John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [73]
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JOHN WAYNE
For much of the first half of 1951, Wayne was busy as a producer.
He had become interested in The Bullfighter and the Lady, which was based on the early career of film director and former bullfighter Budd Boetticher. Yates agreed to back the production with a modest budget.
Together, Wayne and Boetticher, who would direct, chose their cast which included Robert Stack, Gilbert Roland, and Katy Jurado.
Filming took place in Mexico in a small village called Xayai. It did not start well. Over a transatlantic line in 1974, Budd Boetticher said,
“Duke decided he’d be there on the first day of shooting, which I didn’t think would be a problem, but on the first shot, he walked in front of the camera and grabbed Robert Stack and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Bob, if you’re gonna say the line, say it with some balls.’ He almost scared Bob to death. Six times he walked in front of the camera, and after the sixth time I called him aside and said, ‘Duke, do you think you could direct this picture better than I can?’ With Duke, you have to let him know who’s the boss on the set. We went back and Duke confessed to the cast and crew that he’d been scolded by me and that I’d said, ‘One of us has to go home.’ He told everybody, ‘I’m leaving tonight and won’t see you until the end of the picture.’
“He was true to his word. But he left me with Jimmy Grant who was an alcoholic. He disappeared for a week in Mexico City and was living in a whorehouse where he was supposed to be fixing the script.
He finally turned up with a script that was so awful, I never used it.
I didn’t rewrite the script. I just shot it from my own treatment.
“Duke returned on the day we wrapped, and we had a party. He consumed half a bottle of tequila and a full bottle, which he gave to me. We locked arms and began drinking. Duke was so drunk he fell off a veranda into a bush.
“Chata was with him, and we all went to a bullfight together. Then Jimmy Grant turned up with eleven whores. Chata turned to Duke and said, ‘If you even smile at those girls, I’m going to hit you.’
“Duke worked with me on editing the film and at the end of the week we’d get drunk. We’d call each other around one in the afternoon the next day and try to remember where we’d been the previous night. Duke wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was a Saturday-night drunk.
He’d work his ass off all week, and on Saturday he’d get drunk.
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QUIET IN IRELAND
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“During the postproduction, we frequently disagreed as producers and directors often do. He’d have his group of people with him, and when he and I disagreed, he’d walk away, and his group would all follow him. He’d turn around to say something to me and find I wasn’t there among his group, and he’d get furious. His people would always agree with everything he said, but I would tell him if it was full of crap.
“He could be a real bastard, but he could also be a wonderful guy, depending on what his attitude was that day. There was no middle road with him. He either thought you the greatest guy in the world or the biggest son of a bitch. There wasn’t a mean streak in his body, and when he had to say something to someone that would hurt them, which he had to do on occasions when someone didn’t do their job right, it hurt him too. He would really fret when he did those things.
And if he realized he was wrong, he’d apologize.”
Wayne’s next movie, Flying Leathernecks, took him back to RKO, where Howard Hughes had a high regard for him. The feeling was mutual, even though Wayne could not understand Hughes’s obsession with continuing to film miles of footage of planes in flight for Jet Pilot. But a measure of how much Hughes thought of Wayne was the fee he paid him—$3,000,000, then the highest salary ever paid to an actor for a single picture.
Duke was a pilot again in a decent war film directed