by C McGivern
Both producer and director were well aware Duke liked to have scripts re-worked to suit himself, but they warned him that this time he was going to play the part as it was written, “We’re not going to have any of your moralizing or preaching on this one.” When Duke was handed the final script he was amazed by its brilliance, “It was the best thing I’d ever seen.” Cogburn was to be based directly on the book, rough and ready, a man who took a wench when he wanted one, got drunk when he wanted to, and fought just because he was in the mood to fight, a man who was as much as a sinner as a saint. There had never been anyone like Rooster on the screen before, and Duke agreed to stick scrupulously to the novel, playing him almost exactly as ordered, although there were some heated debates and a little give and take on all sides before the creation was complete. He had been in the business over forty years, he knew every aspect of movie making, and he expected people to listen to him.
Things were different in Colorado. Wallis wanted him to wear a moustache and an eye patch, but Duke objected, saying his fans paid to see him, “Not some sonofabitch who looks like a pirate in an Errol Flynn movie.” Wallis compromised, letting the moustache go, but insisting on the eye patch. He knew his star would need careful handling and that only one or two directors were capable of keeping him under control, he crossed his fingers and prayed Hathaway was one of those. He was another tough director and when he overheard Duke protesting about the patch, he warned, “Listen, Duke, I’m in charge of the picture and you’re going to have to do what I say. Cogburn can win you the Oscar if you’ll play him true. So quit bitching about it. Anyway you won’t have to go on a diet. I want you big bellied at 260 pounds.” Duke gave up, there was no point hitting his head against a brick wall, “It’s sure as hell my first decent role in twenty years, and my first chance to play a character role instead of John Wayne. Ordinarily they just stand me there and run everybody up against me.” And he admitted that not having to diet was a massive bonus.
In the autumn of 1968 a fat and happy John Wayne met up with Henry Hathaway in the Colorado Mountains to make a masterpiece and produce one of life’s rare moments when every element falls neatly into its right place. Duke emerged from it as a superhuman presence, finally becoming the superman that he had cursed himself for not being after his date with death. He had been ordered to rest after The Green Berets; battling against constant criticism had tired him out, but the sights and sounds of the Colorado Mountains refreshed him and breathed life back into his weary soul. He took refuge up there and began to feel better. Hathaway had no trouble with his star and was unusually gentle with him in return. He screamed and bellowed at everybody, all the rest of the cast and crew were fair game, but he never raised his voice to Duke, who seemed to know instinctively what was required of him. The director wanted this to be an especially good experience for him because he’d seen the damage the The Green Berets had done. He’d looked so ill when he turned up on location that he hadn’t the heart to treat him roughly; he spoke to him in quiet confidential whispers and allowed him get on with the business he knew best, confident that Duke was invariably right about body placement and nuances of meaning in a script.
Over the years critics accused Duke of being formulaic. He fuelled their criticism by saying that he didn’t act, he reacted, repeating it so often that they came to believe he possessed only limited talent. Now he had been given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to prove his ability. On the surface the character possessed similarities to many others he had played down the years. Rooster was a classic frontier hero, an autonomous man with no woman, family, or ties. But as Duke made one of the longest speeches of his career, telling Mattie he had a wife and son who had left him, but that, although he misses them, he would rather have lost them than his independence, members of the cast and crew applauded, knowing they were witnessing a very special performance. Duke said, “It was the best scene I ever did, it gave me great personal pleasure.” His portrayal of the drunken, swaggering, kindly, warm, and above all, courageous US Marshal, was so clearly a product of his own acting ability that even critics who only months before had written him off forever, were suddenly able to see him clearly, maybe for the first time. Obviously here was a virtuoso of the film world, an artist who knew exactly how to arrange moves, how to raise a single eye to unbelievable effect.
