American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (21 page)

AS THE WAR WOUND DOWN,
Ford was eager to get back to commercial filmmaking. In 1942, MGM had purchased the rights to W. L. White’s bestseller, the nonfiction military story
They Were Expendable,
about a squadron of PT boats in the early months of the Pacific Theater, intended as a populist war vehicle for Spencer Tracy. A year later Mervyn LeRoy was assigned to direct it. When that deal fell through, MGM assigned Frank “Spig” Wead to rewrite the script and when it was finished placed the newly-returned-from-action John Ford in charge of the production. Wead was fifty years old, a World War I veteran who in 1926 had fallen down a flight of stairs at his home and was partially paralyzed. Ford decided the film should, at least in part, glorify Douglas MacArthur, one of his heroes. In the film, the squadron leaders are ordered to evacuate by MacArthur, as the Japanese step up their attacks and force the retreat. Ford also wanted Ward Bond to be in it, even though he was still seriously impaired from his car crash and barely able to walk. After Robert Taylor turned down the role of the hot-headed Rusty Ryan, the director reluctantly decided to offer it to the last name on his possibles list, John Wayne, who quickly and eagerly accepted the assignment. It was the first film they would work on together since 1940’s
The Long Voyage Home
.

At the initial production meeting, Wayne sat uncomfortably in his civilian clothes—gray flannel slacks, brown sports shirt, houndstooth sports jacket—while Wead, Ford, and Robert Montgomery all wore their military uniforms. With the war still officially on, this was the mandatory dress for all soldiers, abroad or at home. Montgomery, three years older than Wayne, had been a popular movie actor before the war, he then went into the navy and was part of the D-Day landing at Normandy. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and won a Bronze Star for his service. Before he entered the military his acting specialty had been light romantic comedy, on ample display in Alexander Hall’s 1941
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
. With the war ending, Hollywood wanted to continue to glorify its heroes and their heroics; these films were popular and profitable.

They Were Expendable,
set early in the war, has an undeniable darkness to it, a film that anticipates the long and drawn-out affair World War II was before it ended in atomic fury, and like all American war movies made during this period, it had an inevitability to it that Andrew Sarris later described: “less history than mythology, the film can now be viewed as an elegy to doomed individuals in a common cause . . . Montgomery a wary Odysseus, as it were, to Wayne’s excitable Achilles.”

When the meeting ended, and Montgomery and Wead stood up and left, Wayne went into the bathroom and began to cry. Ford, who could hear Wayne’s sobs, decided to go in and comfort him, and it was then that all the animosity between the two over Wayne’s decision not to serve was finally resolved. Ford held Wayne in his arms and let him get it all out. For these two, the war ended here.

WITH EXTENSIVE COOPERATION FROM THE
U.S. Navy, production began on
They Were Expendable
on February 11, 1945, in South Florida, near Miami and Key Biscayne. Donna Reed, a savvy beauty who projected an interesting combination of come-hither/girl next door, and who was fourteen years Wayne’s junior, played a naval nurse in a Manila hospital and his love interest in the otherwise mostly all-male script. She was paid $300,000 for her services, while Wayne got $75,000.

During production, Ford quickly reverted to form and continually needled Wayne about his acting. Ford was relentless, and one day it got so bad that Montgomery had to intervene and physically pull the ferocious Ford away from the much bigger but passive Wayne, who would not raise his fists against Ford.

The film was the big Christmas picture at New York’s Capitol Theater, with a live stage show featuring Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra. It received generally good reviews, but lost money in its initial domestic release.

By the time
They Were Expendable
opened, the thirty-eight-year-old newly divorced Wayne was rapidly losing his youthful appeal; his face was weathered and puffy and he had become noticeably heavier, partly due to his excessive drinking, and his hair was rapidly thinning. Knowing he could no longer play the young hero, he was hoping to phase out of acting in front of the camera and make the transition to directing. He had talked about it a lot with Ford. However, when the director became temporarily ill during the making of
They Were Expendable
, he chose Montgomery, who would go on to become a respectable Hollywood director, to take over the production while Wayne did not even appear in another movie directed by John Ford for nearly two more years. Perhaps Ford hadn’t fully forgiven Wayne after all.

