John Wayne: The Life and Legend (88 page)

Mitchum complained to Ed Faulkner, who explained, “Tell him to knock that crap off. He’s just playing with you.”

“Just like that?” asked the queasy Mitchum.

“Yeah, just tell him to knock it off.”

The next time Wayne moved a rook with his thumb, Mitchum swallowed and said, “Excuse me, Duke, but you’re cheating.”

“Well, I was wondering when you were going to say
something
,” Wayne said. “Set ’em up. We’ll play again.” With Wayne reduced to one move at a time, the games got competitive. When Howard Hawks visited the set, Wayne introduced him to Mitchum and suggested that Hawks consider him for a part in a western the two men were planning.

Most of the offscreen entertainment on the picture was supplied by Forrest Tucker, who was playing the heavy and had a high director’s chair outfitted with a couple of saddlebags. In one of the saddlebags was a fifth of Ballantine’s, which Tucker would start drinking at breakfast and finish by lunch. After lunch, he turned to the other saddlebag, which had a bottle of vodka or gin. That would be empty by the time the company broke for the day. In spite of such Homeric consumption, nobody ever saw Tucker drunk.

As always, Wayne was exuberant, although there was one flash of rue. The mornings are cold in Durango, and when Wayne and Tucker had to finish shooting a fight scene left over from the day before in very chilly weather, Wayne looked at Tucker and said, “Aren’t we getting a little old for this?”

Fenady noticed a couple of displays of temper. “He was not nuts about Teamsters, and one time he blew up because something wasn’t there and he blamed the Teamsters. And he blew up at Forrest Tucker once. In spite of his drinking, Tucker never missed a line. But Duke got mad at him because Tucker went to the assistant and pointed out that he wasn’t scheduled to work for the next six days. He wanted to take three or four days off. The assistant said OK, and I said ‘No, we might need him.’ ”

Tucker wanted the time off to go to Chicago and make a lucrative personal appearance, but it might have thrown the production off for one day. Wayne was adamant and confronted Tucker, who had been a friend since
Sands of Iwo Jima
. “Are you a professional, or are you not? You signed on to do this show. We’re shooting Saturday.
You’re
shooting on Saturday.
I’m
shooting on Saturday. We as a
company
are shooting on Saturday. Because that’s what we all signed up to do.” Tucker worked on Saturday.

Andrew Fenady noticed Wayne’s way of reading a script: “He only read the dialogue, never the descriptions. Descriptions he skimmed.” The first time Wayne opened the script, his eyes fell on a line another character had about Chisum: “He thinks his boots is filled with something special.” Wayne didn’t like the line, so out it went. After that, Fenady was afraid Wayne would run roughshod over the dialogue, or bring in another writer, but he found the actor very respectful of good dialogue, and even given to removing unnecessary lines from his character.

“There’s a scene where Chisum is opening up a general store. Someone says that the next thing is to open a bank. ‘Why not,’ was the line, ‘all it takes is money, and I got plenty.’ And he said, ‘McFenady’—he always called me McFenady—‘I don’t need to say that.’ ”And he took himself out of a scene . . . entirely. He was the most generous actor.”

Fenady noticed the easy working relationship with Andrew McLaglen. “When Duke worked with Burt Kennedy, it was ‘Don’t put the camera there. Put it here.
Here!
’ And it had been the same thing on
McLintock!
, Andy’s first picture with Duke. But by the time we made
Chisum
, there was never a strained word between the two.
Chisum
was really an easy shoot. And Duke told me, “McFenady, this is the most pleasant picture I’ve ever made.”

One morning Mike Wayne gave the company a 9 A.M. call, which meant the crew call was 8 A.M. As usual, Mike drove to the location with McLaglen and Fenady. It was 8 A.M., the sun was up, but there was only one lonely, large figure standing in the middle of the set. He wasn’t happy.

“Who is the smart son of a bitch who gave a nine o’clock call?” Wayne demanded, looking right at his son.

“I did,” said Mike Wayne.

“Well, tomorrow, it will be 8 A.M.”

