American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (16 page)

Ford brilliantly sets the tone with his opening scene of the men, a crew without a mission, aboard a vessel without a port, on a journey at sea without an end. They long for the native women they have either left, want to be with, or will never have. It is a moment of unfulfilled sexual desire, unattainable peace. It is the hard price of war. The women represent the warmth of life the men leave behind as they journey into coldness. Ford breaks the mood with a deadly German attack on the ship, killing one of the men. Mankind is its own worst enemy, no matter what colors it flaunts.

Andrew Sarris noted, “The film is suitably moody, shadowy and romantically fatalistic . . . a conscious extension of the foggy expressionism of the Thirties into the programmed heroics of World War II. Producer Walter Wanger, Ford and Nichols were all outspokenly anti-Hitler in this period, and thus
The Long Voyage Home
constitutes a conscious tribute to Britain in its darkest hour . . . Ford and O’Neill are kindred spirits in that they share a tragic vision of life . . . a uniquely American-Irish Catholic vision in which guilt, repression and submission play a large part.”

Production on
The Long Voyage Home
began April 18, 1940, the morning after the night Wayne had finished work on
Three Faces West
. The film was shot in two months at the Sam Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood and on location at the Port of Wilmington with a budget of $682,000. It proved a disappointment at the box office, a little too esoteric for audiences who that year could more easily identify with Ford’s
The Grapes of Wrath
.

Although the film did nothing to advance Wayne’s career, years later in 1949 he told
the Saturday Evening Post
that it was “[t]he role I liked best [to date] . . . from my point of view,
The Long Voyage Home
could have been titled
Wayne’s Long Struggle with a Swedish Accent,
for the role of Oley in this film about the wartime merchant marine . . . Thanks to the coaching of Danish actress Osa Massen and the constructive criticism of director Jack Ford, however, I managed to talk my way out of this hole.”
⁶³

After
The Long Voyage Home,
Ford, who been in the Naval Reserve in 1934, was assigned to make wartime propaganda films for the government. It may have been a blessing in disguise because he was also a founding member of the MPAC (Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain), an organization that at its peak had fifteen thousand members. In July 1937, the group, including Ford, had hosted Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Florence Eldridge, who made an appearance to raise funds for the Loyalists. Ford donated an ambulance to the cause. In 1938, Ford became vice president, along with Philip Dunne and Miriam Hopkins, of the MPDC (Motion Picture Democratic Committee). Its president was the writer Dashiell Hammett, dedicated to the advancement of liberalism, antifascism, and antiracism. That same year, the first incarnation of HUAC was created in Hollywood, to keep a watchful eye on those who held the reins to the mass medium of film. HUAC’s raison d’être was simple: Hollywood had made a hero out of Gene Autry, and one out of Tom Joad. Washington felt the time had come to keep a closer eye on what was going on in Hollywood, and Ford, who had glorified Tom Joad on-screen. His increasing involvement in the MPDC, a group that HUAC suspected was a Communist-driven anti-Franco organization, increased their interest in him. Ford’s distinguished war service probably saved his Hollywood career.

Politics affected everyone in Hollywood, in one way or another. Wayne became more active as an officer of the Screen Actors Guild. Here is how Wayne put it later on, to friend and future biographer Maurice Zolotow: “I noticed something was going wrong in this business in 1937, 1938 [one of Wayne’s most fallow periods, before Ford put him into
Stagecoach
], the Communists were moving in, and under the guise of being anti-fascist. I saw they were hoaxing a lot of decent men and women on humanitarian grounds. I was on the executive board of the Screen Actors Guild and I noticed one or two of my fellow members whose hearts were always bleeding for the little fellow, but they never really helped him. They just talked about it and tried to stir up dissension between extras and producers and directors . . . at parties Russia was the hope of the world.”

During the war, Wayne, who did not enlist, made seventeen commercial films. His failure to volunteer for service would become an issue later on in
his
career and leave a scar on his broad-stroke patriotism.

