by James Morrow
“You’re free of cancer” and “You’re the lover I’ve been looking for my whole life” are surely two of the most uplifting sentences a person will ever hear, and it so happened that both declarations came my way during the same week. An optimist at heart, I took each affirmation at face value, so naturally I was distressed when the speakers in question began backpedaling.
No sooner had Dr. Joshua Pryce told me that the latest lab report indicated no malignant cells in my body, not one, than he hastened to add, “Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re rid of it forever.”
“You think it will come back?” I asked.
“Hard to say.”
“Could you hazard a guess?”
Dr. Pryce drew a silk handkerchief from his bleached lab coat and removed his bifocals. “Let me emphasize the positive.” In a fit of absentmindedness, the oncologist repocketed his glasses. “For the moment you’re definitely cured. But cancer has a will of its own.”
In the case of the man who called me his ideal lover—Stuart Randolph, the semi-retired NYU film historian with whom I’ve shared a bohemian loft overlooking Washington Square for the past eighteen years—I logically expected that his subsequent remarks would concern the institution of marriage. But instead Stuart followed his declaration by arguing that there were two kinds of commitment in the world: the contrived commitment entailed in the matrimonial contract, and the genuine commitment that flowed from the sort of “perfect rapport and flawless communication” that characterized our relationship.
“If we enjoyed perfect rapport and flawless communication, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” I said. “I want to get married, Stu.”
“Really?” He frowned as if confronting a particularly egregious instance of postmodern film criticism. Stuart’s an auteurist, not a deconstructionist.
“Really.”
“You truly want to become my fourth wife?”
“As much as I want you to become my fifth husband.”
“Why, dear?” he said. “Do you think we’re living in sin? Senior citizens can’t live in sin.”
“Imitation of Life is a lousy movie, but I like it anyway,” I said. “Marriage is a bourgeois convention, but I like it anyway.”
“Should the cancer ever return, dearest Angela, you’ll be glad you’ve got a committed lover by your side, as opposed to some sap who happens technically to be your husband.”
Stuart was not normally capable of bringing romance and reason into such perfect alignment, but he’d just done so, and I had to admire his achievement.
“I cannot argue with your logic,” I told him. And I couldn’t. All during my treatments, Stuart had been an absolute prince, driving me to the hospital a hundred times, holding my head as I threw up, praising the doctors when they did their jobs properly, yelling at them when they got haughty. “Checkmate.”
“Love and marriage,” he said. “They go together like a horse and aluminum siding.”
Have no fear, reader. This is not a story about what I endured at the hands of Western medicine once its avatars learned I’d developed leukemia. It’s not about radiation treatments, chemotherapy, violent nausea, suicidal depression, paralyzing fear, or nurses poking dozens of holes in my body. My subject, rather, is the last performance ever given by an old colleague of mine, the biggest box-office star of all time, John Wayne—a performance that was never committed to celluloid but that leaves his Oscar-winning Rooster Cogburn gagging in the dust.
It would be inaccurate to say that Duke and I hated each other. Yes, I detested the man—detested everything he stood for—but my loathing was incompletely requited, for at some perverse level Duke clearly relished my companionship. Our irreconcilable philosophies first emerged when we appeared together in the 1953 survival melodrama, Island in the Sky, and ever since then our political clashes, too uncivilized to be called conversations or even debates, provided Duke with a caliber of stimulation he could obtain from no other liberal of his acquaintance. Throughout his career he routinely convinced the front office to offer me a marginal role in whatever John Wayne vehicle was on the drawing board, thereby guaranteeing that the two of us would briefly share the same soundstage or location set, and he could spend his lunch hours and coffee breaks reveling in the pleasurable rush he got from our battles over what had gone wrong with America.
As I write these words, it occurs to me that any self-respecting actress would have spurned this peculiar arrangement—a kind of love affair animated by neither affection nor physical desire but rather by the male partner’s passion for polemic. No public adulation or peer recognition could possibly accrue to the parts Duke picked for me. There is no Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress Portraying a Cipher. But while I am normally self-respecting, I have rarely achieved solvency, and thus over a span of nearly twenty years I periodically found myself abandoning my faltering Broadway career, flying to Hollywood, and accepting good money for reciting bad dialogue.
