John Wayne: The Life and Legend (79 page)

Nor did he have illusions about unlimited power. “Stars are valuable only to get people inside the doors,” he told one studio executive, by way of explaining that a bad picture can’t be propped up by any actor, no matter how popular.

He maintained a lingering sense of disgruntlement over his long exile in B pictures and the fact that he had had to do it all himself. “I never had a build-up by a major studio, like Cooper and Randolph Scott. Paramount spent lots of money on them, and I had to come up the hard way, with exposure to the kids . . . ten years in those quickie pictures.”

Of course, that long exposure to a youthful audience also meant that he and the audience grew into maturity and old age together. One of his best friends said that in the deepest recesses of his conscience Wayne still thought of himself as “a stagehand who got lucky.”

The old stagehand had some very well-developed ideas about the movie business, ideas that he had learned at the feet of John Ford. He would point to
Red River
as a standard story of father-son conflict that could have been set in a factory or a drawing room or even another country. But placing it outdoors, against the background of a nineteenth-century cattle drive, gave what was actually an intimate character conflict an epic sweep that elevated the material.

“Get it out of doors,” he would demand. “Let some fresh air and sunlight into the story. Give your cameraman a chance to photograph something besides walls and doors and tea tables. Don’t let your story expire for lack of air.”

When the four children from his first marriage fell in love and got married, he wouldn’t allow Pilar to attend the ceremonies. “It’s not appropriate,” he said. Those were occasions for him and Josie to come together and celebrate the raising of their children without awkwardness. “Duke respected Josie, and she respected him,” said Gretchen Wayne. “They supported each other when it came to their children and whatever decisions they made were made together. Because of that, the kids all turned out well.”

What Pilar thought of this restriction is unknown. After her depression of the late 1950s, the marriage had settled down and seemed to be in decent equilibrium, but there were those who had their doubts—about Pilar, and about Wayne’s taste in women in general.

For a time, Wayne and Pilar were happy; they had three children together—children he loved passionately. And then, gradually, he and Pilar weren’t happy. “He was terribly unlucky in marriage, but he never understood why,” said Maureen O’Hara. “Neither did I. I thought he was wonderful, although there was never anything between us. His first wife, Josie, was a sweetheart. The second—well, let’s just say she died of a heart attack in Mexico. The third was the mother of his last kids. They were all Latin women with slightly different temperaments, but he was really marrying the same woman every time.”

Gretchen Wayne saw the central problem as clashing desires. “He wanted a normal life and family, but he also wanted a piece of arm candy who would look great when they went out. All three of the women he married provided the arm candy—they looked great.”

Some people close to Wayne—Harry Carey Jr., for instance—thought he should have married someone like Mary St. John, his devoted secretary, who was smart, tough, and loved him, although not romantically. Gretchen Wayne thought that unlikely. “Mary St. John would never have put up with him.”

“I knew Josie, and I knew Chata, and I knew Pilar,” said Harry Carey Jr. “Chata and Pilar were very different; Pilar was much more intelligent and more grounded. Chata—that was physical more than anything else.

“But Duke never married anybody with brains, not really. It baffled me why he married the women he did. His wives weren’t good company; they weren’t someone you could gab all night with. And his wives were always tough on him. He wasn’t henpecked, but he did put up with a lot. I don’t think he was ever buddies with any of his wives like I am with Marilyn.”

But the subtle misalliance of his third marriage didn’t propel him into affairs the way it had twenty-five years before. Perhaps residual guilt over the divorce from Josie acted as a brake, or perhaps he had just learned his lesson. “There were women that were crazy about him,” said Harry Carey Jr., “and he didn’t fool around. His brother did. Bob would boff them, but not Duke.”

He enjoyed mentoring young actors, often giving them advice worthy of a life coach. When he met Michael Caine in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, he pointed at him and said, “What’s your name?”

“Michael Caine.”

“That’s right. I saw you in that movie, what was it called?”

“
Alfie
?”

“That’s right.”

