John Wayne: The Life and Legend (105 page)

In February 1978, Wayne’s voice began to deteriorate—it was raspy, and the low tones were disappearing. He was angry about his condition, angry about the lack of work, angry about the country. Although he liked Jimmy Carter personally, he felt he was weak and ineffectual. “The United States is losing its balls and its spirit,” he complained. “It’s gotten so crappy here, I can’t stand to see it.”

He began to talk about moving to Mexico. Why not? His marriage was broken, his career was frozen, his health was uncertain. He was ready to give up, and besides the Mexicans loved him. Baja, perhaps. He seemed to be serious and began taking lessons to improve his Spanish, although Michael would undoubtedly have hurled his body between his father and the door to keep him from abandoning America.

In March, Wayne and Pat Stacy attended Henry Hathaway’s eightieth birthday party at the Bel-Air Country Club. It was one more reunion of Old Hollywood: Henry Fonda was there, Jimmy Stewart, Richard Widmark, Hal Wallis, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Tony Curtis, Glenn Ford, Karl Malden, George Burns. Wayne announced that Hathaway was “the most irascible, most fascinating, most talented bastard.” No one disagreed. He tried to take a spin around the dance floor with Hathaway’s wife, Skip, but had to stop after a couple of minutes because he couldn’t catch his breath.

There were a couple of mediocre job offers. Irwin Allen was preparing
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
and wanted Burt Reynolds for the lead, while Warner Bros. was trying to convince Clint Eastwood to take the part. Then Wayne contacted Allen and said he’d be interested in the film, and Allen was thunderstruck. Having John Wayne would lift the film to another level.

However, when the initial script went out—it had the upside-down ship resting on top of an underwater volcano, and yes, the volcano finally exploded—Reynolds, Eastwood, and Wayne all turned the picture down. Around the same time, Steven Spielberg offered Wayne the part of General Joseph Stilwell in his film
1941
. Wayne invited Spielberg down to Newport Beach to discuss the script, then chewed the director out for wasting his time with a role that he felt was demeaning to the military.

“He didn’t want me to make
1941
,” remembered Spielberg. “He said to me, ‘You’re making a mockery of a very serious time. . . . And I read your script. . . . I for one didn’t laugh.’ He gave me such a bollicking about it. We stayed friends although he was just disgusted that I would make what he thought was a very anti-American picture.”

Robert Stack was happy to play the part, and his scene was a bright spot in a very bad picture.

The hoarseness got worse, and he was becoming extremely short of breath—his wind could barely support him through a sentence. After St. Patrick’s Day 1978 he traveled to Boston for open heart surgery to repair a defective mitral valve. Mike Wayne’s son Chris, who had had open heart surgery when he was five, called to tell his grandfather that “If I can do it, you can do it.”

“Well, if I didn’t have so many miles on me, I’d feel more confident,” Wayne replied.

In fact, the hospital was not thrilled about the surgery; Wayne was about to be seventy-one, had one lung and chronic bronchitis. Open heart surgery under those circumstances had a failure rate of at least 10 percent, and nobody wanted to be responsible for killing John Wayne.

On the night of April 2, Wayne and the family went out to dinner at a private dining room at Maison Robert, a fine restaurant in downtown Boston. Wayne’s doctor gave him permission to have one drink, so he ordered the largest martini in the house and raised his glass in a toast: “To the last supper.” That put a lid on the evening, which was already filled with foreboding, but Joe de Franco saved it by altering the terms of the toast: “Last supper until Newport.”

On April 3, the doctors cracked Wayne’s chest, sliced into his heart, and replaced his mitral valve with one from a pig. When he woke up after the surgery, the doctor asked him how he felt. “I saw it was raining,” he said. “I found myself wanting to roll in the mud.” He admitted that he had been “scared, damn scared.” There weren’t a lot of parts for an actor without a voice. “Now, with that damn pig valve in me, I not only have my voice back but I go around saying ‘Oink oink.’ ”

Back home, Wayne’s recuperative therapy involved walking, a daily hike of at least a mile and a quarter. Afterward, he would sit on the deck of his house waving to yachts that sailed by. In the house, four secretaries had to be hired to handle the mail that had flooded in since his surgery. “They’ve opened 10,000 so far,” he said. “And I can take you back and show you boxes with 50,000 more. Isn’t that something? There’s just no way I can answer them, but jeez, I’m really touched.”

In May, he celebrated his seventy-first birthday. Joe de Franco was there, Pat Stacy was there, ten other close friends. But he didn’t enter into the celebration, and he didn’t even empty his glass of wine. He was listless during the following week, so he went to the hospital for more tests, which revealed hepatitis. That entailed six weeks of bed rest, more drugs, daily visits from a doctor. When Pat Stacy’s birthday arrived, he was too sick to help her celebrate. A trip to Catalina aboard the
Wild Goose
seemed to perk him up, and he was better by the end of June. A month later, he surprised Stacy by taking her to the private showroom of Dicker and Dicker in Beverly Hills, where he presented her with her choice of mink coats for a belated birthday gift, then added a white fox boa.

As late as September, he was still slightly listless from the hepatitis and rested for up to seven hours a day. But he hauled himself from Newport Beach to be honored at the Century Plaza for a Boy Scout testimonial dinner. Twelve hundred guests paid $250 a plate to honor Wayne, which amounted to more than $400,000 for the purchase of a camp at Lake Arrowhead that was named the John Wayne Outpost Camp. Merv Griffin was the emcee, and old friends such as James Stewart showed up as well. “If I could pick any man to be my brother,” Wayne told Stewart, “I’d sure pick someone like you—rich.”