THE TOP-GROSSING FILM OF 1940
was Jack Conway’s
Boomtown,
starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, in the midst of their run of buddy-buddy films. Other big hits that year included George Cukor’s
The Philadelphia Story
starring Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant; Walt Disney’s
Pinocchio;
and Chaplin’s much-anticipated, controversial
The Great Dictator,
the only studio film that year that dealt overtly with the coming war satirizing Hitler, and a film that got Chaplin in legal trouble with the American government for violating the Neutrality Act, which Washington warned Hollywood to obey. Chaplin owned his own studio and ignored the directive.

The 1940 Academy Awards took place February 27, 1941, at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, its entrance dressed up for the occasion with a fifteen-foot neon outline of Oscar. The host of the proceedings was Walter Wanger, the producer of
The Long Voyage Home,
who was the president of the Academy. That might, with the inevitability of war hanging in the air, Hollywood decided to throw itself, and America, one final peacetime fling. To mark the occasion (both the reality and the unreality), President Roosevelt delivered a radio address, during which he praised Hollywood for its defense fund-raising efforts, put in a plug for Lend-Lease, and thanked a Hollywood that unified, a patriotic industry that worked together in harmony for “promoting the American way of life.” After, while Judy Garland sang “America,” the Republican faction of the Academy, led by Louis B. Mayer, none of whom could stand Roosevelt, pushed their plates away in disgust. Hollywood was anything but unified.

The nominees for Best Actor were Charles Chaplin, Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rebecca,
Jimmy Stewart in George Cukor’s
The Philadelphia Story,
and Raymond Massey for his performance in yet another Lincoln film, John Cromwell’s
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
. Although Fonda’s performance towered over all the others, the award went to Jimmy Stewart, the result of the Academy splitting its vote between Fonda, Olivier, and Massey (Chaplin, supremely unpopular in Hollywood, didn’t have a chance). Best Actress went to Ginger Rogers for her performance in Sam Wood’s
Kitty Foyle,
over Katharine Hepburn (
The Philadelphia Story
) in her comeback, Joan Fontaine in
Rebecca,
and Bette Davis in William Wyler’s
The Letter.

For Best Screenplay, Nunnally Johnson and Dudley Nichols both lost, for
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Long Voyage Home,
respectively, as did Dalton Trumbo for
Kitty Foyle,
and Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison for
Rebecca.
All fell to Donald Ogden Stewart for
The Philadelphia Story.
Best Picture saw Hitchcock’s
Rebecca
walk away with the honors (the award going to producer David O. Selznick rather than the director). Both
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Long Voyage Home
lost in that category, but John Ford walked away with the Best Director Oscar for
The Grapes of Wrath,
over Sam Wood, Hitchcock, Wyler, and Cukor. Ford’s triumphant year could not be denied. “I love making pictures,” Ford said later, “but I don’t like talking about them,” and instead went fishing with Wayne during the Academy celebrations.

IF WAYNE HAD FELT ADRIFT
after the commercial failure of
The Long Voyage Home,
1940 would not turn completely forgettable. Among other things, he fell in love with a gorgeous displaced German actress with an insatiable desire for hot sex with American boys and men, even hotter if she could break up their marriages or in some other ways humiliate and disgrace them. Her name was Marlene Dietrich, and when she came into Wayne’s life, she juicily sucked every last drop of resistance, loyalty, morality, and guilt out of him. Sex to Dietrich was destructive and debilitating and decadent and debauched. It was the way she liked it, and the way she wanted to make Wayne like it.

It was said by friends of the actress that she liked to put Wayne on his knees and hold his face close between her thighs and make him recite the Pledge of Allegiance to something higher even than his flag and his government.

Chapter 8

By 1929 the heat had gone out of American film director Josef von Sternberg’s silent films, and he accepted an offer from the UFA (Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft), Berlin’s leading film production house, to make a sound film in Germany simultaneously in German and English. It was
The Blue Angel,
the story of distinguished Professor Unrat, who falls for a gorgeous blond showgirl and prostitute, Lola-Lola, who, in turn sexually enslaves and humiliates him, literally turning him into a clown. When she degrades him in front of another man, he returns to the schoolhouse where he once taught and, in the midst of a fit of mad rage, dies.

