American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (48 page)

In the film the vulnerability of its two stars, Wayne and Mitchum, and the inevitability of aging—for them as well as for Hawks—was contrasted by the presence the young and intense James Caan, in the pre-
Godfather
stage of his career when he was still relatively unknown. Wayne received $750,000 for this Paramount film, Mitchum $300,000, Caan $14,000.

WAYNE FELT HE WAS ONCE
more at the top of his game, but he still couldn’t find the financing to get
The Green Berets
made. To his dismay, no studio would go near what they considered not just a political hot potato, but at the time, a film about a war that had no cinematic potential or appeal. How could anybody make a popular movie about such an unpopular confrontation, with no real-life heroes, no decent women roles, and no end in sight?

Instead, Wayne, impatient to get back in front of a camera after the exhilarating experience working with Hawks, signed on to
The War Wagon,
a Batjac production for Universal. The film was part of a new two-picture deal Feldman had made for Batjac, hoping he could convince Universal to make
The Green Berets
the second picture. As of now the studio execs were not out, but they were not in. It was a possibility, they told Wayne.

On September 15, 1966, production began on
The War Wagon,
a tale of justice and revenge set in the Old West starring John Wayne. It was shot on location in Durango and Mexico City with a script by Clair Huffaker, based on his novel
Badman,
a score by Dimitri Tiomkin, Bill Clothier as cinematographer, and a solid cast that included Bruce Cabot as the bad buy, Kirk Douglas as a gunslinger, Howard Keel in the Indian role, Valora Nolan as the love interest, and Wayne as a framed and paroled ex-con.

During production, Wayne and Douglas got into some heated discussions about the war—Wayne was for it, Douglas against it—and California politics. Douglas was a big supporter of incumbent governor Pat Brown, up for reelection in the midyear between presidential campaigns. Douglas, Wayne could not forget, had broken the blacklist, which never sat well with him, and Douglas supported Brown’s ample public support programs. He wanted more of that from the government, while Wayne felt that Brown was too far to the left to be running California, and that his ideas bordered on socialism. Despite their differences, Wayne and Douglas were close friends and remained so.

On-set during production, Wayne received a phone call from his friend Nancy Reagan. The Reagans were longtime friends of the Waynes, and she told him she needed a favor from him. Wayne temporarily closed down production on the film and returned to Los Angeles to help Reagan’s campaign for governor. Reagan had been a Roosevelt Democrat before changing parties and was fond of telling everyone that he hadn’t left the party, the party had left him. Wayne happily went on the stump with his friend. That fall, Reagan won by a landslide and there was talk of the Republican Party making Wayne a candidate on the 1968 Republican national ticket. Once again Wayne rejected any notion of his running for political office. He was just an actor, he insisted, and besides, he wasn’t sure his health would be up for the intensity of such a physically taxing campaign.

However, Wayne certainly appeared “presidential,” whether that was his intention or not (perhaps to drum up business for his dormant war project), when in June 1966 he traveled to Vietnam as part of a three-week USO tour and to narrate a Department of Defense film. He began the trip in Saigon and traveled all over South Vietnam. In Chu Lai, the Vietcong shot off hundreds of rounds at the entourage, some coming uncomfortably close to Wayne, the nearest he had ever been to real enemy fire in any war. He was so unfazed he made a joke out of their poor aim. Everywhere he went, he was recognized and cheered by both Americans and South Vietnamese as a hero.

THE POSITIVE PUBLICITY HE RECEIVED
while in Vietnam convinced Universal to finally give Batjac a tentative green light for
The Green Berets,
and Wayne immediately started his son Michael working on the film’s preproduction. With a budget of $6.1 million, Wayne wanted a screenwriter he had worked with before and knew he could rely on. Jimmy Grant had always been his first choice for the project but had just passed away from lung cancer. Michael now suggested Robin Moore, who had written the original novel
The Green Berets,
already owned by Batjac. Moore was a Vietnam veteran, and his book had the feel of authenticity about it. However, Wayne rejected him after Moore ramped up his public criticism of the Defense Department. Wayne didn’t mind Moore’s comments, but he was afraid using him might result in the government not cooperating with the film, which would make it too expensive to make. Instead he chose James Lee Barrett, a former marine turned screenwriter, who had written a hard and tough novel about the Marine Corps’s training techniques. Using Barrett, the film had no trouble acquiring the cooperation of the Pentagon. When he finished a draft of the script, Michael delivered it to Universal, along with a signed letter from Wayne agreeing to star in the film.

Universal liked the script and was ready to go with it when it was unexpectedly rejected by the Pentagon because it depicted Special Forces carrying out covert missions in North Vietnam, which they weren’t supposed to be doing and had always denied, including an elaborate kidnapping of one of their generals. At Wayne’s directive, Barrett revised the script so that the general is taken while he is in South Vietnam, an unlikely scenario—what would a North Vietnamese general possibly be doing in South Vietnam—but a necessary change. It satisfied the Pentagon and they gave their much-needed approval of the script.

Wayne then made a guest appearance on Lucille Ball’s highly rated
The Lucy Show
playing himself, and soon after the
Merv Griffin
nightly talk show, to promote his movies but also to demonstrate to the world, to the Pentagon, and to Universal that he was in good enough condition to make the film, that he had indeed “beat the big C.”

THE WAR WAGON
WAS RELEASED
May 23, 1967, just two weeks before
El Dorado.
That same month the list of the top ten most popular box-office stars of 1966 was issued. Despite having only released one film that year,
Cast a Giant Shadow,
which hadn’t done all that well, Wayne placed seventh.
¹³¹
He was the second-oldest star to make it; Cary Grant beat him by three years. It was a powerful demonstration of Wayne’s enduring star power.