By October 1978, it had been nearly three years since John Wayne had made a movie, and a sense of aimlessness had descended. The Utah Film Festival awarded him its John Ford Medallion, but he didn’t feel up to traveling, so he asked Peter Bogdanovich to accept it for him. Bogdanovich brought the medallion to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Wayne was staying for a few days to be close to his medical treatments. Wayne was in his pajamas watching a USC football game. Pat Wayne arrived with a couple of his children, and it was all very casual and comfortable.

There was a general air of illness about Wayne, so the only beverage was iced tea. Talk inevitably turned to the old days, of Ford and Hawks and Ward Bond. “Christ, everybody’s gone,” Wayne said. He asked Bogdanovich if he would be interested in directing a Batjac picture called
Beau John.
“It’s kind of a half-western thing, it’s not cowboys and Indians, you know, it’s—oh, the humor and the wonderful relationship between this grandfather and the son and the son-in-law and the grandson. . . . I hope to hell I live to do it. Just a wonderful story.” Bogdanovich said of course Wayne would be able to make it, and he’d be happy to direct it.

Beau John
became the focus of his professional future, and Wayne proposed the project to Ron Howard. “I found a book,” he told Howard. “I think it’s a movie. It’s you and me or it’s nobody.”

“It never got past the verbal stage,” recalled Howard. “And at that point, he was showing signs of not being well. I was a little doubtful.”

With more time on his hands, Wayne was able to look back at his career with equanimity. He was proud of his performance in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, because it was a true character performance. He liked
Hondo, The Searchers, Red River
, and
True Grit.
He didn’t talk much about
The Shootist
—his anger with Don Siegel had soured him on the picture.

Among his contemporaries, he loved Gary Cooper, didn’t like Clark Gable. “You know why Gable’s an actor?” he told his daughter Aissa. “It’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do.” He had grown to like Clint Eastwood and he had a soft spot for Paul Newman: “Now
there’s
an actor who’s got it if he’d stop hurting himself playing those anti-hero roles. The man has real talent . . . when he isn’t directing his own films.” He also appreciated Robert Redford and George C. Scott.

And he had a personal favorite who habitually flew under the radar. “I think the best actor in the world today is James Garner. He can do anything—comedy, detective. Just his facial expressions alone are enough to crack you up. They rave about Brando and Scott, but they couldn’t hold a candle to him.” He had a blind spot about Gene Hackman, couldn’t abide him, called him “the worst actor in town.” On television his tastes mirrored his audience’s; he liked to watch Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and
Barney Miller.

If someone asked him about money, he would snort and give chapter and verse about his financial misadventures. “Wealth? Bob Hope has wealth. I’ve made money, but ill-timed investments cost me a fortune. I once lost $600,000 in a shrimp business in Panama. Three marriages were costly. I threw away a hell of a lot of money having a good time. I don’t regret it. But after 25 years of hard work, I suddenly found myself starting all over again broke. . . . I’m not broke today by any means, but for a lifetime of work, I’m not rich, either. Bob Hope is rich.”

William Wellman Jr. went to Palm Desert for a celebrity tennis tournament at Shadow Mountain. “I was coming out of my room and walking over to the courts walking over the grass next to the pool. And there was Duke sitting in a chair by a small table.”

“Duke, how are you?” asked Wellman, who already knew the answer. Wayne looked tired and sick, and he was sitting by himself in Palm Desert playing a board game. “Bill, how are you?” Wayne cried with the old bonhomie. After the usual amount of small talk, he said, “God, I miss your dad. We should have made more pictures together.”

Every goddamn day it was something different, something limiting.

Wayne began complaining of stomach pains. He said it felt like he had broken glass in his gut. He tried various over-the-counter stomach remedies, but nothing seemed to help except a bland diet of apples and watermelon. A biopsy was done that showed nothing amiss, but he knew. He’d been waiting, and he knew.

“I have it, Aissa,” he told his daughter. “I feel it inside my body.”

By December, the smell of food made him nauseated, and his diet consisted mostly of fruit. Pounds started vanishing, and he began to have trouble sleeping; he’d lie awake for hours, and pass the time by dictating business correspondence into his tape recorder. On Christmas Eve, he invited Joe de Franco and his wife and another couple to dinner, but he couldn’t make it through—the smell of the food and liquor made him sick. He went to his room to lie down.

Without the acting fees that had once rolled in, the
Wild Goose
was becoming prohibitively expensive. Actually, it was eating him alive. “In the last few years, it was costing him $275,000 a year to keep it going,” said Bert Minshall, the ship’s captain. “The insurance was $30,000 a year alone.”

“I hate to let her go,” said Wayne. “I’ve had her a long time. Took her to Europe once, in the ’60s. But with taxes what they are, what’s the alternative? I obey the rules. I don’t like them, but I obey them.” Wayne began looking around for someone to take it off his hands—an open admission of his failing energy and health. But then his eternal restlessness would reassert itself: “I couldn’t retire. That would kill me. What would I do? I’d go nuts. Work is the only thing I know. And as long as I can keep my dignity, I’m going to go on making movies. I like what I do. . . .

“As long as people want to see me in movies, I’m going to go on working. I even reckon they could re-release my movie
The Alamo
. Even the liberals aren’t so blatantly against me anymore that they wouldn’t recognize there was something to that picture besides my terrible conservative attitude.”