John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Contributing to the general malaise was a salt-free diet he’d adopted in an effort to get his weight down. He was also taking Lasix, a drug given to heart patients to drain water out of the system. The result was that everything was tasteless—“the goddamn lettuce tastes like grass,” he complained. He was a virtual prisoner in his suite on the eighth floor of the Ormsby House hotel. He ventured down into the casino area precisely once, and managed only about three minutes at the craps tables before a crowd assembled and made further play impossible.

  “He had one lung, and had trouble breathing at any altitude whatsoever,” said Miles Hood Swarthout. “He had a nurse assigned to him twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes between takes he would take a hit from an oxygen tank.”

  The feeling was that once production got out of the cold and back to Hollywood the star would get his equilibrium, but until then everything was a chore. Wayne was irascible, and he lashed out at cameraman Bruce Surtees, who was supervising the laying of track for a moving shot: “You’d do a damn sight better if you concentrated on the lighting instead of fucking around with dollies, making the cast look like zombies.”

  At dinnertime, the conversation was about old times and old friends—Bogart, Hepburn, Tracy, Pappy Ford. One night, Wayne told Lauren Bacall about his salt-free diet, and she promptly snatched the olive out of his martini. During the day, Wayne groused about his age (“I don’t mind being old, I just mind not being able to move”) and advised Don Siegel on his camera angles.

  On Sunday, Wayne invited Siegel and Carol Rydall, his script supervisor, to his suite to watch a football game and they shared some clams that a friend of his had just flown in from Seattle. But after Wayne advised them to bet the Steelers over the Cowboys, he said he wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed.

  “Wayne wasn’t particularly reflective, at least not with me,” remembered Bacall. “He loved to enjoy life, but he wasn’t feeling well. One day he said to me, ‘God, I can’t drink, I can’t smoke, life’s no fun anymore.’ But he was still feisty, ornery in a way. A very sweet man, actually. We got along very well.”

  Even though the company was working short days, often quitting around 3 P.M. Carson City was hard for Wayne. “They were resting Duke,” said Ron Howard. “He never complained, except to say once, ‘I only have the one lung.’ ” The company made it through the location work without any further trouble. There were no more explosions from the star, and his performance was consistently excellent. But the producers were worried.

  “He was physically uncomfortable,” remembered Self. “A lot of the animosity toward Siegel was due to Wayne’s health. He would get tired, and say to Don, ‘It’s good enough.’ And Don would say, ‘I want another one.’ That became an issue at times. Wayne thought we were over-covering a scene, doing too many takes. Duke would want to move on to another scene and Don would want to keep working. And Wayne being the professional he was, he would do it again.”

  The picture moved to the Warner Bros. back lot, where Robert Boyle converted a run-down western street into a thing of beauty for less than $300,000. James Stewart came in to do his scene, and seemed glad to be back in the saddle, however briefly. But Stewart hadn’t made a movie in five years, and his hearing was badly compromised. He couldn’t pick up his cues quickly, which in turn threw Wayne’s timing off. The two old pros rallied and pulled the scene off beautifully, but it was yet another reminder that the making of the movie was in some sense a mirror image of the story of the movie.

  The tension between Wayne and Siegel continued. Wayne told Tom Kane that Siegel didn’t know how to cover a scene, that he was a TV director—over-the-shoulder close-up, cut to another over-the-shoulder close-up. He complained to reporters about what he felt to be the unnecessary claustrophobia of Siegel’s vision. “Jack Ford used to tell me, ‘Give ’em scenery, give ’em a scene, and give ’em action. Do it in any order you want, but don’t try to give ’em a scene and scenery at the same time, and don’t try to play action at the same time.’ I can’t tell you how many fellas I’ve worked with didn’t realize that.”

  “Siegel had a short man’s complex,” said Swarthout. “He was a little guy, and very feisty—a little bit of a martinet who wanted to do things his way: to follow the script he had laid out. Wayne didn’t like to work that way. He wanted to improvise, change his lines, have a say in the casting. They were just complete opposites in the way they approached movies.”

