John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [103]
“When you have people like Wayne and Martin, you don’t always have to stick to the script. You can tell them some bit of business, and they’ll ad-lib it, and if it works I stop there. I don’t like to do retakes.”
For twenty-six-year-old Angie Dickinson, Rio Bravo was a big break after a run of mediocre films. “The luckiest thing that happened to me was to do Rio Bravo, and to do it with Duke,” she told me later. “Duke was a real man. And I mean a real man. He was like it on screen and off. I was still new to movies, and Duke really helped me a lot. We had some long scenes together. Much longer than Duke is used to. So he was working harder than ever to get through those scenes and keep his concentration. It didn’t matter if the words didn’t come out the way they were written.
He’d say the lines the way he thought his character would say them. I loved Duke. And he enjoyed working for Howard Hawks.
He never argued with him. He just did whatever Howard told him to do. He trusted Hawks.”
Wayne enthused, “We were damned lucky to have Angie Dickinson. She had beauty, sex appeal, and brains. And she was one of the best actresses I ever worked with. There was none of that
‘Don’t mess my hair or makeup,’ or ‘I’m late because I had to get my hair just right.’ She was there on time, she knew what was needed, and she did the job as good as any actress.
“I’ve worked with Maureen O’Hara a few times and she’s like the female equivalent of me. She could rough me up and I could rough her up. I liked working with Gail Russell because she had such a fragile quality which played in contrast to my characters. And with Angie you had someone who was not the female equivalent of me, nor was she fragile, but she was a real woman who could be tough and gentle and sexy, and she didn’t have to rough me up to get her way with me. She was the kind of woman in Rio Bravo you just couldn’t resist.”
When Bud Boetticher visited the set, he recalled: “John Wayne had a powerful presence and he was so perfect in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat that what he did kind of rubbed off on the other actors if they weren’t careful. They were doing a scene in a saloon, and he 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 193
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had some lines with Claude Akins, and they were halfway through it and Akins said his line which was, ‘So what are you gonna do now?’ Wayne came back without a beat and said, ‘Well, the first thing I’m gonna do is change the tone of my voice if all you assholes are going to talk just like me.’ It was really funny to hear the other actors starting to talk like Duke and they didn’t even realize it.”
Released in February 1959, Rio Bravo was an immediate hit, earning $5.7 million domestically and around $12 million worldwide.
There are many stories about John Wayne which, for various and often good reasons, are sanitized. Such was the story of how Wayne came face-to-face with the leader of the Soviet Union in 1958. The idea that Duke Wayne and Nikita Khrushchev could make for good drinking buddies stretches the imagination, but that was the story put out in 1958, and it was the one Wayne told me in 1974.
“President Dwight Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States [in September 1958]. The president sent me word that Khrushchev wanted to meet me. Seems that he had seen many of my films which he pirated across the Iron Curtain and had dubbed into Russian just for his own pleasure. When I got word from the president that the Soviet leader wanted to meet me, I accepted because I certainly didn’t want to embarrass the president.
“I guess I was curious to know what a Communist leader was like.
I knew he was not another Stalin who was a goddamn monster, but these people were still enemies to freedom. Although it hadn’t happened yet, Khrushchev was the guy who sent all those nuclear missiles to Cuba and aimed them at us. And yet the guy I met didn’t seem the type to want to blow up any country, but that’s what he was