John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  Wayne gave her both front-handed and back-handed compliments. “Christ, she wants to do everything,” he complained. “She can’t ride worth a damn and I gotta keep reining my horse in so she can keep up. But I’d hate to think of what this goddamned picture would be without her.”

  Hal Wallis and Paul Nathan managed to convince themselves that everything was wonderful. “Have been loving the dailies,” wrote Nathan to Hepburn. “Truly excellent film on you and Duke. You both make sparks fly—each scene tops the previous, is so special and so fine. I’m very certain Hal and Martha have told you all of that, though.”

  Wayne and Hepburn more or less co-directed the picture, and Wallis thought it was just as well. (Millar never directed another theatrical feature.) But both stars were feeling their age. Work was now hard. One day on location, Hepburn asked Wayne, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Do you hurt?”

  “In every joint,” was the reply.

  On the last day of shooting in Oregon, Hal Wallis threw a party, but the weather had turned cold, and that, plus the elevation, caused Wayne to start wheezing and gasping. There was a canister of oxygen nearby, and he recovered, but it was a clear indication of the razor’s edge Wayne had been walking since the cancer surgery eleven years before.

  After Rooster Cogburn was cut and scored, plans were made for publicity, but Wayne begged off, telling Universal that he was still battling a viral pneumonia he couldn’t shake, on top of which he had some business affairs that were going to involve months of effort. He told them that the male audience would come because of his presence, but they needed to get Hepburn to give them some time for publicity in order to draw the female audience.

  In September 1975, a long-simmering series of perceived slights finally exploded and Wayne wrote a recriminatory letter to Hal Wallis—a laundry list of accumulated grievances. The proximate cause, it seems, was Universal’s decision to move the release date of Rooster Cogburn from the summer to the fall.

  Wayne accused Wallis of panicking when Wayne told him about his cancer eleven years before; Wayne accused him of using Paramount’s money to outbid Batjac for True Grit; Wayne castigated him for the choice of Stuart Millar, and he made a preemptive strike on some of the particulars of a second sequel to True Grit that Wallis was already preparing.

  Wallis responded with a four-page, single-spaced letter giving chapter and verse of why he was not at fault. He pointed out that Charles Portis’s agent had announced that the price for True Grit was $300,000 plus a small percentage of the gross, and that in the event of more than one bid, Portis reserved the right to designate which company got the property. Wallis said that it was his understanding that Mike Wayne had actually bid $350,000, but that Portis had chosen Wallis to make the movie because he had liked a couple of Wallis’s earlier westerns: Last Train from Gun Hill and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

  “You got the deal and a 1/3 interest in the picture along with Paramount and myself and if that isn’t a joint venture I don’t know what is,” wrote Wallis. As for the release date, Wallis pointed out that Universal was releasing Rooster Cogburn in the same month they had released Airport and American Graffiti.

  The underlying problem was that Wayne had felt betrayed by Universal when they backed out of The Green Berets and he remained suspicious of their motives. “I had nothing to do with it,” wrote Wallis of the Green Berets incident. “I was not even on the lot.”

  Wayne’s letter had suggested that if Universal did not want to give a fixed starting date for the next sequel, then Wallis should give him a guaranteed deal, i.e., Wayne would get paid whether the picture got made or not. Wallis didn’t want to do that, because then he’d be holding the bag for a $5 million picture. Wallis pointed out that he had already been on location trips to New Mexico and Arizona, and Charles Portis was working on the script, which should certainly indicate good faith in the matter.

  Wallis agreed with Wayne on one issue only: Stuart Millar. “I confess that was a mistake.” He then reminded Wayne that twice during production he had offered to fire Millar but that Wayne wouldn’t allow it.

  What was most hurtful to Wallis was the suggestion that he had panicked about losing a cheap commitment from Dean Martin when The Sons of Katie Elder needed to be postponed. Wayne had no way of knowing that most of Wallis’s organization had wanted him to hire another leading man to replace Wayne, and he had flatly refused.

  “This is grossly unfair,” an obviously hurt Wallis wrote, going on to say, “My only concern was for your well-being.” He never defended himself by citing the list of employees who wanted him to hire another actor and be done with it.

