John Wayne: The Life and Legend (103 page)

Some people complained about the self-conscious conflation of character and star. Molly Haskell in
The Village Voice
was one of the few nay-sayers, calling the picture “an artfully arranged memorial . . . a museum-like anthology of vignettes in one period-display set after another . . . some quite lovely, that never seem to connect.”

Posterity has disagreed. “It was one of those pictures where nobody gets along but everything managed to work anyway,” said Miles Hood Swarthout. “Wayne was playing a gunfighter at the end of his life, a man who’s very full of himself, a very forceful guy. That character fit Wayne like a glove. But what made it work was his performance—a very sober performance, a very reserved performance. There was none of the bluster that you saw in so many of his films.”

Wayne’s performance centers on a stoic anguish. The basic idea of a famous man dying in a rooming house surrounded by strangers has a haunting resonance—nobody wants to die alone. But there is a quiet but nagging hole at the narrative heart of the movie that is never really addressed. Books decides he wants to go out with his boots on, so he invites three other gunmen to meet him in the saloon for a final showdown. One of them will be famous as the man who kills John Bernard Books.

But instead of essentially committing suicide, Books kills all three of them, dying only when he’s shot in the back by a bartender with a shotgun, who wasn’t in his equation. The irony is attractive, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Books has provoked and killed three men who aren’t guilty of anything except going up against John Wayne . . . er, John Bernard Books.

The Shootist
earned rentals of $5.9 million in North America against its cost of $8 million. It did slightly better than that in the rest of the world. “I wouldn’t say it lost money, but it didn’t make any money,” remembered William Self. “It would be fair to call it a disappointment. It’s a sad picture, and not a typical western; he dies at the end. Frankovich and I both had a percentage of the profits, and somewhere along the line I sold him my share. A few years later, I asked Mike Wayne how the Wayne estate was doing with the picture, and he told me they sold their percentage to De Laurentiis.”

For Hugh O’Brian, it was a thrill just to work with the man. “I wanted that part in the worst way. I’m absolutely grateful to have worked with John Wayne. John Wayne refereed my first fight in the Marines and I was the last man he shot in the movies.”

Oddly, Wayne wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award, although there were a smattering of ads in the trades headlined “Consider Duke Before You Vote.” The difficulty of the film had been worth it on every level except the economic and, for some, the emotional. Months later, Don Siegel came up to Burt Kennedy at a restaurant, put his arm around him and said, “You’re the only man that would understand.”

Besides his lung and heart problems, one of the things that had bedeviled Wayne on
The Shootist
was his prostate—he had to get up several times during the night to urinate and couldn’t seem to empty his bladder. It’s a common complaint for sixty-nine-year-old men, but Wayne was concerned about cancer. In November he went to the hospital for an examination, where it was found that he had an enlarged prostate that was restricting the flow of urine. Surgery was performed the first week of December 1976, and Wayne was relieved that there was no sign of cancer.

During the summer, he had made some time for the
Wild Goose
, with Pat Stacy in tow—they joined the ship in Acapulco, sailed up the coast to Puerto Vallarta. They’d swim, soak up the sun lying side by side on the deck, or take the dinghy to shore and go shopping. After that, there was a trip up to northwestern Washington for some salmon fishing.

His health seemed stable, but Stacy was worried about him. She gently suggested slowing down, and he leveled with her as he had with all the women in his life: “Pat, you’ve got to understand something. As long as a man has a project—something to look forward to—there’ll always be something important to him. He’ll never really get old. If I had nothing to look forward to, I might as well be dead.”

But the reality was that with successive commercial disappointments behind him, not to mention a serious illness that required an insurance claim, producers were not besieging Wayne with scripts. Over the next eighteen months, Wayne kept himself occupied with television.

As always when it came to TV, his feelings were ambiguous. “I don’t know whether I love it or hate it,” he said. “But there sure has never been any form of entertainment so available to the human race with so little effort since they invented marital sex.

