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THE FIRST TIME I saw John Wayne, he was striding toward me out of the Georgia sun as helicopters landed behind him. His face was a deep brown. He was wearing a combat helmet, an ammo belt, had a canteen on his hip, was carrying a rifle, and stood six feet four inches. He stuck out his hand and said, “John Wayne.” That was not necessary.
John Wayne. When I was a kid, we said it as one word: Johnwayne. Like Marilynmonroe. His name was shorthand for heroism. All of his movies could have been titled Walking Tall. He wasn’t a cruel and violent action hero. He was almost always a man doing his job. Sometimes he was other than that, and he could be gentle, as in The Quiet Man, or vulnerable, as in The Shootist, or lonely and obsessed, as in The Searchers, or tender with a baby, as in 3 Godfathers.
He had an effect on people that few other actors ever had. Gene Siskel was interviewing him in the middle of the night during a Chicago location shoot. The Duke had been doing some drinking, to keep warm. At three a.m. he wanted something to eat. “We walked into an all-night greasy spoon,” Gene told me. “He threw an arm over my shoulder. I felt protected. We sat down in a booth. The waitress came over, took one look at him, and made the sign of the cross. She was trembling when she asked him what he’d like to have. ‘Eggs! And plenty of ’em!’ How would he like them? ‘Starin’ at me!’ ”
He smoked until he had a lung removed and didn’t shy clear of booze. He told me: “Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head.” People had this idea he was a reactionary Neanderthal. What they didn’t understand is that he could be funny about his politics. Once I was on location for Chisum in Durango, Mexico. Clive Hirschhorn of London’s Daily Express was there, too.
“Duke,” he asked, “what do you think about Nixon’s policy in Vietnam?”
Wayne sized him up as one of those goddamned hippies.
“I think the president is conducting himself with honor,” Wayne said, “and there’s only one thing better than honor.”
“What’s that?”
“In her.”
He explained that he was a liberal. “Hell yes, I’m a liberal. I listen to both sides before I make up my mind. Doesn’t that make you a liberal? Not in today’s terms, it doesn’t. These days, you have to be a fucking left-wing radical to be a liberal. Politically, though… I’ve mellowed.”
On that same set, we were playing a chess game, both of us bending over the board on an upended apple crate. Wayne, slouched in his old stitched leather director’s chair, had a crowd of kibitzers: wranglers, extras, old cronies, drinking buddies, a couple of Mexican stuntmen. He studied the board, roared with laughter, and said, “God… damn it! “You’ve trapped my queen!”
We studied the board. I made a decisive move.
“Why the hell did I just say that?” he asked. “If I hadn’t-a… said it, you wouldn’t-a… seen it.”
That’s how he talked, with pauses in the middle of a sentence. In his documentary Directed by John Ford, Peter Bogdanovich quotes him: “I started in silent pictures. One of my teachers was the old character actor Harry Carey. He told me, ‘John, the talkies are coming in, and that’s a fact of life. Those Broadway playwrights are going to be selling the studios all of their plays. What they don’t know is, people can’t listen that fast! My theory is, we should stop halfway through a sentence and give the audience a chance to catch up.’ ”
He was utterly without affectation. He was at home. He could talk to anyone. You couldn’t catch him acting. He was lucky to start early, in the mid-1920s, and become at ease on camera years before his first speaking role. He sounded the way he looked. He was a small-town Iowa boy, a college football player. He worked with great directors. He listened to them. He wasn’t a sex symbol. He didn’t perform, he embodied.
I met him three times officially, on the sets of The Green Berets and Chisum, and at his home in Newport Beach. And one other time. “Duke is in town to visit a sick friend at the hospital,” the Warner Bros. press agent Frank Casey told me one day in 1976. “He wants me to invite over all the movie critics to have a drink. He’s got the Presidential Suite at the Conrad Hilton.” At a time when movie stars employ security with black belts to keep the press away, how does that sound? We all gathered at the Hilton—Siskel, David Elliott of the Chicago Daily News, Mary Knoblauch of Chicago’s American, and me. “I’ve been visiting Stepin Fetchit down at Illinois Central Hospital,” Wayne told us. “We worked together for the first time in 1929. But I don’t want that in the paper. I don’t want a goddamned death watch on him. Don’t tell Kup! He’ll run it in his column!”
What did we discuss? None of us took notes. I recall we discussed some politics. Wayne supported the war in Vietnam. (“I’ve been over there and I believe what we’re doing is necessary.”) He was a defender of Nixon. He was a born conservative, but in an old-fashioned, simple, and patriotic way. He would have had contempt for the latter-day weirdos of today’s Right.
