American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (32 page)

The High and the Mighty
premiered May 17, 1954, with a gala, red carpet, klieg light affair at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, and went into national release the next day. It became the biggest hit yet for Wayne-Fellows and one of the highest-grossing films of Wayne’s career. It grossed over $100 million from a $10 million budget and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Score for Dmitri Tiomkin’s whistly theme that floats through the entire film. Dan Roman (Wayne) whistles it one last time after he lands the plane and walks off into the sunset. His costars in this ensemble drama were Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, Jan Sterling, Phil Harris, Robert Newton, and longtime friend Paul Fix. At Oscar time the following winter, Wayne was once again overlooked as Best Actor.
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Despite its success,
The High and the Mighty
was the last film produced by Wayne-Fellows. In January 1954, shortly after completing production on the film, Wayne was forced to end his partnership with Robert Fellows, after Fellows fell in love with one of the company’s secretaries and asked his wife for a divorce. The distraught Mrs. Fellows went to Wayne and pleaded with him to talk her husband out of ending their marriage over some meaningless affair. Wayne politely refused, claiming Fellows’s private life was nobody’s business but his own. Not long after, when it became clear Fellows intended to go through with the divorce, he needed to liquidate as many of his assets as he could and offered to sell his half of the company to Wayne, who quickly agreed to the deal.

Wayne then formed a new company, “Batjac,” named after the fictitious Dutch shipping company in one of his favorite films,
Wake of the Red Witch.
It was his eldest son, Michael, who suggested the name. Wayne liked the way it sounded like bat crap. It was originally supposed to be “Batjak,” as it is spelled in the movie, but a typographical error put into the incorporation papers substituted a “c” for the “k,” thus “Batjac.” On June 1, 1954, the incorporation was complete, Batjac opened new offices on Hollywood and Beverly Boulevards and immediately began work on several unmade Wayne-Fellows properties included in the buyout.

WAYNE AND PILAR MOVED INTO
a new house in Encino, which quickly became a never-ending salon for Wayne’s friends, including Bond, Ford, McLaglen, and Feldman. For them, especially, the door was always open and Ford showed up at all hours of the day and night, usually drunk, the only friend of Wayne’s whom Pilar disliked, but she wisely decided not to make an issue of it. For his part, Wayne always welcomed Ford, no matter what time and now matter what condition he was in. If Ford was drunker than Wayne, he was always ready to drink a few to catch up with Pappy.

When the house wasn’t filled with his friends, Pilar and Wayne often went out by themselves for dinner and entertainment, most often at Charlie Morrison’s and Felix Young’s West Hollywood South American–styled Mocambo, where his favorite maroon leather banquette was always ready for him.
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One time the house reporter asked if he could take their picture together. It was before the divorce had been finalized. When he asked Wayne what the occasion was, he replied, “We’re celebrating the fact that it’s a great world!”

Late into the night, Wayne loved to snuggle with Pilar on the sofa, use his custom remote controls to lower the TV from the ceiling, snack on salami sandwiches Pilar would make, chain-smoke his beloved Camels (he went through four packs a day and did print and TV ads for the brand), and watch TV shows or old movies until he fell asleep. On weekends, they would relocate to Wayne’s boat,
The Nor’wester
. It was a form of at-home happiness Wayne had never had before, and he cherished it, as well as Pilar for giving it to him.

But her friends cautioned he would never marry again. “Duke’s too much of a man’s man,” one friend told her. “He’s too fond of his freedom. He likes to carouse too much.” Another talked of how he had trouble playing the role of a husband. “When he takes off his clothes, he will throw his shirt and pants on a chair and his socks on the floor. He is constitutionally opposed to ashtrays. He hates [domestic] schedules. He likes to eat when he feels like it, drink when he wants to, and stay up until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.” They slept in a specially made king-size bed to accommodate his size and both loved the luxury of the roominess. He always wore only bottoms at night.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, HOWARD
Hughes had wanted Wayne to make a film about Genghis Khan. Two years earlier, Dick Powell, the former film juvenile who had grown up and into rough-and-tough guy roles and become a savvy producer, had been hired by Hughes to direct the film. Hughes, never a speedboat, was finally ready to make it, which meant everybody had to be ready.

