John Wayne: The Life and Legend (76 page)

To a degree that the public never knew, cancer would be a consideration for the rest of Wayne’s life, especially in terms of breathing difficulties that would become part of his daily reality. Then there was his newfound status as a public survivor, a status he took very seriously. On December 22, Wayne sent a telegram to Nat King Cole, who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. “Sorry to hear you’ve joined the club but it can be whipped,” Wayne wrote, then mentioning that he’d just listened to Cole’s “The Christmas Song” and thanked him for the joy he had brought into the world. He closed by saying “Keep punching.” Cole died a little less than two months later.

As Wayne prepared to go to Mexico to make
The Sons of Katie Elder
, assistant director Michael Moore wrote Hal Wallis, “I have had a complete oxygen tank with mask . . . put on the property truck to be with us at all times. Also, I am taking a small, portable outfit which the doctor will have with him at all times. I feel this is good insurance for John.”

On January 3, just a few days before Wayne left for Durango, a burglar broke into the house in Encino. He had taken a cab to the estate before he broke in. Wayne grabbed a loaded .45 and chased the robber out of the house, but then he couldn’t find him. When the police arrived, they found the thief hiding by the basement door. As they were leading him away, the incompetent crook asked Wayne for a favor: would he pay the taxi driver? Wayne told the police to wait, got a $20 bill and gave it to the thief, who gave it to the taxi driver.

“I felt sorry for the cabbie,” he explained to Mary St. John. “The poor bastard’s working the night shift and I thought he might have to cough up the fare himself. Anyway, maybe the whole thing’s symbolic. We’ve decided to sell the house and get out of this shithole of a Los Angeles.”

After nearly a four-month postponement, on January 6, 1965, production began on
The Sons of Katie Elder
and continued for the next forty-six days at a cost of $3.19 million.

Wayne was nervous because of his diminished lung capacity; as he put it, “I had just got over that cancer operation and I thought I could hear myself breathing all the time.” Then there was Henry Hathaway, who refused even to think about coddling his star. “Old Henry was very thoughtful of me, of course. Since I was recuperating and all. He took me up to 8,500 feet to shoot the damned thing and the fourth day of shooting he had me jumping into ice water. Very considerate.

“We had to jump off a bridge into the water and swim across the February River to escape from the heavies and God, that water was cold! The rest of the guys had rubber suits to take the shock away, but I’m so big, they couldn’t get one to fit under my clothes. I didn’t think I’d ever catch my breath.”

Later, struggling with the high elevation, as he would for the rest of his life, Wayne was shooting a night scene that involved him riding up a street. “I’m waiting for Hathaway to get a long shot and let it go at that because, damn it, I’m hurting. Well, he makes me ride right up in the foreground, right up to the camera, get down off that horse the way Duke Wayne’s supposed to get off a horse, tie the reins and walk out. . . . I’m calling the SOB every name I can think of under my breath.”

With another director, Wayne would have rebelled, but he knew that Hathaway was doing it for a reason. Toward the end of his life, Wayne would call Hathaway “the meanest man in the business. He worked me like a goddamn dog. And you know something? It was the best thing ever happened to me. It meant I got no chance to walk around looking for sympathy.” Hathaway’s lack of nurturing was therapeutic—maddening, painful, but therapeutic.

Throughout the production, Wayne talked about his experience with cancer to anyone that would listen. He hadn’t been so scared of dying, he said, as of being helpless. “That feeling . . . of being a burden to your family. That’s what hit me hardest of all. . . . I just couldn’t see myself lying in bed, not being able to help myself—no damn good to anybody. That, to me, was worse than the fear of dying.”

“I told [the public about the cancer] because I know how much solid hope my recovery could bring to many poor devils in the same fix,” he said. “And if it encouraged people to get regular checkups, it would save lives. More men ought to listen to their wives when they beg them to get checkups.”

