WIL ANDERSEN
BELOVED HUSBAND
AND FATHER
Just as Rooster Cogburn is given a second chance to be a protective father to Mattie Ross in True Grit, so is Wil Andersen given that second chance, taking on the education of eleven boys who would be men.
Rydell filmed mostly on location in Colorado and New Mexico, and at one point John Ford made a visit to the shoot. Rydell was honored—“Anyone who’s ever directed knows how great he is”—and he noticed that Duke “followed him around like a pussycat. It was a wonderful thing to watch.” Ford witnessed the crucial scene in which Asa Watts battles it out with Andersen, shooting him several times in the back after a long and brutal fight. Ford was impressed with the scene, though Bruce Dern—terrifying even in real life, frightening the young actors with his intensity—would find it hard to get work for a while after being known as the man who killed John Wayne. No one could believe that a hero of Wayne’s stature could be killed by such a sniveling villain. “America will hate you for this,” Duke reportedly warned his co-star, to which Bruce Dern replied, “Yeah, but they’ll love me in Berkeley.”
As much as he loved the experience and the role of Wil Andersen, it was a physically demanding shoot. Duke did many of his own stunts, as he had in True Grit, regardless of his compromised physical condition after the cancer operation. “It was hard on him,” Rydell said, and at the time he wasn’t aware that he was endangering his lead actor, who had trouble breathing at twelve thousand feet above sea level. Staging the brutal fight with Bruce Dern was particularly difficult, and it took two days to film.
Critical reception of The Cowboys was mixed. It was risky in the 1970s to show the death of a child—one of the cowboys is trampled to death—especially as the Vietnam War still raged. A number of critics complained that the film endorsed youth violence when the cowboys avenge Andersen’s death by outwitting and slaying Asa Watts and his cattle rustlers—all seventeen of them. Pauline Kael wrote scathingly in The New Yorker, “One could easily think that Warner Bros. and the director…were in the business of corrupting minors, because this movie is about how these schoolboys become men through learning the old-fashioned virtues of killing.” She’s particularly critical of “the way that people don’t die in clean kills but writhe in slow torture.” Yet, as Rydell has pointed out, The Cowboys was far less violent than Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, released only a week after True Grit three years earlier. Peckinpah sought to depict violent gunplay in a more realistic fashion than previous Westerns had; he also intended the bloodbaths to be cathartic to an audience numbed by television images of the Vietnam War. But audiences seemed to relish the violence in The Wild Bunch rather than find it horrifying, a fact that troubled him greatly. The bloody ballet of Peckinpah’s ode to the end of the independent-gunfighter era makes The Cowboys worthy of its PG-rated, family-friendly status by comparison.
In 1972’s The Cowboys, Wayne was as protective of his young fellow actors off camera as he was on-screen.
When asked if his movie promoted vigilantism, Rydell answered, “The picture has a legendary quality….It’s not topical; it’s about what it means to be a man and take responsibility for your actions.” He asserted that it was a heroic thing to avenge a father’s death and reclaim the stolen herd, especially at a time and in a place where there are “no police on the frontier.” “What can we do?” the boys ask Nightlinger after they’re stranded by Asa’s gang. “We can be men,” Roscoe answers, which has an added punch because, as the only black character in the movie, his mantle of full manhood has been particularly hard won—a fact dramatized in the film when Asa and his gang try, unsuccessfully, to lynch him.
There is one scene, however, that demonstrates an element of unintended cruelty. Wil Andersen berates Stuttering Bob when his stutter prevents him from calling for help when Slim Honeycutt nearly drowns. Andersen harshly blames the boy for Slim’s brush with death, criticizing him incessantly while the boy tries to brand Andersen “a son of a bitch” until—miraculously—the stutter vanishes. It’s a cringe-inducing moment in the picture, a scene in which Andersen shows himself to be a bully whose behavior would, in reality, likely have worsened the boy’s condition. Tough love always works in the movies but often misfires horrifically in real life.
