John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [153]
You couldn’t have made that in 1939. Look at what Red River did for the Western. It made things change.’
“He said, ‘Hell, I don’t like change.’
“I said, ‘But you’ve been changing along with the genre since you started. That’s what I’ve just been telling you. You can’t just get on a horse or knock somebody about and think the public will go for it anymore. You need to change. You’ve been doing that for years. Don’t stop now.’ I told him to find something that will show that he could still teach youngsters like Clint Eastwood a thing or two.”
Wayne believed he had found exactly what Clothier had been talking about with the publication of a new book called True Grit by Charles Portis. He said, “I was able to get hold of a copy of the publisher’s galleys and when I read this story of a fat old one-eyed marshal called Rooster Cogburn, I said, ‘I was born to play this part.’
And it was a character that had never been seen in a picture before.
Here was a guy with an eye patch who’s survived because he knew you couldn’t give an outlaw a chance. You had to use fair means and foul to bring the outlaw to justice. But he always did it for the greater good, if you will.
“And the writing was so good, it read like a movie. So I put in an offer for the rights only to find Hal Wallis had beat me to it. And Henry Hathaway was going to direct it. So I asked Hal Wallis to give me the part. And that was no easy thing for John Wayne to go and ask a producer if he can have a role.”
Henry Hathaway recalled: “Hal Wallis already had Wayne in mind for the role of Rooster, and I was in total agreement. The only person who wasn’t in agreement was the author, who thought Wayne was all wrong. Apart from that astute observation, Charles Portis was a great writer, and we kept his dialogue in the screenplay because it was perfect.”
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Wayne admitted that, in retrospect, he didn’t realize what an important part the eye patch would play: “I’ve had a bit of a moustache once or twice in my career, but Hal Wallis told me Rooster not only wore an eye patch but also had a big moustache. I didn’t mind the moustache too much, but I said, ‘Hal, my fans don’t expect to come and see me and find I look like an old pirate.’ So Hal said, ‘Tell you what. Forget the moustache, but the eye patch stays.’
I thought he’d made a bad mistake.
“But then Henry Hathaway told me to eat as much as I wanted and get fat. As someone who’d been trying to fend off a considerable spread since middle age, I was delighted to be able to forget all that and just eat as much as I wanted. I did try to persuade Henry to let me lose the eye patch, but he said, ‘You wear that eye patch and give me the performance I want from you and you might even win an Oscar.’ I said, ‘Henry, you’re a great guy—but you’re so full of shit.’
About the only thing I was right about was that the part was one I had to make mine.”
A crucial part of the casting was finding a girl to play Mattie Ross, who hires Rooster Cogburn to find the man who killed her father.
“Hal Wallis thought Mia Farrow would be perfect,” said Hathaway,
“but that fucking Robert Mitchum had told her that I was a real son of a bitch to work for, and so she turned us down. Then Wallis saw Kim Darby on some TV show and decided she was perfect for the part. And she was. The only problem was, she was a young unknown actress who started haggling with Wallis who was offering the part of a lifetime in a John Wayne movie that we all had real faith in, and she virtually had Wallis begging her. I’d have told her to forget it and go on being unknown. But Hal got her.”
Casting Kim Darby caused upset in the Wayne family. Duke said,
“I was sure Aissa was perfect for the role, and I think she would have been good. I was forgetting this was not a Batjac film and I was working for two tough veterans, Hal Wallis and Henry Hathaway. I made the mistake of telling her the part was hers.
Then when I told Hathaway what I’d done, he said, ‘You stupid bastard, Duke. This isn’t your movie.