John Wayne: The Life and Legend (63 page)

There were inconveniences. The publicity office at Fort Clark caught fire, destroying payroll records, correspondence, and files. Some actors who weren’t working, such as Ken Curtis and John Dierkes, manned firehoses and tried to get as many file cabinets as possible out of the office. Later, a flu virus swept through the company, and 80 percent of the cast and crew got sick.

The shoot was marred by a couple of tragedies. There was a car crash that killed two crew members, as well as a civilian. A local girl who had made some forays into San Antonio theater was playing a small part and doing quite well. Wayne gave her more screen time and told her that if she was serious about acting, she should come to Hollywood and he would introduce her around town. She told her boyfriend about the offer, he became violently jealous, grabbed a butcher knife and killed her.

But a big movie is like an ocean liner—nothing stops it short of total disaster. During one shot, a cannon recoil rolled a wheel over Laurence Harvey’s left foot. He maintained his composure until Wayne yelled “Cut,” then let out a scream of pain. The foot swelled up, but Harvey refused to go to the hospital and hold up shooting. Instead, he dipped his injured foot in successive buckets of hot and cold water until the swelling went down. With his foot wrapped, Harvey just kept working. This show of raw guts endeared Harvey to Wayne and the rest of the crew.

Wayne had agreed to pay Jim Henaghan $100,000 or 2.5 percent of the profits of the picture for his services as unit publicist. Henaghan was importing a lot of newspapermen, but Mary St. John said he was also importing hookers to keep the writers entertained. When Wayne found out, he was personally offended and had it out with Henaghan, who departed the picture and Wayne’s employ.

The overriding problem of the production was that Brackettville and Fort Clark were simply too small to hold the 450 people making up the cast and crew. “Brackettville had a gas station, a Frosty Freeze, and a liquor store,” remembered Bob Relyea. “The liquor store did very well. Fort Clark was an army base where Custer had been the last listed commander. Their mess hall became our mess hall, and Custer’s quarters became Wayne’s.

“But there was simply no place to go. San Antonio was hours away. We shot six days a week. By the time you got to Sunday evening, it was like the Friday night fights. People would say things like, ‘Not another goddamn steak. I’m sick of steak!’ It was just too long of a shoot to put that many people in a small town.”

Relations between Wayne and Richard Widmark broke down completely. “Dick was one of the most professional men alive,” said Bob Relyea, “and I considered him one of the nicest men in his field as well. He was always courteous to everybody. If Dick asked if he could fly out on Sunday, I could always let him go, because I could count on him being in makeup at seven in the morning on Monday. His word was gold.

One night shoot, we were breaking for lunch about three in the morning. Dick came up behind Duke, touched him on the sleeve and said, “I want to talk to you about tomorrow night’s scene.”

Duke was touchy about being tugged at and he snapped, “Not now, you little shit.”

And Widmark said, “Fine!” and jumped in front of Wayne and put his fists up. And Duke turned to me and said, “What’s the matter with him?”

“He wants to fight.”

“Why?”

“You just called him a little shit.”

Wayne drew back. “I did not! Why would I say that?”

While all this explaining was going on, Widmark was waiting for Wayne to put up his fists. Relyea finally calmed Widmark down and got them both into the mess hall. Wayne was still insisting he had never called Widmark a little shit, while Relyea was insisting he had.

“I can’t believe it,” Wayne finally said, concluding with, “feisty little shit, isn’t he?” just loud enough for Widmark to hear. “I didn’t think we were ever going to get through the night,” sighed Relyea. “The sad part about it was that Duke’s respect for Widmark as an actor was enormous. Duke admired him. But Dick thought Duke was a big bag of wind, and he was bored with him and the picture.”