To all appearances, Wayne was in fine fettle, throwing ascorbic acid lozenges in his mouth and washing them down with mezcal he kept in a half gallon jug, then proclaiming “Goddamn! I’m the stuff that men are made of.” Dean Martin, working in his second movie with Wayne, was affectionately amused. “He’s two loudspeaking guys in one. Me, when people see me, they sometimes say, ‘Oh, there goes Perry Como.’ But there’s only one John Wayne and nobody makes any mistakes about that.”

Mostly, it was old-home week, the atmosphere in which Wayne always felt most comfortable. Earl Holliman, a Hal Wallis contractee who was playing one of Wayne’s brothers, was the outlier. He had always loved Wayne on-screen, but this was his first time working with him. He found Wayne “a wonderful person” and “lots of fun,” but he was dismayed by Wayne’s compulsion to be the Big Dog. “He had to be the macho man. He had to have more drinks than the next guy.” Holliman also found Wayne “a bit of a bigot in conversation.”

When the production moved to Del Rio, George Kennedy joined it. Kennedy had worked on
In Harm’s Way
, and would also work with Wayne in
Cahill U.S. Marshal.
Kennedy matched up well with Wayne, if only because he was six-one.

“Duke was Duke,” recalled Kennedy. “Very bright. I worked with and dearly loved Jimmy Stewart, and I worked with Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. Heavyweights. But Wayne was on a different planet. If you put him in a group with other movie stars, the eye went to him, and that is the ultimate marker of respect. He was John Wayne. He was very real. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t Olivier; Olivier wasn’t John Wayne.”

One day during a lunch break, Wayne took off his shirt to get some sun, and Kennedy was stunned by the expanse of the angry purple scar from the recent surgery.

Kennedy proceeded to be even more stunned when Wayne lit up a cigar.

“Duke, look at yourself. You look like a railroad track from here to Duluth, and you’re smoking?”

Wayne sighed, took a drag. “I can’t stop,” he said.

Publicly, Wayne loudly proclaimed his abandonment of tobacco, but that was a lie. When I met him in 1972, he was smoking small cigars, as if they were less damaging than unfiltered Camels. He occasionally smoked large cigars as well. Other times, he would chew tobacco.

Psychologically, he was addicted. “He used to die when he saw Jackie Gleason take a drag on a cigarette on TV,” remembered Gretchen Wayne. “He’d say, ‘Boy, he really knows how to smoke a cigarette.’ He inhaled it deeply; you didn’t think the smoke would ever come out.”

If cancer hadn’t nudged him off tobacco, there were other, subtler changes, most of which were only noticeable to the people who had previously worked with him. He seemed less sure of himself on a horse—“He did not want to take a chance of letting a horse get out from under him, so he rode a shorter rein,” said the stuntman Dean Smith. “He wanted to be sure that he didn’t get bucked off or fall from one of those big horses.”

Also joining the company was Dennis Hopper, who had had a legendary run-in with Henry Hathaway years before on
From Hell to Texas
. “We argued all day and had a wonderful time at dinner,” Hopper remembered.

He was a primitive director—he rarely moved his camera, the movement came from the actors—and he gave me line readings that were imitative Brando crap. I’d try to reason with him and he’d snap, “Kid, that’s dinner talk.” I walked off the set three times.

One day he pointed to a huge stack of film cans and said, “Kid, I own 40 percent of 20th Century Fox stock, there’s enough film in those cans to shoot for three months, and we’re gonna film this scene until you get it right.”

I don’t know how many takes we did. I say 86 because I was really 86’d when we were done. But Hathaway wore me down and got what he wanted, and then he told me, “You’ll never work in this town again.” And the word went out and I didn’t make a major Hollywood picture for several years.

Hopper went to New York and studied with Lee Strasberg, then came back and did TV. By 1964, Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of the late Margaret Sullavan. “She was an actress Hathaway and Wayne respected as a good, honest woman. They knew Brooke and I had a baby girl. They talked it over and decided I should be working. And we all got along fine.”

