by C McGivern
When they climbed out of the car he wandered slowly into the hotel with Tom, then turned to wave goodbye to the newsmen before ambling off to the comfort of his room. Mr Mooney, the first reporter, ran a line through his head, “A place where Duke could rest his saddle aches,” it was a good line. He said to no one in particular, “He’s got a contagious laugh. I LIKE him.”
Mary was at the reception desk arranging all Duke’s comforts. She heard Mooney talking and turned toward him, she felt impelled to rush to defend her boss when his colleague commented, “Yes, but he gave us nothing.”
“He’s just tired boys. Come back in the morning and … well I can’t promise anything, but you could try talking to him then.” They hung around, not daring to risk missing an interview now. Mr Mooney was nothing if not dogmatic. The opening words of his report were already prepared, “In today’s world of show business, giants walk the earth, stars shine, and superstars are available as guests on talk shows. Living legends receive standing ovations when they come out of retirement. But then, stomping along, cutting a wide path through all the lesser lights, is the greatest legend of all. He is still working, still going strong… John Wayne… superstar, icon. His shadow dwarfs all the others as he rolls past them, like a tank overtaking the ox-cart; he is the all-time box-office champ. Pictures of young Duke reveal the sensitive, brooding, intense character hidden deep inside the rough exterior… There is about him an inner poetry, buried deep, left somehow undeveloped. He can convey the rugged beauty of the Wild West and still the violence he so often portrays is not out of place…” He was pleased with the words he had put down before he even met Wayne, words chosen with care to describe the superstar. Now, after sharing the back seat of a Rolls Royce with him for twenty minutes, he would have to find the words to convey the message, “I LIKE the man.”
At two in the morning Mooney’s devotion to duty was rewarded when the man in question ambled into the lobby. Dressed casually in an open-necked denim shirt which hung carelessly out of blue jeans, his feet stuffed into a pair of thick woollen socks and unshod, Duke still looked every inch the icon of Mooney’s imagination. “Still here fellas? Come on then, let’s talk,” he offered genially as he sank his weary body into the depths of a huge leather chair and rested his feet on the table in front of him. He was still clutching the whiskey bottle, he waved it toward them, “I was looking for some ice.”
Mooney couldn’t believe his luck. He had waited because he hadn’t wanted to move far away from his hero, sure there was a story to be had, hoping to be the one to get it. “But Mr Wayne it’s two o’clock. Aren’t you tired? I can wait until morning.”
“Yeah, well I can’t. I’ll be busy tomorrow. It’s been a long day and I’m beat, but I can’t sleep so I thought I’d take a look around, see if I could find some company… and there you boys were. I’ve had a rest, but at home it’s still evening, I wouldn’t even have had dinner yet. I’ll be happy to talk now.” He talked at length about films, his acting technique; he even demonstrated the “pass system” explaining, “When you’re filming you miss like this.” A huge fist brushed Mooney’s cheek, “A hit is a miss. I never hit a man since I came of age. All I do is hold ‘em a little. Hold ‘em kinda hard,” and the line shot into Mooney’s head,“Lest he should be mistaken for a pacifist, when he holds kinda hard he can lift a man right off the ground.” Duke was still talking, “Hitting or missing, making a film is hard labour, let me tell you when you’re fighting in mud at 28 degrees and the Texas wind comes over the prairie at you… you’re earning your money the hard way. The Western is America’s folklore and it deals with simple ideals. I’ve played plenty of different parts but they still say everything I do is the same. I guess I’ve just got a strong personality that keeps showing through. I’ll just keep talking shall I? Or did you want to throw the odd question my way?” He smiled.
“You invested a lot of your own money in The Alamo, will you get it all back do you think? Are you solvent?”
