John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  “Because he worked so much, and he worked with my dad, it was different than with kids whose grandparents grew up around the corner,” said Michael Wayne’s daughter Alicia McFarlane. “It was like he was out of town a lot of the time. We would see him if he was in town, or around the holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas. Occasionally he would surprise us; our house was in Toluca Lake, and he would drop by with the biggest box of candy I’ve ever seen.”

  McFarlane remembered him as “a wonderful grandfather, a grab-you-and-throw-you-up-in-the-sky grandfather. It’s a credit to my parents that we didn’t have a big concept of who he was, or his impact. To us, he was our grandfather. We went a few times to visit him on the set, and we figured out what business he was in, but we were kids—we weren’t watching old movies.

  “I have a great photo of the two of us sharing an Oreo cookie—he’s handing me the part with the icing on it. He was a doting grandfather, and he didn’t mind having kids around the house—he already had dogs.”

  Alicia loved to sneak into her grandfather’s office when nobody was around and look at his collection of kachina dolls, then browse through the hundreds of books that were neatly lined up on the shelves. Wayne’s library was unfocused, but with an emphasis on his business. He had first editions of The Searchers and True Grit, novels by Zane Grey, stories by Bret Harte, coffee-table books of Frederic Remington and Tom Phillips.

  There were conservative-oriented books on politics, pop fiction (Jaws, Centennial ) and some very un-pop literary fiction: Nabokov’s Lolita. There were books on Hollywood westerns, a signed copy of Darryl Zanuck’s biography, unsigned copies of books about Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe, as well as compatriots such as Raoul Walsh and Edward Dmytryk. He had a surprising taste for Tolkien, with hardcovers of all the Lord of the Rings novels. His musical tastes centered around Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Doris Day.

  Mike and Gretchen’s son Chris was born prematurely in 1967 and had to have open heart surgery when he was five. He would occasionally mention to his grandfather that he wished he was bigger, so he could play football. “You’re healthy,” Wayne would say. “That’s the main thing.”

  “The house in Newport was a neat place to be,” said Alicia, “and it was a pure delight to go there. Pilar would say, ‘We’re all going to the toy store!’ Looking back as an adult, it must have been a pain in the neck, but Pilar was great; she spoiled us.”

  If the grandchildren were at the house, the evening’s entertainment would consist of a double feature—the first picture was for the kids, the last for the adults. Alicia felt she’d finally come of age when she was allowed to watch the second feature: Le Mans, with Steve McQueen.

  “My grandfather made this movie called Trouble Along the Way, where he had a little singsong in his voice when he talked to the little girl. That’s the way I remember him talking to me when I was little. When I got bigger, it was ‘How are you doing in school? How are your grades?’ I was a very average Joe in school, so I didn’t look forward to those questions. He very definitely wanted to know what was going on in our lives.”

  Alicia’s favorite memory of her grandfather involved a huge trampoline Wayne installed in his yard. “All of us were out there, and he came out and got on the trampoline and started jumping high into the sky! He was so much bigger than the rest of us, so he went higher than we could. All of his kids and grandkids were there, popping up into the sky, and he was right in the middle of them, going higher than anybody else.”

  About this time, Wayne began to combat what he saw as his younger children’s lack of interest in the family. He decreed that dinner would be at 5 P.M. every day, with mandatory attendance. But the kids were teenagers, didn’t want to be there, and even Pilar seemed to resent the command performance. “Asking about our lives, he’d allow us to answer, then he’d wind up issuing lectures,” remembered Aissa. He was harder on Ethan than the girls, and hit him once or twice for lying, when all the girls would get was a lecture.

  But Ethan was a boy, and a chance for Wayne to make up for the mistakes he’d made with Mike and Pat, as well as a chance to mitigate the mortality he felt gaining on him. “He’s mine and I want to be with him,” he said of Ethan. “He’ll be 14 before I know it and something happens [then]. They start to drift away and they don’t come back until their thirties. At 30 they realize what fatherhood is. My oldest boys are in their 30s now and they’ve come back. But with Ethan I won’t be here when he’s 30, so I’ve got to love him now.”

