John Wayne: The Life and Legend (71 page)

As with many of John Ford’s extended family, Wayne had a boat, the
Nor’wester
, a seventy-three-foot motor sailer which increasingly struck him as insufficient. “There was no pride of possession,” was the way he put it.

Between Ford’s
Araner
and his own
Nor’wester,
Wayne had had a lot of sailing experience, but he had always yearned for something grander—something with huge diesel engines. So, in 1962, Wayne finally scratched the itch and bought a boat. Not just any boat—a minesweeper commissioned YMS 382 by the Navy when it was built during the war. The Navy sold the ship in 1948, and it cruised the Pacific Northwest for a number of years until it was bought by Wayne’s friend Max Wyman.

Wayne was a guest on the boat when Wyman traveled through the Princess Louisa Inland Waterway. “Well, we had a wonderful time,” remembered Wayne. “There were three couples on board, but nobody ever got in anyone else’s way . . . and the comfort of this thing was just great.”

Wyman used the boat only once a year or so. Mostly it just lay at anchor in Seattle. Wayne told Wyman he’d like to buy the boat, and a deal was quickly consummated. The price was $116,000, and then Wayne spent even more to remodel it to his specifications. He called it the
Wild Goose.

The
Wild Goose
wasn’t a trim thing of beauty like Ford’s
Araner
, but rather 136 feet of form following function. She was made of Douglas fir, drew nine feet, with a twenty-five-foot beam and twin diesel 500 horsepower engines. When the Navy had her, she held four officers and twenty-nine enlisted men, but as a private vehicle she carried a crew of six, slept twelve, and cruised nicely at 11 knots.

Her appointments included two chattering Teletype machines—one for AP and one for UPI—a barbecue outfit, a wine cellar, and a 16mm projector for watching movies. The pilothouse, master stateroom, and a small two-bunk cabin were all on the top deck, while the main salon, a small head, the engineer’s cabin, a double guest cabin, and the galley, forward of which was the only enclosed dining area on the boat, seating up to eight, were on the main deck. The ship had five deep freeze refrigerators, with enough space to keep the ship fully supplied for a two-month cruise.

In 1965, Wayne renovated the master stateroom to make room for his king-sized frame. It was located directly behind the wheelhouse, and it had six feet, eight inches of headroom. That was all to the good, but the added weight on top of the ship meant that the
Wild Goose
was even more inclined to roll than she had been. With stability that crew member and later Captain Bert Minshall remembered as “marginal,” the crew dropped eight-hundred-pound sacks of cement into the bilge to steady her. The boat dropped down six added inches in the water, which helped, but over the years the cement broke loose and caused problems with the bilge pumps.

The master cabin had a color TV and a small library with some of Wayne’s favorite books, and the chessboard was always set up for a game. Hanging on the sides of the boat were a sixteen-foot Boston whaler and a seventeen-foot British dory for excursions. The atmosphere was comfortable, masculine, and far from ostentatious. For the next sixteen years, until just before Wayne died, the
Wild Goose
was kept at Berth 54 at the Lido Yacht Anchorage.

Bert Minshall, who went to work on the boat in 1963, believed that Wayne was far less a cowboy at heart than he was a sailor.

“He liked to fish for giant salmon,” remembered Minshall. “Forty- and fifty-pounders. He’d do that from sunup to sundown. He also liked wahoo, tuna, marlin, and lobster, but he was a fanatic about salmon.” Wayne would put about 100,000 miles on the ship every year, with his favorite destination being north of Vancouver, where he liked to fish.

“The first time we met, I was wearing brand-new Top-Siders,” remembered Minshall. “We were shooting the breeze and then he suddenly spat on my shoes. I guess I looked confused, because then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Always spit on new shoes for luck.’

“Well, okay.”

Minshall was from Liverpool, and became popular with the Wayne family because of his tireless energy and the fact that he was a good nanny for the children. Wayne adored them, but felt he was too old to tend them personally and handed them off to Minshall when they were on board. “It gave him a chance to relax, play bridge, go over his scripts.”

