John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  With another director, Wayne would have rebelled, but he knew that Hathaway was doing it for a reason. Toward the end of his life, Wayne would call Hathaway “the meanest man in the business. He worked me like a goddamn dog. And you know something? It was the best thing ever happened to me. It meant I got no chance to walk around looking for sympathy.” Hathaway’s lack of nurturing was therapeutic—maddening, painful, but therapeutic.

  Throughout the production, Wayne talked about his experience with cancer to anyone that would listen. He hadn’t been so scared of dying, he said, as of being helpless. “That feeling . . . of being a burden to your family. That’s what hit me hardest of all. . . . I just couldn’t see myself lying in bed, not being able to help myself—no damn good to anybody. That, to me, was worse than the fear of dying.”

  “I told [the public about the cancer] because I know how much solid hope my recovery could bring to many poor devils in the same fix,” he said. “And if it encouraged people to get regular checkups, it would save lives. More men ought to listen to their wives when they beg them to get checkups.”

  To all appearances, Wayne was in fine fettle, throwing ascorbic acid lozenges in his mouth and washing them down with mezcal he kept in a half gallon jug, then proclaiming “Goddamn! I’m the stuff that men are made of.” Dean Martin, working in his second movie with Wayne, was affectionately amused. “He’s two loudspeaking guys in one. Me, when people see me, they sometimes say, ‘Oh, there goes Perry Como.’ But there’s only one John Wayne and nobody makes any mistakes about that.”

  Mostly, it was old-home week, the atmosphere in which Wayne always felt most comfortable. Earl Holliman, a Hal Wallis contractee who was playing one of Wayne’s brothers, was the outlier. He had always loved Wayne on-screen, but this was his first time working with him. He found Wayne “a wonderful person” and “lots of fun,” but he was dismayed by Wayne’s compulsion to be the Big Dog. “He had to be the macho man. He had to have more drinks than the next guy.” Holliman also found Wayne “a bit of a bigot in conversation.”

  When the production moved to Del Rio, George Kennedy joined it. Kennedy had worked on In Harm’s Way, and would also work with Wayne in Cahill U.S. Marshal. Kennedy matched up well with Wayne, if only because he was six-one.

  “Duke was Duke,” recalled Kennedy. “Very bright. I worked with and dearly loved Jimmy Stewart, and I worked with Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. Heavyweights. But Wayne was on a different planet. If you put him in a group with other movie stars, the eye went to him, and that is the ultimate marker of respect. He was John Wayne. He was very real. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t Olivier; Olivier wasn’t John Wayne.”

  One day during a lunch break, Wayne took off his shirt to get some sun, and Kennedy was stunned by the expanse of the angry purple scar from the recent surgery.

  Kennedy proceeded to be even more stunned when Wayne lit up a cigar.

  “Duke, look at yourself. You look like a railroad track from here to Duluth, and you’re smoking?”

  Wayne sighed, took a drag. “I can’t stop,” he said.

  Publicly, Wayne loudly proclaimed his abandonment of tobacco, but that was a lie. When I met him in 1972, he was smoking small cigars, as if they were less damaging than unfiltered Camels. He occasionally smoked large cigars as well. Other times, he would chew tobacco.

  Psychologically, he was addicted. “He used to die when he saw Jackie Gleason take a drag on a cigarette on TV,” remembered Gretchen Wayne. “He’d say, ‘Boy, he really knows how to smoke a cigarette.’ He inhaled it deeply; you didn’t think the smoke would ever come out.”

  If cancer hadn’t nudged him off tobacco, there were other, subtler changes, most of which were only noticeable to the people who had previously worked with him. He seemed less sure of himself on a horse—“He did not want to take a chance of letting a horse get out from under him, so he rode a shorter rein,” said the stuntman Dean Smith. “He wanted to be sure that he didn’t get bucked off or fall from one of those big horses.”

  Also joining the company was Dennis Hopper, who had had a legendary run-in with Henry Hathaway years before on From Hell to Texas. “We argued all day and had a wonderful time at dinner,” Hopper remembered.

  He was a primitive director—he rarely moved his camera, the movement came from the actors—and he gave me line readings that were imitative Brando crap. I’d try to reason with him and he’d snap, “Kid, that’s dinner talk.” I walked off the set three times.