  “The reality was that outside of one or two moments, I didn’t actually witness much of anything,” said Ron Howard. “But they simply weren’t comfortable with each other. Siegel staged it, he directed it. He didn’t abdicate and Wayne didn’t mutiny, outside of a couple of flare-ups.”

  One of those flare-ups remained permanently engraved on Howard’s memory—a scene between him and Wayne in a barn.

  It was an important scene. Duke walked in. There were two things: the camera was on the floor looking up at Duke, who was supposed to be sitting on a bale of hay. The camera was on a dolly and there was going to be a microphone between his feet.

  Duke sat down and looked at the camera and looked at Siegel. And sighed. And said, “Well, hell.” And then he looked at the dolly grip and stared swinging his arms around. The grip didn’t know what to do. Duke kept swinging his arms around, telling him to move the camera without actually saying it. And finally the grip moved the camera over in front of Wayne. And then Duke started moving his arm upward, telling him to raise the camera off the ground, so it wouldn’t look up his nose and jowls.

  And when that was done, he said, “Now let’s shoot the goddamn scene.” Throughout all of this, Don Siegel just stood there and didn’t say a thing. I felt terrible for him. And after we’d done the scene and Duke had left, Siegel said to me, “The reality is that you bring everything you have to a movie, but three weeks into the picture you’re a captive of the star. If they fire anybody, it’s going to be the director. You have to make the decision.”

  That was the only time I saw Wayne take over completely. And ever since then, I’ve wondered what I would do if an actor did that to me.

  Mostly, the relationship between Wayne and Siegel was like a bad marriage that neither partner wants to completely destroy. “There were these little flare-ups, and both guys were angry,” said Howard. “Privately, I suspect there were words. They never kissed and made up, but both of them respected the work. It never held us up.”

  Despite Wayne’s ongoing dissatisfaction, despite his physical problems, the picture was on schedule. “He was on time, he knew his words, he was ready,” said Hugh O’Brian. “There was no bullshit with Duke; he was absolutely professional.”

  Wayne played chess a few times with “Old 21” and beat the hell out of the young man. “He was so aggressive,” said Howard. “I played him well, but I couldn’t come close to beating him. Dave [Grayson], his makeup man, could beat him, and Duke would stomp around and curse about it, but he wasn’t really mad; he loved a good game.”

  Even though Wayne knew that cancer had him in its sights again, he moved resolutely forward, playing even the most dangerous scenes without a trace of self-pity. “Every now and then we would just be standing next to one another and he’d kind of just hold my hand,” said Lauren Bacall. “One of the crew mentioned that it was a beautiful day, and he said, ‘Every day you wake up is a beautiful day.’ ”

  There were no such gentle reflections with Siegel, who became the target for all of the star’s dissatisfactions and fear. After a while, Siegel began to look pale and beaten. He had worked with recalcitrant actors before, but never someone this formidable. Wayne would tell anyone who asked that Siegel was too rigid, that he was blocking scenes instead of letting them flow. Burt Kennedy or Andy McLaglen would have capitulated, but Siegel dug in his heels and the film settled down to a grinding series of disagreements and mutual bad temper.

  “He couldn’t stand Siegel,” said Bacall. “He humiliated him in front of the [crew.] ‘That’s y
our setup?’ he would say.” Despite the bad temper, Bacall didn’t think any the less of either man. “Duke was a sick, dying man; Don was a damn good director.”

  If Wayne wasn’t in the mood to talk, he would stay in his trailer and hunch over his chessboard, leaving the trailer door open. If he was feeling gregarious, he would interject himself into conversations or offer random opinions. Both his kindness and his bad temper were larger than life, as when a crew member walked between Wayne and a light as he was studying his script and he turned and roared, “Will you get the fuck out of the light?”