Wayne put his arm around Caine’s shoulders as he guided him across the lobby. “You’re gonna be a star, kid. But let me give you a piece of advice: talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too fucking much.”

Caine was grateful, said thank you, and then Wayne said, “Call me Duke. And never wear suede shoes.”

Caine had been taking it all in just fine, but the last sentence threw him.

“Why not?”

“Because one day I was taking a piss and the guy in the next stall recognized me and turned towards me and said, ‘John Wayne—you’re my favorite actor!’ and pissed all over my suede shoes. So don’t wear them when you’re famous, kid.”

After a quarter century in the movie business, Wayne had been nominated for an Oscar only once, for
Sands of Iwo Jima
. “What’d I do with an Oscar anyway? It’d just clutter up the mantel.” Although he pretended he didn’t care about the critics, he read all of the major reviews of his pictures as a matter of course, and if he felt badly used, he’d get angry. “That son of a bitch,” he’d mutter. “I’ve been in this goddamn business for fifty years. He’s never been in front of a camera in his life. What the hell does he know about acting?”

But he pretended that reviews mattered either not at all or a lot less than the verdict of the public, to whom he was invariably charming and helpful. Patrick Wayne remembered that having lunch with him in public was a series of interruptions by admirers asking for an autograph. Pat asked his father if it ever bothered him.

“If they didn’t want to come up, how do you think we could have gotten this lunch?” his father said.

As a result, Wayne had a horror of allowing his craft and technique to show. “It’s not being natural,” he explained in one of the few times he discussed acting seriously. “It’s
acting
natural. If you’re just natural, you can drop a scene. You’ve got to do it so the plumber sitting out there, and the lawyer next to him and the doctor don’t see anything wrong.”

To those people who always said he just played himself, he would retort, “It is quite obvious it can’t be done. If you are yourself, you’ll be the dullest son of a bitch in the world on the screen. You have to
act
yourself, you have to project something—a personality. . . .

“I have very few tricks. Oh, I’ll stop in the middle of a sentence so they’ll keep looking at me, and I don’t stop at the end, so they don’t look away, but that’s about the only trick I have.”

Another time, he emphasized how important it was for him to play the truth of a scene. “If someone starts acting phony at a party, you go out and get a drink and the hell with him. But if I start acting phony on the screen, you gotta sit there. Pretty soon you’re just looking at me instead of feeling with me.”

Wayne was a member in good standing of a pre-Method generation of actors whose general intent was, as James Cagney put it, “Look the other actor in the eye and tell the truth.” His primary limitation was a psychological commitment to naturalism. “Duke . . . had to do everything real,” said Henry Hathaway. “There wasn’t anything in Duke that would allow him to pretend he was something. He couldn’t be French, he couldn’t have an accent. . . . It wasn’t a question of acting, it was a question of reality.”

Wayne theorized that stage training could be a handicap rather than a help in movie acting. “If a kid came to me to ask me how to prepare for a screen career, I guess what I’d say would be to go to school, learn to handle liquor, mix with people, get into trouble, work in lots of different jobs and always remember his reactions to things and people. That’s the best equipment in front of a camera.”

In other words, acting for Wayne was accurately replicating responses to life experiences. Nothing more, but nothing less. That sounds constraining, but it was typical of that generation of actors. Henry Fonda, an actor generally granted greater range and respect by the critics than Wayne, said precisely the same thing about himself: “I can’t play anything except someone that I can believe myself to be,” Fonda said. “I can play period American, but I can’t do something classical in the sense that the minute I start to read poetry, then it’s phony. And if I feel phony, I’m dead.”

Actors working with Wayne for the first time were unprepared for his intensity. “He locks his eyes onto you and practically yanks the emotions out of you,” said one. Morgan Paull, who worked with George C. Scott in
Patton
, said that the experience was not dissimilar: “They look you right in the eye. Right into you. Both are very intense actors.”

