John Wayne: The Life and Legend (91 page)

In 1971, Wayne made some inquiries to some friends in the White House. As a loyal Nixon man, he wondered if he deserved better than he was getting at the callused hands of the IRS. Wayne had recently received a bill for back taxes of $251,116 for the years 1964–1966. White House counselor John Dean instructed John Caulfield to look into the matter of celebrity audits, and Caulfield discovered that Wayne was by no means being singled out—Jerry Lewis had been hit for $446,332 between 1958 and 1960. “The Wayne complaint,” wrote Caulfield, “when viewed in the attached context, doesn’t appear to be strong enough to pursue.”

There were plenty of acting offers, some more interesting than others. Robert Aldrich wanted to team Wayne and Katharine Hepburn in a script called
Rage of Honor,
about an old cowboy alienated by industrial development in California in 1929. Aldrich sent the script to Hepburn, who replied, “I can’t think of a single thing to say about that script which would not be insulting to it—especially to you—Good God—Blood and pomposity—Rotten police and butchered horse—You’re hard up?”

Wayne’s business interests remained slightly ramshackle, if only because his criteria for a deal continued to involve the personal more than the professional. He was told about a German ship that had been scuttled in Acapulco Bay and was believed to be full of mercury. He promptly bought the salvage rights, only to find out that the only thing the ship contained was rust. He’d tell the story on himself, roaring with laughter.

“Grandaddy wanted to be in business with his pals,” said Gretchen Wayne. “It was like every guy wants to own a bar, you know? He would go to Michael about a project and say, ‘These guys are going to do this, they’re going to do that . . .’ And Michael would say, ‘Really? And how much are they putting in, and how much do they want you to put in?’ And Grandaddy would grumble and walk out the door.

“Michael was a businessman, he was shrewd, he wouldn’t spend more than he had and he always negotiated for the better deal. Michael’s dad recognized this and would say, ‘Well, I don’t have a college education like you do.’ But Grandaddy was smart in that he always knew how much he could afford to lose, and he wouldn’t go beyond that.”

Wayne hired an old acquaintance named Joe de Franco to run a company called Separation and Recovery Systems Inc., which separated oil from water. De Franco had worked at Studebaker for years and Wayne had long respected him as a solid businessman. Once the two got reacquainted Wayne offered him the job of running the company. De Franco inspected the operation and thought it could be made profitable, but it was severely underfunded.

“I’m going to have to use you, Duke,” he told the owner. “Why not?” Wayne replied, “Everybody else does.” For the next year or so, de Franco marched Wayne into luncheons with prospective investors, who eventually included, among others, Robert Abplanalp, the Nixon crony who had gotten rich by inventing the aerosol valve. In addition to the investors, de Franco got some government grants.

When he was done, de Franco had raised about $3.5 million, with his salary coming out of what he had raised and his piece of the business. Separation and Recovery Systems operated out of Irvine, California, and de Franco built it up to successfully operate in such far-flung locations as Norway, Sweden, and South America.

De Franco’s impression was that the company was one of the few that Wayne owned that was successful. Mike Wayne kept Separation and Recovery Systems going for years after his father died, not selling it off until the mid-1980s.

“I found Duke to be super,” said de Franco. “If you were a smart-ass, he had a temper. Mostly, though, he was thoughtful and praiseworthy. He was appreciative, and he delegated, although sometimes he would micromanage—like when he’d play bridge.”

Although Wayne’s bad memory for names was legendary, de Franco found that his memory for business details was highly retentive. De Franco would go to Wayne’s house every Friday for a business conference, and often on Sundays as well, because de Franco would cook a big Italian dinner.

Like many people around Wayne, de Franco found Pilar “very self-centered. She had that ‘Look at me’ attitude.” Wayne and his wife rarely argued; when they did it was over some social event that Wayne didn’t want to attend. “She’d get huffy and go in the other room and close the door, and he’d go after her and apologize,” said de Franco. “He also thought she spent too much money, but he never complained about it.

“He was a good father in that he set a good example. He was attentive. He would get upset because Aissa’s grades were usually terrible. God, he’d be so proud of how she turned out—going to law school and becoming a successful attorney. He’s beaming down at her, believe me.”

After
The Last Picture Show
and
What’s Up, Doc?
Peter Bogdanovich was the hottest director in Hollywood, but he nevertheless accompanied his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd to Miami, where she was shooting
The Heartbreak Kid
. With time on his hands, Bogdanovich decided to turn his hand to the western he had always wanted to make. Summoning Larry McMurtry, the author of the novel and co-screenwriter of
The Last Picture Show
, they set to work on a western that would unite all of John Ford’s great leading men: John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Bogdanovich and McMurtry called the script
The Streets of Laredo
.

“What we had planned was a sort of last adventure,” remembered McMurtry, “after which they would be over, as would the Old West.” With quality scripts being thin on the ground at the moment, Stewart and Fonda both signed on, if a trifle reluctantly. “They wanted,” wrote McMurtry, “the last adventure to be a wild success, not a dim moral victory of the sort we had planned for them.”

