John Wayne: The Life and Legend (26 page)

Stofft approached the shower and heard a man singing in a voice that sounded familiar. He pulled back the canvas curtain and found Duke. He had jumped on a PT boat and brought his USO troupe with him.

After Wayne got out of the shower, Stofft took him to quarters, where Wayne reached down into his kit bag and handed his old friend a quart of whiskey. “I carried this all over the South Pacific until I could find you,” he said.

“I’ll bet there was a case when you started,” said Stofft.

The troupe went on to another base, but Wayne stayed in New Britain for a couple of days. He went up in an artillery spotting plane and dropped some mortar shells on the Japanese position. “We like to went crazy when we found out what happened,” said Honaker. “A man of that stature doing a thing like that.”

A day or two later, Fred Stofft and his men had to clean out a nest of Japanese who were lobbing artillery into the American area. “I was up in the head of one of the landing craft,” remembered Stofft. “I looked around and here alongside of me, here’s Duke. And I said, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I want to go and see what’s going on.’

“Well, if he’d have been hurt, we’d have been in trouble, because he had no business being up in that area anyway. . . . There was actual fighting and he was part of that.”

Keith Honaker said that “He became one of us. He was just like everyone else. He showed us that he really was a down-to-earth guy. . . . He didn’t ask for any protection. . . . He actually did off the screen what he did on the screen.”

“We have developed a show that the men like,” Wayne wrote Charles Feldman on January 26, 1944. “Someone should explain to our industry that these men deserve the best shows possible. When you look out and up into a natural bowl that only recently was jungle and see 5,000 and 6,000 men sitting in the rain and mud, you wish you had the best show on earth. These are wonderful guys when the going gets tough. They get back to fundamentals out here. It’s the greatest thrill and privilege anyone can ever have to see them yell and relax in front of a show.”

More than twenty years after the war, a soldier wrote his memories of Wayne. “This I will say for John ‘The Duke’ Wayne. He was what is known as a regular feller. There was none of this high-falutin’ stuff about him. What we ate, he ate. Served medicated, warm water—which was all we had—he didn’t holler that he wanted someone to fly down to Australia for ice. He drank his booze warm too—without a clamor.

“He showed no fear of Japanese soldiers, or mosquitoes or snakes or rats and other such unfriendly creatures which infested New Guinea.”

Wayne said he’d like to see Mount Hagen, so a C-47 was ordered up for some sightseeing. “We had a good time with the natives, who were really from Nativesville,” reported the soldier. “They wore bones in their noses; bones in their ears. Their attire consisted of a leaf here and one there. The women were naked except for a loin cloth. And all of them were painted up like the Fourth of July.”

Wayne was gone for three months, and when he returned at the end of March he gave a press conference in Hollywood.

What the guys down there need are letters and cigars, more snapshots, phonograph needles and radios. Their GI bands need reeds, strings and orchestrations. And if you have any cigarette lighters, send ’em along.

The boys are starved for news from home and . . . the biggest day in their lives over there is when the mailman hands them an envelope postmarked “United States.”

Those guys are in a war that’s not only fighting, but work and sweat. They’re where 130 degrees is a cool day, where they scrape flies off, where matches melt in their pockets and Jap daisy cutter bombs take legs off at the hips. They’ll build stages out of old crates, then sit in mud and rain for three hours waiting for someone like me to say, “Hello, Joe.”

Wayne’s months on the USO tour were something, but even he realized they weren’t enough. Wayne’s stance along the sidelines during the war was something he didn’t like to talk about in later years, which is indicative by itself. His secretary, Mary St. John, remembered that he suffered “terrible guilt and embarrassment” over his lack of any war service beyond a Hollywood sound stage. Both his last wife and his daughter Aissa believed that the guilt he felt over staying out of the service lasted for the rest of his life.

He never spoke about either his application or the interview with Donovan. What is certain is that in 1945, Donovan gave him a certificate that attested to Wayne’s “Honorably Serv(ing) the United States of America as Member of The Office of Strategic Services”—the sort of boilerplate document handed out to secretaries. Wayne knew exactly what it was worth: “It was a copperhead,” he told John Ford’s grandson, Dan, “something Jack [Ford] had set up. It didn’t mean anything.”

For the rest of his life, Wayne would compensate by being as much of a red, white, and blue patriot as the most ardent Marine, slaughtering freedom’s enemies on the screen and leading by example—moral, if not practical.

