John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  “If they’d been real bullets the guy would have been dead,” remembered Glen Campbell. “He got down, ran the guy down, took the camera, took the film out of it and called [him] numerous names. The still man was gone after that.”

  He was always going to be in the John Wayne business, always going to be protecting the franchise.

  At the end of the Montrose shoot, they shot the tag of the picture, the last scene in the cemetery with Wayne and Darby. They couldn’t get the whole scene done in one day, and when they came back in the morning to finish, they found it had snowed during the night. Hathaway quickly decided to reshoot the entire scene to take advantage of the snow.

  Gary Combs, a stuntman who was working the picture, said that Wayne was slower than he had been, because of the elevation, but he did the jump himself for the freeze frame that ends the picture.

  “It’s not an easy thing for an actor to do, to ride a jumping horse. But [stuntman Chuck] Hayward took his old sorrel horse Twinkletoes, and we made a low jump and we set the camera low and Duke ran the horse down there and jumped over the thing which was probably about two feet high. It was a nice jump. . . . He was game for anything.”

  By the time the picture got back to the studio for the interiors, Kim Darby was telling Hal Wallis she would never work for Hathaway again. John Wayne was another matter. “He was wonderful to work with, he really was,” said Darby. “When you work with someone who’s as big a star as he is . . . there’s an unspoken thing that they sort of set the environment for the working conditions on the set and the feeling on the set. And he creates an environment that is very safe to work in. He’s very supportive of the people around him and the people he works with, very supportive.

  “He’s really a reflection, an honest reflection, of what he really is. I mean, that’s what you see on the screen. He’s simple and direct, and I love that in his work.”

  Patrick Wayne visited the set at Paramount. “It was a courtroom scene, and they were doing a close-up of my dad on the witness stand. Hathaway was going nuts, pacing around and screaming. I had brought a friend of my dad’s over to the set, and Hathaway turned around and looked at us. ‘I want silence on this set, and I don’t care who the fuck you’re related to!’ he yelled. And neither of us was saying anything.

  “My dad just rolled his eyes.”

  “Acting in the movie business is not limited to actors,” observed George Kennedy. “Ford, Hathaway, Preminger, all those men were good directors, but they were also performers in their own right. They would do things for effect, to make them more important. Are they in charge? They better be, or I assure you that the actors will walk all over them.”

  Wayne gave Roger Ebert an interview during the production of True Grit and he told the critic that he thought the film was his first good part in twenty years. Ebert’s eyebrows shot up, but Wayne persisted. “I’ve gotten damn few roles you could get your teeth into and develop a character. . . . I haven’t had a role like [Rooster Cogburn] since The Searchers. And before that, maybe Sgt. Stryker [in Sands of Iwo Jima] or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, another great Ford picture. Just look at The Quiet Man. Everybody was a character but me.”

  While the picture was shooting interiors at Paramount, there was a photo shoot featuring all the stars who were working on the lot: Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood, Goldie Hawn, along with Wayne. Kim Darby was sitting on the curb watching the photo shoot when Wayne saw her. “Hey kid,” he said as he walked away from the shoot, lifted her off the curb and carried her over to the shoot, putting her in the center of the picture. “How wonderful was that?” she asked over forty years later.

  True Grit began shooting on September 5, 1968, and finished on December 6, a couple of weeks over schedule (Darby got sick and missed three days, among other things) and a final cost of $4.5 million, $470,000 over budget. But nobody at the studio complained, because from the first rushes all the way through postproduction it was clear that they had a winner; the only question was how big the picture would be.

  Wayne hovered over the picture, taking a look at a rough cut five weeks later, then dictating a memo to Wallis about the editing. He told the producer that he didn’t think Kim Darby hit her stride until her character’s meeting with Rooster. The quicker they could get to the scene with Lawyer Daggett after the death of Glen Campbell, the better off they’d be, and he thought the editor needed to give Strother Martin another two or three feet of his close-up in that scene. He was alarmed by the absence of the shot of Kim Darby uttering the film’s title line when Rooster charges the four outlaws.

