by Scott Eyman
For a time, Wayne and Pilar were happy; they had three children together—children he loved passionately. And then, gradually, he and Pilar weren’t happy. “He was terribly unlucky in marriage, but he never understood why,” said Maureen O’Hara. “Neither did I. I thought he was wonderful, although there was never anything between us. His first wife, Josie, was a sweetheart. The second—well, let’s just say she died of a heart attack in Mexico. The third was the mother of his last kids. They were all Latin women with slightly different temperaments, but he was really marrying the same woman every time.”
Gretchen Wayne saw the central problem as clashing desires. “He wanted a normal life and family, but he also wanted a piece of arm candy who would look great when they went out. All three of the women he married provided the arm candy—they looked great.”
Some people close to Wayne—Harry Carey Jr., for instance—thought he should have married someone like Mary St. John, his devoted secretary, who was smart, tough, and loved him, although not romantically. Gretchen Wayne thought that unlikely. “Mary St. John would never have put up with him.”
“I knew Josie, and I knew Chata, and I knew Pilar,” said Harry Carey Jr. “Chata and Pilar were very different; Pilar was much more intelligent and more grounded. Chata—that was physical more than anything else.
“But Duke never married anybody with brains, not really. It baffled me why he married the women he did. His wives weren’t good company; they weren’t someone you could gab all night with. And his wives were always tough on him. He wasn’t henpecked, but he did put up with a lot. I don’t think he was ever buddies with any of his wives like I am with Marilyn.”
But the subtle misalliance of his third marriage didn’t propel him into affairs the way it had twenty-five years before. Perhaps residual guilt over the divorce from Josie acted as a brake, or perhaps he had just learned his lesson. “There were women that were crazy about him,” said Harry Carey Jr., “and he didn’t fool around. His brother did. Bob would boff them, but not Duke.”
He enjoyed mentoring young actors, often giving them advice worthy of a life coach. When he met Michael Caine in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, he pointed at him and said, “What’s your name?”
“Michael Caine.”
“That’s right. I saw you in that movie, what was it called?”
“Alfie?”
“That’s right.”
Wayne put his arm around Caine’s shoulders as he guided him across the lobby. “You’re gonna be a star, kid. But let me give you a piece of advice: talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too fucking much.”
Caine was grateful, said thank you, and then Wayne said, “Call me Duke. And never wear suede shoes.”
Caine had been taking it all in just fine, but the last sentence threw him.
“Why not?”
“Because one day I was taking a piss and the guy in the next stall recognized me and turned towards me and said, ‘John Wayne—you’re my favorite actor!’ and pissed all over my suede shoes. So don’t wear them when you’re famous, kid.”
After a quarter century in the movie business, Wayne had been nominated for an Oscar only once, for Sands of Iwo Jima. “What’d I do with an Oscar anyway? It’d just clutter up the mantel.” Although he pretended he didn’t care about the critics, he read all of the major reviews of his pictures as a matter of course, and if he felt badly used, he’d get angry. “That son of a bitch,” he’d mutter. “I’ve been in this goddamn business for fifty years. He’s never been in front of a camera in his life. What the hell does he know about acting?”
But he pretended that reviews mattered either not at all or a lot less than the verdict of the public, to whom he was invariably charming and helpful. Patrick Wayne remembered that having lunch with him in public was a series of interruptions by admirers asking for an autograph. Pat asked his father if it ever bothered him.
“If they didn’t want to come up, how do you think we could have gotten this lunch?” his father said.
As a result, Wayne had a horror of allowing his craft and technique to show. “It’s not being natural,” he explained in one of the few times he discussed acting seriously. “It’s acting natural. If you’re just natural, you can drop a scene. You’ve got to do it so the plumber sitting out there, and the lawyer next to him and the doctor don’t see anything wrong.”
To those people who always said he just played himself, he would retort, “It is quite obvious it can’t be done. If you are yourself, you’ll be the dullest son of a bitch in the world on the screen. You have to act yourself, you have to project something—a personality. . . .
