by C McGivern
The nomination revived interest in him, and offers of work started flooding in again although he had already agreed to make Rio Lobo with old friend Howard Hawks. He signed a contract to work on it before even seeing the script because it gave him another chance to work with Hawks and Yakima Canutt. Duke sensed he was going to fall at the final hurdle, so he couldn’t afford to relax. As long as he had a project he had to keep going and he scanned every script that came his way.
On April 13 1970 filming on Rio Lobo was well under way, and he had to fly into Los Angeles from location, accompanied by make-up man Dave Grayson, for the award ceremony. Pilar had travelled up from Newport and found a nervous wreck waiting to meet her. He rambled fretfully for hours, telling her he was sure it would be Burton’s night. The more he talked, the more he seemed to accept, and prepare himself for ultimate disappointment.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were staying at the same hotel as the Waynes, and on the morning of the ceremony Duke and Elizabeth Taylor set off early together to rehearse their part of the show. He tried to appear calm and was unusually quiet as he attempted to distance himself from all the hype and also from the hope that somehow refused to be extinguished. Pilar arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion later in the afternoon and once Duke spotted her he couldn’t suppress his excitement any longer, he ran toward her and held onto her tightly, taking comfort in her presence.
When they returned in the evening for the ceremony he heard the mighty roar of approval from waiting fans as they drove up and the warmth of the welcome shocked him. He said nothing but clutched his wife’s hand tightly. She knew from the pressure just how nervous he was and during the ceremony her fingers turned white and numb. When she glanced up at him though she was amazed to see not the slightest sign of nerves on his face, he looked supremely confident, a man at ease; only her crushed hand belied the performance. He let go of her briefly to go to take part in the early presentations. When he returned he whispered to her that he could hardly breathe, “My heart is pumping so wildly.” Barbra Streisand was presenting the Best Actor award, the whole audience silently waited for her announcement, and Duke wasn’t the only person sitting with baited breath. He sat completely rigid as she opened the envelope, stared at the name of the winner for some time, then smiled, “And the winner is John Wayne for True Grit.”
He was surprised, shocked, and for some time remained frozen in his seat. He licked dry lips before standing up to pull his jacket together and moving swiftly down toward the stage. When he embraced the delighted Streisand, his eyes brimmed over and he was red-faced and embarrassed. Now all the world knew that the sentimental Duke could be reduced to tears, and though many were shocked to see Big John Wayne crying like a baby, Pilar was not at all surprised at his reaction. He hadn’t prepared a speech and he whispered to Streisand “Beginners luck,” before turning to face the audience to speak straight from the heart. He wiped a hand across his eyes to clear the tears and gasped, “Wow. If I’d known that, I’d have put on that eye patch thirty five years ago.” The craggy voice broke, he brushed more tears away, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m no stranger to this podium. I’ve come up here and picked up these beautiful golden men before-but always for a friend. One night I picked up two; one for Admiral John Ford and one for our beloved Gary Cooper. I was very clever and witty that night -the envy of Bob Hope. But tonight I don’t feel very clever, very witty. I feel grateful, very humble and I owe thanks to many, many people. I want to thank the members of the Academy. To all you people who are watching on television, thank you for taking such a warm interest in our glorious industry. Good night.” Simple, to the point and to those fans who had stood loyally by him through thick and thin, keeping faith with him despite his politics and his critics. He was honored by them and by the industry, and he wasn’t too proud to say so.
Hollywood rose as an entity to roar their approval of the man who had loved their “glorious industry” so much that nothing had ever made him turn his back on it. All the setbacks, old antagonisms, and political hatred were washed away as the audience refused to sit down and continued cheering long after he had hurried backstage, clutching his Oscar, to join his family.
He and Pilar were stopped by Chicago Sun Times reporter, Irv Kupcinet as they stepped outside into the night air. In one of Pilar’s rare TV appearances she was asked if she had been nervous, “I think I lost about seven pounds the last two days. Now that it’s all over, I’m just so delighted.” Duke put his arm around her and strode off toward a waiting car. Inside, it wasn’t Duke who held the prized trophy, but Ethan, who pretended to be a soldier, shooting at the crowds with it. When they got back to the hotel Pilar and the Burtons started the celebrations without the winner who spent the next two hours with an eager Press, posing for pictures, answering their questions politely. He was ready for a drink when he finally arrived at his own party. As he walked in he overheard Burton complaining that he should have won the Oscar. Duke placed it in his hands, “You’re right, you should have won this, not me.” Burton handed it back, shaking his head, and the serious drinking got under way, Duke had a lot of catching up to do.
The following morning he had to get straight back to location to carry on filming. When Dave Grayson went to pick him up to take him to the airport he found a happy, smiling Duke, still very drunk from the night before. He hadn’t even been to bed but he told Grayson, “I couldn’t feel any better than I do right now.” As soon as they landed in Tuscon he telephoned Pilar to make sure she and the kids had arrived home safely, then he asked in a tense whisper, “It really happened, didn’t it?” She confirmed that Oscar was waiting for him in his den.
