John Wayne: The Life and Legend (74 page)

Initially hired as the romantic lead in the picture was the young Australian actor Rod Taylor, who was coming off
The Time Machine
. Taylor had accepted the part on the basis of Wayne, and hadn’t read the script. When he got to Spain, he discovered that there was nothing in the script for him to do.

“Why don’t you write something?” asked Hathaway. At that point, Taylor politely bowed out, to be replaced by John Smith. “I met Duke when he was with that monster Henry Hathaway,” remembered Taylor. “And I was so surprised at how he liked me and showed it. I didn’t feel that I would fit with him comfortably, but we immediately liked each other.”

For Wayne,
Circus World
was little more than a paycheck, but it introduced Taylor into Wayne’s orbit. Soon, John Ford cast Taylor as the star of
Young Cassidy
, his biographical film about Sean O’Casey, and Taylor found himself drawn toward the inner circle. “Working with Ford gave me a certain cachet in Duke’s eyes. He had such an emotional thing about Ford. I honestly think that he was still intimidated by Ford, and Duke was always amazed that Ford didn’t scare me. I didn’t give a shit, I just liked the man. In any case, he took it for granted that I was in the family. He wanted to keep me around as a sort of mini-McLaglen.

“Duke’s great joy in life was to beat the shit out of me in poker. I never truly won. He was a good chess player, but he was also a good poker player—stud and five card. He played for the pleasure of the game and he played as long as there was a bottle of Conmemorativo on the table, because he insisted it didn’t give him the hangover whiskey did. He
hated
to lose—the old jock thing.”

Production on
Circus World
began at the end of September 1963 on an overly idealistic schedule of seventy-three days for the main unit and thirty-nine days for the second unit. Wayne was contractually bound to work until December 18; after that he was entitled to $30,000 a week overage. But there were weather problems at locations in Toledo—the location was flooded out at one point—and the film went far over schedule.

Wayne was quickly alienated by co-star Rita Hayworth, who was chronically late, didn’t know her lines, and was surly to the crew. That experience may have been what led him to give his children a lecture about how to treat people: “Never lose the common touch. Never think anyone is better than you, but never assume you’re superior to anyone else. Try and be decent to everyone, until they give you reason not to.”

The picture had been shooting for two months when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Wayne had been a Nixon man, but he had a sneaking affection for Kennedy—he knew an Irish rogue when he saw one. Wayne had sent congratulations to Peter Lawford when Lawford’s brother-in-law was elected, and also sent a telegram to the president after his inauguration speech, calling it “thrilling.”

Years later, in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on his own realization of how he had assumed a position of secular leadership that had once been monopolized by politicians, Wayne said, “You didn’t have to be a Kennedy fan to be decimated by his assassination. It was a time to rethink a lot of things we believed; I had to reaffirm to myself my belief in man. John Kennedy could have been good—he was just beginning to realize his responsibilities. The Bay of Pigs taught him a great deal, like living up to his word. . . . Potentially he was a leader [but] we never had a chance to find out.

“There are so many people who can no longer look to politicians, but they’ve begun to look at me . . . so I’ve got an obligation.”

Oddly favorable words, but this was also a period in which Wayne was quietly engaging with many on the Hollywood left. He and the politically liberal Paul Newman exchanged “Dear Duke/Dear Paul” letters and books. Wayne sent Newman a book by a conservative writer, and Newman sent Wayne material by Herman Kahn. Neither seems to have changed the other’s mind, but they enjoyed jousting with each other.

It would be pleasant to report that Jimmy Grant’s take-charge attitude somehow saved a dicey project from going off the rails. Pleasant, but inaccurate. Bronston’s organization was going down, and so was
Circus World
. In March 1964, just after production had ended, news broke about the ruptured partnership between DuPont and Bronston. “It looks like there are a lot of problems ahead,” wrote Paramount’s Frank Caffey to Bronston production supervisor C. O. Erickson. He didn’t know the half of it.

Grant was still in Spain keeping Duke and his son Michael apprised of the situation, and of worrisome developments with Duke’s brother, Bob Morrison, who was also in Spain. Morrison had gone over to work on
Circus World
and felt that Henry Hathaway had knifed him out of an associate producer’s credit. His response was to drink heavily.

Wayne’s response to all this was, said Grant, typical: dig in his heels and “defend the indefensible,” in this case Hathaway, who Grant thought had first manipulated Morrison, then knifed him.

Like many dry drunks, Grant was finely attuned to other people’s alcohol intake, which in Bob Morrison’s case was huge. “Morrison looks dreadful,” he wrote to Mike Wayne. “He is the color of Spanish toilet paper and wears the expression of a man going down for the third time. He drinks all night every night with that bunch of bums . . . and then nips all day to keep alive.”

On top of all this, Grant had seen about an hour of
Circus World.
It was awful, “but what is worse is that Duke is bad. He has so many violent reactions when there is nothing to react to that I am very much afraid a lot of critics will single him out for some of the knocks.”

