John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  “It really hurt me, because the man was more of a mentor and a father to me in the business than my own father was. . . . He did nothing but give me support. He took me from a two or three line role to co-starring with him. He basically made my career. And to have it end that way has always been a great sadness in my life.”

  For his next picture, Wayne opted for something more demanding than the pictures he had been making, something closer to the epic. The Cowboys began life as a novel by William Dale Jennings, an Army veteran who in 1950 co-founded the Mattachine Society, the first modern gay organization in America.

  Jennings’s novel concerned Wil Andersen, a Montana rancher who has 1,500 head of cattle that he needs to get to the rail head at a time when every available hand is off pursuing a gold strike. His only alternative is to hire a crew of kids, ages ten to fifteen, to help him drive the cattle four hundred miles. Andersen’s brand of tough love gets the boys started on the maturation process. He and his crew are waylaid by trail scum and he’s killed, but the boys summon their resources to take revenge on the killers and finish what Andersen started.

  It’s a good, often poetic novel that spins off the traditional movie convention that certain problems can only be solved by slaughter. It quickly sold to the movies because of its interesting combination of ingredients—a little bit of True Grit, a little bit of Hondo, quite a bit of Lord of the Flies.

  Jennings wrote several drafts of the script, which was then punched up by the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. What Jennings did not want was for it to be made into a John Wayne western—he had written it with George C. Scott in mind. In this, he was of the same mind as the film’s director.

  “I did not want John Wayne for The Cowboys,” said director Mark Rydell. “But Warners was heavily invested in John Wayne, with whom I was at polar opposites politically and emotionally and every possible way. I did not admire him. But he seduced me mercilessly. ‘I promise you I will do the best job I possibly can,’ he said. ‘Let’s not talk about anything but acting. Not politics or religion, just acting.’ He completely won me over and I agreed he should play the part.”

  Wayne compared the film to Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Sands of Iwo Jima—an older man molding young men, although in the case of The Cowboys it was unwillingly.

  “He came on board and didn’t talk politics or religion or any anti-Semitic horseshit,” said Rydell. “But I consciously surrounded him with a different crew and actors than he was used to. None of his cronies were on the picture. I cast Roscoe Lee Browne. Allyn Ann McLerie, who played his wife, had been blacklisted. It was my private joke. I wanted him not to be comfortable because I didn’t want a standard Wayne performance; I wanted to agitate him off the mark of his usual performances.”

  For the boys, Rydell split the cast down the middle; half the kids were skilled horsemen who had never acted before, and half were actors who had little experience with horses. Preproduction was largely given over to teaching young actors how to ride and young riders how to act.

  From the first, Wayne was happy with the script and the cast. “He sensed competitiveness from the actors and that made him competitive,” said Rydell. “He was the first on the set and the last to leave. The kids adored him, climbed on him as if he was a playground. And in the end he impressed me tremendously.”

  One day John Ford and his grandson, Dan, showed up after making a special trip via the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Santa Fe. Ford dropped by the set in a limousine and gave Rydell one crystalline bit of advice: “Don’t let ’em give you any shit.”

  Wayne was living in a large ranch house with a couple of hippie girls he had picked up hitchhiking on the drive to New Mexico. “Duke was not known for being a particularly tolerant man,” said Dan Ford, “but he asked these two good-looking girls if they wanted jobs, so they took care of the house and cooked for him. They were great-looking and funny, and he enjoyed having them around.” Also staying at the house was Wayne Warga, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, who was ghosting a prospective autobiography for Wayne.

  On a Saturday afternoon, Ford and Wayne sat around reminiscing about old times. Wayne complained to Ford about the considerable wind on the location, and the old director perked up. “I hope they’re using it,” he said. Wayne said they were using so much of it that it took him most of the night to get the dust out of his eyes.

  Amid random fulminations about the Teamsters from Wayne (“I think Hoffa’s organization was designed to fuck up a scene in the picture”), inevitably the subject of Ward Bond arose. Ford asked if Wayne had ever gotten back the guns stolen from his house in a recent robbery. “I got everything but the good shotgun,” said Wayne.

