John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [28]
“I kind of learned that from watching Yak, and not because he was any good at it! He was the greatest stuntman ever, but he was a worse actor than I was. When I started, I knew I was no actor. I had to invent myself. It was a deliberate attempt to create ‘John Wayne screen actor.’ So I started to speak with a drawl, I squinted, and I tried to find a way of moving which would suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but was always ready for it. It was a hit-or-miss project I set myself, but slowly it all began to come together.
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“I’d watch other actors. I noticed that when Yak had to show anger, he’d grimace, raise his voice, and kinda snarl. But when Yak was in real danger, he reacted differently. There were a few times when I saw Yak heading for a real fight with some rough types who’d challenge him, just to show how tough they were. Yak would get this half-humorous look in his eyes, and he’d talk very straight and direct at the guy looking for a fight. You’d get the feeling that there was a steel spring inside of him just waiting to be released. I told him about it and said he ought to react with real attitude rather than put on a grimace and snarl. But he just didn’t get it—but I did. That’s what I learned from Yak; how to react in a real way.”
He also learned a great deal from Paul Fix who appeared with Wayne in 1935 in Monogram’s The Desert Trail. Fix told me,
“Duke was bright and you could teach him, and he’d quickly learn.
He had trouble with the physical side of acting, like how to move and what to do with your hands. He said he hated watching himself on the screen because he always looked so stiff. I told him to try pointing his toes into the ground as he walked, and when he did that, his shoulders and hips sort of swung. He practiced that walk until it looked so graceful on the screen that I told him he had to watch his films so he could see what he was doing. I told him,
‘You can’t learn what to do if you don’t watch yourself on the screen.’ And in a short time he had that distinctive rolling walk down perfect.”
In 1935 Mascot, Consolidated Film Laboratories—which was run by Herbert J. Yates—and Monogram, along with its Lone Star Productions, were merged into one new company, Republic Pictures.
Yates, who had no knowledge or experience of filmmaking, was head of the new company, and as Wayne would later say, “He was a nice enough guy but he had no taste.” The filmmaking side of the business was left to Nat Levine as head of production.
As with the Monogram Lone Star Westerns, the films Wayne made for Republic had little to differentiate them. “Between April and September each year, we worked like hell to make our quota of pictures,” said Wayne. “We had to make them on schedule because they were all sold in advance as a package to exhibitors. In the winter 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 50
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months we had time off to recover, and then come April, it was back in the saddle again.”
By this time Wayne was beginning to formulate his philosophy of what it meant to be an American, based very much upon the myths which came out of the Westerns. He viewed life much as his screen persona did, believing that the American way of life was based on tough but firm individualism, self-sufficiency, and the need to stand up for yourself, even if it resulted in violence.
And he had become almost addicted to work. As Noah Beery Jr.
told me, “He lived to work. If he wasn’t working, he wasn’t happy.”
And yet he knew he was getting stuck in a rut as a B-Western cowboy star. It didn’t help when he was made to play the part of another singing cowboy in his first film at Republic, Westward Ho, in 1935. Wayne refused to sing—or rather to mime to another man’s singing voice—in any more films.
By now Wayne had a new agent, Charles Feldman, one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. He got Yates to agree to a new