In 1960, John Wayne took the biggest gamble of his career on the most personal project he’d ever mounted. He’d wanted to make a motion picture about the Battle of the Alamo from as far back as 1945 and, over the years, became convinced that if he wanted it done right, he’d have to do it himself. Wayne ended up making his directorial debut with The Alamo, investing $1.5million of his own money into the budget. This might explain why he was so intensely angry when one of his co-stars torpedoed the film’s chances on Oscar night, though, with a display of tastelessness never before seen in Hollywood.
When Wayne first began developing an Alamo movie in ’45, he hired screenwriter James Edward Grant to pen a script. However, he then disagreed with Republic Pictures’ president Herbert Yates over his proposed $3million budget and left Republic in disgust. Unfortunately, he couldn’t take the script with him, and it was eventually reverse-engineered into 1955’s The Last Command.
Not one to be deterred, Wayne formed the production company Batjac with producer Robert Fellows, and in 1956, they inked a deal with United Artists to bring a new version of The Alamo to the screen. Wayne would star and direct, and UA would contribute $2.5m to the budget, with Batjac bringing the other $1.5 to $2.5m. While it was reported that Wayne secured this money with contributions from wealthy Texans who ensured the film was shot there, he eventually admitted to taking out a second mortgage on his home and using his prized cars as collateral to seal a $1.5m loan.
So, Wayne truly had skin in the game with The Alamo, and he needed it to work – otherwise, his career would be in ruins. After a fairly tumultuous production, though, the movie was released to strong box office returns and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. These nominations included ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for stalwart character actor ‘Chill’ Wills, who played ‘Beekeeper,’ one of Davy Crockett’s confidants. It seemed as if Wayne’s gamble had paid off – until Wills went into business for himself. Or, at least, that’s what it looked like at the time.
Wills, the star of City That Never Sleeps and Giant, hired a publicist named WS ‘Bow-Wow’ Wojciechowicz to craft an Oscar campaign to ensure he landed the prestigious honour. What Wojciechowicz did, though, was above and beyond anything Hollywood had ever seen up to that point, and the campaign wound up looking very tasteless indeed.
Wojciechowicz ran a series of advertisements in industry publications attempting to curry favour with Academy voters. In one, he specifically named every member of the Academy alongside a note that read, “Win, lose or draw, you’re all my cousins, and I love you all.” Worse, though, was the ad placed in The Hollywood Reporter featuring a photo of the entire cast that said, “We of the Alamo cast are praying harder—than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo—for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as ‘Best Supporting Actor.’ Cousin Chill’s acting was great. Your Alamo cousins.”
These campaign advertisements didn’t violate any Academy rules, but the second one did drag common decency through the muck. It offended a lot of people in Hollywood, including Wayne himself, who wrote a letter condemning Wills, which was published in Variety magazine. Its choice quote read, “No one in the Batjac or in the Russell Birdwell office [Wayne’s publicist] had been a party to his trade paper advertising. I refrain from using stronger language because I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste.”
Being publicly taken to task by The Duke wasn’t exactly a great look for Wills, who ended up losing out on the Oscar to Peter Ustinov for his performance in Spartacus. Wojciechowicz, for his part, claimed Wills didn’t actually have any knowledge of what shape the ill-advised campaign would take and took full responsibility for the blunder. Unfortunately for Wills, though, public perception was that he had OK’d the campaign, and the damage was done.