John Wayne: The Life and Legend (32 page)

Quinn made an appointment and showed up at Bond’s house, but there didn’t seem to be anyone home. Calling out, he heard a voice from the back of the house: “Yeah, Tony, I wanna talk to you. I’m in the john, come on in.”

Quinn walked in to find Bond on the toilet. Bond pointed to the edge of the bathtub and said, “Sit there.”

Bond didn’t beat around the bush. “You a commie, Tony, a red?”

“Hell, no. Jesus be my judge, I never been even pink, much less red. Ward, I’m a loyal American, for Chrissakes, you gotta believe me.”

Bond, grunted, finished his task, and said, “OK, Tony, you’re all right. Go to work.” The part that had disappeared just as suddenly reappeared. Anthony Quinn never went back to the Actor’s Lab.

That fall, nineteen “unfriendly” witnesses were subpoenaed, as well as twenty-six “friendlies” (only twenty-four testified), with the nineteen eventually being winnowed down to the so-called Hollywood Ten, chosen because the committee already knew they had all been members of the Communist Party. The FBI had at least one informant within the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party and Hoover had authorized break-ins at the offices of the party during 1944 and 1945, during which the membership rolls were photographed. Because of the break-ins, the FBI had a list of 287 members of the party within the movie industry.

It was this information that enabled HUAC to lead party members to perjure themselves; the fact that the information had been illegally obtained was irrelevant because the HUAC investigations were not, technically speaking, a court proceeding.

Suddenly, it seemed like there was an informer for every Communist, not to mention everyone who had voted for Roosevelt. Sometimes informers informed on each other. Ida Lupino told the FBI she thought Sterling Hayden was a Communist; George Murphy was naming names at MGM, as was Mervyn LeRoy. Ronald Reagan was giving up members of the Screen Actors Guild, even as he and Emmet Lavery, head of the Screen Writers Guild, protested against the kangaroo court aspect of the proceedings.

Not everybody ran for cover. Katharine Hepburn spoke at a Progressive rally, after which she was accosted by an investigator for HUAC who asked her if she wanted to explain her remarks. Hepburn, he wrote in a report, “drew herself up” and asked if the agent thought she didn’t look like an adult. Then she told him she knew full well what she had said, was fully capable of writing her own speeches, and needed to make no defense of her position.

Once again, Wayne was absent from the struggle. He spent some of the summer of 1947 hanging around the stages at Republic, where Orson Welles was shooting
Macbeth.
For Wayne, personality always trumped politics; if he liked you, he was willing to overlook your ideology, no matter how rancid it would have been otherwise. Wayne and Welles could not have been further apart in matters of politics, but Charles Feldman was producing the Welles picture. Besides that, Welles was a die-hard fan of John Ford, which would have been enough to absolve him of all taint in Wayne’s eyes.

Another bond between the two men was their size—Welles was six-two—which is probably how the subject of the dangers of small men came up. Welles remembered that Wayne told him, “Always be careful to be sitting down with them.”

Wayne’s absence from the roster of friendly witnesses is curious. The blacklisted screenwriter Howard Koch (
Casablanca, The Sea Hawk
) thought it was another case of Herbert Yates’s bargaining.

In some cases, the heads of the studios made deals with the Committee not to put a certain individual on the stand publicly. That was true not only of so-called suspects or what they liked to call the unfriendly witnesses, but also of friendly witnesses that the studio didn’t want to have “tainted” by political publicity of any kind . . . somebody like Wayne is a good example. How are you going to get people rushing in to see him shooting down the Apaches when they start thinking of him as a guy wearing a suit and tie and saying what a great job all these seventy year old politicians with their glasses and bow ties are doing in defending America? Mixed message.

In other cases, individuals ignored the studios and made their own private arrangements to meet with Committee members or their agents without telling anybody. You heard Cary Grant’s name a lot in that connection.

By November, the House was debating contempt of Congress citations for the ten witnesses who had refused to answer the “Are you now or have you ever been” question. That same month, the studios issued the Waldorf Statement, which broadened the standard morals clause in Hollywood contracts that enabled studios to fire those employees who had “brought themselves into disrepute” by “defying the institutions of the United States government.”

And so the blacklist era began. There would be more hearings in 1950. The result was that dozens were jailed; hundreds lost their jobs; hundreds more left the country. Some died. Every motion picture union, from the Screen Actors Guild to the Screen Directors Guild, ultimately capitulated to the blacklist.

All this would be called by one writer, echoing Daniel Defoe, “The Plague Years.” Dalton Trumbo had another name for it: “The Time of the Toad.” During this period, the right-wing press regularly ganged up on performers who had committed the terrible sin of not serving in the military during World War II; the Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler accused Danny Kaye of not “giving exactly his all during the war,” then added the seasoning of anti-Semitism by mentioning Kaye’s real name—Kaminski.

Pegler neglected to mention that many conservatives hadn’t served, John Wayne among them. Nor did he note that the Roosevelt administration had granted dispensation to Hollywood so that patriotic movies could continue to be manufactured without the interruptions that would have occurred with wholesale drafting of the movie workforce.

But Wayne’s absence from the fray was not permanent: Robert Taylor served as the president of the Motion Picture Alliance in the immediate postwar years, but in 1949 he was succeeded by Wayne, who would be reelected several times. Officers of the Alliance at the time included Charles Coburn, Hedda Hopper, Morrie Ryskind, Robert Arthur, Clarence Brown, and Roy Brewer. The executive committee included Ward Bond, Borden Chase, Gary Cooper, John Ford
³
, Mike Frankovich, Clark Gable, Cedric Gibbons, Louis Lighton, Cliff Lyons, John Lee Mahin, James Kevin McGuinness, Adolphe Menjou, Fred Niblo, Pat O’Brien, Lela Rogers, Robert Taylor, and Sam Wood. A few years later, Cecil B. DeMille, Irene Dunne, and Dimitri Tiomkin would be added to the roster of the executive committee. All in all, the Alliance included a goodly number of the people who were part and parcel of Wayne’s extended filmmaking family.

