John Wayne: The Life and Legend (108 page)

From then on, Caine would pop in every time he visited his wife. Occasionally, he would join Wayne for a long, slow walk down the hospital corridor. Wayne wore pajamas, a robe, a baseball cap. One day Caine asked Wayne how long he expected to be in the hospital.

“It’s got me this time, Mike,” Wayne observed. “I won’t be getting out of here.” Caine was struck by the tone—no sadness or self-pity, just a statement of fact, as if Wayne had been in a fair fight and lost. Tears welled up in Caine’s eyes, but Wayne didn’t want to see it. “Get the hell out of here and go and enjoy yourself,” he ordered.

One day, Wayne slowly made his way down to the hospital mail room on the first floor and apologized to the staff for all the extra work he was making for them. He told them that it wouldn’t be too much longer.

On May 10, Frank Sinatra and his wife, Barbara, came. When they emerged from the room, they were both shaken, and Barbara Sinatra rushed over to Pat Stacy to apologize. She had been stunned by Wayne’s deterioration and had told him she would pray to Saint Jude. Then she remembered that Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. “I meant to say I’d pray to the saint of hope,” she told Stacy. “Please tell him that.” As an old woman herself, Barbara Sinatra’s main memory was of how utterly devastated she had been by Wayne’s condition.

Maureen O’Hara testified before Congress in order to get quick approval for the striking of a Congressional Gold Medal to honor Wayne, the eighty-fifth person in history to receive it. “To the people of the world, John Wayne is not just an actor,” she said. “John Wayne is the United States of America. He is what they believe America to be.” The medal, which had previously honored Jonas Salk, the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Bob Hope, was unanimously approved with the support of President Carter on May 23 and the order was signed three days later, on Wayne’s seventy-second birthday.

Old friends wrote letters to buck him up. Gregory Peck wrote, telling Wayne that he had to “get your conservative ass out of there” in order to pick up his Congressional Medal. James Cagney wrote, telling Wayne he was pulling for him and sending along the regards of Frank McHugh, who had worked with Wayne in
The Telegraph Trail
in 1933.

And Ronald Reagan wrote, telling Wayne “we’ll keep on praying until they decide you can get into a saloon fight (on the studio back lot of course) or go fishing in Baja for real. . . . Nancy sends her love—I would too but there might be talk.”

Mike Wayne finally completed a deal to sell the
Wild Goose
for $650,000, but Wayne ordered that $40,000 be spent overhauling the engines because he didn’t want to take advantage of the man buying the boat. Bert Minshall got $6,000 as severance.

Wayne was no longer taking walks down the hospital corridor. He needed help to get from the bed to the bathroom. Sometimes there were tears of frustration. His seventy-second birthday was greeted by terrible pain that provoked a regimen of narcotics, and he slept through most of the day. The next morning he woke up, so everybody there sang “Happy Birthday” around the bed and passed around pieces of cake, but he was too weak to open presents. By this time, all but the oldest friends were turned away. Henry Hathaway came on May 28 and spent a half hour with his old friend. Wayne insisted on getting out of his bed and sitting in a chair for old Henry.

By May 29, the hospital began administering morphine as a regular part of Wayne’s medication. Occasionally he would say, “I’m sorry,” but he stopped complaining. He had lost nearly one hundred pounds. His chest and abdomen were a network of surgical scars and radiation burns, his arms and legs bruised and mottled from needles.

In the first week in June, he began to turn inward. When the nurses came in to give him Demerol or morphine, he rolled over and let them do what they wanted. He was just too tired.

“At the end, the cancer was everywhere,” said Patrick Wayne. “He was in excruciating pain, and he never complained. He was so strong, so bulletproof all his life, and part of me believed he could beat the cancer back again. I don’t think he did, though. He had a bedsore on his back the size of a grapefruit, an open wound that would not heal. He never complained. Underneath it all, he was a human being. Not superhuman, like he could play, but a human being. But an incredible human being.”

Mike Wayne called Louis and Alice Johnson in Arizona and told them if they wanted to see their friend one last time, they had to come now. They came, and so did Mary St. John. Through his haze, Wayne asked what she thought about death, and she quoted the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
:

He asked her to repeat it, then said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.”

She took his hand and kissed it, and he said, “Well, Mary, I guess the Red Witch finally got me.”

There was nothing to be done except suffer along with him. “You just prayed, saying, ‘My God, don’t let him suffer another day,’ ” said Gretchen Wayne.

Years before, Jane Fonda had told Gretchen Wayne it wasn’t unusual for her to come down to the kitchen in the morning wiping the sleep from her eyes to find John Wayne having a cup of coffee with her father. Wayne’s gregariousness had been one of the few things that could lift Henry Fonda out of his solitary nature, but that close friendship had ended with the McCarthy period.

Now, Henry Fonda told Michael that he’d like to see Duke, but he didn’t want to cause any fuss. Michael said that his father would be very pleased that his old friend wanted to visit. Fonda went in the room to find Wayne sleeping. He just stood at the foot of the bed for a while, paying his respects, saying goodbye.

Josie called. Wayne had stopped taking calls, but that one he took. To Josie’s own dying day in 2003 she never spoke of what they talked about. But later she told her grandchildren her verdict on the man who had been her first and only true love.

“We were married when we were young,” she told Chris Wayne. “Duke was a good man. He was honest, he had a conscience, he had a good heart. He was a man of his word. He
tried
.”

“The last week,” said Pat Wayne, “he went into deeper and deeper sleeps, and he was awake less and less.” On June 8, he began slipping in and out of a coma, and his breathing began to grow shallow.