“I have very few tricks. Oh, I’ll stop in the middle of a sentence so they’ll keep looking at me, and I don’t stop at the end, so they don’t look away, but that’s about the only trick I have.”
Another time, he emphasized how important it was for him to play the truth of a scene. “If someone starts acting phony at a party, you go out and get a drink and the hell with him. But if I start acting phony on the screen, you gotta sit there. Pretty soon you’re just looking at me instead of feeling with me.”
Wayne was a member in good standing of a pre-Method generation of actors whose general intent was, as James Cagney put it, “Look the other actor in the eye and tell the truth.” His primary limitation was a psychological commitment to naturalism. “Duke . . . had to do everything real,” said Henry Hathaway. “There wasn’t anything in Duke that would allow him to pretend he was something. He couldn’t be French, he couldn’t have an accent. . . . It wasn’t a question of acting, it was a question of reality.”
Wayne theorized that stage training could be a handicap rather than a help in movie acting. “If a kid came to me to ask me how to prepare for a screen career, I guess what I’d say would be to go to school, learn to handle liquor, mix with people, get into trouble, work in lots of different jobs and always remember his reactions to things and people. That’s the best equipment in front of a camera.”
In other words, acting for Wayne was accurately replicating responses to life experiences. Nothing more, but nothing less. That sounds constraining, but it was typical of that generation of actors. Henry Fonda, an actor generally granted greater range and respect by the critics than Wayne, said precisely the same thing about himself: “I can’t play anything except someone that I can believe myself to be,” Fonda said. “I can play period American, but I can’t do something classical in the sense that the minute I start to read poetry, then it’s phony. And if I feel phony, I’m dead.”
Actors working with Wayne for the first time were unprepared for his intensity. “He locks his eyes onto you and practically yanks the emotions out of you,” said one. Morgan Paull, who worked with George C. Scott in Patton, said that the experience was not dissimilar: “They look you right in the eye. Right into you. Both are very intense actors.”
An alpha male on the set and off, he turned docile before other alpha males—Ford, Hathaway, DeMille. “You are just paint as an actor. If a director uses your color well, that’s fine.” But if the director was someone less assertive, Wayne would make it a point to help mix the colors himself. “He couldn’t help himself,” said Gretchen Wayne. “If you bought a house, Grandaddy would tell you where to put the lights, he’d tell you where to put the couch in the living room. He had opinions on all of that.”
If he was making a movie during the summer, he made it a point to take his children on location. He was particularly attentive to his second family, and was unhappy when Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa weren’t around. If one of them was out of the house when he came home, he’d wander around looking for them. “Where is Ethan? Does he know I’m home? Where is he? Damn it, I would like to know where Ethan is . . .”
With the children of his third marriage, all he had to do was show his disappointment to bring them back in line. “I’ve spent 50 years building up a name in this business,” he would say; the responsibility of the children not to screw that name u
p was implicit.
“I don’t really ask very much of them,” he said once. “I guess the main thing is that they never lie to me or their mother—or to themselves. I’ve told them that I’ll always help them if they get into trouble as long as they don’t lie. But the minute they lie, they lose my respect. And I can never remember any of them doing it.”
There were a few house rules: the kids had to check in every day at 5:30, and if they were going to be late, they had to call. He believed in being demonstrative; he was always picking them up and hugging them, kissing them on the lips, including his sons.
When it came to his daughters’ weddings, he would listen as they told him what they wanted, and then offer them a choice: a check for the amount the wedding would cost or he would pay for the wedding. They always opted to have him pay for the wedding, which he thought foolish. “Who expects the young to be practical?” he said with the practiced wisdom of someone who had been broke for a long time.
