American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (20 page)

On nights Wayne was out on the town with Bond, Chata stayed in their suite at the hotel and lit candles for both their souls. And for her mother. And for Yates to make her a star.

Chapter 10

On November 25, 1944, thirty-five-year-old Josie sued for divorce, charging her husband with repeated acts of “cruel and inhuman treatment, and grievous physical and mental suffering . . . absenting himself from home several nights a week, refusing to explain his activities” and “daring” his wife to check on his movements. Testifying before Superior Judge Jess E. Stephens, Josephine said she had found a “lady’s coat,” not her own, in the actor’s car upon his return from a trip to a resort. Wayne’s lawyer cross-examined her and asked if she had gone through his pockets at a nightclub party. Josephine replied, “I told him he would have to mend his ways or I’d have to do something. He said, ‘Hurry up and get it over with.’ ” Judge Stephens granted Josephine an interlocutory decree of divorce, to be made final after one year, and she got sole custody of their four children, Michael, ten; Tony, eight; Patrick, five; and Melinda, four.
⁷⁰

Wayne later told one interviewer, “When we split up [were divorced], I took just one car and my clothes and Josie got all the rest of it, including every cent I saved.” In addition to the $75,000 Wayne had in the bank, Josephine got the house and everything in it. Wayne also agreed to turn over 20 percent of the next hundred thousand dollars he earned, and 10 percent of everything after that, for as long as he lived, or until Josephine remarried, which he knew was out of the question. He also set up separate individual trust funds for his children.

It would take years for Josie to get beyond the acrimony, but eventually she and Wayne would become friends. Then he would often come by the house, the same one they’d lived in as husband and wife, to talk to her about his career, spend time with the kids, and just to relax in familiar surroundings. Twenty years after his divorce, Wayne acknowledged he and Josie were much closer and better friends after their marriage than during it.

THROUGHOUT THE WAR YEARS, WAYNE
continued to turn out movies. In 1944, he made
Tall in the Saddle,
a frontier western directed by Edwin L. Marin, in which he was loaned out by Yates to RKO. This was a western, costarring the beautiful Ella Raines, Ward Bond, and “Gabby” Hayes. The story concerns Wayne, a ranch foreman who reluctantly goes to work for the female heir to the land and livestock of the KC Ranch. Through a series of adventures, he winds up falling in love with a competing female ranch owner. Much of this is resolved with fistfights and horse chases. The film received high praise from the critics.
Variety
compared it to
Stagecoach
for its “gutsy approach and spirit.”

It was followed by Joseph Cane’s
Flame of Barbary Coast,
filmed in July 1944 but not released until May 1945, because Yates wanted to hold it until Wayne’s divorce became final. It was touted as the crowning achievement of Republic’s first ten years. It costarred Virginia Grey (after Wayne once again vetoed Claire Trevor). The story concerns the romantic adventures of a cattleman who comes to San Francisco to collect the fee for delivering his herd and is filled with gambling, fights, shoot-outs, and showgirls, which all comes to a climax as the famed earthquake of 1906 hits.

IN MAY 1945, THE WAR
had ended in the European Theater but continued on for another three months, until America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. During that time, at RKO, Wayne was drafted for one more wartime propaganda film, Edward Dmytryk’s
Back to Bataan
(a.k.a.
The Invisible Army
)
,
which went into production in November 1944 while the war was still raging, and ended in May 1945. It was filmed at RKO’s studios in Arcadia, which doubled as Bataan, and at the Baldwin Estate.
⁷¹
Wayne received $87,500 for working on the film, while Anthony Quinn, his co-star on loan from Fox, earned $15,500.

The story concerns the plight of a group of officers and men on Corregidor, trapped by the Japanese and unable to be rescued. Madden (Wayne) orders his troops and the Filipino soldiers to resort to guerrilla resistance. When the Japanese arrive, they hang the Filipino school’s principal for refusing to lower the American flag. Eventually Madden’s guerrilla forces hang the Japanese officer responsible for killing the school principal. Meanwhile, Corregidor is surrendered by General MacArthur and the Filipino men revolt, strong enough to make the Japanese reconsider taking the island, and eventually give it back to the Filipinos. However, before that happens, Madden and his men make a daring attack on the Japanese and wipe out the remaining forces.

Wayne is particularly good in this film, despite the fact that he had no use for Dmytryk, a former Communist who would later be blacklisted, with Wayne’s enthusiastic support. The screenwriter, Ben Barzman (who wrote the film with Richard Landau), would also later be blacklisted. During production, both Dmytryk and Barzman were verbally bullied by Wayne, and they retaliated by writing into the script increasingly difficult stunts they knew their star would insist on doing himself.

Wayne liked to be up at 4
A
.
M
., have a light breakfast, usually two eggs, two pieces of toast, and black coffee, read the papers, then go over his lines and be in makeup by six, ready to shoot at first light. However, Wayne wanted to put it to Dmytryk every opportunity he could, even shit on him, which, in effect is what he did. As Richard Fleischer recalled in his memoir, when he was given a tour of the RKO lot during the filming of
Back to Bataan
by his friend Sid Rogell he noticed something peculiar about the set. Fleischer remembered it was already 10:30 in the morning, a half day’s worth of potential sunlight shooting time, “And nothing was happening. The crew, and it was a large one, was lounging. Small groups were sitting around, talking in subdued tones, and playing cards.” The problem? John Wayne hadn’t taken a shit yet. When he emerged from his trailer, it was signal for everyone to get ready to shoot, that Wayne had moved his bowels and was ready to do some acting. He usually worked until 12:30, broke for lunch, returned at 2:00, and worked straight through to 6:30, after which he would go home, and have a big steak dinner, with potatoes and a side dish of Mexican food.

Later, Wayne had this to say about the production: “Many of us were being invited to supposed social functions or house parties . . . that turned out to be Communist recruitment meetings . . . Take this colonel I knew, the last man to leave the Philippines on a submarine in 1942. He came back here and went to work sending food and gifts to U.S. prisoners on Bataan [when] the State Department pulled him off of it and sent the poor bastard out to be the technical director on my picture
Back to Bataan,
which was being made by Eddie Dmytryk. I knew that he and a whole group of actors in the picture were pro-Reds, and when I wasn’t there, these pro-Reds went to work on the colonel. He was a Catholic, so they kidded him about his religion. They even sang the
Internationale
at lunchtime. He finally came to me and said, ‘Mr. Wayne, I haven’t anybody to turn to. These people are doing everything in their power to belittle me.’ So I went to Dmytryk and said, ‘Hey, are you a Commie?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not a Commie. My father was a Russian. I was born in Canada. But if the masses of the American people want Communism, I think it’d be good for our country.’ When he used the word ‘masses,’ he exposed himself. That word is not a part of Western terminology. So I knew he was a Commie. Well, it later came out that he was.”

The facts about Dmytryk, who died in 1970 at the age of ninety, never hid the fact that he had in his youth been a member of the Communist Party. When he was first subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late ’40s, he refused to cooperate and was sent to jail. After spending several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate with the committee and give them what they wanted, not just his admission that he was a Communist—that was already well known—but the names of his fellow members in the American Communist Party; he tried to minimize his own guilt by claiming that John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz, and others had pressured him to include Communist propaganda in his films. He didn’t work again in Hollywood for several years, but eventually returned to America and directed a hit movie, 1954’s
The Caine Mutiny,
about a fictional revolt aboard a naval vessel in which the men overthrow the captain.

RKO RELEASED
BACK TO BATAAN
on May 31, 1945, when America’s attention had turned completely to the hated Japanese. The film tripled its negative cost of $187,000 in domestic ticket sales and broke all existing records in Manila, where it was released that same month.

Wayne followed
Back to Bataan
with Joseph Kane’s
Dakota,
costarring Vera Hruba Ralston, a Czech-born actress and former Olympic ice skater. Yates had had Ralston under exclusive contract since 1941, after she came to America to escape the Nazis and starred in a number of ridiculous ice-skating-themed films (Yates eventually married her).
Dakota
also featured Ward Bond. At first Wayne resisted working with Ralston, whose English was poor and acting even worse, but agreed to do it if his pal Bond could also be in the film.
Dakota
is a typical Republic western, filled with bad guys, complicated plots, and a fistfight resolution; it earned $145,000 for Wayne (including a piece of the back end), opened in November 1945, and was a big hit with audiences. With the war over, Americans wanted to be entertained by Wayne in his familiar guise as a cowboy, not, as his next picture would prove, a soldier.
Dakota
also marked the end of Wayne’s contract with Republic.

Between December 1941 and the war’s end in 1945, civilian John Wayne made sixteen films.
Back to Bataan
was the 107th film of his career, and the 13th he made during the wars years. Of those, three were about World War II, and only one about enlisted soldiers.
Flying Tigers
told the story of American volunteers in China to fight the Japanese, and
The Fighting Seabees
civilian construction workers volunteering to fight the Japanese. Only in
Back to Bataan
did Wayne play an American enlisted man. And yet, during those years, he become Hollywood’s reigning symbol of the American fighting soldier.

AFTER THE OBLIGATORY ONE-YEAR WAIT,
Wayne’s divorce became final December 26, 1945. Exactly three weeks later he married Chata, in the Unity Presbyterian Church of Long Beach, the same church where his mother had married her second husband, Sidney Preen, a sewer inspector for the city of Long Beach, not long after Clyde’s death. The Reverend Johnson Calhoun performed the ceremony. Herb Yates gave the bride away. Harry Carey’s wife, Olive, was the matron of honor. John Wayne’s best man was Ward Bond, still on crutches after being hit by a car in Hollywood in July 1944, shortly after filming was completed on
Tall in the Saddle
. His leg had been so badly mangled it was about to be amputated, prevented at Wayne’s and MGM’s intervention, both insisting Bond be allowed to heal, no matter how long it might take. The hospital would not guarantee Ward would ever walk normally again. Noticeably absent from the wedding was John Ford.

The reception was held at the California Country Club in Long Beach. Yates then paid for the newlyweds’ three-week honeymoon in Waikiki. Howard Hughes personally flew them there, the first civilian flight to Hawaii since the war ended. Perhaps as an omen of things to come, it rained every day they were in Oahu. That left them largely confined to their suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Upon their return to Los Angeles, Wayne bought a beautiful, and expensive, two-story Colonial ranch house in Van Nuys (4735 Tyrone Street), north of Hollywood, with a separate room for Chata’s mother. Soon after they moved in, Chata, frustrated by her meaningless contract with Republic, began pestering Wayne to use his influence to get her a real role in a real movie. Wayne was reluctant to do so. He didn’t want his wife to become a Hollywood movie star. He knew too well what they were like and insisted her place was in the home.

Her reaction to his refusal to help her career was to begin drinking excessively, and for all intents and purposes, before too long she was a functioning alcoholic. Wayne began complaining to Bond that all Chata did at home was talk to her mother in Spanish. When he complained to Chata about it, his wife said, “Why don’t you buy me a bigger house?”

She and her mother often drank together and always slept curled in each other’s arms in the same bed, and on those nights, when Wayne came home late he would sleep on the oversized sofa in the downstairs living room. Wayne was a physically big man who took pride in keeping himself in condition to always look good in front of a camera. But whereas Josephine had been, like him, bodily immaculate, Chata made no attempt to remove her facial hair (she had a bit of a mustache), bathed not nearly as frequently as Wayne would have liked, and refused to shave her legs, which drove him crazy. Whenever he asked her to do it, an argument would inevitably follow. They soon began arguing about everything. He often talked with Bond about his problems. One time he complained to him, “Our marriage was like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar.” Soon enough, Wayne confessed to his friend that marrying Chata was “the stupidest damn thing I ever did in my life!”

Chapter 11

During the war, John Ford was making documentary films for the government. He shot 1942’s
The Battle of Midway
by hand, with one camera, while in the middle of the action, and it won him a special Academy Award.
⁷²
At one point Ford offered Wayne a chance to help make these movies. British sound director Robert Parrish later learned that Wayne had turned down the chance by not following through on joining Ford’s naval Field Photographic Reserve unit, and later remembered that “Ford remained furious at Wayne for years.” When the director heard that Wayne had divorced his wife and was marrying Chata, he couldn’t resist writing the actor a letter that mocked both him and his decision. It said, in part, “If you can take enough time from playing with those Mexican jumping beans, I would be very much interested in knowing what’s cooking, good looking!” Ford ended it by calling Wayne a “damn fool.”