John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [41]
After The Long Voyage Home it would be another five years before Ford would use Wayne again. It seems Ford had a new favorite actor, Henry Fonda, who worked with Ford in Young Mr.
Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk (both 1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
Henry Fonda told me, “Duke Wayne loved Ford, and I’m sure that from time to time, Ford loved Duke. But Ford was just so jealous when Raoul Walsh beefed up Duke’s career after Stagecoach [with Dark Command]. It was just unforgivable, and I know that Ford made him pay for it by letting him stew in films that really kept Duke out of the so-called A-list of stars for a long time. Duke was still part of the Ford clan and we all went on fishing trips together.”
John Wayne was just popular enough in 1940 for Universal to invite him over and offer him a role opposite Marlene Dietrich in Seven Sinners. He would be second-billed to Dietrich, a far bigger star, although her career was in a decline, and Universal felt that the increasing popularity of Wayne would help her career as much her popularity would help his. He would play a naval officer on a South Seas island where, in the Seven Sinners Café, he would meet and fall for a honky-tonk singer, played by Dietrich.
The first time Dietrich saw Wayne was in the Universal com-missary one noon. She was immediately attracted to him and sent word that she wanted a meeting with him—in her dressing room.
She locked the door and said, “I wonder what time it is?” Before 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 75
DIETRICH AND DEMILLE
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Wayne could check his watch, she raised her skirt and revealed a watch attached to her black garter. “It’s very early, darling,” she told him. “We have plenty of time.” They spent that time making love.
Henry Hathaway recollected, “Duke’s affair with Dietrich was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood. They would appear in public together at Hollywood nightspots, and she even went with him to football games and prizefights. And she took a great interest in his career and later took much of the credit for making him the star he became.”
Dietrich introduced Wayne to her business manager, Bo Roos, and persuaded Duke to hire Roos to manage his finances. Duke didn’t know it then, but it was one of the worst decisions of his life.
She then got Roos to urge Charles Feldman, Wayne’s agent, to renegotiate his contract with Republic. The result was that Yates agreed to give Wayne 10 percent of the gross takings from his films.
Dietrich also taught Wayne that the only way to get on in the business was to be totally single-minded about his career.
Years later, Dietrich virtually dismissed Wayne as an actor and a lover, calling him an “ungifted amateur” in her memoirs. She said,
“Unknown, penniless, he begged me to help him. I can’t really say he was my ‘partner,’ since his performance was kept within very strict bounds—he spoke his lines and that was all. I helped as best I could.” Production on Seven Sinners ran over budget, and was a week behind schedule, but it proved a big success when released in the autumn of 1940.
Wayne finished Seven Sinners late one Saturday night, took Sunday off to be with Josephine and his family, and started work at Paramount on Monday for The Shepherd of the Hills, directed by Henry Hathaway and costarring Wayne’s boyhood screen hero, Harry Carey. It was an ambitious film, shot in Technicolor, in which Wayne played a hotheaded character living in the mountains who vows to kill the man he believes wrecked his mother’s life and cast a shadow over his own since birth—his father. He meets a stranger, played by Carey, who is known as the Shepherd of