John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [88]
“I got on the phone to Oscar Millard and said, ‘You gotta do something with this dialogue. I can’t say those lines.’ He said, ‘You should have said so before. I can’t rewrite the entire script now.’ You see, even John Wayne makes mistakes. And that was one of my biggest.
“For a start, Dick Powell had never directed before, but I figured every new director needs their first one to cut their teeth on. And he was such a nice guy that when I could see that he really was over his head, I tried to be helpful without coming on too strong, which, I admit, I have a habit of doing. I just barge right in there, ‘Hold it a minute; you’re telling me you’re putting the camera there?’
That’s what I’m like. But on this picture I had enough to contend with trying to get to grips with that goddamn dialogue. So we had a less-than-talented director who just happened to be a terrific guy, and we had a script that was written for Brando but was being spoken by Duke Wayne. And it was just a fucking disaster.”
Despite all that, Wayne went about his work with a considerable amount of enthusiasm, as described by Lee Van Cleef, who was in the picture. When I interviewed him in Ireland, where he was filming The Hard Way in 1978, he told me, “I never did become one of 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 165
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Wayne’s in crowd, but it was hard not to like him. It was obvious that he was out of his depth as Genghis Khan. I mean, he was no Omar Sharif. He was Hondo and the Ringo Kid. But he was never less than professional, although he was clearly unhappy with some of the decisions that Dick Powell made. The thing is, when he complained about something—and he never did it belligerently—he was always right. He knew as much about making movies as anyone. He was in trouble because of the part and because of the director. But to give Powell his due, no director could have pulled that one off.
“We shot that picture near St. George in Utah where the temperature got to around one hundred and twenty degrees. I think we were up there for around six weeks. Wayne’s beautiful wife came out there to be with him, which didn’t please our leading lady Susan Hayward at all. Susan had kind of fallen for Wayne, and when Pilar arrived I could see that Susan was kind of jealous. Not that there was anything going on between Wayne and Hayward.
“I think Susan really had a thing for Wayne. She just wasn’t used to her leading men rejecting her. But he was never frank with her in an unkind way. He could have said, ‘Look, I’m not interested so leave me alone.’ He just treated her with his usual courtesy, and you could see she kind of liked that. But she couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to jump into the sack with her.
“You probably heard about the number of people who died from cancer who were involved with that film. Where we were filming was about one hundred and forty miles from the site in Nevada where they were testing the atom bomb. We were right in the path of the nuclear fallout. I heard that a lot of people living in that area had some form of cancer, but we didn’t know it then.
“There’s a place called Snow Canyon which has a lot of dunes.
A spectacular place. We filmed a number of scenes, mainly the battles, so there were a lot of extras as well as crew involved. It turns out that a lot of radioactive dust blew into that canyon, and I remember that a lot of the actors, extras, and crew got covered in that dust. We had to have our mouths and eyes cleaned out with water; we were covered in it. There were more than two hundred people working on that picture, and around half of them came down with cancer. Wayne had lung cancer and then stomach 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 166
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cancer, Susan Hayward had a brain tumor as well as cancer of the skin, uterus, and breast. Pedro Armendariz had cancer of the kidneys and larynx, Agnes Moorehead died from uterine cancer and Dick Powell died from lung cancer.