  Wallis closed by saying, “We have worked together on three pictures, all of them successful. I have enjoyed all of them and want to continue an association that gives me a great deal of pleasure. My principal concern is to make this thing work to your satisfaction and to get all other matters behind us.”

  Rooster Cogburn has come to be regarded as a missed opportunity at best, a reheated dinner at worst. Henry Hathaway filled the original film with beautiful, well-photographed locations; he knew, as did Ford and Hawks, that in a western the landscape is a character, and in True Grit the fluttering leaves of the aspen trees that surround the final shootout and the mantle of snow in the film’s last scene lend intimations of mortality.

  But despite the Oregon locations, Rooster Cogburn is perfunctorily photographed. Besides that, the film feels unshaped, little more than a succession of scenes. Budgeted at $4.6 million (Wayne got $750,000 and a percentage of the net), Rooster Cogburn brought in $7.5 million in rentals in North America, so it should have made a little money. But, relative to expectations, it was yet another disappointment.

  It was now clear that a hero who had survived deep into a period devoted to antiheroes had finally been tripped up by time. The western was the genre that perfectly accommodated Wayne’s particular gifts, but it was also a genre that was becoming extinct.

  As a picture, Rooster Cogburn didn’t live up to True Grit, but it did provide Wayne with a chance to meet and know Hepburn. She wrote him several starstruck letters. (“You are an extraordinary actor-man-spirit-creature . . . I am as goofy as a fan from Nebraska.”) Befitting a woman who’d had relationships with Leland Hayward, John Ford, and Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn liked her men masculine and complicated. A magazine piece she wrote about Wayne is little short of a mash note:

  “From head to toe he is all of a piece. Big head. Wide blue eyes. Sandy hair. Rugged skin—lined by living and fun and character. Not by just rotting away. A nose not too big, not too small. Good teeth. A face alive with humor. Good humor, I should say, and a sharp wit. Dangerous when roused. His shoulders are broad—very. His chest massive—very. When I leaned against him (which I did as often as possible, I must confess—I am reduced to such innocent pleasures) thrilling. It was like leaning against a great tree.”

  Having gotten the fluttery pleasantries out of the way, she got serious: “Politically, he is a reactionary. He suffers from a point of view based entirely on his own experience. He was surrounded in his early years in the motion picture business by people like himself. Self-made. Hard working. Independent. . . . People who were willing to live or die entirely on their own independent judgment. Jack Ford, the man who first brought Wayne into the movies, was cut from the same block of wood. . . . They seemed to have no patience and no understanding of the more timid and dependent type of person. Pull your own freight. This is their slogan. Sometimes I don’t think that they realize that their own load is attached to a very powerful engine.”

  When Wayne was told that Hepburn said he reminded her of Spencer Tracy, he first circled, then encompassed that relationship: “She’s some woman. A strong feminist and yet, you know, she worshipped her father. . . . Tracy was like a father to her, a god.” He searched for the right words, then formed his arms into a circle. “He really enclosed her.”

  At Thanksgiving 1975, Wayne and Pat Stacy headed
for Arizona to spend the holiday with Louis Johnson and his wife and attend the livestock sale. This time, he drove rather than flew. Cold sober, Wayne drove like he was drunk, swerving in and out of lanes and treating other cars as if they were the enemy.

  When they finally got to Stanfield, Stacy was charmed by the Johnsons and in love with rural Arizona. Alice Johnson prepared a Thanksgiving feast, with special attention to the pies that Wayne loved—he thought Alice’s pies were the best in the world.

  Around this time, a reporter asked him if he still had any specific ambitions.

  “Ambition? Son of a bitch, yes. I have an ambition, and that’s to get up every morning still breathing.” To another writer, he put it even more simply: “I’m very conscious that now I know more dead people than live ones. But I don’t try to live back there. I try to live in tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Glendon Swarthout’s novel The Shootist was bought before publication by the producing team of Mike Frankovich and William Self for $350,000. The price included a first-draft screenplay from Miles Hood Swarthout, the author’s son. Frankovich and Self found financing from Dino De Laurentiis, who took all foreign rights in return for veto power over star and director.

