John Wayne: The Life and Legend (86 page)

Henry Hathaway asserted his authority on the first day of production, when he gathered the company around him and announced that there would be only two hard and fast rules: no discussions of politics, and no discussions of cattle. (Wayne’s successful Hereford operation meant that he disputed the quality of any competing breed.)

It wasn’t long before someone from Texas announced that longhorns were preferable to Herefords. Wayne thought that was a highly debatable point, but the debate was quickly cut off because Hathaway fired the Texan immediately.

Off the set, Hathaway was a charmer who drank good wine, knew art and architecture, lived in a gleaming white modern house, and could talk knowledgeably about nearly any subject. He had been married to his wife, Skip, for a long time, and his secret burden was her alcoholism.

But on the set, Hathaway remained a martinet who had developed an unholy hatred for plastic cups. In Hathaway’s mind, a gust of wind might blow a plastic cup in front of the camera and ruin a take. Holding a plastic cup on a Hathaway set was like holding a live hand grenade on anybody else’s.

“Old Henry would eat anybody’s ass out,” remembered stuntman Dean Smith, who was doubling Robert Duvall on the picture. Smith was covering for Duvall during the shot in which the wounded Duvall slowly slides off his horse. But Smith caught his chaps on the saddle horn and got hung up.

“Even the horse was trying to help me,” he remembered. “And you could hear Hathaway hollering for a thousand miles. Duke was laying there with a horse on his leg, and he looked at me and said, ‘Pay no mind to that son of a bitch.’ ”

Wayne was used to Hathaway, but Robert Duvall wasn’t, and Duvall had a large hunk of true grit in him. He didn’t like being yelled at, and one day he blew sky high at Hathaway, screaming, “I can’t do this goddamn scene like Martha Graham!”

“Duke was sitting there with his mouth open,” remembered Dean Smith. “We all were. God, Bob erupted right in Hathaway’s face. It was something!”

“You have to have discipline,” Hathaway asserted near the end of his life in explaining his theory of running a set. “It’s like a father with a big family. What do you do if a kid gets out of line? You’ve got to whip him or pretty soon all the kids are wild. Well, making a picture involves a mighty big family, and there’s a lot of money involved, so I don’t let things get very far out of line.”

When Kim Darby started shooting the picture, she had just given birth to her first child and was simultaneously beginning divorce proceedings against her husband. Naturally, she was distracted. Hathaway hadn’t wanted Darby, which was bad enough, but on top of that he didn’t particularly like her.

“My problem with her was simple. She’s not particularly attractive, so her book of tricks consisted mostly [of] being a little cute. All through the film, I had to stop her from acting funny, doing bits of business and so forth.”

Complicating things was the fact that Darby was scared of horses; Hath-away had to use stuntwoman Polly Burson wearing a Darby mask for most of the picture. Darby estimated that she was actually on a horse for perhaps five minutes of the finished picture.

Surrounded by an angry director, a nervous actress, and the inexperienced Glen Campbell, Wayne took the reins between his teeth the same way Rooster Cogburn does in the climax of the film. “He was there on the set before anyone else and knew every line perfectly,” said Kim Darby.

Joining the picture for seven days to play a doomed heavy was Dennis Hopper, who was taking a break from editing
Easy Rider
. Hopper had come to love the director who had driven him to distraction on
From Hell to Texas
. “I studied his films when I began directing, and I realized he was a very pure filmmaker.” Working on
The Sons of Katie Elder
in Durango five years before had given Hopper the idea for
The Last Movie
. “For the movie, Henry had built fake facades in front of real houses! And people there were still riding horses, and they still wore guns. And I wondered what they would do when they walked past these facades once the film crew had gone.” Hopper would eventually offer Hathaway the part of the director of the film within the film in
The Last Movie
, but his doctor wouldn’t let him work at the high elevations in Peru. Hopper hired Sam Fuller instead.

Near the end of his own life, Hopper took pride in a couple of things: when Henry Hathaway died in 1985, Hopper went to the funeral of a man who had first been a tormentor, then a mentor. “I was one of about seventeen people at the Rosary. He wasn’t a beloved man, and he had outlived most of his peers.”

