by Scott Eyman
There was a script called Cattle Annie and Little Britches making the rounds, about two adolescent girls who joined the Doolin-Dalton gang in the waning days of the Old West. The plan was to cast a couple of unknown girls in the title roles, which necessitated a star for the part of Bill Doolin. Wayne was an obvious possibility, but he wasn’t feeling up to it. The producers said they’d wait, but after a while began to canvass for other possibilities.
Features were getting harder for Wayne to make, but his overhead hadn’t changed. He began to fret about the IRS, the expense of the Wild Goose, his medical bills, his flagging cash flow, and how he believed his money had been mismanaged by Bö Roos and Don La Cava. Aissa was attending USC, and her father gave her only $200 a month for an allowance—barely enough to get by.
So Wayne downshifted and agreed to make a series of commercials for Great Western Bank. (There had been an earlier, brief series of appearances for Datril, a pain reliever, but Wayne hadn’t been happy with the ads and stopped making them.) As he told Aissa, “The truth is, I’m doing it for the money. . . . If Michael had been old enough to manage my money from the start, I’d never have had these problems. You’ve gotta find something you can fall back on Aissa. If I get sick, I don’t know what will happen to you kids. It’s not what you think it is, Aissa.”
Great Western agreed to pay Wayne $350,000 for 1977, $400,000 for 1978, and $450,000 for 1979, with two one-year options after that. Along with the money he was getting from ABC for the TV specials, it was enough to keep the wolf from the door.
The bank received about thirty letters condemning it for hiring someone that the letters referred to variously as a reactionary or a liberal—many paleo-conservatives were still enraged by Wayne’s support for the Panama Canal treaty.
The commercials started running at the end of 1977, and the bank was immediately gratified by the response. In December, the first month of the commercials, Great Western had a net savings gain of $8 million, even though December is traditionally bad for savings and loans because of Christmas withdrawals. January brought more good news, as Great Western recorded a $21 million net increase, most of it in over-the-counter passbook deposits from small investors.
What made the production of the spots particularly interesting is that most of them were directed and photographed by the great cinematographer and committed liberal Haskell Wexler. Wexler had a commercial company in partnership with Conrad Hall, and the two men had recently had success with ads for the Wells Fargo bank, which is how they got the job for yet another bank.
Wexler made a trip to Wayne’s house in Newport Beach to discuss the commercials and was pleasantly surprised by the environment. “It was not a big, plush Hollywood house,” said Wexler. “There was one room filled with awards; that room was a museum of a thousand awards. Otherwise, it was a homey, simple setup.”
Wayne was aware of Wexler’s politics. “He brought it up right off. He knew I’d been in Vietnam with Jane Fonda. ‘I know where you stand,’ he said. ‘And I’m absolutely in favor of standing by our agreement with Panama and I’m taking a lot of guff from the damn right-wingers.’ He gave me all his credentials of how he didn’t go along with the nutty right wing. And then he showed me his station wagon with a big bump in the roof so he could sit in the driver’s seat with his cowboy hat on.”
The two men got along fine that day, although there was one small dustup on the first day of shooting the first commercial. Wexler had placed a horse in the background of the shot, and Wayne looked around and yelled “Cut! What makes you think you’re a director, Wexler? That horse is a swayback. I don’t want a swayback horse in the background of my shot.”
Wexler was a good rider and knew a swayback when he saw one, but he had another horse placed in the background anyway. He could never figure out if Wayne was entirely serious or just asserting his authority.
Wayne’s nineteenth-century attitudes reared up only once. The location was Oregon, and Wexler, as was his wont, had hired a couple of female camera assistants—he believed in integrated crews. One of them, Kristin Glover, had been working regularly in production for five years.
The crew had to cross a muddy field to get to the location, and Wexler decided he wanted to carry the Arriflex camera, which he owned, rather than delegate the job to one of the other crew members. Normally, the camera assistant would have carried it, but it was Wexler’s camera and he was the boss. Wayne observed the director lugging the camera, but said nothing.