  Mostly, he thought the picture had been edited too tightly: “I plead with you to lengthen the looks in two or three of the intimate scenes. . . . It’s too big a picture to cut because of expediency, like a television show.”

  In May 1969, a few weeks before the picture was released, Wayne wrote to Marguerite Roberts thanking her for her “magnificent” screenplay, especially for the beautiful ending in the cemetery that she had devised in Portis’s style. He closed by telling her, “Please write once in a while with me in mind.”

  When it was released in June 1969, even critics who had excoriated Wayne for The Green Berets realized that the actor had long since transcended categories and politics. “I never thought I would be able to take John Wayne seriously again,” wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times. “The curious thing about True Grit is that although he still is playing a variation on the self-assured serviceman he has played so many times in the past, the character that seemed grotesque in Vietnam fits into this frontier landscape, emotionally and perhaps politically too.”

  Not everybody liked Kim Darby—Stanley Kauffman said she was the dullest discovery since Millie Perkins in The Diary of Anne Frank, and Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker stupidly said that the final scene in the graveyard was “offensive . . . a coarse piece of opportunism.”

  Some critics felt that Wayne’s performance was little more than expert self-parody, a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of all the roles Wayne had played over the previous forty years. But those who had known him and worked with Wayne knew that Rooster Cogburn’s charge into four heavily armed outlaws was a metaphor for the values of the actor playing him. “This was as factual a rendition of Duke’s attitude toward life and death as a government report on the national deficit,” observed Melville Shavelson. “Maybe more factual.”

  True Grit brought Wayne his second Academy Award nomination as an actor. Wayne’s relationship to the Academy Award was slightly touchy. As early as 1954, he was pointing out that he had been nominated only once, for Sands of Iwo Jima. “Usually, I attend the Academy Awards to be on hand in case one of my friends, who is not in town, wins an Oscar and I can accept it in his behalf,” he said with a touch of asperity. “I have received awards for Gary Cooper and John Ford. No one—including me—ever has collected one for John Wayne.”

  He was up against strong competition (Richard Burton for Anne of the Thousand Days, Peter O’Toole for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight for Midnight Cowboy). Since Hoffman and Voight would cancel each other out, Wayne believed that Burton was the likely winner. When the two ran into each other before the Awards rehearsal, they agreed to have a private party at the Beverly Hills Hotel no matter who won.

  After Barbra Streisand announced Wayne’s name as the winner, he walked up to her and whispered in her ear, “Beginner’s luck.” Then he stepped to the microphone: “Wow. If I’d known that, I’d have put on that patch 35 years earlier. Ladies and gentleman, I’m no stranger to this podium. I’ve come up here and picked up these beautiful golden men before, but always for friends. One night I picked up two—one for Admiral John Ford, and one for our beloved Gary Cooper. I was very clever and witty that night—the envy of even Bob Hope. But tonight I don’t feel very clever, very witty. I feel very grateful, very humble. And I owe thanks to many, many people. I want to thank the members of the Academy. To all you people who are watching on television, thank you for
taking such a warm interest in our glorious industry.”

  Back at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Richard Burton was depressed and made a gloomy prediction: “Thirty years from now, Peter O’Toole and I will still be appearing on talk shows plugging for our first Oscar.” As a matter of fact, Burton would die fifteen years later without having won an Oscar, and thirty years later O’Toole would still be plugging, until he received an honorary Oscar in 2003.

  Hours after the ceremony, Wayne banged on Burton’s door, thrust the Oscar statue at him and said, “You should have this, not me.” (Actually, Burton was robbed for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? not Anne of the Thousand Days, as Wayne had been robbed for Red River and The Searchers, performances for which he wasn’t even nominated. Turnabout is fair play.) The two men spent the rest of the night drinking. Burton found him “very drunk but, in his foul-mouthed way, very affable.”

  True Grit was the right movie at the right time. It washed away the ideological bitterness wrought by The Green Berets and presented Wayne apolitically, as a beloved anachronism, creaky but indomitable. It was a role he would play, with some variations, for the rest of his life—not a culture warrior, but an old man dredging up enough strength for one last hurrah.

