To Kill the Duke (52 page)

“I think that this fallout problem is going to set a new standard for me to relieve my stress,” Hughes said out loud in his office as he grabbed the files that among other things listed the names of the complete cast and crew on his movie
The Conqueror
.

Of course it came as no surprise to Howard that the first name on the list was his director — Dick Powell. Like everything else — even in Hollywood — organizational charts began at the top. So, here was the name of his studio-chief-in-waiting, Dick Powell, staring him in the face, and he could feel his neck muscles getting all tense as he thought about the potential of nuclear fallout hurting Dick, one of his favorite people in Hollywood. He opened the bottom left drawer to his desk and took out the cleaning solution that had been developed for his spruce wood desk and set it on top of the giant piece of furniture and glanced at the second name on the list.

“Surprised that the writer’s name is listed second,” Hughes said out loud.
I thought that writer’s came in last
, he thought as he chuckled at what he had tried to do to get Oscar Millard to accept Wayne as Genghis Khan.

“John Wayne!” Hughes suddenly yelled out in a tone of awe, as he thought about what nuclear fallout could do to the biggest star in Hollywood.

If Duke gets sick, he will kill me for sure… or his fans will,
Hughes thought.
And I will deserve it for sure — for being played as one of the biggest suckers of all time.

This thought made every muscle in his body tense up. He opened the top drawer to his desk and emptied all its belongings onto the top of the desk and started to clean the inside of the drawer very slowly with his special cleaning solution. He was hoping to not only relax the muscles but his thought process as well.

Suddenly he started rubbing the wood in the drawer very hard as he realized how ironic it was that of all the movie stars in Hollywood that could be done in by the military, it would be the biggest military star of them all, John Wayne, who possibly could be affected. Furthermore, the nuclear fallout was a direct result of the United States’ military’s many attempts to fight Communism, of which Wayne was a big proponent, along with many others of Hollywood’s more conservative political faction.

This thought brought Hughes to his feet and he hadn’t even finished reorganizing the objects on his desk from the top drawer, let alone finished wiping it clean to his standards. He started pacing back and forth in his office, holding the list of the entire cast and crew from his movie, while pondering what their fates might become. This only increased his stress level and he found himself going into isometric exercise mode.

After a few sets of his favorite exercises he found himself feeling better. He returned to his desk, looked at the top drawer and nodded that it was clean enough for him at the moment. He silently and quickly put everything back into the drawer and returned the drawer into the desk. He picked up his file and started reading the names of the cast and crew.

He read the names appearing after John Wayne. Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, John Hoyt, William Conrad, Ted de Corsia, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Mamakos, Leo Gordon. He noticed that he still had a lot more names to read — and that was before he came to the full list of the crew. This made him tense up and he moved to step three in the Howard Hughes’ trilogy of releasing stress: he started to remove his clothes.

It took him much longer to reach an almost climax. Since it was totally against his own personal code to ejaculate — and he had come much closer than ever before — he decided to take a very long cold shower. He thought this might take the edge off his stress and give him
some serenity. Then he would go back to his list of names, but focus on the people behind the actors and actresses.

The first name he saw was that of the man responsible for the sound track. His name was Victor Young. This brought the first smile to his face that wasn’t a direct result of his stress-release mechanism, otherwise known as masturbation. Howard had noticed numerous times that when he was about to climax and opened his eyes to see his facial expression, he always wore a big smile. No matter how many times he practiced this technique — when he opened his eyes — he wore the exact same smile. He thought that was a good thing for the woman to see and was glad he came with a smile. But now, he was smiling for another reason. Victor Young wouldn’t be a potential victim of the fallout, because he would be busy doing his job on the RKO studio lot and nowhere near Southern Utah.

“Oh, oh,” Hughes said as he glanced at the next names. “The cinematographers are always on the set. I sure hope that Joe, William, Leo and Harry are not more exposed than any of the others.”

That line made everyone of Howard Hughes’ muscles tense up more than anything else that he had ever experienced... and Howard Hughes had experienced a lot.

More exposed than anyone else he thought as he flipped to the last page, which would list all the names of the stunt men and women who also doubled their pay by working as extras, set builders, cleaners and just about anything else that was needed when a movie with a big budget was being filmed on location.