His big, masculine, leather-brass-and-wood hilltop home in Newport Beach stood guard over his yacht, a converted navy minesweeper. One end of the room was occupied by Wayne’s big wooden desk, piled with books, papers, letters, and scripts. There was an antique army campaign table with a bronze sculpture of cowboys on it. The walls were lined with cabinets, bookcases, an antique firearm collection, and a display of trophies and awards. Wayne went in the kitchen, brought out tequila and ice, and gave me a tour. He pointed out autographed photos of Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, and J. Edgar Hoover. I said I had to take a pee. On the wall of the bathroom opening off the den, he had a photo of Hubert Humphrey, inscribed “With warm appreciation for your continued support.”
Waiting on the other side of the room, he showed me his firearm collection. “This is my rifle from Stagecoach,” he said. “I always kept it. In True Grit, I spun it like this.”
He took the rifle in his right hand and spun it. Pain crossed his face.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. He replaced the rifle on its rack and massaged his shoulder. “Jesus, I wrecked that shoulder. Down in Baton Rouge, when I was making The Undefeated, I twisted around in the saddle and the damn stirrup was completely loose. I fell right under that goddamned horse; I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.”
He took another rifle for inspection. “And this,” he said, “is the weapon the Russians are sending to kill our boys in Vietnam. People just won’t see we’re at war over there. Win or lose. Look at that—isn’t that a mean-looking rifle? It’s a good one, too. And this is the piece of shit we’re giving our boys to shoot back with. But people just won’t realize. I heard a poem the other day. How did it go? ‘Every day I pray, I won’t go my complacent way…’ Hell, I can’t remember it all. Something to the effect of, I’ll never let those kids down.
“Jesus, that was a terrible thing about Gloria and Jimmy Stewart’s kid getting killed over there. It makes you want to cry. At least Jimmy was over there to see the kid a few months ago. That’s something. But it makes you want to cry. And Bob Taylor’s going was terrible. He was terminal since they opened him up. I know what he went through. They ripped a lung out of me. I thank God I’m still here.
“All the real motion picture people have always made family pictures. But the deadbeats and the so-called intelligentsia got in when the government stupidly split up the production companies and the theaters. The old giants—Mayer, Thalberg, even Harry Cohn, despite the fact that personally I couldn’t stand him—were good for this industry. Now the goddamned stock manipulators have taken over. They don’t know a goddamned thing about making movies. They make something dirty, and it makes money, and they say, ‘Jesus, let’s make one a little dirtier, maybe it’ll make more money.’ And now even the bankers are getting their noses into it. I’ll give you an example. Take that girl Julie Andrews, a sweet, openhearted girl, a wonderful performer. Her stint was Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. But she wanted to be a Theda Bara. And they went along with her, and the picture fell flat on its ass. A Goldwyn would have told her, ‘Look, my dear, you can’t change your sweet and lovely image…’ ”
An eager white puppy hurried into the room. Wayne snapped his fingers and the puppy ran to him. “Hey, little fella.” The puppy growled and rolled over on its back. “His name’s Frosty,” Wayne said. “Belongs to my daughter Aissa.” He played with the puppy.
“But you know,” he said, “I’m very conscious that people criticize Hollywood. Yet we’ve created a form, the Western, that can be understood in every country. The good guys against the bad guys. No nuances. And the horse is the best vehicle of action in our medium. You take action, a scene, and scenery and cut them together, and you never miss. Action, scene, scenery. And a horse.”
Frosty began to chew on the carpet. “Hey, you, get away from there!” Wayne said. The puppy looked up inquisitively and resumed chewing.
“I ought to get him some rawhide to keep him busy,” Wayne said. “But when you think about the Western, it’s an American art form. It represents what this country is about. In True Grit, for example, that scene where Rooster shoots the rat. That was a kind of reference to today’s problems. Oh, not that True Grit has a message or anything. But that scene was about less accommodation and more justice. They keep bringing up the fact that America’s for the downtrodden. But this new thing of genuflecting to the downtrodden, I don’t go along with that. We ought to go back to praising the kids who get good grades, instead of making excuses for the ones who shoot the neighborhood grocery man. But, hell, I don’t want to get started on that—Hey, you!”
