by Scott Eyman
He read the names of the nominees—Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman, and the winner: The Deer Hunter. It was not a choice that could have pleased him, but the Oscars were the centerpiece of the industry he loved and he would never have been intentionally rude and voiced displeasure with the picture. Besides, he had more important things to worry about.
After the show was over, he dropped into the press room to congratulate the winners and posed for a couple of shots. He stood there by himself, let the photographers take a few pictures, and then went home.
In so many ways, this last appearance was congruent with the image he embodied, with the legend he had created—a man alone, seeing his promises through to the end. As Molly Haskell wrote, “He allowed us to see, in his last appearance, a once-majestic frame withered away by the ravages of cancer, allowed us to hear a once-resonant voice that could hardly get out a few well-known names. . . . It was in retrospect, perhaps his most heroic performance. With this parting gesture, his legend, and the larger myth he represented, were ennobled rather than diminished by the shadow of mortality.”
Like nearly everything else in his life, he did it and didn’t regret it. For that matter, he admitted to regretting only one thing: “One time I caught a giant Mahi Mahi in the waters off Hawaii. I weighed the fish and then ate it. Later, when the boat docked, I discovered I had eaten the world’s record catch for that species. I should have had that son of a bitch mounted.”
He began pulling away from old friends. The last time Cecilia deMille Presley saw him he was clearly dying, but he didn’t seem to feel sorry for himself. “To Duke, a body that didn’t work was annoying,” she said. On April 17, his cough was so violent he couldn’t sleep, and there was blood in his phlegm. It was pneumonia, so he went on heavy antibiotics and more tapioca pudding. He avoided looking in the mirror.
In the last week in April, Maureen O’Hara arrived. She had had cancer surgery herself not long before, and Wayne had called to lend his support. When she arrived, Wayne was propped up in bed so his remaining lung wouldn’t fill with fluid. The air in the room was stale. O’Hara must have seen the pictures of him at the Oscar ceremony, but she was still stunned by his appearance. He reached out his hand and she took it, then she put her head down on the bed and began to cry.
“Is that for Charlie?” he asked—Charlie Blair, a brigadier general in the Air Force. O’Hara had married him in 1968 and spent ten years with him until he was killed in an airplane crash.
“Yes,” she lied.
At one point, he began to cry, saying, “Why you? Why me?” O’Hara started to cry again because it was the only time in their long relationship that she had ever known him to break down. “Maureen, why did you and I have such lousy luck?” he said.
They began to talk, and they kept talking for the next day and a half. They talked about chess and steaks and flying and John Ford. Always John Ford.
Wayne insisted she stay the night in the bedroom across from his. The next morning, Wayne and O’Hara sat on the deck with the kids around them. O’Hara told a story about Wayne getting drunk as a lord at John Ford’s house one night in the 1940s, and Ford ordering her to get him home. She said she couldn’t handle him alone, but Ford insisted it was her responsibility.
O’Hara decided to drive to Lakeside Golf Club, where she figured she could enlist reinforcements. Somewhere on Ventura Boulevard, Wayne suddenly decided he needed another drink and demanded that O’Hara pull over.
He chose a house at random and began pounding on the door. A middle-aged couple in pajamas came to the door to be met by John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara standing on their porch. “Good evening,” said Wayne. “We need a drink.” The couple invited them in and Wayne and O’Hara made small talk while Wayne had his drink. The kids loved the story and asked their father if it was actually true. “Well, if your Auntie Maureen says I did . . . I guess I did.” She left later that day.
Shortly after O’Hara left, Claire Trevor and her husband, Milton Bren—who was dying of cancer himself—came by for a short visit. A day later, Yakima Canutt stopped by. They passed the time discussing ideas for Great Western commercials. Wayne called Olive Carey regularly, seemed to take strength from her indomitable spirit.
While the death watch went on inside the house, outside there was a series of impromptu celebrations. On weekends, the boating community in Newport Beach formed parades in the harbor. Wayne would sit on his porch and the boats would sail past, with the people on board waving hello. Wayne cheerily waved to every boat even if he didn’t know them. “It was how people let him know they cared about him,” said Tom Fuentes.
