John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [110]
I had the pleasure of meeting Laurence Harvey at a private function in 1972. He was clearly ill (sadly, he died the following year) but he spoke with energy and enthusiasm about The Alamo when I asked him about his experiences making it. He recalled his first meeting with Wayne: “It wasn’t an audition. There was no actual screen test. When I first met Duke, he had John Ford with him. I think Ford muscled in on the auditions whether Duke liked it or not. Ford sat there with a big cigar, and I was trying to tell Duke about my extensive experience on the stage at Stratford and the Old Vic. He said, ‘Don’t give me all that horseshit about art. I’m up to my ass trying to get this picture together. Can you do a Texas accent?’
“So I said to Ford, ‘Can I have a cigar?’ He looked puzzled but he 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 206
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gave one to me, and I lit it, and as I puffed on it, I said with a soft Texas accent, ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks. It is the east, and Juliet is the sun . . .’ And I went on, and that just cracked Wayne up. Ford just grunted, ‘We haven’t got much time.
Just sign him up.’
“You didn’t see a lot of British actors getting to play Americans in American movies. I must have been one of the first.”
To play the role of Smitty—who was actually based on a character called Deaf Smith because he was deaf—pop singer Frankie Avalon was chosen. “I knew we needed someone to bring in a young audience, especially someone who would appeal to teenage girls,”
Michael Wayne explained. “So I suggested we give the part to Frankie Avalon. Well, my father wasn’t keen on that idea, but I convinced him, and we all agreed that Frankie did a good job.”
With “nepotism running rife in my family,” as Wayne put it, his son Patrick was cast as Captain James Butler Bonham. “We have a joke in the family,” said Patrick. “We say that my father had looked forward to that picture for so long that when he started he was right for the Frankie Avalon part.”
Ken Curtis, Duke’s friend and a John Ford regular, got the crucial part of Captain Dickinson. Wayne needed a little girl to play Dickinson’s daughter, Angelina Lisa. Duke said, “One morning I was watching Aissa playing on the living-room rug with a doll, and I noticed that her focus on the doll was intense. I knew I’d found my little Dickinson girl.” Aissa received a fee of $250 a week which was deposited in her own personal savings account.
To play Sam Houston, Wayne asked Richard Boone, whom I interviewed in 1977 when he was in London filming The Big Sleep.
He told me, “I thought the part of General Houston was a wonderful cameo role. The critics had a go at Jimmy Grant, but he wrote great dialogue—for me, anyway. Duke was kind of funny because he would have liked to have played Houston, and he’d say to me, ‘I think Houston might have done this,’ or ‘Houston would have said it like this.’ And I’d say, ‘Duke, you hired me to act, not to listen to how you’d play the part. Now just tell me where to hit my marks.’
And he’d go, ‘You’re damn right.’ I respected Duke as an actor, and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 207
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I came to respect him as a director because although he didn’t always know the right words to use in directing you, he by God did the job and it was a helluva good job.”
To play Flaca, a widow Crockett rescues and then falls for, Wayne chose Linda Cristal, a stunningly beautiful twenty-four-year-old actress from Mexico who had starred in a number