“Duke is just a lovely man”: the exclusive London club that made an exception for John Wayne
He was used to ruling the roost in the United States, but when John Wayne made the trip over to the United Kingdom to shoot his one and only British movie, he discovered that superstars get special treatment, wherever they are.
On home soil, ‘The Duke’ was treated more like a deity than the average actor. That comes with the territory of being a multi-generational icon, the face of an entire genre, and one of the most bankable figures in Hollywood history, but he didn’t expect to be fawned over when he touched down in London.
Directed by a British filmmaker, Douglas Hickox, set in London, and starring a predominantly British supporting cast, 1975’s Brannigan was a huge departure for Wayne, who’d never shot a production in the country before, and had very rarely travelled outside of America for any of the 200+ pictures he made.
A formulaic action thriller, the stoic leading man played a grizzled Chicago cop dispatched to the capital to bring an American criminal to justice. When the wanted man is kidnapped, Wayne’s title character wreaks havoc across London in trying to recapture his charge, with Richard Attenborough cast as the buttoned-down straight man to his brash, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later counterpart.
“Duke is just a lovely man,” the classically-trained thespian surmised. “He and I are like chalk and cheese in so many respects, which is why I think we make good casting in our respective roles. He’s the big tough cop from America, and I’m the small, gentlemanly detective. It’s a caricature, of course, for both of us, but that’s what the American financiers want, I suppose.”
Brannigan features many familiar locations around London, but one of the locations that even local audiences had never seen before was the inside of the Garrick Club. Founded in 1831, it’s one of the oldest private membership organisations in the world, and was founded as a place for “actors and men of refinement to meet on equal terms.”
One thing it didn’t allow was film crews, with the organisation fiercely maintaining and protecting its privacy. However, ‘The Duke’ had an ace up his sleeve: Attenborough was a long-time Garrick member, and with a word in the ear of the decision makers higher up the chain, the exclusive club opened its doors and landed Brannigan a major coup by allowing the production to shoot inside and out.
Alongside Attenborough, other notable members included the likes of Charles Dickens, Richard Burton, King Edward VII, TS Eliot, David Niven, Burt Lancaster, and Alec Guinness, with current alumni said to include Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, and King Charles, so it goes without saying that it’s a fairly exclusive place, and equally understandable why it’s been so shut off for the world.
And yet, there was John Wayne, granted access to shoot on hallowed ground for the rich and famous for a mediocre cop thriller, and there can’t have been many Americans allowed to set foot in the Garrick before him.
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