The puppy looked up from a sofa leg. Wayne captured it and shooed it out through the sliding glass doors onto the patio. “The little fella was smelling around the wrong way there. But back to True Grit. Henry Hathaway used the backgrounds in such a way that it became a fantasy. Remember that scene where old Rooster is facing those four men across the meadow, and he takes the reins in his teeth and charges? ‘Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!’ That’s Henry at work. It’s a real meadow, but it looks almost dreamlike. Henry made it a fantasy and yet he kept it an honest Western.”
Wayne sipped at his tequila absentmindedly. “You get something of that in the character of Rooster,” he said. “Well, they say he’s not like what I’ve done before. Even I say that, but he does have facets of the John Wayne character, huh? I think he does. Of course, they give me that John Wayne stuff so much. They claim I always play the same role. Seems like nobody remembers how different the fellas were in The Quiet Man, or Iwo Jima, or Yellow Ribbon, where I was thirty-five playing a man of sixty-five. To stay a star, you have to bring along some of your own personality. Thousands of good actors can carry a scene, but a star has to carry the scene and still allow some of his character into it. What do you think?”
It was uncanny being asked by John Wayne what I thought about the John Wayne image. What came to mind was a scene in True Grit where Wayne and Kim Darby are waiting all night up on a hill for the bad guys to come back to the cabin. And Wayne gets to talking about how he was married once, to a grass widow back in Cairo, Illinois, and how she took off one day. And how he didn’t care much, how he missed her some, but he’d rather lose a wife than his independence. And how he took off alone, glad to be alone, and stuck up a bank or two, just to stake himself, back in the days before he took up marshaling. And Darby asks him about those old days, about how he got to where he was now. It’s a scene that echoes back to Howard Hawks’s El Dorado, in which old hand Wayne teaches young James Caan how to hold a gun and shoot it. But the True Grit scene is even more nostalgic. It’s a summation of the dozens of Western characters played by Wayne. That’s what I told him, anyway.
“Well,” Wayne said. “Well, maybe so. I guess that scene in True Grit is about the best scene I ever did.” He sprawled on a cracked leather sofa. “And that ending,” he said, pouring a few more drops of tequila, “I liked that. You know, in the book Mattie loses her hand from the snakebite, and I die, and the last scene in the book has her looking at my grave. But the way Marguerite Roberts wrote the screenplay, she gave it an uplift. Mattie and Rooster both go to visit her family plot, after she gets cured of the snakebite. By now it’s winter. She offers to let Rooster be buried there someday, seeing as how he has no family of his own. Rooster’s happy to accept, long as he doesn’t have to take her up on it any too quick. So then he gets on his horse and says, ‘Come and see a fat old man some time.’ And then he spurs the horse and jumps a fence, just to show he still can.”
He was a totally nontheoretical actor. He never studied his craft. He became good at it because he went out into Monument Valley a great many times with Ford, and they made some of the greatest American movies without giving it much more thought than the whiskey and the poker games and the campfires with which they occupied their evenings. Those were Wayne’s great days, when Pappy and his wagon train camped out in the desert, far from Hollywood and its agents and moguls, and made what they used to call cowboy pictures.
On-screen he held so much authority so that he was not being ironic when he explained his theory of acting: “Don’t act. React.” John Wayne could react. Other actors had to strain the limits of their craft to hold the screen with him. There is this test for an actor who, for a moment, is just standing there in a scene: Does he seem to be just standing there? Or does he, as John Wayne did, seem to be deciding when, why, and how to take the situation under his control?
His last picture was called The Shootist, in 1976. He played an old gunfighter who had fought his way through the West for a lifetime and had finally come to a small town and was filled with the fear of dying. He went to the doctor, played by James Stewart, learned that he had weeks to live, and conducted himself during those days with strength and dignity. There was one other movie he wanted to make, and never made, that he talked about once. It didn’t have a title and it didn’t need a title, not in Wayne’s mind. It would simply have been one last movie directed by John Ford, who died in 1973 with Wayne at his bedside.
“God, that was a loss to me when Pappy died,” Wayne told me. “Up until the very last years of his life, Pappy could have directed another picture, and a damned good one. But they said Pappy was too old. Hell, he was never too old. In Hollywood these days, they don’t stand behind a fella. They’d rather make a goddamned legend out of him and be done with him.”
John Wayne died on June 11, 1979. He had lived for quite a while on one lung, and then the Big C came back. He was near death and he knew it when he walked out onstage at the 1979 Academy Awards to present Best Picture to The Deer Hunter, a film he wouldn’t have made. He looked frail, but he planted himself there and sounded like John Wayne.