American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (43 page)

Wayne had to walk a fine line between politics and entertainment making
The Alamo
, and it wasn’t easy, with his political vision all over the script, threatening to smother the film’s dramatic action in a sea of verbal polemics. The Mexicans in the film represent the Communist threat that Wayne felt was still very real, the nineteenth-century Alamo a metaphor for the United States of 1960. The fierce, climactic battle in the film of the Texans fighting and defending their fortress against Generalissimo Santa Anna’s forces was Wayne’s metaphor, as he saw it, for America’s ongoing battle against the subversive forces that wanted to destroy the country’s way of life. Santa Anna’s soldiers are costumed in Communist gray uniforms decorated with red epaulets, resembling nothing so much as Mao’s Korean War “Volunteers.” The film’s opening narrative tells audiences that “Generalissimo Santa Anna was sweeping north across Mexico toward them, crushing all who opposed his tyrannical rule . . . The [men of
The Alamo
] now faced the decision that all men in all times must face . . . to endure oppression or to resist.”

Crockett’s love interest in the film is Mexican, Graciela Carmela Maria “Flaca” de López y Vejar, a direct reference and a further blurring of the lines of between Wayne and Crockett. All three of Wayne’s wife had been of Latin heritage. Fifty-three years old during the making of the film in 1960, Wayne cast twenty-six-year-old Argentinean-born Linda Cristal to play Graciela (Crockett was married twice; neither wife was Latin).

All during production, Crockett espouses “the American way.” At one point, he says to Lopez, as he tries to explain why he’s come to defend the Alamo: “I’m gonna tell you something, and I want you to listen tight. May sound like I’m talkin’ about me. But I’m not. I’m talkin’ about you. As a matter of fact, I’m talkin’ about all people everywhere. When I come down here to Texas, I was lookin’ for somethin’. I didn’t know what. Seems like you added up my life and I spent it all either stompin’ other men or, in some cases, gettin’ stomped. Had me some money and had me some medals. But none of it seemed a lifetime worth of the pain of the mother that bore me. It was like I was empty. Well, I’m not empty anymore. That’s what’s important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what’s wrong or to say a word for what’s right even though you get walloped for sayin’ that word . . . here’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re livin’. You do the other and you may be walkin’ around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.”

During production, when he heard about it, Wayne publicly criticized Frank Sinatra for having hired Albert Maltz, one of the original Hollywood Ten, jailed for contempt in 1950 and subsequently blacklisted for years, to write the screenplay for a film about Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier executed by the U.S. military, for desertion during World War II. Wayne was outraged that Sinatra had hired a blacklisted writer without forcing him to use a pseudonym (the standard practice of the day). Not long after the completion of
The Alamo
, Wayne and Sinatra happened to be at the same restaurant shortly after Wayne returned from location, and the two men had to be separated before coming to blows.
¹²⁷

Wayne wanted
The Alamo
to be a testament to America, to his America, how he wanted to define it and how he thought it should be. Davy Crockett died fighting to defend freedom from any and all enemies. That freedom was something Wayne was determined not to let anybody take away. His battlefield was as much Hollywood and the rest of America as it was San Antonio, Texas.

EARLY IN MAY 1960, JUST
two months after completing
The Alamo
, Wayne found himself back in front of a camera, where he stayed for the rest of the summer, filming the lightweight
North to Alaska
, his second film for Fox, costarring Capucine, Stewart Granger, Fabian (another teen idol inserted into a movie to attract younger audiences), Mickey Shaughnessy, a character actor who could also throw a convincing screen punch, and Ernie Kovacs as Wayne’s rival for the gold, an extremely popular actor and comedian and early TV pioneer, who would be killed a year later in a car crash. The film is notable for its theme song, “North to Alaska,” which became an enormous hit for Johnny Horton, also killed not long after in a car crash.

Making the film, being back in the saddle as it were, lifted Wayne’s spirits. He had had nothing to do with producing it and after
The Alamo,
to chase Capucine around in her bustier and throw a few fists at Granger and Kovacs was not the worst job in the world.