In 1954 I played a fading opera diva trapped aboard a crippled airliner in The High and the Mighty, which Bill Wellman directed with great flair. Next came my portrayal of Hunlun, mother of Genghis Khan, née Temujin, in The Conqueror, probably the least watchable of the films produced by that eccentric American aviator and storm trooper, Howard Hughes. Subsequent to The Conqueror I essayed a middle-aged Comanche squaw in The Searchers, the picture on which Duke started referring to me, unaffectionately, as “Egghead.” Then came my blind wife of a noble Texan in The Alamo, my over-the-hill snake charmer in Circus World, and my pacifist Navy nurse in The Green Berets. Finally, in Chisum of 1970, I was once again cast as Duke’s mother, although my entire performance ended up in the trim bin.
It was Stuart who first connected the dots linking John Wayne, myself and nearly a hundred other cancer victims in a fantastic matrix of Sophoclean terror and Kierkegaardian trembling. Six weeks after Dr. Pryce had labeled me cancer-free, Stuart was scanning the New York Times for March 15, 1975, when he happened upon two ostensibly unrelated facts: the Atomic Energy Commission was about to open its old nuclear-weapons proving ground in Nevada to the general public, and former screen goddess Susan Hayward had died the previous day from brain cancer. She was only fifty-six. Something started Stuart’s mind working on all cylinders, and within twenty-four hours he’d made a Sherlock Holmesian deduction.
“The Conqueror,” he said. We were having morning tea in our breakfast nook, which is also our lunch nook and our dinner nook. “The Conqueror—that’s it! You shot the thing in Yucca Flat, Nevada, right?”
“An experience I’d rather forget,” I said.
“But you shot it in Yucca Flat, right?”
“No, we shot it in southwest Utah, the Escalante Desert and environs-Bryce Canyon, Snow Canyon, Zion National Park…”
“Southwest Utah, close enough,” said Stuart, shifting into lecture mode. “The Conqueror, 1956, Cinemascope, Technicolor, the second of Dick Powell’s five lackluster attempts to become a major Hollywood director. In the early sixties, Powell dies of cancer. A decade or so later, you’re diagnosed with leukemia. Somewhere in between, John Wayne has a cancerous lung removed, telling the press, ‘I licked the Big C.’ And now the female lead of The Conqueror is dead of a brain tumor.”
The epic in question had Susan playing a fictitious Tartar princess named Bortai (loosely based on Genghis Khan’s wife of the same name), daughter of the fictitious Tartar chief Kumlek (though the screenwriter was perhaps alluding to the real-life Naiman chief Kushlek), who slays Temujin’s nonfictitious father, Yesukai, offscreen about fifteen years before the movie begins. “The curse of The Conqueror,” I muttered.
“Hell, there’s no curse going on here, Angela.” Stuart used a grapefruit spoon to retrieve his ginseng tea bag from the steaming water. “This is entirely rational. This is about gamma radiation.”
According to the Times, he explained, the military had conducted eleven nuclear tests on the Nevada Proving Ground in the spring of 1953, an operation t
hat bore the wonderfully surrealistic name Upshot Knothole. The gamma rays were gone now, and civilians would soon be permitted to visit the site, but during the Upshot Knothole era anyone straying into the vicinity would have received four hundred times the acceptable dose of radiation. The last detonation, “Climax,” had occurred on the fourth of June.
“And one year later, almost to the day, the Conqueror company arrives in the Escalante Desert and starts to work,” I said, at once impressed by Stuart’s detective work and frightened by its implications.
My lover exited the breakfast nook, removed the cat from our coffee-table atlas, and opened to a spread that displayed Utah and Nevada simultaneously. “You were maybe only a hundred and thirty miles from the epicenter. Eleven A-bombs, Angela. If the winds were blowing the wrong way…”
“Obviously they were,” I said. “And the Atomic Energy Commission now expects tourists to show up?”
“Never underestimate the power of morbid curiosity.”