  Self flew to New York for a meeting with George C. Scott, who was starring in Death of a Salesman. Scott didn’t think he wanted to do a western, but a meeting with Self and the nature of the part convinced him. Self returned to Hollywood to give Frankovich and De Laurentiis the good news about Scott, at which point they told him they wanted John Wayne. “Scott is not a western star,” explained Frankovich, “and we know the low level of a John Wayne western. We know we won’t go below that.”

  Wayne was officially cast on August 30, 1975, which gave the production plenty of time to fine-tune the script and production—the picture wasn’t scheduled to start until the New Year. The problem came with Wayne’s physical. Everybody knew about the cancer, but that had been more than ten years before. What wasn’t generally known was that Wayne was beginning to have heart problems. It wasn’t known because Wayne didn’t want it known—he was afraid it would render him unemployable.

  The insurance company must have gotten wind of the situation because it began backing away. Such was Wayne’s desire for the part that he kicked in what Self remembered as $250,000 of his salary to help pay for his insurance.

  If the actual state of Wayne’s health had been known, he probably wouldn’t have been insurable. Before The Shootist got under way, he began feeling bad, although nothing could be found. Then the doctors did a biopsy and found some cancer growing in his stomach. It was treated and went into remission, but by the time the picture got under way, he still wasn’t feeling 100 percent. More importantly, he knew the Red Witch was in heat again.

  Frankovich and Self thought about offering the picture to Howard Hawks, or another of the old guard, but the only actual offer went to Don Siegel, who had lifted Clint Eastwood to another level with Dirty Harry but hadn’t directed many westerns. Siegel was coming off the dismal The Black Windmill, and there would be more stiffs ahead—Telefon, Rough Cut—but Self had worked with him on a TV pilot and been impressed.

  Miles Hood Swarthout wrote several drafts of the script. He had a meeting with Siegel at Universal, and found the director preoccupied with trying to set up Telefon at MGM. “He wasn’t fully engaged,” said Swarthout. “I think in his mind The Shootist was a work for hire. Lenny Hirshan, Siegel’s agent, was also Clint Eastwood’s agent, and it was Lenny who got Siegel into the picture. Lenny told me that Siegel couldn’t get along with anybody but Clint and was virtually unemployable because he spoke his mind so loudly.

  “My greatest creative contribution came after I knew Wayne was cast. I got the book The Films of John Wayne and figured out that if we did a montage sequence with clips from his old movies, we could quickly sketch in the character’s violent past. Siegel had started doing montages at Warners, and when I told him my idea, he said ‘Great! Make a list of some of the westerns we could use scenes from.’ ”

  Siegel wasn’t completely happy with Swarthout’s script, so he brought in Scott Hale, who had worked with him as a script supervisor. For Wayne, who wasn’t sure he could trust Siegel, the director insisting on his own writer was a red flag.

  But after an initial meeting or two, Wayne seemed to relax. He showed Siegel around his house and said, “Wanna buy it? It’s all I’ve got left. Two lousy, crooked business managers done me in.” Later, he told the director sadly, “All I wanted, for all the years I’ve worked, was to keep the status quo.”

  Wayne’s take on John Bernard Books, the aging shootist of the title, was that “it’s about a fellow who has a little more good than bad in him. That’s the kind of character I like to play.” But even after the script was polished, there were elements that he found objectionable. He didn’t mind Books being diagnosed with a fatal cancer, but the obvious implication of a rectal examination to diagnose it struck him as obnoxious. Nevertheless, he let it pass.

  Wayne didn’t really dig in his heels until the ending, which was the same as the ending of the novel: the young boy, to be played by Ron Howard, kills Books. “He’s mortally wounded,” remembered Self of the script conference, “dying of cancer, in terrible pain. He looks at Howard, knows that he’s always coveted his gun and says, ‘Take my gun . . . but first kill me.’ It was a mercy killing.

