John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [147]
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“He’d get his own back in other ways. It was part of our rivalry, but always with good humor. The character I played never got on a horse the normal way. He always did fancy mounts. There were stuntmen to do all those fancy mounts for me, [but] I decided I should do them and not cheat the audience. So I got a small trampoline which we’d hide behind a rock, and I soon learned how to take a run at it, jump on the trampoline, and land on the horse.
“When John was being interviewed by a reporter who said, ‘I hear Kirk Douglas is very good with a horse,’ John answered, ‘Good with a horse! Hell, he can’t even get on a horse unless he uses a trampoline.’ You know, I thought that was very funny.”
The strange thing about hearing Kirk Douglas criticize Wayne for trying to dominate the film is that I’ve spoken to a lot of directors and actors who have said that Kirk did the same thing.
Keenan Wynn was one of them. A regular in Westerns, he played a major supporting role in The War Wagon. When I interviewed him over a drink in the bar of a small hotel off Oxford Street, he told me, “I was not one of Wayne’s regulars. So I don’t speak from any kind of loyalty. I saw that Wayne could impress his opinions on Burt Kennedy, but he never did anything to the detriment of the other actors. Or even to the detriment of Kennedy. Everything was for the benefit of the picture. But Kirk Douglas seemed to feel slighted, I thought. Most of the time he was at ease on the set working with Wayne, but there were times when it was obvious he didn’t like something that made Wayne the center of attention, and Douglas would do something to upstage him.
“I sometimes thought, Here we go. It’s gonna end in a fight. But Wayne, who towered over Kirk Douglas—and most everyone else—
kept his temper in check, and I felt that he had so much respect for Kirk Douglas that he didn’t want to get into a fight with him. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but they never worked together again after that.”
I wondered why Douglas never called Wayne “Duke.” He explained, “Everybody else called him ‘Duke,’ but I called him
‘John.’ I don’t like nicknames unless they mean something special.
I didn’t know what ‘Duke’ meant, so John Wayne was always
‘John’ to me.”
When I told Douglas why he was called ‘Duke’ (although I found 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 276
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it hard to believe he didn’t know why), he laughed and said, “So everyone thinks John’s a dog!”
The War Wagon was released before El Dorado by a matter of weeks. Wayne said, “I hate it when the distributors do that.
Universal with The War Wagon were in direct competition with Paramount and El Dorado.” It didn’t matter much, because The War Wagon made the same at the box office as El Dorado and Katie Elder.
By then, Wayne was eager to make his Vietnam film: “After I got The War Wagon out of the way, I put all my energies into making The Green Berets. I went over to Vietnam [in 1965] and when you’ve been there, when you come back, you can’t sit on the fence.
Personally, I thought it was right that we should be there as a country fighting for freedom in the world. But that’s not why I made The Green Berets, even though everyone said I did. I just wanted to make a picture that showed what our guys were doing for others. No one wants war. But there was one, and we had thousands of young men giving their blood and their lives in it. We had thousands of our young men fighting and dying because their country had sent them there. They didn’t go, ‘Hey, we don’t want to be here so let’s stop fighting and go home.’ They were there because their government had told them to be there, and those guys