Given the green light, Powell’s first choice to play the lead had been Marlon Brando, and when he told Hughes, he did not say no. As it turned out, Brando was under contract to Warner at the time, and they wouldn’t loan him out. Hughes was convinced he could get them to change their mind, no matter how much he had to pay. He hired British-born screenwriter Oscar Millard, who had relocated to Hollywood after World War II, to custom-fit a script for the actor. The screenwriter, however, ignored Hughes and wrote it his own way, without considering Brando at all. According to Millard, “I decided to write it in stylized, slightly archaic English, mindful of the fact that my story was nothing more than a tarted-up Western. I thought this would give it a certain cachet and I left no lily unpainted. It was a mistake I never repeated.”

Not long after, Powell received word that Brando was beginning production work on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film version of the Frank Loesser musical smash
Guys and Dolls.
The truth was, that film was still in preproduction and had no start date; it was just an excuse Brando came up with because the young Method actor hated Millard’s stilted old-style fake-historical script. The bald and at the time immensely popular Yul Brynner also turned it down. With a shooting script ready and a director in place, a desperate Hughes called up Wayne, who had always been his first choice, and asked him to take the part as a personal favor. Wayne didn’t want to say no to Hughes, hoping he could still get him to produce
The Alamo
.

WAYNE RECEIVED $250,000 (PAID AT
a $1,000 weekly salary) to make
The Conqueror
, good money that he sorely needed. It was directed by Powell with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, not entirely Powell’s fault as he had Hughes hovering over him dictating every shot. Millard’s faux twelfth-century Far Eastern dialogue sounded as if Shakespeare had suffered a stroke just before writing it, with acting that made starch seem a softener (some actors’ dialects appeared to come and go without any reason), and throughout, Wayne sounded like someone reading aloud an instruction manual with some of its words missing.

The very idea of Mr. Americana as an Oriental warrior might be laughable if the film weren’t so pathetic.
The Conqueror
is not one of those films that turns out not just as bad as one might imagine, a good piece of camp, but worse, plainly dreadful, a bad tooth of a movie that keeps throbbing with pain from start to finish. Wayne knew he had a dog on his hands, and to get through filming he popped Dexedrine pills four times a day, to help keep him awake and to prevent his weight from ballooning beyond his already brawny forty-six-inch chest, thirty-seven-inch waist, and seventeen-inch biceps. For the five long months it took to make the film, from March to August 1954, he kept to a strict diet of hard-boiled eggs, spinach, green salad, cottage cheese, and one steak or lamb chop a day and washed it all down with as much high-test champagne as he could pump into himself.

The Conqueror
became the last film Hughes ever produced. By 1953, RKO was hemorrhaging cash, and in late 1954, Hughes reluctantly sold out to General Teleradio for $25 million, a deal that included the rights to all of RKO’s negatives, not just the two dozen or so movies made during his tenure.

The sale also meant the end of Hughes’s soft commitment to Wayne to make
The Alamo
. Soon after General Teleradio took over the studio, all productions were shut down and the physical lots were sold to Desilu Productions (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) for $6.1 million. With that sale, RKO, one of the “Big Five” studios of Hollywood’s golden age, ceased to exist.
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One of the more interesting side stories to the making of
The Conqueror
that continues to haunt this cursed film is the large number of cancer deaths among the cast and crew. Of the 220 persons who worked on it, 91 had contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died from it, including Wayne, who died from stomach cancer, not lung cancer as is popularly believed (he first contracted lung cancer in 1964, claimed to have beaten “the big C,” and lived another fifteen years); his costar Susan Hayward; popular character actress Agnes Moorhead; and Dick Powell. It has never been proven (and probably never will be), but many attribute the source of the outbreak of cancer among the participants of the production to radioactive fallout from U.S. atom bomb tests in nearby Nevada. What clouds the facts are the other variables, such as the lifestyle of most Hollywood workers, both in front of and behind the camera. They lived hard, including heavy drinking and cigarette smoking (Wayne was a four-pack-a-day man). Most involved in the production apparently knew about the radiation and none took the threat that seriously (there’s a photo in existence of Wayne smiling and operating a Geiger counter during the filming).