Estimating the membership of the Alliance in these years is difficult; about a thousand people would attend the large meetings held at the American Legion clubhouse in Hollywood. The Alliance had sufficient dues-paying members to maintain offices at 159 South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, so presumably the membership included many more people who didn’t attend meetings.

In other words, the communists were outnumbered.

So Wayne made the transition from a quiet conservative who avoided testifying to a leader of the pack. It’s possible that he came out in public only after the battle over the Hollywood Ten was over and it was safe to shoot the wounded. It’s also possible that slow-burning guilt was a motivating factor.

“He regretted not serving” in World War II, said Mary St. John. “He was not the kind of man to dwell on it or talk about it, but you knew he did. You could see it in his face when anyone asked him about his war record. He would tell them that he had not served, and it made him feel like a hypocrite.”

Certainly, Wayne’s politics began to affect his judgment of potential projects. At the end of 1948, Charles Feldman sent him Robert Rossen’s script for
All the King’s Men
, based on Robert Penn Warren’s roman à clef about Huey Long. Wayne responded with a blistering letter that requested Feldman ask his other clients if they wanted to make a film that “smears the machinery of government for no purpose of humor or enlightenment,” that “degrades all relationships,” and is made up of “drunken mothers; conniving fathers; double-crossing sweethearts; bad, bad rich people; and bad, bad poor people if they want to get ahead.”

He concluded by telling Feldman to take the script and “shove it up Robert Rossen’s derriere.”

Feldman responded with a defensive letter saying, “You are entitled to your opinion. I am entitled to mine.” He went on to enumerate the project’s attributes—a Pulitzer Prize for the novel, for which Columbia paid $200,000, and Robert Rossen as the writer-director. “I consider Rossen one of the best talents in this business, comparable to John Huston, [Frank] Capra and [William] Wyler. We do not represent him!” Feldman closed by saying that if he had failed to submit the script to Wayne he would have been derelict in his agent’s duties. “I have never quarreled with your judgment, and I won’t do so now. To my knowledge you have been right more times than wrong, and perhaps I may have been wrong more times than right. This is my side of the story and I submitted it to you for the foregoing reasons.”

All the King’s Men
eventually won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor for Broderick Crawford. Willie Stark was a great part but playing him would have violated Wayne’s own personal belief system, and this he was not willing to do. He intended to play only men that mirrored his own beliefs, his own values, either partially or completely.

If there was a breach between Wayne and Feldman over
All the King’s Men
, it was brief; Wayne occasionally bought Feldman gifts—sweaters to counteract what Wayne thought was excessive formality at Feldman’s office—and the Feldman agency represented Wayne as long as its founder was alive.

By 1950, liberals were in full flight.
The New York Times
reported on an exchange of letters between Wayne and Walter Wanger, who had produced both
Stagecoach
and
The Long Voyage Home.
In 1944, Wanger wrote a letter to the Alliance stating that the organization “had made unsupported charges of Communism in the motion picture industry—it has linked throughout the nation the word ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Red’ and without proof.”

A few years later, Wayne replied with a letter implying that Wanger owed the Alliance an apology. Wanger wrote a cringing letter back: “If any words of mine hurt your group, or any member of it, I can only express my regret. . . . I recognize that time and history have proven the correctness of the judgment of the Motion Picture Alliance and its foresight in recognizing the Communist menace.”

Dissenters were now outliers. The Alliance passed a resolution calling on the city of Los Angeles to register all Communists. There wasn’t a single vote against the motion.

And then Wayne stepped in it by refusing to be as murderously ardent as others in the organization. When Larry Parks appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, he said he was willing to testify about his own life, but begged not to be forced to name names. Borden Chase got a call from William Wheeler, an investigator for HUAC, who said that the committee wanted someone from the Alliance to stand up and say a good word for Parks. Chase asked for a letter from Wheeler for cover, and then wrote a statement for Wayne saying that Parks deserved to be forgiven.

But when Wayne read the statement at an Alliance meeting, Parks was still equivocating about naming names. Hedda Hopper “grabbed the microphone and ate Duke out in public,” according to Chase. “Duke looked at me as if to say, ‘How could you do this to me?’ ”

As he had all his life, Wayne retreated before an angry woman and apologized to Hopper. Parks eventually caved, but his career was destroyed—the right hated him because he was a weak ex-Commie, the left hated him because he had named names.

Technically, the blacklist lasted until 1959, although the power of the Alliance diminished greatly during the 1950s. Over the years, to counter the left’s narrative of unwarranted persecution and tragic death, the right devised a counternarrative that was a mirror image of the left’s. It was best articulated in a 1951 issue of the Alliance’s magazine. “Three leaders of the MPA have died from heart attacks brought on by the strain of this bitter conflict, in which the MPA leaders have been repeatedly knifed in the back by people who should have been fighting on their side.

“The three stalwarts were Victor Fleming and Sam Wood, two famous directors, and last month, James Kevin McGuinness, one of the outstanding executives in the history of the industry.”

These dueling narratives have persisted to the present day. As late as 1953, Paramount studio head Frank Freeman wrote a letter to William Wyler warning him about privately associating with people that HUAC had named as Communists, among them writer Leonardo Bercovici and director Bernard Vorhaus. “Of course,” wrote Freeman, “the question of guilt by association always arises and if you continue to invite identified Communists to visit you or be part of any affair that you give, then you will have charges leveled at you.”