When he drove onto the set in Old Tuscon Duke was a little hurt that everyone had their back toward him, no one waved to him or greeted him. The whole crew was standing around doing nothing, until, at a sign from Hawks, they turned to face him. Everyone, including Duke’s horse, had an eye patch on, someone waved a ten foot high replica of Oscar and another, a banner proclaiming, “We Love Ya, Duke.” He started crying again as the assembled cast and crew clapped and cheered.
When the exteriors were finished the cast returned to CBS studios in Hollywood to complete the interior shots, but Pilar didn’t join him in Los Angeles. He stayed alone at a hotel and confessed that once again he was having marital problems. After winning the Oscar he had asked her to go back to Tuscon with him to continue the celebrations. She refused, telling him she didn’t want to go on location anymore, “I’ve got a life of my own now Duke. I’ll see you when you get home.” It was a cruel, if long anticipated, blow to a man now armed with an Oscar and a clean bill of health.
Just six weeks after winning his coveted Oscar and finishing Rio Lobo, another heavy blow landed when he was hit by yet another death in the family. When he received the news that his brother had been struck down by lung cancer he took the death very badly, coming as it did only four months after his Mother had died. He had spent all his life with Bobby hanging on his shirt tails, as a child he had taken his little brother everywhere with him, and later he had carried him into the movie business with him. Bobby had never had any real real interest in the work but had always enjoyed the lifestyle that went with being John Wayne’s brother. Once again Duke was seen weeping uncontrollably at a funeral, “I didn’t do right by Bobby in bringing him into this business. He would have been happier if I’d bought him a hardware store. That would have been more meaningful than what I gave him.” But Robert had never complained about the easy and prosperous life his brother had provided. Bobby had loved Duke dearly, had always enjoyed his company, wherever Duke was Bobby had found fun and pleasure in his shadow. Duke had done fine for his little brother.
CHAPTER NINE
HOME IS THE HERO
“If I had my life over, I’d probably do everything I did. That’s not necessarily the right thing.”
“I enjoyed it all so damn much. A man just couldn’t have known so many dear people in one lifetime. I had one
helluva time. Out there doing the things that keep a man fit... Yeah... I had one hell of a good life.”
...Winning the Oscar put extra money in the bank and Pilar asked him again to retire on the back of his success and begin to take life easier. He was damaging his health by his insistence on carrying on but he had already told her he wouldn’t retire and, in the face of her opposition, he embarked on a whole series of films for Batjac in Durango. He finished making Rio Lobo, and then in quick succession Big Jake, The Cowboys, The Train Robbers and Cahill, US Marshal. He explained why he had to go to Durango, a place he described himself as really rough, “Look, when I started out things were different, there was less bureaucracy. We took a cameraman, a grip, a couple of assistants and we went out and made a picture. If there were no houses we’d get a tent, somebody’d go get the food and we’d survive alright. But now… well… the logistics are so different, so difficult. I can’t just go out and do it where it’s rough anymore. We can really only work in Mexico… some parts of Colorado or Arizona maybe. Then we get a shot set up and a plane goes over, and we all have to sit around for fifteen minutes waiting for the con trail to disappear. You don’t realize how much production time that wastes in a day… we have to work there now, or nowhere… have to go.”
And, in fact, he was at his happiest when he was roughing it. He yearned for the old days when movie making had been simpler, for the days when he had been one of the boys, chatting with Yak, sitting out under the stars drinking from a shared bottle, days when it had all been fun, “We never went out to make a classic. We tried to make the best picture we could with what we had to work with. We kind of captured companionship and we made the most of it. And it was delightful. These last few years everything has become built up so it’s hard to find locations like we used to, and if the locations are gone so too is the comradeship. If there’s a road to a location there’s a motel. We don’t live in tents and eat in a commissary anymore. And at night, everybody goes their separate ways. We’re losing the closeness we had.”
He told Pilar it was the only place he could make the movies he wanted to make, but he also enjoyed going there, it reminded him of times lost and gone forever. Dan Ford said, “I don’t know what drove him to work so hard to make so many bad movies. I think he just enjoyed the whole process, whether the picture was good or bad. He and my grandfather wanted to be on set, involved in the camaraderie. Making a movie is a grinding, difficult process and it feels so good when you have got it done.” But none of the Batjac Westerns he made down there did particularly well. Most scarcely broke even and, as each film struggled, it seemed the day he had been dreading for forty years had arrived. On the back of his greatest moment of triumph, his fans suddenly deserted him. In America The Godfather, The Exorcist and The Sting fared well as the youth culture, generated in the sixties and raised in an atmosphere of civil unrest, youth rebellion, Vietnam and drugs found new heroes. They had no connection with, and felt nothing for, frontier values. The morality of the western shoot-out meant very little to them and for the first time the John Wayne image seemed to have little to offer.
If he had been angry before, he now became engulfed by a rage he could scarcely contain. Much of his venom was directed against modern trends in the film world, a world from which he felt increasingly excluded and which was turning out westerns like The Wild Bunch which starred several of his friends including William Holden and Ben Johnson. In its graphically brutal opening scenes innocent women and children are slain by the “heroes.” Duke could see no marked difference between right and wrong, good or evil, and he hated it. He was disgusted with his friends and the producers for succumbing to modern trends.
