John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [46]
The next film, however, was to be a landmark in Wayne’s career.
Flying Tigers was the tale of the American Volunteer Group, or the Flying Tigers, fighting for China’s freedom in the war with Japan. It was a semifictional account about General Claire Chennault’s famous Second World War flying squadron, and its spectacular flying scenes offered thrills and spills in plenty.
It also offered a touching love story between Wayne and British actress Anna Lee. When I was able to speak to her by telephone in 1979, she said, “I first saw Duke in Stagecoach in England and I fell madly in love with him. So getting to play opposite him was just lovely. But he was a man’s man, not a woman’s man, and being 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 84
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blond, I wasn’t his type. He liked dark, Latin women as you can tell from the women he married.
“We were shooting a scene where we’re dancing together, and during rehearsal he asked me if I was a Republican. I didn’t know what a Republican was and thought he said ‘publican’ which, of course, in Britain is someone who owns a pub. So I answered, ‘No, but I’m very fond of beer.’ That made him laugh, and we became good friends, and every now and then he made sure I got a part in his films.”
Flying Tigers presented a new John Wayne to the cinemagoing public, especially to the Americans. The film’s director David Miller, talking to me in 1979, said, “He was a believable World War Two hero. When you saw Wayne on-screen, you caught his sense of patriotism and sincerity. But I know it frustrated him being a hero on screen only and not in real life. One time he said, ‘Jesus, David, what are people gonna think when they see me winning the war against the Japs when they know I’m a fake?’
“I said, ‘You’re not a fake, Duke. You’re the real thing. You act with your heart, you give your character honesty and sincerity, and you’re going to make Americans feel safer if they can believe that there are men like you fighting the enemy. So stop beating yourself up.’ When we finished work on that film, I joined up and so did the producer [Edmund Grainger] and I think that only made Duke feel worse.”
Somehow, during 1942, Wayne found time to return to Mexico to see Chata. But his trip across the border had to be short because in July he was back in front of the cameras in another Second World War picture, Reunion in France, filmed at MGM. He was second lead to one of Metro’s top stars, Joan Crawford, who played a wealthy French socialite who befriends a wounded American pilot.
Jules Dassin directed, and it was produced by Joseph L.
Mankiewicz. When I visited Mankiewicz on the set of Sleuth, which he was directing at Pinewood Studios in 1971, he told me, “Louis B.
Mayer [head of MGM] would only make films that had an unreal quality to them. They had to have glamour, not grit, and even in the hands of Jules Dassin, it turned out to be a most unremarkable film in which Crawford was too glamorous, while Wayne had little 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 85
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interest in the material and it showed. He wanted to be a star, and of course, the emphasis was on Crawford.
“They had a strange working relationship. Crawford usually fell in love with her leading men, and this was no exception. But Wayne found her approach too aggressive and he was one Hollywood actor who refused to fall under her spell. Besides, he was in love with that Mexican woman.”
Way down in the cast list in an early film in her career was Ava Gardner. One day at her London home in 1979, shortly after hearing the news of Wayne’s death, she told me, “I thought Duke was a handsome man, and it was funny to see Crawford almost falling over herself to make herself available to him, but he was so sort of ‘Gee, ma’am, I’m not that kinda guy,’ and she was furious. She said to me,
‘He was happy to fuck Marlene Dietrich. What’s she got that I don’t?’ I was only a minor star at Metro and if I’d told her my answer—which was ‘class’—I’d have been