John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Increasingly journalists baited Wayne with questions that were predominantly social in nature, and he couldn’t resist responding. The vast majority of the interviews he faced now focused on politics and sociology, at which Wayne had presumably developed an expertise through his portrayal of frontier values. The interviews set Wayne’s public image as a reactionary in amber.

  What seemed at the time to be paleoconservatism has since become Republican orthodoxy, as with Wayne’s essential mistrust of government, expressed when he wrote, “Government has no wealth, and when a politician promises to give you something for nothing, he must first confiscate that wealth from you—either by direct taxes, or by the cruelly indirect tax of inflation.”

  Wayne’s politics made it easier for those who didn’t share his beliefs to refuse to engage with the truths he told as an actor. If Wayne was an ignoramus, if he was a war-mongering hypocrite who never served in the military, if he was an actor in a dying genre like westerns, then he didn’t have to be taken seriously as a craftsman, let alone an artist.

  Many New York critics went to town. Pauline Kael wrote, “The world has changed since audiences first responded to John Wayne as a simple cowboy . . . now, when he does the same things and represents the same simple values, he’s so archaic it’s funny. We used to be frightened of a reactionary becoming ‘a man on horseback’; now that seems the best place for him.”

  But there was a corresponding undercurrent of respect and love from literary writers like Joan Didion: “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. . . . When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more.”

  In many respects, these dueling dialogues about Wayne’s value and meaning continue in another century, with the subject long dead.

  In 1971, Wayne made some inquiries to some friends in the White House. As a loyal Nixon man, he wondered if he deserved better than he was getting at the callused hands of the IRS. Wayne had recently received a bill for back taxes of $251,116 for the years 1964–1966. White House counselor John Dean instructed John Caulfield to look into the matter of celebrity audits, and Caulfield discovered that Wayne was by no means being singled out—Jerry Lewis had been hit for $446,332 between 1958 and 1960. “The Wayne complaint,” wrote Caulfield, “when viewed in the attached context, doesn’t appear to be strong enough to pursue.”

  There were plenty of acting offers, some more interesting than others. Robert Aldrich wanted to team Wayne and Katharine Hepburn in a script called Rage of Honor, about an old cowboy alienated by industrial development in California in 1929. Aldrich sent the script to Hepburn, who replied, “I can’t think of a single thing to say about that script which would not be insulting to it—especially to you—Good God—Blood and pomposity—Rotten police and butchered horse—You’re hard up?”

  Wayne’s business interests remained slightly ramshackle, if only because his criteria for a deal continued to involve the personal more than the professional. He was told about a German ship that had been scuttled in Acapulco Bay and was believed to be full of mercury. He promptly bought the salvage rights, only to find out that the only thing the ship contained was rust. He’d tell the story on himself, roaring with laughter.

  “Grandaddy wanted to be in business with his pals,” said Gretchen Wayne. “It was like every guy wants to own a bar, you know? He would go to Michael about a project and say, ‘These guys are going to do this, they’re going to do that . . .’ And Michael would say, ‘Really? And how much are they putting in, and how much do they want you to put in?’ And Grandaddy would grumble and walk out the door.

  “Michael was a businessman, he was shrewd, he wouldn’t spend more than he had and he always negotiated for the better deal. Michael’s dad recognized this and would say, ‘Well, I don’t have a college education like you do.’ But Grandaddy was smart in that he always knew how much he could afford to lose, and he wouldn’t go beyond that.”

  Wayne hired an old acquaintance named Joe de Franco to run a company called Separation and Recovery Systems Inc., which separated oil from water. De Franco had worked at Studebaker for years and Wayne had long respected him as a solid businessman. Once the two got reacquainted Wayne offered him the job of running the company. De Franco inspected the operation and thought it could be made profitable, but it was severely underfunded.