This thought sent Howard Hughes into a frenzy of cleaning the rest of his office, more isometrics and even more masturbation.

I guess that cold shower didn’t work after all, he mused as he grabbed the cleaning solution that was invented for his bathrooms.

When the location of an on-site movie production is Southern Utah, in a town called St. George, not many of the people that will be on-site and involved with the making of the movie would mistake the location for something trendy, historic or exotic. They would find it full of open space,
which is something that the vast majority of actors, actresses, producers, directors, stunt people, photographers, costume design, make-up and set builders were not used to, being from urban Hollywood.

They were used to either a small commute from their homes if filming on the studio lot, or to a short travel distance from a hotel to where the movie was being made, if they were not in Hollywood. Ninety-nine percent of the time the area where they lived in and around Hollywood, or where they were on location, was congested. Except for a very few members of the cast and crew, the majority involved in filming on location in St. George were not familiar with the vast, open space that the United States military had leased to Howard Hughes for the princely sum of $1.

Most producers hated to film on location, where vast amounts of land surrounded very small towns for one reason and one reason only — downtime.

All producers and to a lesser degree, directors, hated downtime when filming on location.

In a variety of ways, on-location filming could be problematic, expensive and very boring during downtime, especially if the right cast, crew and producers were not around. The only item that Hughes and Powell worried about during the planning of the filming of
The Conqueror
was, indeed, boredom.

“And boredom on the set when making a movie is a bad thing,” Powell once told his intern Randy Komara, when the two were discussing making movies back in Dick’s office on the set before the script for
The Conqueror
had even been seen by John Wayne.

“How could anyone get bored on set while making a movie?” Randy asked Dick.

“Easy,” replied Powell. “Way too easy when the movie is in the middle of nowhere.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Randy replied.

“People don’t get bored filming in Paris. People don’t get bored filming on the back lots of Hollywood. People don’t get bored filming in New York City. People don’t get bored filming a safari. People really get bored filming in wide open spaces,” Powell said.

“Then why are so many westerns being filmed all the time? Not only that, most of them are really good,” Komara pointed out.

“Because there is nothing else to do when filming a western on location but to make a good movie,” Powell said.

“Oh,” replied Komara. “I think that makes sense.”

“Don’t think in Hollywood… do,” Powell said.

But Powell wasn’t seeing or hearing about any problems with boredom when it came to downtime on the set. His 11
^th
-century western being filmed in the vast desert and remote surroundings of Southern Utah seemed to be having the opposite effect on the cast and crew. He hoped that this meant that his movie was going to be a smash.

“I’m taking back what I said about downtime and boredom on the set of a western,” Powell told Komara during their once-a-week phone call from Dick Powell’s favorite general store about what Dick needed done for the movie from the main studio.

“Guess it is true what they say about Hollywood,” Komara said to his boss.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What do ‘they’ say?”

“Just when you think everything is going to be the same… it changes,” Komara said.

“Did I teach you that?” Powell asked Komara.

“Yes sir,” Komara said. “Now when do you want those dump trucks to come up there and get the 60 tons of red sand?”

“Good kid that Komara,” Powell said to John Wayne and Oscar Millard, as the three men saddled their horses in order to go for a ride while they were not needed on the set.

“He has a future,” Oscar said.

“You think?” Powell asked.

“He’s screwing that good looking secretary of yours… that’s why,” Millard said.

“The one with the great body?” Wayne enquired.

“The very one,” Millard answered.

“That’s impossible,” Wayne said.

“No, that’s Hollywood,” Powell joked and the other two laughed.

“It’s been a long time since I spent downtime on a film with the director and screenwriter,” Wayne said as he turned his horse to the west with the other two following on their horses. “How did you get the time off, Dick?”

“Second-unit action scenes are running way behind schedule. Ed and Cliff have a lot to do and I trust their work,” Powell said.

Wayne led the others for a long time in complete silence. The quietness was giving all three a taste of serenity — as the set had been very busy, not to mention the other items in all three of the men’s lives.

“Once you get out of the desert and behind this mountain range, it isn’t such a bad place,” Wayne said as he broke the silence.

“The wind has been one royal pain in the ass,” Powell said. “Glad to have these mountains blocking it.”

“We shouldn’t be sand skiing, we should be sail boating with the way the wind whips and blows out here,” Oscar quipped.