  “The one that shot Ward in the ass?”

  “That’s gone . . . I wish he was around so I could shoot him again.”

  Ford was slowly recovering from a broken hip incurred by tripping over some laundry on the back porch of his house in Bel Air. He wasn’t very mobile and wasn’t feeling well. Wayne invited Ford and his grandson to go out for dinner with him. Ford passed because he was tired, so Wayne asked Dan if he wanted to come alone. But Dan said he was going to play some cards with his grandfather.

  A little shadow moved over Wayne’s face—he wasn’t used to being rejected. The real reason Dan skipped the dinner was that he had recently returned from Vietnam and had no interest in talking about any aspect of the war, which emphatically included The Green Berets, a film that he and every other Vietnam veteran he knew thought “was a complete piece of shit.”

  The set for The Cowboys was about eight miles outside Galisteo, a one-horse village with two shops, a gas station, and a dirt floor bar called La Fonda that was locally famous for their margaritas. Wayne was in fine fettle, listening to Frank Sinatra’s “September of My Years” in the car on the way to the location, arriving at least forty-five minutes before his call. Referring to Rydell’s The Reivers, Wayne told the director, “I can’t believe it took you 100 days to shoot a picture with two guys, a kid and a car.”

  “I can’t believe it either,” said Rydell.

  Occasionally, the elevation caused him to feel tightness in the chest and he would cough. “God, I hate not to feel good,” he would say. As was obvious by the repeated playing of the Sinatra album, age and time were on his mind. His ghosts were gathering, and he knew it.

  After the shooting day was done, there was a shower, a massage, one big drink, and dinner. On several occasions he went into the kitchen and mixed up a spicy chili soufflé. He went to bed early, and was again working his way through the writings of Winston Churchill, whom he could quote from memory. If he wasn’t reading Churchill, he was browsing through mail order catalogues.

  Dealing with the young actors in the picture brought out the gentleness and consideration that modulated his temper. “It’s never easy for a young man to talk to an old man unless the old man paves the way,” he said. “It’s much easier for me to start a conversation with a younger person than the other way around. I try to communicate sooner than other people do.”

  But Mark Rydell didn’t grasp Wayne’s patriarchal imperative. On the day they started the cattle drive scene, Rydell gave the stuntmen a 5:30 A.M. call. Wayne arrived on the set an hour later and was upset to find everyone else in gear. “I want to have the same damn call as the stunt guys,” he told Rydell.

  That was the day Wayne chose to challenge Rydell. “There were the kids, the stuntmen, hundreds of head of cattle, five cameras, and I’m up on a camera crane,” remembered Rydell.

  You don’t start cattle by saying “Action!” you start by pushing them, and cattle move slowly. I didn’t want to waste a lot of film by rolling before the cattle started moving, but Wayne was impatient and had decided that it was time to go. He called for the camera to start, and I just lost it and started screaming.

  “Don’t you ever do that! I haven’t rolled the cameras. I’ll tell you when to go.”

  It was not
a wise thing to do. Everybody was there, everybody was watching and he was humiliated.

  He looked at me and went back to his spot and I rolled the cameras and he did the scene. And then he got in his car and drove back to Santa Fe. And as the camera crane came down, the crew filed by me and shook my hand, as if they were saying goodbye.

  That night at the production office, there were four calls from Wayne. I thought Andy McLaglen was going to be there the next day. I may have been producing and directing, but he was John Wayne. One call to Warners and I was gone. So we met and had dinner and that’s when he told me that the only people that treated him that way were me and John Ford. He was very respectful.

  In retrospect, I was wrong; I shouldn’t have lost my temper and shouted at him in front of everybody. But he ultimately respected the fact that I had stood up to him.

  He was extremely competitive and, in his way, a very private man. Bruce Dern and Roscoe Lee Browne were younger, hotter actors, and he was damned if he was going to be thought of as any less than they were. He wanted to make sure that I understood that, in his mind, he and Gary Cooper had developed realistic acting in westerns.