  “I’m going to have to use you, Duke,” he told the owner. “Why not?” Wayne replied, “Everybody else does.” For the next year or so, de Franco marched Wayne into luncheons with prospective investors, who eventually included, among others, Robert Abplanalp, the Nixon crony who had gotten rich by inventing the aerosol valve. In addition to the investors, de Franco got some government grants.

  When he was done, de Franco had raised about $3.5 million, with his salary coming out of what he had raised and his piece of the business. Separation and Recovery Systems operated out of Irvine, California, and de Franco built it up to successfully operate in such far-flung locations as Norway, Sweden, and South America.

  De Franco’s impression was that the company was one of the few that Wayne owned that was successful. Mike Wayne kept Separation and Recovery Systems going for years after his father died, not selling it off until the mid-1980s.

  “I found Duke to be super,” said de Franco. “If you were a smart-ass, he had a temper. Mostly, though, he was thoughtful and praiseworthy. He was appreciative, and he delegated, although sometimes he would micromanage—like when he’d play bridge.”

  Although Wayne’s bad memory for names was legendary, de Franco found that his memory for business details was highly retentive. De Franco would go to Wayne’s house every Friday for a business conference, and often on Sundays as well, because de Franco would cook a big Italian dinner.

  Like many people around Wayne, de Franco found Pilar “very self-centered. She had that ‘Look at me’ attitude.” Wayne and his wife rarely argued; when they did it was over some social event that Wayne didn’t want to attend. “She’d get huffy and go in the other room and close the door, and he’d go after her and apologize,” said de Franco. “He also thought she spent too much money, but he never complained about it.

  “He was a good father in that he set a good example. He was attentive. He would get upset because Aissa’s grades were usually terrible. God, he’d be so proud of how she turned out—going to law school and becoming a successful attorney. He’s beaming down at her, believe me.”

  After The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc? Peter Bogdanovich was the hottest director in Hollywood, but he nevertheless accompanied his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd to Miami, where she was shooting The Heartbreak Kid. With time on his hands, Bogdanovich decided to turn his hand to the western he had always wanted to make. Summoning Larry McMurtry, the author of the novel and co-screenwriter of The Last Picture Show, they set to work on a western that would unite all of John Ford’s great leading men: John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Bogdanovich and McMurtry called the script The Streets of Laredo.

  “What we had planned was a sort of last adventure,” remembered McMurtry, “after which they would be over, as would the Old West.” With quality scripts being thin on the ground at the moment, Stewart and Fonda both signed on, if a trifle reluctantly. “They wanted,” wrote McMurtry, “the last adventure to be a wild success, not a dim moral victory of the sort we had planned for them.”

  As for Wayne, he circled, delayed, and finally said no. Unlike Stewart and Fonda, Wayne had plenty of work, but other than that nobody could quite figure out why he passed. “Maybe he didn’t like it that James Stewart got to play the more poetic character,” ruminated McMurtry. “Maybe he didn’t like Peter, or the script, or
because he was tired of playing the competent grump yet one more time.”

  Actually, Wayne liked Bogdanovich well enough—“He likes the things I like,” was the way he put it—but there was definitely a context to Bogdanovich’s script that bothered him. “It’s kind of an end-of-the-West Western,” Wayne told Bogdanovich, “and I’m not ready to hang up my spurs yet.”

  “But you don’t die in it,” Bogdanovich offered.

  “Yeah, but everybody else does,” replied Wayne.

  “I just don’t like the story,” he confided. “I like Bogdanovich. He’s a good student of all the directors that mean anything to me. But I don’t go for his story . . . and Bogdanovich can be almighty stubborn about it.” There was no getting away from the fact that The Streets of Laredo was a western about the Death of the West, and since the West was more or less synonymous with John Wayne, he wasn’t overjoyed by the implications.

