American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (8 page)

Sheehan, realizing he couldn’t prevent the young unknown from being in the film, then argued that the name Duke Morrison was too long for a marquee and didn’t suit the star of a western movie. He and Walsh spent a few hours together running down names. Walsh later remembered, “We called him Joe Doakes and Sidney Carton and all those sort of names—and I remembered I had read a book that I liked one time about ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne. I thought this Wayne was a great character. So I said, ‘Let’s call him Anthony Wayne or Mad Wayne or whatever the hell you want to call him, call him Wayne.’ Well, they called him John Wayne. That’s how he got his name.” Short, tough, and sounding a lot like John Payne, who was already a big star. If people bought tickets thinking they were going to see John Payne, that would be all right too.

Wayne remembered it this way: “The studio decided that Marion was not exactly a proper name for an American hero and Duke sounded a little too vulgar, for some reason. So they came up with John Wayne. It’s worked all right for me.” Some believe Wayne himself came up with John as an homage to John Ford.

As production began in the spring of 1930, Duke Morrison cross-faded into John Wayne. “I was determined to be as cooperative as possible,” Wayne later wrote in an unpublished memoir. “After all, Fox had given me a great many opportunities, first as a prop man and then as a stuntman and an actor. They started what was called a star buildup campaign for me. Who was I to complain?”

Walsh then sent Wayne to the studio’s resident voice and acting coach, Lumsden Hare, a Broadway veteran who was a master teacher of the neutral sound of Eastern Standard speech. Fox hired Hare after the arrival of sound to train the studio’s actors and actresses how to speak for the microphone. Wayne hated it. “My teacher had me rolling my r’s like I was Edwin Booth playing Hamlet. I felt ridiculous.”

Despite all the lessons, his voice remained higher than a baritone, accompanied by an intimidating squint of his eyes whenever he spoke, and the jerky arm and neck movements that made it look as if he were about to throw a punch every time he turned his head. To learn how to toss a knife for the picture, he was trained by stuntman and good friend Steve Clemente, and for roping, gun handling, and horseback riding, by another Fox pro, Jack Padgin.

Production on
The Big Trail
began with a three-hundred-man crew on location in Yuma, Arizona, where Wayne referred to Walsh in football rather than film terms, as “Coach.” Wayne played Breck Coleman, a young trapper who is enlisted by the government to help cross the Oregon Trail and open up the Wild West to commerce, trade, and land development. A band of pioneers assembles at the Mississippi to begin their historic quest. Early on, Coleman is suspected of having killed a trapper for his furs while he suspects one of the other trailblazers, wagon boss Rod Flack (played by the handsome Broadway star Tyrone Power Sr.). Meanwhile, Coleman finds love with young Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill), who is close with a gambler friend of Flack. Coleman and Flack lead the settlers west, while Flack does everything he can to have Coleman killed. Flack and his gambler friend have joined the caravan to avoid being hanged for previous crimes. The settlers’ trail ends in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where Coleman kills Flack and his friend, and settles down with Ruth.

After a week of filming, with all the other actors sounding like Broadway actors trying to sound like cowboys, a disgusted Walsh told Wayne to forget everything he’d learned in his speech lessons, to just speak in the halting way he normally did, and to leave in that funny walk of his. Years later that walk and talk would become every comic impersonator’s bread and butter.
²²

The production was mired in Yuma for twenty-eight days, during which time Wayne kept mostly to himself. He didn’t drink with the other actors. Nor did he have much to do off-screen with the film’s leading lady, Marguerite Churchill—a Broadway actress discovered by Sheehan who was also being given the big studio buildup—after she made it clear to Wayne when he’d made a pass at her that he’d be better off spending whatever free time he had studying his lines.

