John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [60]
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front door, so he had to break into his own home. He would later relate this incident in detail in court during his bitter divorce battle with Chata, claiming that she tried to kill him with a .45 automatic.
Wayne spent much of 1946 working with Grant on the postproduction of Angel and the Badman. He came to realize that the strength of the film lay in its script and in the on-screen chemistry he had with Russell, but Grant’s direction was too pedestrian for the unconventional story. Wayne said, “I finally had to tell Jimmy,
‘Stick to writing. That’s what you do best.’ ”
When work on Angel and the Badman was completed in December, Wayne took Chata on a belated honeymoon to Hawaii, along with James Edward Grant and his wife. It turned into the honeymoon from hell as Chata was still convinced Duke had had an affair with Gail Russell and that Grant had been an accomplice. The more she drank, the louder she got, and the more drunk and loud she got, the more Wayne tried to drown his own sorrows in whisky and tequila.
He was an emotional wreck when he and Chata returned home to find Mrs. Ceballos waiting for them. Paul Fix described the scene: “Chata’s mother seemed to have moved in for good and that was too much for Duke. He told Chata that the bungalow was too small for the three of them, to which Chata said, ‘Then buy me a bigger house.’ That was the start of all their problems. Chata and her mother drank more than Duke, and he would come home and find them both drunk and arguing about something or other. They’d go shopping together and Duke would find they had spent a fortune in one afternoon. Duke was making a good living, but he wasn’t earning the fortunes that other stars at bigger studios got.
“It was all made worse when Chata’s mother convinced her that an actor and an actress must have real feelings for each other to be able to do love scenes, and so Chata would go crazy when she knew he was kissing his leading lady. He’d tell her, ‘It’s only a job.’ By then I think he’d learned his lesson about having affairs with his leading ladies, and he was, as far as I knew, faithful to Chata in the early years they were together. He was really relieved every time Chata’s mother finally left to go home to Mexico.
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good. They’d laugh and have a great time. But when things got bad . . . oh boy!
“One night they were at a party for an important Mexican businessman, and Chata got so drunk, she was insulting everyone: Duke, the guests, and the important Mexican businessman. Duke said, ‘It’s time to go,’ and she refused to leave. So like John Wayne in a movie, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her out to the car and dumped her on the seat. When he got in, she reached over and scratched his face, drawing blood. When he got her home, he locked her in the bedroom. He turned up the next day at his office at Republic with scratches on his face.
“It was a bad situation. A lot of us told Duke that she was bad for him. I think he knew that, but he felt he’d failed in his first marriage and didn’t want another failed marriage, though God knows, it was never going to be a great success. He even had a heated argument with John Ford who finally said to Duke, ‘Did you have to marry that whore?’”
Angel and the Badman was released in February 1947, but it was only moderately successful. Wayne was disappointed although he had learned a lot about producing his own films.
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Stardom at Last
It was at Ford’s house that Wayne first met Maureen O’Hara. The ever-delightful actress told me by telephone in 1974, “We had a tradition which somehow started. I had to sing as sweetly