shirt.”

After they unbuttoned his shirt, Wayne observed Bond’s chest rising and falling, and finally said, “Look at the hairy-chested son of a bitch.” He took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to Bond’s chest. The hair smoldered a little, then went out. Bond didn’t wake up.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Wayne said. “Leave him there! He’s fucking drunk!”

Another time, Wayne and Bond went quail hunting, for which Bond loaned Wayne his 20-gauge shotgun. Bond was walking in a gully and Wayne was on a ridge above him when a covey broke loose near Bond. Wayne fired and got a quail, but he also got Bond, who was hit in the neck and shoulders. Bond said he had to have about forty birdshot picked out of his back, but the doctors missed some.

Years later, Bond was in New York when he began getting pains in his neck and head. When he was X-rayed, the doctors told him he had some foreign objects lodged in there—did he have any idea what they might be?

“That must be more of Duke’s buckshot!” said Bond. Bond said that he could forgive Wayne shooting him, but couldn’t forgive him for doing it with his own gun. Experiences like these led Wayne and his friends to the conclusion that Bond was unkillable. The shotgun and the wounding became part of Wayne’s and Bond’s personal mythology, a yarn told around endless card and commissary tables.

After
Flame of the Barbary Coast
at Republic—Joseph Kane again—Wayne began shooting
Back to Bataan
for RKO. It’s a story of the Philippine resistance, led by an American (Wayne) and a Filipino (Anthony Quinn, Hollywood’s all-purpose ethnic).

Even as it was being shot the picture was being written by Ben Barzman, a committed leftist who was eventually blacklisted. Writing just ahead of the camera is difficult not just because of the pressure but because of intensely practical concerns—there’s no room for an error in story construction, and you have to write scenes that will work for the sets that have already been built.

Barzman left behind a memoir in which he accused Wayne of subtle digs that were calculated to shatter whatever thin veneer of composure the writer could sustain in such frantic circumstances. One day Barzman delivered three pages that had to be shot immediately, and Wayne loudly announced, “Now, let’s see what kind of golden hero our boy genius has made me today.”

Barzman ignored the possibility that the sarcasm was directed as much at Wayne as at Barzman and retorted, “You always play a goddamn big dumb golden hero anyway!”

Wayne responded with a menacing look and began advancing on Barzman, who was half Wayne’s size. Grabbing a fire ax off a studio wall, the writer stood there trying to look like he knew what to do with it.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” said Wayne, “a fucking fire ax!”

“Come on you big bastard!” yelled Barzman. “I’d love to use it on you!”

“Why, I believe you would!” said Wayne.

There was an uneasy pause, then Barzman said, “Since I was smaller than most kids, I was taught in Canada to defend myself with anything I could lay my hands on.”

“Hurray for the Canadians,” said Wayne. Then he looked curious. “A fire ax? How could you have finished the goddamn film without me?”