A quick trip through the back issues of Film Fan Almanac was all Stuart needed to reinforce his theory with two additional Upshot Knothole casualties. Unable to cope with his cancer any longer, Pedro Armendariz, who played Temujin’s “blood brother” Jamuga, had shot himself in the heart on June 18, 1963. Exactly eight years later—on June 18, 1971—cancer deprived the world of Thomas Gomez, who portrayed Wang Khan, the Mongol ruler whom Temujin seeks to usurp (thereby bestowing a throne on himself and a plot on the movie). Like Susan, Tom was only fifty-six.
“We are the new hibakusha,” I mused bitterly. The hibakusha, the “explosion-affected persons,” as the Hiroshima survivors called themselves. “Me, Duke, Dick, Susan, Pedro, and Tom. The American hibakusha. The Howard Hughes hibakusha. I’d never tell Duke, of course. Irony makes him mad.”
Our obligation was manifest. We must contact the entire Conqueror company—stars, supporting players, camera operators, sound men, lighting crew, costume fitters, art director, special effects technician, hair stylist, makeup artist, assistant director—and advise them to seek out their doctors posthaste. For five months Stuart and I functioned as angels of death, fetches of the Nuclear Age, banshees bearing ill tidings of lymphoma and leukemia, and by the autumn of 1976 our phone calls and telegrams had generated two catalogues, one listing eighty Conqueror alumni who were already dead (most of them from cancer), the other identifying one hundred forty survivors. Of this latter group, one hundred sixteen received our warning with graciousness and gratitude, three told us we had no business disrupting their lives this way and we should go to hell, and twenty-one already knew they had the disease, though they were astonished that we’d gleaned the fact from mere circumstantial evidence.
John Wayne himself was the last person I wanted to talk to, but Stuart argued that we had no other choice. We’d been unable to locate Linwood Dunn, who did the on-location special effects, and Duke might very well have a clue.
I hadn’t spoken with the old buzzard in nine years, but our conversation was barely a minute underway before we were trading verbal barrages. True to form, this was not a fond sparring-match between mutually admiring colleagues but a full-blown war of the Weltanschauungen, the West Coast patriot versus the East Coast pinko, the brave-heart conservative versus the bleeding-heart liberal. According to Duke’s inside sources, President Jimmy Carter was about to issue a plenary pardon to the Vietnam War draft evaders. Naturally I thought this was a marvelous idea, and I told Duke as much. John Wayne—the same John Wayne who’d declined to don a military uniform during World War II, fearing that a prolonged stint in the armed forces would decelerate his burgeoning career—responded by asserting that once again Mr. Peanut Head was skirting the bounds of treason.
Changing the subject, I told Duke about my leukemia ordeal, and how this had ultimately led Stuart to connect the Nevada A-bomb tests with the Conqueror company’s astonishingly high cancer rate. Predictably enough, Duke did not warm to the theory, with its implicit indictment of nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and other institutions dear to his heart, and when I used the phrase “Howard Hughes hibakusha,” he threatened to hang up.
“We need to find Linwood Dunn,” I said. “We think he’s at risk.”
In a matter of seconds Duke located his Rolodex and looked up Linwood’s unlisted phone number. I wrote the digits on the back of a stray New Republic.
“Well, Egghead, I suppose it can’t hurt for Lin to see the medics, but this doesn’t mean I buy your nutty idea,” said Duke. “Howard Hughes is a true American.”
He should have said Howard Hughes was a true American, because even as we spoke the seventy-year-old codeine addict was dying of kidney failure in Houston.
“You may have just saved Lin’s life,” I said.
“Possibly,” said Duke. “Interesting you should get in touch, Egghead. I was about to give you a call. I’m thinking of shooting a picture in your neck of the woods next year, and there’s a real sweet part in it for you.”
I drew the receiver away from my ear, cupped the mouthpiece, and caught Stuart’s attention with my glance. “He wants me in his next movie,” I said in a coherent whisper.
“Go for it,” said Stuart. “We need the money.”
I lifted my hand from the mouthpiece and told Duke, “I’ll take any role except your mother.”
