by C McGivern
He simply ignored his children’s attitude, left them to deal with their own feelings, and assumed they would come round eventually. They were adults and he had Pilar to worry about. He showered her with every concern, treating her like a fragile and precious doll, constantly checking that she felt OK. To her he appeared calm, reassuring, sheltering, comfortable, just like he was in his films… he was, she thought, smoothly in control of the situation... he was John Wayne, the man everyone could rely on… and then she went into labour.
They had gone to bed early. She had fallen asleep as he watched TV. When her waters broke he leapt out of bed shouting, “What do you want me to do?” He was neither the calm, reassuring or smooth John Wayne, “He just fell apart and I had to ask him to calm down before he called the doctor. I was ready to go to hospital before he finished dressing. He couldn’t fasten his buttons. The drive to the hospital, only half an hour away, was a nightmare. He had told me he could find it in his sleep. Duke was renowned for his bad driving, he pointed his car in the direction he wanted to go and put his foot flat down to the floor. As usual he drove too fast and somehow managed to get lost. When I teased him that he’d said he could find the hospital in his sleep he laughed, “I know, but I’m awake now and lost as hell!” At the hospital he behaved as if he was waiting for his first child, rather than his fifth. He paced the floor of the delivery room, stopped to hold my hand, turned white and then went back to his pacing and whistling; he always paced or whistled when he was nervous.” His daughter, Aissa was born on March 31 1956.
Duke was sure something was wrong with the baby when she didn’t cry. The doctor reassured him, telling him she was fine, but he demanded, “Why isn’t she crying, babies are supposed to cry.” Pilar said, “He sounded as if he were ordering the Seventh Cavalry to charge. In the end a nurse picked Aissa up and made her cry. Duke smiled, satisfied at last, “Now that’s more like it.” He cradled his little girl until her cries subsided, Aissa said, “I felt my father’s obsessive grip for ever more. His need to prove himself was suffocating. He loved me so fiercely and demanded so much back that it became almost impossible to breathe. He thirsted for love and wanted it above all things. His demand for affection was overpowering.”
After being all but destroyed by his own childhood, failing in his first efforts at raising a family and also in two marriages, he now refused to let anything go wrong. He invested huge amounts of love in his “second chance.” He couldn’t explain to anyone why he gave so much, or why he needed and wanted so much back. He had learned to suppress his feelings and had long avoided open shows of affection, now he began to demand them from his wife and daughter. When the strong man clung to Pilar she didn’t understand, “I had no idea why he wanted us around all the time, and in truth, I doubt if he knew himself.” He shied away from explanations, all Pilar knew was that he made great demands on her after the birth of Aissa, “He behaved like an idiot father. I have never seen a man so entranced by a child.”
For the last six months of her pregnancy he had refused all offers of work, explaining, “I just want to be home with my wife.” However, once his daughter entered the world the idiot father soon resumed his old ways, accepting the role of Spig Wead for the picture Wings of Eagles, again directed by John Ford. Wead, who had recently died, put career and patriotism above the needs of his family; it was a role Duke understood well.
Work still came first, but Pilar said, “Duke and Aissa were addicted to each other. He was completely overwhelmed by her and she followed him around endlessly, staring devotedly at him whenever he was home. She particularly liked to watch him shaving in his dressing room.” Aissa remembered, “It always smelled so nice, of him and of his soap. I hated to let him out of my sight.” She was aware, almost from babyhood, of the hold she had over him, “Whenever I fell or hurt myself he would look sick to his stomach. He spent hours stroking my hair in his need to soothe me. At Warners he kept an old bicycle that he used to get around on. He let me ride on the handlebars until the day I fell off. He turned white with shock and repeated over and over, “Oh my God, Oh my God.” He never rode it again.” He enjoyed showing his princess off and although she was never carried round the lot on the bike again she still went everywhere with him, usually perched high up, safe on his massive shoulders, “He was strong and powerful and nothing could hurt me up there. When he was around life was safe. Nothing and nobody could threaten my world. I was John Wayne’s daughter. Whenever he was home I crept into bed between him and my mother and lay listening to his peaceful snoring. It was just that he wasn’t there very often.”
