Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  Indeed, for Duke to lobby for the role of a man dying of cancer, after having felt deep shame and anger over his own struggle, meant that he knew it was important to face up to the truth of the disease and to his own mortality, to lead the way in public acceptance of a disease still whispered about and euphemistically referred to as “the Big C.”

  The film is a profile in the courage to face up to one’s end, no matter how grim. “Even an ox dies,” Doc Hostetler tells Books, after first reassuring him that he seemed to have the constitution of an ox. At one point in the film when he’s arguing with the widow Bond Rogers, played by Bacall, who owns the boardinghouse where Books has come to die, he says to her, “I’m a dying man, scared of the dark.” Those are stark, powerful words for a man celebrated for his courage and heroism.

  To alleviate the pain as it grows in intensity, Hostetler gives Books a bottle of laudanum mixed with alcohol—Soldier’s Joy, in fact, though the term is not used in the film—which Books then keeps in his breast pocket, taking long pulls from the bottle with increasing frequency. The doctor has pretty much warned Books that if he has any other way of going out before being beaten by the extreme pain and indignity of the disease, he ought to consider it. “Both of us have had a lot to do with death,” he tells the shootist. “I’m not a brave man, but you must be….I would not die the death I just described, not if I had your courage.” He suggests that Books reflect on this while his mind is still clear.

  Throughout the movie, Books understands that dying with dignity—as well as dignity itself—is the final virtue worth fighting for. He struggles for it—enduring the insults of raffish men such as the surly hothead Jay Cobb, played by Bill McKinney, and reduced to carrying a fancy red pillow stolen from a whorehouse with him wherever he goes, to relieve the pain of sitting. Early on, he cites his own moral code: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do that to others, and I require the same from them.” But this new challenge is beyond anything Books has ever faced before. It can’t be solved with a gun—or can it?

  Books arrives in Carson City in 1901, a change from the novel’s setting of El Paso, Texas, which is where the historical John Wesley Hardin met his death in 1895 in a shoot-out in the Acme Saloon. The town bustles with modernity: A streetcar pulled by a mule runs through town on steel tracks. One of the villains of the piece, a composite character named Mike Sweeney played by a briny Richard Boone, shows up in an automobile—the Oldsmobile Curved Dash. The boardinghouse that Books moves into has a telephone, running water, and an indoor bathroom. When he comes to the boardinghouse to urge the notorious gunfighter to leave town, the local marshal, Walter Thibido, played by Harry Morgan, tells Books, “Books, it’s nineteen-ought-one and the old days are over….We’ll have our streetcar electrified next year….You plain outlived your time.”

  To underline the sense of an era’s end, the death of Queen Victoria is announced in the local newspaper the day Books arrives: “The Queen Is Dead. Long Live the King.” Books is a relic, and he has indeed outlived his time, just as the defeat of The Alamo for Best Picture by Billy Wilder’s The Apartment fifteen years earlier must have left Duke Wayne feeling that his era was coming to a close. Perhaps that was an additional reason Duke had lobbied for the role. He understood this character, and he underplays it with skill and artistry.

  It was a difficult shoot. Duke’s earlier struggle with lung cancer had left him in a weakened state, apparent to the cast and crew of The Shootist. As it had during the filming of True Grit and The Cowboys, the high altitude of location shooting left him breathless. Everything seemed to exhaust him, and there was the added emotional burden of playing a role that so closely shadowed his own life. “Sometimes the irony of this film gets to me,” he told a reporter. He quarreled often with Siegel and was ornery with his co-stars. “I knew he felt rotten all the time,” Lauren Bacall later wrote in her 1994 memoir. “ ‘God, I can’t smoke anymore, can’t drink anymore, all the fun’s gone!’ ” Duke complained to her during the shoot. But one day when a member of the crew exclaimed at the beauty of the day, Duke took Bacall’s hand and said, “Every day you wake up is a beautiful day.”

