John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [51]
causing physical and mental suffering.”
Wayne had already agreed on a settlement with Josephine, giving her custody of their four children, the house, the car, one hundred thousand dollars in securities, insurance, and 20 percent of his gross earnings. Wayne also arranged to put two hundred dollars a month into a trust fund for each of his children.
On 29 November 1944, the divorce was granted, although it would take another year before it was made final. Publicly, Josephine said that the divorce was “a purely civil action in no way affecting the moral status of a marriage.”
In other words, she still regarded herself as Mrs. John Wayne and, although she never gave him any trouble, she insisted that she was his only legal wife. Paul Fix said, “She taught her children that she was their father’s only legal wife, and I think Michael in particular had trouble accepting Duke’s later marriages and the children he had with Pilar.”
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Of his divorce from Josephine, Wayne said, “It was the stupidest damn thing I ever did in my life. She was a woman whose weaknesses were outweighed by her strengths. Not only did I desert the first woman I ever loved, but I also left my four children.”
His guilt over all this, especially over his children, haunted him all his life. Paul Fix said, “He was convinced Michael never forgave him. I think it’s true that Michael, of all the children, judged him more harshly than the others, and it took a long time for Michael to respect his father again.”
All Michael would say when I asked him about his feelings for his father was, “I love my father, and I always will.”
Wayne was wearing a Stetson once more for Republic’s Flame of the Barbary Coast early in 1945. Yates poured $600,000 into the production, a large sum for a Republic picture. Fix, who was also in the film, said, “He got on with his work, knowing his time had passed for getting into the war. He shouldn’t be criticized for that. But it did mean that throughout filming he was in a mean mood and apt to lose his temper more quickly than usual, although you’d never know it from watching the picture.
“When anything went wrong, Duke got mad. He hated holdups and just wanted to get on with the job which he took very seriously.
He had by then developed the policy that making pictures was a business and that films should make money. But he also approached films as a craft and [maintained] that an actor should be honest about his characterization and retain a level of emotion through sheer hard work, no matter how many times shooting was interrupted. That was another reason he got mad when someone screwed up. He believed everyone should be as professional as he was—and by God, he was professional.
“He was also overly generous. Whenever one of the cowboys in his pictures was broke, Duke would always lend them a few hundred dollars. He never asked for the money back. He was too generous.
He was just like his father and that I respect.”
When Flame of the Barbary Coast was released in May 1945, it received favorable reviews. The New York Times summed up the image of Wayne when it said, “John Wayne is perfectly cast. That is, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 95
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he gambles, fights, woos, and rides with consummate ease if not histrionic aplomb.”
He did get into uniform late in 1944, but it was for another war picture, Back to Bataan, which costarred Anthony Quinn and Paul Fix. Wayne’s good friend Robert Fellows produced, and the director was Edward Dmytryk, a gifted filmmaker who was later named as a Communist, as was the film’s writer, Ben Barzman. Quinn told me when I interviewed him on the set of The Greek Tycoon at Elstree Studios in 1977, “That was the cause of some problems while we were shooting the picture. Duke knew that Barzman and Dmytryk were far to the left, and when Fellows introduced Duke to Barzman, Duke said without a smile, ‘I’m Duke to my friends.’ He paused, and then added, ‘Also to the people I work with.’
“We had