On May 2, three weeks after the Oscar ceremony, he collapsed in the kitchen. “Something is wrong with me, Aissa. Something is really wrong.” First he was taken to Hoag Hospital in Newport, where X rays revealed an intestinal obstruction. The doctor at Hoag said that Wayne needed to be taken to UCLA for emergency surgery. He was in agony; he couldn’t sit up, could only lie down, so the station wagon’s backseat was folded down and he lay there on top of some blankets while Ethan drove him to UCLA.
In his bedroom, he had left his favorite dark suit out. “He knew,” said Gretchen Wayne.
By the time they got to UCLA, the place was crawling with TV cameras—someone at Hoag had alerted them. The next morning, Dr. Longmire was operating again, but this time there was nothing to be done—the cancer was everywhere—“diffuse carcinomatosis” as the profession calls it. The radiation hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked. Some thought was given to chemotherapy, but the oncologists decided that Wayne was too weak, that the chemo would kill him before the cancer would. They decided to try interferon as a Hail Mary.
Wayne had entered that stage of terminal illness where nothing stabilizes, where one condition provokes another condition, and the treatment for the first condition only exacerbates the second or the third.
Old friends rallied. Ollie Carey called, and Wayne complained about what the doctors had done to his body. “They didn’t leave me anything,” he said. “Well,” she replied, “you’ve still got your balls and your brain, don’t you?” He laughed and had to admit that was true.
Sometimes Wayne was quiet, other times he’d unleash his temper; once, enraged by his inability to eat anything but bland foods, he threw a bowl of tapioca pudding on the floor. Pat Stacy called Mary St. John to help out, and she came as soon as she could. The first time she saw Wayne, St. John let out an involuntary gasp at his emaciation.
He thought about suicide, asking Patrick to fetch the .38 he kept by his bed. His son refused, as did Stacy. He raged at her until he fell back exhausted onto the pillow.
Michael stopped by the hospital every morning on the way to his office on Wilshire. One day his dad called early and asked him to bring him a USC cap. It seemed that the doctors had given him a UCLA cap, but “I just can’t wear it next to my head.” Michael brought him the cap and his father wore it underneath the UCLA cap. He enjoyed going down the hall in his wheelchair tipping his UCLA cap to everybody and showing off the USC cap beneath it.
George O’Brien called his son Darcy, who had become a novelist and professor. “You need to write the Duke,” George said. “I think he’s dying.” Darcy’s letter was about that long-ago idyllic vacation off Catalina, when Wayne had been so kind to a young boy and helped him dive for abalone. Wayne took the trouble to write “the nicest letter” back. O’Brien kept it framed over his desk until his own premature death.
Johnny Weissmuller, a fellow client of Bö Roos and an occasional drinking buddy of Wayne’s, was having psychological difficulties that might have been Alzheimer’s. He was being transferred to a mental institution, and Wayne got on the phone to try to help. He apologized to Weissmuller’s wife for not being able to do more. “Maria, I’m dying myself . . . If I could, I’d go down there [to the hospital] and crack a few heads.” Later on, before hanging up, he told her, “I’m on the way to the happy hunting grounds where
old elephants go to die.”
Some days he was acquiescent to the doctors and appreciative of whatever of life was on offer. “What a lovely morning,” he would say on those days. Other days he raged. “Goddamn you,” he would say before they gave him an injection, “every time I turn around you‘re trying to stick me with that thing. Why are you sons of bitches giving me this shit? Do you want me so drugged that I can’t fight back? Jesus Christ!”
Visits were mostly limited to family and the inner circle. Dozens of people called continually—Ann-Margret, Lauren Bacall. And Stacy Keach called, which puzzled the family until he explained. “When I was a kid out there in the valley I was selling Christmas wreaths door to door one year. And I came to Wayne’s house and he invited me in. He said, ‘Come in, son, and warm up a bit.’ I’ve never forgotten that gesture. Even though I’ve never had the pleasure of working with him on a film, I remember that and I’d just like his family and all the rest of you to know how highly I regard him.”