  The girls tended to get a pass. For Christmas 1972, nine months after Aissa turned sixteen, Wayne gave her a yellow Porsche 914. She lent the car to a boyfriend, who wrecked it. She returned home at dawn to find Wayne in his pajamas, pacing in the driveway, furious because he thought she’d be home by 2 A.M. Wayne gave her the silent treatment for a day, then came into her bedroom. “If I gave you what you deserved,” he said, “I’d have to ground you forever. So let’s just forget it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Wayne’s TV appearances began increasing in the 1970s. In June 1971, he went to Monument Valley to shoot a CBS special called The American West of John Ford. He wasn’t happy about the fact that he was only paid scale, but he did it because Ford’s grandson, Dan, was producing the show and Ford asked him to appear. It was Ford’s last trip to the location he defined in the world’s consciousness. As the two men reminisced about Ward Bond, Ford said, “Oh God, rest his soul. The only bad thing about this trip is that I miss him.”

  Bob Shelton was putting together a promotional film for Old Tucson when he heard Wayne was in Monument Valley shooting the documentary. Shelton got a small crew together and flew over. Shelton and his film crew handed over some prepared questions they wanted Wayne to respond to. He took a look at them, then threw them over his shoulder.

  “Where’s the camera?” Wayne asked. And then he rattled off five minutes of footage, extolling the benefits and history and pleasures of Old Tucson and all the great pictures he had been lucky enough to make there.

  “We got in the plane and flew home,” said Shelton. “I would have to say that John Wayne was what every young boy wants to be like, and what every old man wishes he had been.”

  Among Wayne’s appearances were spots on the popular Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, also done for scale—$210. He liked Paul Keyes, the head writer, who also wrote for Dean Martin’s TV show. (For one Laugh-In appearance he dressed up as the Easter Bunny; another involved him holding up a red, white, and blue daisy and reciting, “The sky is blue, the grass is green, get off your butt and be a Marine.”)

  In late November 1970, Wayne hosted Swing Out, Sweet Land, written and produced by Keyes and executive-produced by Bill Harbach, whom Wayne had first met while shooting They Were Expendable.

  The show ran ninety minutes, cost Anheuser-Busch $1.4 million, and serves as a time capsule of a special kind of show business hell. Lorne Greene plays George Washington, Rowan and Martin are the Wright Brothers, Lucille Ball is the Statue of Liberty, Dan Blocker is an Indian who sells Manhattan to Michael Landon’s Peter Minuit, and Bob Hope and Ann-Margret entertain the troops at Valley Forge.

  Dean Martin plays Eli Whitney—cotton gin—get it? The Doodletown Pipers sing a choral version of the Declaration of Independence, there are laugh tracks for the comedy bits, and Wayne played himself as an Our Town–style narrator who framed the show and introduced the scenes.

  NBC handed the show to Harbach and his partner Nick Vanoff, who were already producing the highly successful Hollywood Palace series. “It was the biggest show we ever did,” remembered Harbach. “We shot for two weeks, and there were hardly any problems. We told [Wayne] our ideas for the show and he said ‘That sounds fine.’

  “Wayne was a pro. He’d ask, ‘What time tomorrow, Boss?’ and I’d tell him and he’d be there fifteen minutes early. He was very outgoing, and had this deep enthusiasm under the skin. Anything you needed him to do, he did. Of course, he was to th
e right of Charlemagne.”

  The trade papers found the show mawkish—“a star-studded, often awkward, seldom amusing extravaganza . . . a massive name-dropping mélange [with] a few bright spots,” wrote the critic for Variety. But the ratings were huge; NBC estimated that about 77 million people watched the show, once again proving Wayne’s command of his audience, as well as his knack for seamlessly spreading his brand.

  An ancillary reason for the show’s existence was revealed in the credits: the copyright for the show was held by John Wayne.

