John Wayne: The Life and Legend (70 page)

Overseas, it was immediately greeted as a major work. The London
Observer
found it “bathed in Ford’s talent and affection,” and
Cahiers du Cinéma
delivered a riposte to Ernest Callenbach and said it was “anti-fascist.”

Happily, time has been kinder to
Liberty Valance
than would have seemed possible in 1962. The picture returned worldwide rentals of more than $7 million, although the domestic receipts were only $3.1 million, below Wayne’s norm. Clearly, American audiences had grown to like Wayne triumphant, not as a moody alcoholic who dies offscreen. But the picture has never stopped playing in the fifty-odd years since, and is still capable of sparking serious debate. As
The New Yorker
’s Richard Brody noted about the film he called “the most romantic Western [and] also the greatest American political movie,” the movie follows the path laid out by the ending of
Fort Apache
: “Ford shows both the rousing myth and the humbling truth—about the extralegal violence on which law is based, about a glorious political career, and about love.”

Darryl Zanuck had staked what was left of his career, not to mention his studio, on
The Longest Day
, an adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s bestseller about the D-Day invasion. To hedge his bets he was determined to infuse the picture with stars. He began pursuing Wayne in mid-1961, enticing him with the size and importance of the project. “I am writing this from a little village in Corsica where we have been shooting amphibious landings with the Sixth Fleet,” wrote Zanuck by way of introduction. He explained that the script was a joint undertaking by Ryan, James Jones, and Romain Gary, and he was spending the summer supervising the huge battle sequences being directed by Andrew Marton, Elmo Williams, and Gerd Oswald. By the winter, he would be shooting the dialogue sequences.

Initially, Zanuck wanted Wayne to play Brigadier General Norman Cota—the part eventually played by Robert Mitchum—and he went after Wayne with fervor, sending in script rewrites in order to entice a star he had thoroughly alienated with his remarks about overreaching actors.

“I don’t want you because you look like Cota (which actually happens to be the case). I don’t want you because of your box office status (which I certainly don’t underestimate). I want you because I believe in these six episodes you can characterize Cota, and symbolize what he stood for.”

Wayne was interested, but noncommittal. In September, Zanuck set James Jones to rewriting the Cota scenes, but Wayne continued to make himself scarce.

Zanuck continued with the cajolery: “I am shocked to learn that you are going to be with Charlie [Feldman]. I advise you to change your plans immediately as Charlie is a lost fish in Europe. The main difficulty lies in the fact that he cannot determine in advance what gal he is going to take out to dinner—so he usually ends up eating alone.”

In December, Zanuck cabled Feldman that William Holden—another Feldman client—had decided not to play Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort and he wanted Wayne to play the part. After much back and forth, Wayne settled for $250,000 for ten days work—a huge payday, especially considering that many stars were working for $25,000 apiece for the honor and prestige of appearing in such an important picture. Not only that, but Charles Feldman extracted special billing—everybody else was listed alphabetically, except for “And John Wayne” at the end of the cast list.

Despite the traces of bad blood between the two men, Zanuck had no intention of delegating the direction of his biggest star to any of the film’s polyglot roster of directors. (Besides Gerd Oswald, Andrew Marton, and Ken Annakin, Bernhard Wicki was directing the German footage). Zanuck directed all of Wayne’s scenes himself, as he did with some other key actors.

Wayne and dialogue director Mickey Knox became fairly good friends, despite Knox’s left-wing politics. Knox would occasionally take issue with Wayne’s defense of the blacklist, but he remembered that “Wayne never showed any disrespect or anger when listening to me.”

The headquarters for the Normandy location was the Malherbe Hotel in nearby Caen. In Paris, Wayne was reunited with Stuart Whitman, who was sent to the location to deliver twelve boxes of cigars to Darryl Zanuck. After taking delivery, Zanuck asked Whitman if he wanted to go to work, and the actor was promptly cast in Wayne’s scenes.

“It was late January or early February, and we were all freezing our asses off on the location,” remembered Whitman. “None of us could figure out how that son of a bitch Wayne could be so strong, so impervious to the cold. It didn’t seem to be bothering him at all.

“So one day I followed him into his dressing room and I discovered that he had handwarmers built into his underpants so that they covered his kidneys. They kept his kidneys warm, folded newspapers in his shoes kept his feet warm. And he made sure I promised not to tell anybody else what he was doing.”

During production, there was a party thrown by a local duchess, who had a slight scar on her face from a dueling mishap, which Whitman thought was extremely sexy. At one point, Whitman walked into a bathroom and discovered the butler sitting on the bidet while being straddled by the hostess, who was vigorously bouncing up and down. He promptly backed out and closed the door.

A minute later Wayne came around the corner and Whitman beckoned him over. Whitman opened the door and Wayne and Whitman observed the butler and the hostess going at it.

“We walked down the hallway just choking with laughter,” recalled Whitman.

It was a long way from Winterset, Iowa.

Unfortunately, the shoot was not all ribald fun and games. A friend of Whitman’s had just opened a restaurant in Paris and invited the actor to bring some guests for a visit. Whitman was good friends with Robert Ryan, who lived a few doors away from him in North Hollywood. Whitman also invited Wayne, without knowing that the two men had a visceral dislike of each other’s politics.

