John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [78]
“The FBI agents said they’d have to make a report back to 145
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J. Edgar Hoover. John said, ‘Just so long as it’s all hushed up.’ Years later, we all found out Hoover had his famous ‘secret files.’
“John told them that he and Jimmy would scare ‘the living shit’
out of the Russians and he worked out with Grant how they would take them to a remote beach John had in mind. I mean, this was literally scripted, written by James Grant. They’d have guns armed with blanks, and John and Jimmy would act out an execution on them. After that the FBI could do what they liked. Well, the agents thought this was just a great idea.
“John had them hide out in another room. It was dark when the two Russian agents turned up. I suppose they were KGB. They spoke with perfect American accents and had FBI badges and were able to convince the guard on the gate that they needed to see Wayne because his life was in danger. When the guard phoned through to John’s office, he told the guard to let them in, and then he told the FBI agents to be ready.
“When the Russians came into John’s office, the FBI agents came into the room and held them at gunpoint. Then they got into cars and drove up the coast until they came to the place where John planned to carry out the mock execution. He told me, ‘I just wanted them commies to know they didn’t scare me.’ ”
And that’s how John Wayne and James Grant came to be on a remote beach late into the evening, with guns aimed at the heads of two KGB agents, kneeling on the sand, and thinking their time was up.
Canutt told me, “Wayne later learned that those Russian agents were so afraid of going back to Russia that they happily began working for our side, and they were able to provide a lot of useful information. John thought he was safe after that. But a bit later, I learned from my own network of undercover guys—my stuntmen—
that the danger wasn’t over.”
Wayne immersed himself in his work, heading for Mexico City with Robert Fellows as the producers of Plunder in the Sun, which starred Glenn Ford. Then he returned to Los Angeles for the opening of Big Jim McLain in August 1952.
Wayne continued to keep himself busy, scouting locations for The 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 147
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Alamo outside Hollywood. Rising costs were forcing many filmmakers to work outside the United States where nonunion labor was cheap. Late in the summer of 1952 he and a friend, Ernie Saftig, arrived in Peru, partly to make some investments, partly to see if it was a viable location for The Alamo, and partly as a vacation.
There Duke met Richard Weldy, who worked for Pan American Grace Airways and who also conducted trips up the Amazon.
Weldy’s estranged wife, Pilar Palette, was a Peruvian former air stewardess who’d become an actress and was filming her second film, Green Hell.
There was no animosity between Pilar and Weldy, who by this time had another woman in his life, and he flew Wayne into the Peruvian jungle where Green Hell was being filmed. They arrived just as Pilar was doing a scene where she danced barefoot around a fire. When the scene was over, the director introduced Pilar to Wayne. She wrote, “He was the handsomest man I had ever seen.”
That evening, the Peruvian film director threw a party in honor of Wayne on the patio of a hotel cantina. When Pilar arrived, Wayne stood up and asked her to sit with him. She knew that Wayne was a big film star in America, but she was not sure she had ever seen any of his films. Finally she said, “You were wonderful in For Whom the Bell Tolls. ”
Wayne smiled and replied, “You’re thinking of my good friend, Gary Cooper.”
He asked her if she saw many pictures, and she replied she rarely went to the movies. He asked her if she liked Westerns, and she said she didn’t.
Paul Fix told me, “Duke was smitten by Pilar, not just because of her incredible