As for Wayne, he circled, delayed, and finally said no. Unlike Stewart and Fonda, Wayne had plenty of work, but other than that nobody could quite figure out why he passed. “Maybe he didn’t like it that James Stewart got to play the more poetic character,” ruminated McMurtry. “Maybe he didn’t like Peter, or the script, or because he was tired of playing the competent grump yet one more time.”

Actually, Wayne liked Bogdanovich well enough—“He likes the things I like,” was the way he put it—but there was definitely a context to Bogdanovich’s script that bothered him. “It’s kind of an end-of-the-West Western,” Wayne told Bogdanovich, “and I’m not ready to hang up my spurs yet.”

“But you don’t die in it,” Bogdanovich offered.

“Yeah, but everybody else does,” replied Wayne.

“I just don’t like the story,” he confided. “I like Bogdanovich. He’s a good student of all the directors that mean anything to me. But I don’t go for his story . . . and Bogdanovich can be almighty stubborn about it.” There was no getting away from the fact that
The Streets of Laredo
was a western about the Death of the West, and since the West was more or less synonymous with John Wayne, he wasn’t overjoyed by the implications.

When Bogdanovich wasn’t around, Wayne was more specific: “It just wasn’t a good part. Peter had written a good part for Fonda and some fun lines for Jimmy, but I was a whiner. Why the hell should I do that? . . . Peter said, ‘This is a great part.’ I said, ‘To you, not to me.’ ”

Bogdanovich put on as much of a press as he could, even sending Wayne a handwritten letter (“This can be a beautiful movie and not a downbeat one, as you fear . . .”). But Wayne’s mind was made up. All this would have been understandable if Wayne was buried beneath quality scripts, but he was mostly engaged in time passers. As a last resort, Bogdanovich told Wayne that John Ford said he should do it, but Wayne retorted, “That’s not what he told me.” Years later, Barbara Ford told Bogdanovich that her father told Wayne to turn it down, while simultaneously telling Bogdanovich it was a great script.

The Streets of Laredo
hung around Warner Bros. for a number of years, but it was generally felt that Wayne was the only man who could carry the increasingly dicey genre to any kind of box office, and once he passed on a project, it stayed passed. McMurtry let the project go, then rethought it, refocused some of the characters and the plot, and wrote a novel called
Lonesome Dove.
When it was made into a great miniseries years later, Robert Duvall played the part that had been written for Wayne, and Tommy Lee Jones played the role designed for James Stewart.

The cancer surgery was now a part of the dim past. Wayne had regained most of his strength, although there were still things he was leery of. Water skiing, for instance. One day off Catalina he thought he and Bert Minshall should go scuba diving. Minshall wasn’t sure it was a good idea—Wayne’s wind wasn’t good, and he still coughed a lot—but they jumped off the back end of the boat anyway and went down twelve to fifteen feet looking for abalone.

“I could see he was having problems,” remembered Minshall. “He goes back to the surface and I follow him, and he tears his mask off and says, ‘Goddamn it, I’ll never have any more fun!’ And that was the last time he went diving.”

The young man who had once swum, dived, and body surfed with animal joy was now hemmed in by physical limitations, to which he would never entirely reconcile himself. “He got grouchy,” said Minshall. “Near the end he was very short-tempered.”

For a Batjac production called
Big Jake
, Wayne reached far back into the past and hired George Sherman to direct. Sherman had been a mainstay at Republic in the 1930s and 1940s, and at Universal in the 1950s, but had never planted a flag in A pictures and hadn’t directed a theatrical picture since 1966. Batjac got Sherman for the bargain price of $50,000, with options for four more pictures that were shared with CBS.

Big Jake
was written by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian and Rita Fink, who had previously collaborated on
Dirty Harry
, and who injected the western with harsher violence than was customary for Wayne. The plot involved the kidnapping of the grandson of a cattle baron named Jacob McCandles. Even though it’s 1909, and McCandles has long been estranged from his family, he’s regarded as the only man sufficiently fearless to get the boy back.

Sherman began shooting the picture before Wayne showed up in Durango, Mexico. When he arrived, he asked Harry Carey Jr. how Sherman was doing. “Okay,” said Carey. Wayne looked at the rushes, then sought Carey out. “I thought you said he was doing OK. He’s doing shit!” The result, said Pat Wayne, was that “My dad directed
Big Jake
.” Dobe, as Carey was generally known, said that Wayne strengthened the dialogue and rechoreographed the shoot-out at the end of the picture.

Wayne filled
Big Jake
with family—his son Pat, Harry Carey Jr., Richard Boone. Dobe Carey showed up with a bushy beard he had worn on his previous picture, and was told to keep it. The beard was darkened to indicate that copious amounts of tobacco juice had dripped down into it. “You look like the Cowardly Lion,” Wayne cracked one day. In fact, Dobe, as Carey was generally known, chewing tobacco throughout the shoot, as was Wayne—Red Man was giving him his nicotine fix.