Part 24

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.”

How does he explain his own popularity? “It’s very simple. I never do anything that makes any guy sitting out there in the audience feel uncomfortable. So when the little woman says, ‘Let’s go to the show,’ the guy says, ‘Let’s see the John Wayne picture,’ because he knows I won’t humiliate him. I think the guys pull the girls in.”

He wanted to get into Russia to make _The Conqueror_, the first United States picture shot there, but the deal fell through. When a certain TV celebrity received the Kremlin’s permission to film a television show behind the Iron Curtain, Duke asked: “If they let you in, why not me?”

“We’ve never said anything about the Russians.”

Duke Wayne grinned. “That’s the difference. I have.”

_Seventeen_

Maybe I look like Mother or Grandma Moses to Americans in uniform if they’ve been away from home long enough in far-flung places. That’s the only reason I could ever find for Bob Hope’s wanting to take me along on his Christmas shows overseas. The first time he invited me, I was too delirious to ask why. I haven’t asked him since, and he hasn’t told me. But whenever he calls: “Pack your things, Hedda, we’re off,” I’m always rarin’ to go.

You think you know what Bob’s like, but you don’t until you’ve seen him on one of these safaris. We once had to wait six hours while the fuel was drained out of our plane and replaced. When the pilot had stepped aboard, he’d sniffed and said: “My God, they’ve filled it with jet fuel.” Which would have blown us to hell and gone at a few thousand feet. Have you ever had black coffee and Tootsie Rolls for breakfast at 6 A.M. five days running? No complaints from Hope. When I got home, I’d drunk so much of the stuff I developed coffee poisoning and didn’t recover for a month.

I’ve watched him put on a performance in a base hospital for patients who looked better than he did after he’d been driven half blind with fatigue by army wives who wouldn’t let him rest because he helped their husbands’ chances for another promotion. Bob can’t say no to anybody.

He would rather entertain five hundred GI’s than be handed $50,000. He’s looked after the money he’s earned, too, though he pays as high as $2000 a week apiece to his team of writers. They deserve it. This unpredictable character, high over the Pacific, hours out on our way to the Far East, asked two of the team, John Rapp and Onnie Whizzen: “Have you got that script about a sergeant and a private you wrote six years back but we didn’t use?” So help me, they fished it out of one of their bags and passed it to him.

He can joke about his money, along with religion, politics, and the Kennedys. “Since it was reported that I’m worth around $30,000,000,” he told me recently, “busloads of relatives have arrived at the house. We have ’em standing in corners instead of floor lamps.”

He’s irreverent, but never a dirty word does he utter, nor does he take the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve been with him days on end, and I’ve yet to hear a cuss word out of him. Came the night that Hollywood and America honored him at a banquet as the number-one citizen of our industry, and Jack Benny stood up to make a speech. “I hadn’t seen Bob for ten months until I ran into him on the golf course,” said Jack, who’d arrived an hour late for the celebration after dining at home. “He stood there and said: ‘I’ve had the god-damndest time with this ball today....’” We sat there in silence, not believing it.

Bob can’t stay home, can’t sit still any more than Jack can. And at parties Jack’s the champion floor pacer, stanchly refusing to dance. “I don’t have to,” he says. “I don’t have to prove myself. I did that in my youth.”

Dolores Hope--they were married twenty-eight years ago--and their four adopted children haven’t seen Bob at home for the past eight Christmases. If there’s any loneliness in her life, which I doubt, religion fills it--she’s a devout Catholic, who used to preach to me. We spent an hour and a half together driving from Beverly Hills to Santa Ana during the war. My mind was on my son, Bill, who was away in the Pacific, so when she started on religion, Dolores did all the talking by default.

At the end of the ride, she apologized: “I guess I talked too long about the faith.”

“Only about ninety minutes too long,” said I. Now she leaves the attempts at conversion to another good friend of mine, Father Edward Murphy, but we’ll come to him farther along.

I spent wonderful Christmases with Bob and his troupe. There was Thule Air Base, where our servicemen hadn’t seen a woman in two years except five homely nurses. Anita Ekberg was one of our party. For stark horror, you couldn’t beat the looks on those GI faces when she was told to cover up in a fur coat because her gown had a low-and-behold neckline.

Not a dry eye in the house when we sang “Auld Lang Syne.” A colonel got carried away and said to me: “Do you mind if I kiss you? You remind me of my mother.” He couldn’t have been a day over fifty-five.

