John Wayne: The Life and Legend (94 page)

Wayne became far more a part of the community in Newport Beach than he ever had in Encino. Part of it was the thriving boat culture of the area—there are around ten thousand yachts in Newport Beach, and the
Wild Goose
had become as important to Wayne as the
Araner
was to John Ford.

But it was more than recreational. Wayne was in love with the sea, or as much as his innate impatience would allow him to be. “When I die,” he told his family, “I don’t want to miss the ocean. I want to stay here. That’s why I don’t want to be buried. I want to be cremated when I die. Then take me out and scatter me over the ocean. Because that’s where my heart is.”

He felt at home in Newport Beach because of the culture, but also because there were no cameras, and no intrusion on his space. “It was conservative, it wasn’t plastic, it wasn’t about celebrity glitz,” said Tom Fuentes, the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party from 1984 to 2004. “Culturally and politically, he was apart from all that. This was a retreat from the Hollywood crowd.”

Wayne was a fixture at the Balboa Yacht Club, and at the fundraising activities of the Orange County Republican Party. Orange County had originally been an agricultural district of Catholics and Hispanics, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the area grew by more than 100,000 people a year, most of them urban conservatives, on the way to the present population of 3.5 million—more people than six states.

Traditionally, Orange County was where California Republicans needed a 200,000-vote margin to offset the liberal Democratic enclaves in West Los Angeles and San Francisco. If he wasn’t working, Wayne could always be counted on to lend his celebrity and presence to Republican fundraisers.

“His participation was always generous,” said Tom Fuentes. “If we had an event and we needed a draw to rally the troops, a crowd-booster, he was very approachable. We only had two or three Republican celebrities in the area—there was Duke, then Buddy Ebsen, and perhaps Andy Devine. It didn’t have to be anything huge for Duke to participate; one afternoon, we had a party to sign the nominating papers for a county supervisor who was running for reelection. I was in the kitchen and there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there stood John Wayne.

“ ‘Hello, I’m John Wayne,’ he said. He always had the humility and modesty to introduce himself.” Wayne rarely contributed money but Fuentes believed that his presence was more valuable than cash.

Wayne drove himself around Newport in an unpretentious dark green 1973 Pontiac Safari station wagon that had been slightly modified by George Barris, who raised its sunroof six inches, so that Wayne had headroom. (The Safari also included something unusual for the time—a telephone with two channels.) The local grocery store became known as “Duke’s Safeway,” because he would occasionally be seen doing some grocery shopping there. He would also regularly drive his children to school and pick them up, or take them for drives along the Coast Highway.

Aissa remembered that “He was always the one that got us out of jams and protected us and everything. He was security for all of us and if we needed help at school or something, my dad always had good, sound advice. He sat down and really talked to us, but he wasn’t so unreasonable that you couldn’t even talk to him about something. He was a real support day to day, so you never got too far out of line, because he was around.”

Wayne enjoyed his days and nights at the Balboa Yacht Club, which was formed in 1948 and overlooks the channel. The club was eventually rebuilt, greatly expanded, and now resembles a Las Vegas hotel, but when Wayne was alive it was a glorified beach club, the structure supported by telephone poles.

When Wayne was in Newport Beach, he would come in for breakfast about three times a week, for dinner once or twice a week. On Wednesdays he played cards in a clubroom near the spa. In the early years of his membership, Pilar was there also, playing tennis constantly, outfitted in layers of white to protect her skin.

The dining room was open until eleven at night, and once Wayne didn’t feel like going home. He made a date with George Valenzuela, a Mexican dining room captain he was friendly with, to meet up at a nearby restaurant in Costa Mesa. “Keep it open, and I’ll be there,” Wayne said. “You buy the first round and I’ll buy the rest.”

Valenzuela picked up a few more waiters and busboys and their wives, until there were about eight couples in all. He told them that John Wayne was coming to drink with them, which provoked a dubious response. But Wayne showed up as promised and started buying rounds.

“He loved tacos,” remembered Valenzuela, who went to work at the Yacht Club in 1969. “The food at his parties was always salsa and guacamole. He liked me because I liked to drink and talk. He’d talk about filming in Durango and the things that happened. He just loved Mexico. ‘If I’m in Mexico, then I’m happy,’ he told me. He didn’t speak Spanish often, but when he did he spoke good Spanish, not gringo Spanish. He was always the same simple guy.”

Wayne particularly enjoyed the annual employee party at the club, when the membership donned red jackets and waited on the staff. Wayne wore a particularly large jacket and took George’s station, and the waiter pronounced himself satisfied with the actor’s service. “George loved him and vice versa,” said Tom Fuentes. “He had that kind of personality and openness, and a total lack of prejudice.”

Gretchen Wayne thought that in many ways the second family made more demands on Wayne’s energies than he was capable of meeting. “He was more like a grandfather to the second group of kids,” she said. “He was working, he was away, he was tired and then he got sick. Ethan once said, ‘All I remember about my father are his bags in the hall ready to leave. And he was always mad at me.’ And I said, ‘That’s because you were a jerk to your sisters.’

“The child that was closest to him was Aissa. When she got her real estate license, he was so proud. She was getting her first apartment, and he said, ‘Let’s go shopping. You have to look professional. You’ll need a nice blazer.’ And then he helped her furnish the apartment, which he could do very well. He had a good eye, good taste and loved the decorative arts.

