John Wayne: The Life and Legend (30 page)

Without Reservations
would be one of Wayne’s few overt attempts at a romantic comedy, and he acquits himself well. The audience enjoyed it, as did the studio and producers Jesse Lasky and Mervyn LeRoy—the profit topped $700,000. Wayne and Colbert liked each other a great deal; at the time, she was thinking about directing a picture, but hesitated because the producers wanted her to act in it as well.

“I guess what it really comes down to is that I didn’t have the guts,” she remembered. But Wayne thought she could direct, and he offered to work for her. “I knew he meant it,” Colbert said. “I really cherish that remark. I mean, from the he-man of all time.”

After years of push-pull across the U.S.-Mexican border, Wayne and Chata were finally married on January 17, 1946, at the Unity Presbyterian Church in Long Beach. Mary Ford and Olive Carey were matrons of honor, and Ward Bond was best man. Herbert Yates gave the bride away, and Wayne’s mother hosted the reception at the California Country Club.

John Ford boycotted the wedding, and he didn’t mince words with his surrogate son: “Why’d you have to marry that whore?” he asked Wayne. The subject had to be closed between them, but in time Wayne would realize the wisdom of Ford’s question.

The couple honeymooned at Waikiki Beach, where the newspapers were full of stories about their presence on the island. One day as Wayne and Chata were sunning themselves in front of the Royal Hawaiian, four sailors from John Rogers Air Station were taking a day of liberty. They spotted “a tall, handsome guy lying on a blanket beneath a palm tree and wearing sunshades and swim trunks.” Next to him was a good-looking brunette clad in a white one-piece bathing suit and wearing dark glasses. Two of the sailors were from Texas and South Carolina respectively, and weren’t about to say anything, but one was from New Jersey and he piped up, “Mr. Wayne, can we look at your wife?”

Wayne sat up, removed his sunglasses, stared, then smiled. He reached over to Chata, removed her sunglasses and said, “Sure, fellows, help yourselves. I kinda like to look at her myself.” He stood up, shook hands with the sailors and thanked them for their service.

For a time, the marriage seemed to be in rough equilibrium. As Bev Barnett’s backgrounder said, “She likes to drink; she liked Wayne’s friends; they were happy in bed.”

Michael Wayne would say that Chata was cute. Nice shape, pretty legs, good with the kids. “She was like a kid herself,” said Mike’s wife, Gretchen. “She drank like a man and loved to play cards, so that would have worked for Michael’s dad. But the problem would be that if he was out playing cards, Chata wanted to be out playing cards too. She wasn’t going to stay home and make bouquets. They never had any children; Michael’s dad said it was because she was too mean.”

Besides her presumed virtuosity in bed, Chata could match Wayne drink for drink, which made for a household with a high degree of volatility; one writer noted, “No one has ever accused Wayne of being shy in going after the things he wants . . . but he displays an incongruous timidity when it comes to insisting that Chata comply with his wishes.”

Aside from her alcohol intake, there were other warning signs. Wayne was always fastidious about his hygiene and clothing, but Chata cut her own hair, bought her own clothes, and applied her own makeup. “She sometimes looked a bit peculiar and out of it,” commented Mary St. John, Wayne’s longtime secretary. Not only that, but she didn’t like to shave her legs, which bothered Wayne a great deal although he didn’t harp on it until she showed up at Charles Feldman’s house for a Sunday brunch wearing a white tennis skirt, which emphasized her hirsute lower half.

But the main problem was Chata’s temper, which got worse when she drank, which was most of the time. In late 1946, Wayne came into his Republic office with an ugly gash on his cheek. He sheepishly explained to Mary St. John that Chata had objected when Wayne wanted to leave a party the previous night. Chata was drunk, and when he picked her up and carried her to their car, she gouged his face.

Things got worse. Chata’s mother moved in, and she drank nearly as much as her daughter. The women had expected a life of glamour, but Wayne worked very hard; he was in a brutal tax bracket; and there wasn’t all that much left over at the end of the year. Chata began complaining to anyone who would listen that Wayne was obsessed with “thee beezness,” that he didn’t love her or sleep with her, he loved and slept with the pictures.

The drinking stepped up. Not just after six, but during the day. The actor Mike Mazurki’s wife, Jeannette, remembered drinking with Chata one night while their husbands played cards: “She didn’t speak much English and I recall she was quite pretty. I was 25 and a new bride then. I didn’t have any children, and it was still the honeymoon stage for me. She had some tequila. We talked, but you really had to listen because her English wasn’t very good. So we got plastered.”

Mazurki found Chata pleasant and well meaning while sober, “but when she’d get half-looped she’d get so jealous she’d start throwing tantrums. She was a real alcoholic, as was her mother.”

Bö Roos was forced into the role of mediator and Wayne spent a lot of time at his house trying to decompress after the arguments with Chata. Roos arranged reconciliations, then a second honeymoon in Hawaii, but not a long one. Duke had pictures to make.