The following year it was Alaska, with Hopper wrapped up against the cold like an Eskimo. “If you want anything, just ask,” they told Ginger Rogers and me, so we had breakfast in bed in rooms as hot as hell’s boilerhouse. Outdoors, even cameras froze if you lingered longer than fifteen minutes.

One year we discovered that the rain in Spain fell mainly on us; that day Gina Lollobrigida and the John Lodges joined us. Another Christmas Day we spent at a missile base in Vicenze, Italy; put on a show on the deck of the aircraft carrier, _U.S.S. Forrestal_. There was a bronze bust of James Forrestal aboard. I stood and wept for our country’s injustice to this fine man. One of our group asked: “Who was he?”

There was the year we covered the South Pacific. Jayne Mansfield was along, a girl it’s impossible to dislike, who’s kind, anxious to please, and willing to do anything but cover herself up. Mickey Hargitay came, too. In the plane I peered over at the two of them in the seat behind me. He was painting her toenails firehouse red. “She’d do the same for me,” he said.

Her fan letters followed her all through the Pacific. She’d read a fresh batch before she’d eat, then gulp down a stone-cold meal perfectly happy--her fans had fed her. On Guam seven thousand GI’s stood up, cheered, and took pictures of her when she walked on stage, parading her monumental shape. Then, at my suggestion, Bob introduced Mickey. I should have kept my mouth shut. All seven thousand GI’s booed him to the echo.

Twelve thousand marines on Okinawa marched downhill in formation to sit on the ground in a great natural bowl and watch the show. Jayne kicked off her shoes and stood barefoot for an hour and a half because she looked cuter that way, posing with everyone who wanted a picture taken with her. She signed every autograph book, too, drawing a little heart instead of a dot over the “i” in “Mansfield.”

“Who’s going to pay to see it,” I asked Bob, “when she gives it away?”

Years later Jayne came up with a yarn about being stranded off Nassau in allegedly shark-infested waters, which I can testify are so shallow she could have walked to the mainland. I examined her later for mosquito bites; nary a dent on her back or legs. “They’re higher up, Hedda,” she whispered.

I had a special reason for feeling mighty privileged to join Bob on the South Pacific tour, and I used to explain it in talking to our fellows. It made me the only woman in the world able to follow the route her son took journeying from island to island to fight the Japanese.

Bill Hopper, not a bit like his father, is a shy one. The fact that he reached his full growth and height of six feet four when he was fifteen may have something to do with it. He won’t talk about the war, won’t let me write in my column about playing Paul Drake on the “Perry Mason” show or the movies he makes. “If I can’t make it on my own, I don’t want to make it” is his theme song.

In the war he made it strictly on his own as a skin-diving member of the Navy’s Team Ten, Underwater Demolition. Their job was first to sneak in under water and survey the best spots for our landing craft to put ashore on islands held by the enemy. Then their mission was to blast clear paths through the coral, swimming through the reefs with eighty pounds of dynamite apiece on their backs.

One Christmas my family and friends sent off to Bill and his buddies packages with such silly, homey things as miniature bottles of scotch and bourbon, a sniff of his wife’s favorite perfume. Also included was a little bag of earth, a publicity gimmick from one of the studios, labeled “The latest dirt from Hollywood.”

Bill, who doesn’t lack a sense of humor, took the last item along when he and his nine teammates crept ashore on one island. He left behind the tiny sack as a kind of calling card. Team Ten chuckled for weeks imagining the face of the first invading U. S. marine who found it on the beach, asking himself: “How in the name of all that’s holy did this get here among these Japs?”

The team discovered there was nothing to beat one particular latex item, government issue, for keeping sticks of dynamite good and waterproof. It was pure joy for them to figure what the Pentagon must have thought about the statistics piling up in the quartermaster general’s office concerning the kind of war Team Ten was apparently fighting. Bill, as the tallest and huskiest, was the last aboard the waiting pickup boats after the charges had been set--you had to swim fast because the boat couldn’t hang around waiting for you. On one excursion he happened to turn his head. He saw some loose dynamite protectors bobbing up and down in the water after him and nearly drowned laughing.

Their captain was a grandson of Joseph H. Choate, once ambassador to Britain and the godfather of DeWolf Hopper, Bill’s father. Team Ten received some leave to say good-by to their families. I found out later they’d been chosen for the invasion of Japan. Thank heaven, they were in America when the war ended.

A sense of humor is one of the essentials of this life. You can be rich, powerful, famous, but without a bit of fun in your nature, you’re something less than human. I’m not fond of psalm-singing, solemn piety in anybody. But match devotion with kindness and laughter, and you’ve company after my own heart. It’s time to talk about Father Murphy.

