John Wayne: The Life and Legend (78 page)

One day Wayne had looked out over his house with a water view and said, “I wish I could afford all this and enjoy it too. I can afford it, but it’s hard to find time to enjoy it.”

But that was what amounted to a philosophical reverie. When he was what actors like to call “in the moment,” he gave every evidence of enjoying it very much. He would burst through the front door, bellowing “Hello the House!” and there would suddenly be an electrical charge of energy. The children would come running into his arms, ingesting his specific odors—Camel cigarettes, Neutrogena soap, Listerine.

The man described by family members was close to the man millions saw on the screen, except when he wasn’t. He wasn’t as calm as he was on-screen, was in fact frequently irascible. He was innately restless, often pacing back and forth like a caged cat, seldom staying in any one spot longer than it took to smoke a cigarette.

“A lot of the time, he played a stranger, an outsider, the strong, lonely type,” remembered Michael Wayne. “He wasn’t really like that at all. My mental picture of him is children and grandchildren crawling all over him at Christmastime. He loved kids, loved to be married, loved to decorate houses. Once he said to me, ‘I’ve been married all my life.’ I looked at him and then he said, ‘Well, not to the same woman, but I’ve been married all my life.’ ” There were other contradictions. Mike learned to ride not from his father, but from stuntmen. John Wayne didn’t particularly like horses and insisted “I don’t get on a horse unless they pay me.”

As a father, said his oldest son, he was “generous, affectionate, interested, but he was also, you know, the discipliner. He commanded a lot of respect.” His oldest sons had identical schooling: Cathedral Chapel Parochial Grammar School, followed by Loyola High School, followed by Loyola University.

Wayne believed in self-reliance for the boys; Mike never got an allowance and had to pay for his own clothes, his own car, everything except tuition, which was covered by his father. His children learned their father’s quirks early—when he would start to get irritated, for instance, his breathing would quicken, like a locomotive expelling steam. For his first two sons, their father believed in corporal punishment. “He was always fair, you could always depend on a square shoot, and all of that,” said Mike, “but if he said to do something, that was it. Do it or else. You get the hell beat out of you. I’d say we were pretty well regimented. We were just told to mind all our elders and that was it, and if we didn’t we’d get the hell beat out of us.”

He was completely competitive; his sons thought of him as a poor winner. He’d cheat—in gin, he’d lay down a four, five, and seven and hope you didn’t notice the six was missing. “To me, to lose a game of cards or to win a game of cards, doesn’t mean a thing,” said Mike. “It’s a very important thing to my father to win at anything. And then to needle everybody.”

It was his nature to be generous. He liked pants with a little watch pocket in the front, and in that watch pocket he would keep $100 bills folded up to the dimensions of a postage stamp. These would be used for tips and handouts, or for walking around money.

His years of working on film sets had given him a detailed eye for clothing and appropriate styles. “Duke never, never asked what size a woman was,” said Mary St. John. “He would meet the wife of some associate one time and a month or two later see some dress in a catalog and say, ‘You know, Mary, I think so-and-so would like this. Order a size seven.’ ”

Generally, he was cordial and welcoming to reporters, but if a writer seemed unprepared, or in some way antagonistic, God help him. One hapless rookie began by telling Wayne that he thought his real career began with
Red River
.

“That’s not a question, it’s a theory,” retorted Wayne. “You want me to sit here like a dummy and nod my head while you put words in my mouth.”

The rattled writer tried to regroup. “When you made
Stagecoach
 . . .”

“Start somewhere else,” snapped Wayne.

On his desk at home he kept a small plaque that said “A Kind Word.” If someone asked him if he wanted anything—a sandwich, a drink—he’d almost certainly reply, “Yes, and a kind word.”

He disliked routine, liked to eat. A lot. Breakfast at a restaurant would often entail six eggs and four orders of bacon, and when the waitress would ask how he wanted his eggs, he’d say, “Looking at me.” If breakfast didn’t come quickly enough, he’d start with little packages of saltines, after first slathering some butter on them.

He didn’t like milk, except with a breakfast dish he enjoyed: a piece of toast placed in milk, with an egg on top of that, topped off by a sprinkling of sugar. “It’s a cake, unassembled,” he would beam. Another culinary guilty pleasure was peanut butter, with a little bit of jelly. “Pilar doesn’t like it,” he said. “She thinks peanut butter is uncivilized.”