The War Wagon
was an immediate hit. It grossed just over $6 million in its initial North American release, and double that overseas, where it was released first.
El Dorado
opened June 9, 1967, a full two years after the completion of principal shooting, due mostly to extensive problems Hawks had in editing, similar to what had happened with
Red River
. He cut at least a dozen versions of the film before he was satisfied. When it did finally arrive in theaters, it received excellent reviews and did well at the box office, grossing nearly $16 million from a $4.5 million negative cost. Paramount had wanted both films out in the summer even if it pitted one Wayne film against another.

The
New York Times
called
El Dorado
“a tough, laconic and amusing Western that ambles across the screen as easily as the two veteran stars.” The
New York Daily News:
“The heavyweight crown in boxing may be up for grabs, but in the movies it is still firmly planted on the balding head of John Wayne. In
El Dorado,
though he may be a bit arthritic, Wayne still greets the opposition on a first-come, first-served basis and the wrongo [
sic
] who tries to outdraw him and winds up feeling kind of shot.” And
Variety:
“An excellent oater drama, laced with adroit comedy and action relief, and set off by strong casting, superior direction and solid production.” In 2014, film critic and historian A. J. Hoberman, writing in the
New York Times
on the occasion of the film’s rerelease (and its inclusion in a forty-DVD reissue of a number of Wayne’s films), offered this reevaluation: “City of Gold indeed: For one who grew up in the heyday of the post–World War Two western . . . two self-aware relics, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, star in Howard Hawks’ equally self-aware movie [that leisurely summarizes] many of Hawks’ career-long concerns.”

Wayne was now ready to turn his full attention to getting
The Green Berets
made. However, one day, in what seemed like a moment of déjà vu, from the Roos days, he was stunned to find a department store sent a collection letter to Pilar, that a $3,200 bill from Saks Fifth Avenue had gone unpaid. Wayne was furious, had a long talk with his son-in-law, La Cava, and decided from now on, it was best that, if it was true, he take care of his own expenses.
¹³²
He figured he couldn’t do any worse than his son-in-law, who, like Roos, had charged him a fortune to lose his money.

WAYNE WAS SO EAGER TO
get
The Green Berets
into production he turned down an attractive offer to be in
The Dirty Dozen,
from producer Ken Hyman, in association with MGM. It was Wayne’s kind of picture, a bunch of tough guys taking on the Nazis. And it would have reteamed him with Lee Marvin, one of his favorite tough-guy costars. But that was a World War II film and he wanted to make one about the war raging now, that took on the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, all in the name of freedom and liberty. That was the war he wanted to fight now.

On-screen, of course.

Chapter 25

Wayne had wanted to film
The Green Berets
on location in Vietnam, but nobody else thought it was a good idea, especially the Pentagon. They suggested instead Fort Benning, Georgia. Early in 1967, Wayne and Michael visited the base. In return for letting him use their facilities, Wayne promised to build an exact replica of a South Vietnamese village that he would leave standing when filming was completed to use as a training facility.

And then the bottom fell out of the project. Universal, which had never finalized its commitment, notified Batjac that it was pulling out of its end of the deal. The problem wasn’t the movie, they said, it was the war itself, and the increasing protests that were taking place in the streets. Who was going to see this film, the executives wondered? Who would want to see this war glorified? Colonel Mike Kirby (John Wayne) was no Sergeant Stryker, and the North Vietnamese and VC were not the Japanese, the Gulf of Tonkin was no Pearl Harbor, and Universal was not Republic Pictures. There was too much to lose, they concluded, and not enough to gain. Perhaps, they suggested, Wayne should wait until the war was over, and then the film could have a happy, meaning victorious, ending.

Angry but undeterred, Wayne then took the project to every other studio, and they all said no. His last hope was a personal appeal to Jack L. Warner, who, like all the other studio heads, didn’t think the film could earn any money. Warner, however, had made a fortune from John Wayne movies in the past and was a big supporter of the war. It didn’t hurt that the number-one song of 1967 was Lieutenant Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” cowritten by Robin Moore and Sadler. It sold more than four million copies and was on every radio station in America, playing over and over. Even the most radical young leftists found themselves humming the song’s catchy, deep-throated marchlike cadence. What it told Jack Warner was that maybe there was an audience for this film after all. After meeting again with Wayne, Warner agreed the studio would coproduce with Batjac because it was Warner Bros’ patriotic duty to support the war.

If Wayne took no salary.

HE ASSEMBLED A SOLID CAST
to support him on-screeen, with Aldo Ray as the tough master sergeant, Sergeant Muldoon. Ray, with his wrestler’s body and raspy voice, had been for a time Hollywood’s other go-to war movie actor. He had made an especially big splash in Raoul Walsh’s
Battle Cry,
based on the Leon Uris bestseller, also made at Warner Bros. Next Wayne wanted David Janssen, extremely hot after his successful long-running TV series
The Fugitive.
The dark-haired, good-looking Janssen was hired to play George Beckworth, a skeptical journalist who gets his head turned around (after its nearly blown off) and winds up writing favorably about the heroism of the Green Berets. It was believed but never confirmed that the character Beckworth was based on the liberal newspaper columnist Pete Hamill. The cast was rounded out by Jim Hutton, as Sergeant Petersen, a recruit who is destined for a date with Punjab sticks. Hutton was the only actor cast as a soldier who looked young enough to be a recruit, although in the film he does not play a Green Beret.

Then Captain, now Major Ron Miller was assigned as the consultant to the film, for helicopter accuracy and safety: “Aldo Ray had had his troubles in Hollywood and needed a job. Wayne liked him and cast him as one of the Green Berets. Both Wayne and Ray looked a bit too old and too out of shape to be Green Berets, but the army gave them a lot of real ones to surround them, to give the film a bit of a more authentic look.