  Books’s—and Duke Wayne’s—awareness that he is the last of a dying breed punctuates the film. When he first comes into town, he’s disrespected by Cobb, who tells him to get out of the street and calls him “Methuselah.” Marshal Thibido, in his unsuccessful bid to force him to leave town, tells Books that there’s no place for a shootist like him in the new West, and he responds with glee at Books’s cancer diagnosis. Books sees himself as a relic, and he looks for a place to die in peace.

  As in The Cowboys and True Grit, Duke’s character mentors a young man, one on the verge of going down the wrong path. In The Shootist, that’s Gillom Rogers, the widow’s teenage son, played winningly by Ron Howard in one of his first grown-up roles. Gillom works for the nasty Jay Cobb and, like Cobb, is interested mostly in drinking, fighting, and cussing. He’s contemptuous of Books at first, agreeing with his boss that “the old man ain’t worth a bullet. He looks all tuckered out.” The latter observation Books agrees with; he readily admits to being weary. But when Gillom learns that Books is a famous gunman come to live under their roof, he is thrilled by the romance of Books’s past exploits. When Books takes out three would-be assassins who attack him in his room, trying to make their names at his expense, Gillom is over the moon, while his mother is horrified, especially when her other boarders begin to leave. Books acts honorably toward her by offering to make up the financial loss caused by her departing boarders, and a genuine affection begins to develop between them despite her Christian qualms about the way he has conducted his life.

  Gillom now dotes on the legendary shootist, and at one point Books offers to teach him something about guns, telling him that “a man should learn how to handle a gun and use it with discretion.” It’s the quintessential mentoring scene in many Westerns, though he’s surprised to see that Gillom is already pretty good, having learned from the spiteful and intemperate Jay Cobb. But Books knows Gillom requires additional guidance, and he imparts his philosophy about what makes for victory in a gunfight. “It isn’t always being fast,” he tells the youth, “or even accurate, that counts. It’s being willing…most men aren’t. I am.” He then tells Gillom, “There’s more to being a man than the end of a gun,” words that will reverberate by the end of the film. He also warns the boy to always be on the lookout for the unexpected, which is how most shootists meet their end.

  Duke Wayne and Lauren Bacall in Wayne’s last film, The Shootist, in 1976. Wayne’s role as a gunslinger dying of cancer was one of his greatest.

  Books thinks almost constantly about endings. He is searching for a way to die with dignity, not the bestial death described by Doc Hostetler. “A man’s death is the most private thing in his life,” he tells Bond Rogers, and in another powerful scene he says, “A man should be allowed his human dignity,” spoken to an opportunistic ex-flame, Serepta, played by Sheree North, who wants to marry Books so she can make money selling his story to a pulp writer. “I’ll not be remembered for a pack of lies,” he tells her before throwing her out.

  Books has made up his mind to go out on his own terms, in one final shoot-out with three bad men—Jay Cobb, Mike Sweeney, and Jack Pulford. He prepares to meet his death with the solemnity and dignity it deserves. He has the widow Rogers clean his best “Sunday-go-to-meeting” suit, which she does by sending it out for the new “process dry cleaning.” He orders his epitaph, leaving off the death date but determined to die on his birthday. He has young Gillom get word to the three men to meet him at the Metropole Saloon, the fanciest watering hole in town, with the understanding that this will be their chance at a showdown with the legendary J. B. Books.

  Siegel does a masterful job staging and filming the shoot-out in the Metropole, making good use of the outsized mirror over the bar, by which Books keeps his eye on all three of his opponents. Th
at’s how Swarthout envisioned and wrote the scene, and it makes for an elegant dance of precision and desperation among the four men. The hothead Jay Cobb draws first and is of course killed by Books. Then the vengeful Sweeney, older and more powerful but clouded by his desire to avenge a brother’s death by Books’s hand, shoots next, shielding himself with a saloon table. Books kills him, his bullets splintering the wood.

  The most dangerous of the three—the cool, gun-proficient gambler Jack Pulford—wounds Books in his first shot and then stalks him, concealed by the long bar. Books, crouched behind the bar, is able to see Pulford reflected in a glass of whiskey and manages to kill him.

