John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Wayne felt that he owed George Stevens a favor for the director’s favorable blurb for The Alamo, so he appeared in a much derided cameo in Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. The two men had agreed to the cameo in 1960, five years before the film was actually released, on the basis of a handshake. “I can use an earthquake, or a big storm to show the conversion,” Stevens told Wayne, “but I want you to capture it in your face.” Wayne played a centurion at the Crucifixion and had only one line: “Truly, this man was the son of God.”

  A more meaningful part arrived with Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way. The bulk of the picture was made in Hawaii, with only ten days scheduled for the studio in Hollywood. Casting Wayne made perfect sense given the story: Rockwell Torrey, a naval captain, is estranged from his wife, but his son enlists against his mother’s wishes—the same plot as Ford’s Rio Grande, but transposed to World War II.

  Preminger surrounded Wayne with a great cast: Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Dana Andrews, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, and, as Wayne’s son, Brandon De Wilde.

  As with Ford, as with von Sternberg, Wayne easily coped with the authoritarian Preminger. “He had my respect and I had his respect,” he said. “He is terribly hard on the crew, and he’s terribly hard on people that he thinks are sloughing. But this is a thing that I can understand. . . . I come ready and that he appreciated.”

  On the first day of production, Wayne marked an article in what Preminger said was a “reactionary” magazine and gave it to Preminger’s chauffeur with instructions to have his boss read it. Preminger was a liberal Democrat and dropped the magazine without reading it. That day, he took Wayne aside. “Look, John, anybody over 30 has made up his mind about politics. You know where you stand politically, and I would never succeed in trying to convert you. I would not even try. So you shouldn’t try to convert me to your opinions. Let’s agree not to talk politics and we’ll get along very well.”

  And so they did. Preminger said that Wayne was “the most cooperative actor, willing to rehearse, willing to do anything as long as anybody.”

  Wayne had never worked with Kirk Douglas before, but while they were never close emotionally or politically, they meshed on-screen. “We would usually have dinner together only once or twice during the entire shooting of a movie,” Douglas wrote in his memoirs. “And yet we got along quite well.” Douglas was not so sanguine about Preminger, who he thought was a bully and a mediocre director.

  Beneath the surface high spirits, people watching Wayne saw something very wrong. “He looked ill,” remembered Tom Tryon. “He was coughing badly. I mean, really awful. It was painful to see and hear, so God knows what it was like for him. He’d begin coughing and he wouldn’t stop and it sounded just horrendous. He’d begin coughing in the middle of a scene and Preminger would have to stop filming. If it was anybody else, Preminger would have yelled some kind of abuse at him, but he never yelled at Duke.”

  Pilar had accompanied her husband to Hawaii and was alarmed, but Wayne refused to acknowledge that anything was amiss. “Soon everyone was aware of his deteriorating health,” she remembered. “Everyone but him. He refused to see a doctor while we were on the island.”

  Most of the film was shot aboard a heavy cruiser, the USS St. Paul. Tom Kane, the Batjac story editor, casually mentioned that he had served on the ship during the war. “I not only served on it, I put her in commission,” said Kane. “I was a plank owner.” Wayne became very attentive and wanted to know all about Kane’s service on the ship. Kane hadn’t been on board very long, he explained, because the St. Paul was commissioned in the spring of 1945. It had been clear to Kane that the war was almost over—the St. Paul and other ships cruised up and down the coast of Japan and encountered little opposition other than an occasional kamikaze mission. Kane stayed on her until the end of the war, and the St. Paul was right next to the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the peace terms were signed by General Douglas MacArthur.

  Kane sensed that Wayne felt he had missed out on being part of history, “even though he had tried very hard to get into any branch of the service.”

  On the last day of production, Hawaii’s governor gave a party for the cast and crew and Preminger presented each guest with a lei made of red flowers. “At last you are showing your true colors,” grinned Wayne.

