John Wayne: The Life and Legend (68 page)

In June 1960, an informer, rated by the FBI as “reliable,” listed the members of the Beverly Hills chapter of the Birch Society as including John Wayne, Adolphe Menjou, Hedda Hopper, Morrie Ryskind, and Ronald Reagan. Nobody has ever confirmed Reagan’s membership, and it’s unclear if the FBI believed it. But the president of the Birch Society did confirm that Wayne, Menjou, and Ryskind were members.

Wayne ultimately became uneasy about the Birch Society because of its campaign against fluoridation, not to mention Robert Welch’s conviction that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated conscientious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

“What a bunch of horseshit,” he told a friend. “Ike was not my favorite politician, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Communist.”

Wayne had not been shy in complaining about what he regarded as confiscatory tax rates, as well as producers who couldn’t produce, and the ethical swamp of modern—as of 1960—Hollywood. And some producers weren’t much happier, in large part because of movie stars such as John Wayne.

“Actors are now directing, writing, producing,” complained Darryl Zanuck. “Actors have taken over Hollywood completely with their agents. They want approval of everything—script, stars, still pictures. . . .

“Now, I’ve got great affection for Duke Wayne, but what right has he to write, direct and produce a motion picture? What right has Kirk Douglas got? . . . My God, look at Brando with
One-Eyed Jacks
. My God, he’s still shooting!”

Wayne read Zanuck’s comments and steamed. But before he could exact his pound of flesh, he had to make some money, which is where
Hatari!
and
The Comancheros
came in.
Hatari!
is one of those movies that was probably more fun to make than it is to watch. Highly regarded at the time, nobody talks about it anymore. It’s more or less Hawks’s
Rio Bravo
formula: a group of likable characters interacting at inordinate length in a picturesque setting—Africa.

Hawks wanted to emulate John Huston and make a picture in Africa for years, and after the success of
Rio Bravo
, he decided it was time. Wayne came aboard for $750,000 plus 10 percent of the gross after the picture earned $7.5 million, i.e., theoretical break-even. The long location work in Africa meant that the picture was bound to be expensive, so Paramount refused to pay for another big star opposite Wayne. A provisional budget was set at $4.25 million, but that proved illusory. Base camp for the story about men who catch wild animals for zoos was set up at Arusha, about sixty miles west of Mount Kilimanjaro, on the eastern edge of the Serengeti.

Hawks told the cast and crew that they were privileged to be going on the most expensive safari ever, and he expected steady nerves and a lion’s energy. Unfortunately, nobody had profferred copies of the shooting script and the actors began to panic. They knew that Wayne had worked with Hawks before, so they descended.

Wayne heard everybody out, then explained a few things. “Listen kids, I’ve shot a hundred movies. Well, the greatest directors, including Hawks, never handed me a script. . . . You just have to trust them. If you’re good, they’ll show you to your best advantage day by day.”

Production got under way on November 28, 1960, and continued to mid-March 1961. Wayne didn’t want to use any doubles for the dangerous scenes with the wild animals and did a lot of the work himself. Pilar and Aissa were there for the first few weeks of shooting, and Wayne was relaxed and happy. Getting out of the country and away from the flailing of
The Alamo
was undoubtedly good for Wayne’s disposition.

One night Wayne and Red Buttons were outside their tents playing cards. Over Wayne’s shoulder Buttons saw a leopard walk out of the bush and begin moving toward them.

“Duke, there’s a leopard walking toward us,” Buttons noted.

Wayne didn’t turn around, merely said, “Buttons, see what he wants.”

Elsa Martinelli, the female lead, found Wayne to be a complete gentleman; she played chess with him and enjoyed cooking pasta for him and Hawks. Martinelli also claimed that after his wife and daughter left the location, Wayne began a discreet affair with a blond woman who lived nearby, but if it happened it was so discreet it was unknown to everybody else on the production.

A lot of interesting people visited the set—William Holden, Rosalind Russell, the advertising guru Ed Lasker, and even the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who came to talk to Martinelli. At one point, the publicity people inveigled Wayne into shooting an elephant for a photo op. While Wayne would say that “there’s no particular thrill in killing an animal,” he did enjoy an occasional bird-hunting jaunt with Bill Clothier or Webb Overlander. He also allowed as how the African environment, filled with the sounds of savage animals in the morning and night, did awaken certain atavistic impulses. “You take a different attitude than you did when you were at home saying,
‘Well, I’d never shoot a little deer.’ ”

Back in Hollywood, Leigh Brackett stayed with the film for the studio work, writing scenes that would tie the African footage together. She observed the star’s humor and professionalism: “I remember his working with the baby elephant in the scene at the end of
Hatari!
, when the critter gets on the bed and it crashes down. They tried about 18 takes, and he said, ‘He’s doing it right. I’m not.’ The elephant had his cues down perfectly, but it was Duke who was blowing it. He’s a much more complex person than people give him credit for being.”

Hatari!
opened in June 1962 with an insane running time of 159 minutes, completing Hawks’s transition from the fastest director in Hollywood to the slowest. In most respects, it’s a lazy picture, albeit with a first-rate score from Henry Mancini. Hawks is doing the mixture as before, with one new wrinkle that would be present in all of his later pictures: beautiful young women who can’t act.

It’s a strange, amiable ramble, with overly broad comic relief. Yet, by some strange alchemy, by the end of the movie there exists a palpable affection for all the walking, talking clichés.

