John Wayne: The Life and Legend (61 page)

Among the people he consulted about the picture were the historian J. Frank Dobie, and former vice president John Nance Garner, who, Wayne told Hedda Hopper, “was the only man in his administration with enough guts to stand up against FDR”—a comment that disappeared between the interview and the printed version.

By June 1959, Wayne was negotiating with Todd-AO to shoot his film in the 70mm process, but he realized that he needed still more money. He began canvassing for additional investors and the McCullough Tool Company seemed interested. On June 30, he wrote them a long letter outlining the project’s financials. The production cost was listed as $4.5 million, with an additional $1 million for advertising and publicity, $1.5 million apiece for the cast as well as distribution costs. With this—grievously underestimated—math, the break-even point on
The Alamo
was forecast to be $9.6 million.

He then outlined the returns on the three previous Todd-AO spectaculars:
Oklahoma!
had returned rentals of $11 million,
Around the World in 80 Days
had returned about $27 million, while
South Pacific
was at $10 million and still playing.

Donning the cap of Max Bialystock, Wayne went on to feverishly assert that the worst-case scenario for
Oklahoma!
and
South Pacific
was that investors would get their money back, plus 6 percent interest, plus a profit of about $600,000. If
The Alamo
turned out to be a real smash like
Around the World in 80 Days
, “my adding machine’s broken. . . . Under these circumstances, it seems to me that the million dollars and completion guarantee from your group is a safe investment.” The inference, of course, was that Todd-AO was some sort of commercial safety net that would bring the picture home no matter its quality.

In New York, Todd-AO cleared their corporate throats and announced that they had . . .
issues.
On July 8, George Skouras, brother of 20th Century Fox’s Spyros Skouras, wrote Wayne that the board of Todd-AO would have to read the script before it agreed to honor Wayne with its 70mm cameras. A week later, Skouras wrote, “To be frank, I am not enthusiastic over the script. I find the first 112 pages more or less anemic.”

At this point, Skouras was under the impression that John Ford was going to direct the picture, but even that didn’t cut any ice: “I don’t believe, however, even in the hands of John Ford, that the story incorporated in the script has the ingredients of a road show Todd-AO picture.” A few days later, Charles Feldman talked to Skouras, who told Feldman that if Wayne persisted with Jimmy Grant’s existing script the film would be a fiasco.

Wayne responded with both a letter and a telegram. The former quoted John Ford’s opinion of the script—“thrilling”—and went on to enumerate the displays of showmanship he was planning. He said that he would reproduce John Singer Sargent’s
El Jaleo
as embodied by José Greco and his troupe during the night raid on the Mexican army. “Picture that being used just as a background to a suspense sequence in which a group of our men are sneaking through enemy lines, and you will realize the scope of our artistic planning in this picture.”

After a few days of intense lobbying with Skouras, Feldman sent a memo to some associates in his agency outlining the situation. George Skouras hated the script and believed it would bankrupt Wayne. But his brother Spyros, the chairman of Fox, with whom Wayne was in serious business, pleaded with his brother and finally wore him down. Spyros Skouras even said that Fox would pay half of the guarantee that Todd-AO was demanding. “If Spyros didn’t put it in a personal basis—brother to brother—George would have said ‘no,’ ” reported Feldman.

But George Skouras wanted a guarantee that John Ford would direct key scenes. Feldman had raised this chimera earlier in the year, in February, when he wrote Spyros Skouras that “in all probability there will be a codirector who may not get credit for the personal scenes and of course a second unit director for the big battle scenes.” Since everybody in the industry associated Wayne with Ford, they assumed Ford would be the uncredited co-director.

Feldman’s opinion was that nothing else mattered but getting Skouras to sign on the line which is dotted—“once you sign the
papers
, you needn’t be
concerned
, as I will handle it.” (Feldman’s emphasis.) Spyros Skouras finally offered to have Fox take the picture over from UA if it came to that.

While all this was going on, Clint Murchison made noises about pulling out his investment. Murchison had agreed to advance $2 million, an extra $500,000 over his initial investment, in return for a bump in his share of the profits to 15 percent. Then Murchison got cold feet. Wayne wrote that he could probably find the extra $500,000 elsewhere, but Murchison’s $1.5 million was crucial; there wasn’t enough time to raise it elsewhere, and postponing the picture was impossible.

Batjac forwarded a balance sheet which showed that the company’s assets totaled $707,344, while the liabilities amounted to much less; there was a surplus of $242,943. Most importantly, the Batjac film library, which included
The High and the Mighty, Hondo,
and ten other pictures, was carried at a net value of only $27,655. Attorneys regarded the financial potential of the library for reissue and television to be, conservatively speaking, $500,000. They were Batjac’s own attorneys, but they were still grossly underestimating the library’s value.

On July 3, 1959, Murchison’s attorney wrote Wayne that the commitment would be honored. But Wayne’s massively scaled historical spectacular was still underfunded. Wayne and everybody else knew that he was going to have to ante up more money.

The final shooting schedule, dated August 21, called for sixty-six days, an improbably short schedule considering the scale of the picture. While final preparations were going on through the summer of 1959, Wayne and Jimmy Grant were polishing the script, with Grant beginning yet another rewrite—the twelfth!—in May. When he finished, the script had expanded from 106 pages to 156 pages.

As the final version of the script was being completed, Wayne received a letter from Raoul Walsh, which was accompanied by a still from
The Big Trail
showing Wayne astride a horse with the Grand Tetons in the distance.

“Have been looking over some old stills and ran across the enclosed,” wrote Walsh. “Thought you might enjoy meeting a dashing young plainsman.