Hopper took pains to be on his good behavior with Hathaway and decided to fish for a compliment. “See what a better actor I am now?” he said to Hathaway after a take.

“You’re not better, just smarter,” snorted the director.

Hopper liked Wayne, “But it was a strange relationship. He thought of me as his house Commie. He’d get agitated about something and shout, ‘Where’s Hopper, that little Commie bastard?’ and try to involve me in a political debate.

“And he would take time to teach me little acting tricks. He would say, ‘Dennis, if you break your line in the middle—for example, ‘They went . . . thataway—they can’t cut away from you.’ And I would think, ‘Well, that works if you’re John Wayne.’ Anyone else, they’ll get cut out.”

As the picture wound down, so did Wayne. He got one of the bad colds that would increasingly plague him, and he was still coughing. By late afternoon the oxygen inhaler was usually set up by his chair on the set. And he was increasingly sensitive about his age and appearance.

“That guy,” he groused about one reporter who he felt had stabbed him in the back. “I admit I’m balding. I admit I got a tire around my middle. What man 57 doesn’t? Big news.”

Wayne took a break in the interviews about his cancer to pay eloquent tribute to the genre that had defined him. “Westerns are art. They’ve got simplicity, and simplicity is art. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle and with the basic human emotions—love, hate, anger, fear. In Europe they understand that better than we do over here. . . .

“Take a horse. A horse is the greatest vehicle for action there is. . . . Put a man on him and you’ve got the makings of something magnificent—physical strength, speed where you can see and feel it, heroism. . . . There’s a simplicity of conflict you can’t beat. Westerns are our folklore and folklore is international.”

The Sons of Katie Elder
emerged as a fully formed, entertaining western, well directed and well acted. Because of the public’s curiosity about how Wayne would look after his cancer operation, the film was also a considerable hit, earning domestic rentals of $6 million even though the story would just about have sufficed at Monogram—a ranch is stolen from the parents of the titular sons, who have to fight to get it back. But the impeccable production, the stars, and a slew of great character actors keep the picture airborne. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard even makes the scrubby area around Durango look picturesque.

Henry Hathaway, by this time a director who stuck strictly to his narrative, pauses to let his camera lovingly observe Wayne walking for ten seconds at a time—an ineffable image of grace. The loose amble of
Stagecoach
had altered to a very specific walk—arms raised at the elbow, trunk leaning slightly forward, leading with his narrow hips, often coming to rest with a hip cocked in the contrapposto pose of classical Greek statuary. The youthful beauty had faded, but Wayne compensated for that and his extra girth with a continuing Apollonian grace—movement in a mythic rhythm.

Wayne’s triumph over cancer only increased his stature as the unkillable American ideal. Not everybody took his image as seriously as he did. Terry Southern said that Stanley Kubrick offered Wayne the part of the apocalyptically crazed cowboy eventually played by Slim Pickens in
Dr. Strangelove
. “Wayne was approached and dismissed it immediately,” said Southern.

But Wayne always considered himself a working actor, and he remained on the lookout for parts that didn’t require a full-scale commitment. Shortly before the cancer had been discovered, Wayne helped writer-director Melville Shavelson set up a movie about Mickey Marcus, an American Jew who had fought with the Haganah to found Israel. Shavelson was amused, because, as he noted, “If God set out to print a million photographs of Jewishness, he would use John Wayne as the negative.”

But Wayne was enthused by the freedom-fighting foreground of the story. “You could call Jerusalem the Jewish Alamo,” said Shavelson. “You out of your mind?” snorted Wayne. “That picture lost so much money I can’t buy a pack of chewing gum in Texas without a co-signer. Let’s not remind anybody.”

Shavelson asked Wayne to appear in a small part in the picture, to which Wayne agreed, but he went further than that. He personally called Kirk Douglas and asked him to look at the script. Batjac took a profit position in the picture, which was financed by the Mirisch Corporation for United Artists.