by Scott Eyman
“Yes it is, Father,” Wayne said. They went through the baptism ceremony together, ending with “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost.” Then the priest gave him Extreme Unction, absolving him of all sins—the Last Rites.
The priest said that Wayne was lucid, and knew what he was doing. “I gave him the sacraments. But it was impossible to give him Holy Communion because of his condition—he couldn’t swallow the water.”
Patrick Wayne’s memory of the event was slightly different. “On the morning of his death, the chaplain came by and said he’d like to see my dad. I told him he’d been in a coma, but I would ask. He was asleep, but I leaned over and said, ‘Dad, the chaplain’s here.’ And he roused himself and murmured ‘OK.’ That’s when the chaplain baptized him.”
Aissa Wayne was there, and she said that at the time of the conversion her father was under the influence of industrial doses of morphine and was drifting in and out of consciousness. As the priest said the prayers in Latin, Aissa saw her father faintly nod his head, acknowledging that he knew the priest was there and that they were praying. “I knew firsthand how my father felt about Catholicism,” she recalled. “I was raised a Catholic, and my father took no interest at all, never once attending church with me and my mom. Our entire lives, he showed no inclination toward organized religion of any type.”
But Wayne’s grandson Chris knew a priest at Loyola Marymount who used to see Wayne shopping for Christmas presents at Sears. “When you have as many kids as I do, you buy in bulk,” he told the priest. The same priest would occasionally see Wayne at the 5 A.M. Mass. “It’s me, father,” Wayne would say after the priest did a double take.
Wayne’s grandson Matthew Munoz was visiting him along with his mother, Melinda, and he came to believe that Wayne’s conversion was inevitable. “My grandmother was very devout and so was my mother. In fact, my grandfather . . . was very true to God. He always believed in God, but he wasn’t much of a church attendee. I really think my grandfather’s admiration of my grandmother is what made him take that spiritual step and say yes. I also believe my grandmother’s prayers were heard.”
“My dad was not a churchgoing man,” said Patrick Wayne, “although all of us kids were raised Catholic because of our mothers. He always said that he was a ‘Presbygoddamnterian.’ But as far as I know he was never baptized until that last day.”
On the morning of June 11, the doctors told the family he was going to die that day. Supposedly he opened his eyes that morning and fixed on Pat Stacy. She asked him if he knew who she was. “Of course I know who you are,” he said. “You’re my girl. I love you.” Wayne closed his eyes and went back to sleep, a deep sleep. Hours went by. The nurse called the children into the room. His breathing became shallow, more a series of gasps than anything else, and there was a longer time between each breath.
Aissa was holding his right hand and she noticed that the cancer had left his hands undiminished. They were still huge and all-encompassing. The man in the bed drew in his breath. There was a pause. He never exhaled.
The man the world knew as John Wayne but who always thought of himself as Duke Morrison died on Monday, June 11, 1979, at 5:23 in the afternoon. He was seventy-two years old. The cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest of five minutes, caused by gastric cancer of eight months. The attending physician might as well have listed the cause of death as “life.”
As the news spread across the world, the reactions were close to unanimous. The controversy of his World War II nonservice, of his fierce conservatism and support of the blacklist, faded beside the loss of his passing. For decades, he had been America’s great stone wall, impervious to fashion and time. Now, suddenly, the wall was gone.
The Los Angeles Times led the front page with his death, which continued onto six pages inside. The Herald-Examiner also led with his death. President Carter said that Wayne’s “ruggedness, the tough independence, the sense of personal conviction and courage—on and off the screen—reflected the best of our national character.” James Stewart said that “John Wayne was probably the most admired actor in the world. His passing marks a great loss for his family, for the film industry, and for the entire world.”
Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, always had a knack for flamboyant metaphor and said, “The Duke is dead, which means the tallest tree in the movie forest has just been felled. There won’t ever be anyone like him. God, we will miss him.”
