American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (25 page)

McBride posits that Ford sensed which way the political wind in Hollywood was blowing and wanted to make an unabashedly pro-Christian movie (even more so than his others) that in no way disrespected the birth of Christ.
3 Godfathers
is a John Wayne western-style parable (rather than a true western) of the story of the Three Wise Men and the birth of baby Jesus. It is one of the most overlooked films in Ford’s canon. (Andrew Sarris barely mentions it in his Ford book and marks it as one of Ford’s lesser achievements in
The American Cinema
. Bogdanovich also neglects it; McBride pays scant more attention to it.)

Even though they hadn’t worked together for years, and their relationship never recovered from their professional and personal schism, Ford dedicated
3 Godfathers
on-screen “To the memory of Harry Carey—bright star of the western sky.” Carey’s son, Harry Carey Jr., making his first appearance in a John Ford film (after his “debut” in
Red River
), played one of the three godfathers, all bank robbers, Wayne and Pedro Armendáriz the other two. Ward Bond played the marshal looking for the three bank robbers. Running from him, they come across an expectant mother in a covered wagon in the desert, dying of thirst. They deliver the baby, a girl, and the mother’s dying wish is that they care for her. They are deeply moved by this, find religion so to speak, and take the baby to New Jerusalem, Arizona. It is the hokiest, rather than the holiest of Ford films, perhaps rightly neglected by his best critics. If it served any purpose other than “remembering” Harry Carey, it reaffirmed Ford’s moral standing among the political commandants of Hollywood. It also reaffirmed Wayne’s Christian ethics after his divorce. Filmed in Death Valley in thirty-two days, between the end of May and the middle of June, with interiors shot at RKO-Pathé in Culver City,
3 Godfathers
opened December 1, 1948, in time to catch the Christmas crowd. Critics were generally kind to both the film and Wayne. The
New York Times
’ Bosley Crowther wrote, “It is Mr. Ford’s wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mold. John Wayne . . . is wonderfully raw and ructious . . . There are humor and honest tear-jerking in this visually beautiful film.” Audiences loved it as well. Made on a budget of $1.2 million, it doubled that in its initial domestic release and added another $750,00 in foreign. Wayne earned $207,000 from his salary and percentage of the profits (Bond was paid a straight $2,500 a week, Harry Carey Jr., $350 a week).

That same year Wayne had also agreed to make
Wake of the Red Witch
for Republic, a sunken-treasure melodrama based on a forgotten bestseller by Garland Roark. It was directed by Edward Ludwig and bore more than a passing resemblance to
Reap the Wild Wind,
reteaming Wayne with his costar from
Angel and the Badman,
Gail Russell.
⁹⁰
The film, told in a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks, was written by Harry Brown and Kenneth Gamet and filmed at Republic Studios and on location in Arcadia, California.

According to Dave Kehr, an astute film critic writing in the
New York Times,
“
Red Witch
is a film that courts the ridiculous, with its potted-palm islands populated by ethnographically unlikely natives . . . but the film finds something dreamlike and beautiful in all this artifice, largely by refusing any overtly poetic efforts and allowing the slow rhythms and circular patterns of the narrative to reveal the unexpected scale of the characters’ emotions . . .
Wake
[along with
Red River,
helped] reveal a new, middle-aged gravity in Wayne and a dormant ability to play distant, troubled men . . . an eccentric, haunting work that made a contribution to Wayne’s transformation, but which traffics in elements of gothic fantasy and lyricism not often associated with Wayne’s personality.”

Made for $1.2 million,
Red Witch
grossed $2.8 million in its initial domestic release, a tribute to Wayne’s popularity. The best sequence is his battle against a rubber octopus that took six puppeteers to control. For the film, Wayne earned $283,000, Gail Russell $35,000, and Luther Adler, who played the villain, $10,000.

