John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [171]
I was interested to observe Wayne’s relationship with Douglas Hickox, a British director with a handful of good films to his credit, plus another handful of not-so-good films. I might have expected Wayne to ride roughshod over his British director, but he didn’t. They would talk, just out of my earshot, and their expressions suggested they were generally in agreement. In fact, in retrospect, learning later how tough Wayne could be on directors, my impression was that Wayne liked Hickox and treated him with respect.
Hickox told me on the set, “I thought I might be in for a tough time because he is . . . well, he’s John Wayne! And I’d been told all these horror stories about how he’s supposed to be a bully. But there’s been none of that. Fortunately, we’ve got his son Michael with us, and he’s a good man, and if there’s anything that Duke’s upset about, Michael deals with him. Mind you, Michael’s no pushover. He can be tough. He’s got to be. He virtually runs Batjac. I have a lot of liking and respect for Duke and Michael.”
All this backslapping doesn’t mean that Wayne made himself popular with everyone. I met a man who worked on the film in an administrative position, who would probably not wish to be identified (so I’ll call him Jim), who didn’t like Wayne. Jim told me that for the first couple of weeks of filming, Wayne stayed at the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly before finding the house in Cheyne Walk. Unhappy with the room he had been given, Wayne grabbed the surprised and horrified Jim and literally threw him across the room.
Jim never knew why—or wouldn’t say why—Wayne had been so angry. But his secretary Pat Stacy gives a good clue in her book. It turned out that Pat was to have a room right next to Wayne’s suite.
But she had thought it inappropriate to be so close to Duke and moved to a room on the floor above. Wayne liked the original arrangements, and my guess is that he thought the change of room was Jim’s fault.
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Yet there was a gentle side to Wayne as well, and an exceptionally generous one too. I learned that when Wayne heard that the mother of one of the Brannigan crew had been taken seriously ill, Duke immediately had the lady put into private medical care and paid for all the bills himself.
On the day they shot in Piccadilly Circus, Hickox told me I could be an extra in the scene. Many of the people in the scene were not extras but simply people totally unaware they were being filmed and presumably wondering why a Royal Mail pillar-box had suddenly sprung up on a pedestrian crossing. So I mingled with the crowd just so I could say that I had appeared in a John Wayne movie. I never could spot myself on screen, but I have seen a number of other people I know turn up in the film, although they had not realized they had been filmed. I think that Brannigan must have been one of the last films shot on location in central London; the local authorities clamped down on filmmakers using the busiest parts of the capital because of the chaos it caused.
My last day on location was in a quiet London street, much of it involving Duke’s stand-in doing a lot of running, with the occasional close-up of Duke coming to a halt and catching his breath. Hickox told me, “I don’t know if we’ll use all those close-ups of Duke.
Probably one or two to establish that he’s the guy doing the running.
I also talked it over with Duke and said, ‘Maybe we should show you out of breath,’ and he said, ‘Sure, let’s do it. No point in kidding the audience I’m a young man anymore.’ ”
At the end of the day and the end of my week with Brannigan, I thanked Douglas Hickox, and then I found Duke and thanked him too.
“It’s been a real pleasure, Michael,” he said. “Hope you had a good time with us.”
I told him I had and that I was sorry I had to return to the mundane duties of a publicist in Wardour Street.