TRUE GRIT
In an early scene in True Grit, released in 1969, produced by Hal B. Wallis and directed by Henry Hathaway, the good people of an Arkansas town are singing “Amazing Grace” as they watch a public hanging of three hapless miscreants. It’s a scene that could have been staged by John Ford, except that the beloved gospel is used as the backdrop of a grim scene rather than to celebrate the virtues of community.
Duke read the galleys of True Grit, Charles Portis’s lively 1968 novel, and knew immediately that U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn was a role he could inhabit. The irascible, over-the-hill, heavy-drinking, one-eyed marshal seemed to combine the most salient traits of John Ford and John Wayne, even allowing Duke to wear a black eye patch like his hero and mentor and use his age and bulky weight to his advantage. Even better, it had a comic dimension that gave him a chance to make fun of his macho image, now set in bronze and increasingly burdensome as he grew too old, and too ill, to live up to the demanding responsibilities of “being John Wayne.” Instead, Duke relished playing a Falstaffian figure—blustery, comic, fat—but one with undisputed courage who still possesses the skill, when needed, to take down an outlaw gang.
Through Batjac, he made an offer to Portis to buy the film rights for $300,000, but he was too late; producer Hal Wallis had already snapped them up and had hired another tough-guy director, Henry Hathaway, with whom Duke had worked on five previous films, beginning with The Shepherd of the Hills in 1941.
At sixty-one, Duke was arguably too old for the role of Rooster Cogburn, a fortyish U.S. marshal, so Charles Portis didn’t think John Wayne was right for the part. But Duke really wanted it. Not only did he admire Portis’s novel, but he was blown away by Marguerite Roberts’s script—which preserves much of the novel’s saucy dialogue—considering it the best screenplay he had ever read. One of the pleasures of Portis’s novel is his use of the poetic rhythms and parable-heavy language of the King James Bible, adding an authentic, nineteenth-century feel to the dialogue. “I won’t put a thief into my mouth to steal my wits,” young Mattie Ross, played by Kim Darby, tells Rooster Cogburn when he offers her a drink. When Mattie explains why it has fallen to her to hire Cogburn to avenge her father’s murder, she says, “My mother’s indecisive and hobbled by grief.”
Born in Colorado, Roberts liked writing scenes for tough guys. “I was weaned on stories about gunfighters and their doings,” she said, “and I know all the lingo, too. My grandfather came West as far as Colorado by covered wagon. He was a sheriff in the state’s wildest days.” “There was a kind of beauty that was different from most Westerns,” Wayne later said. “My part was as beautifully written a thing as I’ve ever read. And the girl’s part was the best part I ever read in my whole life.” Luckily for Duke, Hal Wallis and Henry Hathaway both wanted him in the role, and they signed him.
It was ironic, perhaps, given Duke’s outspoken conservative politics, that he fell so in love with Marguerite Roberts’s screenplay. After a lucrative career as a screenwriter in the 1930s, she had been blacklisted when she and her husband, the writer John Sanford, who was briefly a member of the Communist Party, had refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not only did Duke put aside his right-wing views, but he made sure the screenplay was accepted and billed under her name.
True Grit’s mix of adventure, drama, and comedy would prove irresistible to the public, right down to the pairing of a tough, cranky old coot, Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, with Mattie Ross, a feisty fourteen-year-old girl who comes to town from her family’s farm in Yell County, Arkansas, to track down her father’s killer. She proves to be Cogburn’s match in many ways, exhibiting as much courage, savvy, and persistence as the seasoned pursuer of miscreants, who spends his off time drinking corn whiskey on a broken-down daybed in a Chinese immigrant’s dingy store, shooting rats with his Peacemaker.
Mattie hires Rooster Cogburn, the toughest U.S. marshal in the land, who, she believes, has “true grit,” to go after Tom Chaney, the man who gunned down her father. “I won’t rest until Tom Chaney is barking in hell!” she tells Cogburn. Chaney, played with whiny self-pity by the veteran actor Jeff Corey, has hightailed it out to Indian Territory to join up with “Lucky” Ned Pepper’s gang of outlaws, beyond the arm of the law but within the boundary-crossing grasp of Marshal Cogburn. A young Robert Duvall plays Ned Pepper, and Dennis Hopper plays Moon, one of the unfortunate, but oddly eloquent, members of Ned Pepper’s gang. In his final scene, as he lies dying on the dirt floor of a dugout where the Pepper gang is about to rendezvous, Moon says with his last breath, “I am bleeding buckets! I am gone. Send the news to my brother, George Garrett. He is a Methodist circuit rider in South Texas. You can write care of the district supervisor in Austin….I will meet him later walking the streets of Glory!”