He was surprised and delighted when both he and
North to Alaska
received positive reviews. Eugene Archer, writing in the
New York Times,
wrote: “Mr. Kovacs is droll as the would-be nemesis and Mickey Shaughnessy brightens a moment or two as his drunken stooge, but the proceedings are easily dominated by the indefatigable Mr. Wayne. Straddling the muddy terrain without benefit of his customary six-gun, he proves that he can carry his tongue in his cheek with the same impregnable aplomb.”

As much fun as he had making the film, it also helped ease a lot of financial woes for Wayne. He received $666,666.67 to star in what was Fox’s most expensive film that year. The gamble paid off.
North to Alaska
proved a big hit, earning a domestic gross of over $12 million in its initial domestic release, from a budget of $5 million. And there was not even a whiff of stale politicking anywhere to be found in it. The film’s numbers were great for Wayne. He was back in the money, and back in the big show.

FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER HE FIRST
thought of making a film commemorating and re-creating the famous Texas battle,
The Alamo
opened October 24, 1960, with a gala tent-pole premiere held in San Antonio, paid for by Wayne, to offset “[o]ne smart-aleck remark from a newspaperman on opening day that could cost us plenty.” The road to the San Antonio opening turned out to be another battle for Wayne, this one behind the scenes to ensure the film received ample publicity in its buildup. Batjac originally hired Jim Heneghan to promote the film, with one eye on a rollout that would build to a climax with a klieg light “event” premiere, and the other on making
The Alamo
a certain contender for that year’s Oscar race.

Heneghan’s strategy was to wine and dine critics, features writers, radio and TV talk-show hosts, anyone he felt could help promote the film. However, when too many women’s names showed up on Heneghan’s expense accounts who did not make their livings by writing and not enough writers who did, Wayne angrily fired him. Heneghan immediately sued, and to avoid any unwanted negative publicity, Wayne paid him his full fee of $100,000, and all the questionable expenses he claimed he had accrued.

With no one to promote the film and the clock ticking, Batjac then hired Russell Birdwell, who had golden credentials; he had been in charge of the great publicity campaign for
Gone with the Wind,
which had climaxed with the star-studded Atlanta premiere. It didn’t get any better than that. Wayne agreed to pay him $125,000, plus all expenses, and provide office space for the duration both in New York and Beverly Hills. Batjac allotted $1 million for Birdwell to spend on media advertising, one-eighth of the film’s original budget, one-twelfth of what it actually cost to make.

Birdwell immediately issued a 183-page press release and arranged for ABC to air a network special the night before the film’s opening, called
The Spirit of the Alamo,
in which Wayne appeared and read a letter out loud written by the real Davy Crockett. After, Wayne looked with squinting eyes straight into the camera, and warned viewers in his slow-paced style, “Nobody should come to see this movie unless he believes in heroes.”

The next day, he continued promoting his personal message as much as the film, telling
The Hollywood Reporter,
“I think we’ve all gone soft, taking freedom for granted . . . I think [the film] will be a timely reminder to Americans and the world that freedom does not come cheap and easy.”

THE ALAMO
PROVED A GIANT
step forward in Wayne’s self-assigned mission to be, on film at least, America’s Great Defender of Freedom, but a giant step backward in Wayne’s development as a filmmaker and the complexity of his acting, which had reached its zenith in
The Searchers
. Everything that film was,
The Alamo
wasn’t. Any trace of Ethan Edwards’s dark, ambiguous, existential antihero was nowhere to be found in Wayne’s two-dimensional portrayal of Davy Crockett as loyal chauvinist. Ethan questioned everything and by doing so upset the status quo. Crockett questioned nothing and fought to maintain the status quo. In
The Searchers,
prejudice and vengeance set up the film’s redemptive climax. In
The Alamo,
there is nothing revelatory about the film’s inevitable climax. Wayne’s vainglorious performance as Crockett is sometimes painful to watch. At one point Crockett greets a blind man, the allusion to Jesus Christ unmistakable and completely out of place. If
The Searchers
was Ford’s great and existential epic poem,
The Alamo
was Wayne’s unspectacular and bloated political prose.

