John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [23]
said Wayne. “Most of the contract players there may have had regular work, but they generally didn’t move up from there into the major studios—they went down, and that’s the direction I thought I was headed.”
Wayne may not have been in the same league as the really big movie stars at the major studios, but when it came to B Westerns, he was one of the most popular cowboy stars.
He started out at Lone Star as Singin’ Sandy Saunders, the singing cowboy, in Riders of Destiny. It was something that would haunt Wayne for the rest of his life as the subject of his singing role would often be brought up. “I was just so fucking embarrassed by it all.
Strumming a guitar I couldn’t play and miming to a voice which was provided by a real singer made me feel like a fucking pansy. After that experience, I refused to be Singin’ Sandy again.”
From then on, at Monogram at least, he played straight, rootin’
tootin’ nonsinging gunmen on the side of good in sixteen Westerns for that studio. But Wayne also added a new dimension to the stereotypical screen hero in a cowboy hat. He said, “All the screen cowboys behaved like real gentlemen. They didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke. When they knocked the bad guy down, they always stood with their fists up, waiting for the heavy to get back on his feet. I decided I was going to drag the bad guy to his feet and keep hitting him. And if the heavy hit me with a rose, I’d hit him back with a chair.
“I learned that as a kid from watching the Westerns Harry Carey made with John Ford. He had realism, he was a real man, and I decided that’s what my screen cowboy would be like.”
Yakima Canutt, who worked regularly on the Monogram films, told me, “A guy called Paul Malvern produced all the Lone Star Westerns. A really nice guy too. He said he’d been reading dime novels since he was a kid, and a lot of the plots for those films came from the novels he read. He reckoned he had about a hundred of these stories in his head.”
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Wayne recalled, “The plots weren’t really that important. There wasn’t time to develop character or some long story line. The emphasis was on action, and plenty of it, no matter what. Come hail, rain, sun, hell, or high water, you had to make those films in six days. If the wind blew, the microphone picked it up and nobody could hear the dialogue, so if any talking had to be done, it was usually done indoors. Out of doors, dialogue was kept to a bare minimum. The main thing was, finish the film and don’t go over budget. Those films cost around $30,000 to $40,000 to make, which was low enough for the studio to make a profit. I was earning $5,000 a week, and I was working every week, so I thought I was doing all right.”
With the security that came with his contract at Monogram, Wayne was finally able to marry Josephine on 24 June 1933, in Loretta Young’s garden in Bel Air. Josephine would have preferred to marry in church because she was a Catholic, but Wayne was not, so a civil but elegant ceremony was held at Young’s Hollywood home.
Wayne’s best man was his brother Robert. Over recent years, Duke had grown closer to the brother he had resented in childhood.
The Waynes moved into a small furnished apartment on Orange Grove Avenue, just outside Hollywood. Josephine kept herself occupied with charity work while Duke made one Western after another over the next two years. Robert N. Bradbury, the father of Duke’s old friend from Glendale, Bob, directed most of them. And since most of the films featured Yakima Canutt, whose friendship with Wayne grew stronger, they often rehearsed their stunts on their own. They also continued to play practical jokes when they got the chance.
Canutt told me of one such joke: “There was one picture we did; there were so many I can’t remember which one—they were all kind of the same, but I had to double him by riding up to a hotel, catch hold of a rope, and swing up onto a balcony and go through