John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [125]
And that’s probably why he treated Duke that way. He didn’t want Duke to think he was doing him any favors.
“I had a nice moment with Duke. We never were friends, and we hadn’t worked together much, but we had a scene where I had to draw on him and he would simply knock the gun out of my hand.
Before filming the scene, he said to me, ‘Can you draw that gun?’ I said, ‘I can draw this gun so fast you won’t be able to clap your hands before I put it between your hands.’ He said, ‘I’d like to see you try that.’ So we did it. We got Lee [Marvin] to count one, two, three, and he clapped his hands and I drew my gun, and I had the gun between his hands before he could bring them together.
He said, ‘That’s pretty damn good. How am I gonna knock the gun out of your hand if you’re too fast?’ I said, ‘It’s okay, Duke. I’ll slow it down for you.’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s right nice of you to help an old actor out.’ That’s the nicest memory I have of John Wayne.”
When I interviewed James Stewart in London in 1980, he remembered the way Ford created tension between his actors: “For the scenes at the beginning and the end when we were all playing our parts older, Woody Strode had his black hair grayed up, and he was put into overalls and a hat. And Ford asked me what I thought of Woody’s wardrobe, and I said, ‘Well, it looks a bit Uncle Remus–like to me.’ I immediately knew I’d made a mistake when Ford said,
‘What’s wrong with Uncle Remus?’ And he starts yelling, ‘Hey, Woody, Duke, everyone, come over here and have a look at Woody.
21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 234
234
JOHN WAYNE
One of the . . . players . . . seems to have some objection. One of the . . . players . . . here doesn’t like Uncle Remus. As a matter of fact, I’m not at all sure he likes Negroes.’ Well, that had tensions rising on the set for a while.”
Woody Strode recalled that incident, and one other: “I appreciated John Ford for giving me a really good part in Sergeant Rutledge, but I didn’t like him too much, I’m afraid. He tried to make out that Jimmy Stewart was a racist, and Jimmy is one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet anywhere in the world.
“But the most damage Ford did was to the friendship me and Duke Wayne might have had. He kept needling Duke about his failure to make it as a football player, and because I had been a professional player, Ford kept saying to Duke, ‘Look at Woody.
He’s a real football player.’ It’s like he’d needle him about whatever reasons he had for not enlisting in the war by asking Jimmy, ‘How many times did you risk your life over Germany, Jimmy?’ And Jimmy would kind of go, ‘Oh, shucks’ or whatever, and Ford would say to Duke, ‘How rich did you get while Jimmy was risking his life?’
“This really pissed Wayne off but he would never take it out on Ford. He ended up taking it out on me. We had one of the few outdoors scenes where we hightail it out to his ranch in a wagon.
He’s driving and I’m kneeling in the back of the wagon. Wayne was riding those horses so fast that he couldn’t get them to stop. I reached up to grab the reins to help, and he swung and knocked me away.
“When the horses finally stopped, Wayne fell out of the wagon and jumped off ready for a fight. I was in great shape in those days and Wayne was just getting a little too old and a little too out of shape for a fight. But if he’d started on me, I would have flattened him.
Ford knew it, and he called out, ‘Woody, don’t hit him. We need him.’
“Wayne calmed down, and I don’t think it was because he was afraid of me. Ford gave us a few hours’ break to cool off. Later Wayne said to me, ‘We gotta work together. We both gotta be professionals.’ But I blame Ford for all that trouble. He rode Wayne so hard, I thought he was going to go over the edge. What a miserable film to make.”
21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 235
WORKING TWENTY YEARS FOR NOTHING
235
For Lee Marvin, the film offered him his most