John Wayne: The Life and Legend (106 page)

His last public appearance of the year was on December 13, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he accepted a plaque from the Los Angeles Advertising Club for the Great Western Savings and Loan ads. Wayne had been advised by his doctor not to attend the lunch, but he showed up anyway. “The way my luck has been running lately, I’m surprised I didn’t wind up making commercials for Ford Pintos . . . I’ve got a feeling the real reason you guys are gathered here today is to make an old actor happy—and if I meet an old actor on my way home, I’ll tell him all about you.”

To a journalist friend, he would say, “I gotta say it, I’ve had a helluva good life. There’s no way anyone could have had more fun. I got no complaints. Even with all the things that have happened to me. There’s a saying they have in Mexico. ‘He was ugly, he was strong, and had dignity.’ Yeah, that’s the kinda thing I’d like them to say about me.”

Shortly before Christmas, he was seized by a terrible mood. Usually, his bursts of temper were over quickly and followed by apologies, but he was picking at Pat Stacy about everything, and she began to keep her distance. On Christmas Day, he wore his robe because he didn’t feel up to getting dressed. He didn’t have the stamina to open all his presents and went back to bed.

In the second week of January 1979, Wayne taped an interview with Barbara Walters aboard the
Wild Goose
for a March airing. It may have only been TV, but he was invigorated by the prospect of once again having a camera aimed at him.

“Are you romantic?” Walters asked him.

“Very much. Very much so. Easily hurt.”

“Would you want to get married again?”

“If I were a young man of 50 or so, yes. But I think it’s pretty ridiculous at 71 to start thinking about marriage.”

“What’s your idea of a very good day?”

“Well, getting up in the morning. Being still here. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve had enough experience to know that if I open my eyes and look outside, and it’s a nice, foggy day, it’s great. If it’s a sunny day, it’s beautiful.”

“By the end of the two days we spent with him,” said Walters, “there wasn’t one of us who didn’t feel affection and respect for the man. He was straightforward, honest and tough, in the best sense of the word. He never once tried to force his views upon us, and was enormously considerate.” At the end of the second day, Walters asked Wayne to pose with her crew for a picture.

The day after the interview was completed, Wayne entered UCLA Medical Center for exploratory surgery. Mike and his son Chris came to visit. The TV was on, and the Steelers were playing the Cowboys. “Who are you pulling for?” Wayne asked his grandson. “The Steelers,” said Chris.

“Well then, I’ll pull for the Cowboys. Wanna wager?”

They settled on a dollar. Mike and Chris were home by the time the Cowboys won. “He won’t remember [the bet],” said Chris. “He’ll remember,” said his father. The next time Chris went to visit his grandfather, he was met with a question: “Where’s my dollar?”

“You really want it?”

“Of course I want it. If you’re not going to pay off, don’t bet.”

Chris handed over the dollar.

He knew what the doctors would find; he told Pat Stacy that if anything happened to him, she should keep an eye on Marisa—she was the only one of his children he was worried about. As they wheeled him off to the operating room, he smiled and said, “See you in the movies!”

As soon as Dr. William Longmire opened Wayne up, he knew the prognosis was bad. There was a malignancy in the stomach, a large one that was likely to have spread. Longmire quickly sent some tissue out to pathology and the verdict came back: malignant carcinoma. Longmire and the other doctors settled in for a long day as they performed a complete gastrectomy. The operation began at 9:45 A.M. and went until 7 P.M. During the nine and a half hours of surgery, Wayne’s stomach and his gall bladder were removed, as well as some gastric lymph nodes. Longmire constructed two small pouches out of a portion of Wayne’s small intestine to serve as a stomach.

Cancer cells were found in the lymph nodes. But the next day, a consultant to the medical team that carried out the grueling operation announced that “there was no clinical evidence” that the malignancy had spread and said that “without question,” Wayne would be able to go back to making films.

When reporters pressed him about the possibility of the cancer having spread, the consultant said, “I did not categorically state that it hasn’t [spread], I said there is no evidence.” The implications of a cascading series of health emergencies for a man who had endured two major surgeries within a year were clear, but the hospital, and presumably the family, kept a stoic public facade. Wayne was moved to room 951 at the UCLA Medical Center.

Gastric carcinoma spreads fast and has a very low five-year survival rate. Because the cancer had been found in the lymph nodes, there was a 90 percent probability that it had spread. Medical professionals reading between the lines knew that Wayne’s survival was measured in months, not years.

Each day, three thousand letters and one thousand phone calls arrived at the hospital. The flowers that arrived were parceled out to the very young and the very old after Wayne read the attached cards. He was sitting up in a chair and walking short distances.

Recovery was incremental; he and Pat Stacy would play cards, he would watch television, mostly news and game shows—
Wheel of Fortune, Password, Hollywood Squares,
playing along, answering the questions. Stacy was heartened when he began yelling at Walter Cronkite. His walks down the hall were accompanied by an IV pole, and he was usually supported by Stacy, Michael, or Patrick. He had drainage tubes on both sides of his body. On January 28, he reached a milestone: he walked the entire length of the hall and back without assistance.

On February 10, he left the hospital and returned to Newport Beach. He was optimistic at this point—there was no talk about dying, but much talk about what had to be done to adjust to life without a stomach. He ate very little, and much of what he did eat he couldn’t keep down.

He was diminishing daily. Except for his eyes—as his body shrank, as his face hollowed out, his eyes became bigger. His daughter Aissa wrote that “they still shone clear and calm and resolute. Even when I was deeply depressed, I could still lose myself for a time in his incandescent blue eyes.”