  The climactic naval battle scene of In Harm’s Way was hampered by intercutting miniatures with actual ships, which made the differences in scale all too apparent. “The special effects . . . were terrible and phony,” remembered Kirk Douglas. “I said, ‘Otto, you can tell they’re goddamn little toy boats. There’s nobody on deck. Couldn’t you have at least put a couple of toy soldiers on the ship?’ ”

  Preminger brought the film in eleven days under schedule, but In Harm’s Way still cost $8 million and earned domestic rentals of only $4.2 million. It did better overseas, but was still a loser. Finances aside, it’s a watchable hunk of Palmolive made up of bits and pieces from other, better movies. It features some well-written characters, notably Dana Andrews’s vain careerist naval officer, and there are intimations of anti-Semitism in Torrey’s son’s disinclination to fight “Mr. Roosevelt’s war.”

  Wayne actually doesn’t do much except be a leader of men and be obviously amused by Burgess Meredith’s witty performance. But he brings a thoughtful, unsentimental quality to some reflective scenes with Patricia Neal as a loving nurse—the best moments in the picture.

  In June 1964, Wayne agreed to make a western entitled The Sons of Katie Elder as his next picture at Paramount. The property had been bouncing around the studio since 1955 until Hal Wallis took it up, initially for director John Sturges and star Burt Lancaster, who thought it was a routine western with unsympathetic characters. Dean Martin was always penciled in for the second lead, but everybody from James Stewart to Charlton Heston was considered for the role of John Elder until Wayne signed on. It was a good deal—$600,000 plus one third of the profits and one third ownership of the negative. Henry Hathaway agreed to direct the picture for $200,000.

  Wayne hadn’t seen a doctor in two years, and his cough was terrible. Since In Harm’s Way had finished almost two weeks early, Pilar insisted he get a check-up. The examination was done at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, where X-rays were taken. The next day he was back at the clinic, when a technician came in. Wayne wanted to know if they were going to take still more X-rays. “Well, you know, we could go on taking them from every angle, but it’s pretty obvious; I don’t have to do any more.”

  Wayne was confused. “It certainly looks like it’s there,” the technician continued.

  “What’s there?” asked Wayne.

  “Didn’t they tell you? Cancer.”

  There was a tumor the size of a golf ball in his left lung.

  It was one of those moments when the hearing suddenly disappears and there’s a sudden coldness in your fingers. “I sat there, trying to be John Wayne,” he remembered years later.

  Wayne thought of several things simultaneously. His children, mostly, and how to tell them. And he thought of Pedro Armendáriz, his old friend who had committed suicide the year before after a fatal cancer diagnosis. He couldn’t think how he was going to tell his mother, who had refused to see The Alamo because he died in it.

  He was suddenly conscious of something that other people had always taken for granted as a primary part of his personality—his embrace of life. “People resist death,” he would say in retrospect. “There is a little pull that begins somewhere in you that begins wanting to stick around a little bit longer.”

  In the next couple of months, and for the rest of his life, he would have cause to experience that pull a great deal. The strange part was that, aside from his cough, he didn’t feel sick, so he couldn’t quite believe he might be dying. That came later.

  It was September 13, and he was supposed to start The Sons of Katie Elder on October 20. The next day, Wayne invited Hal Wallis to his dressing room at Paramount. As soon as he walked in,
Wallis knew something was wrong. Henry Hathaway was there, and so was Michael Wayne.

  “Well, Hal, I’m going to hit you with it,” he began. “I’ve got the Big C.”

  Wallis sat there in complete shock. “All he could say was ‘What?’ ” remembered Wayne. Wallis asked Wayne if he was going to have radiation treatments. “No. None of that stuff. I’m going to have the lung removed. I’m checking in for surgery tomorrow morning.” Wallis remembered that “he said it matter-of-factly, much as one might say that an ingrown toenail was going to be removed.”

  Wayne said that he knew Wallis would want to recast the picture. He thought Kirk Douglas would be good in the part. Wallis protested that he didn’t want to do that, that he would postpone the picture until Wayne could do it. Wayne said he didn’t know how long he was going to be laid up; it might be as long as six weeks.