“Grandaddy came from a tough background and was very concerned about presenting well; he always believed it was important to have your shoes shined and to dress as well as you could afford. Those were the things that were important to Mary Morrison, and she passed it on to him.”

When Ethan was little, his father would pick him up and sit him on the railing of the boat. Ethan would be scared of falling, so his father would say, “What do you think I’m going to do? Drop you? Lean back!” So Ethan would lean back over the ocean in the middle of the night, while his father held his arms tightly. “See, I’m not gonna let you go,” he’d say.

When Ethan was older, he and his father would just stand on the prow of the ship, looking out at the ocean. “The ocean looked like
Victory at Sea
. We’d just stand out there and look around. I miss that.”

A young actor-turned-writer named Robert Osborne came to Wayne’s house for an interview about Wayne’s childhood. After a bit of talking, Wayne offered Osborne a drink. It was only about two in the afternoon, but few people said no to John Wayne. Osborne opted for a scotch and soda. So did Wayne.

After sipping his drink, Wayne began to warm to his subject—not horses, but Hollywood phonies. “You know, the problem with this business of ours is that too many people pretend to be something they’re not. Take Roy Rogers.”

“Roy Rogers?” echoed the confused Osborne.

“Yeah, Roy Rogers. He wasn’t a cowboy. He was a goddamn country singer from Ohio.”

Wayne launched into a long story about the two men making
Dark Command
for Republic in 1940. There was a gala premiere and parade in some town, and Roy Rogers got more applause than either Wayne or Claire Trevor.

“I didn’t care about me,” Wayne said, now thoroughly worked up, “but Claire Trevor was a great actress. And Rogers wasn’t any actor, Rogers was barely a singer! And they applauded
him
!”

Roy Rogers was a very pleasant, unassuming man who never worked for John Ford once, let alone more than a dozen times, but that didn’t matter to Wayne. Neither did the fact that, with the exception of Ben Johnson, there weren’t any real cowboys working in front of Hollywood cameras in the 1940s and 1950s. Wayne’s lubricated disquisition proved only that, in everybody’s life, no matter their accomplishments or their place in the world, there is always some tender place where they feel they’ve been slighted. Even if they’re John Wayne; even if they’re pretending to be angry on someone else’s behalf.

He was still making movies because they were there. “In Michael’s mind,” said his wife, Gretchen, “
Chisum, Cahill
and
The Train Robbers
were all the same picture.” Finally, there was a part of sorts for Rod Taylor, or there was after Wayne instructed Burt Kennedy to write an extra scene for him and Ben Johnson in
The Train Robbers
. It was shot in Durango, Mexico, from March to June 1972.

The deal with Warners specified that the picture was not to cost more than $4.5 million. Burt Kennedy was getting $62,500 for his script and $80,000 for directing, Mike Wayne was getting $150,000 for producing, and his father was getting only $200,000 guaranteed, plus 10 percent of the gross up to $5 million, 15 percent thereafter. There was also a “consultant’s fee” of $125,000, but the diminishing guarantee was a clear indication of the way Warners was beginning to regard westerns . . . and John Wayne.

Wayne was on location every day from early in the morning until five in the afternoon. On the way back to the hotel in a van, he would take a quick nap. That and dinner refreshed him sufficiently for a long night of drinking and storytelling with Rod Taylor. He was smoking little cigars again. Someone worked up the nerve to ask if he wasn’t afraid of killing himself. “We are all under sentence of death,” he replied. “Bet you don’t know who said that? Whittaker Chambers.”

If the subject turned to politics, he’d usually get angry about what he saw as misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance, but, as one writer observed, “He was always happy to see the cook and waiters. He was always happy to see the cast. He was always happy to drive out to the location. . . . In the immediacies of everyday life, in what he was doing and living, he seemed to relish everything, the simple ordinary things, the fried eggs over easy and the toasted rolls and the wonderful Mexican coffee. And he relished every morning he was working.”

At work, remembered Taylor, “He did what he wanted to do. Burt was very gentle with him. Duke wanted a free rein.” At night, there were the poker games—Taylor remembered more poker than filming. Mike was there, Taylor was there, Kennedy would sit in on a few, and a few wranglers. “Anybody who could lose a dollar was there,” said Taylor. “He played for the pleasure of the game and he played as long as there was a bottle of Commemorativo on the table. When it came to conversation, movies were off-limits. And one of the last times I was at his house, I was looking at this monstrous wall of trophies and honorary diplomas. It was an enormous display, and on the bottom was a line of my uncashed checks, nicely framed, from all of our poker games.”

Politics came up occasionally, and Taylor found that you didn’t have to be conservative to be well regarded. “I would call him an Old Nazi, and he didn’t care. He didn’t change his mind about anything, but he didn’t care because he didn’t have rules or regulations about who was entitled to be his friend. He loved Nixon. Jesus, how do you do that? Reagan I can understand, but Nixon?”

One night Taylor and Wayne were invited to the home of two well-to-do brothers who helped the company scout locations outside Durango. “We got stuck at this thing talking bullshit for hours, and finally we staggered away. There was no car waiting. I didn’t know what time it was. So I staggered into an adjoining gym, where there was a sauna and a rubbing table, and he staggered off to his bedroom.