“The worst part of it has been, I think, the adverse effect on family life. It kills off family conversation. And it’s hard to get your children to read books. I became a confirmed reader when I was growing up in Glendale. I’ve loved reading all my life. Now I’ve got this daughter, Aissa, a very bright young lady—but it is a hard job to get her to read. Television’s just too easy.”

Wayne’s core problem was that TV was too helter-skelter, but TV was also increasingly where his audience was. One of the more ignominious showcases was
An All-Star Tribute to John Wayne
, which ran on ABC in November 1976. It’s a bizarre amalgam of stars, many of whom had nothing to do with Wayne: Charles Bronson, Glen Campbell, Sammy Davis Jr., Ron Howard, Lee Majors, Claire Trevor, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Rowan and Martin, Maureen O’Hara, Angie Dickinson, Henry Winkler, and Monty Hall. Totie Fields stands up and takes a bow.

Frank Sinatra hosted and the format was more or less that of the AFI Life Achievement Awards—an entrance by the star, who sits at a table surrounded by family and friends, with various people singing his praises, and a final heartfelt thank-you from the honoree. Wit was in short supply, although Bob Hope got off a decent line: “He’s a symbol of the Old West, where men are men and women are women, and the way he walks he could fall into either category.” Maureen O’Hara sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face,” which obviously moved Wayne, and he used notes for his own thank-you speech: “Folks out there, I want to thank you for the last 50 years of my career. I hope I can keep it up for another 50 years, or at least until I get it right.”

The show is more or less a shambles without a clear purpose—
The Shootist
had already come and gone, so it couldn’t even be rationalized as publicity for the picture. Wayne probably went along with it only because it was a charity event to raise money for the Variety Clubs. But in the deepest sense, he had never differentiated all that much between media—it was all show business to him. His career had not been built on consistently making discerning choices so much as a steady stream of appearances. Some would be good, and some wouldn’t, but work was work.

By now, Wayne and Frank Sinatra were close friends. Sinatra and his wife, Barbara, visited Wayne in Newport Beach, where they would drink and josh each other. “They were buddies,” said Barbara Sinatra. “I don’t know why, because they were completely different in almost everything. But they liked each other a great deal, and they kidded a lot.”

At this point, a couple of prospective pictures appeared on the horizon. Wayne was talked about for the role of an old IRA leader in the movie version of Leon Uris’s
Trinity,
and Robert Aldrich offered him a part opposite Gene Wilder in
The Frisco Kid
. In the case of the former, the film fell through; in the latter, Wayne’s health became an issue, and Harrison Ford played the part. The result of all this was that he had time on his hands—never a good thing.

In April 1977, looking slightly drawn from an unexplained weight loss but sporting a flattering pair of glasses, Wayne accepted the Asa V. Call award from USC, the school’s highest alumni award. The presenter was Gene Clarke, whom Wayne had known since his Glendale days. “Gene and I have known each other since the beginning of time,” noted Wayne in his acceptance speech, “which ain’t just yesterday. I don’t think of university days when I think of him. I think of Boy Scouts and sandlot football, Model T Fords with Ruckskell axles, Robert and Echols’ Drugstore on Brand Boulevard, Pexi Eckles’ older sister . . .” It was a touching tribute to yesterday from a man who preferred to live in today and tomorrow.

Wayne was beginning to take more and more medications. He began to believe that the doctors were treating symptoms rather than illness. Pat Stacy devised a chart and taped it to the bathroom mirror so he could keep track of when he had taken his digitalis, his digoxin, his allopurinol, his potassium, his Lasix.

He remained available for interviews. The English film historian Kevin Brownlow was making
Hollywood,
his series about silent movies, and enlisted Ollie Carey to call Wayne for an interview. Wayne enthusiastically agreed to talk about Harry Carey, John Ford, and silent movies. The interview was set for June 1, 1977.