Wayne thought the movie was okay, but overlong: “We should have done something so two or three of the sequences would have been different. You know, you just can’t ride out and catch animals the same frigging way all the time . . . it needs to have a variety of approaches and [Hawks] let the second unit do it and they didn’t know how to handle action. . . . Shit, we did everything the second unit did.” By the end of 1964, the film had amassed domestic rentals of only $4.7 million, although it went into profit in the 1970s.

Wayne enjoyed making the picture, but it became less enjoyable after he again had trouble extracting his overage from Hawks and Paramount. Wayne had agreed that Hawks was to have twelve weeks of his time, which later became fourteen. But as the shoot kept going and going, Wayne found himself budgeted for twenty weeks—five months, “which is about as much as a fellow can be asked to give.”

Paramount claimed that Hawks had said Wayne wouldn’t want any overage.
Au contraire
, said Wayne. “I would appreciate hearing from you on this subject,” wrote Wayne to Hawks. “I certainly want to keep my relationship with you a pleasant and fair one.”

Paul Wellman’s novel
The Comancheros
first entered Wayne’s orbit in 1953, when Charles Feldman sent him a copy of the book, which had been purchased by George Stevens. The director eventually sold the property to 20th Century Fox in 1959 for $300,000 as part of the deal to make
The Diary of Anne Frank
.

Originally, the film was planned for Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster as a follow-up to their very popular
Vera Cruz
; after Cooper died the western was reconfigured for Wayne as part of his three-picture deal with Fox. Charlton Heston was originally set as Wayne’s co-star, but after
Ben-Hur
Heston wasn’t about to take second billing to anyone, so the studio downshifted.

Stuart Whitman was making
Francis of Assisi
with Michael Curtiz in Italy when the director gave him the script for the western. “There’s a hell of a role in there for me,” Whitman said the next day.

“I think the part is cast,” replied Curtiz. “But when you get back to Fox, check and see.” It was indeed cast, but Curtiz told Whitman he would prefer him to the actor that had gotten the job, and told him to go talk to Wayne, who was shooting the interiors for
Hatari!

“I went over and walked behind him as he was going into his dressing room,” remembered Whitman.

“What do you want?” asked Wayne.

“I want to play Monsieur Regret.”

“Oh, you do?”

The two men spent about twenty minutes together and Wayne ended the conversation by telling Whitman, “You’ve got the role.”

When production began in the summer of 1961, Whitman could see that Curtiz was not in good shape; he had been diagnosed with cancer and had begun fading toward the end of
Francis of Assisi
as well. Working as a third assistant director was the future screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, the son of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The young man’s primary assignment was to pick up Wayne every morning at six at the house he was renting in Moab. The first day of the picture Mankiewicz was in the coffee shop of the Apache Motel where most of the company was staying, killing time until he was due to pick up the star.

At 5:40 A.M., Mankiewicz was just about ready to leave when he heard a clanking sound behind him. He turned around to find Wayne, fully costumed and made up, complete with spurs.

“Are you the fella who’s supposed to pick me up?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Wayne.”

“Well, I like to drive myself with my wardrobe and makeup guys. I know this valley pretty well by now. I’ll get there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wayne then noticed the John F. Kennedy button that Mankiewicz was wearing. “I’d take that button off if I were you. We don’t advertise Socialists on my set.” And then he broke into a big John Wayne grin, just to let Mankiewicz know he was kidding—more or less. Mankiewicz decided to downplay his political sympathies for the duration of the shoot.

Mankiewicz found Wayne to be kind and caring, a leader who projected camaraderie, although occasionally gruff. After a few weeks, Wayne told Mankiewicz to call him Duke, and the young man knew he had arrived.

Wayne’s warmth was in contrast to Curtiz, who was, said Mankiewicz, “an arrogant prick.” Curtiz sneezed into tablecloths, he sunbathed nude at the hotel. He might have been dying, but that didn’t mean he was going to stop pushing everybody’s patience to the utmost, as he had done all of his life.

Although Wayne had approved Curtiz’s hiring, the two men didn’t seem to like each other. The unease that Mankiewicz noted might have had something to do with Curtiz’s plans for a scene involving a cattle stampede. For the occasion, several dozen of Wayne’s own longhorns had been rented. Curtiz told second unit director Cliff Lyons that he wanted the cattle to go over a five-foot drop, then scramble up the other side. Lyons told him that some of the cattle would surely break their legs.

“Don’t argue with me, just do it!” snapped Curtiz, walking away.

Mankiewicz asked Lyons if he was going to go ahead and kill John Wayne’s cattle.

“Fuck it,” said Lyons. “Curtiz is the director. If he wants to commit suicide, that’s up to him.”

Mankiewicz was young and foolish, so he went over to Curtiz and asked him if it wouldn’t be a good idea to call Wayne and run the idea by him first. Curtiz grabbed a gun from an extra’s holster, fired a blank at Mankiewicz, then fired him.

That night, as Mankiewicz was packing up in his hotel room, the phone rang. “I heard what you did out there,” said Wayne. “Thank you. I’m going out to see what that Hungarian piece of shit is doing with my cattle. See you in the morning.”

“I don’t think so, Duke. He fired me.”

“Hell, by the time I’m through with him he won’t even remember that. See you tomorrow.” Mankiewicz showed up for work the next day, and Curtiz didn’t say a word.