John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [130]
That year Wayne bought a 136-foot former minesweeper for $110,000, and called it the Wild Goose. “His boat was one of the great loves of his life,” said Claire Trevor. “It became his sanctuary from the madness of life. He would take off with his family to the San Juan Islands in the Pacific or anywhere he felt like going. And he’d just have a great time fishing and reading.”
The Wild Goose had an oak-paneled lounge with a wood-burning fireplace, a master suite, three guest staterooms, a poker table, and a bar, and a film projector and screen were installed, along with state-of-the-art navigation equipment. It was manned by a crew of eight whose company Duke always enjoyed.
While it was being modernized, Wayne went to Hawaii in the late summer of 1962 to make Donovan’s Reef. Wayne told me he had no idea it would be his last film with John Ford who had been planning it for the past couple of years and had discussed it with Wayne on the 243
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set of How the West Was Won. Typically, Duke agreed to do the film mainly for Ford’s sake, but it also provided Wayne with another film to work off his Paramount contract.
Lee Marvin played the part of an old enemy who turns up on Wayne’s island, has a well-staged and funny fistfight with Duke, and does little else as though the screenwriters forgot he was there.
“Donovan’s Reef was one of those films that seemed like a good idea at the time,” Lee told me. “Duke says to me, ‘Let’s go to Hawaii, make a film with John Ford, have lots of fun.’ So I went, and ended up with nothing much to do but drink an awful lot, which I may say I did with great aplomb.”
Wayne explained, “Jimmy Grant had written the screenplay, and I was happy enough with it, but Pappy didn’t like it and he got Frank Nugent to rewrite it. A lot of good stuff that would have involved Lee Marvin got lost in the rewrite.”
Wayne was unhappy with the script, and with his part. But he would never admit he was unhappy with Ford. “I was just all wrong for the picture,” he said, blaming himself for the film’s flaws. “It needed a younger guy. I felt awkward at my age to be romancing a young woman.”
Costar Cesar Romero, whom I interviewed by telephone in 1988, recalled, “Wayne loved John Ford and had so much respect for this great director that he did all he could to help Ford. And while Wayne was busy assisting Ford as well as playing his part, Lee Marvin had nothing to do but get drunk. One night he was so drunk at the Kawaii Hotel that he took off all his clothes and did a hula on the bar.”
Dorothy Lamour played a small, inconsequential role. She had not worked for Ford since The Hurricane in 1937. “It was a difficult film because John Ford was getting old and he was ill, and he was just bad tempered all the time,” she said. “One day on the set he insulted me, and I said that I wasn’t having any of that and walked off. Ford turned up at my dressing room and apologized, which wasn’t like him at all. That’s when I realized how ill he was. Duke took on some of the director’s responsibilities like checking the rushes each day, and just making sure with the assistant director that everything was set up right. I could see the strain was getting to him, and sometimes he blew his top. But we all knew he was doing his best to help Ford.”
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Released in July 1963, Donovan’s Reef had a ready-made audience, one which had enjoyed North to Alaska, The Comancheros, and Hatari, and who now looked upon the release of a John Wayne film as an event not to be missed. Despite its weaknesses, Donovan’s Reef makes for an easy 109 minutes of comedy and romance, with an occasional brawl for good measure. And even though leading lady Elizabeth Allen was just twenty-eight, she played Wayne’s love interest with the kind of feisty strength that was reminiscent of Maureen