John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [126]
“Fortunately I have no trouble playing a mean son of a bitch! I often wished Duke and I had had the chance to make a film where we had either good opposing roles, where he’s the good guy and I’m the vilest meanest bastard ever to walk God’s green earth, or we played on the same side, like Burt Lancaster and me in The Professionals.
We had a lot in common. We’re not only experts in getting completely and totally drunk, but we both have culture too. He found out that I enjoy reading and appreciate works of art and that I like history, and I found out he enjoyed reading history and biographies, and he read everything ever written by Winston Churchill. I said to him, ‘You’re not the illiterate, uneducated ignoramus you’d like people to think,’ and he said, ‘Neither are you.’ I said, ‘Let’s keep it to ourselves or we’ll ruin our image.’”
Before The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wrapped in November, The Comancheros had been rushed through postproduction and released in October 1961, to good reviews and tremendous business.
Wayne was on his way to becoming not only the archetypal American movie star and the definitive Hollywood cowboy, but he was in the process of becoming a movie legend.
Michael Wayne put it more simply when he said, “The cowboy is the hero of American folklore. My father has become the symbol of that cowboy.”
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Winning the West, the War,
and Wild Africa
The work did not let up, and Wayne continued to push himself without a break. He was off to East Africa with Howard Hawks to make Hatari, a film about the adventures of the people who capture big game for the world’s zoos.
Wayne was joined by German actor Hardy Kruger, comedian Red Buttons, Italian beauty Elsa Martinelli, old friend Bruce Cabot as an Indian, and a lot of wild animals.
The film had a very loose plot formulated by Leigh Brackett, but it was mostly a series of largely improvised set pieces highlighted by the scenes of Wayne and the other actors catching wild animals for real.
Hawks said, “Duke had the time of his life chasing those rhinos in the truck. He didn’t have a stuntman; he did it all himself. One time the rhino got in closer than we wanted, and for a moment or two Duke was in trouble. It made for a great scene.
“You couldn’t control the animals. We chased nine rhinos, filmed them all, and we caught four. I told Wayne and the other actors just to ad-lib their lines, to say whatever came to mind, and if we had to have them dub over the lines in the studio later, that would be okay.
So those scenes of the animals being chased and caught have a real 236
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sense of danger and excitement about them because they really were dangerous and exciting.”
When I telephoned Red Buttons in 1979 for his recollections of Wayne, he said, “I worked with Duke twice, in The Longest Day and Hatari. On The Longest Day we worked together maybe two days.
On Hatari we were in Africa for four months. So when you’re with someone in Africa for four months, you better get on with them.
Duke was easy to get on with, and we had a lot of fun. One night we were outside playing cards. A leopard walks out of the bush. He’s walking toward us. I said quietly, ‘Duke, there’s a leopard walking toward us.’ He said, “Buttons, see what he wants.’ That was the Duke. He had a quick wit, and he was having such a good time on that film. It was a damn shame we had to finish it.”
In January 1962, Duke flew to France to appear in The Longest Day, Darryl F. Zanuck’s epic about the D-day landings. Duke worked just four days on the film which featured most of Hollywood’s major stars of the day. “I wanted to do the film because I thought it was an important picture,” Wayne told me. Then, with that lopsided grin of his, he added, “and I wanted Zanuck to pay for what he’d said about me directing The Alamo. He paid all right, to the tune of two hundred and fifty thousand