“Good,” he said. “You’ll be playing my grandmother.” He chuckled. “That’s a joke, Egghead. I have you down for my mentor, a retired school teacher. We finish principal photography on The Shootist in two weeks, and then I’m off to New York, scouting locations. We’ll have dinner at the Waldorf, okay?”
“Sure, Duke.”
Later that day, Stuart and I telephoned Linwood Dunn.
“You folks may have saved my life,” he said.
I’m probably being unfair to Duke. Yes, his primitive politics infuriated me, but unlike most of his hidebound friends he was not a thoughtless man. He enjoyed a certain salutary distance from himself. Of his magnum opus, The Alamo, he once told a reporter, “There’s more to that movie than my damn conservative attitude,” and I have to agree. Beneath its superficial jingoist coating, and beneath the layer of genuine jingoism under that, The Alamo exudes an offbeat and rather touching generosity of spirit. The freedom-loving frontiersmen holding down the fort do not demonize Santa Ana’s army, and at one point they praise their enemy’s courage. I think also of Duke’s willingness to appear in a 1974 public forum organized by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon. When a student asked him where he got the “phony toupee,” he replied, “It’s not phony. It’s real hair. Of course, it’s not mine, but it’s real.” Another student wanted to know whether Mr. Wayne’s horse had recovered from his hernia now that the superstar was dieting. “No, he died,” Duke answered, “and we canned him, which is what you’re eating at the Harvard Club.”
This refreshing streak of self-deprecation surfaced again when we met in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria. As we dug into our steaks and baked potatoes, Duke told me his idea for an urban cop picture, which he wanted to call Lock and Load. He’d seen Clint Eastwood’s first two Harry Callahan movies, Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, and he was beguiled by both their vigilante ethos and their hefty profits. “If a liberal like Eastwood can make a fascist film,” said Duke with a sly smile, “imagine what a fascist like me could do with that kind of material.”
I laughed and patted him on the arm. “You’ll make Harry Callahan look like Adlai Stevenson.”
It was obvious to both of us that there would probably never be a John Wayne picture called Lock and Load. We were eating not in the hotel restaurant but in his room, so that the general public wouldn’t see what a wreck he’d become. Maybe Duke had licked the Big C in 1964, but thirteen years later it was back for a rematch. He breathed only with the help of a sinister looking portable inhaler, and he had a male nurse in permanent attendance, a swarthy Texan named Sweeney Foote, forever fidgeting in the background like a Doberman pinscher on guard.
“You l
ook terrific, Egghead,” he said. He was wearing his famous toupee, as well as a lush Turkish bathrobe and leather slippers. “I’m sure you gave the Big C a knockout punch.”
“The doctors aren’t that optimistic.”
Duke worked his face into a sneer. “Doctors,” he said.
I glanced around the suite, appointed with tasteful opulence. Sweeney Foote sat hunched on the mattress, playing solitaire. I’d never been in the Waldorf-Astoria before, and I wondered if Duke had selected it for its symbolic value. When the Hollywood Ten’s highly publicized appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee started going badly (not only were the Ten actual by-God former Communists, they didn’t seem particularly ashamed of it), the heads of the major studios called an emergency meeting at the Waldorf Before the day was over, the money men had agreed that unemployment and ostracism would befall any Hollywood actor, writer, or director who defied a Congressional committee or refused to come forward with his or her non-Communist credentials.
“Tell me about Lock and Load,” I said.
“Hell of a script,” said Duke. “Jimmy’s best work since The Alamo. I’m Stonewall McBride, this maverick police captain who likes to do things his own way.”
“Novel concept,” I said dryly.
“Stonewall has stayed in touch with his fifth-grade teacher, kind of a mother-figure to him, regularly advising him on how to get along in a dog-eat-dog world.”
“I’ve always enjoyed Maria Ouspenskaya.”
Duke nodded, smiled, and gestured as if tipping an invisible Stetson, but then his expression became a wince. “I’ll be honest, Egghead.” He popped an analgesic pill and washed it down with beer. “I’m not here just to scout locations. Fact is, the Big C has me on the ropes. The medics say it’s in my stomach now, as if I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Duke.”