John Wayne: The Life and Legend (77 page)

Unfortunately,
Cast a Giant Shadow
failed to earn back its negative cost, and there were no profits for Batjac.

Just as Wayne was recovering, Jimmy Grant began to feel ill. He went to a doctor in Madrid, who couldn’t find anything, so he came back to California and to UCLA, where he was diagnosed with cancer.

James Edward Grant died in 1966. After the funeral, Wayne told Colin Grant that his father had been his best friend. It was a lovely thing to say, but Wayne’s special gift was that all of his friends could plausibly believe the same thing. The family didn’t forget Jimmy’s widow; Pilar regularly sent a limo to bring her to the house for lunch.

Jimmy Grant’s last script,
Support Your Local Gunfighter
, was made five years after he died. He was prolific and successful to the end—and beyond.

Originally, Newport Beach was supposed to be just another California seaside community, but by the late 1920s the bay was being dredged and a seawall was constructed. By the 1960s, it was one of the most exclusive beach and boating communities in the world.

Wayne had customized the house in Encino to his specifications and most people believed he didn’t really want to move but was doing it for Pilar. Tom Kane came to the Encino house one day and found Wayne on his hands and knees with a tape measure and a legal pad. He was measuring his den. “Just let me finish this and I’ll be right with you,” he said. “I’m going to reproduce this room in the house in Newport Beach exactly as it is here.”

“Duke was essentially a family man,” said Tom Kane. “He’d do anything to try to keep a family and a marriage together, such as [the] move. He was not too happy about leaving Encino, but he did it anyway.”

The Newport Beach house—2688 Bay Shore Drive—was remarkable primarily for its location: at the water’s edge, facing Balboa Island. The house itself, like many extraordinary houses on the Malibu and Santa Monica oceanfronts, was nothing special from the outside. Inside, the eleven-room, seven-bath house blossomed as you moved toward the bay view.

The interior was an unexpectedly stylish compendium of travels and accomplishments, decorated largely with furniture and objects Wayne had picked up on his travels—he enjoyed shopping for antiques, and he made a habit of taking a few favored possessions with him whenever he went on location, to dress up a hotel room and make it feel more like home. The house had furniture from Madrid, antiques from Colorado Springs, figurines from Kyoto. The living room had a fire-engine-red coffee table and a stone fireplace wall that held attractive modern art and a gilt-bronze Buddha. The dining room featured a Baccarat chandelier and a mirrored wall, before which was a Nepalese statue of a deity.

“Wayne bought out the original woodcut blocks from a Buddhist temple,” remembered photographer Sam Shaw. “The prints of the wallpaper were made from these woodblocks. He gave me a print. A beautiful Japanese print. Rice paper. With eight tones of black and one red.”

Wayne’s office was paneled, with a fireplace, a small collection of guns, some Harry Jackson sculptures, and a collection of kachina dolls that he had collected during his forays into Monument Valley. There was a bar in one corner, and a draft beer dispenser—a gift from Budweiser. Elsewhere in the house, there was also a hidden screen and projector for the screening of films.

“Wayne took the western very seriously,” remembered Sam Shaw.

He had an immense library on the west. He absorbed the west, was steeped in western folklore. He did scholarly studies on the west. You know, I’m a professional photographer, and Wayne, an actor, showed me the work of Edward Curtis, an early photographer of American Indians. Wayne had a rare portfolio edition, printed by J. P. Morgan, which he bought for $3,000. Bought before Curtis became accepted by the art world. . . . It was Wayne who introduced me to Curtis, a photographer sympathetic to Indians.

Wayne was cultured; very charming, polite, elegant. Not from what we heard and read about him, but in the confines of his home. Not even in his friendships with his fellow filmmakers, but in the confines of himself. . . . But on the set, for the press, he played a guy rolling in the mud.

Shaw was from New York and had been born with the name Arshawsky—a die-hard Jewish liberal. After a number of political set-to’s, Shaw said to him, “You’re not the reactionary they say you are.”

“I’m a reactionary?” asked Wayne, managing to keep a straight face.

“Yes. From where I come, everybody looks up on you as the leader of the wolf pack.”

“Sam, I’m not the leader of the wolf pack. I’m not a reactionary.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a real strong trade union guy. What you are is a Bull Mooser.”

“What’s a Bull Mooser?”

“Like Harold Ickes and Theodore Roosevelt. Honest, uncorrupted American conservatives. Dedicated American citizens.”