They Were Expendable
’s disappointing box office was a good indicator of the subtle shift that had taken place in American audiences’ attitude toward pictures being made about the war. The gung-ho spirit of inevitable victory had given way to an uneasiness about what we had been fighting for. Was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe all that much better than Hitler’s? Was Mao’s surging forces and China’s rich oil supplies really what the Allied war against Japan was all about?

The next year, Hollywood’s big “war” film would be William Wyler’s postwar
The Best Years of Our Lives,
a realistic film about the problems that faced veterans returning to civilian life. It was the most successful Hollywood film of the ’40s. Ford had always sought to sentimentalize the past, even when it produced films like
They Were Expendable
that audiences weren’t always able or willing to identify with. He described his own philosophy of making war films in Hollywood this way: “Any war
I
was in we always
won
. . . of course [the soldiers]
were
glorious in defeat in the Philippines, they kept on fighting.” Wyler’s film saw things differently (both thematically and stylistically). His film looked at the very real consequences of the war on American everyday life, and what it did to the individual G.I.’s who fought it.

Now that Hitler and Hirohito were gone and the Soviet Union had devoured much of Eastern Europe, and Mao China, the Specter That Haunted the Continent soon began to hover over Hollywood, or at least it appeared that way to those who sought to stop it before it spread any further. Wayne regarded
The Best Years of Our Lives
as frankly anti-American, the public’s embrace of it disturbing, while the box-office sales of
They Were Expendable
were surprisingly disappointing. He believed the reason for the success of the former and the failure of the latter was a rising postwar disillusionment fueled by American Communism. He determined to play a larger role in the quickly polarizing politics of Hollywood and the nation, and he wanted everyone to know for certain which side he was on.

This was a war in which John Wayne was more than happy to serve.

WAYNE QUICKLY SIGNED A NEW
seven-picture, nonexclusive contract with Yates at Republic. Upon their return, many of the actors who had left Hollywood to fight in the war were having more than a little difficulty finding work. Five years away from the camera was a lifetime in the film business. Most had aged out of the new youth market and missed the cultural postwar shift from the just-ended hot war to the beginning of the cold one. Younger audiences now wanted younger stars, like John Garfield and the newest and hottest kid on the block, Montgomery Clift, who’d made a big splash on Broadway before moving to the big screen. Wayne was one of the few able to age gradually (if not totally gracefully) because he did it in front of the camera rather than fighting on the front, and his continual presence in movies made during the war served as something of a security blanket for Americans. His deal with Republic guaranteed steady work and income he would need following his divorce.

Wayne now wanted to make one film a year for Yates that he could also produce, a step toward directing. The real money in films, Wayne had learned, was in producing. Wayne set up his own production company with a writer friend Robert Fellows, Wayne-Fellows, and as part of his new deal at Republic got Yates to agree to let Wayne-Fellows make films on a nonexclusive basis, whenever the opportunity presented itself. To help run Wayne-Fellows, Duke hired someone he knew he could trust, his brother, Robert.

Wayne then signed a similar deal with RKO Radio Pictures, a move Howard Hughes encouraged him to make. Hughes was planning to take over RKO and wanted to ensure the studio would have at least one legitimate star in its stable. To induce Wayne to sign with the troubled studio, Hughes promised him he would have greater control and bigger budgets than he had ever had before.

The first postwar film Wayne-Fellows produced at Republic was 1946’s
Angel and the Badman
(a.k.a.
The Gun
and
Angel and the Outlaw
), a western written and directed by James Edward Grant, a writer Wayne favored, who had scripted several of Wayne’s earlier B movies.
Angel
costarred the twenty-two-year-old raven-haired Gail Russell. During production, Russell developed an intense crush on Wayne, who, with his relationship at home with Chata not going well, reciprocated and began an intense physical relationship with the actress.