After finishing up in Yuma, the caravan moved to Sacramento, where Walsh wanted to film a river sequence. It was in Sacramento that the production began to come apart. Part of the problem was the widespread weariness among the cast and crew, who weren’t used to doing so much traveling to make a movie. At the time, most Hollywood films were shot on soundstages in Hollywood, where it was possible to re-create almost any location, indoors and out. Few, if any connected to the production, including Sheehan, had agreed with Walsh’s decision to take the film on location but Walsh argued, convincingly, that shooting in Grandeur was going to make fake outdoor sets look even more unreal than usual. He insisted that for the widescreen, they had to shoot
The Big Trail
outdoors in Sacramento.

As soon as they were set up, crates of bootleg whiskey suddenly arrived for the cast and crew, much-needed balm imported by them to get through the increasingly long and difficult production. Walsh demanded throughout the location shoots that the actors be ready to film at dawn, so he could catch the all-important first rays of golden sunlight and before the heat became unbearable. The actors, mostly out of the New York theater, where they could sleep all day and perform at night, hated him for it, and he had little use for them. As Walsh later recalled: “Sheehan and [Bill Fox’s executive assistant] Sol Wurtzel figured this boy [Wayne] should have some help. They sent back to New York and they engaged five prominent character actors, the most prominent actors of the day, and brought them out and surprised me with these fellows . . . I knew none of them had ever seen the sun rise or the sun set—I knew I was going to have a hell of a time with them. We got on location, got started and I called John and said, ‘sit beside me when I’m directing these character actors, because they’re the best and you’ll learn something from them.’ Well, the night before, a bootlegger got in to them and they were pretty well oiled up for this scene. Not only did they scare the Indians that were sitting around, they scared the hawks and the crows that were in the trees . . . these great character men stayed loaded all through the picture, and things finally got so bad we nicknamed them Johnnie Walker, Gordon Gin, and several other names of whiskey.”

The script, too, was a problem. It suffered from a lack of any stylistic cohesion, having been written by committee—story by Hal G. Evarts, dialogue and sequences woven together by Marie Boyle, Jack Peabody, Florence Postal, and Fred Sersen—which on location made it difficult to get the quick rewrites necessary to adapt the reality of the locales to the logic of the story.

Finally, the massive and delicate Grandeur equipment was extremely difficult to set up, break down, and move from site to site. Dozens of expensive motors for the cameras burned out and had to be replaced. Every scene had to be shot at least three separate times, once for the Grandeur format, once in the standard 35 mm so it could be distributed in cities where there were no theaters equipped with the widescreen equipment, which was most of them, and once in German (Walsh was helped with that version by Lewis Seiler), part of Fox’s still-grand scheme to become the king of world cinema. Having some of the actors try to speak phonetic German proved a nightmare for Walsh, and after a lot of wasted time and money, much of the German version was eventually overdubbed.
²³

EVEN WITH ALL THESE DIFFICULTIES,
Walsh continued to drag his cast and crew across the face of the American West another four months, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the Grand Teton Pass; St. George, Utah; Sequoia National Park; Moise, Montana. And it paid off. Many of the wagon train sequences shot by cinematographers Lucien Andriot and Arthur Edeson are stunning, and Walsh’s use of natural sound was innovative and exemplary.

However, the physical strain on machines and humans continued to take its toll. Wayne became seriously ill during filming: “I was three weeks on my back with
turistas—
or Montezuma’s revenge, or the Aztec two-step, whatever you want to call it. You know, you get a little grease and soap on the inside of a fork and you’ve got it. Anyway, that was the worst case I’ve ever had in my life. I’d been sick for so long that they finally said, ‘Jeez, Duke, if you can’t get up now, we’ve got to get somebody else to take your place.’ So, with a loss of eighteen pounds, I returned to work while I puked and crapped blood for a week.”

In the end, the biggest problem with the film’s star was not his health but his acting. Wayne’s lack of real-life experience showed in his on-screen lack of authority. Breck Coleman is the key character of the story, a star turn, the one who keeps all the plot strands of the film together. Much of Wayne’s acting comes off overly stiff, with exaggerated hand gestures and facial expressions meant to “show” what he was thinking, instead of illustrating what he was feeling. And when it came to the love scenes with Marguerite Churchill, the uptight Wayne had absolutely no idea how to approach her or them. Some of the other actors giggled at his attempts to be romantic (as audiences would when the film opened). They came off tentative, imitative, and artificial.

