John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [30]
They were all directed by George Sherman, who told me, “Those films were awful, and it certainly wasn’t Duke’s fault. They were just based on a simple formula. Wayne was the romantic hero whose love life was generally the cause of the trouble the Mesquiteers found themselves in. Terhune was the so-called comedian, and Corrigan was the cowboy who never fell in love!
“Duke had replaced Livingston to ease the tension on the set, but Corrigan, who was a big star in B Westerns, resented Duke.
So they were not happy films to make. Duke hated them because he knew that Republic were intent on keeping him a minor star while they had bigger plans for Corrigan. You know, in Hollywood, it’s true that nobody knows anything, because Duke went on to become the biggest movie star of all time, and Corrigan retired into obscurity in the 1950s.
“Those films were bread and butter for me and Duke, but for Overland Stage Raiders we had Louise Brooks as the leading lady, and she was a big star in the silent days. She felt that making that film was a real comedown for her. She was no longer in demand and very unhappy about the way her career had gone. But when I introduced her to Wayne, she was really impressed by him.”
Louise Brooks would later say about Wayne, “Looking up at him I thought, this is no actor but the hero of all mythology miraculously brought to life.” She said that Wayne was what Henry James defined as the greatest of all works of art—“a purely beautiful being.”
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Overland Stage Raiders was Brooks’s last film; she retired after it was completed in two weeks. Wayne was not ready to retire, but he was still unhappy with his career, and he was even more unhappy at home. Sherman recalled, “Josephine just had no respect for her husband’s profession and couldn’t understand his frustrations.” But despite the rift in his marriage, somehow he and Josephine refused to admit defeat, and in 1938 she was pregnant again; she gave birth to Patrick in July 1939. But only shortly after Duke was able to announce he was to be a father again, his own father, Clyde Morrison, died of a heart attack. Wayne loved his father and, remembering how generous Clyde had always been, Wayne hoped to emulate him by supporting Clyde’s widow, which he did throughout the rest of her life.
With his father gone, Wayne looked ever more to John Ford as a substitute father. John Carradine said, “I think Ford loved the idea that Wayne would look to him for all the things he would have needed from his own father, and Ford really made the most of that.
It seemed to me that Ford felt he owned Wayne and that Wayne owed him. But from the time Duke starred in The Big Trail, Ford didn’t lift a hand to help him. He sort of kept him in his place until he really needed John Wayne.”
It was in 1938 that John Ford really needed John Wayne.
In 1937 John Ford had become interested in a short story called
“Stagecoach to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox. It had been published in Collier’s magazine the previous year, and he and screenwriter Dudley Nichols went to work turning it into a screenplay, calling it Stagecoach. The result was something quite unique for the time: they had taken a basic Western tale about a stagecoach making a perilous journey across New Mexico and fending off Apaches, and filled it with fully rounded, three-dimensional characters. Most Westerns up to that time had been the typical John Wayne good guys in white hats versus bad guys in black hats. Seven years earlier Raoul Walsh had tried to transform the Western into a more adult and artistic form with The Big Trail and failed.
Among the characters that included a corrupt banker, a mild-mannered whisky peddler, a prostitute with a heart of gold, a cavalry 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 54
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officer’s pregnant and delicate wife, a Southern gambler with few scruples, a sheriff whose sense of duty did