by Scott Eyman
The Train Robbers finished shooting in June 1972, and in November, Wayne was back in Durango for the eighth time shooting a film called Wednesday Morning, released as Cahill U.S. Marshal, directed by Andrew McLaglen. Wayne’s contract again reflected the studio’s insecurity about westerns. He was working for a percentage of the gross; on Cahill he got 10 percent of the gross up to break-even, 15 percent thereafter.
As with all Batjac productions, Cahill was a very smooth operation; budgeted at $4.4 million, after a little more than two weeks they were four days ahead of schedule, and the picture finished two full weeks under schedule and nearly $600,000 under budget. Unfortunately, audiences don’t go to movies to marvel at the efficiency of the production. A year and a half after it was released in the summer of 1973, Warners estimated the world rentals for Cahill as $6.2 million, including TV sales, which was even less than The Train Robbers estimate of $6.4 million.
Cahill is about a marshal with mildly delinquent kids who are blackmailed by a hardened criminal. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible either. Mainly, it’s listless and crudely characterized. Wayne knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been: “The theme was a good theme,” he said. “It just wasn’t a well-done picture. It needed better writing. It needed a little more care in the making.”
Andrew McLaglen’s relationship to Wayne was complicated. “Andy was a great big guy, a wonderful man, but very unassuming and laid-back,” said William Wellman Jr. “He wasn’t at all like Wayne. On the set, it appeared that Wayne was in charge, and, in fact, Wayne was in charge. But at the same time he respected Andy and liked him and they got along. But you knew who was the boss.”
Perhaps it would be fair to say that McLaglen, Burt Kennedy, and the other men who directed Wayne for Wayne’s own production company knew they were there to serve their star. Conversely, on a picture directed by Ford, Hawks, Hathaway, or Wellman, Wayne was there to serve the director and, by extension, the picture.
“I’m amazed by actors who can direct themselves,” said Mark Rydell. “It’s oppositional; the two skills are in direct contrast to one another. An actor has to live in the moment. If he’s really good, he doesn’t know what happened during a take. On the first day of shooting On Golden Pond, Henry Fonda and Kate Hepburn turned to me after the first take with faces like nineteen-year-old kids. They had become lost in what they were doing, and were unable to evaluate what happened. Which is the appropriate way for an actor to work. If they’re judging themselves, then their concentration is not where it belongs.”
Mostly, Cahill is product, and it shows the extent to which the declines of Ford, Hawks, and Hathaway adversely affected Wayne’s career—they had always demanded more of him than he demanded of himself. Without them to nudge him forward, he was content to bask in the familiar, and the familiar won’t sustain the career of a sixty-five-year-old movie star. Westerns were dying precisely because of movies like The Train Robbers and Cahill.
It was while Wayne was wrapping up Cahill at the studio that he ran headlong into what might have been. Mel Brooks was at Warners working on the final draft of Blazing Saddles, which at the time was called Black Bart. Walking through the commissary, Brooks saw John Wayne having lunch and realized Wayne would be hilarious as the Waco Kid—the part eventually played by Gene Wilder. Brooks walked over, introduced himself and asked Wayne to read the script.
“He knew who I was,” remembered Brooks, “he had seen and loved The Producers. Before he could change his mind I slammed the script on the table and said, ‘Please read it at your convenience—like in the next hour.’ ”
Wayne said he’d read it that night and Brooks could meet him at the commissary the next day. “I met him at the same table at the same time the next day, and he said, ‘I read it and found myself actually laughing out loud. It’s much too rough and raw. I could never be in a movie that used the N-word, or that had such low-down dirty talk. I’m sorry I can’t be in your movie but I promise you I’ll be the first one in line to see it.’
“And that is the true story of Mel Brooks, John Wayne, and Blazing Saddles.”
Cahill U.S. Marshal was Wayne’s last picture at Warner Bros. The association that had begun in the early 1930s with the Leon Schlesinger productions constructed around old Ken Maynard footage and had slammed into high gear with the hugely successful Batjac productions of the 1950s limped to an end. There was no recognition of all that Wayne had meant to the studio. Even a few months after Cahill was released, in the executive meetings presided over by John Calley, John Wayne’s name never came up. It was as if he had never existed.