Walsh realized too late that the big difference between John Wayne and Gary Cooper was something all the lessons and lenses in the world couldn’t fix. Cooper sizzled on-screen, a quality that got him through the most ridiculous of scenarios, like
Morocco
, but Wayne had plainly no heat. He acted at room temperature, and it would keep him from ever becoming a romantic leading man.

As visualized by Walsh,
The Big Trail
was a metaphor for the journey of life, with its Chaucer-like multiplicity of stories that emerge from under the one umbrella theme of progress. However, with too many writers to make it a unified whole, and with the limitations imposed by having to shoot in Grandeur, the momentum of the Great American Dream is viewed only from an external viewpoint, too much vista, too little vision.

The Big Trail
premiered November 1, 1930, a noisy, flashing, lavish spectacle of a night, complete with klieg lights rotating in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, followed the next day by awful reviews and after that, mediocre box office. Walsh was, at this point in his career, still directing with an actor’s eye rather than a director’s, and it limited his ability to construct a convincing mise-en-scène
.

Wayne, too, had to share some of the blame. He had not had enough training or experience to carry a major motion picture. His acting was full of exaggerated motions he had learned watching silent film. He didn’t yet know how to do more in front of a camera by doing less, to trust that the camera could look into rather than just at him.

THE RECRIMINATIONS FROM THE FILM’S
failure ran deep.
The Big Trail
all but ended Marguerite Churchill’s run as a movie star
.
She never again starred in a major motion picture. It was Tyrone Power Sr.’s only “talkie” and his last film. He died the next year of a heart attack, in his star-to-be son’s arms. After finishing out his contract with Fox, Walsh moved to Paramount and floundered for nearly a decade before he next landed at Warner Bros and found his auteurist soul directing
The Roaring Twenties
in 1939, with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney as the
yin
and
yang
of Depression-era crime.

The Big Trail
was seen in its original intended Grandeur form in only two theaters, the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s in Los Angeles. The rest of the country and the world saw it in standard 35 mm, which is to say they didn’t really see it at all. After the film’s brief run ended, William Fox warehoused all his Grandeur equipment, and widescreen 70 mm would not be used again until the early ’50s, when it was revived as part of the dying industry’s attempt to combat the ubiquitous but small television screen.

The film’s financial failure signaled the end of William Fox’s career as a Hollywood mogul. He eventually served six months in jail for perjury, having to do with the government’s antitrust lawsuit. When he was released, he declared bankruptcy and retired from the film business. In 1935, under new management, the studio was taken over by Twentieth Century in what was politely called a merger. Under the leadership of Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century Pictures became Twentieth Century–Fox. William Fox moved back to New York City and died in obscurity in 1952 at the age of seventy-three. No Hollywood producers came to his funeral. (In his unpublished memoirs, Wayne graciously gave William Fox and his studio credit as the person and institution that gave him his first big opportunity in Hollywood.)

With his star turn a bust, Wayne didn’t appear in another movie for a year and a half. Zanuck finally put him in a movie after demoting him to the Bs, the cinematic dead end for has-beens or never-wases. The whole experience left him bitter and broke: “So I was the star of a super-spectacle $3 million picture. What a laugh. My salary was all of $75 a week.”

Without money, without a future, and without a dream, he did what any twenty-three-year-old would do in his situation.

He decided it was the perfect time to think about setting down and getting married.

Chapter 4

“I can’t act and I couldn’t learn in a thousand years,” Wayne warned Raoul Walsh when he cast him in
The Big Trail,
and he had made good on his prediction. After, whenever anybody asked him why the film failed, he manned up and refused to blame anyone else for the film’s failure, citing only his own inability. That was his way.

He determined to better himself. According to one friend, “He was obsessed with the idea of becoming a good actor.” After
The Big Trail
, he tried to repair the real damage that had been done to his career. Sheehan and Wurtzel ignored him whenever they passed Wayne at the studio, as if he didn’t exist.