He kept several checkbooks scattered around the house, and whenever he needed a check, he’d tear it out of the nearest book without recording anything. As a result, balancing his checking account was impossible, and he never had as much money as he thought.

His favorite lunch was steak and tomatoes, his favorite dinner was steak and lobster, the steak charred on the outside, red on the inside. If he was at home, he tended to be a light drinker; Pilar insisted he couldn’t even have a cocktail before dinner, unless he was with some of his cronies, in which case it was an odds-on bet that the competitive drinking would extend into the next morning. He liked to pretend that he didn’t get hangovers, but he did. On particularly bad mornings, his heart would pound and he’d yell, “My heart, my heart. Pilar, I’m gonna die. Pilar, where are you? Goddamn it! I will
never
drink again.
Pilar!”

He instructed his children on the importance of concentrating on a goal, whatever it might be. “When I’d ride horses or motorcycles,” remembered his son Ethan, “he’d tell me not to focus on that hole, rock, or bump. ‘Look where you want to go, not at what you’re trying to avoid,’ he’d say. ‘Or else you’re going to hit it.’ . . . He always moved forward . . . He always stayed positive.”

The children hated to see their father leave for location, because they knew he’d be gone a long time. “He’d always say, ‘All right boy, see you in October,’ or whatever it was,” remembered Ethan, “and [then] he’d say, ‘God willing and the river don’t rise.’ I got this horrible feeling inside! My stomach would drop every time he’d say it. Why’d you have to say that? And he’d hit the gate and I’d see him leave, and I’d think, ‘Don’t go!’ Oh, my God. What does that mean? ‘God willing and the river don’t rise.’ I just didn’t get it.”

Between Wayne’s charisma, his huge physical presence and his energy, he could be overwhelming, but his absence could be more overwhelming, when the house became deathly quiet. His daughter Aissa hated it when her father left to make a movie, so he took her aside once and told her, “Every night I’m gone, honey, I want you to look at the stars. Wherever I am, I’ll look at them, too. And no matter how far apart we are, we’ll know we’ve looked at the same stars.”

The little girl’s neediness derived from her father; for years, whenever Aissa would walk past him, he’d need to be kissed and be told she loved him. “You have to kiss me before you can cross by,” he would say. When he was out of town on a picture, he’d call or send telegrams, reminding the kids he was their father.

Harry Carey Jr. said that he was “a marvelous father. Broadminded. Didn’t try to affect his kids’ opinions. He loved them very much.” That said, it wasn’t easy being one of John Wayne’s kids, because the bar was set high. “A B in school didn’t exist,” sighed Michael Wayne. “To be second-best didn’t exist. If you were in a race, you had to win. He gave of himself that way and he thought everybody should do that.”

“He was a friendly man for the most part,” said Dan Ford, the grandson of John Ford. “He was never a nasty drunk. I’d have to say that what you saw was pretty much what you got. And the relationship between he and my grandfather never changed. Late in my grandfather’s life, Duke was sitting with him. My grandfather turned to him and said, ‘You’re doing too much TV. Get off.’

“And Duke said, ‘Yes, sir.’ That was it.”

“He was always frightened of Ford,” said Harry Carey Jr. “He was more scared of him than I ever was. I got to know the old man really well, and Duke didn’t have to be that scared of him, but he was.”

For most of his life, his energy was volcanic. When he was working, he would wake up around 4:30 or five in the morning; when he was at home he was up by dawn. Because he didn’t like to be alone he would wake everybody else in the house by seven. When he arrived back home after shooting a movie, he’d be a homebody for all of a week or so, then get restless and bored and expect everybody to drop everything and do what he wanted to do.

He regretted being a slow reader, but took pride in the fact that he remembered everything he read. His two favorite novels were both by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
The White Company
(a favorite of John Ford’s as well) and
Sir Nigel
. Other favorite writers were Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Rex Stout. For nonfiction, he liked either political or military history, and anything by Winston Churchill—next to John Ford, his hero. Occasionally, he’d say something that indicated the range of his reading—if he decided to pursue a business proposition, for instance, he would smile and say, “Barkis is willing,” after the character in Dickens’s
David Copperfield.

