John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [98]
Maureen O’Hara also found herself faced with the pressure of 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 183
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portraying a real-life character. “Wead’s marriage to Minnie was strained,” said O’Hara, “and she became a drunk. We shot scenes where I had to play her drunk, which was a vital part of the story. All very dramatic and truthful, and I thought I was bloody good in those scenes, and so did John Ford and so did Duke. But when we finished the film, Wead’s children saw it and objected to the scenes that showed their mother was a drunk, and those scenes were all cut out.
I think the film suffered because of that.”
Wayne was also disappointed with the way it turned out. “I don’t think the Spig Wead film was bad. I just don’t think it was what the public expected. The title was wrong. It sounded like I was in another war picture, shooting down Japanese planes or something. Pappy tried to persuade the studio to change the title but they rejected that idea. They decided they were going to sell the film as a John Wayne’s–back-at-war picture, which it wasn’t. It was a biography of someone both Pappy and I thought the world of. The public didn’t really know who Spig Wead was, so we wanted to tell them who he was. But the studio didn’t make that clear.
“There were some studio executives who complained to Pappy that the picture had too many laughs. Pappy wrote to me and said,
‘How can a picture have too many laughs?’ I never did work much at MGM. Thinking back, I realize why.”
Wayne was working on one film after another and, in November 1956, he began preproduction work on Legend of the Lost.
“Duke should have slowed down,” said Loretta Young, whose own career had considerably slackened off by then. She remained a close friend of Duke’s, yet she never imposed on him to give her work, happy as she was working for various charities. She continued,
“He told me he had to keep working before ‘the well dried up,’ as he put it. He also needed to earn as much as he could as quickly as he could to put toward The Alamo. But his work was gradually breaking down his marriage, brick by brick.”
Henry Hathaway, who would direct Legend of the Lost, had written the original story about three people—two men and a woman—who head off into the Sahara Desert in search of a lost city and the treasures it is rumored to contain. He told me, “The film was a coproduction between Batjac, United Artists, and an Italian 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 184
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company called Dear Films. It was a really complicated setup with too many fingers in the pie. We had a screenplay by Ben Hecht which wasn’t really good enough, so we had another writer, Robert Presnell Jr., have a go.
“When I told Wayne about the story, we didn’t have a script, but he loved the idea, which is why he wanted Batjac involved. But when we got our first draft of the screenplay by Hecht, we knew it wasn’t good enough. Even so, we began making deals left, right, and center.
“Duke wanted Sophia Loren in the picture so we’d have plenty of sex appeal, and we chose another Italian, Rossano Brazzi, a good but uninteresting actor who had become an international star in South Pacific. So with Loren, Brazzi, and Wayne, I had my three characters.
And that’s pretty much all I wanted in the film—just these three people. But Wayne wanted more to it, so we added the early scenes involving a bazaar and crowds, and I felt it all got too messy.
“Wayne went to United Artists to sell them on the idea, and they couldn’t make up their minds, so Duke told them, ‘Look, I’m giving you John Wayne, Sophia Loren, and Rossano Brazzi, for Christ’s sake. What more do you want?’ Finally they agreed to come in with us.
“We started filming in January [1957] in a village called Ghadames which was smack in the middle of the Sahara. We shot there and in the desert for two months, and then we moved to Cinecitta Studios in Rome for twelve