John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [29]
When Wayne heard that Cecil B. DeMille was going to make The Plainsman, an epic adventure featuring the exploits of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, and Calamity Jane, he asked to be considered for the role of Hickok.
“My agent, who was Charles Feldman, called DeMille and an appointment was arranged for me to meet the great director,”
Duke recalled. “Well, me and Charlie turned up on time but we were sitting for an hour outside of DeMille’s office before the great director emerged, only to announce, ‘I’m going to lunch.’
“I got up and Charlie thought I was going to hit him—maybe I was—and he said, ‘Mr. DeMille, you asked John Wayne to come over for an interview.’
“DeMille said, ‘Oh yes, so I did.’ So we went into his office, and he said to me, ‘You were in The Big Trail, weren’t you? I saw it and you did just fine. But a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.’ That was DeMille’s way of turning me down. To him I was now just a minor star of mere B Westerns.”
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voice. “He worked hard on improving his delivery,” said Fix. “He paid attention to the character actors he sometimes got to work with, he listened closely to what the directors wanted, he learned how to handle small comedic moments, and he paid attention to all aspects of filmmaking.”
At home, life was still troubled. Said Paul Fix, “Josie really tried to make a gentleman of Duke and to make him become a Catholic.
He just wanted to be accepted for what he was. He really wanted to love Josie, but it just wasn’t working. I noticed that around her he really watched his Ps and Qs. But around his friends he was funny, boisterous, he could swear all he liked, and he just seemed so much more comfortable.”
In 1936, Trem Carr, who had produced some of Duke’s films at Republic, left the studio to work at Universal, and he took Wayne with him. Universal, a major studio that made minor action films of their own, signed Wayne to a six-picture deal. He made the films virtually back-to-back in 1936 and 1937—and not one of them was a Western. They were all made just as quickly but not as cheaply as the Republic pictures. The budgets for the Universal pictures Wayne made were as much as $500,000.
The first, The Sea Spoilers, was an action film in which Wayne was a U.S. Coast Guard commander outwitting smugglers who have kidnapped his sweetheart, played by Nan Grey. Next he was in Conflict, playing a lumberjack who turns to prizefighting, and California Straight Ahead, as the owner of a convoy of trucks in competition with a train for delivery of aviation parts.
I Cover the War was one of the more ambitious films at Universal.
Wayne played a newsreel cameraman caught up in a tribal war in the desert, and the studio came up with 150 extras as the British cavalry and 400 extras as Arab tribesmen.
In Idol of the Crowds he was a professional hockey player who turns down bribes to throw the game; and in Adventure’s End he was a pearl diver aboard a whaling ship on which the first mate leads a mutiny. But the Universal pictures didn’t do well commercially, costing too much to make a profit from the market they were aimed at.
He was back riding the range again in 1937, this time at 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 52
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Paramount, in Born to the West. Then it was back to Republic to become part of a series of films featuring “The Three Mesquiteers,”
a trio of heroes supposedly modeled on The Three Musketeers of Dumas. This trio, however, were cowboys in stetsons and fighting with six-guns. Despite the Western setting, the series was set in the 1930s and featured automobiles and airplanes.
A number of Mesquiteer films had already been made, featuring Ray Corrigan, Robert Livingston, and Max Terhune, but because of ongoing tension between Corrigan and Livingston, Wayne was brought in to replace Livingston.