After the success of The Searchers Duke’s bankability increased dramatically and in June 1956 he signed a deal with Twentieth Century-Fox that shocked the industry. He agreed to star in three movies over the next four years for $666,666 a picture, “I’m glad the producers were stupid. They won’t spend money to make new stars. They won’t take a chance on these new kids, but they’re more than willing to pay me a fortune.” He was grateful he had been given his chance when he was still a kid, and was sorry those days were gone. His own rise had exactly coincided with the great developments taking place in the industry. He would have preferred to see a healthy, continued growth, with the studios developing new stars, as he still tried to do at Batjac, but he accepted it was easier and safer for the big companies to spend their money on his services. He thought it was short-sighted of them to pay him a fortune for a few movies when they could have more wisely invested in new, cheaper talent. He was glad to be personally secure at last, but worried about the future of a business that faced immense competition from outside.
Rich, famous and powerful, he was now used to getting his own way in Hollywood. At home he remained less successful, “I wanted to be the perfect father and husband but it didn’t take long before all the old tensions and frustrations found their way back into my life.” Just because he had a new family to love his priorities hadn’t changed and, however hard he tried, he could never satisfy the needs of his family because he gave so much elsewhere.
In 1956, just after the birth of Aissa, more offers than ever were flooding in; he was a busy man. He spread himself thinly and gave what he could, when and where he could. The demands of the industry put an inevitable strain on his marriage but as long as Pilar was at his side Duke was content. He didn’t see why the arrival of the child he doted on should change things. He was passionately in love with them both and craved their company. He demanded their presence and found life tedious without them. At first Pilar gave in to his demands and took the baby and a traveling nanny along on location, but she felt increasingly unhappy following him around the world. She was torn by the dual demands he and the baby made on her. And he also began to face conflicting needs, those of his work and of his constant longing to be close to his family. The beginnings of cracks appeared. At the time he hardly noticed; he was so busy and so overwhelmed by love for his wife and daughter.
His restlessness invaded Pilar’s peace. He made his family feel lazy when they refused to get up to share the morning with him, and they began to avoid him instead. Pilar said, “It was like witnessing a miracle. His eyes popped open at four thirty every morning of his life. Once he was awake he had to get up, he simply couldn’t lie still. Unfortunately he also hated us all sleeping in and usually managed to drag everyone out by seven, bellowing at the top of his voice, “It’s time to get up! It‘s seven o‘clock in the morning! Come on!” Sometimes we pretended to be asleep, but we didn’t want to bruise him by telling him to go away or to stop doing it. On the whole it was easier to get up than to hurt him. Anyone whose life he touched in any way, found him such an electrifying personality that he completely overwhelmed them, particularly in the morning.”
The power of his presence filled and dominated the lives of his family when he was home, but left them empty and alone when he went away, the contrast of his coming and going was great; when he was there he was everything to them, and when he went he left a
void that nothing filled until he came home. He came and went at will, passing through their lives and making demands which none of them had the energy to fulfil, and though they missed him desperately when he went, it was also the only peaceful time they knew. Aissa suffered the most, “When I knew he was going to be gone before morning I cried bitterly. He always tried to comfort me, “Every night I’m gone Honey, I want you to look at the stars. Wherever I am, I’ll look at them too. And no matter how far apart we are, we’ll know we’ve looked at the same stars.” I did that every night he was away. I longed for him to come home and make me feel safe again.”
