It’s impossible to talk about movie politics without finding John Wayne on camera hammering away with both fists. He’s a rock-ribbed Republican who wears his creed like a medal. It’s affected his popularity no more than Frank Sinatra’s been hurt by his sympathies for the other side of the street.
Duke Wayne had no hand in politics until he smelled that Communists were infiltrating the movie business. Then he sat down in James McGuinness’ house one night with Sam Wood, Adolphe Menjou, writer Morris Ryskind, Ward Bond, Leo McCarey, and Roy Brewer of the A.F. of L. That’s how the Motion Picture Alliance was born.
Duke likes to tell about a producer who warned him the next morning: “You’ve got to get out of that MPA. You’re becoming a controversial figure. It will kill you at the box office. You will hit the skids.” He says: “I hit the skids all right. When I became president of the MPA in 1948, I was thirty-third in the ratings of box-office leaders. A year later I skidded right up to first place.”
He occasionally hankers after the days, thirty-four years and more than 150 movies ago, when he was the easygoing ex-prop man making his first Monogram picture on a total budget of $11,000. “We couldn’t afford more than one horse. So in the first scene I had to knock out the heavy and steal the horse.” His political faith is simple enough. For America: “I’m for the liberty of the individual.” Overseas: “We’ve permitted the world to think of us as big soft jerks who’re trying to buy our way with money.”
For all the burning of midnight oil he’s done as a hard-hitting businessman producing movies like The Alamo, he hasn’t managed to reap great profits. “I have a pretty tough partner in Uncle Sam. I’m not squawking, but he’s taken a little of it.” The Alamo, on which he gambled his entire bankroll of $1,500,000, has done well in the United States and cleaned up overseas.
Duke’s a kind of patriarch, with four children born to his first wife, Josephine Saenz, whom he married when he was toiling in the slave market of cowboy serials. Those children have now supplied him with four grandchildren, and by his third wife, Pilar Palette, he has a delightful daughter, Aissa, and a son, John Ethan. When Aissa was in her cradle, he set the beatniks around Schwab’s drugstore on their ears by striding in straight from work in full Western regalia one evening demanding: “Give me an enema nipple, small size, for a sick baby.”
His middle wife was a Mexican tamale named Esperanza Baur. As a warm-up to grabbing headlines with vitriolic accusations against him, “Chata” Wayne dispatched two detectives to spy on him in her native land, where Duke was filming Hondo. The two not-very-private eyes unfortunately got themselves arrested and thrown into jail. It took Duke to get them out.
“One had acute appendicitis. The doctor wanted to operate. You know the reputation of Mexican doctors. If anything had happened, I’d have been blamed. So I got a plane and got them out of there, over to the American side of the border. Then there could be no reflection on me if anything happened.”
Today, at fifty-five, he still stands six feet six in his Western boots (“Most comfortable things in the world if you have them made to order”) and behaves like a twenty-five-year-old when the script calls for action and he’s “on.” For Hatari, shot in Africa in 1962, he was pulling stunts like lassoing rhinos, missing disaster by inches when one of them charged his open truck.
He isn’t a man who goes out much, though he always comes to my parties early and stays late, talking a blue streak. “I don’t think the industry is going on the rocks,” he decided not long ago. “We’ve hit as low a point as we can go, and we can’t get anything but better.”