That and one other thing: “In both of the films I made with John Wayne, I died in his arms.”

Five weeks into the shoot, Wayne wrote Hal Wallis a letter from his quarters at the Lazy IG Motel in Montrose, Colorado. There was a general feeling that the film was working well and was going to be a hit, and Wayne had heard rumors of a possible reserved seat release. He asked Wallis to think about it before a summer general release. He closed by saying that he didn’t really know much about distribution, but was throwing the idea out on behalf of a picture he believed in. “I’m sure this one is going to make those theater owners ‘fill their hands.’ ”

The locations in Montrose were nearly six thousand feet above sea level, causing Wayne his usual difficulty with his breathing, but he didn’t flinch, except for the day they were shooting his mounted charge against Lucky Ned Pepper’s gang. For his close-up, with the reins between his teeth, twirling and cocking his rifle one-handed as he bore down on the outlaws, Wayne was not sitting on a horse, but on a saddle mounted on a camera car. The still man took some shots of Wayne on the contraption, and the actor stopped, leveling his rifle and the pistol at the still man and firing blanks at him.

“If they’d been real bullets the guy would have been dead,” remembered Glen Campbell. “He got down, ran the guy down, took the camera, took the film out of it and called [him] numerous names. The still man was gone after that.”

He was always going to be in the John Wayne business, always going to be protecting the franchise.

At the end of the Montrose shoot, they shot the tag of the picture, the last scene in the cemetery with Wayne and Darby. They couldn’t get the whole scene done in one day, and when they came back in the morning to finish, they found it had snowed during the night. Hathaway quickly decided to reshoot the entire scene to take advantage of the snow.

Gary Combs, a stuntman who was working the picture, said that Wayne was slower than he had been, because of the elevation, but he did the jump himself for the freeze frame that ends the picture.

“It’s not an easy thing for an actor to do, to ride a jumping horse. But [stuntman Chuck] Hayward took his old sorrel horse Twinkletoes, and we made a low jump and we set the camera low and Duke ran the horse down there and jumped over the thing which was probably about two feet high. It was a nice jump. . . . He was game for anything.”

By the time the picture got back to the studio for the interiors, Kim Darby was telling Hal Wallis she would never work for Hathaway again. John Wayne was another matter. “He was wonderful to work with, he really was,” said Darby. “When you work with someone who’s as big a star as he is . . . there’s an unspoken thing that they sort of set the environment for the working conditions on the set and the feeling on the set. And he creates an environment that is very safe to work in. He’s very supportive of the people around him and the people he works with, very supportive.

“He’s really a reflection, an honest reflection, of what he really is. I mean, that’s what you see on the screen. He’s simple and direct, and I love that in his work.”

Patrick Wayne visited the set at Paramount. “It was a courtroom scene, and they were doing a close-up of my dad on the witness stand. Hathaway was going nuts, pacing around and screaming. I had brought a friend of my dad’s over to the set, and Hathaway turned around and looked at us. ‘I want silence on this set, and I don’t care who the fuck you’re related to!’ he yelled. And neither of us was saying anything.

“My dad just rolled his eyes.”

“Acting in the movie business is not limited to actors,” observed George Kennedy. “Ford, Hathaway, Preminger, all those men were good directors, but they were also performers in their own right. They would do things for effect, to make them more important. Are they in charge? They better be, or I assure you that the actors will walk all over them.”

Wayne gave Roger Ebert an interview during the production of
True Grit
and he told the critic that he thought the film was his first good part in twenty years. Ebert’s eyebrows shot up, but Wayne persisted. “I’ve gotten damn few roles you could get your teeth into and develop a character. . . . I haven’t had a role like [Rooster Cogburn] since
The Searchers
. And before that, maybe Sgt. Stryker [in
Sands of Iwo Jima
] or
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, another great Ford picture. Just look at
The Quiet Man
. Everybody was a character but me.”

While the picture was shooting interiors at Paramount, there was a photo shoot featuring all the stars who were working on the lot: Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood, Goldie Hawn, along with Wayne. Kim Darby was sitting on the curb watching the photo shoot when Wayne saw her. “Hey kid,” he said as he walked away from the shoot, lifted her off the curb and carried her over to the shoot, putting her in the center of the picture. “How wonderful was that?” she asked over forty years later.