  Wayne had certainly done more subtle acting than Rooster Cogburn, but few of his performances were quite as enjoyable—the actor’s pleasure transfers to the audience. And in the scene where he talks about his isolation from his family, the reason his only friends are a Chinese man and an insolent orange cat named General Sterling Price, he reveals a sense of loss that was all the more touching because it was usually concealed by masculine bravado—the same combination of elements that made Frank Sinatra a great singer.

  True Grit was an enormous commercial and critical success, earning rentals of slightly more than $14 million. As of September 1970, Wayne’s profit percentage from True Grit had earned him another $788,000 on top of his salary. It would be Wayne’s last massive commercial success, the reasons for which were contained in a brief exchange with a man from The Hollywood Reporter.

  “Westerns are different today,” said the reporter, referring to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Wild Bunch.

  “Not mine,” said John Wayne.

  The only negative experience relating to True Grit was Paramount’s hasty decision to sell the film to television in September 1969, while it was still in the theaters and before Wayne got his Oscar. Joseph Hazen, Wallis’s partner, and also a participant in the profits, wrote a steely letter to the studio pointing out that there was a good chance that Wayne would win an Academy Award for the picture, in which case True Grit would have a substantially higher broadcast value than would otherwise be the case.

  “There is nothing to be gained by making a sale of True Grit now,” Hazen wrote, further pointing out that the picture was going into profit only three months after release. “As 662/3% owners of the profits from the network telecast of Grit, it is our deep conviction and strong feeling that Paramount should neither offer nor sell True Grit to the networks at this time, and that it should definitely and positively await the results of the Academy Awards before it offers the picture for network showing.”

  But Paramount sold the picture anyway, for $1.1 million, about the same as the first-run prices for The Sons of Katie Elder and Rosemary’s Baby. Wayne and Wallis were both incensed, and they continued to feel that way even after the license fee was increased to $1.54 million. Wallis, Hazen, and Wayne sued and eventually got a settlement for more money.

  For those who knew Wayne, True Grit always had a special place. “Rooster Cogburn—that was Duke,” said Cecilia deMille Presley. “He was the kindest teddy bear in the world. Unless you did something wrong. Then you best step back.”

  True Grit also contained the prism that would slightly distort the final stage of Wayne’s career, in which he would be not only the star of his movies but their subject. With the marginal exception of The Cowboys and The Shootist, the succeeding Wayne films—The Undefeated, Chisum, Big Jake, etc.—were not movies with individual identities so much as they were John Wayne movies, in which the star’s persona was identical from film to film. This presentation suited Wayne, suited his ego and his idea of himself, and it also suited his audience.

  “For my father, the studio and the producers were not the boss,” said Mike Wayne. “The fans were the boss. He felt he worked for his fans. He played bigoted, terrible guys, but bigoted, terrible guys with convictions. Every man he played had a code and never deviated from it during the film. If he was a mean son of a bitch, that’s what he was. And he would never trick his audience. Surprise yes; trick, no.”

  That audience was extremely loyal, but it was also finite, and Wayne’s refusal to try to expand it meant that it would stay finite, before it inevitably began to shrink.

  The Undefeated had been purchased by Warner Bros. back in 1961. In the mid-1960s, there was a screenplay by the old hand Casey Robinson for director Henry King, but Warners sold the property to Fox, who ordered up a rewrite from James Lee Barrett. The picture was expensive—$7 million—partially because of its pricey co-star Rock Hudson, but coming on the heels of True Grit it seemed like a good bet.

  Wayne’s co-star Lee Meriwether was lodged in a hotel in Baton Rouge, when most of the other major actors had houses. Marian McCargo found out and invited her to stay with her in her rented house. The two women threw a party for the cast and crew, which involved two days of cooking. Everybody pitched in—stuntman Hal Needham cooked chicken livers. Wayne ended up in the kitchen with a few friends—Ed Faulkner and Dobe Carey.