When he noticed that the crew included women, Wayne muttered, “Does the crew still shower together?” Once they began working, Wayne completely ignored Glover, even when she was standing right next to him with a tape measure to check focus. Throughout the first day of the shoot, he refused to acknowledge her existence. “I was a nonentity,” she recalled. “I just did my job and figured that was the way he was.”
That night, Wayne invited Wexler and the crew to dinner. Kristin Glover was the first person to arrive at the restaurant, and Wayne was alone at the table. “Well,” he announced, “I see that you can’t carry a camera, so what are you good for?”
“Why Mr. Wayne, how rude,” said Glover, teasing him. The rest of the crew came in, including a female assistant Glover was paying out of her own pocket.
During dinner, Wayne began baiting Wexler. “What we need is another good war,” etc. Wexler figured the dinner was an extension of the shoot; since it didn’t pay to antagonize the star, he didn’t take the bait. Wayne then began a diatribe about women on film sets, specifically women who couldn’t do the job, who took jobs away from men who needed to feed their families, and so forth. Glover sat there until she couldn’t take it anymore.
“I have something I’d like to say,” she announced.
“Well, go ahead,” said Wayne.
“I was hired because I’m capable of doing my job. I take it seriously. I love it, I care about it, and I’m good at it.” At this point, Glover’s voice cracked. “And besides,” she continued, “you’re really hurting our feelings.”
“I didn’t cry,” she remembered, “but I was on the verge.”
Wayne’s entire demeanor shifted. “I am so sorry,” he announced to the crew, specifically to the women members of the crew. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I apologize.”
The next day, in front of the entire crew, Wayne came up to Glover and put his arm around her “so sweetly. He was a huge man, he just towered over me.”
“I hope you’re not still mad at me?” he asked her.
“I couldn’t possibly have stayed mad at him,” she said. “He was a chauvinist, and he couldn’t help himself. But he heard me. I realized that he loved to start arguments, loved to debate, loved to tussle with people and challenge them. The rest of the time he treated me as an accepted member of the crew, worthy of being spoken to. I would have to call him a charming chauvinist.”
“He was a great guy to work with,” said Haskell Wexler. “It was a very important situation in Kristin’s life to see a man of that stature in the film business who did good interactive things that showed in the work. It was good for her. After that initial dustup, he was charming to the girls. He responded to them, and they responded to him.
“I thought he would be tougher, and maybe a little mean. But my expectations were colored by prejudice. And I think maybe it goes with my getting older or maybe just being more mature. I don’t think there are too many people I’ve come across that are all bad or that I hate. All of us have something to say that’s worth listening to and paying attention to and acting well with. It doesn’t mean we don’t have principles of our own, it just means that it’s not worth fouling up relationships.
“Kristin says Wayne was a charming chauvinist? I would have to say he was a principled reactionary.”
Although the commercials didn’t tax Wayne’s endurance—a couple of them were completed in one take—he was very much cognizant of a health situation that was not apparent to anybody else: he was beginni
ng to lose weight for no apparent reason, and was drinking protein drinks during the shoots.
“He was aware that his days were numbered,” said Wexler. “It was nothing overt, but he would say things. I remember he told me, ‘As lousy a director as you might be, Wexler, you might be the last one I work with.’ ”
The Great Western commercials turned out to be simply but elegantly produced, and surprisingly emotional. The messages are all heartfelt, the mood is intimate and gently retrospective, the sell is soft and dependent on Wayne’s status as a trusted friend of the audience.
In one, Wayne stands among redwood trees, wearing his familiar vest and cowboy hat and having lost a fair amount of weight. “These trees have been around for a thousand years,” he says. “It’s a nice feeling to be around something that’s been here a long time and is going to last.” Another one shows him in front of the mountains of Lone Pine. “I rode out here about 50 years ago on a little dun horse and started a film career. A picture called The Big Trail. . . . In those days, a Great Western Savings Account would have come in pretty handy.”
“I have a picture of the two of us,” said Haskell Wexler. “Part of [the inscription] is that quote from Wayne: ‘What makes you think you’re a director, Wexler?’ Thirty-odd years later, Kristin will still say that to me out of the blue. Whenever I see the people from that crew, we still talk about the experience of working with him.”
