John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [76]
While the tempestuous love scenes are memorable, The Quiet Man is perhaps best remembered for the epic fistfight between Sean and Mary Kate’s brother Will. Wayne told me, “I was no youngster at forty-five, but Victor McLaglen was almost seventy, and he said,
‘Don’t you worry about me, youngster’—he called me ‘youngster.’
He said, ‘I can still give you a good whopping if I had to.’ Pappy, who’d say or do anything to get his actors to play the scene as well as they could, said, ‘You’re getting too old, Victor, for that sort of talk. Young Wayne here will still be fresh when the scene’s over, but you’ll be flat on your back from exhaustion.’ Victor—who wasn’t Irish at all but a Londoner—said, ‘We’ll see about that, you Irish son of a bitch.” And sure enough, when we did the fight, which took endless hours and days of rehearsing and shooting, Victor never let up. When Pappy called ‘Cut!’ for the last time on that sequence, Victor was still standing.
“I went up to him and said, ‘You did all right for an old Cockney.’
“He said right back at me, ‘And you did okay for an old Yank.’ He was almost thirty years my senior, and he was calling me old! I loved Victor. He never gave up. Kept right on working till he died [in 1959].”
Following the climactic fight, Sean takes Mary Kate home, but not before she whispers something in his ear, to which Sean registers tremendous shock. I asked Wayne what it was that Mary Kate was supposed to have whispered. He said, “That, my friend, is a trade secret. No, it really is. Pappy told Maureen what to say to me, and believe me, coming from the lips of a lady, it was shocking. Pappy wanted me to look shocked, and the look on my face was real. When Pappy told Maureen what to say, she was shocked and said, ‘I can’t say that.’ He said, ‘You can and you will.’ So she said it, and it worked. But Pappy swore us both to secrecy.”
When I tried to get Maureen to tell me what she’d whispered, she replied, “There was a deal between Duke, Ford, and myself that we 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 142
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would never divulge what I’d whispered. No one but we three ever knew.”
When filming ended in August, Wayne returned to Hollywood in what he called “a really good fucking mood because I knew we’d made a great picture.” “I was in high spirits, and I went to see Robert Fellows, my partner in our own production company, and together we went to talk over The Alamo with Yates. It turned into a real battle of words, although I’d have liked to . . . ! Anyway, the long and the short of it was that Yates wasn’t going to let me make The Alamo at Republic. Fortunately, The Quiet Man fulfilled the contract I had with Yates at the time, and when he said, ‘I’d still like us to work together. How about signing a new contract,’ I said, ‘You know where you can put your contract. I’ll never work here again.’
And I didn’t. And within a few years, Republic was little more than a TV production company. I know it sounds like sour grapes, and really, I was fond of the studio. We’d grown up together. I’d had success and I made a fair bit of money. Yates was starring me in pictures when other bigger studios would only let me either star in a minor film, or play second lead in a bigger film. But I was sore at Yates, not just because he wouldn’t let me make The Alamo but because having told me that I couldn’t film the story of the Alamo, he went and filmed the story anyway—a picture called The Last Command. It was a big-budget picture for Republic, but not as big as the film I had planned.”
Wayne never did work at Republic again. When The Quiet Man was released in August 1952, it was a great success and enhanced Wayne’s reputation as a major movie star.
As well as having his troubles with Yates, Wayne also had his domestic problems to deal with. Paul Fix told me, “Chata had been with him on The