In France, the three national TV networks showed Wayne’s best-known films in a tribute they called “John Wayne, Duke of the Wide Open Spaces.”
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a charming reminiscence regarding Wayne’s appearance in an ad for National Review in 1969—his picture with a quote: “National Review is my favorite magazine. Why don’t you give it a try?” A year later, Wayne received a solicitation from the magazine illustrated with his own pitch. He sent it to Buckley with a scrawled note: “Bill, What do you need to be convinced? Duke.”
“The miracle is the memory,” wrote Buckley. “Of all those villainous men dispatched by John Wayne, surely the most widely viewed executive of good causes—frontier justice, battles against totalitarian forces, the defense of the weak—in human history. His memory keeps us cheerful.”
But not everybody was overwhelmed with grief. The director—and World War II veteran—William Wyler wrote a letter to Newsweek referring to Wayne as “a great American hero fighting for God and country in all services and all wars. And it was all done before cameras in Hollywood and on safe locations. That’s damn good acting!”
Four days after Wayne died, a funeral Mass was held at Our Lady Queen of Angels at Corona del Mar at four in the morning to avoid crowds and the usual celebrity circus. The Mass was conducted by the archbishop of Panama. John Wayne was buried shortly after the sun rose at Pacific View Memorial Park in Newport Beach. Seven children, twenty-one grandchildren, and his estranged wife, Pilar, were present.
The next day, a steady stream of cars entered the Pacific View Memorial Park. They weren’t allowed to go to the gravesite, but circled a makeshift memorial the cemetery had erected by a flagpole. The largest of the arrangements was a four-foot-wide design that featured red and white roses forming an American flag.
For years, Wayne lay in an unmarked grave—Michael didn’t want tourists making a pilgrimage to the site and wanted to follow his father’s wishes that everything be quiet and dignified. Finally, he relented; the stone that marks John Wayne’s resting place carries a quote from the man who lies beneath: “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes to us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”
The tribute that might have meant the most to Wayne happened in Durango, Mexico, where Burt Lancaster was on location. When word came that John Wayne had died, the cast and crew paused for a minute of silence. They were making Cattle Annie and Little Britches.
They were making a western.
EPILOGUE
“I’ve had the most appealing of lives. I’ve been lucky enough to portray man against the elements at the same time as there was always someone there to bring me the orange juice.”
—JOHN WAYNE
“I’ve played the kind of man I’d like to have been.”
—JOHN WAYNE
Wayne’s will was filed a week after he died. The thirty-page document, dated and signed October 5, 1978, denied any bequest to Pilar because she had earlier entered into a private settlement with Wayne. “I am married to Pilar Wayne,” the will stated, “but she and I are separated and for this reason I intentionally make no provision in this will for her.”
The will set up a trust for Josie, out of which she was to be paid $3,000 a month. Mike received all of his father’s Class A preferred stock in Batjac Productions, which gave the oldest son ownership of the company and of the Batjac film library. Also receiving special attention
was his daughter Toni, who was the beneficiary of a separate trust involving her proportionate share of the remainder of the estate. Pat Stacy received $30,000, Mary St. John $10,000.
The remainder of the personal property was to be divided equally among the children, except for his collection of western art, which had been previously deeded over to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. The executors were Mike Wayne, Louis Johnson, and John S. Warren.
The estate was valued at $6.8 million, with real property valued at $1 million, personal property at $5.75 million, and annual income from personal property at $100,000. A careful reading of the will made it clear that most of the estate was in property—there was little cash.
Michael Wayne told Stacy that she could stay in the house Wayne had rented for her until the lease was up, and she would remain on the Batjac payroll for the rest of the year or until she got another job, whichever came first.
The house in Newport Beach was sold in March 1980 for $3.48 million. It was torn down in 2002, and replaced with something far larger and gaudier. Louis Johnson sold the 26 Bar Ranch, the Red River Land Company, and the Red River Feed Yard in January 1980 for $45 million, half of which went to the Wayne estate.