  In many respects, John Bernard Books was a tricky part, and an unusual Wayne character—because the character is dying, he’s of necessity focused almost exclusively on himself. Wayne was very concerned about the character becoming maudlin. He was also concerned that Siegel was making the movie darker than it needed to be. Literally. Wayne was particularly irate over a scene where a couple of gunmen come through a window to try to kill Books. (One of the men was played by the director Robert Totten, Ron Howard’s directorial mentor.) “He thought it was all too dark,” said Howard. “He objected to both the lighting and the camerawork.”

  As the pieces of the film were cut together, it became obvious that Siegel’s intimate approach to the picture was both intellectually and emotionally valid—he never lets us get very far from Books. John Ford would have undoubtedly been ideal, and would have given the film more poetry, but he was dead and Hawks and Hathaway were over-the-hill. Siegel’s decision to make the movie an intimate chamber piece gave Wayne and his character a compressed power.

  For Howard, The Shootist became an opportunity he hadn’t expected. He had initially come to the picture a little dissatisfied with his part—he wanted to be a little less callow, a little tougher—but all that was swept away by a priceless learning experience.

  “The only thing Duke told me about acting was something he said John Ford had taught him—not to take an emotion to its furthest extreme. Always leave the audience a percentage of the emotion to complete for themselves. If you have to cry in a scene, don’t feel that you as the actor have to completely fulfill it. Hold a little back. And pacing. He cared a lot about pacing. He was very aware of rhythm.”

  Howard had already worked with other Golden Age stars such as Henry Fonda and Bette Davis, and, while he was a fan of Wayne he thought of him less as an accomplished artist than as a personality. But that changed.

  When we ran lines, and he was sorting out his performance, sometimes there would be an awkward moment that was a little stilted—a speech that wasn’t quite landing. And he would say, ‘Let me try again.’ And he would put that hitch in, that pause that he had in his speeches, and the line would suddenly take on power. He understood how to work with the rhythms of speech, to find a surprising nuance in the moment of the dialogue.

  I had always thought those hitches were him forgetting his lines. Not at all. The opposite. It was a very particular tool—it was a way of putting the focus on an aspect of a verbal moment. And it worked in different ways. When I saw more movies of his in later years, sometimes it made him funny, and sometimes it made him vulnerable.

  It was interesting, and it was art.

  The one thing that united Wayne with Fonda and Davis was a ferocious work ethic. “They were who they were because they worked harder than anybody else, even into their seventies,” said Howard. “Every scene was still important to them. Not in a neurotic, crazy way, but in a professional, caring way.”

  In particular, Howard found the difference between Wayne and Fonda instructive. “Fonda was more of a working actor, less of a star. He expected a certain amount of respect, but that was easily given because he commanded that naturally—there was a lot to respect. Fonda’s attitude was, ‘My job is to do the scene and I’m not gonna tell you how to do your job.’ ”

  One day word spread that Clint Eastwood was going to visit the set, and Wayne began talking about the pictures Eastwood and Siegel had made together. “I remember this great moment,” said Ron Howard. “Wayne wondered out loud what Eastwood’s politics were. He’d heard he was conservative, but then he’d also heard he was liberal. And Don Siegel told him, ‘He’s very conservative.’ And you could tell that Duke was much more excited about meeting him after that.”

  Hollywood had changed, the movies themselves had changed, but one thing hadn’t changed: John Wayne needed to do what he had been doing for more than fifty years—work at the craft he loved more passionately than anything besides his children. A reporter asked him about his refusal to quit, and he said, “To stop would be to surrender. To give up.” He understood his situation and had no illusions. “You don’t beat it, friend,” he said of cancer. “You stand it off.”

  Beset by shaky health, by a director he disliked, and by a picture that was leading him into places he wasn’t entirely sure of, Wayne could be pettish but always there was his willingness to extend a hand.

  “Anyplace I go in the world they treat me like a friend,” he said, with satisfaction and some wonder. But now he found that one depressing subject—politics—had been replaced by another—his health. “I hate it. It’s so damn irritating to feel bad when you haven’t felt bad all your life. I have been abnormally healthy. Even when they told me I had cancer, I hadn’t had any pain . . . nothing. They took the lung out and I was well again. Felt fine.