  When Bogdanovich wasn’t around, Wayne was more specific: “It just wasn’t a good part. Peter had written a good part for Fonda and some fun lines for Jimmy, but I was a whiner. Why the hell should I do that? . . . Peter said, ‘This is a great part.’ I said, ‘To you, not to me.’ ”

  Bogdanovich put on as much of a press as he could, even sending Wayne a handwritten letter (“This can be a beautiful movie and not a downbeat one, as you fear . . .”). But Wayne’s mind was made up. All this would have been understandable if Wayne was buried beneath quality scripts, but he was mostly engaged in time passers. As a last resort, Bogdanovich told Wayne that John Ford said he should do it, but Wayne retorted, “That’s not what he told me.” Years later, Barbara Ford told Bogdanovich that her father told Wayne to turn it down, while simultaneously telling Bogdanovich it was a great script.

  The Streets of Laredo hung around Warner Bros. for a number of years, but it was generally felt that Wayne was the only man who could carry the increasingly dicey genre to any kind of box office, and once he passed on a project, it stayed passed. McMurtry let the project go, then rethought it, refocused some of the characters and the plot, and wrote a novel called Lonesome Dove. When it was made into a great miniseries years later, Robert Duvall played the part that had been written for Wayne, and Tommy Lee Jones played the role designed for James Stewart.

  The cancer surgery was now a part of the dim past. Wayne had regained most of his strength, although there were still things he was leery of. Water skiing, for instance. One day off Catalina he thought he and Bert Minshall should go scuba diving. Minshall wasn’t sure it was a good idea—Wayne’s wind wasn’t good, and he still coughed a lot—but they jumped off the back end of the boat anyway and went down twelve to fifteen feet looking for abalone.

  “I could see he was having problems,” remembered Minshall. “He goes back to the surface and I follow him, and he tears his mask off and says, ‘Goddamn it, I’ll never have any more fun!’ And that was the last time he went diving.”

  The young man who had once swum, dived, and body surfed with animal joy was now hemmed in by physical limitations, to which he would never entirely reconcile himself. “He got grouchy,” said Minshall. “Near the end he was very short-tempered.”

  For a Batjac production called Big Jake, Wayne reached far back into the past and hired George Sherman to direct. Sherman had been a mainstay at Republic in the 1930s and 1940s, and at Universal in the 1950s, but had never planted a flag in A pictures and hadn’t directed a theatrical picture since 1966. Batjac got Sherman for the bargain price of $50,000, with options for four more pictures that were shared with CBS.

  Big Jake was written by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian and Rita Fink, who had previously collaborated on Dirty Harry, and who injected the western with harsher violence than was customary for Wayne. The plot involved the kidnapping of the grandson of a cattle baron named Jacob McCandles. Even though it’s 1909, and McCandles has long been estranged from his family, he’s regarded as the only man sufficiently fearless to get the boy back.

  Sherman began shooting the picture before Wayne showed up in Durango, Mexico. When he arrived, he asked Harry Carey Jr. how Sherman was doing. “Okay,” said Carey. Wayne looked at the rushes, then sought Carey out. “I thought you said he was doing OK. He’s doing shit!” The result, said Pat Wayne, was that “My dad directed Big Jake.” Dobe, as Carey was generally known, said that Wayne strengthened the dialogue and rechoreographed the shoot-out at the end of the picture.

  Wayne filled Big Jake with family—his son Pat, Harry Carey Jr., Richard Boone. Dobe Carey showed up with a bushy beard he had worn on his previous picture, and was told to keep it. The beard was darkened to indicate that copious amounts of tobacco juice had dripped down into it. “You look like the Cowardly Lion,” Wayne cracked one day. In fact, Dobe, as Carey was generally known, chewing tobacco throughout the shoot, as was Wayne—Red Man was giving him his nicotine fix.

  One day Dobe was snoozing on his lunch break when he was awakened by the thunk of a large body landing in an adjacent chair. He looked over to discover Wayne sitting there. “Jeez, I miss your dad,” he said. “I loved that old man. Even if he was a Democrat.”