He refused all compromise and instead became swamped in nostalgia, dwelling on the past and raging about how it had all been lost. He stubbornly clung to the image he had so lovingly created, refusing to bend with the times, increasingly rugged in his determination to make what he called, “The John Wayne Thing.” When he discussed films like the Wild Bunch he all but foamed at the mouth. The western mythology that he treasured and had so carefully nurtured over the years was being turned into a nightmare, “I haven’t seen many films lately that appeal to me. They’re so corrupt, or the approach is so cheap that I walk out after the first reel. These days they want to show it all to you, they want to shock you, and shock’s all right, but the whole picture shouldn’t be all sweat and hair.”
The anger boiled over at odd times, unexpectedly, and was often misdirected. P. Kluge, writing for Life, believed it was his own long association with the mythology of the nineteenth century which so alienated him from the twentieth century fascination with violence, “Once he gets going Wayne paces his study back and forth. He’s flushed and he’s breathing hard… for the first time you remember that he has just one lung. He’s filled with distress at how things are turning out… He leaves the study and paces the green carpet edging his patio swimming pool… you try to calm the roar… but there’s no stopping him… When we remember him, we will not see an aging movie cowboy pacing in anger at the edge of the Pacific. We will see him when he was a younger hero, on horseback, in the Monument Valley of thirty years ago. We will picture him a proud figure in a bright and clear landscape…”
Duke didn’t care about the message the new films were trying to put across, the violence was simply too graphic for his own taste, “Movies should be the stuff of illusion, and these pictures shatter all illusions and dreams, they leave no place for escape, no place for hope.”
He could often be found gazing out over the water of the harbor that lapped his back lawn, shaking his head mournfully, longing for a return to old fashioned values, and for some self-regulation from within the industry. He had been a supporter of the Production Code which tried to do just that, but when it was made defunct he commented pithily, “Men of bad taste were then allowed in to make pictures. Perhaps I’m just too set in my ways to ride with the times, but I hate what they are doing to the industry I love.” He believed the public would get tired of the fare pouring out of Hollywood and he deeply regretted that the Golden era was drawing to a close.
He had been away on location almost constantly after True Grit, always in isolated spots, always angry, increasingly withdrawn, lonely and unapproachable, very unlike his old self. He had a lot on his mind and he needed the support of his family. He was, Pilar recognized, sinking back into depression, hit hard by the deaths of his Mother and brother, by the horror that Hollywood had become, by the changing world over which he had no control. She could not reach him any longer and knew the man she had loved was lost to her. Too often he allowed his temper to run unchecked and it wasn’t only his wife who dreaded the sound of the Wayne roar. Once, on location, he called to Dave Grayson, his personal make-up man. He didn’t hear and carried on his conversation until Duke leapt up in fury and threw a chair across the set. Though it hadn’t been aimed, it struck Grayson on the arm and he charged over to confront his boss, “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Well, I called and you deliberately ignored me!” Duke said, as stunned by the incident as Grayson.
Duke, who could be perfectly charming when the need arose, broke the tension, joking “kiss me.” Although the incident blew over quickly Duke continued to apologize for his behavior for the next three days, suffering as much as those around him from his ungovernable temper. Grayson said, “Duke was a man of very contrary qualities, he was naturally humble, without a trace of vanity, and yet it was vital for him to look good in front of others. When I ignored his call, I guess he felt exposed to ridicule, suddenly undignified in front of the crew. He threw the chair to re-establish his macho image.” And Grayson might well have been right, the image was vital, but that didn’t stop him torturing himself for his behavior, “In apologetic mood, Duke was like a big, vulnerable kid, charming and ingratiating. He couldn’t hold a grudge against anyone for long, and those who really knew him couldn’t hold a grudge against him either.”
The a
rguments continued to rage around him as he left home to begin work on The Cowboys, a film in which he was starring but had no controlling interest. It promised to be a whole new experience as his co-stars were all young children, and he was to be brutally murdered two thirds of the way through it. He pleaded with Pilar to go along with him on what he expected to be a tough assignment. She told him she had other, more important things to do. He was hurt, disillusioned and bitterly disappointed, “Dammit, you’re my wife and your place is with me.”
During filming he made a brief visit home. Grayson said when he returned he was very distressed, “He looked as if he’d had enough whiskey to anesthetize a horse. He had obviously not had enough though because the tears fell unchecked as he sat at the mirror having his make-up applied. He was too drunk to bother trying to hide them.” He had been talking to his lawyer, arranging a maintenance settlement. He had fought against the inevitable for some time, it wasn’t in his nature to give up but the tears he cried on the set of The Cowboys told their own tale of personal defeat.
If he was forced to admit he had failed in his third marriage his career seemed to have picked up again. The movie-going public was looking for something different and he accepted he had to adapt again, without giving in to modern tastes entirely. He set about subtly changing his movie persona in the Mark Rydell film, a picture that was another turning point in his career.