John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [81]
Paul Fix said that Duke didn’t want a pretty young thing to play Angie. “He wanted a woman with a more hardened look, but still sort of handsome—not ugly. Duke’s agent, Charles Feldman, also represented Geraldine Page who was a successful actress on the New York stage. Robert Fellows offered her the part without testing her.
“Duke was dismayed when he first saw her. She had bad teeth, so the first thing Fellows did was send her to a dentist who worked on her for three days. There was another problem Duke quickly noticed when he began working with her. She had a rather bad aroma. I think it was her way, as a New York stage actress, of getting into the part of a realistic frontierswoman.
“When it came to a love scene, Duke said, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m afraid I might puke.’
“Then John Ford decided to show up uninvited, and he took one look at Geraldine and told Farrow, ‘Nobody’s going to believe that John Wayne is in love with such a homely woman.’ So Farrow had some of her dialogue rewritten so she would say, ‘I know I’m a homely woman.’ I felt this was unfair because she was the very type of woman they had wanted, but because John Ford had spoken, Duke duly obeyed. I sometimes wish he’d stood up to Ford more. It wasn’t even Ford’s film.
“James Edward Grant revised the original script drastically, and they shot it in 3-D, a process requiring two cameras mounted side by side which was very cumbersome to use. It really wore down Duke’s 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 152
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patience. He hadn’t made a Western in quite a while, and he got pretty sore in the saddle. He told me, ‘I’d be glad if I never saw another horse again.’
“Although the film was being directed by John Farrow, Duke maintained very tight control over the filming. He wanted to direct—
that I know—but he felt he wasn’t ready to do so until he was ready to make The Alamo. A lot of people criticized Duke for not always letting his directors do their job without interference, but Duke knew that if any film of his bombed, especially if it was one he produced, the blame would be laid at his feet. It was only a really influential director like Hawks or Ford who would get the blame. Otherwise, it would be Duke’s failure, and I think that he wanted to make sure that if the film was going to fail, it would fail on his terms, because he’d be big enough not to blame the director for his own failings.”
After Wayne died in 1979, I was able to talk to Geraldine Page, who either didn’t know about the criticism that was leveled at her, or was generous enough to shrug it off, because she had a considerable amount of praise for Wayne.
She recalled her experience of making Hondo and working with Duke: “There were many times when the 3-D cameras broke down and we had nothing else to do while they were being fixed but to sit in the baking Mexican sun and talk politics. I was used to the liberal politics of New York, but here I sat with these three men [Wayne, Bond, and Farrow] and listened with growing horror to their right-wing political views. There was nowhere for me to escape so I sat there, and the more I listened, the more I noticed a difference between them.
“John Wayne, for instance, would talk very sensibly about his views, while I found Mr. Farrow quite illogical, and Ward Bond was just a bully in his approach. When Duke said something that made sense, Farrow would take what Duke had said and turn it into whatever his own horrifying view was.
“By the time we’d finished the film and I had heard several of their conversations, I realized all three men were reactionaries and not activists at all. But Duke was a reactionary for all sorts of non-reactionary reasons. I came to the conclusion that if John Wayne was transplanted out of this circle of people that were around him all the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 153
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time, he would be the