Hathaway had cherished Duke’s ability over a thirty year period. He, more than any other director, had coaxed out his more amiable side, the side that so many others missed completely. Together, on this one special occasion, they combined to produce a shining moment and, many said, to make the best western ever. Apart from his one long speech he actually had few words to say; he had to drink, shoot, pursue, and fall off his horse. But his performance went deeper than words could have taken him, and he conveyed the character of Cogburn simply, in gestures and intonations.
Pilar watched as another of his favorite sequences was filmed out in a meadow of autumnal brilliance. Duke sat tall in the saddle telling the four outlaws confronting him that he plans to either kill them or see them hanged. “Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man” their leader sneered back. Duke’s horse was already at full tilt as he shouted his most famous battle cry, “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch,” and, with the reins in his teeth, pistol in one hand and Winchester in the other, he charged hell-for-leather straight at them. It was the first time anyone ever heard profanity from John Wayne in a picture, “In my other pictures, we’ve had an explosion go off when I said a bad word. This time we didn’t. It’s profanity alright, but I doubt if there’s anyone in the United States who hasn’t heard the expression. We felt it was acceptable in this instance. At the emotional high point in that particular picture, I felt it was OK to use it.”
Over many years he had portrayed characters unaffected by eating, drinking, or smoking, but in Rooster the laws of nature had clearly taken a heavy toll. He is old, fat, one-eyed, hardly able to get up in the mornings. He can’t hold his liquor and falls off his horse after a long day’s ride, too drunk to get back up and says, “We’ll camp here tonight.” Unlike his other unencumbered characters Rooster falls under the spell of young Mattie, he cares about her, and in looking after her, begins to lose the independence he cherishes. Rooster was strong, funny, subtle and at all times believable and, although Duke had no hand in script development, he was a direct descendant of the traditional Wayne character. He invested Rooster with the warmth, comfortable masculinity, and dignity that was all his own, he was the heartbeat of the character. As Pilar looked on in wonder Rooster came to life before her eyes, spinning his Winchester in his hand as he rode toward his adversaries with all his skill. He rehearsed the climactic scene over and over again, helping the rest of the cast to get it right. She was worried about him working at such high altitude. He was the oldest member of the cast, and even the younger members moaned they couldn’t catch their breath. The difficulties of filming the scene where the five men performed a tricky maneuver on horseback and the long hours necessary to choreograph it perfectly were tough on everyone. On the day it was finally shot it was bitterly cold. Hathaway repeatedly called, “Action,” in his determination to get the best image of Rooster, riding alone but undaunted, against an enemy that far outgunned him.
At the end of the day, Duke asked how it looked. The director asked him how it felt, and laughing, Duke replied, “Damn good.” Hathaway told him that was how it looked. He had caught Duke’s most triumphant moment in all its glory and knew what it had taken out of the star, “Yeah, I’d say Duke had more guts than the average guy. He did another scene where he had to pick up the body of a dead villain, a 200 pound man, and carry him over his shoulder like a baby for fifty yards. He did it, bad back, one lung, at altitude. When we finished he was exhausted. No other actor would have done that, because he was actually walking away from the camera, and he didn’t need to do it. He did it for authenticity. It knocked the breath out of him and it took him a long time to come out of it. He sat on a rock strugglin
g to breathe. Duke just doesn’t have to do things like that anymore, but there was never one complaint out of him about anything.”
After finishing filming just before Christmas he took a month off to rest at home. In January 1969 Hal Wallis drove down to see him, “I knew we had a winner Duke.” He had seen the rushes, “It is extraordinary … Familiar as I was with the script, I often laughed out loud viewing the film.” Just one year after The Green Berets, True Grit opened at Radio City Music Hall. The same critics who had said they could never take Wayne seriously again now lavishly piled praise on a great moment of American cinema, calling his performance in it a triumph, by far the best of his career, and just twelve months after writing him off they actively hyped him for the Oscar. Everyone was talking Oscars except Duke, who didn’t even dare to hope, “I never really went into that field of endeavor. I think to get the critics interested in you for an Oscar, you have to be in a certain type of picture. It was an accident that I was in this picture. It was just a natural for me.”
