John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [77]
Early in 1952 Wayne and Robert Fellows formally sealed their partnership and set about preparing to film Big Jim McLain for 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 143
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Warner Bros. It was a contemporary thriller that had as its heavies Communists, with Wayne and James Arness playing investigators exposing a Communist spy ring in Hawaii.
The screenplay had been written by Richard English and Eric Taylor, but Wayne brought in James Edward Grant to fashion the dialogue to Wayne’s own particular style.
To direct Big Jim McLain, Wayne and Fellows hired Edward Ludwig who had directed The Fighting Seabees. Andrew V.
McLaglen was assistant director. “Duke believed in what the film had to say,” McLaglen told me. “Warner Bros. was concerned because the film would show witnesses refusing to answer questions in the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
They didn’t want the scene to be offensive, so Jimmy Grant revised the script and Warner Bros. were happy with it.”
Said Wayne: “Even J. Edgar Hoover had me and the film investigated. He sent agents to Hawaii to check us out. He thought we were playing FBI agents and he wanted to know how the FBI would come across. But when the agents found out we weren’t playing FBI but House Un-American Activities investigators, they left us alone.
“It was a difficult time for me. The film was getting criticism from the do-good leftists before we’d finished filming, and at the same time my second marriage was coming to an end.”
By the time filming began in Hawaii, Chata had returned for an attempted reconciliation. But after a fight at a party on Waikiki Beach, Chata returned to their Encino home and filed for divorce.
When filming was completed, Wayne returned to Los Angeles and rented a house for himself. Paul Fix said, “Duke blamed himself for the failure of his second marriage. He just kept saying it was his fault because he devoted too much time to business and not enough with Chata. All his friends told him the same: that nothing he could have done would have made Chata happy. But again he was full of guilt.”
When Big Jim McLain opened, the reviews were disastrous.
Critics damned the film as little more than Wayne’s own crass anti-Communist propaganda.
“I got a lot of flack over that picture from the left-wing liberals in 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 144
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Hollywood and the left-wing press,” Wayne told me. “They figured that it was just all part of the so-called hysteria that was going on in Hollywood about Communists.”
It might have seemed a good time for Wayne to go public about the Communist threat to his life, because the very people the press thought he was being hysterical about had already made their first attempt to kill him.
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Assassins
“American Intelligence was pretty smart to discover Russian agents had arrived in America,” Yakima Canutt told me. “FBI agents had infiltrated a lot of Communist groups—and I mean groups of real hard-liners who were sponsored by Stalin and who played host to the agents Russia sent over. They had nothing to do with the film industry. The Communists in the business were just trying to follow a policy that they believed in, although they were naïve to do so.
“The FBI were able to discover the time and place, which was at Wayne’s office at Warner Bros., where he and Jimmy Grant would be working on the script [for Big Jim McLain]. The KGB agents would be masquerading as FBI agents. John had decided to set up a
‘sting’ for his would-be-assassins.
“The FBI agents were prepared to be with John and Jimmy when the KGB turned up. Wayne prepared for the FBI’s arrival by telling the guard at the studio gate that he was expecting two agents, so they were able to drive straight in