He was born in 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of an Irish laborer’s eight children, and he followed an older brother into the priesthood. At one time he was a student together with Fulton Sheen, but one went on to convert the rich, the other the poor. They’ve both exercised their persuasions on me, their faith, I guess, bolstering their hopes for the impossible.

Any danger of conversion by the then Monsignor Sheen was limited to an elevator ride I took with him from the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers down to the entrance level. We’d just been introduced by Clare Boothe Luce, who was a fellow passenger. The monsignor, now bishop, has hypnotic black eyes and a magnetic presence that’s inescapable. I was fascinated by him and his words. Then the elevator reached our destination. “Saved by the basement!” I exclaimed. “Ten more floors and you’d have had me a Catholic.” He roared with laughter.

Father Murphy, bless his heart, has tried longer. I hadn’t known many Catholic priests until I met him at a party in Hollywood, when he was in our town lecturing. I fell under the spell of the soft voice and gentle spirit of this giant-spirited little man. In the Josephite Order of Missionary Priests to the Negro, he served as pastor of the St. Joan of Arc Church in New Orleans, was dean of the department of philosophy and religion at Xavier University there. He did as much for the Negro in that city as anyone alive today.

There was a young man in his parish who had gone as far as he could studying sculpture in New Orleans, though it was plain to Father Murphy that he could become an important sculptor, so funds were raised to send him to New York. Some time later the priest found himself in that city on his way to Rome by way of Paris, and he invited the young sculptor to luncheon. The student had a request to make--would the priest please serve as his eyes and report back to him every possible detail, from the chisel marks to the play of light, of how the statues looked in the Louvre and St. Peter’s?

Father Murphy went straight from the luncheon to the steamship office, where he exchanged his first-class ticket for two tourist berths, with a little spending money left over. He telephoned the young Negro to join him and spent two inspiring weeks in Europe seeing the greatest art treasures of the world through his young companion’s starry eyes. On the voyage home they also shared a cabin.

“Father,” said the young man, “may I ask you a very personal question? I understand that to white people we Negroes have a distinctive odor. What do I smell like exactly?”

Father Murphy’s eyes must have twinkled, as they do constantly. “It’s a little bit like burnt chestnuts.” They both laughed at that. “Now,” said the priest, “we must have a special odor to you. What do I smell like?”

“Well, Father, I’d say it’s--it’s a little bit like an old goat.”

Before he had left Hollywood, it had been arranged that a party of us would meet at the next spring’s Mardi Gras and I’d bought him a suit to replace the one he was wearing, which was turning green with age. He wrote me about both items soon after he got home:

Brace yourself. This is probably your first “mash” note from a dignified, almost funereal representative of the cloth, on which you made a positively ripping impression. (Me for the ecclesiastical tailors!) Your casual conversational reference, for instance, to someone as an equine posterior (remember? even though those two words are not exactly the ones you used) left me limp with inner mirth.

Girl, I’m envious for the first time in my life. With your gift of gusto, what a ministry I’d have had! I’d have blown Negro prejudice in N’Orleans to smithereens and been an electrified Abe Lincoln to the lowly. Henceforth mouse Murphy shall assume stature and verve. In sheer defiance of incipient arthritis, he shall frisk.

Don’t forget our date for Mardi Gras. It is said on the Delta that all good Americans go to N’Orleans when they die, and that all wise ones come while they are living. You are very wise, _ma chère_....

He signed off “Mississipiously, Edward F. Murphy, SSJ.” Letters over the years carried fifty-nine varieties of sign-off greetings: “Emphaticallergically” ... “Con amore-and-more” ... “Your sancrosanctly devoted friend” ... “Deltavowedly” ... “Turkishbathetically.”

His first letter deserved a prompt reply:

Now you can brace yourself after that beginning. You’ve won me, hands down. Don’t confuse that with the Church, however, as I’m still a Quaker. You go ahead and make your contacts for our voodoo meeting down there, even if you have to hold it in the church, because Frances Marion and I are-a-comin’ ... God bless the Irish!

He promised to “put the curse of the seven wet-nosed orphans on the weatherman if he doesn’t behave himself while you’re here.” Somebody must have had influence, because the February weather was fabulous, and Mardi Gras turned out to be a long, nonstop ball. I didn’t miss anything. We lunched with Mayor “Chep” Morrison, teaed with Frances Parkinson Keyes, nibbled chicken legs alfresco with total strangers squatting on the asphalt in the middle of Canal Street.