When Brownlow’s crew arrived, Wayne was dressed in slacks, open shirt, and a jacket with a rumpled collar. He was drinking out of a tall glass of colorless liquid. Deciding on the setup took a long time; Brownlow’s co-director David Gill suggested the sofa, but Wayne rejected the idea. “You won’t get a background worth a damn,” he said.

Someone suggested that some of Wayne’s Charles Russell bronzes could be raised on a two by four, and brighten up the background, but Wayne refused, saying the couch would still be too low. After more indecisive milling around, he tried to take charge.

“I mean, don’t let me take over your job, but if I was shooting it, I’d start here”—he formed his hands into a film frame—“[and say] ‘We visited John Wayne’s house’—here he pointed at a statue with a Harry Carey—like pose in the other room—‘and we found a statue which was posed like Harry Carey’ and so on. Now, that may not be what you want, but it’s an idea.” Brownlow sensed the years of torment Wayne must have endured while waiting to direct
The Alamo,
and not measuring up to Hollywood’s expectations when he did.

No one seemed to like Wayne’s idea, and the crew decided on the sofa. And then somebody asked for some phone books to raise the Russell statues. “That’s it,” Wayne said, his voice rising. “Telephone directories! I was trying to be helpful and I hardly get through talking when some guy cuts in with another idea. The people I’m used to working with don’t act that way.” With that, he petulantly stalked off to his office. “When you’re ready, I’ll be in here—
if
you’re ever ready.”

Brownlow took stock of the situation, which was on the verge of collapsing. He thought that Wayne might very well have a hangover, and liked to dish out a little John Ford, so long as Ford himself wasn’t around.

Brownlow began to apply the soft soap, saying Wayne couldn’t expect TV technicians to be the equal of a John Ford crew, and then asked Wayne if by any chance had he known the outlaw-turned-actor Al Jennings.

Wayne’s face brightened. “Yes, very well.”

Informed there was a lot of silent footage of Al Jennings, Wayne said he didn’t know any had survived. “We were going to make a picture around ’32 with him as my uncle.” Wayne was soon telling one of his favorite John Ford stories—playing a member of the jury for Ford in 1928’s
Hangman’s House
and being carried away by Hobart Bosworth’s (over)acting.

By then he was laughing and in a good mood. When the camera setup was finally arranged, Wayne approved. Just before the cameras turned, Brownlow asked Wayne if he had a high regard for Tom Mix. “Not so much for Mix,” he said. Brownlow went on to talk about the research that had been done on Mix’s life, and the resulting chasm between legend and reality.

“I don’t think they ought to do that,” said Wayne. “It takes something away from the people.” He blamed the publicity departments. “They said I was an All-American. Christ! I went up to the publicity man and got him by the throat and said, ‘You take that back!’ Because it looked ridiculous. And I felt ridiculous with the fellows in my group.”

When the camera finally turned, Wayne was funny, charming, completely entertaining. When it was all over, he noticed a gold bracelet on the wrist of one of the crew. “Where’d you get that from?”

“Vietnam.”

Wayne was wearing the identical bracelet, and they began comparing notes. When some souvenir photos were being taken, a helicopter passed overhead and Wayne said, “Listen. A Chinook chopper. The sound of Vietnam.”

As the crew filed out the door, Wayne said, “Thanks for showing me such respect when I teed off a little back there.” In the car, everyone was excited; some of the men had been shaken by the sight and sound of an angry John Wayne, but one of the female members of the crew was near rapture: “Wonderful, sexy, so attractive.”

November 1977 brought
Oscar Presents the War Movies and John Wayne,
an ABC special that mostly consisted of movie clips. The script was written by the
Los Angeles Times
movie critic Charles Champlin, who remembered that Wayne was unhappy about the inclusion of a scene from the 1949 Stanley Kramer/Carl Foreman production
Home of the Brave,
about racism in the military, because it did not reflect what he thought of as the reality of the American fighting man. Champlin said that Wayne watched a montage of his own valorous achievements in screen battle with wry humor: “I really was brave, wasn’t I?”