John Wayne: The Life and Legend (47 page)

Shortly after the divorce was granted, Mary St. John called Tom Kane one Sunday and asked if he had any plans. It seemed that Wayne’s lawyers had worked out a lump sum payment to Chata of $375,000 that would wipe out all his obligations. They needed someone they could trust to lug the cash down to Mexico. A couple of other people went instead of Kane, but that money, and the savings it represented of $100,000, was the end of Wayne’s relationship with Chata, who continued drinking until her early death in March 1961.

Tom Kane wondered about Wayne’s reaction to his ex-wife’s death and asked George Coleman, Wayne’s driver. Coleman reported that Wayne never said anything about her death—there was no response whatever.

Wayne’s vulnerability to an inappropriate, obviously predatory female like Chata when he was already middle-aged indicates a basic naïveté in his character. That character was formed early, as was his belief system. He was a hard-smoking, hard-drinking man by college, a conservative by the Depression, and his attitudes never altered by a millimeter. He tried marijuana but it didn’t do anything for him, tried opium but it didn’t affect him.

After the divorce from Chata was final in October 1954, Wayne married Pilar a month later. They would have three children: Aissa in 1956, John Ethan in 1962, and Marisa in 1966. Their mother was over twenty-five years younger than their father.

By the time
Hondo
finished shooting, public interest in 3-D had begun to fall off. Among other things, it was very difficult to maintain precise synchronization between two projectors running two reels of film, and if there was as much as a frame or two difference between the two projectors, the result would be audience eyestrain and headaches. Further complicating matters was the September 1953 premiere of
The Robe
in CinemaScope, an anamorphic widescreen process that didn’t replicate 3-D, but did excite audiences the way the 70mm projection of
The Big Trail
had more than twenty years before.

Hondo
was quickly edited and trade-screened in November. A studio minion reported back to Jack Warner: “
Hondo
screening last night drew excellent reaction. . . . These people plainly enjoyed the film and their appreciation and the good word they gave the picture at its conclusion seemed genuine. Picture played well throughout with no out of place laughs. [Geraldine] Page being accepted okay.”

The night of the
Hondo
preview Wayne, Bob Fellows, Jimmy Grant, and Tom Kane were at Lucey’s restaurant, adjacent to Paramount. It became apparent that Wayne was no longer listening to the conversation. Everybody followed Wayne’s gaze and saw a teenaged Mike Wayne escorting his mother into the restaurant.

“That’s the finest woman I’ve ever known,” Wayne said. He would never forgive himself for selfishly blundering into divorce, especially considering how his second marriage turned out.

In order to maximize revenue, Warners announced that
Hondo
would be available in conventional prints as well as 3-D.
Hondo
was released at the end of November 1953, and was an enormous hit in both formats. Produced for $1.32 million, it returned worldwide rentals of $5.9 million—one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Contrary to the general belief that it played most of its engagements in conventional 2-D,
Hondo
seems to have been among the last 3-D films to be widely exhibited in that format. Until February 1954, almost all bookings of
Hondo
were in 3-D; after that, it began playing smaller suburban theaters and drive-ins that were not equipped for 3-D. It was the second-highest-grossing 3-D film of the 1950s, after Warners’
House of Wax
.

The film begins with an arresting, quintessential Wayne image: a lone man carrying a saddle, accompanied only by his dog, walking out of the desert. Wayne is lean and looks spectacular. (“I was physically and mentally at my best when I was 45,” he would say decades later.)

Hondo Lane is an Army scout who has an uneasy relationship with creatures with two legs, a marginally easier one with creatures with four legs. “Sam’s independent,” he says of the dog. “He doesn’t need anybody. I want him to stay that way. It’s a good way to be.” Self-reliance is the keynote of his belief system; he’s a libertarian: “I let people do what they want to do,” he says.

Hondo doesn’t own Sam, but has more of a partnership with him. He appraises the Indians as having “a good way of life, but it’s gone now.” End of discussion. You get the feeling that if Sam were to get a better offer, it would be fine with Hondo.

But
Hondo
is also the story of how a man who thinks he doesn’t need anybody realizes that he just might need a family. He finds one ready-made after he has no choice but to kill the husband of Angie Lowe, a sturdily unglamorous frontier wife.

“I am fully aware that I am a homely woman, Mr. Lane,” says Geraldine Page (playing Angie), who wasn’t homely at all, just not a prodigious beauty, which in Hollywood means you’re homely. The line might seem cruel if it wasn’t part of the overall clinical nature of Hondo—the character as well as the film. It’s why the film is probably the best movie Wayne ever made that wasn’t directed by John Ford or Howard Hawks.

Page, who is as out of her element as her character, is one of the reasons the film works as well as it does. If Maureen O’Hara had come striding furiously out of a sod hut, the narrative would have been obvious, but Page gives the film an emotional credibility that would have been lacking if the part was more conventionally cast.