There was clearly a gradual erosion in Wayne’s box office. Simply put, the public would come out for something perceived as special—True Grit, The Cowboys—but bread-and-butter westerns such as The Train Robbers were now difficult to make profitably.
There have been dozens of theories to explain the apparently permanent decline of the genre. The writer-director Larry Cohen had a novel take: “What killed the western? Burt Kennedy and Andy McLaglen killed the western. They made dozens of them, one after the other, none of them very successful, none of them that good.”
While Wayne had moved effortlessly from picture to picture, John Ford sat in Bel Air and stewed. “Ford used to like me,” said Burt Kennedy. “He would say, ‘You and Duke had some rough times. Duke’s got the big head now.’ Ford wasn’t bitter, he was angry. But that’s what they do to you in this town. You make two bad pictures, it’s over. It happens to all of us. You get to the point where you don’t make as many pictures and you have too much time on your hands. You’re not retired, you’re just not hired.”
Early in 1973 it was announced that Ford would be the recipient of the first American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. There was really no other choice—for one thing, he was the only director to have won six Oscars, universally recognized for his great accomplishments. For another, he was dying of cancer.
All the surviving Ford actors and crew attended. Publicly, they all paid tribute to the Old Man, but some of them hadn’t forgiven him. “He kept sending me messages that weekend that he wanted to do a picture with me,” remembered Charlton Heston, the chairman of the American Film Institute. “But Hank Fonda told me, ‘You wouldn’t have liked it. He was a mean son of a bitch.’ ”
Wayne thought about the best way to pay tribute to his mentor and father figure, and decided on a full-page ad in Variety. In Wayne’s looping, graceful handwriting, the message read, “Dear Coach, Thanks for a wonderful and eventful life. Duke. John Wayne, 1973.”
At the ceremony itself, Wayne seemed tongue-tied; he cut his own speech short with an abrupt, “I love him; I could say more.” After the ceremony, there was a receiving line, with Ford in his wheelchair and Wayne standing impassively behind him. When everybody had filed by and congratulated the honoree, Wayne pushed Ford’s wheelchair up the ramp and out of the empty ballroom.
Four months later, Ford was on his deathbed. On August 30, 1973, Wayne arrived at Ford’s Palm Desert house. “Hi, Duke, down for the deathwatch?” asked Ford. “Hell, no, Jack,” said Wayne. “You’re the anchor—you’ll bury us all.”
“Oh, well, maybe I’ll stick around a while longer then.”
But Wayne knew—Ford was terribly emaciated. “He looked so weak,” said Wayne.
Then Ford said, “Duke, do you ever think of Ward?”
“All the time,” said Wayne.
“Well, let’s have a drink to Ward.” So Wayne got out the brandy and gave Ford a sip and took one himself. “All right, Duke,” said Ford. “I think I’ll rest for a while.”
John Ford died at 6:35 P.M. the next day, August 31, 1973. An American flag was draped over his body and his life was toasted with a glass of brandy. Then the glasses were broken.
The funeral mass was held at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Hollywood. Ford’s mahogany coffin was covered by the tattered flag from the Battle of Midway—a battle he had photographed with a handheld 1
6mm camera. Jean Nugent, Frank Nugent’s widow, attended the funeral. Barbara Ford was drunk. “Hi, Jeannie,” she said, “I’m looking for Duke, I gotta find Duke.” Jean Nugent told her it was her father’s funeral, but that didn’t help.
“In came the procession,” remembered Jean Nugent, “and there was Duke, and I thought he was going to drop dead. He was beet red and could hardly walk.” Wayne had obviously been crying heavily. Jean Nugent sat there thinking about John Ford—what a tough taskmaster he had been; how when he and Merian Cooper cashed out of Argosy Productions, they didn’t send her husband even a bottle of scotch; how Ford had once told her husband he had only been to three funerals in his life: his father’s, his brother’s, and Harry Cohn’s, because “I wanted to make sure the son of a bitch was dead.”