Paramount promoted True Grit as his “Fortieth Anniversary in Pictures” film, and to make it special they scheduled three screenings just for the movie community before its official release. Duke felt especially worried and nervous about those shows; the approval of his peers meant a lot more to him than the barbed words of the critics. Each performance was met with thunderous applause. The biggest stars in Hollywood all agreed it was by far his best work and when the critics finally had their say even they agreed. Vincent Canby, who had hated his last film, wrote, “The last scene in the movie is so fine it will probably become Wayne’s cinematic epitaph. Curious thing about True Grit is that although he is still playing a variation on the self-assured serviceman he has played so many times in the past, the character that seemed so grotesque in Vietnam fits into this frontier landscape, emotionally-and perhaps politically too … Hathaway obtains from Wayne the richest performance of his long career.” Duke’s Cogburn was called, “A flawless portrait of a flawed man.”
Everyone was eating out of his hand, a strange but welcome feeling for him. Andrew Sarris wrote, “And there is talk of an Oscar for Wayne after forty years of movie acting and after thirty years of damn good movie acting. Wayne’s performances for John Ford alone are worth all the Oscars put out. Indeed, Wayne’s performances in The Searchers, Wings of Eagles, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are among the most full-bodied and large-souled creations of the cinema; Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Red River for Hawks are almost on the same level as Ford’s, and Hatari! is not too far behind. Then there were the merely nice movies; finally there are the leisurely Hathaway movies. It would be a mistake to assume that all he can play or has played is the conventional western gunfighter. There is more of Christian submission than pagan hubris in the Duke’s western persona. Relatively “liberal” types like Henry Fonda and Paul Newman have been considerably more conspicuous than Wayne in the matter of flaunting virility and swaggering about with six shooters at the ready. …Wayne embodies the brutal implacable order of the West, less with personal flair than with archetypical endurance. He is more likely to outlast his opponents than to outdraw them, and ever since Stagecoach he has never hesitated to use the rifle, an instrument more efficient, though less phallic, than the six-shooter. Ironically, Wayne has become a legend by not being legendary. He has dominated the screen even when he has not been written in as the dominant character.
“The perfection he created in Ethan Edwards is echoed in Rooster Cogburn. They have in common the essential form of John Wayne, the continuous identity of the western hero, the loner, the rugged individualist who serves the community without being part of it. And this is the public conception of John Wayne as well. As Rooster he adds new shadows. The broken-down marshal is a mythic creature of folk legend. He is the ironic descendant of Wayne’s own heroic past, roused once more to action and adventure and love. The “knight” is summoned by a call to duty. Every time Wayne embarks on such a journey he faces an important spiritual struggle, just as he faces the external struggle with the villain. In creating the mythical, symbolic, American hero, Wayne always incorporates something of himself into the characterization.”
Hardly a sour note sounded. John Belton went on, “What’s remarkable about Wayne in True Grit is that, though his part is self-conscious and self-parodic, his performance is not. He plays Cogburn straight and without tricks. He has come out of the classic mould of acting. He always gives a clean performance. Where Brando creates The Godfather with the aid of make-up and mumbling, Wayne portrays Cogburn in spite of the eye patch. He always finds a single gesture to express what he wants with simplicity, surety and clarity. For Wayne every gesture is effortless, he has none of the neurotic mannerisms of other actors. His every move is pure, natural and intuitive, giving each performance a slow, fluid grace. The final scene of True Grit is both absurdly comic and heroically grand. It can only work because Wayne, the actor, is totally committed to what he is doing, totally absorbed himself. Only Wayne could have carried off an otherwise unplayable scene.”
Richard Fleischer praised him, “This was true stardom.” Duke could hardly believe what he was reading. He was pleased and flattered by the attention. After The Green Berets he had been shown as a brutal and harsh man; the interviews he had given had done little to dispel the image. Now, suddenly, he was a sensitive, college-educated, skilful actor. They had always used words like “tough” “leathery” and “stupid” to describe him, now they were calling him a man of real emotion, a man easily moved to tears, a man who by his own admission had shaken with fear. That at least was close to the truth!