When the movie was finally completed, people were appropriately mortified.
Circus World
is beautifully designed by John DeCuir, even though Bronston’s financial troubles are made obvious by one or two recycled sets from
The Fall of the Roman Empire
. A shaky sense of production is indicated by an intermission in a film that only runs 135 minutes.

Wayne plays Matt Masters, who runs a combination circus/Wild West show around the capitals of Europe; his adopted daughter is Claudia Cardinale, complete with unexplained thick Italian accent, his lost love is Rita Hayworth. Before the inevitable reconciliation, there’s some thinly motivated spectacle—most stirringly a large ship capsizing and a fire sequence directed by Richard Talmadge—interspersed with some pretty good circus acts.

That’s on the positive side. On the debit side are some of the worst process shots of the sound era and a script that Herbert Yates would have rejected as old-fashioned. (The hash is explained by the credits: “Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Julian Halevy, James Edward Grant, from a Screen Story by Philip Yordan and Nicholas Ray.” And that’s not even counting whatever Frank Capra contributed, or the blacklisted Bernard Gordon, whose credit was restored in 2000.)

Jimmy Grant tried to take his name off the picture, but his agent told him not to be stupid, leave it there for future residuals, of which there were none. The reviews were dire:
Time
wrote that “Cinerama . . . magnifies a meager tale beyond all reasonable proportions. To sit through the film is something like holding an elephant on your lap for two hours and 15 minutes.” Produced for slightly less than $8 million, North American rentals were $3.5 million.

Circus World
was the second consecutive Bronston flop, and his Madrid studio completed its slow-motion collapse. Bronston spent the rest of his life in court, battling people who wanted the money he had promised them. Grant received $50,000 for his work on
Circus World
—less than he had been promised, more than he deserved.

For several years, Wayne had been troubled by a hacking cough, the result of his four- and five-pack-a-day smoking habit. On a voyage to Mexico’s Coyote Bay aboard the
Wild Goose
, Wayne wanted to go water skiing, but it went badly. Getting up on the skis was difficult for him, and afterward he was badly winded, then beset by a coughing attack. He never went water skiing again.

One day, as he opened his fifth pack of cigarettes and lit a fresh unfiltered Camel off the butt of an old one, he looked at his nicotine-stained fingers. “So maybe it’s six months off the end of my life,” he said. “But they’re not going to kill me.”

Wayne felt that he owed George Stevens a favor for the director’s favorable blurb for
The Alamo,
so he appeared in a much derided cameo in Stevens’s
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. The two men had agreed to the cameo in 1960, five years before the film was actually released, on the basis of a handshake. “I can use an earthquake, or a big storm to show the conversion,” Stevens told Wayne, “but I want you to capture it in your face.” Wayne played a centurion at the Crucifixion and had only one line: “Truly, this man was the son of God.”

A more meaningful part arrived with Otto Preminger’s
In Harm’s Way.
The bulk of the picture was made in Hawaii, with only ten days scheduled for the studio in Hollywood. Casting Wayne made perfect sense given the story: Rockwell Torrey, a naval captain, is estranged from his wife, but his son enlists against his mother’s wishes—the same plot as Ford’s
Rio Grande,
but transposed to World War II.

Preminger surrounded Wayne with a great cast: Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Dana Andrews, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, and, as Wayne’s son, Brandon De Wilde.

As with Ford, as with von Sternberg, Wayne easily coped with the authoritarian Preminger. “He had my respect and I had his respect,” he said. “He is terribly hard on the crew, and he’s terribly hard on people that he thinks are sloughing. But this is a thing that I can understand. . . . I come ready and that he appreciated.”

On the first day of production, Wayne marked an article in what Preminger said was a “reactionary” magazine and gave it to Preminger’s chauffeur with instructions to have his boss read it. Preminger was a liberal Democrat and dropped the magazine without reading it. That day, he took Wayne aside. “Look, John, anybody over 30 has made up his mind about politics. You know where you stand politically, and I would never succeed in trying to convert you. I would not even try. So you shouldn’t try to convert me to your opinions. Let’s agree not to talk politics and we’ll get along very well.”

And so they did. Preminger said that Wayne was “the most cooperative actor, willing to rehearse, willing to do anything as long as anybody.”

Wayne had never worked with Kirk Douglas before, but while they were never close emotionally or politically, they meshed on-screen. “We would usually have dinner together only once or twice during the entire shooting of a movie,” Douglas wrote in his memoirs. “And yet we got along quite well.” Douglas was not so sanguine about Preminger, who he thought was a bully and a mediocre director.

Beneath the surface high spirits, people watching Wayne saw something very wrong. “He
looked
ill,” remembered Tom Tryon. “He was coughing badly. I mean,
really
awful. It was painful to see and hear, so God knows what it was like for him. He’d begin coughing and he wouldn’t stop and it sounded just horrendous. He’d begin coughing in the middle of a scene and Preminger would have to stop filming. If it was anybody else, Preminger would have yelled some kind of abuse at him, but he never yelled at Duke.”