  “We were all somewhat concerned about the ending—squeamish—but Duke was adamant. He felt the audience would react badly.” Also, he probably felt that his character was acquiescing to malignant fate—a man with a code being outstripped by events. The ending was changed—the Howard character kills the man who kills Books, then throws the gun away in a renunciation of violence.

  Once Wayne came on board, the rest of the casting proceeded smoothly. “Old Hollywood came to the rescue,” said Self. “Jimmy Stewart came in and did his small part for Duke. We were not in a position to meet Lauren Bacall’s usual salary, but she did the picture because of Duke.” The reason was simple: “We all felt it might be his last film,” said Hugh O’Brian, who played the gambler who takes on Books in his last gunfight.

  At Siegel’s suggestion, Wayne began to grow a mustache and a little patch under his lower lip. He hadn’t liked the idea, but agreed to try, and during preproduction Siegel received a Polaroid of Wayne that had been taken in Mexico. He was sporting two weeks worth of a bona fide mustache and the soul patch. Scrawled on the Polaroid were the words, “I can’t believe it. Duke.”

  With a budget of $8 million, half from Paramount, half from De Laurentiis, The Shootist got under way in the second week of January 1976 with location work outside Carson City. As Miles Hood Swarthout said, “It was hammer and tongs from day one.”

  “It started with a quote in the Carson City newspaper,” recalled Ron Howard. “Don Siegel had given an interview and we were walking around while Wayne was reading the article out loud. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Wayne is supposed to eat directors for breakfast. But if he tries to eat me, he’ll get indigestion.’

  “Wayne folded up the newspaper and looked at me. ‘Why the fuck did he have to say that?’ he said.” That led into a long, fuming diatribe about how Dirty Harry wasn’t all that good, that Europe liked Siegel a lot more than Americans did, somehow arriving at the injustice of The Apartment beating out The Alamo for Best Picture.

  Howard already knew he wanted to be a director and found himself in what he called “an unbelievably privileged situation. Duke always referred to me as ‘Old 21.’ He respected the fact that I had come out of TV. Early on, he said to me, ‘I came out of cheap westerns, and that was the TV of our time.’ He liked the unpretentious work ethic of television, where you have to finish it by Friday.”

  Wayne and Howard had several important scenes together, and since Wayne was always willing to rehearse, Howard spent a lot of time in Wayne’s trailer. Siegel knew Howard wanted to be a director, so Siegel was always answering
Howard’s questions about the craft. “I was in both of their good graces. And when the schism presented itself, I was afforded a little insight.”

  The elevation was 3,500 feet. Wayne quickly caught a cold, which, as was often the case after his cancer surgery, turned into a bronchial infection. The film was supposed to open with shots of Wayne descending on horseback from the high country, but that proved to be a bad idea; his faltering lung capacity wouldn’t allow him to go any higher than the flatlands, so the film opened with unimpressive landscapes.

  After an initial set-to when Wayne discovered that Frankovich and Self had hired a still photographer he hadn’t approved, Siegel began directing. He got the shot for the main title, but as they segued to the scene of an attempted holdup that began the story, Wayne simply took over and directed the sequence himself. “He didn’t do too badly,” remembered Siegel with dry humor. “I wasn’t welcome to have anything to do with it.” At the end of the day, Siegel was embarrassed and despondent.

  The next morning, Wayne called Siegel and asked him to come to his hotel room, where he apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. “The trouble is simply this,” he said. “I have to work loose, or I’m no good.” For that day and several thereafter, Wayne was docile. “Mr. Siegel, there’s one director on this picture and thank God it’s you,” he announced to the cast and crew. “What’s your pleasure?”

  But Wayne continued to have trouble breathing. Several mornings he had to lie across a table while a physical therapist pounded his back to try to loosen the phlegm that was collecting in his lungs—the same therapy cystic fibrosis patients have to endure. A couple of times he needed assistance to stand up.

  Occasionally he was racked by spasms of coughing, and his voice was raspy from the cold and elevation. His stamina was not what it had been; he had to lie down in his trailer for twenty minutes at lunchtime. “I just don’t seem to have the charge anymore,” he grumbled. “But damn it, I’m 69 in May.”