American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (38 page)

However, by late September, just before they were preparing to leave for Arizona, Pilar’s pill addiction had gotten out of hand. It came to a climax one night when she ran out of her supply of tranquilizers and couldn’t fight off the symptoms of withdrawal. When Wayne realized what was going on, rather than get her the refills she begged him for from the Beverly Hills doctor who had prescribed the pills, he threw away the empty bottles and insisted they could get through it together.

At least, as it turned out, until it was time for him to leave for Arizona, which he did and by himself. Two days later, against her doctor’s advice, an insistent Pilar showed up, with Aissa, and without pills. Two days later she began to have hallucinations. Reportedly, she tried to slit her wrists. Wayne immediately sent her back to Los Angeles in a private plane and had her admitted to a hospital in Encino. Pilar’s father came up from South America to care for the baby while Pilar stayed in recovery.

His wife’s problems weren’t the only ones that plagued Wayne during the making of
The Horse Soldiers,
one of his most beautiful and overlooked collaborations with Ford. The director was unhappy with the script by John Lee and Martin Rackin and rightfully so. Few who have seen the film remember many of the plot’s details, but no one can never forget Ford’s beautiful visual of soldiers riding their horses in single file and in shadows across the skyline horizon.

In
The Horse Soldiers,
Wayne plays Colonel John Marlowe, assigned to lead his Union soldiers on a mission of serial terrorism in the heart of Confederate land. To play Major Henry Kendall, a doctor assigned to accompany the band of soldiers on their mission, Ford wanted Jimmy Stewart, but he had other commitments, and the director instead got William Holden, one of the most popular actors of the ’50s, whose career had peaked with
Bridge on the River Kwai
and was now beginning its slow slide into decline. Ford charitably gave “Hoot” Gibson, the great film cowboy, a small part. Gibson was broke, in bad health, and needed money. Ford had a small part written into the script for him.

Unfortunately, the chemistry between Wayne and Holden was nonexistent (“Two Hellions” as the film’s coming attractions described them, something neither one came close to playing on-screen; their real-life differences were mostly philosophical). They didn’t work well together on-screen, nor did the mandatory love interest, played with sophistication by the gorgeous Constance Towers as a captured southern belle forced to accompany Colonel Marlowe on his mission until he can deliver her safely into the enemy’s hands somewhere near Louisiana. The film’s implied triangle between Wayne/Holden/Towers also doesn’t work, and the film feels at least a half hour longer than its 119 minutes.

Some of the film’s problems were the result of Ford’s heavy drinking. Holden, who was a degenerate alcoholic, and Wayne needed little encouragement to join him in what became a booze-drenched set. Because of it, the film lacks Ford’s usual precise timing and the much-needed sexual spark between Marlowe (Wayne) and Hunter (Towers). He is a gentleman, she is a southern woman of means. Their attraction is complicated by her repressed feelings for Kendall (Holden), and his for her. There should have been more dramatic tension and the lack of it leaves
The Horse Soldiers
an action picture without much action. What real drama there was occurred off-screen, when Ford hired Fred Kennedy as a stuntman. Kennedy was out of shape and, tragically, was killed falling off a horse as he doubled a shot for Holden. After that, Ford’s already heavy drinking increased, so did Holden’s and Wayne’s, and they all lost any real interest in finishing the film.

Wayne and Holden each received a hefty $750,000 for being in the film, while Ford received $200,000 for directing and a percentage of the profits that never materialized. Its negative cost was just under $4 million and the film’s net just matched it, off a gross of $10,200,000.

AS THE DECADE DREW TO
a close, Wayne wanted more than ever to make his cherished film about the Alamo. He had already begun preproduction back in the mid-1950s by personally paying for the writing of a script by James Grant, his favorite screenwriter, whom Wayne also made a coproducer on the film. He had then taken it to Yates, who optioned it but was no longer in a position to finance anything. Yates told Wayne at that time no studio would back the film. The script as written was too long, had no sexual heat, and an ending that, even though it was based on historical fact, was too downbeat for Hollywood. In 1955, about a year after he turned down Wayne, Yates released his own version of the Davy Crockett Alamo saga,
The Last Command,
directed by Frank Lloyd, and starring Sterling Hayden as Jim Bowie. This incensed Wayne, who felt that he had been stabbed in the back by Yates, and perhaps worst of all, that Hayden was in the film despite his having confessed to being a Communist in front of HUAC. Because he had named names he was able to continue working, although his career never regained the level of stardom it once had.

Wayne then lost any shred of sympathy he had left for anyone caught in HUAC’s career-killing web. And he had no forgiveness in him for Yates, who he rightly believed had stolen his movie and given it to a Commie. Wayne never worked for Yates again.

Wayne was more determined now than ever to get his own Alamo movie made. He may have lost this battle to Yates, but he was determined to win the war.

Wayne went to Jack Warner in 1959 hoping he would agree to make it to fulfill part of his multiple-picture deal contract with the studio, but Warner was not at all enthusiastic about the project, and advised Wayne to let the whole thing go, that it was too expensive for any studio to make, and that the days of the western epic had gone out of fashion. Besides, Warner told him, he was too old to play Crockett. Wayne disagreed. He said at fifty-two, he was only two years older than Crockett was when he died at the Alamo. Maybe so, Warner told him, but Disney’s TV bio had officially lowered Crockett’s age to make it possible for Fess Parker to play him. Besides, Warner said, heroes in film were always portrayed younger than they were in real life, to bring in the youth market that did most of the buying of tickets these days.

A disappointed and increasingly desperate Wayne then went to John Ford, who echoed Warner’s (and Yates’s) comments. When Wayne insisted he was not only going to get it made, but he was going to direct, produce, and star in it, Ford told him he was flat-out crazy. He had no experience as a director and an epic like this, if he somehow did manage to get it funded, was not the project to start learning how to do it. The film, Ford concluded, had failure written all over it.

Wayne next took the script to UA and asked for a budget and for $7.5 million to make it. The studio agreed to give him $1.5 million up front and a commitment to distribute. That meant he would have to find $6 million dollars elsewhere. He went immediately to Howard Hughes, who turned him down. The increasingly reclusive billionaire said he was out of the movie business for good.

Furious, Wayne decided to put up the balance of the money needed himself and then hope to make his investment back by selling the negative to the highest bidder.

There was only one problem. By the end of the 1950s, after thirty-four years in the business and 139 feature films, the man at the top of the popularity charts, whose name was synonymous with Hollywood heroes, discovered he was flat broke.

Photo Insert

Marion Morrison as a baby.

Marion Morrison, USC football star.

Two early studio publicity photos of young Marion Morrison (one autographed as “John Wayne”—the autograph added later by Wayne), star of a series of “B” college-football films, a popular genre at the time. Morrison failed to connect with the public through these films, most of them made before he changed to a “B” “cowboy.”

(Rebel Road Archives)

Morrison’s “B” cowboy movie character, whom audiences would more readily accept.

(Rebel Road Archives)

A rare studio PR photo as a generic cowboy good guy, before he had his teeth fixed by the studio.

(Rebel Road Archives)

Harry Carey, John Ford’s silent-film cowboy star, after whom Wayne modeled his own cowboy screen image. Wayne paid tribute to Carey at the end of
The Searchers
by grabbing one arm with the other hand, a familiar Carey gesture.