Typically, Minshall would swim with the kids and man the boat pulling the water skis. Once in Acapulco, Minshall was towing Marisa on a plywood sled he had constructed, with the other children in the boat with him. Wayne didn’t like the look of the jury-rigged sled and yelled out, “I’m gonna shoot four people if Marisa gets hurt on that thing!”

That put an end to the festivities, and the next day Wayne came up to Minshall and apologized. Wayne told Minshall he should call him Duke, at least when he was off the ship, but that came hard for the sailor.

Over his years with Wayne, Minshall became familiar with the actor’s fury, which was sudden and complete, but also transient. He also grew used to his apologies. “It’s my damn Irish temper,” Wayne would say by way of explanation. When Minshall’s parents visited from England, Wayne invited them to the house and cheerfully posed for pictures with the awestruck couple. For that matter, he didn’t mind Minshall bringing his camera on trips, good-naturedly griping that he ought to be getting a performance fee if Minshall insisted on taking home movies. The
Wild Goose
would occasionally be chartered out to friends, and Otto Preminger used the boat on-camera for his lamentable
Skidoo.

Contributing to Wayne’s enthusiasm for the
Wild Goose
was the fact that it could be used for parental leverage. “I need the space for six kids and the six grandchildren and the wife, that makes fourteen people already,” he explained. “A boat’s the only place I can relax and forget about my work. And I like to have my kids around me. You know how kids are. The only way you can have them is if you have something they want that no one else has. It was the same way with me. I love my mother and my father, but you make your own life and don’t see your parents much unless they have something extra to offer.”

In the winter, Wayne would sail for Mexico, in the summer for Seattle, with occasional weekends in Catalina. Few movie people were to be seen on the boat—only co-workers such as Claire Trevor, Dean Martin, Maureen O’Hara, and Hugh O’Brian were welcome. Mostly, he favored friends who were businessmen—a car dealer named Chick Iverson, or, for that matter, the boat’s ex-owner, Max Wyman.

Wayne made sure that Pilar didn’t succeed in her occasional attempts to redecorate the ship to her specifications. He once told an overenthusiastic interior decorator, “I don’t want my boat turned into a goddamned French whorehouse.” On board, Wayne would read and engage in marathon sessions of gin or bridge. In the early years aboard the ship, he drank brandy on the rocks, but in the mid to late 1960s he switched almost exclusively to tequila, which remained his drink of choice for the rest of his life. As with everybody else who watched Wayne drink, Minshall was amazed at his capacity. No matter the volume, he always remained on his feet, “coherent and coordinated. He never got seasick, but didn’t pretend he was more of a sailor than he was, either. I never once saw him take the wheel.”

Like all boats, the
Wild Goose
was an expensive toy. The ship’s original captain was named Pete Stein, a wild man with a drinking problem who was once thrown overboard by a steward he had just fired. Wayne didn’t mind Stein’s occasional benders, saying, “I don’t trust a man that doesn’t drink.”

“He couldn’t stand to be alone,” remembered Bert Minshall, “so even if we were only going to Catalina, he’d invite two other couples and play bridge all day. Every once in a while, he’d take a little five-minute break and dive off the stern to cool off. And every single time he’d come to the surface and say, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s cold.’ It didn’t matter if the water was 80 degrees—‘Jesus Christ, it’s cold.’

“He’d go out fishing in the morning, come back in the afternoon, go back out, back for dinner, then back out until it was dark. He’d hire professional guides to find the hot spots where the fish were. He’d come back with gunny sacks full of fish.”

On one trip aboard the
Wild Goose
, Batjac story editor Tom Kane was puzzled by the presence of a man who was introduced as Joe Roe. Kane thought he knew everybody in Wayne’s circle, but he had never met him before. Not only that, Wayne treated Roe as if he was a dear friend. Kane asked Mike Wayne about Roe, and Mike didn’t know any more about him than Kane. Finally, Kane asked Wayne.