  As with many politically committed people, seeing the nation move in the opposite direction from his own orientation had a residual impact on Wayne. Although he talked about how much he hated politics and politicians—his preferred phrase was “fucking politicians”—he obsessively returned to the subject of the deadly path America was on. At the same time, he was at pains to refute the prevailing image of himself as an intellectual troglodyte. “I came into this business from the University of Southern California, where I was taking a pre-law course. I had gone to Glendale High School, from which I graduated with a 94 average. I could say, ‘isn’t’ as well as ‘ain’t.’ ”

  On college professors: “It takes 15 years of kissing somebody’s backside for a professor to get a chair somewhere and then he’s a big shot in a little world, passing his point of view on to a lot of impressionable kids. He’s never really had to tough it out in this world of ours, so he has a completely theoretical view of how it should be run and what we should do for our fellow man.”

  On Vietnam: “I would think somebody like Jane Fonda and her idiot husband would be terribly ashamed and saddened that they were a part of causing us to stop helping the South Vietnamese. Now look what’s happening. They’re getting killed by the millions. Murdered by the millions. How the hell can she and her husband sleep at night?”

  On government: “I don’t want any handouts from a benevolent government. I think government is naturally the enemy of the individual, but it’s a necessary evil, like, say motion picture agents are. I do not want the government . . . to insure me anything more than normal security.”

  On Manifest Destiny: “When we came to America, there were a few thousand Indians over millions of miles, and I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from these people, taking their happy hunting ground away. We were progressive, and we were doing something that was good for everyone.”

  On identity politics: “The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that’s what we have to put up with. I think that any person that’s in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from.”

  On the women’s movement: “I have always felt that women should get exactly the same salary for the same work that a man would. And I assume and presume that is gradually coming to pass. Mainly because women have been individual enough to step out and become lawyers and do these different things.

  “But I think it’s ridiculous for the studio to have a woman be a grip on a set. There are certain standards of hard work that are expected of a grip that a woman can’t cut. That doesn’t mean that she couldn’t direct the picture if she had the talent to do it. But I mean, there’s a lot of men that couldn’t go in and be a grip, because they’re not capable of the physical effort required to perform that job.”

  On Richard Nixon: “The Cronkites and the Sevareids and the rest of you guys are out to get him just because a bunch of jerk underlings acted stupidly. The President is too great a man to be mixed up in anything like Watergate.”

  On the dark night of the soul: “There’s that hour when you go to bed at night, before you sleep, when you’re alone. That’s when you have time to think over your past and that helps you shape up your attitudes toward people, toward situations. If you lose your self-respect, you’ve lost everything.”

  The simmering irritation that some of the public felt about Wayne’s social and political opinions came to a boil when Wayne sat down for an interview with Playboy that was published in May 1971: “With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”

  That was just for starters. Carl Foreman and Robert Rossen had done things “that were detrimental to our way of life” by making High Noon (“the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life”) and All the King’s Men respectively, and he would never regret “having helped run Foreman out of the country.” The men that gave him faith in his country were men like Spiro Agnew. Douglas MacArthur “would have handled the Vietnam situation with dispatch.”

  Some of the Playboy interview was funny—after comparing modern producers to whores, he said, “Why doesn’t that son of a bitch Darryl Zanuck get himself a striped silk shirt and learn how to play the piano? Then he could work in any room in the house.” But the truculence overwhelmed the humor.

  Wayne had voiced many, if not all, of these opinions in print before, but not in the pages of Playboy at the height of its influence. The year before, he had told Reader’s Digest that “the way to stop [Vietnam] is to call Russia’s Kosygin and say that the next time a Russian-made gun is turned against us, we’ll drop a bomb right on him. They tell me everything isn’t black and white. Well, I say why the hell not?”

  Wayne loosed his most breathtaking blast of imperialist rhetoric in the not exactly obscure pages of Life a few months after the Playboy article: “Your generation’s frontier should have been Tanganyika. It’s a land with eight million blacks and it could hold 60 million people. We could feed India with the food we produced in Tanganyika. It could have been a new frontier for any American or English or French kid with a little gumption. Another Israel! But the do-gooders had to give it back to the Indians.”