  One day on the set, he and Roscoe were trading lines of poetry from Keats and Byron. I was amazed at his erudition. He loved Roscoe and told him, “You’re the first nigger I’ve ever met with a sense of humor.” It sounds bad in the telling, but it was said jokingly, lovingly, one friend to another.

  In the end, he gave a great, loving performance. His feeling for children surprised me; he was amazing with them, and he encouraged them. It taught me a lesson: how many people with whom you agree politically are jerks? And how many people with whom you disagree politically are attractive human beings? He knew I hated his support of the blacklist and was much more liberal than he was, and he laughed about it.

  Wayne liked Rydell but thought the picture could have been better. “I was too strong for this young man,” he said a few years later. Specifically, Wayne felt that Rydell botched Wil Andersen’s death scene. “He played everything off the heavy, and I had no chance to show the audience that what I was doing was trying to save these kids’ lives. . . . Give me an opportunity to play the scene. Those kids were crying when I played the scene, but the audience wasn’t crying with them because they weren’t in the mood for the scene when it started.”

  It wouldn’t have taken much to fix the scene, and Wayne made his suggestions, but he said that there were “so many sycophants around [that] had said, ‘Oh, I think it’s great, it’s great, it’s great.’ When a guy is directing a picture, that’s his picture. I can only tell him what I think, and if he wants to do it the other way, then goddamn, I’m getting pretty good money to do what he says. Only one man can paint the picture.”

  A good picture, not a great one, The Cowboys cost $4.8 million and brought back domestic rentals of $7.4 million, with Wayne receiving $1 million and 15 percent of the profits.

  Wayne had thought about writing a memoir for a number of years and got as far as a series of reminiscences with the fan magazine writer Maurice Zolotow that were later cannibalized for a biography. In 1971, Wayne again made tentative steps toward a book when he began dictating to Wayne Warga.

  They got as far as fifteen hours of tapes and five chapters before Wayne began to get uncomfortable, specifically about the chapter devoted to John Huston and The Barbarian and the Geisha. He wanted his anger to show, but he also wanted the chapter to be funny and he didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. He threw the chapter out because, “If there’s one person out there who might think it’s petty of me to pick on Huston, then I don’t want it in the book.”

  Wayne would invite Warga on the Wild Goose for what were supposed to be working vacations on a book that was tentatively titled What Hat, Which Door and When Do I Come In? Not a lot of work got done.

  “I want you to see what it’s like to be around me, and don’t worry about the goddamn book,” said Wayne. They were somewhere in British Columbia when Warga casually mentioned that he’d never seen a glacier. Nothing would do but that Wayne charter a seaplane that landed by the Wild Goose. Off they flew to take pictures of a glacier from the air.

  Wayne told Warga that he always wanted to be Fred Astaire, and he demonstrated by launching into “Putting on the Ritz.” He danced, remembered the writer, “with all the grace of a freight elevator.” He also told Warga that he’d like to make something besides westerns, but people didn’t come to him with those kinds of stories, and he’d accommodated himself to the industry’s perception.

  Warga was being paid $10,000 plus 25 percent of the royalties, but Wayne pulled away and the project gradually atrophied. Warga found him “a richly complicated man, far more intelligent than he was given credit for, easily hurt, very witty, very literate, naturally friendly, and often in conflict with the world’s image of him. He worshipped his children. He was a very bad businessman and a very loyal friend.”

  Ultimately, he shyed away from the memoir for the same reasons he shyed away from The Streets of Laredo. “He . . . felt,” wrote Warga, “that the day he wrote The End for his book it might also mean the beginning of the end of John Wayne.”

  Wayne had known for decades that to stay in the business at a high level required constant vigilance. Robert Relyea, the assistant director on The Alamo, became a producer later in the 1960s, notably on Bullitt and other pictures made by Steve McQueen’s Solar Productions. One day on the Warners lot, as Wayne was preparing The Cowboys, he sidled up to Relyea and put his arm around him. “You got a project?” Wayne inquired. “Well, when you’re looking for an actor, think of your old friend.”

