John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [122]
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JOHN WAYNE
said, ‘Well, there’s not a lot of actual cash. It’s all invested.’ He was getting mighty nervous and I was smelling a rat, and I said,
‘Just tell me how much I can raise.’ He said, ‘Give me a couple of weeks.’
“So a couple of weeks go by and I asked him again: ‘How much am I worth?’ He was really squirming. He said, ‘It isn’t that simple.’
I lost my patience then and I slammed my fist on his desk and said,
‘It’s a simple question. I’ve given you a goddamn fortune over the years. Millions of dollars! Where is it, goddamn it?’
“Well, I could see him giving up his charade as he slumped into his chair and said, ‘It’s all gone.’ That did it. I blew my top. I told him I was going to sue him for screwing me, and I went to my lawyer who had his accountants go over Roos’s books with a fine-tooth comb. Finally my lawyer came to me and said, ‘The guy isn’t a cheat.
He hasn’t stolen anything from you. It’s just a case of complete incompetence.’ I said, ‘Nobody’s that stupid to lose that much money.’ He said, ‘Bo Roos is.’
“I said, ‘I want to sue the living shit out of that son of a bitch.’ The more I looked into things, the more I found out what had been happening to my money. It was going into dry oil wells, cheap Mexican hotels for which he paid top prices, a shrimp company that went bankrupt, and on top of that were his own fees and expenses. I was stupid enough to trust him and not ask questions over twenty years. And I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people had trusted him and lost money.
“Then we found out that many of his expenses were of a dubious nature. Nothing illegal. But when he came to Japan when I was making that Huston film, he was spending my fortune on geisha girls.
“In the end it was pointless suing him because he was broke.
Besides, my lawyer told me if we went to court, I’d be the one looking like an idiot for letting Roos spend my money without asking him where it was going for the past twenty years. So I had to let it go.
“But Roos cost me the first twenty years of my career. I’d worked for twenty years for nothing.”
Wayne began to solve his financial problems by signing a non-21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 229
WORKING TWENTY YEARS FOR NOTHING
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exclusive contract with Paramount for ten pictures, guaranteeing him a fee of $600,000 per film.
John Ford would direct his first film under this contract, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but first he had a commitment to make a third film for Twentieth Century Fox, which would be The Comancheros. Upon its completion, Wayne would receive a full $2
million from Fox as originally agreed upon.
Pilar, however, had more on her mind than her husband’s obsession with making money. Claire Trevor, who remained a close friend of Duke’s to the day he died, said, “Pilar had become pregnant, but she lost the baby. She was feeling isolated and she was suffering from depression and anxiety, so she went to Peru for a holiday. She didn’t stay long, and came home to find Duke was too busy with sorting out his problems to realize she needed him. He loved her deeply and he showered affection on her, but affection wasn’t what she needed the most. She needed to feel she was more than just Mrs. John Wayne. So she pulled herself together and started to help run a charity called SHARE which raises money for handicapped children. That did the world of good for her, and she did so much good for others.”
If North to Alaska provided Wayne with the style of comedy he would inject into virtually all of his work, The Comancheros established Wayne as the mature Western hero who could shoot straight, punch hard, and still deliver a comical quip in the process.
He played a Texas ranger on the trail of a Confederate renegade who plans to establish a new Confederate empire in Mexico.
Wayne’s director from “The Three Mesquiteers” series, George Sherman, produced the film with Michael Curtiz directing from James Edward Grant’s screenplay. Filming began in June 1961, in Moab,