“Joe Roe kept me from starving,” he explained. It was just after Harry Cohn had fired him from Columbia and blackballed him. “I couldn’t get a day’s work. I literally was not eating.” But Joe Roe owned a restaurant on Sunset and Gower, right across the street from Columbia, and he grubstaked Wayne to three meals a day for as long as it took to get back on his feet. Once Mascot hired Wayne for the serials, he repaid Roe for all the meals, but didn’t think it was quite enough.

Years later, he had Mary St. John track the man down. Roe’s restaurant was gone, as was his money, and he was at the veterans hospital in Sawtelle. Roe jumped at the chance to go on a fishing trip, and when he came back from the voyage Wayne gave him a box of fancy lures as a keepsake.

Perhaps because he worked in a business that was always convulsively unsettled, Wayne took great solace in familiar faces. Among the Batjac staff was a crusty man named Al Podlasky, an accountant who lost an arm in a streetcar accident. Wayne had met him at Republic when he was making the Three Mesquiteers pictures. Wayne asked Podlasky for a new pair of boots, as his had holes in the bottom and he was getting pebbles in them.

Podlasky was reading
The Hollywood Reporter
at the time. As Wayne finished his request, Podlasky folded the paper up and handed it to Wayne. “Stick that in there,” he said.

Wayne remembered thinking, “You old son of a bitch, if I ever get a company of my own, you’re the first guy I’m going to hire to protect my money.” As far as Wayne was concerned, the one-armed accountant had a job for life.

Things were changing everywhere, and not necessarily for the better. Grant Withers was gone, Ward Bond was gone, and Jimmy Grant was now a mainstay of Alcoholics Anonymous.

After a few years of hibernation, Batjac was reactivated for
McLintock!—
one of Wayne’s more personal films. It was an obviously commercial project, and the reason United Artists got distribution was that Batjac still owed the company $700,000.

In August 1962, Batjac and UA made a deal in which Batjac would repay the studio out of the gross receipts for
McLintock!
To maximize profits, the budget was kept to a very low $2 million. Wayne took no salary, only a percentage: 5 percent of the gross up to break-even, the first $700,000 in profits, and 10 percent of the gross thereafter. After recoupment, Batjac took 10 percent of the gross and 75 percent of the net, and the film negative was to revert to Batjac after five years.

In return, UA released the Batjac film library that had served as collateral for
The Alamo
loan and Charles Feldman agreed to make a good-faith effort to convince Wayne to play the title role in
Mister Moses
, a project UA was very high on. (Robert Mitchum played the part, to no great public or critical response.)

For $100,000, Mike—who became the executive producer on Batjac pictures—and his dad hired Maureen O’Hara for the part of McLintock’s estranged, continually outraged wife, a part she could have played in her sleep. (Some thought was also given to Deborah Kerr—who was twice as expensive as O’Hara—and Susan Hayward.)

Mike’s mandate in producing the picture was to cut costs whenever possible without cheating the picture. Mike’s father wanted Henry Hathaway to direct, but Hathaway’s price was $100,000 and a percentage. Mike hired Andrew McLaglen to direct for a flat $25,000, and so on down the line—not Dimitri Tiomkin but Frank De Vol, etc.

The film had a fairly comfortable fifty-nine-day shoot, but costs were rigorously watched. Although UA was releasing the picture, Batjac shot the interiors at Paramount. A month before shooting began, Paramount’s Frank Caffey wrote a memo stating that Batjac was “promised complete autonomy. . . . It is of the utmost importance that we watch every expenditure and make sure it has been OK’d by the Batjac office, as they have had some very unhappy experiences at Warners.”

Everybody remembered the film as a pleasant experience, with Wayne always hovering. For a scene where doubles for Wayne, Yvonne De Carlo, and Maureen O’Hara were to tumble down stairs, Wayne said he didn’t want stuntwomen doing the shot. “Why not?” asked Polly Burson, who was supposed to double for De Carlo.

“Someone might elbow or knee you in the breast or someplace,” Wayne grumbled. “I just don’t want to risk it.”