In 1957 when Aissa was still a baby he prepared to go off on location to make Legend of the Lost, a film involving two months of location work at an isolated oasis in the Sahara Desert, followed by a further twelve weeks shooting in Rome. He was going to be away from January to August. Henry Hathaway, the producer and director, had decided to shoot most of the film four hundred miles from Tripoli. Everyone, including the stars, were to sleep in tents. There were no radios or telephones available and there was just one toilet for the whole cast and crew. As Duke packed his bags and prepared to leave he told Pilar he wanted her and Aissa to accompany him, “It’s going to be fun sleeping out on the desert in a tent. Please come with me.” He was upset to find she did not think it was such a good idea, he was hurt by her rejection and began shouting that he wanted her there, that he was counting on her, “Damn it Pilar, you are my wife. The nurse is perfectly capable of taking care of Aissa, and I need you with me!” Pilar stood her ground in the face of his anger but she finally agreed to meet him in Rome for the last twelve weeks of production.
A few weeks into shooting Pilar received an urgent cable, “Please hurry here. I need you. I love you. Duke.” She was filled with fear, something must have happened to him, he was a man of his word and they had made a deal, he was unlikely to go back on their agreement unless something serious had happened to him. He was always getting hurt during filming, “battered” as he called it, he took no care of himself as he struggled to make the action look realistic, and he still performed most of his own stunts. She was terrified something awful must have happened, and in fact he had hurt his foot and ankle and was hobbling around on crutches when he sent the message… but that wasn’t why he sent it.
She rushed to join him in Africa. All through the flight she prayed he was alright, and as soon as she descended from the light aircraft felt relief to see him waiting for her on the landing strip. She rushed headlong into open arms, thanking God he was at least able to stand up. When she asked him what had happened he smiled, “I just wanted you here so you could see the sunsets with me.” She was furious, but he just laughed and turned on the charm until she agreed to stay with him and meet up with Aissa later in Rome, “The sunsets were spectacular, and he did everything he could to show me how happy I made him, but I was anxious to get home.” Nothing he said could dispel her growing unease or anger. He wouldn’t be drawn into an argument and he refused to admit there was a problem; he had wanted her, and she was there… he didn’t have a problem; the fact that she was unhappy didn’t concern him then. She found it difficult to sleep in Africa, it was hot, uncomfortable, but mostly she worried about leaving Aissa. A doctor prescribed sleeping pills.
Duke was a massive star, a banker, his co-star Sophia Loren was a sex goddess, Rossano Brazzi a huge European star, the film was being directed by one of Duke’s personal favorites, Henry Hathaway, and his own production company, Batjac, was involved. Nothing rescued it at box-office. It generated a small profit but nothing like the amount Duke had anticipated. His previous film Wings of Eagles, had also fared poorly and he was facing a situation he had never, even as a B-movie star, come across before, back-to-back disappointments. Complicating things further, Howard Hughes had finally released the film, Jet Pilot, which Duke had worked on many years previously. It was savaged by the critics. Despite all his success he was no more immune from the Hollywood syndrome of insecurity than anyone else. He was anxious and set off to Japan to begin work on the first of the films in the Twentieth Century Fox deal a worried man. If The Barbarian and The Geisha failed it would be disastrous. He liked to give value for money, he wanted his fans to enjoy his work; repeated failures implied they weren’t.
The new film, directed by John Huston, fell far short of Duke’s own expectations and he complained, “The experience was one of the worst in my career.” When he was first introduced to Huston he was still full of expectation and hope but within days had come to loath the director. The feeling was entirely mutual. Huston hated Duke’s politics, hated the John Wayne phenomenon, hated the man and he spent his entire time in Japan going out of his way to annoy his star. Duke, with great difficulty but complete professionalism, stayed calm and refused to rise to the bait.
Huston had himself chosen Duke to play Townsend Harris, the first American Consul to Japan, intending to “let loose” the huge actor against the beauty of Japan. But Duke was never happy working in an unstructured way, he relied on his director more than most and was used to the dictatorial Ford, Hathaway and Hawks, none of whom would let loose an actor for even a second of a film. He wrote to Pilar, who had refused to go with him to Japan, “I have done everything but stand on my head to get near this man’s thinking. I just have to hope and pray that he’s good.”