Things were much better with Laurence Harvey, if only because Harvey settled into the role of class clown. Harvey was a gourmet and had fine wines, champagne, and caviar shipped to the middle of Texas, all of which he would enjoy in the middle of the commissary tent. Wayne had admired Harvey’s courage, and now he came to admire his style. He also thought Harvey was hilarious. The photographer Sam Shaw, who was covering the production, remembered that “Harvey, in the middle of all the tough guys, the cream of the Hollywood stuntmen, the tempers, the heat, would go over to Wayne, tweak his cheeks and call him ‘Dukey.’ ”

“Duke teased him all the time, called him ‘the English fag,’ ” said Bob Relyea. “
To his face
. And Larry would laugh and say, ‘Where do I stand? Tell me where to stand.’ They got along fine. Larry was an awfully good actor, and dedicated to doing the best job he could. He couldn’t have cared less about the insults.”

At the end of one of Harvey’s scenes, the crew broke into applause. Jimmy Grant was standing nearby and snapped, “Don’t look so smug, Laurence. They’re applauding the writing, not the acting.” Harvey looked at Grant and said, “Quiet, James, or I will give you a big kiss and all these Texans will be sure you are a fag.”

Wayne would give line readings, which made Relyea and the actors bite their tongues. Once he even showed Linda Cristal how he wanted her to walk to a carriage, complete with a little sashay. Once or twice he snapped, “Be graceful—like me, goddammit.”

“Duke’s only problem as a director is that he feels every actor should be able to do a scene the way he can do a scene,” said William Clothier. “He’d be pushing [people] and screaming. I must have told him 50 times, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are; relax and be patient. Other people can’t do what you can do.” The one actor that Wayne treated with great politeness was Richard Boone, but then Boone was notoriously truculent.

The Screen Writers Guild went on strike while the picture was shooting, and Jimmy Grant had to stop working. It could have been a blessing in disguise, and Grant wrote a note to Wayne suggesting that if he needed a line to cover an actor’s move, he should just write it himself. “All the fans tell me they love you because you say such honest, straightforward things right out of your own balding, pointed head.”

But it was only a question of time until Jimmy Grant brought the spotlight back to where he needed it to be—on Jimmy Grant. After a disagreement with the president of Batjac, Grant wrote Wayne a memo quitting the picture and the company. “Don’t let this upset you for a moment,” he wrote. “I have served my purpose on this picture—and well, I think. I’m proud of the job. And this incident will not affect in the slightest my personal attachment to you. It will not dim the almost sexual joy I have experienced from having my stuff put on the screen by a director who had an instinctive and intuitive understanding of the values.”

This was the last thing Wayne needed to concern himself with, but he managed to put out the fire and keep Grant close. There were those who wondered why. Happy Shahan said that Grant “was an opinionated guy. He wrote a lot of good scripts. But when he made up his mind that he wanted it this way, he fought to get it. I liked James Edward to talk to; I argued with him all the time about the historical Alamo. Wayne knew what was right, but he let Grant out-talk him.”

Wayne’s main creative partner on the picture was cameraman William Clothier. “He listened to Clothier and respected him,” said Bob Relyea. “And Clothier was a solid guy; technically, he was one of the best cameramen in the world.” Clothier certainly worked magic when he had to. One great shot showing thousands of Mexican soldiers on a hillside was done with optical trickery. The troops first filled a third of the shot, with two thirds of the image blacked out. Clothier moved the same soldiers over and put them on horses, then unblocked the lens. The same group then moved further still and this time played artillery. “It looks like we had a pretty good-sized army there . . . but we had three times more people on the screen than we ever did on the set.” (The largest extra call appears to have been 1,800, for the final assault.)

“The picture was hard,” said Bob Relyea.

The nature of the piece was a couple of thousand extras. And we shot forever. People died of old age. And I must say, Duke never went off on me. He did get joy out of calling me “Bobby.” Somebody had told him I hated being called Bobby, so of course he had to do that.

The shooting was efficient. Some of the picture was storyboarded, but not much. All of it was storyboarded in Duke’s mind and we didn’t vary from that much. He would never argue about practicality or logistics. If I told him we were getting deep into gold [overtime], he’d say okay. His preferred method was to do his master shot, then move in. He didn’t do a lot of takes, but he wasn’t a one-and-out kind of guy. He would stay with a shot until it was right.