The film was a huge international hit and made a star out of Marlene Dietrich, a former showgirl and German silent film star, who then made Sternberg into her real-life Unrat. His love for Dietrich (who was married) turned into a perverse addiction he could feed only by making more films with her. After she came to Hollywood, she made a point of sleeping with every one of her leading men, in films mostly directed by Sternberg, twisting her costars out of sexual shape until they could no longer stand straight. Her so-called victims were all willing and eager for a taste of her luscious exotica (including the young and beautiful and notorious swordsman Gary Cooper, whom she reportedly fell in love with while making Sternberg’s 1930
Morocco
); Sternberg’s Unrat-like obsession with Dietrich, and her inability to successfully break away from him, eventually ruined both their careers, as each of the seven films they made together under contract to Paramount became increasingly fetishistic and overstylized. By 1935, both had become box-office poison.

In 1939, Dietrich’s career was fully revitalized when she managed to land the female lead in George Marshall’s western spoof,
Destry Rides Again
(a.k.a.
Justice Rides Again
), produced by Joe Pasternak, a remake of an old Tom Mix silent film, based on a Max Brand novel. This was Jimmy Stewart’s fifth and final film of 1939, a very prolific year for the young actor. Even before production began, Dietrich let it be known that she intended to make a full-course meal out of him. Rumors persisted for months after the completion of
Destry
that she had gotten pregnant by the actor and had an abortion, reportedly arranged by her friend Louis B. Mayer.
⁶⁴

She then lost all interest in Stewart and dropped the smitten actor without ever bothering to tell him to his face that his time with her was up. It was a heartbreaking turn of events for the young bachelor, who took a long time to get over her. It was prime Dietrich, whose pattern of hot seduction and cold heartbreak would be put into play again with her next victim, John Wayne.

Tay Garnett, a former naval flying instructor turned gag writer for Hal Roach, Mack Sennett, and Cecil B. DeMille before developing into a solid, if unspectacular film director, was a good friend of Wayne. Both were members of the Emerald Bay Yacht Club. In the fall of 1940, Garnett was assigned to helm
Seven Sinners
for Universal
. Destry
had made Dietrich bankable again, and Universal wanted her immediately for another film produced by Pasternak, this one an updated, (very) loose adaptation of Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
. Garnett knew exactly whom he wanted to play opposite Dietrich. The role called for a rugged tough guy, and he chose Wayne, whose own star had risen after
Stagecoach
before stalling following
The Long Voyage Home
. The only thing standing in the way of Garnett casting Wayne was Dietrich. She now had costar approval, something that came along with her huge $150,000 fee to make the movie, a deal Feldman, who had signed her on as a client, had negotiated.

When Garnett first introduced Wayne to Dietrich, she played it cool, but afterward she whispered in the director’s ear, “Daddy, buy me
that
!”
⁶⁵
According to Pilar Wayne, “A meeting was set up in Dietrich’s dressing room at Universal. Duke recalled that day quite vividly. He said that Dietrich invited him inside and then closed the door and locked it. He’d never been in a major star’s private dressing room before and stood gawking at the luxurious appointments.

“Dietrich broke the awkward silence. ‘I wonder what time it is?’ she said, giving him a smoldering look. Before Duke could glance at his watch she lifted her skirt, revealing the world’s most famous legs. A black garter circled her upper thigh with a timepiece attached. Dietrich looked at it, dropped her skirt, and sashayed to Duke’s side, saying in a husky voice, ‘It’s very early, darling, we have plenty of time.’ ”

IN
SEVEN SINNERS,
⁶⁶
DIETRICH’S NAME
was billed above the title—“MARLENE DIETRICH IN
SEVEN SINNERS—
and Wayne’s was half the size—“With John Wayne.” Dietrich plays Bijou Blanche, a South Seas music hall girl (call girl), a variation of the same easy-virtue seductress she had played in every move since
The Blue Angel
. She was so big she was able to demand that no other woman in the film could have blond hair (causing one of her costars, Anna Lee, to have to dye her natural-blond hair dark brown).