John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [113]
It would take eighty-one days in all to film The Alamo. Many involved felt that Wayne had taken on too much. The stress upon him increased and he became quick to lose his temper. He lost thirty-five pounds and his cigarette habit increased from sixty to a hundred Camels a day. Not surprisingly, he developed a terrible smoker’s cough.
The man who often eased the tension was Laurence Harvey.
Wayne told me, “What I best remember about Harvey is when things got a bit tense—which they did, and often—he’d just crack 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 211
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us up by going into Shakespeare with a Texas accent. And talk about the show must go on. That scene where we’re on the battlements and listening to Santa Anna’s messenger, and Travis lights the cannon. When it fired, it recoiled—right over Harvey’s foot. And he didn’t even flinch. He knew it would ruin the take.
When I said, ‘Cut!’ only then did he cry out in pain. Now that’s a professional. He had that foot in plaster for weeks, and I had to keep his damaged foot out of shot.”
Laurence Harvey had a wonderful time making The Alamo. He said, “It wasn’t always fun, but it was never dull. John Wayne treated me very well. I found him to be most amiable, although as time went by his fuse burned ever shorter and quicker. But he never lost his temper with me. I think he thought I was Sir Larry Harvey because I came from the British theatre.
“I liked the part I had—Colonel William Barrett Travis. But there was quality in the script, at least as far as my part was concerned. It had many layers to it. And I liked working with Wayne, and I liked Richard Widmark, although things started a bit strained between Wayne and Widmark. But they sorted themselves out and got on with working together in, shall we say, a professional manner.”
Stories have surfaced over the years that Wayne and Widmark supposedly got into a fight and had many heated arguments. But when I spoke to Widmark in 1979, he said, “We didn’t start off too well, and so much has been made of our so-called feud that it’s kind of gone down as Hollywood lore. The fact is, I thought Duke, who’s a really nice man, was not an actor’s director. He was great at working with William Clothier to get some good shots, both the action scenes and the intimate scenes. But he couldn’t help actors. I already had an idea how I wanted to play Bowie, but Duke would show me what he wanted me to do, and it would have been Bowie as played by John Wayne. So we had some friction to start with. But we were both professionals. We had a job to do, and Duke had more than anybody else to do. I take my hat off to him. We needed to get on because we needed a certain chemistry on screen. Crockett and Bowie liked each other and we had to make the audience believe 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 212
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that. We had some nice scenes together, and once we’d made it clear where we both stood, we got on with the work, which is all that matters. And we had some good times. We laughed a lot.”
Wayne’s attempts to show his actors how to play their parts seems to be the only major criticism anyone involved in the film had. Said Ken Curtis, “Duke didn’t know how to motivate an actor with just a word or two. He’d say, ‘Do it this way.’ If you watch the scene where Pat Wayne rides into the Alamo, gets off his horse, takes a drink, and throws the ladle away, he does it just the way his father would do it. He’d always say, ‘Be graceful . . . like me, goddammit.’ But I can’t complain because it was just about the nicest part I’ve ever had.”
Clothier had only praise for Wayne: “You know, one way or another Duke was getting the job done, and it was being done with quality. Duke didn’t hog the movie. There are some wonderful scenes. Like when Bowie gets a message in his hat that his wife has died. Duke let Richard go with that scene. He put him in the foreground, and Duke stood back in the shadows while Laurence Harvey as Travis reprimands Bowie for receiving information.
Widmark was superb in