John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [97]
His faith in Westerns was restored when The Searchers was released to good reviews and good business in March 1956. But as good as the reviews were, there was little to suggest that the film would become a classic, except from the Hollywood Reporter which called it “undoubtedly the greatest Western ever made.”
Variety was not so enthusiastic, saying, “Despite its many assets, there is a feeling that The Searchers could have been so much more.”
Nevertheless, the film took a respectable $4.9 million in America and Canada, and its success around the world would have, at least, doubled that figure. Its place in Variety’s 1983 All-Time Western Champs is at sixty-two, but rises to seventeenth position with its figure adjusted for inflation, meaning that if released in 1983 and seen by the same amount of people, its domestic figure would have been more than $24 million, and its worldwide takings as much as $48 million.
As far as work was concerned, Wayne was at the top of his profession, but his family life was proving ever more complicated.
Three weeks after Aissa was born, his oldest daughter, Toni, invited her father to her wedding to Don LaCava, the son of film director Gregory LaCava. To Duke’s dismay, the invitation did not include Pilar. He still avoided confrontation with any of his first four children.
“Can you imagine how that made Pilar feel?” Paul Fix asked me.
“I always felt that was the beginning of the troubles which beset Duke’s third marriage. I think that maybe some of his children, especially Toni, still felt that Josephine was her father’s real and only wife. Toni, and the other three, had had a Catholic upbringing, and Toni was married in a Catholic church [in May 1956]. The reception after was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosted by both Josephine and Duke. Now Duke and Josephine had maintained good relations, but to cut out Pilar like that . . . ! Well, I personally thought it was a disgrace.”
21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 182
182
JOHN WAYNE
*
*
*
Wayne went to work for Ford again in the summer of 1956, in The Wings of Eagles, the story of screenwriter Frank “Spig” Wead who had written Ford’s Air Mail (1932) and They Were Expendable (1945). Wead had previously been a pioneer in naval aviation, but had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his neck, bringing his aviation career to an abrupt and sad end. He began writing aviation stories for magazines, which caught the attention of John Ford, and the two became good friends.
Wayne was cast as Wead, and he was reunited with Maureen O’Hara as his wife. Also in the cast were Ken Curtis, Dan Dailey, and Ward Bond, who played film director John Dodge, who was clearly modeled on Ford.
Ken Curtis told me, “It wasn’t a film that Ford really wanted to make. It was MGM’s idea, and when Ford told them he didn’t want to do it, they said they’d get another director, and Ford decided that he didn’t want anyone else making a film about the friend he loved so much, so he said he’d do it. And he decided that if he was going to make a film about a man he loved, he might as well get another man he loved to play Wead, and that was Duke.”
I was fortunate enough to interview Dan Dailey by phone in 1997.
Sadly, he died the following year. He recalled for me: “It was a difficult role for Duke because he felt he had an obligation to play Frank Wead with honesty and dignity. That’s why when he’s into the scenes where he plays Wead as an older man, for the first time ever, Duke removed his toupee and revealed his thinning hair to the public. But the funny thing was, he was so good in the part that nobody noticed he was showing his naturally balding pate.
“The film began with some comic moments, and Duke and I had some good laughs. But always Duke was worried that he might be too frivolous. But I think we got the balance just right. The story of Frank Wead was such a tragedy that you couldn’t just go straight into a heavy, dramatic film. Besides, those moments where Wead crashed a plane into a swimming pool, which was