IT HAD BEEN A BUSY
period for Wayne. As Gladwin Hill noted that year in the
New York Times,
“Even the home-bound little-old-lady-in-Pasadena . . . can hardly peek out the door these days without coming into figurative combat with that amiable, shambling, six-foot-five pillar of the Hollywood community Marion Michael Morrison, alias, John Wayne, alias ‘Duke.’ ” Hill then quoted Ford’s reply as to the reason for Wayne’s popularity. “ ‘He’s the best actor in Hollywood, that’s all.’ ”

Certainly one of the most popular. In March 1949, the influential poll of exhibitors that appeared annually in the
Motion Picture Herald
had Wayne in fourth place, up from thirty-three the year before (behind Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Abbott and Costello).
⁹¹
The honor was announced by Louella Parsons on her ABC radio program. She had reconciled her differences with Wayne when he became the president of the MPA.

By the fall, it was possible to choose from eight John Wayne pictures playing at the same time new or in rerelease in various theaters in Los Angeles, a time when Hollywood’s output was at an all-time low, due to its political infighting and the new popularity of television. Playing at the same time were
Red River, Stagecoach,
3 Godfathers, The Long Voyage Home, Wake of the Red Witch, Fort Apache, The Spoilers
,
Seven Sinners
,
Pittsburgh
,
I Cover the War
,
The Sea Spoilers
,
Fighting Seabees,
and
Flying Tigers.

He was also on TV every day on
Frontier Playhouse
or
Six-Gun Cinema,
a syndicated series of replays of some his old B movies. A spokesman for
Frontier Playhouse
said at the time, “We regard our Hopalong Cassidy, Tim McCoy and John Wayne westerns as our quality shows. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that only kids watch them. Our surveys show that while fathers and mothers may say they’re just looking at them to keep the children company, they outnumber the juveniles in our audiences, sixty-two percent to thirty-eight percent.”

According to one publication, the reason for his surge in popularity was that he “carries dynamite in his large fists. This, and the charm in his crinkly eyes, gives him tremendous pull at the box-office all over the country. His drawing power is especially potent in the small towns, where any John Wayne picture, whether it is new or 10 years old, will pack the house . . . working with a steady, unnervous strength for four different studios—Republic, RKO, Argosy [John Ford] and Warner Bros—he shifts back and forth between Westerns, sea-epics, and war pictures . . . one female fan summed up his appeal for women this way: ‘He doesn’t look like an actor—he looks like a real man.’ ”

Because of this newly elevated popularity, in April 1949, one month after his ascendacy in the popularity polls and his election as president of the MPA, Wayne was offered and signed a precedent-setting deal with Warner Bros to do one picture a year for the studio for seven years, in return for 10 percent of the gross when and if any of them were reissued. No other actor had ever received this type of residual deal, and it initiated a long fight between the studios and the guilds over the question of reissues. Wayne had insisted on including it because so many of his films were being perpetually rereleased, with no additional pay for him. Wayne justified his position as an unselfish move: “I’m looking for some security for my kids. Don’t forget I didn’t start making big money until the era of high taxes. Right now, I get to keep six cents out of every dollar I make. That’s why I have to get the residual rights of some of my pictures so the money will keep coming in.” The Screen Actors Guild was against reissues without repayment as well, because it claimed it kept members from making new pictures while getting nothing for the ones they already made.

How did he get the deal? There is no question he was hot, at the top of his game, and that his pictures, good or bad, were making money. But there was something else. Simply put, popularity meant power in Hollywood. No studio wanted to come up against Wayne over the question of residuals. His strong anti-Communist stance and his new position as the head of the MPA was a strong one-two punch. And yet, as much as he fought for the additional money, he also worried that all this exposure would make audiences tire of him and lower the demand for new John Wayne movies, reducing his price. “That finishes me,” Wayne told Ward Bond one night not long after, over drinks at the Formosa, a small Polynesian-style bar across from Warner’s Hollywood studios. “No actor can have that many pictures showing at one time and not be finished.”

When asked by the press how he felt about all the exposure he was getting that year, Wayne again expressed his concern over making too many movies: “I think four [pictures] a year, which due to delays probably means about three and a half, is about right. I don’t want to saturate the market with my pictures, and I hope it doesn’t turn out that the reissues have done so. I’ve got three [unmade] pictures coming up—
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
[Ford/Argosy]
, The Sands of Iwo Jima
[Republic] and
The Fighting Kentuckian
[Republic]—and if they don’t go aground on the rock of too much Wayne, I suggest a case will have been made for the saturation-booking idea.”