Honors quickly accrued to Wayne’s memory and image. The house where Marion Morrison was born was turned into a museum. The Orange County airport was renamed the John Wayne Airport, with an impressive statue of Wayne outside the terminal. Two years after his death, the UCLA Medical School’s Division of Surgical Oncology became the John Wayne Cancer Clinic.
At least four life-sized or larger bronze statues of him dot the American landscape, and there are other commemorations: the John Wayne Pioneer Trail in Washington state, and part of Arizona Highway 347 is called the John Wayne Parkway.
In 1991, the Wild Goose was purchased by the former owner of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Today, the ship remains a floating shrine to the memory of John Wayne and is available for charter out of Newport Beach. Likewise, the bar at the Balboa Yacht Club in Newport Beach is called Duke’s Place, where there is a floor-to-ceiling painting of Wayne at the helm of the Wild Goose.
Pilar would marry twice more, although her identity stayed that of Mrs. John Wayne, surrounded as she was by John Wayne memorabilia, including her own paintings that often featured a representation of her late husband somewhere in the composition. With her husband dead, Josie was free to remarry in the eyes of the Church, which she did in 1996. She died in 2003 at the age of 95.
In 2011, Ethan Wayne auctioned off a large batch of Wayne’s personal effects, from his annotated script for Stagecoach, through costumes to personal possessions such as eyeglasses and prescription bottles. The auction brought more than $5.3 million from fans eager to possess something Wayne had once touched, once worn. His cap from The Green Berets brought $179,250 (a record price for a costume hat), his hat from Big Jake and The Cowboys brought $119,500, a holster and belt from El Dorado brought $77,675, his driver’s license brought $89,625, and one of the eyepatches from True Grit brought $47,800.
Mike Wayne ran Batjac until his own death in 2003, after which it was taken over by his wife, Gretchen. Once, he was asked what his father would think of the large collection of John Wayne posters and memorabilia he had amassed. “He’d look at it and say, ‘That’s great,’ ” said Mike. “And then he’d never give it another thought.”
Mike came to some realizations about his father’s place in American folklore, and of how a man whose early life had been chaotic and insecure came to place such a high value on certainty—on- and offscreen.
The thing that he required as an actor was a strong male role that had a philosophy. That runs consistently through the roles that he played. . . . He was a strong man with strong beliefs and he stuck to those beliefs. Now the beliefs [of the character] weren’t always right . . . but the character stuck to those beliefs. He was a man that had conviction, that had integrity and so he was able to portray that and more [importantly] project it. . . .
Because of his films, my father came to symbolize the American man throughout the world, whether he was wearing a soldier suit or a cowboy hat or a police uniform. The . . . values they presented—honesty, integrity, independence—were qualities he had on and off screen.
He wasn’t a cowboy or a rancher; he was a movie star. He wasn’t a hero; he was a movie star. But for many people, he was a symbol of America.
The impact of most stars recedes after they die, for the movie business is one of temporal enthusiasms, and standards of masculinity change nearly as much as standards of beauty. But to a great extent Wayne remains, his films in constant rotation, his image immediately recognizable.
He was a rich character hiding in plain sight—deeply flawed, deeply moving, earthy and warm, a Scots-Irish brawler by blood and by temperament, full of love and rage and forgiveness. He was a freedom fighter whose best friends included flagrant anti-Semites and racists, a deeply conservative man who believed passionately in freedom of speech, an emotionally expansive man who was a little afraid of women, a man with a father he adored who spent years in search of a father substitute, a fierce patriot who didn’t serve, an insecure young man who grew to be a secure husband and father. And a fine actor who only grudgingly stepped outside his comfort zone.
The people that knew him, and the people that worked with him, would spend the rest of their own lives happily talking about him. “The thing about Duke is he’s like a big kid,” said Howard Hawks. “I don’t think, with all that’s happened to him over the years, that he’s ever really come to terms with it.”