When his children were young, he tried to attend as many school events as possible. Gretchen Wayne remembered a time in high school when Toni Wayne had been elected to some position, and her father came and stood at the back of the auditorium. “He was always very polite and proper about things like that,” Gretchen remembered. “He didn’t want to take over the room by his presence; he was not aggressive in any way.” As his children became adults, he tried to stay out of their lives unless there were money troubles, and then he would intervene.
Because his married children always had to make Christmas stops at in-laws’, Wayne decreed January 15 as a mutually convenient “All Family Day.” That was the day they got together around the tree and exchanged gifts. “Christmas was a big deal,” remembered Gretchen Wayne. “Toni had eight kids, Patrick had two, Michael and I had five, Melinda had five. Grandaddy would ask me beforehand what the kids wanted and then do his own shopping for the grandchildren. The house was decorated with more stuff than you can imagine, and there would be gifts for us as well.
“He loved his family, loved the holidays, loved to celebrate. He was also a great catalogue shopper. When he died, we found a closet full of stuff he’d ordered from catalogues and hadn’t gotten around to either giving or returning.”
Mail order packages would arrive in bunches, ten or twenty at a time. Wayne would sit there with a child on his lap and they’d take turns opening the boxes. Tom Kane believed it all had to do with the deprivations of his childhood.
The Christmas tree in the house at Encino had gone all the way to the ceiling. At the house in Newport he would decorate the pier and the Wild Goose. “He went as far as personally addressing the little stickers that went on the packages even though he had three secretaries available to do that stuff,” said Tom Kane. “He liked to do it himself.”
Wayne was usually in Newport for the holidays, and took great pleasure in the Festival of Lights, a flotilla of carolers in colorfully decorated boats who sailed up and down the channel in front of his deck. Wayne would erect a tent over his flagstone patio and hire an orchestra. The railing on the sea wall would be covered with holly and Christmas lights, and the Wild Goose would be anchored in the middle of the channel in case any of the guests wanted to go aboard. Typical guests would include Wayne’s brother, Bob, Mike, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda Wayne and their spouses. Other invitees might include UA executive Robert Blumofe, perhaps Ricardo Montalban and his wife, Andy Devine, Buddy Ebsen, Claire Trevor and her husband. One year, Rod Laver and Roy Emerson made an appearance at the party as a special treat for the tennis-crazed Pilar.
Amidst all the Christmas bounty, there was one consistent shortfall. There wouldn’t be any presents for Michael. “Pilar was wonderful to me, terrible to Michael,” said Gretchen Wayne. “Grandaddy would look around and ask Pilar where Michael’s present was, and she would say, ‘Oh, I forgot.’ So he would go get a bunch of cash and give it to Michael; Michael didn’t really care, but what did bother him was that his father was bothered by it.
“The problem was that Michael didn’t think his dad should have married Pilar, and she picked up on it. He didn’t want to see his father get married again; he just thought it wasn’t in his father’s best interests. Grandaddy liked to play cards with Pilar, but she wasn’t of the same intellectual background. She wasn’t up on politics; she would rather play tennis. He would talk to me about what was going on in the Republican Party, and she couldn’t have cared less. It simply wasn’t interesting to her. She had her coterie of friends—the nouveau riche who played tennis, then lunched.”
Wayne’s grandchildren were a special case, and he never stood on ceremony with them any more than he did anybody else. His grandson Matthew Munoz, a Catholic priest, remembered taking an outboard to the Newport Beach house with a friend when he was a teenager. The boys docked, got out, and walked up the pier, only to discover that there was a formal party going on, with everybody in tuxedos and gowns.
Matt was wearing only swim trunks and was prepared to be thrown out on his ear, but his grandfather was delighted to see him. “His whole face lit up,” remembered Munoz. “ ‘Hey you guys! How you doing?’ Well, he threw me up on his leg, didn’t even dust me off, he was so proud of me. And I had probably trampled sand through the house. . . . ‘But get back before [Matt’s parents] find out.’ So my cousin and I stayed for a while longer and then left. But Grandpa never told my parents about us visiting. It was a little secret between us.
