John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [158]
Nevertheless, True Grit had given Wayne’s career “a much needed kick up the ass,” as Johnson put it, but fewer people went to see him in The Undefeated when it opened in September 1969, taking $4 million domestically and an estimated $8 to $10 million worldwide, which was still a respectable outcome. In 1969, John Wayne was the top box-office star in America. For a sixty-two-year-old star who’d been going for almost forty years, that was no mean feat.
The films made by Batjac in the late 1960s and early 1970s all cost around $4 million to make under Michael Wayne’s close fiscal scrutiny. Chisum, when released in August 1970, did better than The Undefeated, taking $6 million domestically and at least double that amount worldwide.
Early in 1970 Wayne was in Old Tucson making a non-Batjac Western, Rio Lobo, produced and directed by Howard Hawks.
Wayne played an ex–Union officer who rids a Texas town of carpetbaggers and settles an old score with a wartime informer in the process. It was very much in the mold of Rio Bravo and El Dorado, despite Hawks’s insistence that it wasn’t. Instead of Ricky Nelson or James Caan, it had the lesser-known Jorge Rivero, and instead of Angie Dickinson or Charlene Holt, it had Jennifer O’Neill. The old coot, as previously played by Walter Brennan and then Arthur Hunnicutt, was played by Jack Elam. Curiously, there was no character the equivalent of Dean Martin or Robert Mitchum, although Mitchum’s son Chris did play a supporting role. But there was no veteran actor for Wayne to spar with, which surprised even Wayne who asked Hawks, “Do I get to play the drunk this time?”
Rio Lobo was in production when the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony took place in Los Angeles. Wayne flew to Hollywood for the event, meeting Pilar and his children at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“I really didn’t think I had a chance at winning up against all that talent,” Wayne told me. “So when Barbra Streisand read out my name, I was as surprised as anyone. I tell ya, when Miss Streisand handed me the little golden man, I was trying hard not to blubber.”
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Bob Hope was master of ceremonies, as he had been for many years. Over a brief transatlantic phone call in 1979 (which terminated prematurely when the line went dead and I couldn’t get him back again), he told me, “I was so glad for Duke—but not as glad as Duke was. I didn’t cry. I only cry when my fee’s too small.
But Duke deserved that Oscar.”
Wayne told the appreciative audience, “Wow! If I’d known this, I’d have put that eye patch on thirty-five years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m no stranger to this podium. I’ve come up here and picked up these beautiful golden men before, but always for friends.
One night I picked up two, one for Admiral John Ford, one for our beloved Gary Cooper. I was very clever and witty that night; the envy even of Bob Hope. But tonight I don’t feel very clever, very witty. I feel very grateful, very humble.”
The next morning, Wayne flew back to Old Tucson: “I arrived back on the set of Rio Lobo to find everyone wearing eye patches.
Even my horse!”
Rio Lobo wasn’t one of Hawks’s best films, and he knew it. “Rio Lobo is a Civil War picture before it’s a Western. I didn’t think it was a good picture but I made it because I had a good story to start with.
But the studio couldn’t afford to have another actor alongside of Wayne, so I threw out the original story and quickly wrote a new one.”
It seemed to me that Hawks blamed everyone else but himself for the film’s weaknesses: “Jennifer O’Neill could have been a lot better, but she was . . . well, a damn fool. She wouldn’t let Duke help her, and she was no good. And we had a couple of boys who just couldn’t even begin to compete with Duke.”
I asked Hawks if he was referring to Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert) and Jorge Rivero. He said, “Chris doesn’t even look like his father, and sure as hell doesn’t have his father’s power. I thought Jorge Rivero would