Yet there is a grace note to the relentless urging of young boys to get up before dawn—“we’re burning daylight!”—ride and rope relentlessly throughout the day, and ultimately act like men. When Andersen sends the terrified Homer Weems to stand watch at night, not knowing that he has already been terrorized by Watts, Nightlinger questions Andersen’s judgment. In response, Andersen offers a kind of apology. “You think I was too rough on the boy?” he asks. “I can’t say I always decide right.” This Duke Wayne can admit he might be wrong, which is another important part of learning what it means to become a man.
Rydell, his disapproval of Duke’s right-wing political stance firmly in the rear-view mirror, came to respect and admire the aging actor. “Wayne loved the script and didn’t change anything. He was a great collaborator….He was the sweetest man.”
Four years later, Duke would have one more chance to play a similar role on-screen, in his final film, The Shootist.
8
Going West: Twilight of the Gods
I have a lust for…dignity.
—JOHN WAYNE
FINAL DAYS AND FAREWELLS
Liberty Valance was Ford’s last great Western, but it wasn’t his final turn at directing cowboys. He followed Valance up with How the West Was Won, a 1963 historical saga of western conquest he co-directed with George Marshall and Henry Hathaway, and the following year he co-produced and directed his last Western, Cheyenne Autumn, a sympathetic and thus revisionist depiction of the Cheyenne people and their mistreatment by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. “I’ve long wanted to do a story that tells the truth about them and not just a picture in which they’re chased by the cavalry,” he said. “I’ve killed more Indians than Custer. This is their side.”
But filming dragged on and on, well behind schedule, unusual for a John Ford movie, until Warner Bros. ordered him off the shoot. That plunged Ford into a fit of pique. He began drinking, something he never used to do while making a movie. Ben Johnson, whom he’d finally hired again after an eleven-year hiatus, said, “That’s when the whole thing fell apart. They sent another director up there to finish the job.”
Ford, who turned seventy in 1964, was just worn out. His penultimate film, 1965’s Young Cassidy, about the life of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, brought him back to his beloved Ireland, yet even there he did not return to form. He was pleased to return to Dublin to work on the film starring Rod Taylor, Julie Christie, and Maggie Smith, but Cheyenne Autumn seemed to have permanently broken his resolve never to drink while directing. Michael Killanin, Ford’s Irish friend and co-producer on The Quiet Man and Young Cassidy, spent time with Ford on location in Dublin and discovered bottles of Scotch stashed in Ford’s living quarters. Weakened by a bout of strep throat, drinking heavily, Ford returned to California, and the film was completed by his cinematographer, the distinguished Jack Cardiff. He nursed his desolation aboard the Araner, embittered by the lackluster reception of his recent films, his ill health, and his dwindling clout in the motion picture business. By this time he walked with a limp and was so hard of hearing that people had to shout to be heard. His marriage had finally deteriorated, with Mary talking about a separation, and the two of them occupying distant rooms of their house. And his contentious relationship with his only son, Patrick, who had worked with him on so many films, finally came to a breaking point. Ford was outraged when, in 1965, Pat asked him for money after the birth of his daughter, and the two never really spoke again. The poor reception of Cheyenne Autumn further dispirited him, and he sulked among the mementos and relics of his once illustrious and deeply satisfying career: a war bonnet from the Battle of Little Bighorn, Buffalo Bill Cody’s gloves, a black silver-mounted sad
dle.
Ford made his last picture, 7 Women, with MGM in 1966, and he viewed it as another way to rejuvenate his career, and perhaps a chance to be reunited with Kate Hepburn. This film celebrating the heroism of nurses captured in World War II was his only effort with a nearly all-woman cast. However, Hepburn was unavailable and Patricia Neal took her part, until she was felled by a devastating stroke while making the film and was replaced by Anne Bancroft. But Ford was tired, and he lost interest in the picture, telling his brother-in-law and co-producer, Bernard Smith, “Let’s do the goddamn thing. It’s no good, but let’s do it and get the hell out.”
After the poor reception of 7 Women, Ford stopped getting offers to work. He flew to Honolulu to lick his wounds, depressed and often drunk. Back home in Bel Air, he holed up in his bedroom, where he drank, watched TV, and read. News of Duke Wayne’s lung cancer, diagnosed in 1964, stunned him, and he visited his former mentee at Good Samaritan Hospital, reliving the good old days with Pilar.
