John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [119]
He was right. In Variety’s 1983 list of All-Time Western Champs, it reached twenty-fifth position, and in an inflation-adjusted list, it came out as being the tenth most successful Western up to that time.
United Artists knew there was still money to be made from it; it was reissued several years later and its box office continued to rise until it was number 117 on the 400 top-grossing films of all time up to 1970.
With poor reviews and initially slow business, Wayne was depressed. Then came worse news: Not long after the premiere of The Alamo, Ward Bond died from a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-five. Wayne was just two years younger than Bond, and he felt his own sense of mortality. At the funeral, Duke fought back his tears to deliver the eulogy.
Loretta Young recalled, “I would call Duke from time to time, and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 222
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ask how he was. After Ward Bond died, he told me he felt as though he had a black cloud over him and he couldn’t shake it off. I told him to try praying. The next time I talked to him, I asked how he was doing. He said, ‘I took your advice. Somebody upstairs listened. It kind of lightened the load.’ I was so glad about that.”
Although he was hardly an old man, Wayne’s fifty-three years felt heavier upon him than they should have. But the years of hard drinking, heavy smoking, and a losing battle with his weight made him look older and slowed him down. Fortunately, on-screen he merely appeared rugged.
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20
Working Twenty Years
for Nothing
North to Alaska had been having its own problems before filming on it began, and everybody fought hard to keep it all a secret from Wayne.
Hathaway, who directed and produced the film, told me, “When we began shooting, we barely had any kind of a script. For a long time, the project had simply been a business deal made by agent Charles Feldman with little more than the title of North to Alaska. The title could have meant anything. Feldman represented me; the writers, John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin, Wayne; and a young French actress, Capucine, who just happened to be Feldman’s latest flame.
So Feldman went to Buddy Adler, who was then head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, and through sheer tenacity talked Adler into green-lighting North to Alaska—although at that time I wasn’t involved. Feldman had another director, Richard Fleischer, who’d done good work with Kirk Douglas on The Vikings and 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea. So Fleischer was pretty hot in those days.
“Feldman’s deal with Fox was that Mahin and Rackin would write the script for John Wayne to star in with Fleischer directing, and it would all be signed and sealed even before the writers got to work on the script.
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“Feldman told Duke, who was still finishing off The Alamo, that the film had the green light, and typically of Duke, he didn’t ask to see the script. If he had done, there would have been no script to show him. But from time to time he asked how the screenplay was progressing, and Feldman would always say, ‘It’s nearly finished.’ I don’t think Mahin and Rackin had even started writing it. They were still trying to come up with a story to fit the title.
“When Richard Fleischer found out there was no script, he pulled out and I took over. So I started badgering the writers to get the script finished because I knew that if we didn’t have a finished screenplay to show Duke as soon as he was finished on The Alamo, he would pull out. Then we had a damn strike by the Writers Guild, so Mahin and Rackin couldn’t finish the screenplay. Duke turned up for work and I had to explain that we would work on the screenplay as we went along. Somehow it turned out not to be a disaster.”
John Lee Mahin told me, “Marty and I knew we had to have a story about gold prospecting, because there was no other