American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (12 page)

During the production, his costar Sally Blane was supposed to hit him in the head with a vase. When she really did, Wayne looked confused, upset, and out of character. The stunned audience sat in silence staring at Wayne, whose eyes became glassy and unfocused. From the fifth row center came a ringing voice of criticism for his being drunk. It was Josephine, yelling at her husband as if they were in the privacy of their living room, “Duke, you are a disgrace! You are just a disgrace!”

“Duke was so frightened of live theater that he overdosed on booze and made a total ass out of himself,” Harry Carey Jr. later said of the incident. Wayne never acted in another stage production.

IN 1936, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TREM
Carr left Republic for Universal, a much better organized studio with far deeper pockets. One of the first things Carr did was to call the out-of-work Wayne and offer him a deal similar to the one he had tried to get for him to re-sign with Republic, $6,000 per picture for six films, but with one big difference. Knowing Wayne did not want to do any more cowboy movies and that Republic still held that option, Carr promised that none of the six films he would make over the next two years would be a western. Wayne was eager to get back into the movies and took the deal, hoping for one more chance to make an important film, the dream he had been chasing ever since the failure of
The Big Trail.

It didn’t happen. Of the six films he made for Universal, not one proved a breakout hit. In Frank Strayer’s 1936
The Sea Spoilers,
he played the commander of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter assigned the unglamorous task of battling seal poachers who have also kidnapped his girlfriend, played by Nan Grey (who later married singer Frankie Laine).
Variety
dismissed it as “Dimly realized . . .” and it quickly died at the box office.
⁴⁶
That was followed by David Howard’s
Conflict,
in which Wayne played a lumberjack and a member of a gang that conducts fake prizefights. He meets Jean Rogers (of
Flash Gordon
serial fame), who gets him to see the light. He wins the fight and her.
⁴⁷

Conflict
was better received than
The Sea Spoilers
.
Variety
called it “a very satisfactory program offering . . .” and “An ideal vehicle for John Wayne . . .” Next came Arthur Lubin’s
California Straight Ahead,
a remake of a silent film, in which Wayne plays a truck driver who has to complete a delivery before a labor strike shuts down the train awaiting his goods.
⁴⁸
Louise Latimer played his love interest. It was another turkey. After that came Arthur Lubin’s 1937
I Cover The War,
in which Wayne plays a newsreel cameraman.
⁴⁹
In this one his love interest is Gwen Gaze, making her film debut. The film had better production value than the previous three but like the others, still failed to make any noise at the box office. Next was Arthur Lubin’s 1937
Idol of the Crowds,
⁵⁰
in which Wayne played a member of a professional hockey team pressured to throw the championship game. This film gave the Wayne a chance to show off his physical prowess.
Variety
called it “Old-fashioned hokum . . .” Wayne’s leading lady was Virginia Brassac, who would go on to make sixty films in her career. His sixth and final film at Universal was the aptly named
Adventure’s End,
another 1937 Lubin-directed production.
⁵¹
In it, Wayne plays a Pacific Isle pearl diver who marries the captain’s daughter, who is pursued by the evil first mate. Diana Gibson is his love interest.

None of these six Universal films were good enough to elevate Wayne to the ranks of an A-list star. Even though they had better production values than the movies he had made at Republic, they still looked and felt like B movies. When his contract was up, he parted ways with Carr, who made no real effort to keep him.

Scrounging for work as a freelancer, broke again and needing to make some money, he was hit with the devastating news that on Sunday, March 4, his father had died of a heart attack in his sleep, after not feeling well enough to go to a football game Robert was playing in for the Los Angeles Dons, a semi-pro team that played at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Wayne was grief-stricken, and cried in the car all the way to the funeral.

Mary did not attend.

An inconsolable Wayne leaned on the big shoulders of John Ford for comfort. If Ford was tough and mean, henceforth Wayne would assume the role of obedient son for his Clyde surrogate, who played the role of paternal martinet with great delight. It would become the oddest and most effective real-life faux father/fake adopted son working relationship in all of cinema.