“Read in the trade papers that you are going to direct
The Alamo
and also play in it. This is a pretty tough assignment but with all the experience you have had I know of nobody better qualified to become a director. So I’ll be rooting for you. And if you take the advice of an old wrangler, do not start the picture until you have a finished script to your liking.”

Walsh had intuitively determined the primary problem of
The Alamo.
Wayne’s years of thinking about the project had resulted in a prolix script.

The script would be the focus of critical dissatisfaction then and now, but Happy Shahan insisted that Wayne’s original ideas were actually much stronger than what finally emerged. “I have to defend Wayne. It definitely wasn’t Wayne’s fault as much as it was the writer’s. . . . I was there during arguments when Wayne wanted to do what history said and Grant said, ‘Hey, who knows about that? Nobody but Texans.’ . . .

“You gotta remember one thing: Wayne was very loyal to his friends.”

Shahan’s version of events was confirmed by Al Ybarra, who said, “[Wayne] should have done more cutting, eliminating [the scene in the woods where Crockett sends the girl home] and also eliminating the scene in the Cantina. That didn’t mean a damn thing. . . . When guys were down there on that kind of a hardship and with a potential war on their hands, they don’t mess around with feathers on their noses. . . . His writer, Jimmy Grant, talked him into that. And he talked him into the love scene which should never have been left in the final cut.”

The script became “way too wordy,” according to Gretchen Wayne. “They never shut up. No wonder they lost—the Mexicans could have come over the walls while they were all talking. But Granddaddy wanted to get his points across, and it was his picture and he could do what he wanted.”

Wayne was blinded by his dream. Concerned that United Artists’ limited investment would correspond to a limited enthusiasm for the picture he hired Russell Birdwell as Batjac’s personal publicity man for
The Alamo
. Birdwell was a legendary figure who had supervised publicity for Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
, as well as Howard Hughes’s
The Outlaw
. Not coincidentally, Birdwell had also been born in Texas.

Birdwell’s affinity for the bold began early; he had been a reporter at the sensational New York
Daily Mirror
in 1927 when he scooped the world with the story of Lindbergh’s takeoff for Paris. Birdwell had enormous energy, a lot of charm, and wasn’t hampered by excessive amounts of taste.

Wayne’s plan was that Birdwell would work in tandem with UA’s own publicity apparatus on
The Alamo
, but UA immediately resented the idea of Birdwell’s interference, mostly because they regarded his ideas as old-fashioned ballyhoo that, given the seriousness of the picture, was in atrocious taste. The conflict that resulted undoubtedly damaged the picture.

Wayne was pleasantly surprised when Frank Sinatra expressed interest in the part of the chilly, driven William Barret Travis. “Frank came over,” remembered Wayne, “he talked to me about the Travis part, he knew Travis as well as I do.” But Sinatra was booked up for the next year, and Wayne couldn’t afford to put off production and pay interest on the loans.

Wayne offered Richard Widmark his choice of either Travis or Bowie, hoping he’d take Travis. He took Bowie and a salary of $200,000. That left Travis, for whom Wayne recruited Laurence Harvey, hot from the previous year’s
Room at the Top
. Harvey came on board for $100,000.

Wayne not only personally hired every actor, he personally hired every stuntman. A twenty-seven-year-old Texan named Dean Smith was doubling for Dale Robertson on
Tales of Wells Fargo
when Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias took him to meet Mike Wayne and Bob Morrison. Smith had won a gold medal on the 1952 Olympic team with Mathias, who made
China Doll
for Batjac while Smith was playing for the Los Angeles Rams.

“I told them I could ride and jump with anybody,” remembered Smith, “and that I wanted to go back to Texas and work on something dealing with Texas history. While I was there with Bob and Mike, I also met Tom Kane. And then guess who walked in?”

Wayne remembered Smith from the Olympics and the Rams. After a brief conversation, he turned to Mike and his brother and said, “Let’s take this kid to Texas. He needs to go back home.”

Over in Culver City, a young assistant director at MGM named Robert Relyea had just been fired for mouthing off to the head of production. He had never worked anywhere but MGM, so was understandably worried. That afternoon, his phone rang: “Bob Relyea,” announced a familiar voice. “This is John Wayne.”

“Yeah, and I’m Attila the Hun,” said Relyea as he slammed the phone down and wondered which of his jerk friends was teasing him. The phone rang again, and again it was that unmistakable voice. “If you’re done fucking around . . .”

The next morning Relyea left for Brackettville to work as John Wayne’s assistant director on
The Alamo
. It was now late August 1959, and William Clothier was making test shots of the set under varying angles of light with the 70mm Todd-AO camera. Wayne went down a month before shooting to get used to the location and the sets.

“When we walked on the set for the first time,” remembered William Clothier, “Duke said to me, ‘We have no angles here.’

“What do you mean we haven’t got any angles?’

“ ‘We haven’t got anything to shoot.’

“Well, this is the set of
The Alamo
, they spent a million dollars building this damn thing. I said, ‘Duke, you got all sorts of angles.’

“ ‘Well, show me one.’

“ ‘Well, over here, you shoot through the stairway.’

“ ‘Show me another one.’

“So I showed him half a dozen. Then he says, ‘What if I’m out in the middle of a street?’ I said ‘We got props; we got wagons, we got cannons, we got cows and horses, we got all sorts of things.’ You have to set it up to frame on something. You put something in the foreground. Anyway, he scratched his head and said, ‘I never thought of that.’ Well, he’d never directed a picture, either.”

To a great extent, Wayne hired John Ford’s crew, except for Wingate Smith, Ford’s assistant director for decades as well as brother-in-law, and a man Wayne didn’t care for. Relyea’s status as an interloper worried him—needlessly. The department heads, as well as all the members of the Ford stock company, turned out to be extremely courteous to the assistant director.