John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [80]
Pilar was only supposed to stay in Hollywood for a month. But when she fell in love with Duke, she stayed forever. “Duke and Pilar were very discreet,” said Paul Fix. “They’d go out to little restaurants where the other film stars never went, which meant that reporters never went there either, and so they were able to be together without anyone noticing them.”
Fix was among the cast of Wayne-Fellows’s next production, Island in the Sky, again at Warner Bros. Wayne played a pilot who has to land his troubled airplane in a snowy uncharted landscape. In freezing temperatures and occasional blizzards, he has to keep his crew together while a seemingly futile search goes on for them.
Much of the film was shot on location early in 1953, under the direction of William Wellman. On Wayne’s recommendation, I was able to telephone Wellman in 1974, and he told me, “I’d signed a 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 150
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contract with Wayne’s corporate setup for six pictures, three of them with Wayne, and three with whomever we got. The first story they had bought was Ernest Gann’s Island in the Sky and they sent it to me to read. It was wonderful. So Ernie and I worked on the script together. It was a true story, and every one of the characters were real characters. There was a plane down and the rescuers left everything—
their wives, their kids—and they went up there and found them.
They gave up everything to find their pals, and that was fliers.”
Wayne numbered Wellman among his favorite directors. “He’s just a wonderful old son of a bitch. He had a metal plate in his head from some accident, and all the actors we had would never get into an argument with him. And they certainly wouldn’t get into a fight with him because they were afraid they’d kill him.”
Lloyd Nolan, who was also in the film—and whom I was able to talk to in 1979—said, “Duke Wayne really respected Wellman. He didn’t always respect his directors, as I discovered the more I got to know him. There’s a handful of names I can give that Duke respected, and they would be Wellman, Ford, Hathaway, and Hawks. I’m sure there are others, but those he definitely always deferred to.”
Paul Fix recalled, “When Duke wasn’t on location, he’d head back to Hollywood to be with Pilar. It seemed that finally Duke had found a real soul mate. She even agreed to give up her career as an actress for him. Then she discovered she was pregnant, and this threatened to cause a major scandal for Duke. Pilar was a Catholic and she had already committed a sin in the eyes of her Church, but it was really awful for her when she decided to have the pregnancy terminated.
This was all happening while Duke’s lawyers were getting ready for battle in the courts.”
There was a temporary alimony hearing in July 1953, at which Chata accused Wayne of twenty-two acts of physical cruelty, claiming that Wayne had “clobbered” her and asking for an order restraining Duke. Wayne swore that he never once struck Chata, but had held her back at arm’s length whenever she charged at him in a drunken rage. He countered with thirty-one charges against her.
Outside the courthouse, one girl waved a giant sign which read: JOHN
WAYNE, YOU CAN CLOBBER ME ANYTIME YOU WANT.
The court awarded Chata a temporary settlement of $1,100 a 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 151
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month. Wayne was relieved to be out of court and on his way to Mexico to film Hondo, a Western for Warner Bros. produced by Wayne-Fellows Productions and directed by John Farrow who had directed Plunder in the Sun. The cast included some of Duke’s favorite actors and friends: Ward Bond, James Arness, and Paul Fix.
Wayne played Hondo Lane, a U.S. Cavalry scout who discovers a lonely ranch where Angie Lowe, deserted by her husband, lives with her son Johnny. Despite Hondo’s warning that she and her son are in danger from Apaches, she refuses to