An alpha male on the set and off, he turned docile before other alpha males—Ford, Hathaway, DeMille. “You are just paint as an actor. If a director uses your color well, that’s fine.” But if the director was someone less assertive, Wayne would make it a point to help mix the colors himself. “He couldn’t help himself,” said Gretchen Wayne. “If you bought a house, Grandaddy would tell you where to put the lights, he’d tell you where to put the couch in the living room. He had opinions on all of that.”

If he was making a movie during the summer, he made it a point to take his children on location. He was particularly attentive to his second family, and was unhappy when Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa weren’t around. If one of them was out of the house when he came home, he’d wander around looking for them. “Where is Ethan? Does he know I’m home? Where is he? Damn it, I would like to know where Ethan is . . .”

With the children of his third marriage, all he had to do was show his disappointment to bring them back in line. “I’ve spent 50 years building up a name in this business,” he would say; the responsibility of the children not to screw that name up was implicit.

“I don’t really ask very much of them,” he said once. “I guess the main thing is that they never lie to me or their mother—or to themselves. I’ve told them that I’ll always help them if they get into trouble as long as they don’t lie. But the minute they lie, they lose my respect. And I can never remember any of them doing it.”

There were a few house rules: the kids had to check in every day at 5:30, and if they were going to be late, they had to call. He believed in being demonstrative; he was always picking them up and hugging them, kissing them on the lips, including his sons.

When it came to his daughters’ weddings, he would listen as they told him what they wanted, and then offer them a choice: a check for the amount the wedding would cost or he would pay for the wedding. They always opted to have him pay for the wedding, which he thought foolish. “Who expects the young to be practical?” he said with the practiced wisdom of someone who had been broke for a long time.

When his children were young, he tried to attend as many school events as possible. Gretchen Wayne remembered a time in high school when Toni Wayne had been elected to some position, and her father came and stood at the back of the auditorium. “He was always very polite and proper about things like that,” Gretchen remembered. “He didn’t want to take over the room by his presence; he was not aggressive in any way.” As his children became adults, he tried to stay out of their lives unless there were money troubles, and then he would intervene.

Because his married children always had to make Christmas stops at in-laws’, Wayne decreed January 15 as a mutually convenient “All Family Day.” That was the day they got together around the tree and exchanged gifts. “Christmas was a big deal,” remembered Gretchen Wayne. “Toni had eight kids, Patrick had two, Michael and I had five, Melinda had five. Grandaddy would ask me beforehand what the kids wanted and then do his own shopping for the grandchildren. The house was decorated with more stuff than you can imagine, and there would be gifts for us as well.

“He loved his family, loved the holidays, loved to celebrate. He was also a great catalogue shopper. When he died, we found a closet full of stuff he’d ordered from catalogues and hadn’t gotten around to either giving or returning.”

Mail order packages would arrive in bunches, ten or twenty at a time. Wayne would sit there with a child on his lap and they’d take turns opening the boxes. Tom Kane believed it all had to do with the deprivations of his childhood.

The Christmas tree in the house at Encino had gone all the way to the ceiling. At the house in Newport he would decorate the pier and the
Wild Goose
. “He went as far as personally addressing the little stickers that went on the packages even though he had three secretaries available to do that stuff,” said Tom Kane. “He liked to do it himself.”

Wayne was usually in Newport for the holidays, and took great pleasure in the Festival of Lights, a flotilla of carolers in colorfully decorated boats who sailed up and down the channel in front of his deck. Wayne would erect a tent over his flagstone patio and hire an orchestra. The railing on the sea wall would be covered with holly and Christmas lights, and the
Wild Goose
would be anchored in the middle of the channel in case any of the guests wanted to go aboard. Typical guests would include Wayne’s brother, Bob, Mike, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda Wayne and their spouses. Other invitees might include UA executive Robert Blumofe, perhaps Ricardo Montalban and his wife, Andy Devine, Buddy Ebsen, Claire Trevor and her husband. One year, Rod Laver and Roy Emerson made an appearance at the party as a special treat for the tennis-crazed Pilar.