The word Hawks was searching for was “innocence,” a quality that derived from a rare purity of being. Wayne was by turns enthusiastic, generous, excitable, easily moved to both anger and laughter, always apologizing for the former, never for the latter. To a great extent, he was the same man at seventy that he had been at thirty—there was never anything pretentious about him, and he always seemed surprised and pleased by praise, perhaps because he received so little of it for so long.
“He treated me square, he treated me with class and he was damn good,” said stuntman Dean Smith. “When I met him, I didn’t have a quarter, and now I’m eighty years old and I’ve got a thirteen-year-old son and two ranches. And I’m gonna be like Old Duke—I’m gonna milk that cow until she kicks me.”
Underneath the surface certainty was an overwhelming sense of responsibility and a tendency to repress insecurity whenever it arose, which resulted in explosions of anger if he felt ignored or powerless. He needed approval far more than he wanted money, and at his best or worst he was always relentlessly honest.
“If he told you tomorrow’s Christmas,” said Ben Johnson, “you could get your stocking ready. He was that kind of person.”
Near the end of Harry Carey Jr.’s life, an autographed picture of Wayne was prominently displayed in his bedroom. It was a shot from Hondo, of Wayne with his dog, with an inscription to Carey’s mother: “Ollie Dear—If we could turn it back I’d like it to be about here, or Big Bear. Duke.” Below that inscription was a smaller one, also in Wayne’s hand: “Me too. Lassie.” (Big Bear was a reference to The Shepherd of the Hills, and his co-star Harry Carey Sr.)
Pilar judged her husband to be someone who refused to rely on talent, and believed predominantly in effort. “He got up every morning determined to do his best. . . . Though the results varied, the effort never did. He believed that hard work, sweat rather than talent, was what it took to succeed.”
“I think he was very aware of what he had to live up to,” said Budd Boetticher, “but I don’t know that Duke was ever happy. Obviously he was happier on the set or carousing than he was at home. He worked hard not to be lonely, which tells me that he must have been. Anybody who keeps that busy has got to be lonely.”
Many actors have a way of becoming what they play, but, as with Cary Grant, John Wayne first had to devise a screen character. After that, he became what he wanted to be, an
d he played John Wayne so well that it gradually overlapped with—but never obliterated—Duke Morrison.
Although he enacted a great many scenes of violence, that’s not what the audience remembered as much as a prevailing forthright attitude and, paradoxically, his grace—the way he could give a mythic rhythm to pure movement.
Perhaps the most appropriate definition of star acting as it was practiced by Wayne came from Charles Laughton. The great actor was asked about the difference between him and an actor like Gary Cooper. “We act in opposite ways,” Laughton said. “His is presentational acting. Mine is representational acting. I get at a part from the outside. He gets at it from the inside, from his own clear way of looking at life. His is the right way, if you can do it. I could learn to do, but it would take me a year to do what he can do instinctively, and I haven’t the time.”
The genre that Wayne personified is more or less dead, except when a powerful director or star gets an urge to make a vanity western. Sometimes they’re good—Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Kevin Costner’s Open Range. Sometimes they’re just okay—the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit, relentlessly bent toward their obsession with bleak Americana, with Jeff Bridges strenuously imitating Nick Nolte. And sometimes they’re not so good—James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma, or Quentin Tarantino’s fatuous Django Unchained.
“Westerns didn’t die,” said Andrew Fenady, “they were murdered. By Altman, by Peckinpah, by the revisionists. Around the time of Vietnam, suddenly there couldn’t be heroes. The righteous revisionists took great delight in demeaning and defiling and perverting anybody that ever wore a badge, a uniform, or moved west.
“And something else happened: the western got absorbed. Star Wars was like a Borden Chase western, with two uneasy friends, except with rockets and spaceships instead of horses and wagons. Setting it in space worked. And today, kids don’t know from westerns.”