“When that sun broke, he wanted to start shooting,” said Mike Wayne. Habits left over from Monogram and Republic persisted.

Besides his $1 million salary, Wayne was getting 10 percent of the gross, plus 15 percent of the gross TV sales—a very rich deal, commensurate with the great box office and critical success of
True Grit
. Ben Johnson got $30,000, Forrest Tucker $75,000, and Bruce Cabot $17,500.
Chisum
was a success, although not compared to
True Grit.
By 1974, it had earned world rentals of $9.6 million.

Wayne and Howard Hawks had been talking about another western for a good six months, and Hawks found financing from Cinema Center, a production arm for CBS. When the cast and crew arrived in Cuernavaca for the location work for
Rio Lobo,
Hawks had about eighteen pages of material. “It wasn’t a script,” said Ed Faulkner, “it was a fragment. Hawks did a lot of the writing down in Cuernavaca, although I’m sure he had some collaborators.” This wasn’t unusual for Hawks—he had made a lot of good pictures writing a day or two in front of shooting—but he had passed the point where he could pull off that particular high-wire act.

The altitude at Cuernavaca was difficult for Wayne, and Chuck Roberson was called upon to do almost any shot involving action. Otherwise, he was the same old Duke. The young actor Peter Jason remembered his first day on the set, when Wayne greeted forty Mexicans, walking up to each of them and shaking their hand, greeting them by name. “It was very impressive to watch the real guys do it. As opposed to today, when nobody even knows who the hell’s on the set.”

Rio Lobo
began to go off the rails fairly quickly, and Hawks couldn’t bring himself to admit that he might be the problem. “Wayne had a hard time getting on and off his horse,” he complained. “He can’t move like a big cat the way he used to. He has to hold his belly in. He’s a different kind of person.”

Actually, Wayne was in better condition than his director. One Monday morning, the company was ready to shoot but there was no Hawks. They scoured the set, and everywhere else they could think of. Finally, someone went to his hotel and found the director relaxing by the pool. He had lost track of time and thought it was Sunday.

In March 1970, just a few weeks into
Rio Lobo
, Wayne had to fly home—Molly Morrison had died at the age of eighty-one. She had always been formidable, and she didn’t get any less so as she aged. Bob Morrison would die that year, too, from lung cancer. On the ride over to visit his brother in the hospital, Wayne railed to his children, “You know what your uncle did? He’s got a tube in his throat, and the stupid sonofabitch is inhaling cigarettes through
that
.”

Wayne soldiered on. His energy was good—Dean Smith said he was “still as tough as an old boot”—and he still loved to play chess. Near the end of every shooting day, he’d say to Ed Faulkner, “Doing anything tonight?” If the answer was no, he’d say “We’ll have dinner and play chess.”

Some nights, a small group of actors that included Faulkner and Chris Mitchum would be invited to dinner at Wayne’s rented house. The company had a 6 A.M. call, so the actors had to get up at five, but Wayne would say, “Well, why don’t we go up to the Tropicana and see the girlie show?” Soon, there would be three cars lined up to transport the actors to the Tropicana, where tables would have been cleared in advance, surrounded, as Chris Mitchum remembered, “by 30 glaring Mexicans . . . who’d been thrown off their tables.” The group wouldn’t get back to their rooms until three or four in the morning—just in time to shower, shave, and go to work.

In June 1970 Wayne received an invitation to go to Las Vegas for a benefit that featured the astronauts that had landed on the moon. The astronauts had been asked whom they wanted to meet, and their answer was: John Wayne.

Wayne told Bob Shelton that he’d go if Shelton would go with him, and the entire twenty-four-hour experience gave Shelton a ground-level view of just what it was like to be John Wayne. By the time the benefit rolled around,
Rio Lobo
was shooting in Hollywood. Shelton went there with an overnight bag and at the end of the day they got on a private jet to Vegas. The plane was supposed to land and taxi to the private terminal. “Don’t worry,” said the pilot, “nobody knows you’re coming, and we’re taking you to the private terminal.”