Lacking either surprise or suspense—virtually everybody knows how the movie ends before they see it—at the premiere, which ran 202 minutes,
The Alamo
felt even longer than the real thirteen-day battle. After it opened for general release, at UA’s insistence, and over Wayne’s vehement objections, it was cut to 167 minutes. At thirteen minutes under three hours it was still too long to allow for as many plays-per-day as the standard two-hour film, and as UA feared, it hurt the film’s gross.
¹²⁸

The critics were neither thrilled nor enthralled by the film. Most shared a similar complaint, too much Wayne, not enough Crockett. The
New York Times
’ Bosley Crowther compared the film unfavorably to the immensely popular Disney version and wondered if the generation that grew up on coonskin caps and “b’ar-killing” would accept Davey Crockett as an older, more preachy character: “Whatever the case, we can assure you that [Davey Crockett] in ‘The Alamo’ is much less a convincing figure from history than he is a recreation of Mr. Wayne.”

The
Southern California Prompter
pointed out the film’s unmistakable allegory: “If he is saying that America needs about 10 million men with the courage of Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis, the point is well-taken. It may also occur to some he is suggesting that the easy answer to today’s complex problems is to pit this raw courage against Russia’s 10 million Santa Annas.”

The New Yorker
dismissed the film as “sentimental and preposterous flapdoodle . . . a model of distortion and vulgarization.”

Even conservative
Time
magazine could not find anything good to say about it: “Wayne & Co. have not quite managed to make it the worst [big western ever made].”

Wayne was determined to find an audience for film, despite all the negative reviews, and asked Birdwell to devise a new advertising campaign. However, before any of that could happen, Wayne received a phone call that brought tears to his hard eyes. On November 5, 1960, fifty-seven-year-old Ward Bond was dead. He had been Wayne’s closest friend from their earliest days together at USC, and they had made twenty-three films together. Bond had finally gained a measure of real stardom with his portrayal of Major Seth Adams in the hit TV series
Wagon Train,
for which he had completed 134 episodes starting in 1957. That November weekend he had flown to Dallas during a break in production from the TV show to watch the L.A. Rams play the Cowboys. Shortly after arriving, he was taking a shower in his hotel room when he died from a massive heart attack.

Wayne was sickened by the news. Other friends had passed, most notably Grant Withers, a member of the John Ford stock company, who couldn’t get over his addiction to pills and alcohol and committed suicide in March earlier that year. Wayne had felt bad about not being able to do more for Withers, but Bond’s passing was even worse. When Bond’s TV show became a hit, as if on cue his eating and his drinking increased, one long celebration of his long overdue stardom. When the show’s producers began to complain about his excessive weight for a man supposed to be rugged and in shape enough to lead wagon trains across the rough and dangerous terrain of the country, he did what everybody did in Hollywood in those years when told to shed pounds: he went on amphetamines. He popped the little pills like they were nuts on a bar top.

At the time of Bond’s death, Ford also happened also to be in Texas, directing
Two Rode Together
with Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark. He interrupted filming to take Bond’s body back to California, accompanying Bond’s widow, Mary Lou. The funeral was held at Field Photo Farm in Hollywood. Ford didn’t stay for it; he had to get back to Texas and resume production on his film. Wayne gave the eulogy, during which he called Bond “a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”

He was devastated by this loss but knew he had to keep his focus on
The Alamo
. His goal was to turn it not just into the biggest film of the year, but the biggest of his career. In the first three months of release,
The Alamo
earned only $2 million in rentals, far short of the $17 million needed to break even. Wayne then knew that the only thing that could save his film now was a big showing at the Oscars. Out of his own pocket he gave Birdwell an additional $75,000 to devise an Oscar campaign and, at Wayne’s directive, to aim it squarely at the Academy voters.

One of Birdwell’s industry ads listed the sizable number of paychecks that went to “American citizens” during the making of
The Alamo,
to remind everyone in the business of Wayne’s contribution to employment in Hollywood during a period when hiring had dipped. And Wayne allowed himself to be interviewed by several L.A.-based journals, during which he talked about the film’s Oscar-worthiness in political, rather than cinematic terms. In an interview with Dick Williams of the
Los Angeles Mirror,
he said, “The eyes of the world are upon us. We must sell America to countries threatened with Communist domination.” In response, an unimpressed Williams, wary of Wayne’s proselytizing disguised as promoting, in his piece compared Wayne’s Oscar tactics to the pressure he had applied during the height of the blacklist: “The impression is left that one’s proud sense of Americanism may be suspected if one does not vote for
The Alamo . . .
Obviously, one can be the most ardent of American patriots and still think
The Alamo
was a mediocre movie.”