“Helluva good question, and I can’t answer it. I guess I’m all but broke right now, and it’s all my own fault. Made a lot of bad investments. Hell, I’ve owned more restaurants than you’ve eaten in. Gold mines, oil wells, I was known as Dry-Hole Wayne in the oil industry. People say I had bad advice, but I can blame no one but myself, I should have known better. Now I’m letting my own family take care of my interests, and I can command big money for my work. I guess I’ll be alright. I love my life, there’s no better way to make a living. That’s why I’ll keep making westerns. You get the sun, lots of action, fresh air, scenery and for some reason none of the bickering that you get back in the studios. The men I work with are all outdoor guys. Greatest guys in the world, I have a great time, and I love every minute of it. I don’t chase girls in my pictures any more. I wanted to mature so people would accept me. Of course in real life it can happen… I’m twenty two years older than the girl I’m married to now … I was a star before she was even born. But people don’t like to see an old guy making it with a young girl on screen, so I won’t do it. Course, you don’t need a love interest in a western …”
“Mr Wayne, why have you never got involved with TV?”
“Oh, really because I’m still making good money doing pictures, you know doing the thing I love best. But hell, you’re right, I’ve been offered lots of series. Gunsmoke for instance. But I didn’t want to do it. Jim Arness was under contract to me but I let him go do it. Being an actor myself I couldn’t make money off him, I released all my actors from their contracts, I felt too embarrassed to make money out of them.”
“Why did you want to direct The Alamo?”
“I just believed in it and thought I could do a good job. I still think I did a good job, even though the critics in America say it’s too patriotic. Hell, of course it is. That was the whole point, you just can’t be more patriotic than giving your life for your country. I suppose I won’t make a cent out of it because I made some bad deals so I could make it as I wanted it. I am proud of what I did.”
Mooney was worried that perhaps Mr Wayne would be irritated by his questions, he must have heard all of them before. But he answered each one with patience and gave no hint that he was tired or bored. He looked relaxed and there wasn’t the slightest suggestion that the whiskey was having any effect on him. They talked until the bottle was almost finished, but Duke still gave no sign that he wanted to end the interview. Mooney found the man who had killed off all-comers from Stagecoach to The Alamo, a film in which he had been killed off, full of the most astonishing humility, friendly, open, good-humored and above all, polite. He had been expecting the typical Hollywood creature of artifice, but had found instead a man larger than his own image, “I like him,” the reporter thought again. He watched him intently and considered the intangible air of sadness that hung about him, and which was especially noticeable the more he relaxed. Mooney found his patience incredible, it was three in the morning but he showed no sign of flagging. He brushed over politics, but happily talked about sex and violence in the business, commenting once again that he would never do any of that stuff. It was the reporter who tired first, and as his eyes began to droop he knew the last line of his report would read, “The image of the man is that of a dogmatic Puritan with the fiery righteousness of Moses. The man I met was warm-hearted, an almost reticent legend who obviously likes people too much to be iron-clad in his approach to them. Above everything else I found him to be a gentle man… and I liked him very much.” Great stuff.
Duke smiled as he watched another fall by the wayside. Always the last to collapse, he again assumed the responsibility of looking after “the children.” He called to the night porter to bring a blanket and covered the weary reporter with it himself. He padded off back toward his room wondering what he could do now; he wondered if Pilar was home, what would she be doing now? Was she missing him? He wished she and the kids had come with him. Energy seethed inside him, making rest impossible. He picked a book up he had found
in Los Angeles … he’d just look at it, see if it gave him any ideas for a picture.
Some days later, after waving a fond farewell to England where his beloved film received every plaudit he had hoped for, he flew on to Rome and then, finally back home to his family and the increasingly savage attacks by the American Press. The excitement he’d had for the project had died along with Ward Bond. He needed to put it behind him, he needed to recover his strength, and Duke, ever the optimist, believed something would come along to replace The Alamo in his heart. Nobody could replace Bond, but he consoled himself, “At least I still have my family, my friends and my health.”