  One day he pointed to a huge stack of film cans and said, “Kid, I own 40 percent of 20th Century Fox stock, there’s enough film in those cans to shoot for three months, and we’re gonna film this scene until you get it right.”

  I don’t know how many takes we did. I say 86 because I was really 86’d when we were done. But Hathaway wore me down and got what he wanted, and then he told me, “You’ll never work in this town again.” And the word went out and I didn’t make a major Hollywood picture for several years.

  Hopper went to New York and studied with Lee Strasberg, then came back and did TV. By 1964, Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of the late Margaret Sullavan. “She was an actress Hathaway and Wayne respected as a good, honest woman. They knew Brooke and I had a baby girl. They talked it over and decided I should be working. And we all got along fine.”

  Hopper took pains to be on his good behavior with Hathaway and decided to fish for a compliment. “See what a better actor I am now?” he said to Hathaway after a take.

  “You’re not better, just smarter,” snorted the director.

  Hopper liked Wayne, “But it was a strange relationship. He thought of me as his house Commie. He’d get agitated about something and shout, ‘Where’s Hopper, that little Commie bastard?’ and try to involve me in a political debate.

  “And he would take time to teach me little acting tricks. He would say, ‘Dennis, if you break your line in the middle—for example, ‘They went . . . thataway—they can’t cut away from you.’ And I would think, ‘Well, that works if you’re John Wayne.’ Anyone else, they’ll get cut out.”

  As the picture wound down, so did Wayne. He got one of the bad colds that would increasingly plague him, and he was still coughing. By late afternoon the oxygen inhaler was usually set up by his chair on the set. And he was increasingly sensitive about his age and appearance.

  “That guy,” he groused about one reporter who he felt had stabbed him in the back. “I admit I’m balding. I admit I got a tire around my middle. What man 57 doesn’t? Big news.”

  Wayne took a break in the interviews about his cancer to pay eloquent tribute to the genre that had defined him. “Westerns are art. They’ve got simplicity, and simplicity is art. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle and with the basic human emotions—love, hate, anger, fear. In Europe they understand that better than we do over here. . . .

  “Take a horse. A horse is the greatest vehicle for action there is. . . . Put a man on him and you’ve got the makings of something magnificent—physical strength, speed where you can see and feel it, heroism. . . . There’s a simplicity of conflict you can’t beat. Westerns are our folklore and folklore is international.”

  The Sons of Katie Elder emerged as a fully formed, entertaining western, well directed and well acted. Because of the public’s curiosity about how Wayne would look after his cancer operation, the film was also a considerable hit, earning domestic rentals of $6 million even though the story would just about have sufficed at Monogram—a ranch is stolen from the parents of the titular sons, who have to fight to get it back. But the impeccable production, the stars, and a slew of great character actors keep the picture airborne. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard even makes the scrubby area around Durango look picturesque.

  Henry Hathaway, by this time a director who stuck strictly to his narrative, pauses to let his camera lovingly observe Wayne walking for ten seconds at a time—an ineffable image of grace. The loose amble of Stagecoach had altered to a
very specific walk—arms raised at the elbow, trunk leaning slightly forward, leading with his narrow hips, often coming to rest with a hip cocked in the contrapposto pose of classical Greek statuary. The youthful beauty had faded, but Wayne compensated for that and his extra girth with a continuing Apollonian grace—movement in a mythic rhythm.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Wayne’s triumph over cancer only increased his stature as the unkillable American ideal. Not everybody took his image as seriously as he did. Terry Southern said that Stanley Kubrick offered Wayne the part of the apocalyptically crazed cowboy eventually played by Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. “Wayne was approached and dismissed it immediately,” said Southern.

  But Wayne always considered himself a working actor, and he remained on the lookout for parts that didn’t require a full-scale commitment. Shortly before the cancer had been discovered, Wayne helped writer-director Melville Shavelson set up a movie about Mickey Marcus, an American Jew who had fought with the Haganah to found Israel. Shavelson was amused, because, as he noted, “If God set out to print a million photographs of Jewishness, he would use John Wayne as the negative.”