He was deeply superstitious—a hat on a bed would provoke an angry outburst at the miscreant who had put it there, and if a playing card turned face-up on the table, the owner would have to stand and circle his or her chair three times. Nobody could pass the salt to him; they would have to put it on the table, at which point he’d pick it up. He was also deeply sentimental, but made it a point not to throw compliments around promiscuously, unless the subject was John Ford.

The years of studying Ford, of being showcased by his genius and enduring his abuse, had left their imprint and he had adopted some of the director’s peremptory traits. Ford’s habit of ordering attendance became part of Wayne’s own personality, even though Wayne would get irritated when Ford did the same thing to him. Once when Wayne and the actor Ed Faulkner were on location, Faulkner was just getting ready to go to bed when he got a call.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, I’m going to bed.”

“Well, the hell you are! The chessboard is set up.” Faulkner manfully trooped over to Wayne’s room and played till dawn.

Besides the
Wild Goose
, Wayne’s primary extravagance was a personal helicopter, which could make the trip from Newport Beach to Hollywood in twenty minutes, as opposed to an hour and a half on the freeway. What Wayne regarded as extreme expenses for the helicopter became an issue as his relationship with Don La Cava, the husband of his daughter Toni, and the man who had been managing Wayne’s finances since Bö Roos, blew up. Gretchen Wayne remembered that one day her father-in-law concluded La Cava had managed his money poorly.

Wayne “wanted to kill” La Cava, but Michael said that John Wayne was not going to kill the father of his grandchildren. Wayne went to Cecilia Presley, who ran the Cecil B. DeMille estate, and told her he had a problem. “Get him out,” counseled Cecilia, “and put Toni’s money in a trust.”

Eventually, La Cava and Toni separated. Toni put up a wall and never discussed it, while Wayne would, but only with family and close friends. The upshot was that Michael took over his father’s business affairs for the rest of his life.

The family unpleasantness didn’t change things overmuch. Wayne refused to alter his lifestyle and simply made more movies. “I can make a million dollars by stepping onto that horse,” he pointed out, “and I can make two or three pictures a year.”

As he aged, he put on weight and grew grumpy when he had to lose fifteen or so pounds for a picture. As soon as a picture was finished, he’d put the weight back on, and between Halloween and New Year’s he’d add even more. He enjoyed personally shopping for Halloween candy—black and red licorice, Tootsie Rolls, and something called Abba-Zabas, which consisted primarily of peanut butter and toffee. What the trick-or-treaters didn’t eat, he would. In addition, the family grew accustomed to his midnight snacks of salami, baloney, bacon, “any kind of heavy red meat,” as his daughter Aissa remembered. (Given Wayne’s passions for nicotine, cholesterol, and tequila, the fact that he lived to be seventy-two has to be considered a testament to his remarkable stamina.)

His politics hadn’t altered one millimeter. People on unemployment were apt to be labeled “layabouts.” “Obviously, government is the enemy of the individual,” he said. “My feeling about life is that you’re put here and you have to make your own way. Our country used to be small enough so that a man who’d proven himself and who had some understanding could get himself sent to Congress and the people back home would just go on about their business believing that whatever he’d do would be good enough for them. . . . Now though, we’ve got this democracy and the politician kowtows to whomever wants the most . . . the politician appeals to the popular vote, that being the mob vote.”

He remained on the lookout for signs of untoward political sympathies. “[Dean]
Rusk
was with Stilwell when they made that coalition government in China.
Rusk
was with Truman and told him, after he’d had the guts to go to war with the Communists not to go all the way.
Rusk,
he was the one who wouldn’t fight the thing all the way in Cuba. And now, Rusk,
Rusk
, he’s putting up a coalition government with the Commies in Laos. How many mistakes are we going to let the s.o.b. make?”

He knew he was the biggest star in the business and he surveyed his situation with a great deal of objectivity. “I’ve reached a point in my career where it’s really hard to get parts to fit me any more. Like Coop [Gary Cooper] and Gable, they’d reached a maturity where they shouldn’t be playing with these younger girls, and it quite obviously affected their audience. Nobody’s that good an actor.”