He was about to lose each of those things as, first, his friends, his health and then his beloved family began to slip away. In a strange twist of fate his friends, the inner circle, seemed to die in rapid succession. Ward Bond hadn’t been the first to go. Duke had known and loved Grant Withers for thirty years; they had shared many a daring escapade together, but as Duke went on to find fame and fortune, Withers turned into an incompetent drunk. The laughter had stopped as he passed through five disastrous marriages and his life became a long list of arrests for drunken driving, car accidents, and wife-beating. For years he lived on the edge of disaster with Duke always doing what he could for him. In the end what he did proved inadequate. He never understood that others couldn’t cope with the excessive amounts of alcohol that he consumed, and although he continued to drink too much, when Withers died he was forced to look back to ask, “What if?” He had always believed that the drinking they all did was harmless fun. Duke was a happy drunk who mistrusted those who didn’t indulge, but his friends paid a tragic price for the fun they shared with him. No matter how much Duke drank he was always able to get up and go to work the next day, was always able to fulfill his responsibilities. He couldn’t understand why Withers couldn’t do the same. He simply didn’t have the same constitution and on March 27th 1959 he left a note asking his friends for forgiveness, swallowed a bottle of pills and drank a quart of vodka. Duke, weeping openly, blamed himself for not being sensitive enough, for not doing enough. The death hit him hard but what followed was worse.
Ward Bond had been, at fifty five, just two years older than Duke, when he died. They had grown up together, shared the worst of times together, and been sitting at the pinnacle of their careers together; Bond starring in the hit TV show, Wagon Train, and Duke completing The Alamo. Bond had not handled his long awaited stardom well after living too long in Duke’s shadow. He loved the attention he got away from the star and accepted every Hollywood invitation that came his way, stubbornly ignoring his friend’s advice to slow down. After Wither’s death Duke was especially sensitive to the health and welfare of his friends, and was particularly worried about Bond, who loved going to parties and was using a cocktail of amphetamines and other drugs to keep pace with his newly acquired celebrity.
Bond’s last episode of Wagon Train was directed by John Ford and starred Duke in a cameo role in his only dramatic TV appearance. Starring “Michael Morrison,” the show was screened posthumously. Duke rushed straight to Dallas when he heard about the death, to accompany the body of his best friend back to Los Angeles. Crying once again, he read the eulogy at the funeral, “We were the closest of friends, from schooldays right on through. This was just the way Ward would have wanted it; to look out on the faces of good friends. He was a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”
Duke was inconsolable and much as John Ford was upset himself, he was seriously worried about the state Duke fell into as they went to tip Bond’s ashes into the Catalina Channel. Bond had requested a sea burial saying, “I have loved lobster all my life, and I want to return the favor.” Duke laughed when he heard that, but cried throughout the ceremony. He cried again later when he discovered the gun, with which he had accidentally wounded Bond so many years before, had been left to him. Their friendship had been a rare commodity in the jungle that was Hollywood and Duke knew he would never find anyone to replace Bond. He missed him badly and sat alone for days, desolate and refusing to talk to anyone as he looked back, remembering the past, “There will never be another Ward Bond. I remember telling him, a hell of a long time ago, that he was too damn ugly to be a movie star. But I was wrong. He was beautiful where it counted, inside.” He wept uncontrollably and contemplated his loss.
He had great difficulty coming to terms with the concept of aging and death and suddenly, with the loss of Withers and Bond, he found himself facing his own mortality alone. The members of the Ford clan handled their grief in their own way but of them all Duke was the least equipped to cope. Ford himself turned to the Catholic faith, but Duke could find no solace there, he had always shunned organized religion. He might have drowned his sorrow in a wild drinking spree but Jimmy Grant had turned to Alcoholics Anonymous, and his other drinking partners were all cutting back. He didn’t know where to turn to find salve for the wounds that followed so hard on the heels of his personal savaging by the Press and his depression was compounded by the deflating sense of anti-climax he inevitably felt after completing his life’s obsession. Mary St John said, “He looked as if someone had cut out his heart.” He couldn’t eat or sleep as he tried to come to terms with everything, he felt useless, angry, embarrassed and out of control.