  After everybody else had gone home, Rock Hudson stayed behind to help McCargo and Meriwether clean up. The women were washing dishes, Hudson was drying, and Wayne was sitting at the kitchen table finishing off his drink. With the dishes finished, Hudson said, “C’mon, Duke.” Wayne rose and staggered a bit. Hudson steadied him and the two went through the front door.When Wayne staggered again, Hudson put his arm around Wayne’s shoulder and the two men walked to the end of the block, while Meriwether watched and wished she had had a camera.

  Hudson is the most famous example of a closeted movie star, and he was still working at it. Meriwether remembered that Hudson was “the best dancer ever,” and came over to her at a party. “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you happy at home?”

  “Why, yes I am,” she replied.

  “He was flirting with me,” remembered Meriwether. “I honestly didn’t know he was gay.”

  Wayne did know, and was flummoxed by the vagaries of sexual identity. “Look at that face,” he said admiringly to his daughter Aissa, who was visiting the set. “What a waste of a face on a queer. You know what I could have done with that face?” To someone else he would say about Hudson, “It never bothered me. Life’s too short. Who the hell cares if he’s queer? The man plays great chess.”

  The gay man flirted; the straight man didn’t. “It was all business,” says Meriwether. “Duke was a journeyman film man. He was very relaxed and didn’t need to rev up for a scene. When it was time to act, he just started acting. He knew what he wanted to do with a scene, and he did it.

  “It was a fantastic lesson in film acting. Natural, comfortable, easy. He was comfortable in his own skin and he didn’t have anything to prove. He tended to be the same take to take, but if something was thrown at him, he could go with it. He didn’t ad-lib much, but he could adapt; he was flexible.”

  On the set, someone asked Wayne the secret of acting. “Listening,” he said. He was as good as his word. “He didn’t show you he was listening,” says Meriwether, “he just listened.”

  In spite of the goodwill on the set and a pleasant atmosphere, The Undefeated didn’t return its investment, running up a $2.4 million loss for Fox. Part of the reason was a sequence involving a stampede of horses. Horses are generally easy to control in a staged stampede because they’re run toward a corral and they’re usually no
t bright enough to head off on their own. But on The Undefeated, the stampede was staged with three thousand horses. “When we got through shooting the stampede, we had 2,940,” said William Clothier. “Somewhere we lost 60 horses. . . . Those damn horses took off like goats. We had horses all over Mexico.”

  The first time Andrew Fenady saw John Wayne was in 1951. He was newly arrived in Hollywood and drove around town to see all the studios—“Even Monogram. I was wondering if I would ever get into any of those places.” One day on Barham Boulevard, right by Warner Bros., a large man was walking across the street against the light and was nearly run down by Fenady.

  “You dumb bastard, watch where you’re going,” yelled John Wayne.

  Years later, after Fenady had hits on television such as The Rebel, the editor Otho Lovering came to Fenady’s doorway with John Wayne in tow. “Ya see, Duke, there it is,” said Lovering, pointing to a large poster of Wayne as Hondo with Sam the dog, curving down from the ceiling to the floor of Fenady’s office. Wayne nodded and said, “That’s one of my favorite pictures. It comes back to me in three years.”

  The two men were favorably disposed toward one another, so Fenady began working on a story based on the career of the cattle baron John Chisum while Wayne made Hellfighters, True Grit, and The Undefeated.

  When Fenady was finished, he had both a ten-page outline and a forty-page treatment. Mike Wayne read the ten pages, as did Tom Kane, the Batjac story editor. Both liked it, and Fenady was told, “Duke wants to talk to you about it. Tell him the story. He doesn’t want to read it.”

  So Fenady trooped onto the Wild Goose and began telling the story. “Mind if I smoke?” asked Fenady. “Not if you blow it my way,” said Wayne. After five or six minutes of Fenady’s recitation, Wayne stood up and walked out of the salon, saying “Turn ’em loose.” Mike whacked Fenady on the shoulder. “You’re in,” he said. “He wants you to do it.”