John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [152]
He just nodded and gave me that chin-down-low-and-eyes-looking-up-at-you kind of smile.”
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Before The Green Berets was released, Wayne was at work on Hellfighters, inspired, apparently, by the exploits of oil-fire fighter Red Adair. Andrew McLaglen directed, and the cast included Vera Miles, Katharine Ross, Jim Hutton, and Bruce Cabot.
The plot had little going for it, but the oil-fire scenes were exciting, and there were the usual scenes of Waynesque humor. Jim Hutton recalled, “When we were doing The Green Berets Duke said,
‘Jim, you’re just the kind of guy I need for my next picture which is about fighting oil fires.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about fighting oil fires, and I’m sure I don’t much like the idea of big fires. I’m just a light-comedy actor at heart.’ He said, ‘That’s why I want you with me. You make me laugh, and the audience loves you.’ Well, what could I say? I liked Duke. And if he liked you, you got to do more work with him.”
Vera Miles, from The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, played Wayne’s female foil in what was his last real stab at a romantic role. Duke told me, “When we had to cut her scenes from The Green Berets, I told her I’d make up for it by giving her the role of my ex-wife in Hellfighters. Since the film was such a bomb, maybe I didn’t do her any favors.”
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For director Andy McLaglen, this was only his second film for Wayne since his first, McLintock! , although they would go on to make another three together in the life and career Wayne had left.
McLaglen said to me, “You wanna know how tough Wayne is? I had a tubular director’s chair with plastic webbing—the kind you can fold up easily. I came over to the camera where we had one of the big fires going which makes you feel like the skin is peeling off your face, it’s so hot. And when I went back to the chair, the webbing had totally melted to the chair, even though it was some thirty or forty feet away from the fire.
“And Wayne went into those fires. He said, ‘By God, for a million dollars I’ll do anything.’ But we had to keep water on him the whole time with hoses.
“At one point, I said, ‘Stop the water. I can’t see Duke with all that water.’ But immediately the water on his suit began to bubble and that meant that the heat was so intense he was about to boil. So we hit him right away with more water, and he was fine. But Duke is tough.”
Hellfighters didn’t set the box office alight. Wayne said, “I had the feeling my career was about to start flagging. I had a hit with The Green Berets but I wasn’t getting any younger and I knew that Hellfighters was not going to be a blockbuster. I was also working with Andy [McLaglen] on The Undefeated, which we were planning to shoot in Durango sometime early in 1969, which I hoped would be the kind of Western that people would like.
“But I was getting anxious because there was this young guy called Clint Eastwood making Westerns in Italy and having tremendous success with them. All of a sudden the studios all wanted Eastwood to come and make Westerns for them, but they were not the kind of Westerns I’d been making. They were tough and bleak.
One day I said to Bill Clothier, ‘I don’t get it. What do people see in these films?’
“He said, ‘Duke, times change. You gotta change with them. I just don’t think The Undefeated is a film people will go to see these days.’ I didn’t like what he was saying and I refused to give in. But he had a point.”
It was a point I was able to bring up with Clothier, who told me, “Duke was having trouble adjusting to the changes that came 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 286
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about— especially in the 1960s. He thought things were only just changing, and that he’d been doing things the same as he’d always done them.
“I said, ‘Duke, you and the Western have grown up together. The kind of Westerns you used to make in the forties are different from ones you were making ten, fifteen years ago. Look at