John Wayne: The Life and Legend (42 page)

What was definite was that the company was headquartered at Ashford Castle in the village of Cong. Ashford Castle is, as Frank Nugent wrote, “a battlemented, turreted, Victorian pile built by the Guinness Stout people in the 1850s.” Cong itself had no electricity until the film company brought it, but the town contributed the pubs, the churches, and the houses.

What with the profusion of Guinness and Irish whiskey, it must have been a tough shoot for the alcoholics on the picture, but Ford stayed rigorously sober. Wayne also was on his best behavior, except once, when he had an afternoon off and went to a pub and started drinking. After shooting ended for the day, Ford and Andrew McLaglen went looking for their star and found him in a condition McLaglen called “falling down drunk.” Ford didn’t seem overly concerned, but at midnight McLaglen took a sandwich and some milk to Wayne’s room. He was already fighting a terrible hangover, but he was ready to go by seven the next morning.

As usual, when a film was made during the summer Wayne took his kids with him. “I was only eleven,” remembered Patrick Wayne, “but the experience made a huge impression on me. Mike and I were there for six weeks and my sisters were there for two or three. The people in Ireland are so friendly, and we had time to sightsee—‘tomorrow we’re going to Galway,’ they’d say. We had a lot of opportunity to see Ireland beyond the locations.

“In 1975, I went back, and nothing had changed at all. I remembered everything about every place I had gone. And I found that they played
The Quiet Man
every afternoon at four o’clock at Ashford Castle.”

Ford had a bad day or two during the location shoot over his frustrations with O’Hara. With Ford sulking in bed, Wayne directed a section of the steeplechase race and a scene of O’Hara walking home from the beach. Herb Yates was visiting the location and when he saw the rushes, Wayne told him, vis à vis
The Alamo
, “You see, I know how to direct.”

“The son of a bitch said, ‘Maureen O’Hara walking up from the beach is not the same as filming the battle of the Alamo,’ ” Wayne remembered. “I always said he had no taste, and I was right. I knew where to put the camera and I knew how to work with the lighting cameraman, and all there was to know. It doesn’t matter if you’re directing a small scene or a big scene, you still have to know where to put the goddamn camera. But Yates knew nothing about filmmaking.”

The critical and public response to
The Quiet Man
was mostly rapturous, although
The New Yorker
landed on the same qualities that have irritated a minority of viewers ever since. “The people are not only cute, but quaint, and the combination, stretched out for something more than two long hours, approaches the formidable . . . the master who made
The Informer
appears to have fallen into a vat of treacle.” John Ford won his fourth Oscar for Best Director, and the film returned worldwide rentals of $5.8 million—the biggest hit in Republic’s history.

In Cong today,
The Quiet Man
is an industry, and the 400 villagers put on
Quiet Man
festivals and John Wayne look-alike contests. They even went to the trouble of rebuilding White O’Morn, so tourists would have something to visit.

Throughout his period of frantic activity in the late 1940s, Wayne always kept one eye on
The Alamo
. Active preparation began in December of 1947, when he took two round-trip tickets and a $500 advance from Republic to scout around San Antonio for likely locations. Traveling with him was Pat Ford, John Ford’s son, who would complete a 131-page outline—actually more of a first-draft script—in September 1948.

Pat Ford’s script begins abruptly, but manages to avoid speeches about freedom. It makes a feint at a love story between Davy Crockett and a Mexican girl, and creates a fair amount of the characters and dramatic incidents that would eventually populate Wayne’s movie, including successful raiding parties and the characters of the Beekeeper and the Parson. (It also gives a subsidiary character the spectacular death Crockett has in the final version.)

Contrary to Wayne’s later story of wanting only a small part in order to concentrate on directing, Davy Crockett is clearly written for him: “Soldiering is a trade, Bub,” Crockett says in the cadences of John Wayne. “Just like harness making. Or gun-smithing. And fights are won by the man who’s best at his trade. Can you remember that? . . . You’d better, because from now on you’ll be learning that trade. It’s a hard one to master. Not many people have.” Overall, it’s a solid first draft, leagues ahead of the average Republic script.

A year after that, Wayne spent a week in Mexico looking for a more economical way to shoot the picture than could be had in the States. As always, Yates rode a tough herd on expenses; Wayne had to assume all costs for the trip over $500.

By this time, there were noticeable strains in the Wayne-Yates relationship; it took Wayne several years to receive his full 10 percent of the gross on
Wake of the Red Witch
and
Sands of Iwo Jima,
which cumulatively amounted to about $300,000. (Yates’s position was that Wayne had to produce as well as act in his Republic films in order to get his percentage.)

When the Feldman agency checked with Wayne, he said he wasn’t going to do anything so pathetic as write an angry letter, that he would get his 10 percent “or else.” “I guess he meant by ‘or else’ he would tear the studio down or kill somebody,” wrote the Feldman agency’s Sam Norton. Yates eventually paid Wayne the money. Then there was Wayne having to give up his percentage in order to get
Rio Grande
and
The Quiet Man
made, gestures that ended up costing him somewhere north of $700,000.

