John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [133]
George was embarrassed that he’d been made to bring in so many stars as extras. After filming, George decided he needed the centurion to say the line after all, and he got Wayne into a sound studio, and he wasn’t in costume and he just had a microphone, and George asked him to deliver the line. Wayne told him, ‘I can’t do this.’
George said, ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you? That’s what you’ve been trying to prove all these years.’ And Wayne said, ‘I’ve got nothing to react to, so if I screw this up, don’t blame me.’ And he was right. He couldn’t give the line what it needed. You can’t blame Wayne, you can’t blame George; you can only blame the assholes who made the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 249
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decision to use Wayne—and all the other actors who were in that scene just so the names would bring in the crowds—which they didn’t.”
Playing John the Baptist was Charlton Heston, Hollywood’s most prolific star of epics. He said, “There are actors who can do period parts and there are actors who can’t. God knows Duke Wayne couldn’t play a first-century Roman.”
In June 1963, Wayne was due to start work on Circus World, a large-scale and expensive film about the adventures of an American owner of a European circus. Samuel Bronston was producing it at his studio in Madrid, and Frank Capra was set to direct. David Niven had been announced as Wayne’s costar.
Wayne decided to fly to Bermuda where he would board the Wild Goose and sail on to Portugal to pick up Pilar and their children; Pilar had decided not to brave the transatlantic crossing. From Portugal they flew to Madrid, but by the time they arrived at the Bronston Studio, plans for Circus World had changed. Frank Capra told me,
“I’d been approached by Samuel Bronston to make a film initially called Circus which would star John Wayne and David Niven. Philip Yordan and Nicholas Ray had written the story, but there was no script. The next thing I knew, James Edward Grant had arrived in Madrid to write the script because Wayne had demanded it.
“I’d been hesitant about working with Wayne because we’d had a few cross words back in the late 1940s, but I hoped we could work well together. The biggest problem with Circus World, as it came to be called, was that it was the merging of two empires. One belonged to Samuel Bronston who’d been making his epic films in Spain since 1959. He’d been raising money for his past few films by making complicated deals, one with Paramount to distribute the film in certain territories, another with the Rank Organization in Britain, and he had money coming from various quarters. Because he had a deal with Paramount, who had a deal with John Wayne, they wanted Wayne in the film, and with Wayne came his own little empire.
“I quickly began to see I would have trouble, especially when Jimmy Grant told me, ‘All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 250
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and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smack in the face every five minutes. In between all that, you have gags, flags, and cases.
That’s what his fans want.’
“I said I’d write my own script, and Grant said, ‘Duke won’t like it,’ and he went off to play golf. I had a screenplay that had quality to it, I thought, but when Duke turned up in Madrid, he looked at my script and Grant was right—he hated it. Sam Bronston was faced with the choice of either me or Wayne, and he needed Paramount’s money, so he chose Wayne. I told Bronston, who was a very nice man for an independent producer, he ought to get Henry Hathaway to direct the film, and I headed for home.
“In fact, I met Henry Hathaway who said, ‘Why are you walking out on Duke Wayne?’ I said, ‘Henry, I’m not walking. I’m running.’
And I believe that when I walked, David Niven made his excuses and said he would not be turning up for work.”
When I interviewed David Niven at Pinewood Studios on the set of Candleshoe, he explained his reasons for quitting Circus World.
“I loved the idea of making