  “He was partially kidding, but, in his John Wayne way, he was also partially serious,” said Relyea. “At the time, his private helicopter was parked on a pad right outside my office window.”

  About this time there came to be a sense within the youthful population of the industry that Wayne was falling behind the times. Strictly speaking, it was true.

  Tom Kane told a story about a time when Wayne was fishing on the Wild Goose in Mexico when Lee Marvin pulled up alongside him. “Hey Duke!” Marvin yelled. “Did you ever go fishing with a Jew?” Marvin was referring to his fishing partner Keenan Wynn. Wayne began talking about a nice little part in an upcoming picture that would be good for Marvin, and the younger man chuckled.

  “What are you laughing about?”

  “You said it’s a nice little part. I don’t do little parts anymore, Duke.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Christ, I’m a big star like you are. I get a million dollars a picture.”

  “You what?”

  “Yeah. I did The Dirty Dozen and it made more money than anything in the last 20 years. I was the lead and that’s what I get now.”

  Wayne was puzzled by this and thought Marvin was pulling his leg. “What did we pay him on that Randy Scott picture we made?” he asked Tom Kane.

  “$16,000,” replied Kane, who got the distinct impression that Wayne never believed Marvin got a million dollars a picture.

  If Wayne was falling behind the times in some aspects, he was still susceptible to majestic filmmaking. “I loved The Godfather,” he enthused. “It was just terrific. It had such a wonderful feeling [for] Sicilian or Italian family life even though it had the murderous stuff in it. Marlon Brando was just great. The way he played with his grandson, Jesus, he looked like he was ninety years old. He used that light make-up over the beard to get that sallow effect. Great. But his attitude was what made it.”

  In 1972, Tom Kane got a phone call from a friend at MGM. The studio had just bought a bestseller called The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, and there was a part in it that was perfect for John Wayne—a man who gets out of prison after twenty years for killing his wife, an Indian squaw.

  Kane read the book and agreed that it was a perfect upper-range vehicle for Wayne. He made some calls, and found that not only had MGM not discussed Wayne, they weren’t interested. MGM w
anted a younger, more au courant star—they eventually made the picture with Burt Reynolds.

  Kane never told Wayne about the book, because he didn’t want Wayne to say, “I love it,” only to have him find out that MGM didn’t want him. “I was never going to put him in that position,” remembered Kane. “And I didn’t.”

  Many of Wayne’s friends felt similarly protective of him on the personal level. They thought he was utterly devoted to his children, but many had come to the conclusion that he was badly used by his wife. Cecilia Presley respected Pilar as a mother, but was less enthusiastic about other aspects of her personality.

  “The difference between them—well, there were a lot of differences between them, but the main one was that he had a wonderful sense of humor about himself. You could make fun of him and he’d take it. She had no sense of humor about herself. None. She was the sort of woman who didn’t want to go on the Wild Goose because she’d get her hair mussed. If he liked you, Duke didn’t care if you were a busboy or the president of the United States. He was not a snob . . .

  “The problem was that he couldn’t have fun with Pilar. But he loved her and wanted to keep the marriage going and really tried to be a good husband. He would follow her around and sit there while she played tennis or shopped, and she loved to shop. It was kind of pathetic.”

  Cecilia and Wayne would sit and drink and talk and drink. One day she asked him who had been the greatest one-night stand in his life, the single most exciting sexual episode. “Oh, Christ, Citzie . . .” he demurred. But she kept after him and finally he cast his mind back and smiled. “Rome. The Excelsior Hotel. Dietrich. I took her on the staircase.”

  Wayne tried to be a family man, and mostly succeeded, but there were rumors for years about a single affair with a legendary co-star. “He and Maureen O’Hara had a long affair,” said one good friend. “They would meet in Arizona, at the ranch he owned with Louis Johnson. It went on for years, before and during his marriage to Pilar.”