John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [177]
“What was so funny was that Mike stood up and said, ‘Don, you’ve flipped your wig,’ and Duke without a beat said, ‘Sit down and shut up.’
“The problem we had was that Mike had allowed this kid to write the script because his dad had written the book, but I told Duke I had a guy called Scott Hale who could make it into a really good script.
Mike objected and Duke said, ‘You get a writer Don approves of or you can count me out,’ and they started having an argument, and I realized they didn’t like each other much when Duke called him a liar. He told Mike, ‘Be a good fellow and give Don what he wants,’
and so I got Scott Hale to fix the script, and he did a great job.
“We had to let Miles finish his script before letting Scott loose on it, and as well as my notes on the script, and Frank’s notes, and the censor’s notes, we needed Duke’s notes. You think a screenplay is a creative process? It’s damn hard work getting it so everyone’s happy. I brought over the finished script by Miles and about seventy pages of my own notes, and all the other notes.
“Duke had a wonderful house by the bay at Newport, and I suddenly became aware of how beautiful it was. Duke said to me,
‘Wanna buy it?’ I knew he was joking, but then he surprised me by saying it was all he had left. I don’t know how rich or how broke he really was, but he’d lost a lot of money. He said, ‘Two lousy crooked business managers done me in.’
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“He moaned a lot about how much taxes he’d paid, and I knew he’d made a lot of money and he wasn’t living in poverty, but I felt some sympathy for him because he felt he deserved to keep more of the money that he earned than he could. Taxes and bad business deals—but mostly taxes—took a lot of it from him.
“It was easy to like Duke. I felt he was on my side from the beginning. He asked for a day to read the script and the notes, so we arranged to meet the next day. Turned out he had plenty of his own ideas, which I’d expected, and some I liked which gave me inspiration, and some I didn’t like. But we didn’t fight over any of it.
We liked each other and we respected each other.
“What was so funny about Duke was his colorful language. He said to me, ‘Why does Clint Eastwood make films that have so much violence and profanity?’ I said, ‘There’s really very little gratuitous violence or bad language in Clint’s films. He’s got kids of his own.’
“Now, we were having lunch and he had all his grandchildren around him, and he said, ‘Bullshit! His films are full of fucking obscenities,’ and he let loose a tirade of his own obscenities, and I noticed that not one of his grandchildren paid any attention to what he said. They must have been used to it. And I said, ‘Duke, you’re wrong about Clint’s films, and besides, listen to yourself speak.’
“He laughed and said, ‘But you’ll never hear me use profanity in a picture.’ I never understood his double standards, but I admired him for making some two hundred or whatever films and never using bad language. Anyway, after he’d run down Clint, I said, ‘Actually, Clint wants to make a picture with you,’ and Duke said, ‘Well, I never said he was a bad guy.’
“Some days later I took Scott Hale over to Duke’s house and we all worked together really well. Duke even showed us his gun room.
For some reason, Duke started having problems breathing and couldn’t get up out of his seat, and Scott made the mistake of offering his hand to Duke and saying, ‘May I help you?’ Duke didn’t have enough breath to shout, but he said, ‘Goddamn it, no!’ Duke was too proud to accept help, which I admired.
“Anyway, we worked on the script, and it all fell into place.
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