We had a magnificent four-hour luncheon at Brennan’s restaurant where every dish had been prepared in wine, champagne, or brandy sauces. Father Murphy religiously abstained from anything that came by the bottle but ate heartily and conscientiously spooned up every last drop of the sauces. “I’m not drinking,” he observed blandly, “but there’s no rule against my not _eating_ these things.”

At six-thirty one morning I was up and off to see King Coal, the colored monarch of Mardi Gras, land at the docks with his court off a barge and parade their way through the streets on trucks. Their first stop for a drink was at a celebrated local undertaker’s parlor, which was always jammed with guests for the ceremony. One year a visiting New York newspaperman discovered to his terror how they made room for all the celebrants. In the middle of festivities he opened the door of the men’s room. Three corpses, which had been stood inside upright behind the door, tottered out at him, and he fled, screaming his head off.

My faithful new N’Orleans correspondent was writing more than some of the liveliest letters I’d set eyes on. He has a long string of book credits to his name, from _Yankee Priest_ to _Mary Magdalene_, which was bought years ago by David Selznick, who retitled it _The Scarlet Lily_ as a vehicle for Jennifer Jones. But by the time he gets around to making it, I suspect we may all be ringing St. Peter’s doorbell.

The good father, too, is a fast gun with a news item.

And how about this front-page violent calm into which you and Louella-la have flown? [he wrote during one Hollywood armistice between us.] By what female magic has yesterday’s equine _derrière_ become a bosom pal of today? Are you quite sure that the embrace is not an _osculation de mors_ or a mutual search for the most vulnerable places in each other’s anatomy? Well, whatever the mystery, the moral shines clear: _Anything can happen_. After this, I shall not flicker an eyelash if Peace descends on the human race as a certified dove--not an unmistakable bucket of bricks.

In his early days he used to serve as weekend assistant at St. Michael’s in New York, where he met Eddie Dowling, and a bit of grease paint rubbed off on Father Murphy’s Irish heart. He’s been an avid follower of stage and screen ever since.

New Orleans was set on its ear when Elia Kazan went down for Fox to make _Outbreak_, with Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Richard Widmark, on location there. As supporting players, Gadge rounded up six hundred local characters, from B-girls to skid-row derelicts, from detectives to three extras whom police spotted in the crowd and dragged off to prison.

My faithful correspondent kept his eyes peeled.

Well, [Elia Kazan] went the aesthetic limit the other day, [he wrote,] using some genuine Orleanian streetwalkers. Of course, the ladies were paid for their posing and the wear and tear on their delicate constitutions. A bit later, when a policeman was about to pull them in for loitering (what a name for the world’s oldest profession!) they haughtily gave him the brush-off. “We’re working for Twentieth Century-Fox now,” they said, swishing their skirts.

He had a new sign-off for that note: “Kazanimatedly.”

When a member of the actor’s union led a cavalcade of stars to New Orleans and they were tendered a banquet at Arnaud’s, Father Murphy outdid himself. He gave an invocation to end all invocations. It went something like this:

O Lord God, Creator of the Cohens, the Kellys, and the Murphys;

Author of the scenario of reality, from which we all play our parts, some of us so badly that we get hell for our performance and others brilliantly enough to achieve stardom;

Director of the drama of the ages, which begins with the sublime curtain-raiser called Genesis, unfolds with the dreams, sighs, and sins of mankind, culminates with the Atonement on Calvary and ends endlessly with the unspeakable visions of the Apocalypse;

Source of the silver screen of existence, which Hollywood ingeniously reflects with a silver screen of its own on which appear the animated shadows of thespians, whose fine art makes fiction seem truth, so differently from many of us poor preachers who succeed only in making truth seem fiction;

We thank you, O Lord, for this occasion that brings some of the best representatives of Cinemaland into our midst. Help us to honor them fittingly. Bless them for shedding the gleams of their gifts into our darkening times. Save them--tonight--from Bourbon Street. Inspire the mighty industry that sponsors them. And, in fine, smile beneficently on the box offices of the land, breathe into them a second spring and let there be the financial flow that is so vital to the maintenance of an enterprise without which our daily lives would be so definitely drabber. Amen.

The one man who could hold a candle as a letter writer to Father Murphy was Gene Fowler, another friend of many years. I loved him as much as I loved Agnes, his wife of nearly half a century. Gene and I knew each other well when the urge remained, but the ability in both cases had departed. I doubt whether he put a dull word on paper, whether it was a book, a three-thousand-word letter, or a post card.

After a dinner party for Gene and Agnes, for instance, he wrote:

My dear Handsome: