John Wayne: The Life and Legend (29 page)

Barzman threw the ax away and began laughing, as did Wayne.

Writers’ memoirs are full of scenes like this, and historians believe them at their peril. As Nora Ephron observed of the book written by her father, screenwriter Henry Ephron, he was always the hero and always telling Darryl Zanuck to go fuck himself. In the real world, writers who threaten movie stars have pronounced tendencies toward alcoholism and lengthy periods of unemployment.

But Barzman’s memoir does capture Wayne’s wry sense of humor, as well as his particular brand of conservatism. “He was far right, anti-Roosevelt, anti-spending taxpayers’ money for welfare, education, public health or practically anything,” wrote Barzman. “And he was staunchly anti-women’s rights when women were Wacs and Waves overseas and doing hard, often dangerous work in war factories.”

Despite all this, Wayne and Barzman developed a decent rapport. “You know what each cigarette costs me on account of that man in the White House,” Wayne asked Barzman one day. “Two dollars.”

“Hell, Duke, there’s a war on, and we all pay taxes.”

“Not two bucks for a smoke you don’t.”

Wayne was determined to do his own stunts. When Barzman suggested that Wayne and Quinn sink beneath a pond that had recently frozen over in a cold snap, Wayne refused to use a double. Wayne’s lips eventually turned blue, but he and Quinn did the stunt.

Also on the left was director Edward Dmytryk. Dmytryk liked Wayne, liked the way he “threw his . . . body around like a lightweight gymnast. His acting was honest, which is a good deal better than clever; he lived life with gusto; and he was already beginning to think of himself as some kind of political pundit, but we all make mistakes.”

Back to Bataan
is a comparatively violent film for its period—children die—and it also has a surface realism. But despite the fact that it’s beautifully photographed by Nick Musuraca, and makes a concerted effort to portray the diversity involved in the war in the Philippines, the script has a boilerplate feel to it. Verisimilitude is further reduced by the fact that the narrator is the same man who breathlessly introduces the parodic Columbia serials directed by James Horne.

At the end of the movie, Wayne tells a Filipino child, “You’re the guy we’re fighting this war for”—a sentiment, and a line, that would be repeated nearly verbatim in a far more controversial Wayne movie about a far more controversial war several decades later.

But as far as RKO was concerned,
Back to Bataan
was another raging Wayne success; it cost $1.2 million and returned domestic rentals of $2.2 million, earning a profit of $160,000 in its first year of release. Not long after the film was made, Robert Fellows invited Ben Barzman to a New Year’s party at his house. Wayne was there and threw his arm around Barzman. “You remember you once asked me what I thought was the reason for my success?” said Wayne. “And I told you I always wondered myself. I never kidded myself it was because I was a great actor.”

“Yeah, I remember. And you said some woman once stopped you for an autograph and told you why she thought all the women were nuts about you. But you couldn’t remember what she said.”

“I remember now,” said Wayne. “She whispered to me, ‘You have such wicked thighs!’ ”

MGM’s
They Were Expendable
wasn’t released until November of 1945, which undoubtedly damaged its commercial prospects—the picture had been in preparation since July of 1942, but MGM was never fast off the dime. Frank Wead worked on the script, as did George Froeschel and Jan Lustig, in concert with producer Sidney Franklin. Wead completed a partial script by April of 1943, shortly after which Norman Corwin began wrestling with the material. He didn’t quite grasp the possibilities.

“The story in none of its forms so far has much heart,” Corwin wrote in some notes on the project. “It lacks conviction and nobody gives a goddamn what happens to anybody. . . . There is no reason why this picture should not have a clear line of continuity: the telling of the short and hectic history of a squadron of men who knew they were doomed; the expensing of the expendables.”

Corwin was always interested in the macro, so he spent a lot of time pondering the characterization of the Filipino characters, even though they’re only a backdrop to the story of the PT boats. Corwin proposed a round-robin of narrators: “Thus Ensign Chandler might begin the story and carry us to the point where he is shot in the ankles and hospitalized. He could then apologize for not being able to carry the narration further and yield, let us say, to Reynolds. . . . Reynolds might then conduct the story until the time he gets it in the neck. Then perhaps one of the surviving four . . . might carry it through the end.”

It was an interesting theoretical idea, but narration as a baton being passed around was sure to keep the audience from focusing on the characters. Corwin was ambivalent about the material; at one point, he devised a document he called “Arguments for and Against Its Production.” In another memo, he wrote, “It is on the one hand a great, sprawling documentary about the fall of the Philippines in a strictly Naval sense—full of giant-sized incidents—and, on the other hand, the interwoven biography of four men—the canvas much smaller, tighter and more easily manageable.”

Corwin had stumbled on the approach that Frank Wead and John Ford would emphasize. They simply alluded to the larger situation via a few lines of dialogue, with Ford’s magnificently gloomy images as the foundational underpinning of a tight dramatic focus. Corwin was off the picture by the end of 1943 and Frank Wead was back on, finishing the script by November of 1944.