  “But this last year, it’s been one thing after another. . . . That’s the worst thing about getting old—having to use your will power to drive yourself instead of natural physical energy. Before, it all came so easy. Now I have to push.”

  The bronchial infection was still plaguing Wayne and he began to wear down. Some days, it was a struggle to walk twenty feet. Again, he had to have his back pounded to clear his lungs. As Siegel moved into the crucial scene of the final gunfight, the set became increasingly tense. Wayne wasn’t happy with Siegel’s staging of his entrance into the saloon, but acquiesced. At one point, Wayne said, “You’re really fucking this up,” loudly, in front of everybody.

  Siegel shot the beginning of the gunfight, but ran out of time and called a wrap. Wayne was visibly exhausted and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to wrap the moment I got here. See you all tomorrow. Don’t drink up all the booze.”

  But when tomorrow came, Wayne wasn’t there. Mike Frankovich told Siegel that Wayne was ill and they weren’t sure when he would be back. The words “if ever” were hanging in the air. Frankovich wanted to know how much could be done without Wayne.

  “A few days,” Siegel replied.

  “I heard Don say, ‘We’ll shoot around him,’ ” said Ron Howard. “And then he said, ‘Of course, I have to root for his recovery.’ ”

  So for a few days, Siegel staged the action with the other people in the scene: Hugh O’Brian, Richard Boone, and Bill McKinney. “He brilliantly shot around him,” said Howard. “He staged that entire shootout, and covered everybody first, including me, without John Wayne. Sometimes there was a double, but mostly there wasn’t. He staged the whole scene without the protagonist.”

  Hugh O’Brian’s death scene involved Books shooting him in the forehead as he peeked around the end of the bar. The bullet was to enter directly above the bridge of his nose. It was as harrowing an experience as any the actor ever had.

  Today the shot would be done with CGI, but at the time the studio hired a marksman to shoot O’Brian with a rifle firing a red pellet that flattened on impact and resembled a bullet hit. The marksman was situated to the right of the camera, about ten feet away from O’Brian. They rehearsed the shot a couple of times, after which O’Brian went to Siegel and told him they better get it on the first take, because there wasn’t going to be a second take.

  “If he missed, he could put my eye out,” remembered O’Brian. “The director knew it, I knew it, the marksman knew it. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. But he didn’t miss.”

  And then shooting was suspended. There were some sc
enes still to be done—between Wayne and Bacall, between Wayne and Howard—but they couldn’t be done without Wayne. This was all unheard of; Wayne worked hungover, he worked sick, he worked on impossible locations, he worked on pictures where the script was an embarrassment, he worked.

  But not this time.

  “It wasn’t easy keeping his illness quiet,” said William Self. “None of us talked about it, there was no gossip. It didn’t get in the trade papers. And at this point it became obvious that this picture could be it for him.”

  As the days passed by, the producers quietly floated the idea of using a double for Wayne in order to finish the picture. Siegel hated the idea, but he was contractually obligated to make the movie with or without its star. Siegel finished shooting the gunfight with Chuck Roberson doubling for Wayne, which meant that you couldn’t see Wayne’s face as he engaged in the gunfight and as he died. The sequence would cut together, but the picture was obviously going to suffer from the substitution.

  After two weeks, Wayne finally came back to work. He was pale but otherwise all right. When he asked what had been done in his absence, Siegel knew he was in trouble. They offered to take up part of the lunch hour by showing him the gunfight as it had been edited. Wayne nodded to Hugh O’Brian and said, “Watch the rushes with me.”

  The two men trooped off with Siegel, who must have felt like he was marching to his execution. “Duke agreed with the majority of the stuff he saw,” remembered O’Brian. “The only thing that startled him was the way Siegel had shot the scene with the guy played by Bill McKinney, the town braggart. Duke—or Duke’s double—shot him in the back as he’s trying to get out the door of the saloon. And when he saw that, Duke jumped up. ‘Wait a goddamn minute! I’ve never shot anybody in the back and I’m not going to start now.’ ”