John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [79]
When the party was over, Duke said good-bye to Pilar, and they both assumed they would never see each other again. Wayne continued his tour of South America, returning to Los Angeles in September where, said Paul Fix, “Chata told him that she needed a new life so she could marry someone she loved. Obviously she didn’t love Duke anymore. There must have been someone else in her life.”
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Both Duke and Chata filed for divorce, but she beat him to the court by thirty minutes. There she accused Wayne of physical and mental cruelty, and of having an affair with Gail Russell.
“There were mutual charges,” said Fix, “each charging the other with infidelity and too much hard liquor.”
Even as the impending divorce was hitting the headlines and causing a scandal, Wayne was filming Trouble Along the Way at Warner Bros. “The title says a lot about what was going on at that time,” Melville Shavelson told me when I interviewed him by telephone in 1979. Shavelson was producing the film from his own screenplay. Michael Curtiz was directing the film which was not at all a typical Wayne movie. Duke played an alcoholic football coach who finds himself persuaded by Father Burke, played endearingly by Charles Coburn, to coach the football team at a run-down college.
The film concentrates largely on Wayne’s attempts to maintain custody of the young daughter he adores, played by Sherry Jackson, and he finds he is being investigated by a probation officer in the form of Donna Reed, who told me, “Duke Wayne had a lot of problems in his life when we worked together. Just as we started the picture, he and his wife both filed for divorce. His wife charged him with physical and mental cruelty. I don’t know what went on in their marriage, and I didn’t pry. All I know is Duke was on time and knew all his lines. He was a real pro, and it’s always rewarding to work with someone as professional as that. I couldn’t say that we became particularly close friends. Besides which, he had a new lady in his life, Pilar. She, it seems, turned up in Hollywood to dub a film she had made into English, and she and Duke had already met in Peru, so they started seeing each other. So on the one hand he had his wife causing him misery in a divorce battle, and on the other, he had Pilar making life more pleasant for him. But his problems did spill over into the production at times.”
Melville Shavelson confirmed: “Wayne was going through his divorce and he was having an affair with Pilar. His wife hired a detective to follow him to try and catch him with Pilar, and one day Duke got hold of the detective and shook him. Then Wayne disappeared for a week and we had to shut down the picture until he came back.
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“I liked Wayne—we later made Cast a Giant Shadow as a joint production. In the main, he is one of the kindest and most sensible of men. But he wasn’t happy with the script I had written with Jack Rose. He insisted that James Grant do a rewrite. He said Grant had a good feel for Wayne’s style of dialogue. Frankly, I hated Grant’s script, and we ended up with two scripts, one which we used for Wayne’s scenes, the other we used when he wasn’t in the scenes. The trouble is, one day he turned up when he wasn’t supposed to and found we were using the original script. He was furious and grabbed me, and to be grabbed by a guy who stands over six feet and is running the goddamn picture was pretty terrifying. After that we used Grant’s script. But for a long time after that Wayne and I never spoke.
“Somehow we managed to make up for some of the time lost when Wayne went missing and finished just three days over schedule [in November 1952].”
Trouble Along the Way is actually an endearing and amusing film, with Wayne proving he could handle romance, drama, and light comedy without resorting to hitting or killing anyone. But the film was a disappointment for Shavelson,