Angel and the Badman
was shot in black-and-white in Monument Valley, Wayne’s professional nod to
Stagecoach
and personal tribute to John Ford. The film tells the story of “the badman,” Quirt Evans (Wayne), who is wounded and nursed back to health by the granddaughter of a Quaker family, the aptly named Prudence, the “Angel” of the title, played by Russell. Also in the film is Harry Carey, who plays the marshal and ultimately saves Wayne from the other “badman” in the film, Bruce Cabot. Carey’s presence, Monument Valley, and Wayne’s better-than-usual performance in a western that was grittier than many of his recent previous ones led some to suspect that perhaps Ford had something to do with the direction, which was not true. It did, however, mark Wayne’s return to classic western form. It was, also, without question, the best work of Russell’s twenty-five-film career.
⁷³

In an interview Wayne gave to Louella Parsons to promote the film he talked about the professional struggles he had gone through and the strong influence Ford had had on him, perhaps sending a message to Ford that he wanted to work with him again: “I started in three-day productions. I went in and out of those so fast that half the time I didn’t know their titles. I’ll bet I’ve survived more bad pictures than any other actor onscreen, but I was so disgusted with the lot of them that I would have gone back to being a prop man if it hadn’t been for Jack [John] Ford . . . Well, every time I’d get completely discouraged, Jack would insist that I hang on—that he’d yet find the right part and put me across.”

Parsons asked him what it was like to be both producer and star, as he was on
Angel:
“It sure changes you when you’re the producer as well as the star. I used to be a little vague about when I reported to the studio mornings—but now I’m ahead of time. I know all my lines. I love all the other actors in the troupe, who don’t blow scenes . . . as a producer I want to give new people chances. If they click, I’ll feel that will be a sort of repayment for the brand of friendship and trust that Jack Ford has given me.”

At the end of filming, Wayne threw a cast and crew party. According to Gail Russell, “Earlier in the day, James Brandt, director and writer, and John Wayne, producer and star of the picture, had surprised me by telling me they were presenting me with approximately $500 because they believed my salary had not been in keeping with the caliber of my work as feminine lead . . . John [Wayne] took me home after the party. He had celebrated too much and apologized to my mother for his condition. He called a taxi. My brother helped him into the taxi and he left about 1:00 a.m. The next morning he sent my mother a box of flowers with a note of apology for any inconvenience he might have caused her. I was contemplating marriage to Guy Madison at the time and was living with my family.”

Chata, meanwhile, whose Hollywood film career had gone nowhere, began to suspect, along with and encouraged by her
mamacita,
that her husband was spending entirely too much time with Russell. One night during filming he didn’t come home at all, and she suspected her husband was at a hotel in Studio City with Russell.
⁷⁴
When he finally did come home the next night, after spending a few hours drinking with the boys, he discovered he was locked out of his house. He broke a glass pane of the front door with his fist, let himself in, and, still drunk, lay down on the sofa. A few minutes later, a drunk Chata came running into the living room holding a loaded gun. Her mother grabbed it and prevented her daughter from killing John Wayne.

The next day she apologized and promised Wayne she would stop drinking and be a better wife to him. To do so, Wayne said, his mother-in-law would have to go back to Mexico, and Chata would have to share her bed every night with him. She agreed, but they soon fell back into a familiar pattern of arguing, drinking, arguing some more, fighting (sometimes physically), breaking up, and then entering a brief “honeymoon phase” before it all started again. It would be that way for the rest of their marriage.

IN 1947, WAYNE APPEARED IN
the first film under his new contract with RKO, although he did not produce it (Stephen Ames did). He was given $101,000 to star in Richard Wallace’s
Tycoon,
with a screenplay by Borden Chase and John Twist, adapted from the novel by C. E. Scoggins. The film is about the adventures of a couple of railroad tunnel-building engineers in Peru (Wayne and James Gleason), working for the film’s tycoon (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). During their off-hours, Wayne falls for his daughter (Laraine Day, a last-minute replacement for Maureen O’Hara) and marries her, while he continues to have problems with her father.