  Gillom rushes in just in time to see the bartender—who doesn’t have a dog in this fight but who shows up anyway, wielding a shotgun—fatally shoot Books in the back. He’s the unexpected foe that Books had warned Gillom about. As the shootist lies dying on the barroom floor, Gillom picks up his gun and kills the bartender.

  It’s worth noting here that Duke made three important changes to this scene. First, in the novel and in the screen adaptation, Books orders a white wine when he first enters the bar. (What was Swarthout thinking?) Duke changed that to a whiskey. More important, the script called for Books to shoot Jay Cobb in the back. Duke vehemently objected. In the brief documentary on the making of The Shootist, Hugh O’Brian recalled Duke saying, “Wait a damn minute. I’ve done 265 films [sic]. I’ve never shot a man in the back and I don’t intend to start now. You reshoot it or you get yourself another boy.” The script also called for Gillom to shoot and kill Books, which would make him the next celebrated shootist. Again, Duke objected. Instead, Books looks imploringly at Gillom after he’s killed the bartender, and Gillom—understanding the look in Books’s eyes—throws the gun away. Books nods his approval in the moments before he dies.

  According to Swarthout, the costumer Luster Bayless recalled that “John Wayne virtually dictated this new ending on the set when they shot it, telling director Siegel ‘he would not compromise on this matter’ and directing Ron Howard to throw Wayne’s pistol as far away as possible, out of his life forever.” One reason given was that he was afraid it would hurt Ron Howard’s career—as he believed it had Bruce Dern’s in The Cowboys—if he was seen killing John Wayne. Siegel wanted to film different endings and then audience test them, but Duke refused.

  So what is to be made of John Wayne’s final moments on-screen, in his valedictory film, after a lifetime of playing the unbeatable fighter and marksman, ending his career with what is essentially an antigun message? Film critic Carl Freedman compared him to Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest—a farewell role in which he renounces his magic.

  The wisdom that Duke’s character imparts to young Gillom by word and by deed is the following: have courage, be willing, face the end with dignity, don’t drink too much, don’t cuss, and don’t live by the gun. His role as a mentor has finally trumped his role as a shootist, a lesson sealed with his death.

  “THE DUKE IS DEAD”

  The Shootist turned out to be Duke’s last picture, and it didn’t do well at the box office, probably because of its somber theme. Frankovich recalled Paramount’s head of marketing complaining, “Where are we gonna open this picture, hospitals?” The public did not want to see John Wayne weakened by cancer and facing his mortality. He himself garnered strong reviews in the role, however, because critics recognized the power of his understated performance. Arthur Knight wrote in the Hollywood Reporter, “Just when it seemed the Western was an endangered species…Wayne and Siegel have managed to validate it once more. The Shootist may well become a classic, ranking right up there with many of Wayne’s earlier masterpieces.” And Frank Rich, then writing for the New York Post, wrote, “Books is easily the star’s best role in years….Wayne makes a terminally ill character seem transcendentally alive.”

  In the years after The Shootist, Duke was too ill to work, except for a few commercials and two TV appearances: a special for General Electric and Perry Como’s Early American Christmas, filmed in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1978. That same year, he endured open heart surgery to replace a defective mitral valve, and in 1979, three years after The Shootist, Wayne’s cancer returned, this time in his stomach. On January 10, Duke’s stomach was removed. The radiation treatments left him even weaker and struggling for control. He made his last public appearance two months before his death, at the 1979 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to present the annual Best Picture Award. As some of Duke’s biographers have noted, there was irony in his handing over the golden statuette to the producers of the anti–Vietnam War picture The Deer Hunter, a movie that stood in stark contrast to so much of what Duke had believed in, including the moral rightness of America’s interventions.

  And yet perhaps he had been able to come to terms with some of the radical changes that gripped America in the last two decades of his life: the refusal of many young men to fight in a war they saw as unjust, the blurring and breaking down of gender roles, the eroding of respect for law, order, and authority. Shortly before his death, Duke told a reporter, “Our country thrives on change. In nature nothing is permanent. So it stands to reason that as laws change, ideologies and mores change so that society changes, and that is good.” Again, the real John Wayne might have been less rigid than his reputation, just as his best film roles were more nuanced, more loving, and sometimes more pacific than his iconic image would lead one to believe.

