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“But then I read the script. Oh boy, was it a dog! It was credited to someone I’d never heard of called Martin Julien. I realized it was actually written by Hal Wallis and his wife Martha Hyer. And it was awful. Just ridiculous. It was The African Queen in a Western setting. I turned it down.

“When I took on North to Alaska I was not the first choice, which always irked me. They wanted Richard Fleischer to direct it, but he turned it down when he discovered they had no finished script. So this time, I turned the tables and suggested they get Dick Fleischer to direct Rooster Cogburn. Wayne had approved Fleischer for North to Alaska and I thought there was no reason why he 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 329

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would not approve him for Rooster Cogburn. But Wayne rejected him.

“Fleischer assumed Wayne was getting revenge for his having refused to direct North to Alaska, but Duke wasn’t petty like that. He told me he understood Fleischer’s reasons for not doing that picture. By 1975 Fleischer had a good body of work behind him, like The Boston Strangler, the Pearl Harbor picture Tora! Tora! Tora! which Duke admired, and Soylent Green. Wayne said to me, ‘I couldn’t let Dick Fleischer take on Rooster Cogburn because I thought you were the only one who could make that film what it should have been, and, by God, I was right. I thought you’d come to our rescue, but you didn’t.’

“So, having lost me and having turned down Dick Fleischer, Hal Wallis chose Stuart Millar, who’d been an assistant to William Wyler for a long time and then began producing films. But he’d only directed one film, When the Legends Die, a really fine film with Richard Widmark. I think they all thought that Rooster Cogburn would establish Millar as a top director. But he had a lousy script and a star who thought Millar was too inexperienced as a director. And maybe Duke was right.

“He told me that Millar would do so many takes that eventually Duke lost his temper and said, ‘Damn it, Stuart, there’s only so many times we can speak these lines before they stop making any sense at all.’

“I think Millar was desperately trying to make sense of the script.

Wallis had Charles Portis come in and try tidying up the screenplay, but he wasn’t able to do much with it, so Wayne and Hepburn made up most of their lines. All Millar had to do was shout, ‘Action!’ and

‘Cut!’ It didn’t do Stuart’s career any good and after that he went into TV.”

Richard Jordan played the heavy in the film, and was well aware that his presence would be overshadowed by the combination of Wayne and Hepburn. When I interviewed Jordan on the set of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square at Pinewood in 1978, he told me, “It [ Rooster Cogburn] was a two-person picture, and I didn’t mind that. Wayne and Hepburn were the stars, and if anyone was going to come and see the picture, they were coming to see them, not me or anyone else in the cast.

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“I never became friendly with Wayne but that’s because he was having too good a time spending all his hours with Katharine Hepburn. I thought he was the best screen partner she’d had since Spencer Tracy. She was sometimes giving him direction. He was trying to inject whatever he could to recapture the performance he gave in True Grit, and Hepburn would quietly tell him, ‘You’re tipping your mitt,’ which meant he was going over the top.

“They had such a respect for each other that the rest of us really were outside of it all. But I never minded because I felt that Wayne should enjoy himself while he was able, and we all thought that maybe Katharine Hepburn might not be around much longer, so she should have a good time too. She only complained because Wayne was bossing everyone—I mean everyone—around, just trying to get the film made, which wasn’t fair to Stuart Millar, and Hepburn complained that she was the one who usually bossed everyone around!”

Ironically, despite Jordan’s seemingly justified theory