In 1971, Ford was diagnosed with inoperable abdominal cancer. Facing up to the bitter news, Jack and Mary Ford sold their home in Los Angeles and moved to a five-bedroom Spanish-style house on Old Prospector Trail in Palm Desert so he could be closer to the Eisenhower Hospital, where he would undergo treatment. As before, the two resided in opposite wings, though they became closer in the final months of Ford’s life. Filmdom showered honors on his illustrious career, such as the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion Award and the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, while at the same time continuing to make the kinds of movies that Jack Ford hated, with graphic sex scenes that he particularly loathed. “I don’t like porn,” he announced when asked if he’d seen Midnight Cowboy. “These easy, liberal movies. A lot of junk. I don’t know where they’re going. They don’t either”—this from a man who had once been considered a social Democrat. Acclaim came from beyond the film industry; President Nixon awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor he felt paled beside being made a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, the institution he loved far more than Hollywood.
But the end had finally come for old Jack Ford. Fighting cancer, weak and emaciated, Ford received a string of friends in the final three weeks of his life who had come by to say their farewells. Director William Wyler and veteran film editor Robert Parrish, who had been a member of Ford’s Field Photographic Branch, came, as did Peter Bogdanovich and Kate Hepburn. Bogdanovich was shocked at how gaunt and old Ford looked. Ben Johnson, lately restored to the Old Man’s graces, came to his deathbed, and Howard Hawks—Ford’s good friend, who lived in Palm Desert and who had shown him what John Wayne was capable of in Red River—visited often.
Ford asked to see Duke, who rushed to his side. Losing Ford was like losing his father all over again—a much tougher, meaner, yet idealized father at whose hands Duke had both suffered and prospered. Yet when he arrived, Ford sarcastically said, “Come for the death watch, Duke?”
If he was taken aback by that gruff question, he didn’t show it. He was used to navigating Jack Ford’s roughness. “Hell, no. You’re the anchor. You’ll bury us all,” Duke reportedly answered.
When Kate Hepburn arrived, Dan Ford, the director’s grandson, had a tape recorder on hand to capture the Old Man’s last words. Instead, Dan recorded his grandfather’s conversation with Hepburn as she sat with him and reminisced. At one point Ford apparently asked Dan to turn off the recorder while he spoke privately with the actress he so greatly admired, but it stayed on, recording their last words together. Ford’s voice unmistakably says to Hepburn, “I love you,” a shocking utterance from the gruff, tormented man who had relegated the majority of his sentiment to his moving pictures.
Curiously, it was Woody Strode who remained with Ford for his final six hours as the old director slipped into a coma and passed away at 6:00 p.m. on August 31, 1973. Barbara was nursing her father at the end because Mary, crippled by Parkinson’s at that point, was too incapacitated. Strode later described how he and Barbara draped an American flag over Ford’s body and toasted him with two glasses of brandy, which they then tossed into the fireplace, shattering them.
A few days after Ford’s death, Kate Hepburn was interviewed at length on The Dick Cavett Show. She talked about how Jack Ford had given Spencer Tracy his start in the movies and what a canny director he was, though life had been hard for him. “He was Irish,” she said, “and the Irish have such great imaginations that it’s hard for them to live in the world.” Hepburn concluded, “Jack Ford died like [a] gentlem[a]n, with great courage.”
“FEO, FUERTE Y FORMAL”
Spanish for “ugly, strong, and dignified,” this is the motto Duke wanted engraved as his epitaph, and it well describes John Bernard Books, the dying gunman Duke played in his final film, The Shootist, made in 1976, three years before his own death from cancer. Based on the legendary Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin, who once shot a man for snoring, from a novel by the popular Western writer Glendon Swarthout, it co-starred Lauren Bacall and Ron Howard and was directed by Don Siegel, best known for the classic 1956 sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and for five Clint Eastwood films, including Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz.