  Wallis told him that the would wait as long as necessary. The stunned producer went back to his office and sent a telegram to his associate producer Paul Nathan: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are going to have to postpone the start of Katie Elder until possibly sometime in the middle of November and it might be even a little later. This I will not know for about a week.”

  Wayne needed to talk to people who had beaten cancer, but in 1964 there weren’t that many of them. Fortuitously, one was Henry Hathaway, who had survived colon cancer more than ten years before. He told Wayne that his odds were good—something Hathaway couldn’t really have known—but also counseled him that the surgery “is no piece of cake. We’re not young men anymore; expect to be tired and expect the recovery to take longer than you think. You’re gonna be sore as hell.”

  Scripps recommended that Dr. John Jones at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles perform the surgery. Jones examined the X-rays and said that the tumor was too big to go in from the front; he would have to go through Wayne’s back, which would make it easier to look for evidence of metastases. On September 16, Wayne was admitted to the hospital for what was announced as an ankle injury; a few days later, the story was that he was under treatment for a lung abscess.

  On the morning of September 17, Dr. Jones sliced into Wayne’s chest under his left breast and continued under his arm and around his back—a twenty-eight-inch incision. He moved the diaphragm and stomach aside, removed two ribs, and got down to the business at hand. What Jones found in the lung was an obviously malignant tumor the size of a chicken egg—very large, but with a well-defined border between it and the surrounding tissue, which meant that it might not have spread. Jones removed the entire upper lobe of the left lung.

  The surgery took six hours and went well, but a few days later, Wayne had a coughing fit and ripped all of his stitches loose. And then he began to swell up. First his throat, then his face, then his hands. Edema. He was tranquilized, but not so much that he couldn’t tell something was very wrong. When he scratched his face, he could tell it was the shape of a basketball. He believed the swelling was the cancer; he believed it was the end.

  “I lost interest in everything; I didn’t say a word when they told me they were going to operate again. . . . Air got into my whole system and when [my children] looked at me their faces told me I’d had it.”

  But the doctors insisted that they had gotten the cancer, and the swelling was just fluid. They’d fix it. Five days after the original surgery, they operated again. This time he was under the knife for an additional six and a half hours. The broken stitches were repaired and holes were opened in his side to drain the fluid. “It looked like they had lawn hoses in my side,” Wayne remembered.

  On October 7, three weeks after entering the hospital, Wayne left under his own power—barely. Pictures show him smiling but drawn; he had lost a lot of weight. There was an election coming up on November 4, and he managed to summon the strength to do a half hour national TV show promoting Barry Goldwater.

  Back home, Wayne lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating his mortality. He had promised to show his children the scar if they wanted to see it, and they all did. Up to this point his publicists had misled the public, at least partially because Wayne was terrified that accurate reports of the situation would render him unemployable. “I’ll never work again if they find out how sick I am,” he said. “If they think an actor is sick, they won’t hire him.”

  While the patient was battling cancer, edema, and depression, Hal Wallis held firm in his determination to make The Sons of Katie Elder with Wayne and nobody else. Joseph Hazen, Wallis’s financial partner, gently suggested he switch leading men—what about Mitchum or Holden? “If we hold onto Katie Elder to assist John Wayne’s recovery,” wrote Hazen, “and he is recovered to start production after the 1st of the year, you will be running into a terrific production jam on all the other projects. I do not see why we should box ourselves into that situation if an out presents itself at this time.”

  But Wallis refused to back down; when Wayne called him on October 26 to check on the status of the project, Wallis told him that he was putting the picture off until after the first of the year. A week later, Paul Nathan again nudged Wallis about recasting the part, but Wallis again refused; he wouldn’t go back on his word. Wallis demonstrated a remarkable degree of personal integrity for a man usually regarded as a cold fish, one, moreover, who had no prior professional or personal relationship with Wayne.