And the pain didn’t end there. Bev Barnett, Duke’s shy, honest, softly spoken press agent and close friend, was the third to go. Duke, badly injured by life, cried, “God, I miss him. His death is so hard to take.” Everywhere he went there was a visible aura of defeat about him and Mary went on, “The emptiness he felt was tangible.”
His family began to worry when he lost interest in his work and even five-year old Aissa sensed something was terribly wrong, “He became distant, empty and angry.” She noticed the first real change to their close relationship on the set of The Comancheros. She had never felt threatened by him in any way; whenever she had been naughty it was her mother who shouted at her, and her father who put things right. He had never shown the slightest aggression toward the girl he called his little princess. She had a small part in his new film and was supposed to deliver her line after playing with his tie, as he held her in his arms. She said the line but forgot the tie. He shouted at her in his sternest voice, “You’re supposed to play with my tie, Aissa. Come on, get it right.” She was shocked by the anger she saw in his eyes and refused to be comforted when he apologized profusely. Too young to understand that he had been lashing out at life in general, she was old enough to sense that things would never be the same again.
Immediately after The Alamo he still had “his friends, family and health.” The friends were rapidly disappearing, he soon noticed the inevitable changes taking place in his family and, at the same time began to be deeply troubled by the cough that had started in Bracketville. He suddenly felt old, ill and unable to overcome the insecurities that plagued him. He wanted to be held and comforted and he started demanding evidence of love from a family he sensed was growing away from him. He understood Aissa was growing up, developing her own interests and was less dependent on him, but he hated the fact that her spontaneous demonstrations of affection had suddenly stopped. When his urgent need to be smothered in warm family love went unfulfilled he couldn’t hold on to his fiery temper.
His outbursts of anger were often delayed and his daughter said, “He bottled up his emotions, their release often came in the form of misdirected rage.” No one could predict what would set him off, but his wife and children knew they didn’t want to be around when he was angry and they began avoiding him; the very thing most likely to upset him. When he lost his temper with anyone other than his family, the rage was even worse, and his speech became peppered with obscenity he wouldn’t dare use at home. Once the anger subsided, which it usually did quickly, he was full of deep and sincere remorse, and he repeated over and over, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
As in his youth, his physical presence, enough to intimidate the very boldest, bec
ame a problem, and even his own children cowered away from him. The screen image might be somewhat threatening but the man behind the image took no pleasure in any situation were all he saw in front of him were cringing white faces and he tried hard to avoid confrontation. Still he crashed around in pain, and drove away the very people he needed most; he knew it, but was powerless to stop himself. The harder he tried to put things right, the further away they drifted, and the louder he shouted.
His wife recognized the fragile and gentle soul behind the fury but even she began to turn away, “I could feel his pain but could do nothing to alleviate it.” She wanted him to slow down and relax, to take life at a more normal pace. She let him know that to keep her he had to give more of himself and his time, he had to cut back on his work schedule. In a weak moment he admitted there was more to life than work. Still, a film set was the only place he found relief, and the knowledge that she expected him to ease off frustrated him. How could she suddenly demand that he start living a different, normal life, when nothing in his life had ever been normal, when life had made him anything but ordinary? She was asking him to break a lifetime’s habit, demanding that he gave up his sure route to happiness. His self-esteem had been entirely tied up in his need to hustle since he was eight years old and an outside force, greater than himself, had spurred him on ever since he first found his salvation in effort. Sometimes he felt so exhausted that he would have given anything to be like other men, to be able to switch off and slow down, like his wife wanted. He knew it was impossible. He was still running as hard as he had done at any time in his life, powered by a complex mix of emotional, financial and professional needs.