The Duke gets regal revival on AMC
By Scott Eyman
Palm Beach Post Arts Writer
Sunday, July 10, 2005
You've memorized every edit in The Sons of Katie Elder; you can recite the dialogue to The Searchers while getting your teeth cleaned; when Dean Martin reaches into the spittoon in Rio Bravo, you break into tears; and, to be completely frank, you don't ever want to see Big Jake ever again.
You, my friend, are overly familiar with the films of John Wayne.
Relax. Some major John Wayne movies that you almost certainly haven't seen are about to drop into your lap.
American Movie Classics is featuring the exclusive cable premieres of The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky on July 16 and 17. Neither has been publicly shown for more than 30 years.
While The High and the Mighty was a smash hit in 1954, and made a great deal of money, it's a big, splashy, somewhat corny prototype of a corny genre: the airplane disaster movie, now permanently devalued by repetition and outright parody.
Although The High and the Mighty has a spectacular musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin, and an unusually self-effacing performance by Wayne, the real surprise is Island in the Sky, which was made the year before The High and the Mighty. It's about a downed transport plane in Antarctica and how the group struggles to stay alive. It wasn't a big hit, but plays as a very strong, intimate, personal film of its director, the perennially underrated William A. Wellman.
"It's a quiet little black-and-white film," says Gretchen Wayne, the widow of Michael Wayne, John's oldest son and his partner in Batjac Productions. "Michael's dad looks the best he ever did. It's an interior piece, but it's wonderful, it grabs you."
Michael Wayne died two years ago of lupus at the age of 67. He didn't formally prepare his wife to take over Batjac, but, she says, "He certainly knew I was capable and he often used me as a sounding board. If he had an idea, if he had written something, he asked for my opinion. And he always played off what I thought. When you're married for 45 years you absorb things."
In an era when everything is thrown onto the marketplace, the better to grab every spare buck to be had, Michael Wayne intentionally kept a block of his father's best work off the market.
"Michael's feeling was that less is more. He was most judicious in the say that he dealt out the product to the public. One of the reasons The High and the Mighty was off the market was water damage to the negative.... Reels three and five were damaged.
"But now, the time is right, we were able to restore it so that the films look perfect, and the sound was restored, so what we bring to the public and what the fan will get is what they expect. One thing he and his father never wanted to do is cheat the public. 'Those are the people that put the food on my table,' John Wayne would say; he had the utmost respect for them."
'Call me Granddaddy'
Gretchen met Michael Wayne when they were both 15 years old, and attending different Catholic high schools. Gretchen was a freshman at Immaculate Heart, Mike was a freshman at Loyola. "We were on a school dance at Loyola. It was a square dance and neither of us square danced. We sat there the entire night and talked. Mike's sister Toni and I were friends in school, and she always said, 'You married Michael in spite of the fact that you knew him so well.'
They proceeded to become off-and-on sweethearts until they married, which means she knew John Wayne when she was a teenager, as well as her father-in-law.
What was he like as the latter?
"He was a great father-in-law. When I met him as Toni's father, he was Mr. Wayne, and when I met him as the father of the boy I was going out with, it was still Mr. Wayne.
"When Michael and I were married, I still couldn't call him anything but Mr. Wayne.
" 'Call me Dad,' " he said.
"I couldn't do it. So, he said 'Call me Duke.' Well, I couldn't do that either. Then I got pregnant, we had a child, and he said 'Call me Granddaddy.' And that's what I called him the rest of his life.
"He loved his family, loved the holidays, loved to celebrate. He'd call and ask, 'What do the kids want for Christmas?' He wanted a list. And then he would go out and do the shopping himself. He was also a great catalog shopper. After he died, we found a closet full of stuff he'd ordered from catalogs, hadn't liked, and never returned.
"He was there — when my son got a concussion from a skateboard fall, he came to the hospital."
In conversation, Wayne was less doctrinaire conservative and more open-minded about politics than he was generally portrayed as being; was he able to countenance some of his children being Democrats, or did everybody have to agree with him?
"He truly felt he was liberal in the true sense, as in liberal arts. He was open to listening to ideas and opinions. He read the Congressional Record every week, read a book a day — he was a very bright man.
Duke on-screen and off
So, some of the kids were Democrats?
"Well, no, now that I think of it. If you didn't vote the way he voted, you better have a good reason why. Michael was the same way. I remember when one of my kids voted for Clinton and another one voted for Ross Perot. Michael couldn't believe it. But they had very specific reasons, so he couldn't argue with it.
"The only difference between Granddaddy in the room and on the screen was the wardrobe. What he projected was the man. In The Shootist, there's a line where he says, 'I won't be wronged, I won't be laid a hand on...' That was something he would have said.
"He was really comfortable with people. Had a great sense of humor — the Waynes have to have a good sense of humor. He loved intellectual jokes. A warm human being; he never met a stranger. He looked very imposing, but he was a warm person, genuinely interested in what you had to say."
"He was interested in life, and interesting. There was nothing he didn't know about. He loved to be on his boat, loved to be on the ocean."
In her memoir of two years ago, Maureen O'Hara enumerated a long list of Wayne's fine qualities, then mentioned in passing that he was a slave to his image, severely limiting what he did on-screen. His daughter-in-law basically agrees.
"He wouldn't trick the public in any way; he played light comedies, before and even during the war, but as his role grew, as he played a military person during the war and during Vietnam, he began to know what the public expected to see. Even if he played a real person, like Red Adair in The Hellfighters, he played a man who would be heroic in the way they dealt with life. That was consistent through all his roles."
'On to tomorrow'
How was Michael Wayne like his father, and how was he different?
"Michael was compassionate like his father, fiercely loyal, a great sense of humor. Quick to temper, quick to anger, twice as quick to get over it and be on the the next thing. Like his father.
"But Michael also loved to collect, and he had a lot of memorabilia; scrimshaws, pocket watches, movie posters. His father made 152 films, we have posters for all but seven of the early films, not just the American posters but the foreign posters and other films that Batjac made.
"His dad wasn't interested in that sort of thing; it was always on to tomorrow with him."
Since it was started shortly after World War II, Batjac — the name is taken from a Dutch ship in a Wayne movie called Wake of the Red Witch — produced more than 30 movies, mostly with Wayne, some with stars such as Robert Mitchum and Randolph Scott.
"The first Dirty Harry came in to Batjac, before Clint Eastwood got it. So did On the Waterfront, but it was a totally different story then. The main character in that early version was the priest, and Granddaddy said it wasn't a role for him — 'a great script but not right for me.'
"I still think of him as Granddaddy, you know; I just happened to have a father-in-law named John Wayne.
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