True Grit’s cast is all the more remarkable considering who passed on various roles. Elvis Presley—Elvis Presley!—was offered the role of a bumptious Texas Ranger named La Boeuf, who has been on Chaney’s trail for some time; Chaney has a price on his head for the murder of a Texas senator, so La Boeuf joins forces with Cogburn and Mattie, against Mattie’s wishes. But Elvis Presley’s agent demanded that he be given top billing over John Wayne, and because that wasn’t going to happen, the part went to a newcomer to the movie business, one of the most popular country-western singers of the day, Glen Campbell. Hathaway, however, resented that bit of casting, feeling it was done just to guarantee a hit for the movie’s title song. Composed by Elmer Bernstein with lyrics by Don Black, “True Grit” was indeed nominated for the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Song.
Duke as the Falstaffian Rooster Cogburn, with Kim Darby as Mattie, in True Grit, 1969. Duke manages to send up his own image, with a nod toward Ford by donning an eye patch.
For the bold and strong-minded role of Mattie Ross, Mia Farrow was the director’s first choice, until Robert Mitchum, who had just worked with the actress in Secret Ceremony, convinced Farrow that Henry Hathaway would prove too ornery a director for her. Duke suggested another singer with no acting experience—the tragic Karen Carpenter, an early sufferer of anorexia—and he even wanted his daughter Aissa to be considered for the part, but Wallis rejected those ideas. The role was then offered to two delicate blondes, Tuesday Weld and Sondra Locke, both of whom turned it down. So a relative unknown, Kim Darby, was cast as Mattie, and her tomboyish appearance and unswerving gaze suited her well for the part of the girl from Yell County who won’t take no for an answer and who can bully Marshal Cogburn into doing her bidding. Her weapons? Besides the clumsy, misfiring Colt Dragoon left to her by her murdered father, she has native wit, a sharp tongue, courage, and unstoppable resolve. In short, she has true grit, the quality she most admires. “My God, she reminds me of me,” Rooster Cogburn exclaims after Mattie crosses a river on the back of her Texas pony, Little Blackie, so as not to be left behind.
If Mattie is equal to Marshal Cogburn in the possession of grit—and she is—does Cogburn mentor her? After all, she provides the funds, the motive, and the resolve to go after her prey, and she proves herself an able companion on the trail. Indeed, she already has a grown-up mind and a formed character, and she doesn’t need nurturing. In truth, Cogburn—though decades older in years and experience—doesn’t mentor her as much as he protects her, even to the point of going to extreme measures to save her life.
Duke won his only Academy Award for True Grit.
After initially siding with La Boeuf against Mattie, whom they both consider a liability on the trail of a killer, Cogburn swings around to her side against the interloping Texas Ranger. The turning point arrives when La Boeuf spanks Mattie for her insolence and to punish her for tagging along, and Cogburn stops the Texas Ranger, pointing out that he’s enjoying it too much. At that point, any paternal instincts Cogburn has left in him after the disintegration of his own family years earlier, including the loss of a son, kick in. From then on, the cranky old marshal will contin
ue to squabble with Mattie but will keep an eye out to protect her, not just from La Boeuf, but from Ned Pepper’s gang.
In the climactic scene, after Mattie falls into a pit of rattlesnakes and is bitten by one of them, Rooster Cogburn takes her onto the back of her stalwart pony and rides day and night until the pony collapses under them. But they do reach an Indian doctor who saves her life, though in the novel, and in the 2010 remake by Joel and Ethan Coen, her arm is amputated.
In the movie’s final scene, Cogburn visits Mattie on her family’s farm in Yell County, where Mattie has laid out a place for him in the Ross family graveyard. He has become her family—a father figure to a fatherless girl—and in a final recognition of both his obsolescence as a cowboy hero and his tough endurance, he jumps his horse over a four-rail fence and tells Mattie to “come and see a fat man ride.” Against all odds and his own encroaching decrepitude, not only has he triumphed in wiping out the outlaw Ned Pepper’s gang and in bringing about the death of Tom Chaney—shot by a dying La Boeuf to save Mattie’s and Cogburn’s lives—but, more important, he has endured.
