John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [90]
He’d suffered with that ear since the DeMille picture. He was in so much pain when filming began that he was on strong painkillers.
You’d see this glazed look come over his eyes from the medication, and his ear was so swollen that for several days John Farrow could only shoot him from his good side. But he got on with his job and didn’t let it stop him working, no matter how much pain he was in.
He’d only go and lie down in between takes, and then when he was called, he’d be back. That infection started in September, and he was still in pain two months later.”
Making The Sea Chase was not a happy experience for Wayne, and not just because of his ear infection. Said Wayne, “We had two writers [John Twist and James Warner Bellah] with us in Hawaii while John Farrow and myself tried to get the script into shape because what they were giving us just wasn’t that good. And it never finished up very good.
“It didn’t help that Lana Turner took an instant disliking to our director. And she didn’t much like the rest of the cast. In fact, she didn’t much like anything. That’s not good for someone like me because it tends to throw me into the position of becoming defensive of all the things that I didn’t like about the film.
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“She led a troubled life and drank a lot. I might have had some sympathy for her but she’d usually turn up late in the morning with a hangover. In fact, for the first five days she didn’t turn up for three of them, and that’s enough to lose my sympathy vote. In fact, John Farrow decided he’d had enough and fired her. She came running to me and asked me to help her. I told her straight. I said, ‘You’ve not behaved in a professional manner.’ I could see the tears welling up, and that was enough to tug at my old heartstrings, and I said, ‘I’d be willing to give you another chance. I’ll talk to John.’ And he gave her back her part. She cut back on her drinking and turned up on time, more or less, after that.”
“Lana Turner was stunning,” Paul Fix remembered, “but she seemed so insecure about her own talent and probably the script that she compensated by becoming obsessed with her looks. I mean, talk about vanity. That was because she came from MGM where actresses like her were supposed to look glamorous all the time. So when Duke had a love scene with her, she’d say, ‘Don’t touch my hair.’ Or ‘Don’t smudge my makeup.’ Duke said—not to her—‘How am I supposed to make love to a woman who won’t let me touch her?’ He had to make sure that when he held her, his hands didn’t go near her hair and when he kissed her, he couldn’t make it look too passionate because he might ruin her makeup. So the love scenes in that film look so false.”
The unit returned to Hollywood to film at the Warner Bros.
studio in December. The Encino house was still undergoing altera-tions, but over the festive season many of Duke’s friends dropped in on the Waynes, including John Ford, Andrew McLaglen, Grant Withers, Yakima Canutt, James Edward Grant, and many others—
all men.
Canutt recalled, “I sensed that Pilar was not always happy about the constant stream of visitors, although she was always kind and courteous. But I know she treasured her time alone with John, and it seemed she never had much time alone with him.”
The Sea Chase was released in May 1955, to poor reviews but moderately good business. People still wanted to see a John Wayne picture.
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JOHN WAYNE
By the mid-1950s television was trying to seduce many of the cinema’s biggest stars, and Wayne was among them. CBS, one of the biggest TV production companies, offered him the