A young makeup man, an ardent Fordian named Michael Blake, also attended the funeral and watched Wayne and a group of stuntmen place Ford’s coffin in the hearse for the procession to Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. Wayne left the church with Pilar on one arm and Mary Ford on the other. Tears were streaming down Wayne’s face. That this giant sequoia was vulnerable to shattering grief, not just on screen but in life, affected Blake, who began sobbing as well.
The funeral procession wound its way to Holy Cross, where Ford was laid to rest near his brother, Francis. Wayne went home to contemplate the definitive end to the best chapter of his life.
“Jack Ford was the one true friend I had,” said Wayne after Ford’s death. “Jack was the person who had the greatest influence on my life. I don’t think I can ever be close to anyone again. I miss that man. Right now I feel lonely. Jack and I didn’t need a lot of words. Sometimes we went fishing and we would sit for hours without speaking. We rarely tried to force our personalities on each other. It was a case of knowing you had a friend to turn to. That man was everything to me.”
“Ford was so defiant,” said Darcy O’Brien, the son of George O’Brien. “I doubt that he ever gave himself to anybody. Can you imagine John Ford in therapy? He was so untouchy, so unfeely. It would have been very embarrassing had he ever attempted to tell O’Brien or Wayne how much they meant to him. Maybe Ford gave himself to Mary—who knows what they talked about in private? Maybe there was an intimacy there beyond our cliché understanding of marriage.
“But I think John Ford was his movies.”
With westerns faltering, it was time for something else. McQ was an attempt to catch up to an audience that increasingly felt Wayne was old (cowboy) hat. He had turned down a lot of pictures over the years, usually without regrets. He had turned down The Dirty Dozen solely because it was going to be shot in Europe and Pilar was pregnant and he was concerned that the shoot might run into Pilar’s due date. He had turned down Patton, although since he was a huge admirer of George C. Scott’s performance he had no regrets.
But Dirty Harry had passed through Batjac, and Wayne had also turned it down. “I made a mistake with that one,” he said, ignoring the fact that it would have been an entirely different movie with John Wayne and his house director than it was with Clint Eastwood and his house director. Wayne wasn’t crazy about the script for McQ, believing that the basic plot was ordinary and that the dialogue was lackluster. But, as he explained, “I haven’t made a movie in over six months, and this one is better than most of the junk they’ve been sending me.”
After giving some consideration to Jud Taylor, Stuart Millar, and Don Medford, Batjac actually hired an A list director, but John Sturges was now an A list director on the downhill slide, preoccupied with things that interested him more than the movies—designing a boat, for instance. Sturges’s price to direct the picture was $206,000.
McQ shot from June to August 1973 in Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, the setting for the car chase finale. One of the attractions was that the main character lived on his boat, which meant that Wayne could stay on board the Wild Goose while the picture was on location.
Wayne was in a bad mood during the shoot—the noose of Watergate was closing around Nixon’s neck. And beneath the affectionate magazine profiles Wayne’s life was growing increasingly complicated.
Wayne and Pilar had stopped sleeping together around 1968. Pilar had increasingly staked out a life for herself that had little or nothing to do with her husband. Aside from her passion for tennis, she had converted to Christian Science. As a goodwill gesture, Wayne went to church with her once, but he fidgeted throughout the service. He thought the religion was “too extreme” and didn’t understand what on earth his wife was looking for.
He also thought Christian Science was impractical. Once, Aissa got diarrhea and asked Mary St. John what she should do. Mary told her to see a doctor and get some medicine, but Aissa double-checked with her father. He agreed with St. John, but told his daughter not to tell her mother. If, God forbid, Pilar found out her daughter had consulted a doctor, tell her the advice came from Mary St. John.
St. John had been working for Wayne since 1946, and was leaning toward retiring; among other things, she was unhappy about the increasing amount of time she had to devote to being a go-between for Wayne and Pilar. St. John’s replacement was a young woman named Pat Stacy, who was hired from the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen. Initially, her duties focused on Wayne’s business, personal, and fan mail. Wayne felt it was imperative to honor fan mail requests for photos and such. “He feels,” Mary St. John explained to Stacy, “that the fans were responsible for making him a star and keeping him a star, and he’s not about to ignore them now. Remember—he’s adamant about that.”
