John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [105]
He said that Mao Tse-tung was like Stalin and he kept trying to push the Soviet Union into a war with the West. Khrushchev told Duke that Mao was in on the conspiracy. Duke said that Khrushchev seemed concerned but he gave no guarantees.
“Duke finally said to him, ‘Do you really watch my pictures?’
and Khrushchev said, ‘Yes, I especially like the ones about the U.S.
Cavalry. They remind me of how the white Americans oppressed the true natives of America.’ Duke said he wanted to punch Khrushchev in the mouth but thought better of it. Then Khrushchev said, ‘Our Russian actors do not do a very good impression of you.
Now I have heard you speak, I will try to imagine how you would say your lines.’
“Duke said he had to pretend he liked the leader of the Soviet Union because it suited the president’s PR men to say that even John Wayne liked the president of the USSR. Duke didn’t mind so long as it helped ease tensions between East and West. But, of course, it didn’t help a damn.”
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I asked Canutt how the interpreter took the news that the Communists had been trying to kill Wayne. Canutt said, “John said that the interpreter told him he wouldn’t be the one to tell the president that the Russians had been trying to kill John Wayne, and John told him, ‘That’s fine by me. Because if you did ever say it was discussed, I’ll deny it, and I’m sure you won’t get old Iron Curtain Pants here to back you up.’ John had a way of putting things that made people do what he told them— asked them.” It was especially important to Wayne that all of this was kept secret.
Also in 1958, Wayne made a surprise unbilled cameo in a Diana Dors comedy, I Married a Woman, in which he appeared in a film within a film. It was little more than a favor to RKO.
More importantly, in late October 1958, Wayne and Ford reunited to make The Horse Soldiers. Written and produced by John Lee Mahin in partnership with Martin Rackin, it was based on a true incident in the American Civil War. It wasn’t a Western in the traditional sense but a historical film. And yet it was Ford and Wayne and columns of men in blue on horseback, giving its backers, the Mirisch brothers and United Artists, hopes of a picture to compare with the likes of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and Rio Grande. But Civil War films were risky enterprises.
Over the phone in 1980, John Lee Mahin (who was giving me good advice about screenwriting) explained, “John Ford was an American Civil War buff and had wanted to make a Civil War picture for a long time. But that’s the hardest kind of film to make in America. With the exception of The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, there has never really been a successful Civil War picture because somebody has to be the heavy and it’s either going to be the Confederates or the Yankees. So The Horse Soldiers was a risky project because it was based on a historical event about a Union cavalry raid deep into Southern territory. Martin Rackin and I had read the book [by Harold Sinclair] and we decided to form our own production company and optioned the book for a year for one dollar. We wrote our screenplay and took it to Walter Mirisch, who agreed to put up three and a half million dollars if we could sign several bankable stars.
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“We figured that the combination of John Ford and the cavalry was as good as a bankable star and he loved the idea. He wanted to cast John Wayne, which made the project even more viable, and we were able to interest William Holden, who was a top star then following his success in The Bridge on the River Kwai. So Mirisch went to United Artists and they came on board. Then Paramount, who had Holden under contract, tried to keep him off the film, and that resulted in a legal battle which we won.
“Ford knew the film would be difficult to bring off because of the problems all Civil War films have. He told Marty Rackin,
‘You know where we should make this