For the first time in forty years, Wayne had time on his hands, so he looked around for make-work projects. When The People’s Almanac asked him to rate the five best movie actors and five best movies of all time, he thought about it, then made his choices. For actors, he listed (from the top) Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Kathrine (sic) Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, and Lionel Barrymore. For the best pictures, he went with A Man for All Seasons, Gone With the Wind, Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man.
In February 1978, Wayne’s voice began to deteriorate—it was raspy, and the low tones were disappearing. He was angry about his condition, angry about the lack of work, angry about the country. Although he liked Jimmy Carter personally, he felt he was weak and ineffectual. “The United States is losing its balls and its spirit,” he complained. “It’s gotten so crappy here, I can’t stand to see it.”
He began to talk about moving to Mexico. Why not? His marriage was broken, his career was frozen, his health was uncertain. He was ready to give up, and besides the Mexicans loved him. Baja, perhaps. He seemed to be serious and began taking lessons to improve his Spanish, although Michael would undoubtedly have hurled his body between his father and the door to keep him from abandoning America.
In March, Wayne and Pat Stacy attended Henry Hathaway’s eightieth birthday party at the Bel-Air Country Club. It was one more reunion of Old Hollywood: Henry Fonda was there, Jimmy Stewart, Richard Widmark, Hal Wallis, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Tony Curtis, Glenn Ford, Karl Malden, George Burns. Wayne announced that Hathaway was “the most irascible, most fascinating, most talented bastard.” No one disagreed. He tried to take a spin around the dance floor with Hathaway’s wife, Skip, but had to stop after a couple of minutes because he couldn’t catch his breath.
There were a couple of mediocre job offers. Irwin Allen was preparing Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and wanted Burt Reynolds for the lead, while Warner Bros. was trying to convince Clint Eastwood to take the part. Then Wayne contacted Allen and said he’d be interested in the film, and Allen was thunderstruck. Having John Wayne would lift the film to another level.
However, when the initial script went out—it had the upside-down ship resting on top of an underwater volcano, and yes, the volcano finally exploded—Reynolds, Eastwood, and Wayne all turned the picture down. Around the same time, Steven Spielberg offered Wayne the part of General Joseph Stilwell in his film 1941. Wayne invited Spielberg down to Newport Beach to discuss the script, then chewed the director out for wasting his time with a role that he felt was demeaning to the military.
“He didn’t want me to make 1941,” remembered Spielberg. “He said to me, ‘You’re making a mockery of a very serious time. . . . And I read your script. . . . I for one didn’t laugh.’ He gave me such a bollicking about it. We stayed friends although he was just disgusted that I would make what he thought was a very anti-American picture.”
Robert Stack was happy to play the part, and his scene was a bright spot in a very bad picture.
The hoarseness got worse, and he was becoming extremely short of breath—his wind could barely support him through a sentence. After St. Patrick’s Day 1978 he traveled to Boston for open heart surgery to repair a defective mitral valve. Mike Wayne’s son Chris, who had had open heart surgery when he was five, called to tell his grandfather that “If I can do it, you can do it.”
“Well, if I didn’t have so many miles on me, I’d feel more confident,” Wayne replied.
In fact, the hospital was not thrilled about the surgery; Wayne was about to be seventy-one, had one lung and chronic bronchitis. Open heart surgery under those circumstances had a failure rate of at least 10 percent, and nobody wanted to be responsible for killing John Wayne.
On the night of April 2, Wayne and the family went out to dinner at a private dining room at Maison Robert, a fine restaurant in downtown Boston. Wayne’s doctor gave him permission to have one drink, so he ordered the largest martini in the house and raised his glass in a toast: “To the last supper.” That put a lid on the evening, which was already filled with foreboding, but Joe de Franco saved it by altering the terms of the toast: “Last supper until Newport.”
