John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [83]
“Duke said to me, ‘I guess this Khrushchev fellow still wants me out of the way.’ [Stalin had died earlier in 1953.]
“I said, ‘I’m not so sure. My guy who got me this tip says that the American Commies are making their own decisions. All the same, you better expect more trouble sometime.’ ”
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With secret detectives, Communist assassins, Chata’s accusations of cruelty, and trouble with the 3-D cameras all plaguing Wayne while he was making Hondo, it’s a wonder the picture turned out to be as good as it was.
Costing around $3 million to make, Hondo took in $4.1 million in domestic sales alone when it was released quickly in November 1953, probably making at least as much overseas. The rush to get it edited, scored, and released was an attempt to cash in on the popularity for 3-D. Unfortunately, the gimmick was already losing its appeal and, after just a week into its release, Hondo’s 3-D version was withdrawn, and the “flat” version went nationwide. Its popularity proved that a good piece of cinematic storytelling didn’t need gimmicks to be successful.
There was one more indication of the film’s quality which came as a complete shock to Wayne. Andrew McLaglen told me, “Duke always said that Geraldine [Page] may have been great on Broadway but she didn’t know a damn thing about movies. Well, you can imagine his surprise when I called him a few months after the film came out and told him that Geraldine had been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Hondo. There was just silence on the other end of the line. Duke just couldn’t understand it.”
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From the Mighty to
the Mongols
In October 1953, the divorce trial finally got under way. Paul Fix, there to give Wayne moral support, told me, “It got very nasty. Chata told the court that Duke was every kind of awful man—a drunk, violent, unfaithful.
“Duke told the court he often returned home to find Chata and her mother lying drunk on a bed. He also claimed that Chata once threatened to kill him, and related the events of the night he came home after the Angel and the Badman wrap and how Chata tried to kill him.”
Wayne told the court that following the wrap party at the studio, he returned home at 1:30 A.M. “My wife refused to let me in. I could hear her and her mother talking about me loudly. I rang the bell but they wouldn’t open the door. Then I broke a glass panel, reached in, and opened it myself. Chata and her mother, they came charging out. Chata had a .45 in her hand. She and her mother were fighting over it.”
Under oath, Chata said that she had thought a burglar was breaking in which is why she came running out with a gun.
Wayne refuted this version, saying that Chata had been hysterical and demanded to know if he had been to a motel with Gail Russell.
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Accusing him of infidelity, she aimed the gun at him and threatened to fire.
Wayne’s attorney asked him if there had been any affair with Russell, to which Wayne replied emphatically, “Absolutely not,”
insisting that he and Miss Russell had only ever shared a friendship.
Wayne, who always insisted that honesty was a virtue he demanded of himself and from others, was not entirely honest in his testimony.
According to Budd Boetticher, “On the stand Duke told how one night he and Esperanza had been at my house for a party, and sometime after midnight all the guests decided to drive to a restaurant which was not far from where I lived. Chata was very drunk and refused to go, so I told Duke and my wife to go on ahead and that I would try and sort Chata out. Finally I threw her over my shoulder and we arrived fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later. But Duke told the court that we’d been alone for two hours. I was furious.
“When we left the court, I said to Duke, ‘That was a despicable thing you did.