John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [84]
The trial suddenly ended after three days when the lawyers persuaded their clients to settle. The judge granted them an uncommon divorce, unique to California law, whereby neither party would concede to the other’s charges, and the divorce would not become final for one whole year. Wayne agreed to give Chata $150,000, pay off all her current debts, and pay $50,000 per annum for the next six years. But he got to keep the Encino estate.
Paul Fix said, “That divorce trial took it out of Duke. He came away from it exhausted. And he still felt guilty. He felt even worse when he heard that Chata died a year later from a heart attack.
She’d been living in Mexico City and after her mother died, she became a recluse and just drank herself to death. She was only thirty-eight. Believe me, Duke didn’t feel happy about that at all.
He felt responsible.”
While the divorce trial had been in session, Pilar had gone to Mexico City, making sure she didn’t accidentally step into any spotlight and give Chata any more ammunition. Duke joined her and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 158
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they traveled to Acapulco where he rented a house with a view of the ocean. They went waterskiing, scuba diving, and sailing. It was just the kind of relaxation Duke needed. Then they returned to Los Angeles and Pilar moved in with Duke into the Encino home.
Said Paul Fix, “Duke would have married Pilar in an instant, but he had to wait a year when his divorce would become final.”
As Andrew V. McLaglen said, “Duke was always a one-woman man. When he fell in love with a woman, he had to marry her.”
Wayne had been waiting to hear from RKO where he still had one more picture to make. Howard Hughes had a project in mind but was being very vague about it. Whatever it was, Hughes kept delaying it but insisted that Duke should not undertake any other assignment until the RKO project had been completed. But Wayne was not the kind of person to sit around, waiting for something to happen, so he went on to his next Wayne-Fellows production, The High and the Mighty, to be directed by William Wellman.
It was about an airplane in trouble and became the basis for many of the disaster movies of the 1970s. The script delved into the backgrounds of the various passengers and crew, leading to the moment when one of the engines catches fire and the pilot becomes too hysterical to keep control of the plane, forcing the heroic copilot to take over. After a perilous journey, the copilot manages to bring the plane safely down.
William Wellman loved anything to do with aviation, and was wildly enthusiastic about making The High and the Mighty, even before it was written. He told me, “When Ernie Gann and I were writing the screenplay for Island in the Sky, one day Ernie said,
‘Look, Bill, I want to tell you a story, just for fun so we can take our minds off this job for a while. It’s a thing I call The High and the Mighty. I haven’t written it yet but I can tell it to you.’ So he told me the story and I said, ‘Stay right here and I’ll make you the quickest sale you’ve ever had in your life.’ I called Wayne and his partner, Fellows, and I said, ‘It’s Bill here. I’ve got to come over so don’t go away. I’ve got the greatest story to tell you that you’ve ever heard in your life.’
“I went down there full of enthusiasm and I told them the story. I 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 159
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said, ‘That’s what’s going to be our next picture with you playing it, Duke.’ Duke said, ‘No, we’ll get Spencer Tracy to play it.’ I said,
‘That’s okay, Tracy will be great.’ They said, ‘What does Ernie want for it?’ I said, ‘Fifty-five thousand dollars.’ I sure as hell didn’t know what he wanted. But then I said, ‘And he wants at least five or ten percent of the profits.’ Duke said, ‘Okay, we’ll pay him fifty thousand and he can have ten percent