On April 3, the doctors cracked Wayne’s chest, sliced into his heart, and replaced his mitral valve with one from a pig. When he woke up after the surgery, the doctor asked him how he felt. “I saw it was raining,” he said. “I found myself wanting to roll in the mud.” He admitted that he had been “scared, damn scared.” There weren’t a lot of parts for an actor without a voice. “Now, with that damn pig valve in me, I not only have my voice back but I go around saying ‘Oink oink.’ ”
Back home, Wayne’s recuperative therapy involved walking, a daily hike of at least a mile and a quarter. Afterward, he would sit on the deck of his house waving to yachts that sailed by. In the house, four secretaries had to be hired to handle the mail that had flooded in since his surgery. “They’ve opened 10,000 so far,” he said. “And I can take you back and show you boxes with 50,000 more. Isn’t that something? There’s just no way I can answer them, but jeez, I’m really touched.”
In May, he celebrated his seventy-first birthday. Joe de Franco was there, Pat Stacy was there, ten other close friends. But he didn’t enter into the celebration, and he didn’t even empty his glass of wine. He was listless during the following week, so he went to the hospital for more tests, which revealed hepatitis. That entailed six weeks of bed rest, more drugs, daily visits from a doctor. When Pat Stacy’s birthday arrived, he was too sick to help her celebrate. A trip to Catalina aboard the Wild Goose seemed to perk him up, and he was better by the end of June. A month later, he surprised Stacy by taking her to the private showroom of Dicker and Dicker in Beverly Hills, where he presented her with her choice of mink coats for a belated birthday gift, then added a white fox boa.
As late as September, he was still slightly listless from the hepatitis and rested for up to seven hours a day. But he hauled himself from Newport Beach to be honored at the Century Plaza for a Boy Scout testimonial dinner. Twelve hundred guests paid $250 a plate to honor Wayne, which amounted to more than $400,000 for the purchase of a camp at Lake Arrowhead that was named the John Wayne Outpost Camp. Merv Griffin was the emcee, and old friends such as James Stewart showed up as well. “If I could pick any man to be my brother,” Wayne told Stewart, “I’d sure pick someone like you—rich.”
By October 1978, it had been nearly three years since John Wayne had made a movie, and a sense of aimlessness had descended. The Utah Film Festival awarded him it
s John Ford Medallion, but he didn’t feel up to traveling, so he asked Peter Bogdanovich to accept it for him. Bogdanovich brought the medallion to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Wayne was staying for a few days to be close to his medical treatments. Wayne was in his pajamas watching a USC football game. Pat Wayne arrived with a couple of his children, and it was all very casual and comfortable.
There was a general air of illness about Wayne, so the only beverage was iced tea. Talk inevitably turned to the old days, of Ford and Hawks and Ward Bond. “Christ, everybody’s gone,” Wayne said. He asked Bogdanovich if he would be interested in directing a Batjac picture called Beau John. “It’s kind of a half-western thing, it’s not cowboys and Indians, you know, it’s—oh, the humor and the wonderful relationship between this grandfather and the son and the son-in-law and the grandson. . . . I hope to hell I live to do it. Just a wonderful story.” Bogdanovich said of course Wayne would be able to make it, and he’d be happy to direct it.
Beau John became the focus of his professional future, and Wayne proposed the project to Ron Howard. “I found a book,” he told Howard. “I think it’s a movie. It’s you and me or it’s nobody.”
“It never got past the verbal stage,” recalled Howard. “And at that point, he was showing signs of not being well. I was a little doubtful.”
With more time on his hands, Wayne was able to look back at his career with equanimity. He was proud of his performance in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, because it was a true character performance. He liked Hondo, The Searchers, Red River, and True Grit. He didn’t talk much about The Shootist—his anger with Don Siegel had soured him on the picture.
Among his contemporaries, he loved Gary Cooper, didn’t like Clark Gable. “You know why Gable’s an actor?” he told his daughter Aissa. “It’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do.” He had grown to like Clint Eastwood and he had a soft spot for Paul Newman: “Now there’s an actor who’s got it if he’d stop hurting himself playing those anti-hero roles. The man has real talent . . . when he isn’t directing his own films.” He also appreciated Robert Redford and George C. Scott.