Ford shot the picture in and around Miami beginning in February 1945. It was an efficient shoot, enlivened by some glorious tropical nights. A young soldier named Bill Harbach, the son of the famed lyricist Otto Harbach (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”), was at a party with the cast.

“It was the first time I met Wayne,” said Harbach, who would come back into Wayne’s life a quarter century later. “I had Levi’s on, and he had his Six-Foot club around him—Ward Bond and the rest of his cronies were just about the same size as him. Anyway, he said, ‘Fellas, look, Levi’s!’ And he reached out and put his hands on my waist and lifted me up and swung me around to show the guys what I was wearing. I’m six feet and weighed about 160, and he handled me as if I was a bag of groceries. Amazing strength!”

Ford wisely chose to deemphasize his stars, because they were playing characters continually buffeted by circumstances out of their control. The narrative consists almost exclusively of military disasters, beginning shortly before Pearl Harbor, when PT boats couldn’t get any traction with the naval brass, continuing through Subic Bay, Corregidor, and Bataan.
They Were Expendable
begins Ford’s preoccupation with the contradictions of human history—the difference between actual events and the invariably more comfortable official version constructed over time, a central dynamic that motivates movies as varied as
Fort Apache
and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They Were Expendable
is also the most mournful movie about World War II until
Saving Private Ryan
.

Ford had the great freelance cameraman Joe August shoot the film, probably because he didn’t believe that any of the MGM cameramen—used to glossy high-key lighting that illuminated every corner of every set—could or would give him the kind of images he wanted: shots of long, dark corridors peopled by small groups of grieving men.

Robert Montgomery gives the most effective performance in his post-juvenile period, and Wayne is self-effacing in a performance keyed not to action or heroism but to loss—the dramatic high point is Wayne’s recitation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” over two coffins: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea . . .”

Wayne’s Rusty Ryan is the second in command to Montgomery’s Brickley. Ryan is an impatient man only tempered by duty and his love for Sandy, a nurse on Corregidor, played by Donna Reed in a pitch-perfect performance. Ford is at his best capturing the exquisite gallantry of the officers at a dinner party where Sandy is the only guest. But the relationship never takes flight; in the end Sandy is lost to the war. She might be hiding in the hills, she might be a prisoner of the Japanese, she might be dead. We never find out. Either way, the work of the war has to go on.

It’s a beautiful, understated picture about coping with a war of attrition—men die, their boats are destroyed, and the sailors are faced with a succession of fiascoes, culminating in the officers getting airlifted out while their men are left stranded. The film’s great strength derives from the fact that it was conceived and executed by Ford and Wead—filmmakers who had been soldiers and who knew that war is about loss.

This magnificent, melancholy film earned great reviews and mediocre box office; for the audience, it was an unwelcome reminder of the worst days of a war that had just been won. Nevertheless, Wayne was recognized as a major contribution to the film’s artistic success: “John Wayne registers the greatest acting job of his career,” wrote one reviewer. “If anything, he is the film’s standout.”

Christmas of 1945 was taken up by a series of welcome-home parties that Mary Ford staged at the Ford house on Odin Street. After that, Ford went upstairs and drank himself into oblivion. For some reason, he grew obsessed with a record of Mexican revolutionary songs, and played them over and over. His daughter, Barbara, took care of him during the day, and Wayne came over at night, in full makeup and costume from
Without Reservations
at RKO. “I’ll take my turn,” Wayne told Barbara as he trooped upstairs, where he found Ford wrapped in a bedsheet surrounded by empty bottles. The two men whiled away the hours talking, with the Mexican war songs grinding away; whenever the record ended, Ford would start it over again.

There was nothing to do but wait for the storm to run its course.

Without Reservations
was an entertaining if overlong romantic comedy directed by Mervyn LeRoy that paired Wayne with Claudette Colbert. The premise is creative: an author (Colbert) writes a novel about a man named Mark Winston that becomes more of a movement than a book. (Ayn Rand, anyone?) The book is purchased for the movies, which leads to Cary Grant turning the part down in a funny guest appearance (Jack Benny also shows up unbilled). The studio starts looking for an unknown.

On the train to California, Colbert meets Wayne, who embodies all aspects of her fictional hero. (Wayne’s character is a rugged individualist who doesn’t believe in social engineering.) He’s asked to test for the movie, and his face assumes an expression of unbounded disgust. “An actor??!!” he exclaims. Eventually, the stubborn, uncorruptible American gets corrupted, but on his terms.

Throughout the movie, Wayne underplays the comedy, and he expresses a winning appreciation for his co-star—he drinks her in. He’s sexy, romantic, obtainable. On the other hand, although Colbert was an actress with something approaching perfect pitch, here she seems a little overly flustered for such a soigné creature, especially one outfitted by Adrian.