On May 5, President Carter visited Wayne. Like everybody else, Carter was shocked at Wayne’s appearance, but managed to conceal it. Wayne told Carter that he approved of the new left-hand part in his hair, that it improved his looks, and as a show business professional he knew what he was talking about. Pointing to an intravenous tube in his arm, Wayne told the president that he’d be happy to offer him some of his delicious meal, but he only had one straw.
Robert Parrish cabled: “Dear Duke,” it read. “Among many others throughout the world, my heart is with you.” Wayne dictated a reply: “Dear Bobby, Your thoughtfulness was very much appreciated. The farther out you go, the lonelier it gets. Affectionately, Duke.”
On May 7, doctors told the family that the cancer had metastasized. The next day, Jimmy Stewart and Paul Keyes visited. Burt Kennedy came with Al Murphy, who had worked as an assistant director at Batjac for years and who had changed his name from Silverstein. As the two men were ushered into the room, Mike Wayne joked, “The reason Duke didn’t want to see you was because Al is a Jew.”
Wayne smiled and pointed to the ceiling. “It’s the other Jew I don’t want to see.”
Michael Caine’s wife, Shakira, was at the UCLA Medical Center for some minor surgery, and one day while Caine was visiting her he heard a familiar voice calling him. Wayne’s room was two doors away from Shakira Caine’s. Wayne was pleased to see Caine, and the two talked until a nurse threw Caine out.
From then on, Caine would pop in every time he visited his wife. Occasionally, he would join Wayne for a long, slow walk down the hospital corridor. Wayne wore pajamas, a robe, a baseball cap. One day Caine asked Wayne how long he expected to be in the hospital.
“It’s got me this time, Mike,” Wayne observed. “I won’t be getting out of here.” Caine was struck by the tone—no sadness or self-pity, just a statement of fact, as if Wayne had been in a fair fight and lost. Tears welled up in Caine’s eyes, but Wayne didn’t want to see it. “Get the hell out of here and go and enjoy yourself,” he ordered.
One day, Wayne slowly made his way down to the hospital mail room on the first floor and apologized to the staff for all the extra work he was making for them. He told them that it wouldn’t be too much longer.
On May 10, Frank Sinatra and his wife, Barbara, came. When they emerged from the room, they were both shaken, and Barbara Sinatra rushed over to Pat Stacy to apologize. She had been stunned by Wayne’s deterioration and had told him she would pray to Saint Jude. Then she remembered that Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. “I meant to say I’d pray to the saint of hope,” she told Stacy. “Please tell him that.” As an old woman herself, Barbara Sinatra’s main memory was of how utterly devastated she had been by Wayne’s condition.
Maureen O’Hara testified before Congress in order to get quick approval for the striking of a Congressional Gold Medal to honor Wayne, the eighty-fifth person in history to receive it. “To the people of the world, John Wayne is not just an actor,” she said. “John Wayne is the United States of America. He is what they believe America to be.” The medal, which had previously honored Jonas Salk, the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Bob Hope, was unanimously approved with the support of President Carter on May 23 and the order was signed three days later, on Wayne’s seventy-second birthday.
Old friends wrote letters to buck him up. Gregory Peck wrote, telling Wayne that he had to “get your conservative ass out of there” in order to pick up his Congressional Medal. James Cagney wrote, telling Wayne he was pulling for him and sending along the regards of Frank McHugh, who had worked with Wayne in The Telegraph Trail in 1933.
And Ronald Reagan wrote, telling Wayne “we’ll keep on praying until they decide you can get into a saloon fight (on the studio back lot of course) or go fishing in Baja for real. . . . Nancy sends her love—I would too but there might be talk.”
Mike Wayne finally completed a deal to sell the Wild Goose for $650,000, but Wayne ordered that $40,000 be spent overhauling the engines because he didn’t want to take advantage of the man buying the boat. Bert Minshall got $6,000 as severance.