It was a triumphant role, and for the first time in a career spanning five decades, John Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor, beating out such competition as Richard Burton for Anne of the Thousand Days. “Wow! If I’d known what I know now, I’d have put a patch on my eye thirty-five years ago,” Duke famously said.
In 2011, the great Western novelist Larry McMurtry teamed up with his screen-writing partner Diana Ossana, with whom he co-wrote Brokeback Mountain, to talk about Henry Hathaway’s 1969 True Grit and the Coen brothers’ remake, which starred Jeff Bridges in Duke’s role, Matt Damon as La Boeuf, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, and Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney. They concluded that “the story of True Grit is mainly a study of loyalty. Reluctant loyalty, it is true, but loyalty nonetheless.” There’s no clearer assertion that the idea of the reluctant hero, introduced in Stagecoach, has come full circle thirty years later. Rooster Cogburn acknowledges this himself, in his own colorful way: “I’m a foolish old man who’s been drawn into a wild goose chase by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop.”
THE COWBOYS
The Cowboys, a 1972 Warner Bros. Western directed by Mark Rydell, was made three years after True Grit. Again, Duke lobbied for the role of Wil Andersen, an aging rancher whose cowhands have deserted him to chase a gold rush, forcing him to recruit and train the only help he can find for a four-hundred-mile cattle drive—a handful of schoolboys. George C. Scott was Rydell’s first choice, and he was reluctant to cast Wayne because of their radically different politics and his doubts about Duke’s health. Rydell, a onetime actor from the Bronx who had come up through the Actors Studio in New York, described himself as a liberal, and he was leery of Duke’s right-wing views; it was only four years after John Wayne’s polemical The Green Berets, which forcefully argued for America’s continued involvement in Vietnam. But Rydell met with Duke in Durango, Mexico, where the actor was filming Big Jake, a Batjac production under the helm of his son Michael.
Rydell was surprised by Duke’s humility and his eagerness to take on the role. “The political John Wayne never showed up,” recalled Roscoe Lee Browne, who played Jebediah Nightlinger, the eloquent and loquacious trail cook in The Cowboys. As if he were a novice actor, Duke asked Rydell for the part by saying, “If you give me the chance, I’ll do my best work.”
“He wanted it,” Rydell recalled later, and despite his initial misgivings he never regretted the chance to work with the Hollywood legend. However, he did rather relish the fact that Sarah Cunningham, the actress who played Annie, Wil Andersen’s wife, had been blacklisted by Hollywood, a practice Duke had tacitly supported. This was her first role since being blacklisted in 1955, but if Duke had any idea about her past, he didn’t let on. Or perhaps, just as he had championed Marguerite Roberts’s screenplay adaptation of True Grit, he knew now to keep his politics out of his working life.
In addition to Sarah Cunningham and Roscoe Lee Browne, Rydell surrounded Duke with a cast of superb, Actors Studio–trained actors, including Bruce Dern as the magnificently weaselly villain and ex-con Asa Watts, who tries to steal Andersen’s herd after being turned down as a cowhand; and Colleen Dewhurst as a warm and earthy madam, corralling a wagonload of impossibly blond and beautiful young prostitutes, with whom at least one man on the cattle drive—the trail cook Nightlinger—will find pleasure. Nightlinger makes it clear, though, that the women are off-limits to the boys. Added to this stellar, mostly East Coast roster of actors was an old Hollywood friend of Duke’s, the folksy character actor Slim Pickens.
Duke felt challenged by the Method-trained actors. As in The Big Trail, when he was a neophyte set among theatrically trained easterners, and in Red River, when he played opposite Monty Clift, one of the greatest Method actors to come out of the Actors Studio, Duke knew he had to hold his own against performers with different, and deeper, training than his on-the-job Hollywood-star school of acting. But he rose to the occasion. “He loved being pushed, he loved being challenged,” Rydell remembered. He was won over by Duke’s cooperation and work ethic. “John Wayne was a very impressive figure,” he later said. “He had solidity, power, commitment. He was determined to act brilliantly in the picture…he was challenged by the actors who surrounded him. He didn’t have that training, but he was to be as good as the best of them.”