The plane taxied over to the corner of the hangar where Shelton observed thousands of people clustered around, including some on top of the hangar—a mob scene. Wayne wasn’t appalled—“he expected it,” remembered Shelton, and he gave Shelton some of the autographed cards he always carried, so Shelton could pass them out.

At the Frontier Hotel, the beautiful people were out in force and also mobbed Wayne. If he was uncomfortable or in an awkward moment, he would pull his earlobe, which was the signal for Shelton to come over and say “The governor wants to speak to you.”

Glen Campbell was appearing at the hotel, and Wayne said he’d like to take a peek at the show. Campbell was in the middle of his set, but his conductor told him who was in the audience, and Campbell introduced Wayne from the stage. The lights went up and people swarmed Wayne. The lights went back down and Shelton watched with amazement at people crawling down the aisle on their hands and knees to get an autograph.

Wayne had made Shelton promise to get him on the 7 A.M. flight because it was imperative that he be back at the Newport Beach house by 8 A.M. It wasn’t business, it was Pilar. “If I don’t get there in time, it’s a death sentence,” he grumbled to Shelton.

Wayne and Shelton were given a large suite with a bedroom on either side. They finally got to bed about four in the morning, but not before Shelton left a 5 A.M. wake-up call.

The call woke up Shelton and he went into Wayne’s room to rouse him. He just followed the clothes—a shoe, another shoe, pants, then underwear. Wayne had simply shed his clothes on the way to bed. With one hour of sleep, Wayne bounced right up and the two men went off to breakfast. They made the flight, and Wayne was back home in time to avoid domestic unpleasantness.

The interiors for
Rio Lobo
were shot at Studio Center in Hollywood, the renamed Republic Studios lot. Someone asked Wayne where his dressing room had been in the old days and he snorted, “Dressing room? I didn’t have a dressing room. I had a hook.”

Joining the company for a bit part was George Plimpton, then at the height of his success as an Everyman attempting fish-out-of-water experiences, which he memorialized in books, or, in this case, a TV documentary. Wayne enjoyed teasing the writer by mispronouncing his name, or referring to his popular book
Paper Lion
as
Paper Tiger
. Plimpton observed the care with which Wayne made a movie—his pleasure in being on the set at all times instead of hiding in his trailer. And he also overheard, as he was meant to, some of Wayne’s oft-stated political views, which struck him as paradoxical. How could a man who listened so intently, who was a first-class bridge player, a very good chess player, a man with an obviously fine mind—Plimpton listened to Wayne recite John Milton from memory—how could that man’s politics be so rigid and simplistic?

The movie industry was much on Wayne’s mind. He gave an interview to
The Hollywood Reporter
in which he vented his pessimism about the industry. “The Jack Warners, Harry Cohns and Louis B. Mayers were men with a certain integrity, whether for business reasons or not, and they cared about the future of the industry,” he said. “Now we’re afflicted with fast-buck producers cashing in on pornography and depravity, and there’s no leadership to stop them.”

He was convinced that the movie industry as it was constituted in the early 1970s was a house of cards. “I see pay-TV in the not so distant future and this, I think, is how it will work as far as those who make it are concerned: At the moment, we know our feature films will show in theaters for from one to a couple of years, and then, after quite a while, they go on the air. But pay-TV is going to work differently. We’ll do the feature films, all right, but we’ll pull them out of the theaters in three to six months, hold them for another three months, then show them on pay-TV. And it won’t be the tiny screens we show them on now.

“See that over there?” he said, pointing to a movie screen of about three feet by five feet. “That’s what’s coming, you mark my words, and it’ll be the death blow of dirty X-rated pictures, which have just about run their cycle anyway.” Except for overlooking home video, and the human appetite for pornography, he got it right, up to and including the time element.

When it was released in December 1970,
Rio Lobo
proved to be flaccidly written and shot, shakily acted by almost all of the supporting cast—a careless old man’s movie capable of lowering the spirits of the most ardent auteurist. Some idea of the messiness of the enterprise can be gauged by the casting of a Mexican actor to play a Confederate officer, which is explained by giving the character a French mother and a Mexican father from New Orleans.