Wayne was no longer taking walks down the hospital corridor. He needed help to get from the bed to the bathroom. Sometimes there were tears of frustration. His seventy-second birthday was greeted by terrible pain that provoked a regimen of narcotics, and he slept through most of the day. The next morning he woke up, so everybody there sang “Happy Birthday” around the bed and passed around pieces of cake, but he was too weak to open presents. By this time, all but the oldest friends were turned away. Henry Hathaway came on May 28 and spent a half hour with his old friend. Wayne insisted on getting out of his bed and sitting in a chair for old Henry.
By May 29, the hospital began administering morphine as a regular part of Wayne’s medication. Occasionally he would say, “I’m sorry,” but he stopped complaining. He had lost nearly one hundred pounds. His chest and abdomen were a network of surgical scars and radiation burns, his arms and legs bruised and mottled from needles.
In the first week in June, he began to turn inward. When the nurses came in to give him Demerol or morphine, he rolled over and let them do what they wanted. He was just too tired.
“At the end, the cancer was everywhere,” said Patrick Wayne. “He was in excruciating pain, and he never complained. He was so strong, so bulletproof all his life, and part of me believed he could beat the cancer back again. I don’t think he did, though. He had a bedsore on his back the size of a grapefruit, an open wound that would not heal. He never complained. Underneath it all, he was a human being. Not superhuman, like he could play, but a human being. But an incredible human being.”
Mike Wayne called Louis and Alice Johnson in Arizona and told them if they wanted to see their friend one last time, they had to come now. They came, and so did Mary St. John. Through his haze, Wayne asked what she thought about death, and she quoted the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
He asked her to repeat it, then said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.”
She took his hand and kissed it, and he said, “Well, Mary, I guess the Red Witch finally got me.”
There was nothing to be done except suffer along with him. “You just prayed, saying, ‘My God, don’t let him suffer another day,’ ” said Gretchen Wayne.
Years before, Jane Fonda had told Gretchen Wayne it wasn’t unusual for her to come down to the kitchen in the morning wiping the sleep from her eyes to find John Wayne having a cup of coffee with her father. Wayne’s gregariousness had been one of the few things that could lift Henry Fonda out of his solitary nature, but that close friendship had ended with the McCarthy period.
Now, Henry Fonda told Michael that he’d like to see Duke, but he didn’t want to cause any fuss. Michael said that his fath
er would be very pleased that his old friend wanted to visit. Fonda went in the room to find Wayne sleeping. He just stood at the foot of the bed for a while, paying his respects, saying goodbye.
Josie called. Wayne had stopped taking calls, but that one he took. To Josie’s own dying day in 2003 she never spoke of what they talked about. But later she told her grandchildren her verdict on the man who had been her first and only true love.
“We were married when we were young,” she told Chris Wayne. “Duke was a good man. He was honest, he had a conscience, he had a good heart. He was a man of his word. He tried.”
“The last week,” said Pat Wayne, “he went into deeper and deeper sleeps, and he was awake less and less.” On June 8, he began slipping in and out of a coma, and his breathing began to grow shallow.
And then, on June 10, at about 9 P.M. he suddenly woke up, and was amazingly alert and responsive. “For two hours, maybe three, he was totally alive and with us, talking to all of us,” remembered Patrick Wayne. “Six of the seven children were there, and we all had a chance to have a last conversation with him. And he had all of his humor, all of his gregariousness. He was once again the whole man.” Pat Stacy was there, and she agreed with Patrick that those few hours were a last flair of light. “His blue eyes were shining. He showed no pain. He seemed to be enjoying every moment of those three hours.”
He knew he was in the hospital, but he also seemed to think that he was still working and making movies. No matter—for one last time, he was John Wayne—the Duke. Gretchen Wayne said that “He was lucid, he was funny, he felt good. At the end, he accepted it. He didn’t fight it. He said, ‘It’s been great.’ ”
“Then he went back to sleep,” said Patrick Wayne. “I treasure those two hours.”
Late on June 10 or early on June 11, Father Robert Curtis was called to Wayne’s bedside. He looked at Wayne and asked him, “Is it your wish that you become a Catholic?”