  But Wayne was enthused by the freedom-fighting foreground of the story. “You could call Jerusalem the Jewish Alamo,” said Shavelson. “You out of your mind?” snorted Wayne. “That picture lost so much money I can’t buy a pack of chewing gum in Texas without a co-signer. Let’s not remind anybody.”

  Shavelson asked Wayne to appear in a small part in the picture, to which Wayne agreed, but he went further than that. He personally called Kirk Douglas and asked him to look at the script. Batjac took a profit position in the picture, which was financed by the Mirisch Corporation for United Artists.

  Unfortunately, Cast a Giant Shadow failed to earn back its negative cost, and there were no profits for Batjac.

  Just as Wayne was recovering, Jimmy Grant began to feel ill. He went to a doctor in Madrid, who couldn’t find anything, so he came back to California and to UCLA, where he was diagnosed with cancer.

  James Edward Grant died in 1966. After the funeral, Wayne told Colin Grant that his father had been his best friend. It was a lovely thing to say, but Wayne’s special gift was that all of his friends could plausibly believe the same thing. The family didn’t forget Jimmy’s widow; Pilar regularly sent a limo to bring her to the house for lunch.

  Jimmy Grant’s last script, Support Your Local Gunfighter, was made five years after he died. He was prolific and successful to the end—and beyond.

  Originally, Newport Beach was supposed to be just another California seaside community, but by the late 1920s the bay was being dredged and a seawall was constructed. By the 1960s, it was one of the most exclusive beach and boating communities in the world.

  Wayne had customized the house in Encino to his specifications and most people believed he didn’t really want to move but was doing it for Pilar. Tom Kane came to the Encino house one day and found Wayne on his hands and knees with a tape measure and a legal pad. He was measuring his den. “Just let me finish this and I’ll be right with you,” he said. “I’m going to reproduce this room in the house in Newport Beach exactly as it is here.”

  “Duke was essentially a family man,” said Tom Kane. “He’d do anything to try to keep a family and a marriage together, such as [the] move. He was not too happy about leaving Encino, but he did it anyway.”

  The Newport Beach house—2688 Bay Shore Drive—was remarkable primarily for its location: at the water’s edge, facing Balboa Island. The house itself, like many extraordinary houses on the Malibu and Santa Monica oceanfronts, was nothing special from the outside. Inside, the eleven-room, seven-bath house blossomed as you moved toward the bay view.

  The interior was an unexpectedly stylish compendium of travels and accomplishments, decorated largely with furniture and objects Wayne had picked up on his travels—he enjoyed shopping for antiques, and he made a habit of taking a few favored possessions with him whenever he went on location, to dress up a hotel room and make it feel more like home. The house had furniture from Madrid, antiques from Colorado Springs, figurines from Kyoto. The living room had a fire-engine-red coffee table and a stone fireplace wall that held attractive modern art and a gilt-bronze Buddha. The dining room featured a Baccarat chandelier and a mirrored wall, before which was a Nepalese statue of a deity.

  “Wayne bought out the original woodcut blocks from a Buddhist temple,” remembered photographer Sam Shaw. “The prints of the wallpaper were made from these woodblocks. He gave me a print. A beautiful Japanese print. Rice paper. With eight tones of black and one red.”

  Wayne’s office was paneled, with a fireplace, a small collection of guns, some Harry Jackson sculptures, and a collection of kachina dolls that he had collected during his forays into Monument Valley. There was a bar in one corner, and a draft beer dispenser—a gift from Budweiser. Elsewhere in the house, there was also a hidden screen and projector for the screening of films.

  “Wayne took the western very seriously,” remembered Sam Shaw.

  He had an immense library on the west. He absorbed the west, was steeped in western folklore. He did scholarly studies on the west. You know, I’m a professional photographer, and Wayne, an actor, showed me the work of Edward Curtis, an early photographer of American Indians. Wayne had a rare portfolio edition, printed by J. P. Morgan, which he bought for $3,000. Bought before Curtis became accepted by the art world. . . . It was Wayne who introduced me to Curtis, a photographer sympathetic to Indians.

  Wayne was cultured; very charming, polite, elegant. Not from what we heard and read about him, but in the confines of his home. Not even in his friendships with his fellow filmmakers, but in the confines of himself. . . . But on the set, for the press, he played a guy rolling in the mud.