Rydell also noticed that Duke was far more sensitive and erudite than his image would have one believe. He once overheard Duke and Roscoe Lee Browne—a Shakespearean actor and poet as well as a product of the Actors Studio—exchanging quotations from poems by Shelley and Keats. Ultimately, according to Rydell, Duke “felt he raised his acting level ten times to work with Studio-trained actors.”
But at one point during production, Rydell yelled at Duke, embarrassing him in front of the entire cast and crew, when Duke rode too soon into a difficult scene that had been set up involving hundreds of cattle. Rydell later fretted that he would be fired for his outburst. But Duke invited him to dinner and told him that he had reminded him of Ford. “Jack Ford treated me like that,” he reassured his director, who was just forty-two at the time. From that point on, Duke called the younger man “sir” and made it clear that he considered the director his boss, worthy of respect. “I was very touched and impressed by that,” recalled Rydell.
After being deserted by his former cowhands, Duke’s Wil Andersen describes his dilemma to his friend Anse, played by the former rodeo cowboy Slim Pickens. What can he do when there are no men left to drive his cattle to market? Anse reminds Wil that he himself had made his first cattle drive at the age of thirteen, so Wil goes to the only place left to find cowboys who can possibly do the job—a one-room schoolhouse where he will recruit schoolboys for the drive. One of the first things he tells the boys, who range in age from nine to fifteen, is “I’m a man and you’re boys,” emphasizing that they will be cowboys, taking their orders from him.
Of the eleven actors hired to play the recruited cowboys, six were what Rydell described as “country boys” who had already been in rodeos. The rest were actors who had to learn how to ride and rope, just as the rodeo boys had to learn how to act—a more difficult task, Rydell noted. A few of the standouts were Robert Carradine, who played Slim Honeycutt, the most senior of the schoolhouse group at fifteen; Sean Kelly as Stuttering Bob; Clay O’Brien Cooper as Hardy Fimps, one of the “country boys” who would grow up to earn seven rodeo world championships; Mike Pyeatt as the frightened Homer Weems, who is terrorized by the predator Asa Watts; and A. Martinez as an older boy called Cimarron.
Cimarron is the most troubled and the most interesting of the crew of young cowboys, the only one not recruited from the prairie schoolhouse. Part Native American, rejected by both white and Indian society, he calls himself “a mistake of nature,” yet he already has the appearance and self-possession of a young man. An eternal outsider, Cimarron seethes with anger and resentment, threatening to destabiliz
e the group of would-be wranglers and posing a threat to Andersen’s authority. Though he outrides and outropes the rest of the boys, he is summarily rejected after instigating a knock-down, drag-out fight with Slim. Later he will be allowed back into the fold and—through Andersen’s belief in him—will learn to harness his temper and master himself.
In an era when boys wanted to grow up and become men, Rydell recalled, the young actors were “thrilled to have the opportunity to appear alongside John Wayne,” who was often the favorite actor of their fathers and even grandfathers. One of the boys, the future rodeo star Clay O’Brien Cooper, said that John Wayne up there on his horse seemed to have “an aura around him, a kind of white light.”
What must have surprised them was the degree to which the most famous Hollywood actor of their day genuinely looked after the boys, mentoring them, just as his character, Wil Andersen, mentors his young posse throughout the picture. Duke would later describe taking on that role as “the greatest experience of my life.” Nurturing and teaching the young were important to him, in life and in art, and he was concerned about and protective of the young cast. “He was very paternal and very loving,” said Rydell. “Wayne didn’t pull back. He loved being a father, and he was a father to [those] boys…he loved it.”
After he is stalked, robbed, beaten, and shot in the back by Watts, Wil Andersen’s dying words to the young boys he’s trained who will now carry on without him are “Every man wants his children to be better than he was. You are. I’m proud of you”—words so many sons and daughters long to hear from their fathers and, too often, do not. Having already buried his own two sons, who are revealed to have been a disappointment to him, Andersen gets a second chance at fatherhood by mentoring these eleven boys. When he is laid to rest on a lonely mesa, his epitaph reads,
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