  Paramount wondered if it would be able to get insurance on Wayne, which caused a flurry of memos from Wallis to Paramount and back. Paramount told Wallis that if they couldn’t insure Wayne, hiring him would have to go before the executive committee. Wallis told them the matter had to be decided now, before the examination. He told the studio that Dr. Jones, who had performed the surgery, had just looked at some new X-rays and they were completely satisfactory—there was no reason Wayne could not go back to work in January. Jones offered to talk to the insurance company in order to convince them that Wayne was insurable.

  The exam took place and Wayne was indeed insurable, albeit with the high deductible of $25,000 plus 2.5 percent of the final net insurable cost. But Wayne continued to struggle with post-surgical depression; he began to refer to the cancer as “the Red Witch,” after Wake of the Red Witch. For years, whenever he was due for a check-up, he would say, “Well, I’m going down to La Jolla to see if the Red Witch is waiting for me.” For years, the X-rays would be clear and he would say, “Well, the witch wasn’t there this time.”

  Depression was unusual for Wayne, but it might have been one of the things that stimulated him into going public with his illness. Just before New Year’s, he gave a series of interviews in which he outlined the story of his cancer, always emphasizing the importance of getting regular check-ups. Wayne was among the first celebrities to tell the story of surviving cancer—besides Henry Hathaway, William Powell had also gone through major cancer surgery and lived, but the news had been stifled by MGM.

  To a degree that the public never knew, cancer would be a consideration for the rest of Wayne’s life, especially in terms of breathing difficulties that would become part of his daily reality. Then there was his newfound status as a public survivor, a status he took very seriously. On December 22, Wayne sent a telegram to Nat King Cole, who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. “Sorry to hear you’ve joined the club but it can be whipped,” Wayne wrote, then mentioning that he’d just listened to Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and thanked him for the joy he had brought into the world. He closed by saying “Keep punching.” Cole died a little less than two months later.

  As Wayne prepared to go to Mexico to make The Sons of Katie Elder, assistant director Michael Moore wrote Hal Wallis, “I have had a complete oxygen tank with mask . . . put on the property truck to be with us at all times. Also, I am taking a small, portable outfit which the doctor will have with him at all times. I feel this is good insurance for John.”

  On January 3, just a few days before Wayne left for Durango, a burglar broke into the house in Encino. He had taken a
cab to the estate before he broke in. Wayne grabbed a loaded .45 and chased the robber out of the house, but then he couldn’t find him. When the police arrived, they found the thief hiding by the basement door. As they were leading him away, the incompetent crook asked Wayne for a favor: would he pay the taxi driver? Wayne told the police to wait, got a $20 bill and gave it to the thief, who gave it to the taxi driver.

  “I felt sorry for the cabbie,” he explained to Mary St. John. “The poor bastard’s working the night shift and I thought he might have to cough up the fare himself. Anyway, maybe the whole thing’s symbolic. We’ve decided to sell the house and get out of this shithole of a Los Angeles.”

  After nearly a four-month postponement, on January 6, 1965, production began on The Sons of Katie Elder and continued for the next forty-six days at a cost of $3.19 million.

  Wayne was nervous because of his diminished lung capacity; as he put it, “I had just got over that cancer operation and I thought I could hear myself breathing all the time.” Then there was Henry Hathaway, who refused even to think about coddling his star. “Old Henry was very thoughtful of me, of course. Since I was recuperating and all. He took me up to 8,500 feet to shoot the damned thing and the fourth day of shooting he had me jumping into ice water. Very considerate.

  “We had to jump off a bridge into the water and swim across the February River to escape from the heavies and God, that water was cold! The rest of the guys had rubber suits to take the shock away, but I’m so big, they couldn’t get one to fit under my clothes. I didn’t think I’d ever catch my breath.”

  Later, struggling with the high elevation, as he would for the rest of his life, Wayne was shooting a night scene that involved him riding up a street. “I’m waiting for Hathaway to get a long shot and let it go at that because, damn it, I’m hurting. Well, he makes me ride right up in the foreground, right up to the camera, get down off that horse the way Duke Wayne’s supposed to get off a horse, tie the reins and walk out. . . . I’m calling the SOB every name I can think of under my breath.”