  Shaw was from New York and had been born with the name Arshawsky—a die-hard Jewish liberal. After a number of political set-to’s, Shaw said to him, “You’re not the reactionary they say you are.”

  “I’m a reactionary?” asked Wayne, managing to keep a straight face.

  “Yes. From where I come, everybody looks up on you as the leader of the wolf pack.”

  “Sam, I’m not the leader of the wolf pack. I’m not a reactionary.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a real strong trade union guy. What you are is a Bull Mooser.”

  “What’s a Bull Mooser?”

  “Like Harold Ickes and Theodore Roosevelt. Honest, uncorrupted American conservatives. Dedicated American citizens.”

  Prominent in his office was what Wayne called his “Fifty Years of Hard Work Wall,” featuring plaques and honors deriving from his career, as well as a faded photo of Wayne, John Ford, Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond displaying a sailfish caught near Cabo San Lucas in the 1930s. There was a picture of Barry Goldwater, another of Richard and Pat Nixon and Wayne, signed by the president. Another picture was signed by Dwight Eisenhower. There were Winchesters in display cases, and some Remingtons, including a 1901 Remington picturebook. Some Charles Russell bronzes. An 1855 pepperpot pistol.

  There was an autographed picture from Ronald and Nancy Reagan that said, “Duke, we love you,” as well as a piece of polished wood from the deck of the battleship Arizona. In time, pride of place on the Fifty Years of Hard Work Wall would be given to his Academy Award for True Grit.

  Outside, a long dock rocked gently with the waves.

  A new house in a new town mandated new friends. Cecilia deMille Presley had been raised by her grandfather Cecil B. DeMille, so she wasn’t intimidated by movie stars. She had a long marriage with a real estate developer named Randy Presley and had been a friend of Mike Wayne’s when they were both children. But it was only after Wayne moved to Newport that she got to know him as an equal.

  “Duke would bring his backgammon set to the Balboa Bay club to kill time while Pilar played tennis,” she remembered. Randy Presley would always give him a game. The Presleys would be married for over fifty years and part of their relatio
nship involved merciless mutual teasing. They were playing bridge with Wayne one day, when Cecilia told her husband, “Randy, you played that well, for a lay-down.”

  Wayne broke up and said, “If I ever said that to Pilar, I’d have to leave the fucking house.”

  Wayne grew to love the Newport Beach house because he loved the sea. “Look at that changing scene out there,” he once exclaimed. “You know, a view like you have in Encino doesn’t mean anything after you’ve lived there for a while but here—God, it’s beautiful. It’s hard as hell to work because you start looking at this and pretty quick your mind just eases off into numbness.”

  But it was more than that. In the mid-1960s, Newport Beach was a seaside village of only 36,000 people, with few markets or restaurants. In many respects, Wayne was replicating his fond memories of Glendale, except on a higher economic stratum. Where the Encino house had been a comparatively sterile walled enclave, Newport was wide open to the sea; the smell of freesia, orange blossoms, and night-blooming jasmine were as regular as the salt air.

  Wayne could sit out on the back veranda for hours, watching the water change color as the sun shifted. Along with the new house came a new dog, a Samoyed named Frosty, who would eat breakfast on a chair beside his master, who fed him strips of bacon. Wayne happily spent the rest of his life at the Newport Beach house.

  An arbitrator’s decision about Wayne and Bö Roos’s business dealings finally came down in September 1964. He stated that “Each have a unique ability to create complex business and personal problems for themselves. . . . Each communicated orally by preference and apparently shun or are inexpert in writing techniques.”

  This lack of written documentation created havoc not only in their business dealings but in the arbitrator’s attempt to resolve problems. Batjac had agreed to pay Roos 2.5 percent of its net profit before taxes. The arbitrator decided that, while Roos owed Wayne various sums for repayments of loans, notes, and other fees, Wayne also owed Roos money on his percentage, as well as fees due Roos for The Barbarian and the Geisha, Rio Bravo, and The Horse Soldiers. The Solomonic decision concluded that Roos owed Wayne $31,613.66; Wayne owed Roos $94,601.78.