  The Playboy interview inflamed the bruises left by The Green Berets, although it was both an amplification and a distortion of Wayne’s feelings. While Wayne didn’t care for the 1964 Civil Rights Act—he felt it violated the rights of property owners—he blamed white supremacists for the civil rights movement. The Fifteenth Amendment, he believed, clearly gave everybody the right to vote. “If blacks had been allowed to vote all along,” he told Mary St. John, “we wouldn’t have all this horseshit going on. George Wallace is part of the goddamn problem, not the solution.”

  The novelist P. F. Kluge, who wrote the cover story for Life that contained the inflammatory quotes about Africa, found something other than his expectations, something other than an imperialist dinosaur. “My strategy for the story was whether or not the end of the west meant the end of his career,” Kluge remembered. “And I found a level of articulation that I had not expected. The description he gave me about Monument Valley rose to the level of elegy, which I wasn’t sure he had in him. There were depths of memory in him that surprised me. All of those stars of that generation had been interviewed to death and pawed over and worn smooth. His ability to articulate and come up with something fresh surprised me.”

  The interview was done on a transcontinental flight from New York to Los Angeles, with another day at Wayne’s house in Newport Beach. Kluge was delighted to find that the local Budweister distributor had supplied Wayne with a tap, and the two men started drinking, which is when Wayne sailed into politics.

  “He was really invested in his politics. I had to acknowledge that this was not bullshit, this was from the heart. And he had a need to talk about it; it wasn’t a potted right-wing speech that he had given before. He was generating feeling when he spoke to me.

  “I liked him. Kind of. Yeah. But there was a considerable gap of disagreement there. And you didn’t know how far you could go before you pissed him off.”

  The hangover from the Playboy interview lasted for decades. A year
after it was published, Wayne was made the grand marshal of the Rose Bowl Parade. The USC Daily Trojan opined that the selection of Wayne was “a gross insult to Blacks, to American Indians and to Americans of any race who believe in equality. John Wayne is a blatant racist.”

  The pot was kept bubbling when a reporter for The Advocate asked Wayne about gay rights. He clearly hadn’t been expecting the question, because he paused to think. “I think gay people . . . personally . . .” he began. “You know, I’m an older man, and I’ve been thrown in a lot of experiences, and I have a feeling that it’s abnormal and it’s certainly not the natural way we were put on earth. So I see no reason to jump with joy because somebody is gay, and I don’t see any reason for waving a flag for all the wonderful things gays have done for the world . . . any more than you’d say, ‘Oh, boy, hooray for the tuberculosis victim!’ It’s abnormal to me.

  “Now, as far as having them live their own life, I feel that a man has a right to live his life the way he wishes—as long as he doesn’t interfere with me having my rights. So I have nothing against them, but I certainly see no reason to jump with joy about it.”

  It hardly needs to be pointed out that Wayne was a man of his time, embodying the attributes of a small-town Edwardian boyhood and a good many of the prejudices as well. Once, in a discursive conversation, he expounded on his sense of fair play. “I didn’t know about Jews, niggers or Japs as minority groups until I went to college. At Glendale High we had ’em all—and on the football team if any guy called the Japanese fella a Jap we took him off the field, but not until the bunch of us took our turns at ’em. We all shared the fact that we were poor and struggling and there wasn’t time to show prejudice. We only felt together.”

  In his own mind, Wayne was a true democrat, if not a Democrat, but at the same time he was oblivious to matters of terminology and tone. “His language reflected his background and his class,” said P. F. Kluge. “But that wasn’t him. I know a lot of people like that. I’m from New Jersey, and people from New Jersey speak roughly about other races. But they’re all in the same neighborhood and rubbing against each other and giving each other a ration of shit and having a beer. Wayne would give a fair shake to people he encountered.”