James Edward Grant’s primary flaw as a writer was a lack of subtlety—he tended to clobber story or character points with a sledgehammer—but the script for
Hondo
is not just lean and epigrammatic, it’s also graceful. Grant expertly communicates the mingled attraction and repulsion Angie feels for the Indian chief Vittorio, played by the Australian actor Michael Pate. He also captures the respect between Hondo and Vittorio—two men bound by a ferocious, mutually shared sense of honor.

The film runs a lean eighty-three minutes—a short running time minimized reel changes, which was important in a dicey system like early 3-D. The problems that plagued the production are occasionally obvious—some shots have a fuzzy focus, and the heat of the location was made worse by fill lights used to fully illuminate faces for 3-D effect.

Shortly after
Hondo
was released,
Mad
magazine came out with a parody of the movie. Bob Morrison, Tom Kane, and Mike Wayne were sitting in the office chortling at the magazine when Wayne walked by. He looked at the magazine and said, “There’s nothing funny about this. You guys make your living on western films.”

So much for
Mad
magazine; so much for laughter. Wayne generally enjoyed poking fun at his own image, but could get touchy when other people did it. “He was very tenacious about protecting his identity as a western, macho he-man,” said the photographer Phil Stern, who became a good friend for a number of years. “He would not allow anyone to make fun of that except himself.”

As part of the promotion for
Hondo
, Wayne made what seems to have been his first extensive television appearance other than a brief bit on
Art Linkletter’s House Party.
Wayne appeared on
The Colgate Comedy Hour
in October 1953. The show was a big-budget, all-star spectacular with revolving hosts: Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Donald O’Connor, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello.

Wayne’s episode is gleefully under-rehearsed, rather in the manner of the later Dean Martin show. Wayne comes on and looks thoughtful while a voice-over tells us his thoughts à la
Strange Interlude
: “Why does [Durante] want to see me? Probably wants me to be on his television show. Why did Gary Cooper have to be out of town?”

Later in the skit, after a long pause, Durante asks him, “Who’s got the next line, you or me?” Wayne breaks up and says, “You! We gotta work together.”

Throughout the show, Wayne carries on manfully even though he seems to have only the vaguest idea of what he’s supposed to be doing, which turns out to be singing a little, then switching his body language to the feminine when his voice becomes a soprano. The critics weren’t impressed—
Variety
’s review said, “[Wayne] was unsure of himself and awkward in his lines and movements but Durante covered his nervousness by making a few fumbles with him. But with JD a goofed line is always good for a big laugh.”

During that same trip to New York, he made an appearance on the Milton Berle show, during which he insisted that he was not one of those actors who go on TV just to plug a new movie. Every time he turned around, there was a big electric sign on his pants flashing HONDO.

“It got big laughs, but I felt embarrassed, kind of humiliated” said Wayne in retrospect. “I thought I had made a fool of myself. I felt I was basically a movie actor. I didn’t belong in television.” Wayne didn’t feel secure playing comedy unless he had rehearsed it with a director he trusted. That, and TV’s habit of burying the director in the control room a mile away from the actors, unnerved Wayne.

Besides that, there was the issue of prestige; at this point, TV had the aura of the B movies in which he had been mired for a long, long decade.

Wayne-Fellows was set up as a complete studio operation. Aside from associate-producer/brother-of-the-star Bob Morrison, the company had its own art director (Al Ybarra), production manager (Nate Edwards), and cameramen (Archie Stout and William Clothier).

Clothier had worked for Bill Wellman as far back as
Wings
in 1927. John Ford had offered Clothier a lieutenant’s commission in his unit during the war, but Clothier had taken a captaincy in the Air Force instead, where he shot
The Memphis Belle
for William Wyler. Unusually, Ford didn’t hold the rejection against Clothier and hired him to shoot second unit on
Fort Apache
, where he told him he was “too good to be a second cameraman.”

Wayne would hire Clothier as a cameraman for reasons both personal and professional. “Bill Clothier was like my father,” said Michael Wayne. “He was independent, wasn’t a joiner. For a long time he didn’t belong to [the American Society of Cinematographers], and to get nominated for an Oscar you had to be a member. But Bill could do anything you wanted. He could get beautiful shots
and
keep to a schedule. A lot of cameramen take days to get their shots, but that’s not filmmaking, that’s waiting for shots.”

In 1953, Wayne told reporters that in three years’ time he intended to be producing four pictures a year and starring in only one. He was even signing contract players—James Arness, for instance. By that October, he was angling to sign Ronald Colman to star in
The High and the
Mighty.

Wayne had adopted some of John Ford’s production grace notes for his own; as on Ford’s films, Danny Borzage would serenade the cast and crew with his accordion during breaks. Otherwise, Wayne demanded a high standard of professionalism. “The men around me are doers, not talkers,” he said. “I won’t tolerate a free loader.” Unless, of course, the freeloader happened to be named Bob Steele, Grant Withers, or Bruce Cabot, who could turn the Wayne-Fellows offices into something resembling fraternity row.