Six weeks after the surgery, Wayne began radiation treatments; the target began in his central abdomen from the navel to the sternum and then broadened out to the left side of his chest to the armpit. After a few weeks of treatment, his appetite disappeared, and he developed a bright red radiation burn on his chest. By the end of March, his weight dropped below 190 pounds. As his condition weakened, his mood darkened. He didn’t complain about the pain, but he complained bitterly about his invalid status, his desire for real food. The children all visited regularly, but Pilar didn’t, although she sent over food—spinach soufflés, light food he could digest. He didn’t want her food, didn’t want any food.

He made arrangements to donate some of his most prized possessions to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. He had begun giving them things years before—a saddle here, a gun there. When his donation was complete, it comprised more than two hundred items. There were forty-five guns and seventeen paintings—five by Olaf Wieghorst, two by Edward Borein, and a beautiful painting by Harold von Schmidt entitled
The Searchers
. There was a Chinese lacquer painting of two horses that had hung over the mantel in the Newport Beach house for years, and a terra-cotta horse from the T’ang dynasty. There were also forty-six bronzes, some by Charles Russell, more by Harry Jackson.

Some of his most valued books were included in the donation, including his complete set of Edward Curtis’s
The North American Indian
, and twenty loose-leaf folios of Curtis’s images. Also included were books by Winston Churchill and Douglas Southall Freeman and his collection of sixty-four Hopi kachina dolls collected over the years while making movies in Arizona and Utah.

Most of the time he was angry; sometimes he was furious. Now, he couldn’t even shoot commercials for Great Western anymore—he’d lost too much weight—he was down to 180 pounds. After he was released from the hospital, he didn’t even go to the Balboa Yacht Club, probably because he didn’t want to see the looks on people’s faces when they saw him. George Valenzuela, his favorite waiter, had noticed that he was shrinking, and that was before the surgery.

Luster Bayless called and he could hear a lot of clinking going on. Wayne explained that he had to eat every couple of hours—something to do with his stomach being gone. It was a long conversation, more about Bayless than about Wayne. Bayless remembered that it was as if Wayne didn’t want to hang up and go back to his life.

Wayne’s last time aboard the
Wild Goose
came on Easter weekend 1979. He issued orders to Bert Minshall: “I don’t want any damn long faces on board here, and no tears. I’m doing fine, so no crying for me—you tell them all that.”

The trip was a simple one, Newport to Catalina and back. He must have known he would never see Catalina again, and he seemed to enjoy just taking it all in. He played cards and backgammon, had quiet talks with Ethan and Marisa. Anything but bland liquids came right back up, so his diet was limited to tapioca, food processed in a blender, protein drinks.

“He was breathless with pain, and he had lost so much weight because he couldn’t eat,” remembered Bert Minshall. “He and the kids would spend hours just sitting in the sun on the gray deck chairs. At one point, Ethan took the helm and his father looked proud. He went over and gave the boy a gentle hug, but he didn’t say anything.

“He also seemed to enjoy standing on the forward deck alone, the salt spray splashing at him. I don’t recall him ever spending so much time out there alone.”

He also had fits of temper. “He was bitching at Pat Stacy, accusing her of going off with other guys,” said Minshall. “Which wasn’t true—she was a good companion. When would she have done it? At first, she had a trailer on the waterfront a few yards from the
Wild Goose
, then he rented her a house across the street from his house.”

The
Wild Goose
anchored at its usual spot in White’s Cove. He played some gin with Stacy and began reminiscing—hunting with Johnny Weissmuller; the buffalo roaming wild in the Catalina hills; times with Pappy, Ward, and the rest of the crew on the
Araner,
long weekends when nobody drew a sober breath. In the six years Pat Stacy had been with him, he’d never talked about Pappy as much as he did that day on the
Wild Goose.

The next day he wanted to go ashore and do some shopping in Avalon. He slipped away and came back with his arms full of gifts to hand out on Easter morning. On Easter Sunday, he handed out the gifts—he gave Stacy a miniature of two rabbits locked in a hug. Then he announced it was time for a hike across the isthmus. He’d been making that jaunt for nearly sixty years, and wasn’t about to stop now. Besides, he needed the exercise.

Wayne, Ethan, and Pat Stacy went ashore in the dinghy and began walking, but the trip was too ambitious. He made it one way, but was too exhausted to walk back. He and Ethan hitched a ride back to the dock.

After the boat returned to Newport, Wayne lingered on board longer than usual. Minshall asked him if there was anything he needed. “No, Bert there’s nothing I need. Goodbye, my friend. Thanks, Bert. I had a nice time.”

Minshall never saw him again.

And then, astonishingly, Wayne agreed to present the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. Nobody wanted him to appear in public with such a great weight loss, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m going to do it,” he snapped. “That’s all.”

By the time of the telecast, on April 9, 1979, he needed a new tuxedo. He didn’t want to go to Sy Devore’s shop on Vine Street, so Devore said he’d come to the Batjac offices and do the fittings there. While they waited for the haberdasher to show up, Wayne and Tom Kane made small talk. Kane was having raccoon problems at his house, with the animals coming right into the kitchen through the cat door to eat the cat food.

“You’ve got to shoot the bastards,” said Wayne, who went on to say that even if Kane closed off the cat door, it wouldn’t help. “They’ll tear the chimney out of your house. I know all about them.”

For the week before the ceremony, Wayne underwent an exercise regimen, so that even if he didn’t look like the John Wayne the audience knew, he would at least move and stand like the John Wayne the audience knew.

The morning of the Oscars, Wayne went to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach for his daily radiation treatment, then made the hour-and-a-half journey to Los Angeles. He rested until it was time for his rehearsal. He had been invited to the Governor’s Ball after the ceremony, but had to decline. What was the point? He couldn’t eat anything, he couldn’t drink anything, and he didn’t have the strength to dance.