He was due to go to the clinic for his regular cancer check-up. He dreaded going each time, and lay sleepless for weeks before each visit. Now he was going for the five year examination, the one that would tell him if he had really beaten the disease, and the nervous tension he felt was even worse than usual. He always hated the way the doctors talked about remission, recurrence and about the length of his future although their previous reports had been good if cautious. This time he expected to be told cancer was present again, “Every time I have to get a check-up it runs through my mind about how I’m going to tell my family this time, without being too dramatic. Every time is like waiting to be hit in the body by a hard left hand. There’s no other way I can explain it. It’s rough. You know I’ve got seven kids, and fifteen grandchildren, and I nearly know most of their names” he smiled, but added, “It’s really rough thinking about how I’d tell them…” He expected to be humbled by cancer. He had just been named Hollywood’s top attraction, surely The Red Witch had to be waiting for him and he couldn’t fail to spot the irony of the possibility of winning his first Oscar as he was being slowly suffocated by a lung tumor.
When he walked into the clinic for the results of his tests it was to find his doctor smiling at him broadly. He was swept by overwhelming relief; he was disease free, clinically cured. He still needed an annual check-up, but he was assured there was little chance of his dying of lung cancer.
Long before the Oscar nominations were announced he was already back at work. In February 1969 he was working on The Undefeated when his horse stumbled and fell, throwing him badly. He broke two ribs and badly bruised his left side. He took several days off, and went home to recover. Filming went on without him until he returned well taped, uncomfortable but willing to continue shooting a scene that called for him to ride a horse at full speed into a Confederate position. His bad luck continued when his stirrup came loose, “I fell right under that god-damned horse; I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.” This time he dislocated his right shoulder, an injury that forced him to ride with his arm held close to his body to reduce the pain.
Rock Hudson, Duke’s co-star, had been anxious about working with the embodiment of American masculine strength. He knew Duke was aware of his homosexuality and was worried about how the macho man would react to him. On the first day on location he sat watching Duke apply natural lipstick in a s
mall mirror. When he turned to face him he smiled, “Well, I hear you’re a good bridge player.” Throughout that day’s shooting he kept telling Hudson how to walk and talk to obtain the best effect. The next day Hudson returned the favor, giving unwanted and unhelpful advice to Duke, who eventually laughed, “It’s OK, take it easy. I like you.” Everyone knew Duke hated being around gay men, or “men in striped trousers” as he colorfully described them, but he never let that get in his way when he worked with a fellow professional. The two got on well and often played bridge together in the evenings, “What Rock Hudson does-in the privacy of his own room-is his business. He’s a professional on the set and a real gentleman-and he plays a hell of a hand of bridge.”
Duke was putting the finishing touches to his next film, Chisum, when he first heard he had been nominated for an Academy Award. Pilar, who still hated going to Durango, happened to be spending a few days on location with him there when the news hit town. He tried to brush it off, telling her, “You can’t eat awards, and you sure as hell can’t drink them.” He was convinced he wouldn’t win and he didn’t even dare to hope, but getting the nomination would at least ensure the success of Chisum. “Well, of course, I knew True Grit was going to go… even with the critics. Once in a while you just come across something with such great humor. The author caught the flavor of Mark Twain, to my way of thinking. You know it wasn’t really parody. Rooster was basically the same character I’ve always played. And the film wasn’t the best one I ever made either, Stagecoach, Red River and The Searchers were all better. But I knew it was going to go. I never expected to win the Oscar though.” The other nominees had much to recommend them; Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Peter O’Tool, and Richard Burton were all actors of the highest calibre. Many thought that if Duke won it would be an award honoring his lifetime’s effort as much as this performance and Hollywood expected him to emerge the victor. Rooster Cogburn was a grandfatherly figure and even the Hollywood liberals could accept him in that light; he may be politically and socially outrageous but grandfathers were allowed, even expected to be.