The “son of a bitch” director who refused to hire John Wayne: “That’s how you talk to a dog”
Despite being one of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most iconic figures, John Wayne didn’t work with too many of the era’s highest-profile auteurs, outside of his famous and career-long partnership with his mentor and father figure, John Ford.
The way the industry tends to work is that the biggest stars work with the most famous directors, but ‘The Duke’ was somewhat lacking in that department. While he worked alongside plenty of proven and established names, the period is awash with indelible filmmakers he never crossed paths with as much as once.
He collaborated with Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz, and John Huston, turned down Stanley Kubrick, Mel Brooks, and Steven Spielberg, but he wasn’t even a blip on the radar of Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Eliza Kazan, or David Lean, to name a few, not that he would have been suited to the types of stories they were telling anyway.
However, he did make one film with a director many have pinpointed as one of the most important of all time: Cecil B DeMille. Celebrated as one of American cinema’s founding fathers and Tinseltown’s most powerful director/producer in the early years of the medium, it took him a while to come around to the idea of casting Wayne in one of his pictures.
Several years before Stagecoach elevated his profile to new heights, ‘The Duke’ secured a meeting with DeMille in the hopes of playing the lead in his 1936 western, The Plainsman. Gary Cooper ended up being cast in the part, but the True Grit Oscar-winner never forgot the poor first impression the director made.
“I sat outside the bastard’s office, and I could look in there and see him thinking,” he recalled. “So after about an hour, the son of a bitch kept me waiting that long, he came out and said, ‘Well, I’m going for lunch’. My agent said, ‘You asked John Wayne to come over for an interview’. DeMille said, ‘Oh, yeah, so I did. Come along’. That’s what you say to a dog.”
During their conversation, the filmmaker informed Wayne that although he’d seen him in Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail and thought he’d done alright, “a lot of water had run under the bridge since then.” DeMille didn’t even call him back to tell him he’d been overlooked for The Plainsman, and it was something he didn’t forget.
In 1940, Walsh’s The Dark Command had firmly cemented Wayne as a star on the rise, and DeMille reached out to the actor and inquired if he could have the studio send a print his way. “Make him come over here if he wants to see it,” Wayne told Republic Pictures chief Sol Siegel. “Just tell him that I said a lot of water’s run under the bridge since I’d seen him last.”
It was a petty move, but it didn’t completely sour the relations between the two parties, since DeMille hired ‘The Duke’ to headline Reap the Wild Wind two years later, their one and only movie together.
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