John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [127]
Wayne also accepted another cameo role in another all-star epic, this one a Western, How the West Was Won. Filmed in the original Cinerama format, the title gave an apt description of what the film was about, as seen through the eyes of three generations of one family.
Bernard Smith had the daunting task of producing this project which was so big it had three directors: Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and John Ford. In 1969 my boss at Cinerama, where I was still a humble messenger boy, put a call through to Bernard Smith in Hollywood especially for me to talk about How the West Was Won.
Smith told me, “We had three units working under three directors, each with his own cameraman and his own cast, although some of the actors had parts in more than one episode. Henry Hathaway had the biggest job, filming the pioneer and river scenes, the wagon train, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 238
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and the railroad. George Marshall directed the sequence with the outlaws and the runaway train. John Ford had the small segment. I didn’t think he was up to anything really big because he was getting old and ill, and so I offered him the Civil War episode. He pretended like he was doing us all a big favor by accepting it, but I knew he liked doing it because he was a real expert on the Civil War.
“It was a simple enough job. There was an opening sequence where the boy [George Peppard] goes off to war, the aftermath of the battle of Shiloh, and then the boy returning home as an officer to find his mother dead and buried. The battle sequence was taken from Raintree County.
“Ford said to me, ‘I gotta have John Wayne.’ I said, ‘That’s what Henry Hathaway said. Wayne can’t play two roles.’ Ford said, “I’ll talk to him. I guarantee he’ll do my episode.’ And he was right.
Wayne did a small cameo as General Sherman. Hathaway said to me, ‘It’s a mistake. People wanna see Duke killing the bad guys.
But all he’s gonna be doing is talking.’ As far as I know, no one complained.”
Wayne gave me three good reasons why he did How the West Was Won. “The first is because Pappy wanted me to do it; the second is because the studios [MGM and Cinerama] would be making donations to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica from the profits; and the third is because it gave me the chance to play a character part.
I said to Pappy, ‘Come on, Coach, convince the men in suits to let us make a whole damn film about Sherman and Grant. This is the best role I’ve had since The Searchers.’
“Pappy wanted everything to look right. Henry Morgan as Grant grew a beard and looked a lot like Grant. I had hair hanging down below my hat and a week’s growth of beard because Sherman thought winning the war was more important than getting his hair cut and his face shaved. I didn’t sting the studio like I did Zanuck. I got a standard five thousand dollars for a week’s work, which is what every star on that picture got paid per week. That way they kept costs down and made more profits which was good for MGM
and Cinerama, which means it was good for the business, and it was good for St. John’s Hospital.”
George Peppard had the film’s biggest role, dominating the whole 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 239
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second act of the film. He began as the boy who goes to war and wound up as the marshal who shoots it out with the outlaws on a runaway train. “I got to work with all three of the film’s directors,”
he told me. “Duke Wayne said to me, ‘I’ve been in this business almost forty years and I only worked with two of the film’s directors—Hathaway and Ford. You’ve been in it for five minutes and you get to work with Ford, Hathaway, and Marshall. You’ll learn more from this film than from any other you’ll ever do.’ And he was right.
“We were both in the Civil War episode, but I didn’t actually have a scene to play with him. I just prevent an attempt on his life. But I watched him and I listened to everything Ford said, and I learned so much. Duke had only a couple of pages