“Bob was very liberal, and of course Duke was very conservative. We all sat down at this table and it didn’t take long before both of them stood up and started to go for each other. I grabbed hold of Ryan and someone else grabbed Duke.” It would have been an interesting fight; Wayne outweighed Ryan by forty or so pounds, but Ryan had been a heavyweight boxing champion at Dartmouth and a Marine drill instructor during World War II.

Later, Whitman asked Ryan what set him off. “Those fucking Republicans,” he said. “The day before I left to do this film, someone set off a bomb in my doorway and the door got blown off.” Ryan blamed the John Birch Society, and he was in no mood for a typical Wayne crack about “goddamn liberals.” Within a few days, Wayne and Ryan had repaired the breach; Mickey Knox reported that they even went on a weekend bender together and reported for work on Monday morning only slightly the worse for wear.

In his ten days of work, Wayne shot eight crackerjack scenes for
The Longest Day
, and he even does some expert but unnecessary exposition (“We’re on the threshold of the most crucial day of our times . . .”).
The Longest Day
was critically hailed and a great hit, but the script is inadequate to the drama, as almost any script would be. It’s a film with a couple of great sequences—the parachute drop into Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the Pointe du Hoc climb—more than it is a great film.

Another glorified guest appearance entailed five days of work for John Ford in the Cinerama production of
How the West Was Won.
Wayne played an ahistorically oversized—but accurately unkempt—William Tecumseh Sherman for little glory and the modest fee of $25,000. (Part of the movie’s impetus was that a lot of the profits would go to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, so the all-star cast worked cheaply to keep costs down.)

By this time, Ford had largely despaired of inclusion, let alone contentment, and his episode of
How the West Was Won
is all about leaving and longing. In the wake of the bloodbath of Shiloh, even U.S. Grant (Harry Morgan) is full of despair, which leads to Sherman’s pep talk: “Doesn’t matter what the people think. It’s what you think, Grant.”

In later years, Wayne seemed slightly embarrassed about
Donovan’s Reef 
: “[Ford] never should have used me in that picture,” Wayne told me. “He should have picked some young guy. It didn’t require much of him. All he had to be was a good-looking young guy, and I wasn’t young enough.”

Actually, a number of people connected with the picture seemed embarrassed by it. “Ford hired a friend of Wayne’s, James Edward Grant,” said William Clothier, who photographed the film. “Jimmy wrote a script and Ford hated it. He got another writer [Frank Nugent] and changed the whole damn thing. They called it
Donovan’s Reef
. You’ve got to blame the Old Man for things like that. Just plain bad judgment.”

Actually, Ford hired several writers; Edmund Beloin is credited with “screen story,” Nugent gets billing over Grant, and no less than James A. Michener was credited with the original source material in publicity handouts but not on the film itself.

The problem is not so much the picture—it’s a ragged but loving Quirt and Flagg movie mostly made on the island of Kaui between late July and September 1962—it’s that it’s relentlessly caricatured. It does have some compensations—among other things, Ford uses his ship the
Araner
in the movie.

The film has one beautiful set piece, a Christmas pageant that once again brings out Ford’s great gift for ceremony. And yes, Wayne and Marvin are too old for their parts—Wayne had arrived at the same conclusion as Cary Grant: he was simply too old to get the girl.

Wayne and Lee Marvin pursued their usual ration of after hours drinking, as well as comparing notes about literature, which led Marvin to exclaim, “You’re not the illiterate, uneducated ignoramus you’d like people to think.”

“Neither are you,” said Wayne. “Let’s keep it to ourselves or we’ll ruin our image.”

Dorothy Lamour went back a quarter century with Ford, to
The Hurricane,
but she and her husband had moved to Baltimore years earlier and she was more or less retired. “John [Ford] called and asked me to do the picture and right away I said, ‘I don’t know where I can find Hawaiian clothes in Baltimore.’ And John said, ‘That’s all right, Mary has a closet full of them.’ ” Lamour played much of the picture wearing Mary Ford’s mu-muus. She said that Ford “hadn’t mellowed too much, but he was a darling man.”

Lamour was stunned one day when Wayne actually yelled back at Ford—an unheard-of occurrence. When Lamour asked Wayne about it later, he explained that Ford’s thinking simply wasn’t what it had been, and that his eyesight was also compromised. Wayne was checking out the rushes every day to avoid embarrassment, and he was feeling the strain. He finished by telling Lamour that he loved Ford too, and he was sure things would work out.

But everybody noticed a difference in the Coach. William Clothier told stories about Ford wanting to work a short day, not wanting to venture far from his hotel room on location, and even making tentative moves toward settling for something less than top-notch photography—the foundation of his art.

The reviews ranged from mildly favorable to what-the-hell-happened? One critic said that “the screenplay . . . is almost primeval in its foolishness.”
Donovan’s Reef
cost $3.4 million, earned worldwide rentals of $5.7 million, and didn’t go into the black for decades. Besides his salary, Wayne got 10 percent of the gross after recoupment.

The film’s reputation has risen somewhat in the intervening decades, but it’s probably best regarded as a paid vacation for a director who had long since earned one.