The betrayal that made John Wayne end a 17-year partnership: “I know it sounds like sour grapes”
Once John Wayne set his mind to something, he’d move heaven and earth to ensure he did it. Unfortunately, when one of the most powerful people in Hollywood disagreed, it led to an instant dissolution of a mutually beneficial partnership that had lasted for almost two decades.
It’s clear from his list of frequent collaborators that ‘The Duke’ maintained the friendships he developed throughout his career: John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Maureen O’Hara, James Edward Grant, Paul Fix, and Ward Bond being just some of the names on either side of the camera who stuck with him through thick and thin.
On the other side of the coin, one wrong decision was all it took to end up in Wayne’s bad books. He was as stubborn as he was successful, and the bigger a star he became, the easier it was for the actor to cut ties with anyone he didn’t think was worthy of working with or, even worse, holding him back.
That ruthless side came back to bite Herb Yates when the Republic Pictures founder refused to back down. When ‘The Duke’ was still struggling to make a name for himself and break into the movie business in a meaningful capacity, the producer and industry mogul took a chance and made him one of the first signings to his upstart outfit in 1935.
For the next 17 years, Wayne called Republic his home. While he was frequently loaned out to other studios, he remained under a deal with Yates. Both of them benefited from the lengthy period they spent in each other’s company, with the former becoming an increasingly important leading man and the latter having a genuine A-list superstar on the books.
All good things must come to an end, though, and Wayne’s directorial debut was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He’d been developing The Alamo for years, and having become the jewel in Republic’s crown, he didn’t see any reason why Yates wouldn’t green-light his long-gestating passion project.
He didn’t, and wouldn’t, which was the exact moment they became enemies, with ‘The Duke’ capitalising on his contract running out after Ford’s The Quiet Man. “The long and short of it was that Yates wasn’t to let me make The Alamo,” he told Michael Munn. “And when he said, ‘I’d still like us to work together. How about signing a new contract?’ I said, ‘You know where you can put your contract. I’ll never work here again.'”
True to his word, he never made another picture under the Republic banner, and almost revelled in his exit coinciding with the company’s slide down the ladder. “Within a few years, Republic was little more than a TV production company,” he scoffed. “I know it sounds like sour grapes, and really, I was fond of the studio. We’d grown up together. I’d had success, and I made a fair bit of money.”
The ultimate betrayal wasn’t even the fact Yates ruled out Wayne directing The Alamo either, but that he did so and then stabbed him in the back. “Having told me that I couldn’t film the story of the Alamo,” ‘The Duke’ recounted. “He went and filmed the story anyway: a picture called The Last Command.”
Yates had told Wayne he wasn’t allowed to make The Alamo at Republic, which saw the actor put the studio on his shit list for the rest of his career, only to go ahead and make another Alamo movie. It was a dick move, and it’s easy to see he completely washed his hands of them.
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