But when another reporter suggested he was a shrewd businessman, perhaps better at making money than movies, he just grinned, put his head down, moved his boot in the dust, and, with, his eyes still looking forward, said, “I’m just a guy trying to make a living in the movies.” He was even more insistent about his financial needs when he was interviewed about his exposure by Hedda Hopper, claiming he wasn’t just cashing in on his fame, but struggling to make ends meet, that that was the reason he was working so hard. “I have to make $2,600 a month to take care of my two families. I just have to keep jumping around . . . to make it.”

DURING THIS PERIOD OF NONSTOP
filmmaking, the newly-empowered Wayne stepped up his campaign to clean up Hollywood, to rid it once and for all of those he perceived were the bad guys. In 1949, his single-minded battle against Communist infiltration led him to publicly declare that, much to his dismay, the blacklist was ineffective because blacklisted writers were being hired without hesitation by the studios under assumed names. Wayne believed the Communists were a talented and powerful bloc in Hollywood and that the studios needed their talent to make movies, regardless of whom or what they believed in. Whether it was true—a case could be made for both sides—what’s important is that Wayne
believed
it was true and began to wonder if the studios he was so determined to protect were just as corrupt as those he was trying to protect them from.

WAYNE’S NEXT RELEASE WAS
SHE
Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
made for John Ford at his Argosy Pictures, on location in Monument Valley. It was written by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings, adapted from two short stories by James Warner Bellah, who had also provided the original source material for
Fort Apache
. Wayne had brought the Argosy project to his friend Howard Hughes’s RKO for funding and distribution.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
opens with a shot of the flag of the Seventh Cavalry and the words “Custer Is Dead” splashed across the screen. This informs the audience it is a follow-up to
Fort Apache.
When Ford suggested the Indian chief leader of the Kiowas, played by Noble Johnson, an African American actor, wear a bright red shirt, Hughes went ballistic. Ford said it was simply because the film was being shot in color, but Hughes insisted that somehow it meant that Ford was sympathetic to both the Indians in the film and the Communists in Hollywood. Wayne, who didn’t want to go against Ford, did believe he was pushing the limits with his red-shirted Indian. Ford was openly mocked for it later on by the hard right, who called his film
He Wore a Deep Red Ribbon.

The film produced another kind of excitement. Wayne was nearly killed during production when the cinch belt on his saddle loosened and he was thrown from his horse while filming a sequence in which he waves his blue coat at the Indians. “I hit the ground. Hit my head. Blacked out. Now there’s about fifty horses tear-assing at me. I came out of the blackout to hear the Old Man, Mr. Ford, yelling and there was general hysteria, but a wrangler with guts, he ran out and headed off the stampeding horses, which were within about a few feet of stomping me to death.”

In the film Wayne plays the reluctant retiree, aptly named Captain Brittles, supported by a strong star-studded cast that included Ben Johnson, Victor McLaglen, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey Jr., Mildred Natwick, and Wayne’s old friend Paul Fix. Wayne’s performance smartly emphasizes the emotional pain the aging Brittles feels at the announcement of his reluctant retirement. Wayne was forty-three at the time the film was made, and once again willing to age himself, as he had in
Red River,
to give his character an even deeper and more complex gravitas.
⁹²

The speech he gives at the end of the retirement ceremony, in which his troopers give him a silver watch and chain and he responds with his moving, humble, brink-of-tears farewell, is all the more impressive because it was not in the original screenplay, but entirely improvised during the shooting of the scene. It’s memorable “I’ll be back” recalled the famous “I shall return” of Douglas MacArthur, one of Ford’s heroes. (It also anticipates Kazan and screenwriter Schulberg’s “I’ll be back” at the end of Kazan’s 1954
On the Waterfront.
Kazan idolized Ford, and many of his films echo Ford’s stylistic touches.) “It was an emotional reaction rather than a studied response,” Wayne said, later. “Pappy was very conscious of each actor that he had, their sensitivity, he knew the paint he was using when he put me in that scene. So he knew my reaction would be simplistic and deeply moving, which I think it was.”