Swarthout found the term “shootist” in a newspaper clipping from the 1880s that used the word to describe men who lived by the gun, a synonym for “gunman,” “man killer,” and “assassin.” Books is identified as “the most legendary shootist extant” at the outset of the film, and a killer of thirty men, and his iconic status is established by a montage of clips from earlier John Wayne Westerns, showing the actor in all his tough, virile beauty in shoot-outs with various outlaws. There are few actors whose body of work could have been used so well to establish the character’s backstory, and because it happened to be Duke’s final film, it’s a fitting evocation of his long, consistent, and iconic career.
The screenwriter Miles Swarthout, who adapted his father’s novel for the motion picture, noted,
As soon as Wayne had the lead, I got the idea of using clips from Big John’s earlier Westerns as a unique way of quickly establishing this character’s gunfighting younger days, his violent past….Look for a little piece of Red River (1948) to kick off the action, followed by slices from the classics Hondo (1953), Rio Bravo (1959), and El Dorado (1967).
An innovative technique at the time, it has seldom been used since then to such good effect.
If John Wayne could have chosen a visual record of his life, his philosophy, his cause and manner of dying, it would be The Shootist, and indeed Duke did choose it, because he had to lobby for the part. “It’s the kind of picture you wait for,” he said. “They don’t come by often.”
George C. Scott was the producers’ first choice, but when Duke read the novel, he knew it was the film he had to do; it would be his sixty-ninth Western in a career of nearly two hundred films. By 1976, John Wayne’s box office clout had diminished, in part due to a poor choice of roles since True Grit. He also had to persuade the producers, Mike Frankovich and William Self, that he still had the stamina to undertake the role. His battle with lung cancer had left him weakened and short of breath, looking every bit of his sixty-nine years. He was paunchy, though still graceful and light on his feet, and his features had coarsened. Gone was the chiseled, Scotch-Irish beauty of his youth, but Duke managed to lose ten pounds before filming began on location in Nevada on January 8, 1976. Even so, Swarthout claimed that the producers had to pay a doctor under the table to allow the actor to pass the insurance physical. Duke grew a mustache for the part, which further distances him from the familiar image of John Wayne but well suits the character of a dying, apparently over-the-hill gunman. It would prove to be not only his last film role but one of his deepest, most powerful, and most poignant.
Once the producers decided to go with Duke Wayne, other actors of his stature asked to be in the picture as well: Duke’s friends Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, John Carradine, and Richard Boone. It’s a testament to Duke’s li
kability that an outspoken, left-leaning actress like Bacall considered Duke a dear and lifelong friend, in spite of being on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Hugh O’Brian, of TV’s Wyatt Earp fame, offered to waive his salary just to be in the movie with Duke, so he was cast in a role expanded to accommodate him: that of Jack Pulford, a cold-blooded gambler and expert with a gun. Stewart and Bacall accepted $50,000 for their roles, far less than their usual salaries, and Duke was paid his usual fee, now up to $750,000.
Having had cancer was a source of shame for Duke, a fact he’d tried to keep hidden from the studios and from his legions of fans. But in his role as the old gunslinger, he understood well Books’s dour acceptance of Doc Hostetler’s fatal cancer diagnosis—“You have a cancer. Advanced.” It is this illness that brings Books to the bustling little town of Carson City, Nevada. The straight-shooting doctor is played by Jimmy Stewart, who, as in Liberty Valance, completely holds his own against his powerful co-star, though he has little screen time in a movie that belongs entirely to Duke Wayne.
In an interview on the making of The Shootist, Miles Swarthout recalled how his father had read an article about long-distance truckers being prone to prostate cancer, comparing them to the cowboys of the nineteenth century who spent so much of their lives in the saddle. Without a cure, Swarthout said, those men would have died a painful death. Though Books’s cancer isn’t described as such, the “pain like sin” deep in his spine was probably intended to be advanced prostate cancer; in any case, Doc Hostetler—at Books’s insistence—reluctantly describes the progress of the disease in unembellished terms: “There will be an increase in the level of pain in your lower back, your hip, your spine….The pain will become unbearable. No drug will moderate it. If you’re lucky, you’ll lose consciousness. Until then, you’ll scream.”
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