Aboard
The Araner
one weekend not long after his dad’s death, Wayne confided to Ford about how bad things were going and asked the director, “When is it my turn?” Ford, never one to turn to for sympathy, barked, “Christ, if you learned to act you’d get better parts!” He then changed his tone, as was his way. “Just wait. I’ll let you know when I get the right script.”

That wait would soon come to an end.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1937,
Ford’s sixteen-year-old son read a three-thousand-word story in
Collier’s
magazine called “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox, about a group of eight easterners making a pilgrimage across the country by stagecoach that would take them through dangerous New Mexico Apache territory. The story was a very loose and Americanized adaptation of Guy du Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif.”
⁵²
When he gave it to his dad, Ford read it and was convinced he could turn it into a character-rich western. He hadn’t made an oater in eleven years, since
3 Bad Men,
a silent 1926 feature.
⁵³
After the failure of
The Big Trail,
not just Wayne but most westerns had been relegated to B pictures and serials. The studios believed
The Big Trail
proved that adults were no longer interested in “cowboy” movies. Ford bought the rights to the story for $4,000 and assigned Dudley Nichols to try to turn it into a workable film script.

And Ford wanted Wayne to star in it, which would make it an even harder sell. Getting a studio to green-light the picture was one thing; getting Wayne approved as its lead quite another. He had made sixty-five films, none of which had been a big enough hit to make him a bankable star.

Dudley Nichols completed his film script adaptation of “Stage to Lordsburg” (screenplay credit was shared with Ben Hecht) and renamed it
Stagecoach.
One night not long after, during a weekend-long poker game aboard
The Araner
whose players included actor Grant Withers, Victor McLaglen, Nichols, Wayne, and Ford, Ford tossed everyone a copy of the manuscript with the directive they read it immediately.
⁵⁴

The following evening, during a break in the marathon game, Ford called Wayne on deck to discuss the film. The director decided to toy with him a little, saying that he had signed Claire Trevor to play the female lead, and that almost all the male leads were already cast, with George Bancroft, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, and Andy Devine. The problem he was having, Ford said, was that he couldn’t think of any actor to play the Ringo Kid, the young rebel who helps guide and protect the wagon train safely through Indian country. Wayne meekly suggested Lloyd Nolan, a good actor who had recently been in King Vidor’s
The Texas Rangers
. Ford said no, he was looking for a different type, handsome, strong and tough, and tender with the ladies; someone with star quality. Wayne assumed that didn’t mean him and they both went back below deck to play some more cards.

The next night, Ford took Wayne back up, turned to him suddenly, and said, “Duke, I want you to play the Ringo Kid.” According to Dan Ford, the director had wanted Wayne for the part from the very moment he finished reading the short story. It was just Ford’s way; he liked to toy with actors, especially Wayne. Years later, Ford himself would explain his reasons for choosing Wayne: “I wanted John Wayne to play [Ringo]. He was by no means a finished performer, but he was the only person I could think of at the time who could personify great strength and determination without talking much. That sounds easy, perhaps, but it’s not.”

And according to Wayne, “Well, I had made a lot of cheap pictures after Raoul Walsh saw me on the set and gave me the part in
The Big Trail
. He needed a man of my type, and I was a prop man and handy. Funny thing, John Ford remembered me in that picture.”

This time, Wayne promised himself that despite his easygoing manner and his reputation of being the type of actor who did what he was told and never complained, he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone—not the film’s temperamental producer David O. Selznick, not even kick-ass John Ford—ruin what might very well be his last real shot.

Or Josephine. Despite or perhaps because of Josephine’s strict limitations on their sex life rules, the family had kept growing. During their first six years of their marriage, Josephine had given birth to two children—Michael in 1934, Toni in 1936, and now was pregnant with their third, Patrick, who would be born in 1939 (they would have a fourth child, Melinda, in 1940).

In 1940, after the release of
Stagecoach
, Wayne complained to his friend and press secretary Beverly Barnett that there was no longer anything sexual about his relationship with Josie. Barnett pointed out she had given him four children, and Wayne bitterly replied, “Yeah, four times in ten years.”