“Part of his charm was his earthiness. He spoke what he believed, whether you liked it or not. And yet he saw himself as just another guy doing a job.”
People were surprised by how solicitous Wayne was of others, of how he would go out of his way to please them. “He liked to walk down Fifth Avenue in the morning, just when the stores were opening,” said Gretchen Wayne. “He’d wave and say ‘Hi,’ but he learned never to stop, otherwise he’d get mobbed. But he always had a touch with people. In social situations, if someone wanted to take his picture, he’d squat down a little, so they’d be on the same level; he was always very kind about things like that.”
Beginning in 1951, with The Quiet Man, and continuing for the rest of his life, he indulged in a beau geste of ordering personalized coffee mugs for the cast and crew of each of his films. These mugs would say, “To xxxx from Duke” on one side, and on the other would be a scene from the film, or a line of dialogue. Wayne would rough out the artwork himself, then give it to an artist for the final version. The cup from The Searchers shows two horsemen in the desert with an Indian spear alongside them and underneath, “That’ll be the day.” On the other side is “The Searchers.”
Conversely, it was hard to buy for John Wayne. One day at Bullock’s department store, Tom Kane ran across a huge wastebasket, about three feet tall, emblazoned with red, white, blue, and gold American eagles. Kane knew Wayne would love it, so he had Bullock’s ship it to his house.
A few days later, Wayne stuck his head in Kane’s office. “You’re off the hook” he said. “You’re off the hook for Christmas, you’re off the hook for my birthday, you’re off the hook.” Wayne kept the wastebasket on The Wild Goose for years.
“He really didn’t give you a lot of rules, do’s and don’t’s,” said Patrick Wayne, his second-eldest son.
He knew the difference between right and wrong. He valued honesty, reliability, trustworthiness, and friendship—character things more than anything else.
Most of what I gleaned about acting was by watching him, seeing how he prepared and went about his business. The standards and goals I set were self-imposed by his presence.
In hindsight, it wasn’t that hard being his son. He didn’t put that many demands on you. He could accept very little and be a dear friend forever, with few requirements. But if you crossed the line, it was hard to get back into the fold. The big things were honesty and loyalty. Consistency was a big thing with him. He didn’t really make demands of anybody else that he didn’t make of himself. He had a temper, and if he blew up
, he would apologize just as loudly and in front of just as many people.
Usually, the competitive edge was stifled when Wayne was with his family, but not always. “I used to play chess with my dad a lot, and I never fared very well,” said Pat Wayne. “But there was this one particular time when I won three games in a row. He started to set the pieces up again and I said, ‘I’m tired, I don’t want to play again.’ And he followed me around with the board for hours, trying to get me to play with him again. And finally I agreed and we sat down and he slaughtered me.”
His relationship with his mother remained unrewarding. Every year he sent his mother and her second husband on a vacation. One year, it was an around-the-world, all-expenses-paid trip. When they got back, Wayne greeted them and wanted to hear all about it. Sidney Preen, Wayne’s stepfather, raved about the trip and thanked him profusely. Molly just complained—the flights were tiring, the service was bad, etc. Wayne’s response was a visible deflation. After he left the room, Mary St. John asked Molly, “Don’t you think you could be a little nicer to him sometimes?”
To which Molly Morrison Preen replied, “I don’t give a damn about him.”
As sentimental as he was about family and friends, some things left him cold. One day a man came to the Batjac office with two copies of the 1925 Glendale High School yearbook. His wife had been in the class that year, they had two copies and they thought Wayne might like one. No charge.
When Wayne came in, he was handed the yearbook. He leafed through it casually, as if it were an old issue of The Hollywood Reporter. “God, there sure were a lot of ugly broads in our class,” was all he said as he put the book down. At the end of the day, one of the Batjac people handed it to him to take home.
“Nah, I don’t want it,” he said. “You want it? Take it.”