Wayne never groused about it publicly, but late at night, with a drink or two in him, he would vent. “I get so mad every time I think about the money that this son of a bitch [Ford] cost me,” he said. “He is such a fucking bad businessman. I said to him once, I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, when you make a deal, please, once in a while let me in on it if you’re making the deal.’ ”

By 1951, Wayne was getting the distinct feeling that Yates was shying away from
The Alamo
. As
The Quiet Man
got under way, Wayne wrote Yates a multi-page letter of grievance. He was perturbed about the studio not anteing up as it should have for
The Bullfighter and the Lady
, pointed out that he had enlisted Jimmy Grant to do a rewrite in exchange for 5 percent of the profits, and then had enlisted “the best director in the business” i.e., Ford, to use his cutting talents to straighten out what Wayne called “a bad job of direction.”

After all this, Wayne found that the picture was not credited as “A John Wayne Production,” but, rather, “Herbert J. Yates Presents.” Wayne demanded his proper credit and closed by saying, “I want you to stop misconstruing my cooperation and fellowship as stupidity.”

In mid-1951, Yates asked if the script for
The Alamo
was ready. At this point, only four of Wayne’s contractual seven pictures had been made and his contract was up in seven months. The budget for
The Alamo
had been locked at $1.2 million, even though in Wayne’s own estimation, and that of many others who read the script, it was a $3 million picture. On August 28, Wayne wrote a letter charging that Yates and his organization were engaged in a backdoor sabotage operation—that Republic had killed a deal to make the movie in Mexico, even though the budget wouldn’t allow it to be made in America.

Wayne’s sense of grievance boiled over again regarding the costumes. Wayne had gotten estimates for leather uniforms made in Mexico for $15 apiece against a $150 weekly rental from Western Costume. A Republic employee named Baker had replied, “We’ll take care of that, Duke—we’ll check what they can be made for down there and what they can be made for up here and decide which is best.”

Wayne was enraged at Baker “talking down to me as if I were a child, or with no regard for what I had just a minute before stated.” He concluded by writing, “I can’t spend all my time at this studio fighting with people who do not understand or recognize the needs of Class A pictures.”

In September 1951, Yates sent Wayne a six-page letter of his own, enumerating several main points: he regarded Wayne as being overly kind in his choice of associates, people he regarded as being far below Wayne’s own standards. (This was a veiled but justified swipe at Grant Withers, whom Wayne had made associate producer on
The Bullfighter and the Lady
.) Yates then pointed out that he had paid James Edward Grant $30,000 for a screenplay that had not yet been delivered. So far, so good.

Yates then went off topic by making the highly dubious claim that Republic had lost money on two previous John Wayne productions (
Angel and the Badman
and
The Fighting Kentuckian
), that
The Bullfighter and the Lady
also looked like a loser, and that he had only made that film because of Wayne’s unyielding enthusiasm. The clear implication was that
The Alamo
was likely to be more of the same.

Wayne’s contract with Republic was due to expire on January 14, 1952, but the two men left the door open for
The Alamo
. Yates grudgingly increased the proposed budget to $1.5 million, with locations to be done in Panama. Then he stalled again, and on October 16, Wayne wrote yet another letter, this time more resigned than angry. “Every time it comes to making a picture, there’s a hassle,” he wrote, listing all the junkets he had made for pictures he hadn’t even starred in, all he had done for the studio, including giving up his percentages on
Rio Grande
and
The Quiet Man
.

“So I repeat: I will make
The Alamo
if we start on it immediately—or I will forget it. It’s up to you. . . . I might also add, Herb, that if I am disappointed in this instance, I will never make another picture at Republic.”

Wayne had been at Republic for as long as the studio had existed; he had proven his loyalty over and over again. But Herbert Yates hated expensive films—
The Quiet Man
verged on being too rich for his blood, and
The Alamo
as Wayne envisioned it was going to cost more than
The Quiet Man
.

Finally, the two men got into a shouting match in Wayne’s office, which ended when Yates stormed out, followed closely by Wayne. A half hour later, Wayne came back into the office and told Mary St. John, “Pack everything. We’re moving.” A truck would be there shortly.

Mary started packing, and just about the time the van arrived, Yates came back into the office, demanding to see Wayne. “He’s gone,” St. John said. Yates’s jaw was working furiously on a plug of tobacco; a bit of the juice was lodged in the corner of his mouth. He ordered St. John to stop what she was doing, and she refused. “Who are you working for, him or me?” he demanded. “Wayne,” she replied. She grabbed her purse and walked out of Republic, never to return—just like her boss.

Wayne left behind dozens of westerns distinguished only by his presence, some not bad costume pictures, and two pictures with Ford that have never stopped playing—
The Quiet Man
and
Rio Grande
. For Republic, there would be seven more years of diminishing returns, but the company was doomed by Herbert Yates’s unwillingness to manufacture anything but downmarket goods at a time when downmarket goods were moving to television. A relationship that had begun in 1935 was over.

And then Yates did something truly reprehensible. He simply purloined the basic idea of the Alamo, which was in the public domain, commissioned a new screenplay, and produced a knockoff entitled
The Last Command
that took some small advantage of the public’s rage for all things Davy Crockett in the wake of the Walt Disney–Fess Parker TV shows. Richard Carlson played Travis, Sterling Hayden played Jim Bowie, Arthur Hunnicutt played Crockett. It was a tawdry stunt even for Hollywood.

There were cards exchanged for birthdays and Christmas, but Yates and Wayne apparently never saw each other again.