She recognized the note of pleading and unhappiness and finally gave in, setting out to join him just before Christmas, after he confessed, “I can’t work with him.” He believed a director should direct, not spend valuable production time out searching the streets for arts and crafts. To make matters worse, the female lead was a real geisha who spent her nights with Huston. They both arrived on set late every morning; a cardinal sin in Duke’s eyes who was intensely irritated. He might have tolerated another man’s weakness but he could never forgive Huston for giving him no chance to produce any kind of performance himself. This director, the complete opposite to the ones Duke so admired, continually rewrote the script and often worked without one. Whenever Duke asked to see the next day’s lines he was told to go away and absorb the beauty of the area, and stop worrying about the part, “You can improvise.” Duke couldn’t work like that, mastering lines came easy, he liked to feel prepared and to know his moves and marks. He detested Huston, “He can quote chapter and verse on the price of a god-damned piece of Japanese porcelain, but he won’t tell me how he wants me to do a scene. It’s a little frustrating.”
For the first time since he had been making cheap westerns he had no idea how the film was going to look. When he saw the final cut he acknowledged its beauty but knew it was not going to be a good vehicle for him, “There wasn’t enough action in it.” Long before its release he worried it would go bust, and that, together with the other poor films he had been involved in lately, would probably mean it was the one that marked the end of his career. A less popular star would have been finished long before and his worries were well founded. In fact it broke even but gave him his fourth box-office disappointment in a row. Huston blamed him for the picture’s failure, saying Duke made changes to it that he had not wanted. Duke offered a stinging retort, “Considering he never told me at any point what he did want, I consider his comments unfair.”
The more he worried about his future the more he alienated an already fretful Pilar. She had gone to spend a few weeks with him in Japan but she missed Aissa all the time and called home repeatedly to check she was alright. Eventually Duke suggested it might be better if she went home. She hadn’t been back long when she was woken from a deep sleep by Blackie’s furious barking. The house was on fire and by the time she snatched Aissa up, much of the second story of the house was engulfed in flames. Before fleeing with the baby tucked under her arm, Pilar grabbed Duke’s old cavalry hat. That was pretty much all that was saved and by the time the fire department arrived most of the first floor had gone and everything, including their wonderful bed, had been lost to the flames.
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bsp; Ward Bond raced over as soon as he heard the news and took her, Aissa and Blackie next door to friend and make-up artist, Web Overlander’s house. Pilar telephoned Duke but kept the call brief, knowing he couldn’t break off filming, no matter what had happened at home and she asked, matter-of-factly, “How do you like single story houses?”
He and Pilar had often laughed about her constant lament, “I have nothing to wear” when her cupboards were bursting at the seams. Now, in response to the call, Duke sent her a blank cheque and a note, “For the girl who really has nothing to wear.” It was his way of telling her he loved her and badly wanted to be there for her. He was still having tremendous difficulty with Huston and he wanted to get home at the earliest opportunity. Because he was unhappy at work for the first time, because of the upset of the fire, and the thought of what might have been, because he found himself thinking about Pilar all day long, he stopped to analyze his own feelings, also for the first time. He wondered at the kind of love he now felt, deeper and more intense than anything he had ever known before, and the fire, traumatic though it was for Pilar, was also a life-altering event for him. The next day he made a highly emotional call his wife to talk things over. The cheque had been a jokey thing to calm his own nerves, but he was scared and he sank into a deep depression. Pilar did her best to reassure him. “No one’s been hurt and the house can be restored.”
He was less sure about his career. At fifty he no longer felt at ease playing the romantic lead, and he needed an exceptional film now to repair the damage done by the series of flops. People wouldn’t notice the rubbish he had been turning out with such annoying regularity once another good one turned up. He accepted he was at his best when he had no control over either script or direction, and that all his better work was done for the tough directors, and when Howard Hawks approached him with another Western, he jumped at the chance. He needed to re-invent his image and to start playing character roles that could carry him into a dignified old age; find a new persona that would allow him to remain a real man, but a real fifty year old man. Hawks’ Rio Bravo provided exactly the vehicle he was looking for and his part in it became the one that opened the door to all his future roles.