John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [85]
“We tried to get some big-name stars like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ida Lupino but they all turned me down because they didn’t feel the parts being offered were big enough. The thing with The High and the Mighty is that it’s an ensemble piece. So I said to Wayne, ‘To hell with the big stars. If we can get Spencer Tracy to play the copilot, which is the only big part, we’ll get good character actors for the rest of the cast.’ So we got Robert Stack as the pilot, people like Claire Trevor, Phil Harris, Jan Sterling, Laraine Day, Robert Newton, David Brian. Spencer Tracy read it and thought it was lousy and said he wouldn’t do it. So Wayne had to do it, and Wayne thinks that he wasn’t good in it.”
Andrew McLaglen, who was assistant director on the film, had a slightly different story for Tracy’s refusal to do the film. He told me,
“Bill Wellman was the best-prepared director I’d ever met, but he also had a reputation for browbeating his actors. He got Tracy to read the script, and they had lunch and shook hands on a deal. But then Tracy’s friends who’d worked with Wellman told him that he was in for an ego-bruising ride, so Tracy pulled out, telling Wellman that the script was lousy.”
I asked Wellman why Wayne hadn’t liked his own performance, and he replied: “Wayne didn’t think he was good when we were making it, and he still doesn’t think it’s any good. I said to him, ‘What the hell: you mean to tell me you don’t think you were good in that?’ He said, ‘Well, it never had any love story.’ I said, ‘It had the greatest love story that had ever been written. The audience never saw your wife or your kids. All they saw was a half-burned-up little toy bear you carry with you, and you’re a lonesome, attractive, wonderful man. Everybody visualized a beautiful woman 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 160
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and a lovely kid and a wonderful guy that could only ever love that one woman. You couldn’t ask for a better love story.’ Oh, we used to argue like hell. He still thinks it’s lousy, and I think he’s crazy.”
Claire Trevor was delighted to be working with Wayne again.
Although she wasn’t as big a star as a Crawford or a Bette Davis, she was a highly regarded character actress who’d won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in Key Largo in 1948. And with Wayne having to step into Tracy’s role, there was suddenly a lot of marquee power in having the names John Wayne and Claire Trevor together again. Trevor said, “It was wonderful working with Duke again. He had become such a fine performer as well as an important person in Hollywood since we had last worked together. He was so ambitious. He was so dedicated to his work. He always wanted to win. He was a perfectionist.
“It was the first time I’d met Pilar. She came to the set most days, and was very shy, but when you got to break through her shell, she was wonderful. You could see how much in love she and Duke were.
He was a romantic. He liked women although he was much more at ease with men. But he was a very true man, very true to his marriage, very true to his wife.
“I came to realize that Pilar had had no formal education and she was very sensitive about that. She was actually very bright, very intelligent, but she was concerned that people would perceive her as being uneducated and therefore not very clever. Her command of English was not very good back then, and so she tended not to talk, which some people took as her being standoffish. She felt a little out of place, I think, and she didn’t particularly enjoy the typical Hollywood life—you know, the parties, the events. She was a strong woman, but as a Peruvian living in America, speaking broken English, she suffered some anxiety. It was difficult for her to relate to or with Duke’s Hollywood friends, but she became good friends with Duke’s secretary, Mary St. John. She had to find herself in Hollywood, and that