True Grit
began shooting on September 5, 1968, and finished on December 6, a couple of weeks over schedule (Darby got sick and missed three days, among other things) and a final cost of $4.5 million, $470,000 over budget. But nobody at the studio complained, because from the first rushes all the way through postproduction it was clear that they had a winner; the only question was how big the picture would be.

Wayne hovered over the picture, taking a look at a rough cut five weeks later, then dictating a memo to Wallis about the editing. He told the producer that he didn’t think Kim Darby hit her stride until her character’s meeting with Rooster. The quicker they could get to the scene with Lawyer Daggett after the death of Glen Campbell, the better off they’d be, and he thought the editor needed to give Strother Martin another two or three feet of his close-up in that scene. He was alarmed by the absence of the shot of Kim Darby uttering the film’s title line when Rooster charges the four outlaws.

Mostly, he thought the picture had been edited too tightly: “I plead with you to lengthen the looks in two or three of the intimate scenes. . . . It’s too big a picture to cut because of expediency, like a television show.”

In May 1969, a few weeks before the picture was released, Wayne wrote to Marguerite Roberts thanking her for her “magnificent” screenplay, especially for the beautiful ending in the cemetery that she had devised in Portis’s style. He closed by telling her, “Please write once in a while with me in mind.”

When it was released in June 1969, even critics who had excoriated Wayne for
The Green Berets
realized that the actor had long since transcended categories and politics. “I never thought I would be able to take John Wayne seriously again,” wrote Vincent Canby in
The New York Times
. “The curious thing about
True Grit
is that although he still is playing a variation on the self-assured serviceman he has played so many times in the past, the character that seemed grotesque in Vietnam fits into this frontier landscape, emotionally and perhaps politically too.”

Not everybody liked Kim Darby—Stanley Kauffman said she was the dullest discovery since Millie Perkins in
The Diary of Anne Frank,
and Penelope Gilliatt in
The New Yorker
stupidly said that the final scene in the graveyard was “offensive . . . a coarse piece of opportunism.”

Some critics felt that Wayne’s performance was little more than expert self-parody, a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of all the roles Wayne had played over the previous forty years. But those who had known him and worked with Wayne knew that Rooster Cogburn’s charge into four heavily armed outlaws was a metaphor for the values of the actor playing him. “This was as factual a rendition of Duke’s attitude toward life and death as a government report on the national deficit,” observed Melville Shavelson. “Maybe more factual.”

True Grit
brought Wayne his second Academy Award nomination as an actor. Wayne’s relationship to the Academy Award was slightly touchy. As early as 1954, he was pointing out that he had been nominated only once, for
Sands of Iwo Jima.
“Usually, I attend the Academy Awards to be on hand in case one of my friends, who is not in town, wins an Oscar and I can accept it in his behalf,” he said with a touch of asperity. “I have received awards for Gary Cooper and John Ford. No one—including me—ever has collected one for John Wayne.”

He was up against strong competition (Richard Burton for
Anne of the Thousand Days,
Peter O’Toole for
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight for
Midnight Cowboy
). Since Hoffman and Voight would cancel each other out, Wayne believed that Burton was the likely winner. When the two ran into each other before the Awards rehearsal, they agreed to have a private party at the Beverly Hills Hotel no matter who won.

After Barbra Streisand announced Wayne’s name as the winner, he walked up to her and whispered in her ear, “Beginner’s luck.” Then he stepped to the microphone: “Wow. If I’d known that, I’d have put on that patch 35 years earlier. Ladies and gentleman, I’m no stranger to this podium. I’ve come up here and picked up these beautiful golden men before, but always for friends. One night I picked up two—one for Admiral John Ford, and one for our beloved Gary Cooper. I was very clever and witty that night—the envy of even Bob Hope. But tonight I don’t feel very clever, very witty. I feel very grateful, very humble. And I owe thanks to many, many people. I want to thank the members of the Academy. To all you people who are watching on television, thank you for taking such a warm interest in our glorious industry.”