Wayne was highly conscious of his coalescing screen image. He would occasionally compare himself to Robert Montgomery, who had carved out a pleasant, innocuous “tennis, anyone” career at MGM until he grew weary of it and decided to change his image by playing a psychopath in
Night Must Fall.

“He won an Oscar, but he lost his audience,” said Wayne. “He was wonderful in the film but he fooled the people who had been going to his movies because he was ‘a nice, bright young kid.’ Suddenly they said, ‘No, he’s a dirty, miserable killer, a maniac.’ [Audiences] become accustomed to you as an actor as they would a friend, and . . . you can surprise them but you can’t fool them.”

There are several problems with Wayne’s premise. Although he was nominated for
Night Must Fall,
Montgomery didn’t win the Oscar—Spencer Tracy did, for
Captains Courageous
. And the public response was hardly catastrophic; Montgomery’s starring career continued without interruption for another thirteen years, through World War II and beyond, including the aforementioned strong turn in
They Were Expendable.
At that point, Montgomery got the directing bug, which increasingly occupied his time.

Wayne was far more disturbed by Montgomery’s decision to play a killer than the public was—it was the sort of stunt casting in which he always refused to indulge. It was around this point that he began to think of the audience as an extended family and would turn down any part that he felt might violate their expectations of him.

Wayne’s next picture was critically important to him in every way, for reasons that become clear with the opening title: “A John Wayne Production.”
The Angel and the Badman
was an interesting choice of material—a largely nonviolent western. The plot—a gunslinger is reformed by the love of a Quaker girl—and much of the development harks back not to John Ford but to the chiseled biblical morality of William S. Hart.

Wayne plays Quirt Evans, a wounded gunfighter on the run who providentially falls into the healing hands of a Quaker homestead, personified by Gail Russell radiating serenity. After his fairly indiscriminate behavior as a young man, Wayne was cleaning up his act, but if he didn’t have an affair with Russell, he seems to have had a crush on her. He would pay tribute to her as having “wonderful possibilities; her eyes are very expressive. But I think her home studio [Paramount] has let her down in not giving her proper grooming and teaching her to be at her best, that is, how to handle herself. If it weren’t for that handicap, I’m sure she’d be one of our big stars.”

Years later, after Russell died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-six, Wayne would get agitated at the very mention of her name. “Gail was just such a beautiful young girl that some of those fucking sons of bitches at the studios had taken advantage of her. You know about the old casting couch? She’d been there a number of times. Well, it didn’t happen with me. I gave her the part on her own merits. She was one person I never shouted at because I knew she was insecure. She had an anxiety problem, which I understood because I’d had that when I was just a kid. I felt all she needed was someone to show her some kindness.”

Wayne’s secretary, Mary St. John, didn’t think that Wayne and Russell had an affair, and neither did Mike or Gretchen Wayne. “In the family gossip, I never heard that they had an affair,” said Gretchen. “What I did hear was that he felt sorry for her. She was really beautiful. I know that Michael swore that nothing happened, and Michael and Pat were on location when
Angel and the Badman
was shot in the summer.”

Angel and the Badman
revolves around its polar opposites in an effective way, although it’s slightly hampered by Republic’s habit of shooting many exteriors in the studio in front of a process screen. The mix of character and action is uneven, but the film has charm, takes the idea of nonviolence seriously, and, for a first film by director James Edward Grant, is fairly well made.
¹

“It sure changes you when you’re the producer as well as the star,” Wayne observed in an interview on the set. “I used to be a little vague about when I reported to the studio mornings, but now I’m ahead of time. I know all my lines. I love all the other actors in the troupe who don’t blow lines. I think we’ve got a swell story—I found it myself. I even think it’s got a message. Anyhow, it’s one I wanted to do. James Edward Grant wrote it, and the only way he’d sell it to me was for me to give him the chance to direct it. So I did. As a producer, I want to give new people chances. If they click, I’ll feel that it will be a sort of repayment for the brand of friendship and trust that Jack Ford has given me.”

The reviews were, by and large, excellent.
Variety
said, “John Wayne gets off to a spectacularly successful stint in his producing-starring deal at Republic . . . classes as a western but could aptly be called romantic drama . . . under any tag it is top quality film . . . and is a sure BO hit anywhere.” Philip K. Scheuer wrote that the film was “very probably Republic’s sweetest western. . . . John Wayne, who stars in it with Gail Russell, also produced it and on both counts he has done himself proud . . . told with sentiment, spunk and a leavening humor as well as commendable insight.” The film had been budgeted at $948,035, but ended up costing $1.3 million. Domestic rentals alone were almost $1.8 million, but Republic claimed it lost $249,784 on the picture.

Angel and the Badman
was Wayne’s first collaboration with Grant, a former Chicago newspaperman who had all the virtues and vices of that largely vanished breed. Born in 1902, Grant was slightly stocky, very articulate, highly gregarious, generally alcoholic. By the age of twenty-one he had a column called “It’s a Racket” about organized crime. He began writing stories for
The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Redbook,
and the like, right on down the periodical food chain to
Detective Fiction Weekly,
where he wrote a gem called “Dames Are Such Suckers.”