  In June 1979, Duke entered UCLA Medical Center, where his cancer was discovered to have spread to his colon and throughout his lymph system. That’s where he passed away, surrounded by his beloved children from his first and last marriages. Separated from Wayne since 1973, Pilar was unable to be with him when he passed away at 5:23 p.m. on June 11, 1979, discouraged from visiting by the grown children of his first marriage. He was seventy-two.

  Which makes me think of my own father passing away in July 2006. Dad—Lieutenant Commander Sigmund B. Schoenberger—had always reminded me of John Wayne: his barrel chest and long legs, his self-reliance, a certain taciturn quality, his quiet devotion to his family of six kids, his willingness to teach us things, such as how to swim, how to fish, how to play softball, how to change the oil in your car. He even tried to teach my two oldest brothers how to box—a less than exuberant experiment that was never repeated. Trained as a navy fighter pilot in Korea, he named his Corsair the Betty Ellen, after our mother.

  At the end, he had suffered small strokes and complications from peripheral neuropathy that left him, in his final year, bedridden in a nursing home in Pensacola, Florida, where he and my mother had retired because that’s where he had attended test pilot school, decades earlier, as an ensign in the navy. Virtually paralyzed, this once proud and active man was totally reliant on health-care workers—all of them amazing, patient folks—to take care of his most basic needs. Because his mind remained sharp, he got through this yearlong ordeal because Betty came every day to read to him his favorite novel, Larry McMurtry’s great Western, Lonesome Dove. And my brother Jack came every night to watch movies with him.

  What movies did they watch? Westerns, of course. Not all John Wayne–John Ford Westerns, because Dad was also a big fan of Randolph Scott, but John Wayne movies figured prominently in getting my dad through his ordeal of being a prisoner of his own body, as though he were a prisoner of war. So much of John Wayne’s persona resonated with how my father had lived his life, including Wayne’s role in non-Westerns like the 1953 aviation classic, William Wellman’s Island in the Sky, in which Wayne portrayed a pilot stranded with his crew in a frozen wasteland in Quebec. We find out at the end of the film why he is so eager to survive and return home: he has six children, like Dad. While he was stranded in his own wasteland, to see his hero reflect his own life choices must have given Dad some comfort, and affirmation, at the end of his days.

  Future generations of men won’t conform to the John Wayne mold cut by John Ford, and perhaps the abse
nce of Ford and Wayne from the cultural stage is more of a loss than we realize. Many of the lessons they had to teach still ring true to contemporary ears. I think some of the confusion today about masculinity stems from the fact that we no longer grow up watching Westerns, which are parables of (mostly) men trying to do the right thing. The Western hero, as Ford and Wayne imagined him, grapples with moral as well as physical dilemmas. He mentors the young. The Fordian hero is capable of admitting he’s wrong and is capable of saying he’s sorry. He looks after and protects those weaker than himself and respects those—even women—who can carry their own weight. In other incarnations, notably Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, the Western hero practices a kind of gun control—taking guns away from predators and miscreants and sometimes banning them from town. The Western hero respects women, even if he seldom gets the girl, because Westerns are really morality tales and not romances.

  In the deeply satisfying guise of the quest or adventure narrative, often against the backdrop of starkly beautiful American vistas, to the pleasing sound of hoofbeats and vernacular American song, Westerns seduce us into seeing how mere mortals become heroes, how boys become men.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I thank Dan Ford for allowing me to peruse the John Ford Papers, the impressive archive he was instrumental in assembling, housed at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, and giving me permission to quote from unpublished material. I’m also grateful for the help extended to me by Lilly Library’s research librarians and by my research assistant, Joseph Hiland, who was inspired to write about the great stuntmen who toiled in the Westerns of John Ford and John Wayne. The Lilly Library’s Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship allowed me to immerse myself in the archive, and for that, my thanks.