He wasn’t difficult. It was the picture that was difficult.

The only real moment of tension between the two men came on one of the dreaded night shoots. The production was busing in extras for the next morning, and Wayne and Relyea rounded a corner around two in the morning in deep discussion. A large woman was standing there, and she couldn’t have been any more startled by the sudden appearance of Jesus than by the presence of John Wayne. She began yelling,
“John Wayne! John Wayne!”
and then in a frenzy she started picking up pebbles and throwing them in Wayne’s face.

Wayne was used to strange reactions, but he’d never gotten one like this before, and he just stood there and stared while the woman kept scooping up pebbles and tossing them at him as some sort of love offering. The image was so incongruous that Bob Relyea first began to laugh, then lost all control and fell to the ground in hysterics.

When Relyea got his wind back, he looked up to see Wayne coldly staring down at him.

“Are you finished?” Wayne asked.

“I’m sorry. It was just that the image was so hilarious.”

“Well, if you’re finished, and if you feel like it, you can get up off the ground and we can continue discussing what we’re going to shoot.”

During this conversation, the occasional stray pebble was still bouncing off Wayne’s face. As they turned and walked away, Wayne pirouetted, took off his hat and made a low, sweeping bow to the hysterical woman. He didn’t speak to Relyea for the next three days unless it was absolutely necessary.

Relyea believed that Grant’s occasional presence was not productive. “Duke gave me the impression that Grant would not make changes in the script that Duke needed or thought he needed,” said Relyea. “I wouldn’t say they were on the outs, but Duke would say things like, ‘I need a scene here,’ and Grant would say ‘Sure’ and do nothing about it.”

“There really weren’t any [production] rewrites on that script,” said Burt Kennedy. “I did a little work on Richard Widmark’s part, but that was about all. . . . Jimmy was a good writer and good writers don’t want to work; after a certain point, he wouldn’t work on that script.

“The problem I always had with the script was that it’s a big historical picture and they brought in a romance that didn’t make any sense at all. I thought we should spend more time on the backstories of the men at the Alamo so you’d feel some loss when they were killed.” It’s entirely possible that Grant was simply written out—he’d been on the picture off and on since at least 1950.

Between the difficult location and the problems of the production, Relyea’s health began to suffer. Late one night, the noise from his air-conditioner woke him up. He got up to turn it off, but he fell down and blood started pouring out of his mouth. He lay on the floor until he felt stronger.

The company doctor examined him and told him an ulcer had broken. “Let’s see if you can make it through the night,” the doctor said, prescribing shots of warm cream. At two in the morning, Relyea was feeling pretty good until he went down again. The nearest hospital was in a border town called Del Rio, where he was given thirteen pints of blood.

Things got increasingly ragged. During night shoots the actors and crew had to contend with thousands of crickets that were so thick you couldn’t see the ground. Then there were the rattlesnakes—the high count for a night was sixteen—and skunks. Makeup man Webb Overlander said he counted thirty-two one day; Wayne had to hire someone who did nothing but catch skunks all day long.

Wayne stayed healthy—he was medicating himself with poker, whiskey, and tobacco, lighting cigarettes nonstop off the stub of the previous one—but he lost a fair amount of weight during the shoot. “He believed in the picture so much,” said Relyea. “Rightly or wrongly, he thought the story of the Alamo was an example of America at its best—that Americans should be able to hold off ten times their number for thirteen days because dammit, that’s the way we are.

“But if he had a couple of drinks, he would start talking about how he was going to be in the poorhouse when it was all over. And then he’d brighten a little and say, ‘But then nobody else in the poorhouse has ever made a $14 million dollar picture.’ ”

Relyea accompanied Wayne when he flew to Clint Murchison’s ranch to repay Murchison’s seed money. On the way back, Wayne said to Relyea, “He’s no gambler. He’s not gracious. He took my personal check.” And then he sighed and looked out the window. “The only son of a bitch who’s going to be broke is me,” he said.