Stacy found that, as a boss, Wayne “required perfection.” He was “sensitive, very affectionate, tough if he had to be, had a temper which exploded easily but was over within five minutes. He didn’t hold a grudge and had a terrible time with names.” And, she noticed, he was terribly restless. “Duke just had to be doing something all the time.”
Stacy was thirty-four, relaxed, reasonably efficient, good-looking but not beautiful. But she didn’t have St. John’s knowledge of the industry or her institutional memory. Tom Kane began to get phone calls from Wayne, with a long list of questions that ordinarily would have been St. John’s purview—“What’s the name of the little boy in Trouble Along the Way?” and so forth. Stacy came to Seattle for the shooting of McQ, and Bert Minshall made a pass at her, to no avail. “She was after bigger game,” he chuckled.
For the Seattle shoot of McQ, Wayne brought his chef from Hollywood, so that the oysters Rockefeller, trout stuffed with crab, and cherries jubilee were just as he liked.
He was smoking cigars, and he was inhaling. “I don’t know how in hell you can smoke them without inhaling them,” he said. Between the run of indifferent movies, and the indifference to his health, it seems obvious that Wayne was, on some level, no longer willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay alive, physically or at the box office.
A couple of weeks into the picture, Pilar came with Marisa for a quick visit. Wayne was first delighted, then angry when Pilar left almost as quickly as she had arrived. After Pilar returned to Newport Beach, he and Pat Stacy went to a charity premiere of Cahill U.S. Marshal and then to a restaurant.
Everybody was feeling good by the time they got back to the Wild Goose. According to Stacy’s recollection, she was headed back to her cabin when Wayne took her gently by the arm and escorted her to his stateroom, where she spent the night. “It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go with him,” she recalled.
Shortly after he got back from the location of McQ, Wayne and Pilar had a major blowup. She wanted him to retire and spend time with his family—probably the only thing he could not, would not give her.
Wayne came into his daughter Aissa’s room and sat down. Slowly, tears began rolling down his face. “Honey, your mother and I are having some serious problems. I love her so much, I love you, I love our family, but I have to work—you know I have to—to support us, and I know it’s hard on your mother. She doesn’t understand.” There was no
sobbing, just tears that kept coming faster and faster. John Wayne’s seventeen-year-old daughter went over to her sixty-six-year-old father and held him while he cried.
A few days later, Pilar and Wayne separated. Pilar never had a bad word to say about him other than he couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust to changing times. “That man maybe was not perfect, but he was about 80% perfect,” she said years later. “I liked the way he handled himself. I liked the way he treated people.”
The underlying problem was the same in 1973 as it had been in 1958: “Pilar felt I was trying to smother her personality,” he explained. As if all this wasn’t complicated enough, Josie, Wayne’s first wife, was also around Newport occasionally. “Josie had a lot of spunk,” said Tom Fuentes. “In her mind, she was still married to Duke. But the two women were quite different. Josie was refined and sweet, in a Beverly Hills kind of way. Pilar was very Newport Beach.”
Wayne and Pilar officially separated in November 1973. He was miserable about the failure of yet another marriage, but beyond that he was also lonely. “What does she want?” he would ask rhetorically. “I’d give her anything she wants.” Joe de Franco concurred, saying, “He never saw it coming. I don’t remember any anger at all; I remember disappointment.” But Pilar had moved on, although not to the extent of a divorce. She recognized the residual power in being Mrs. John Wayne and wasn’t about to let it go.
“She left and moved to Big Canyon,” said de Franco. “They would see each other, exchange Christmas presents. I never heard him say an unkind word about her. He supported her in every way he could; he bought her a French restaurant in Corona del Mar.”
It was a turbulent time emotionally, but he maintained his professionalism on the set. Julie Adams played McQ’s divorced wife and found Wayne “a charming gentleman. He had a sense of humor.” Adams and Wayne had never met, so after the introductions were made, they went off and rehearsed the scene just for themselves. “We rehearsed several times, and I felt we caught the undercurrent—two people who were both being polite, but who were in an awkward situation, conscious of all that they had felt for each other. We ran it a few times until we felt it was right.” John Sturges made almost no suggestions. A few takes later and the scene was done. Wayne was undoubtedly aware of the resonance the scene had to his own life.