Chapter 6

Ford was ready to start production on
Stagecoach
for David O. Selznick. The independent producer wasn’t the biggest fan of Ford, but he admired Merian C. Cooper and wanted to work with him now and in the future. As far as Selznick was concerned,
Stagecoach
was not a major project, just another western. To maximize its commerciality, he declared to Ford it needed big-name stars, not John Wayne.

Selznick insisted that Ford instead use Gary Cooper to play the Ringo Kid, and he also wanted Marlene Dietrich, a much bigger star at the time than Ford’s good friend Claire Trevor, to play Dallas, the young prostitute run out of town and hoping to start a new life. Dietrich had, after all, made her reputation playing one in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930
The Blue Angel,
and she had just finished a solid turn in George Marshall’s satirical western
Destry Rides Again
as the happy hooker Jimmy Stewart falls in love with. Ford, however, remained adamant about Claire Trevor and Wayne, claiming Cooper and Dietrich were both too old to play these roles, even though he knew they weren’t. In truth, Ford could see Cooper as the Ringo Kid, but Dietrich’s Germanic man-devouring dominatrix-with-a-heart-of-ice was something he wanted no part of. When Ford refused Selznick’s casting, and after Selznick tried to lure Ford off the project by offering him a number of others, including the film version of
Gone with the Wind,
none of which interested Ford, the producer threw his arms up and killed the project.

Interest in
Stagecoach
was revived by independent producer Walter Wanger, who had made a string of successful films in the ’30s, among them James Cruze’s 1932
Washington Merry-Go-Round,
and Frank Capra’s 1933
The Bitter Tea of General Yen,
both made at Harry Cohn’s Columbia. Wanger then decided to go independent, created Walter Wanger Productions, and signed an exclusive distribution deal with Universal. Unfortunately, the first seven films Wanger made there all lost money. In 1938, when he first became interested in
Stagecoach,
the studio agreed to let him make it, but only if he could bring it in for under $400,000, which necessitated the film being shot in black-and-white and eliminated the possibility of big money to attract any major stars to be in it.
⁵⁵
Ford signed a contract for $50,000 to direct, with a healthy percentage of the back end after the film recouped its negative cost, and final say on casting. The rest of the company received a combined total of $65,000 in salary. Wayne signed on for $600 a week against a minimum of $3,000, a salary that Cooper would have laughed at.
⁵⁶
Trevor received $15,000 as the female lead; Thomas Mitchell, $12,000; Andy Devine, $10,000; and Tim Holt, in a relatively small role, $5,000.

The film was sold with the tagline “The Powerful Story of 9 Strange People!” None are conventionally respectable and all are seeking redemption of one sort or another. The characters aboard the stagecoach are going against the grain of their own lives, seeking salvation (in the film, the stagecoach moves from west to east, from Tonto, Arizona Territory, to Lordsburg, New Mexico Territory, against the grain of the country’s natural and morally self-justified expansion west). Ford’s direction and the Nichols/Hecht script offer a heavy dose of morality in the telling of the characters’ individual stories that separates and elevates the film above the rest of the shoot-’em-ups being made after
The Big Trail
.

Trevor received first billing over Wayne in the front credits, but not above the title; Ford gave no one star treatment. Louise Platt played the young and pregnant Lucy Mallory, taking the stage to meet her U.S. Cavalry husband in Lordsburg. In many ways Lucy is the opposite of Dallas—one is fleeing from her past, one is rushing toward hers. They are linked by the en route delivery of Lucy’s baby. Dallas assists, helps save Lucy’s life, and by doing so finds new meaning in her own.

Wayne’s Ringo Kid, as directed by Ford, comes off as a character with the exterior charm of Roy Rogers and inner darkness of Harry Carey. Ringo is a fugitive from justice headed for Lordsburg to avenge the death of his brother and father at the hands of Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler), who he knows will be there waiting for him. George Bancroft is “Curly” Wilcox, the shotgun-riding marshal there to protect the passengers from any and all danger, especially from the Apaches. The balance and the contrast of the characters continues—Wilcox is a lawman, Ringo is a fugitive from the law.