Ultimately, although researchers have failed to make any connection to the tests and the high rate of those who worked on the film, Hughes believed there was. He felt guilty about having caused the death of so many of his friends, which might have been one of the factors in his decision to withdraw
The Conqueror
from circulation after its initial run. It is said that during the last crazy years of his life, lived as a recluse on the top floor of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, he often screened it with a 16 mm projector and a portable screen for himself while lying propped up in bed.

The film’s initial release itself was delayed two years because of postproduction problems—much of the desert sand had to be relocated to the RKO studios to try to make some scenes match the location shooting—because of the sale of the studio, and because of Hughes’s plain weirdness. He didn’t release
The Conqueror
until February 1956 (and
Jet Pilot,
which had wrapped in 1951, didn’t come out until fall of 1957).

IN OCTOBER 1954 WAYNE AND
Pilar traveled to Honolulu, sparking rumors they were about to be married there. Wayne denied all of them. He said, “Unless there is some delay in
The Sea Chase
[his new movie, the official reason they were there] I won’t be free to marry before my return. I certainly hope to marry Pilar when I am free—that is, if she will have me. There are two sides to this, you know.”

The Sea Chase
was made for Warner, shot in Warner color and CinemaScope, and produced and directed by John Farrow. Jack Warner, the film’s executive producer, eager to sign Wayne to a new long-term contract, threw a huge, star-studded welcoming party on the beach, highlighted by an appearance of MGM star Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband, British actor Michael Wilding.

THE SEA CHASE
IS A
World War II at-sea drama based on a 1948 novel by Andrew Clare Geer that Warner Bros had bought the rights to in 1950. In it Wayne plays the captain of a ship hunted by the Nazis, with Lana Turner as a German spy somehow on board and undetected as the enemy, to supply some much-needed, if highly improbable, sexiness to the story. Warner had to pay MGM $300,000, to borrow Turner. Before they signed her, at Wayne’s suggestion they tried to get Virginia Mayo or Susan Hayward for the role. When they couldn’t get either, they signed Turner and paid MGM. Wayne hadn’t wanted her because he couldn’t stand her and she abhorred him. Wayne thought she was cheap-looking, and she considered him Hollywood’s biggest hick. The two didn’t say a word to each other off-camera the entire shoot. The cast also included Wayne’s good friends James Arness, Paul Fix, and Alan Hale Jr.
The Sea Chase
was a familiar genre for Wayne and gave his audience what it wanted, a simple, nonpolitical action thriller with Wayne the larger-than-life if two-dimensional movie hero.

WAYNE AND PILAR TIED THE
knot on November 1, 1954, in Kailua, before they left Hawaii after Wayne received the phone call he had been waiting for, from Frank Belcher, informing him that the final divorce papers had been delivered to him that morning. “You’re a free man,” Belcher told Wayne, laughing as he did. Wayne put the phone down, turned to Pilar and said, “How would you like to get married today?” Pilar scurried to find a wedding dress, aided by Wayne’s longtime personal assistant, Mary, while Wayne used his influence to bypass all the necessary papers and blood tests. District Magistrate Norman Olds agreed to waive the mandatory three-day waiting period.

The wedding took place at sunset, a civil ceremony held in the palatial former home of King Kamehameha III. Mary was the maid of honor, and Francis Li Brown, a wealthy sportsman and former Republican senator from Oahu, the best man. Director John Farrow, who had just wound up production on
The Sea Chase,
gave away the bride. Also in attendance were three of Wayne’s children, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda, who had come to Hawaii while their father was making the film.

Pilar, twenty-six, wore a pink organza dress with matching hat, orange blossoms in her hair, and held a bouquet of native flowers as the two exchanged vows.
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Wayne, forty-seven, wore a dark suit, white shirt, black tie. The ceremony lasted ninety seconds. The word
Obey
was omitted by mutual agreement. After he kissed the bride, Wayne said, “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’ve had a lot of wonderful things happen, but this is the best.”