Prominent in his office was what Wayne called his “Fifty Years of Hard Work Wall,” featuring plaques and honors deriving from his career, as well as a faded photo of Wayne, John Ford, Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond displaying a sailfish caught near Cabo San Lucas in the 1930s. There was a picture of Barry Goldwater, another of Richard and Pat Nixon and Wayne, signed by the president. Another picture was signed by Dwight Eisenhower. There were Winchesters in display cases, and some Remingtons, including a 1901 Remington picturebook. Some Charles Russell bronzes. An 1855 pepperpot pistol.

There was an autographed picture from Ronald and Nancy Reagan that said, “Duke, we love you,” as well as a piece of polished wood from the deck of the battleship
Arizona
. In time, pride of place on the Fifty Years of Hard Work Wall would be given to his Academy Award for
True Grit.

Outside, a long dock rocked gently with the waves.

A new house in a new town mandated new friends. Cecilia deMille Presley had been raised by her grandfather Cecil B. DeMille, so she wasn’t intimidated by movie stars. She had a long marriage with a real estate developer named Randy Presley and had been a friend of Mike Wayne’s when they were both children. But it was only after Wayne moved to Newport that she got to know him as an equal.

“Duke would bring his backgammon set to the Balboa Bay club to kill time while Pilar played tennis,” she remembered. Randy Presley would always give him a game. The Presleys would be married for over fifty years and part of their relationship involved merciless mutual teasing. They were playing bridge with Wayne one day, when Cecilia told her husband, “Randy, you played that well, for a lay-down.”

Wayne broke up and said, “If I ever said that to Pilar, I’d have to leave the fucking house.”

Wayne grew to love the Newport Beach house because he loved the sea. “Look at that changing scene out there,” he once exclaimed. “You know, a view like you have in Encino doesn’t mean anything after you’ve lived there for a while but here—God, it’s beautiful. It’s hard as hell to work because you start looking at this and pretty quick your mind just eases off into numbness.”

But it was more than that. In the mid-1960s, Newport Beach was a seaside village of only 36,000 people, with few markets or restaurants. In many respects, Wayne was replicating his fond memories of Glendale, except on a higher economic stratum. Where the Encino house had been a comparatively sterile walled enclave, Newport was wide open to the sea; the smell of freesia, orange blossoms, and night-blooming jasmine were as regular as the salt air.

Wayne could sit out on the back veranda for hours, watching the water change color as the sun shifted. Along with the new house came a new dog, a Samoyed named Frosty, who would eat breakfast on a chair beside his master, who fed him strips of bacon. Wayne happily spent the rest of his life at the Newport Beach house.

An arbitrator’s decision about Wayne and Bö Roos’s business dealings finally came down in September 1964. He stated that “Each have a unique ability to create complex business and personal problems for themselves. . . . Each communicated orally by preference and apparently shun or are inexpert in writing techniques.”

This lack of written documentation created havoc not only in their business dealings but in the arbitrator’s attempt to resolve problems. Batjac had agreed to pay Roos 2.5 percent of its net profit before taxes. The arbitrator decided that, while Roos owed Wayne various sums for repayments of loans, notes, and other fees, Wayne also owed Roos money on his percentage, as well as fees due Roos for
The Barbarian and the Geisha, Rio Bravo
, and
The Horse Soldiers
. The Solomonic decision concluded that Roos owed Wayne $31,613.66; Wayne owed Roos $94,601.78.

Nine months later, in June 1965, Wayne sued Roos for $500,000, asserting that an original investment of $144,468 had been devalued by Roos’s pillaging the funds for unauthorized travel, entertainment, and granting of discounts to friends, relatives, and various airline hostesses. Joining Wayne in the lawsuit were cowboy star Rex Allen, Frank Belcher (Wayne’s attorney), and Roberto Arias. They wanted damages, and they wanted the court to declare them the controlling owners of various hotels.

Despite the legal proceedings, Roos and Wayne maintained a semblance of friendly relations. When Wayne would run into Carolyn, Roos’s daughter, he would always come over and give her a big hug, and end by saying something nice about her father. But the days when the two men socialized were over.

As far as Wayne’s finances were concerned, he still paid alimony to Josie, and the overhead for Pilar and his second family was around $200,000 a year. Add in the upkeep for the
Wild Goose,
his private helicopter, agent’s fees, and tax bracket, and it’s obvious that Wayne’s output of two pictures a year was as much a financial imperative as professional preference.

People assumed Wayne had a great deal of money, and the temperature could drop very quickly if people asked him why he kept working at such a pace: “What makes you think I don’t have to work? Have you checked my financial statements? If you did, you’d know that if I’m going to continue to live this way, I do have to work. Maybe I should be in a position where I don’t have to work, but I’m not.”