  One Sunday night at sunset, Wayne was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the house where he was living when Mike Wayne came bustling by. “Come up here, sit down and look at this sunset,” Wayne said. Mike said he couldn’t, there were things he had to straighten out for the next day’s shooting. “Let me tell you,” Wayne said, “the work will be there. This sunset isn’t going to be there. It will never be there again.” In telling the story, Mike Wayne concluded, “He had balance in his life. He was in sync with the world around him.”

  Mike Wayne was always proud of the deal he made for Big Jake, and it’s easy to see why. The film was fully financed by CBS for its theatrical arm Cinema Center Films, at a budget of $4.3 million, but Batjac owned the picture. Mike called it “the best deal I ever made in my life, and it also made the most money. Just phenomenal. The script was better than the film, but it really played.”

  The cast budget for the picture clearly shows that special consideration was given to actors in the Batjac family. Wayne got his usual $1 million and a percentage, Patrick Wayne got $25,000. Dobe Carey got $1,000 a week, Bruce Cabot got $2,000 a week with an eight-week guarantee, and Maureen O’Hara got $30,000 for the small part of Wayne’s estranged wife, a character originally offered to Susan Hayward, who had a scheduling conflict. Richard Boone got $90,000, with $5,000 of that salary diverted to a school he helped support in Hawaii. (Wayne knew that the roster of actors who could go up against him was not large; the second choice for the part appears to have been Gene Hackman.) Ethan Wayne, in his first screen role, earned $650 a week, with his father signing the contract for the minor. As for the crew, the venerable William Clothier got $2,250 a week.

  A very interesting casting choice that didn’t happen involved Jeff Bridges playing Wayne’s son. Mike Wayne and George Sherman decided on Bridges after what Mike remembered as “fifty-five interviews, twenty-three readings, and three tests.” Batjac agreed to pay Bridges $1,750 a week for eight weeks, but he ultimately turned down the film. CBS didn’t like Chris Mitchum, Bridges’s replacement, but Batjac lobbied until the studio agreed. Production began on October 10, 1970, and wrapped fifty-five days later, three days under schedule, at a cost of $4.39 million.

  The most startling thing about Big Jake is its violence—at one point, Jake’s dog gets hacked to death, and a man takes a pitchfork to the face—but it was somehow rated PG. At times, the self-reliance of the Wayne character coarsens to something approaching the ugly—when he’s not slugging his sons for insubordination, he’s humiliating them.

  But the audience didn’t mind. The casts of these later pictures were mostly the same, the saloon brawls were from central casting, and so were some of the character beats: Jacob McCandles is as relentless as Tom Dunson, he’s embarrassed when he has to put on his reading glasses, just as Nathan Brittles was in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and when
somebody tells him, “I thought you were dead,” he responds with “That’ll be the day.” It’s also a little sloppy; at one point, Wayne mispronounces “ostentatious” as “ostentious.” There was no retake.

  Despite all of this, Big Jake was a success, returning domestic rentals of $7.9 million. In 1971, the sixty-four-year-old Wayne was the number one box office star in America, in front of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and George C. Scott.

  Big Jake was released in May of 1971, and Chris Mitchum and Wayne went on The Tonight Show to promote the picture. Mitchum had been working for the passage of Proposition 13, an environmental initiative to clean up Los Angeles harbor and set pollution controls. Wayne preceded Mitchum on the show, and when Mitchum brought up his work for the environment, Wayne and Mitchum engaged in an apparently playful back-and-forth about the supposedly left-wing politics behind the movement. The exchange resulted in a flurry of publicity and letters to the editor to the general effect that being conservative does not have to mean turning your back on the environment.

  Wayne never spoke to Mitchum again. “I don’t know if he decided I was a Commie, or if he was just mad that he’d gotten involved in something with me and because of it received some negative fallout,” remembered Mitchum. He wrote Wayne several notes trying to repair the damage, and when Wayne fell ill a few years later sent him a letter saying he was only an hour away and was ready for a chess game anytime. There was never a response.