In later years, the political left would come to view him as a hypocrite for never getting any closer to combat than fifty feet—besides the skirmish he attended in New Britain, some Vietcong bullets landed nearby during a 1966 tour of Vietnam. As for the right, and the military, they were never bothered overmuch by his lack of service. As General David Shoup, a Marine commandant and winner of the Medal of Honor, would say, Wayne would symbolize the Corps’ “hell for leather, go and get-em attitude,” a role that was far more important than any actor’s actual service would have been. That was good enough for them.

Thirty years after World War II, late one night on location in Durango, Mexico, for a western, Wayne began reminiscing to a small group, thinking out loud as much as telling a story:

It was the Long Island North Shore somewhere. I was one of three well-known actors who were to help the Vanderbilts and Lodges put together a package to help the war. The affair was huge, maybe a thousand or more. We were introduced around, but the center of attention was the party itself. There were two orchestras, in adjoining ballrooms so big they couldn’t hear each other.

Conversation was difficult, but I didn’t realize why until a

beautiful young debutante was introduced. She asked how tall I was, and laughed when she said, “And I thought I was tall at five feet eight.” We laughed and she said, “Have we met? What family are you a part of, Mr. Wayne?” I said I was just there to help with the fund-raising for a film to help the war. She wasn’t the least condescending when she said, “Films? Motion Pictures?” I laughed and said yes. “Oh, how exciting that must be . . . I must see one someday.” She meant it. She was beaming. She had never seen a movie. We chatted a bit more, and then she moved on. I don’t think I ever felt more unimportant in my life.

And so John Wayne was reminded that underneath it all, he was still Duke Morrison.

Shortly after the USO tour was concluded, Chata was in Mexico and encountering visa trouble. Al Murphy, who had become Wayne’s driver, believed that Josie was pulling strings to keep her out of the country. (It could just as easily have been Bö Roos or Charlie Feldman.) Murphy and his boss drove down to Tucson, Wayne crossed over the border and somehow brought Chata back with him. Murphy believed that if someone had been able to get between Wayne and Chata, he would have moved on—the relationship had the status of a sexual fever.

“I think Duke would have forgotten her quick enough,” said Murphy. “But the problem was, he never did like anyone telling him what to do, pushing him around. . . . Somebody tried to keep that girl out of his life and it just didn’t work.”

Josie stayed angry for a long time. Ben DeLoache came to Hollywood for a visit and stayed with Wayne for a week. Wayne wanted DeLoache to meet his son Michael, but when they showed up at the house Josie refused to let the men see the boy. No visitation was scheduled, therefore there would be no visitation.

The war, and Wayne’s omnipresence in wartime movies, lifted him to an entirely different level of success. By doing so many different kinds of pictures opposite so many different kinds of leading ladies at studios with entirely different strands of movie DNA, Wayne showed off his range and ability.

Dakota
is a good example of the mid-range entertainments Republic was devising for their star. It’s chock-full of cronies to keep Wayne happy—Paul Fix, Grant Withers, Ward Bond—but there’s a wild card lurking in the credits. The story, about Polish refugees on the Great Plains, a vague predecessor of
Heaven’s Gate
, is by Carl Foreman, a political liberal with whom Wayne would cross swords in the future. (The film features some darky humor that was presumably introduced by hands other than Foreman’s.)

The leading lady was Herbert Yates’s mistress, Vera Hruba Ralston—not attractive, not talented, but terribly earnest—and the director was Republic house director Joseph Kane, for whom the term “journeyman” was invented.

Foreman seems to be trying for a sprawling, Edna Ferber–style saga, but the script is botched; the film ends with Wayne jawing impotently at Ralston while his voice is drowned out by a riverboat whistle. About half the film is played in front of a process screen. Republic would always be Republic. One of Herbert Yates’s mantras was “Some people make dollar cigars. We make nickel cigars. Remember that.” Although he had a million-dollar property in Wayne, Yates still made him endure collaborators such as Ralston and Kane—a man who made more than one hundred movies without an interesting shot to be found in any of them.

Wayne must have taken some consolation in the fact that his star was rising, and so was his income. Charlie Feldman noted in a memo that Wayne’s acting income was $128,000 in 1942, $116,169.46 in 1943, $167,291.66 in 1944, and $220,000 in 1945. The trajectory was clearly ascending, and so was the caliber of films he was making everywhere but Republic.

Dakota
was the fourth picture in the five-picture deal that Wayne had signed with Republic in 1943. The four pictures—
In Old Oklahoma, The Fighting Seabees, Flame of the Barbary Coast,
and
Dakota
—did very well (
Dakota
cost $843,545 and earned domestic rentals of $1.44 million). The money was rolling in, so Yates and Feldman worked out a new deal before the fifth picture was made.