And then, on June 10, at about 9 P.M. he suddenly woke up, and was amazingly alert and responsive. “For two hours, maybe three, he was totally alive and with us, talking to all of us,” remembered Patrick Wayne. “Six of the seven children were there, and we all had a chance to have a last conversation with him. And he had all of his humor, all of his gregariousness. He was once again the whole man.” Pat Stacy was there, and she agreed with Patrick that those few hours were a last flair of light. “His blue eyes were shining. He showed no pain. He seemed to be enjoying every moment of those three hours.”

He knew he was in the hospital, but he also seemed to think that he was still working and making movies. No matter—for one last time, he was John Wayne—the Duke. Gretchen Wayne said that “He was lucid, he was funny, he felt good. At the end, he accepted it. He didn’t fight it. He said, ‘It’s been great.’ ”

“Then he went back to sleep,” said Patrick Wayne. “I treasure those two hours.”

Late on June 10 or early on June 11, Father Robert Curtis was called to Wayne’s bedside. He looked at Wayne and asked him, “Is it your wish that you become a Catholic?”

“Yes it is, Father,” Wayne said. They went through the baptism ceremony together, ending with “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost.” Then the priest gave him Extreme Unction, absolving him of all sins—the Last Rites.

The priest said that Wayne was lucid, and knew what he was doing. “I gave him the sacraments. But it was impossible to give him Holy Communion because of his condition—he couldn’t swallow the water.”

Patrick Wayne’s memory of the event was slightly different. “On the morning of his death, the chaplain came by and said he’d like to see my dad. I told him he’d been in a coma, but I would ask. He was asleep, but I leaned over and said, ‘Dad, the chaplain’s here.’ And he roused himself and murmured ‘OK.’ That’s when the chaplain baptized him.”

Aissa Wayne was there, and she said that at the time of the conversion her father was under the influence of industrial doses of morphine and was drifting in and out of consciousness. As the priest said the prayers in Latin, Aissa saw her father faintly nod his head, acknowledging that he knew the priest was there and that they were praying. “I knew firsthand how my father felt about Catholicism,” she recalled. “I was raised a Catholic, and my father took no interest at all, never once attending church with me and my mom. Our entire lives, he showed no inclination toward organized religion of any type.”

But Wayne’s grandson Chris knew a priest at Loyola Marymount who used to see Wayne shopping for Christmas presents at Sears. “When you have as many kids as I do, you buy in bulk,” he told the priest. The same priest would occasionally see Wayne at the 5 A.M. Mass. “It’s me, father,” Wayne would say after the priest did a double take.

Wayne’s grandson Matthew Munoz was visiting him along with his mother, Melinda, and he came to believe that Wayne’s conversion was inevitable. “My grandmother was very devout and so was my mother. In fact, my grandfather . . . was very true to God. He always believed in God, but he wasn’t much of a church attendee. I really think my grandfather’s admiration of my grandmother is what made him take that spiritual step and say yes. I also believe my grandmother’s prayers were heard.”

“My dad was not a churchgoing man,” said Patrick Wayne, “although all of us kids were raised Catholic because of our mothers. He always said that he was a ‘Presbygoddamnterian.’ But as far as I know he was never baptized until that last day.”

On the morning of June 11, the doctors told the family he was going to die that day. Supposedly he opened his eyes that morning and fixed on Pat Stacy. She asked him if he knew who she was. “Of course I know who you are,” he said. “You’re my girl. I love you.” Wayne closed his eyes and went back to sleep, a deep sleep. Hours went by. The nurse called the children into the room. His breathing became shallow, more a series of gasps than anything else, and there was a longer time between each breath.

Aissa was holding his right hand and she noticed that the cancer had left his hands undiminished. They were still huge and all-encompassing. The man in the bed drew in his breath. There was a pause. He never exhaled.

The man the world knew as John Wayne but who always thought of himself as Duke Morrison died on Monday, June 11, 1979, at 5:23 in the afternoon. He was seventy-two years old. The cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest of five minutes, caused by gastric cancer of eight months. The attending physician might as well have listed the cause of death as “life.”

As the news spread across the world, the reactions were close to unanimous. The controversy of his World War II nonservice, of his fierce conservatism and support of the blacklist, faded beside the loss of his passing. For decades, he had been America’s great stone wall, impervious to fashion and time. Now, suddenly, the wall was gone.

The
Los Angeles Times
led the front page with his death, which continued onto six pages inside. The
Herald-Examiner
also led with his death. President Carter said that Wayne’s “ruggedness, the tough independence, the sense of personal conviction and courage—on and off the screen—reflected the best of our national character.” James Stewart said that “John Wayne was probably the most admired actor in the world. His passing marks a great loss for his family, for the film industry, and for the entire world.”

Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, always had a knack for flamboyant metaphor and said, “The Duke is dead, which means the tallest tree in the movie forest has just been felled. There won’t ever be anyone like him. God, we will miss him.”

In France, the three national TV networks showed Wayne’s best-known films in a tribute they called “John Wayne, Duke of the Wide Open Spaces.”

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a charming reminiscence regarding Wayne’s appearance in an ad for
National Review
in 1969—his picture with a quote: “
National Review
is my favorite magazine. Why don’t you give it a try?” A year later, Wayne received a solicitation from the magazine illustrated with his own pitch. He sent it to Buckley with a scrawled note: “Bill, What do you need to be convinced? Duke.”

“The miracle is the memory,” wrote Buckley. “Of all those villainous men dispatched by John Wayne, surely the most widely viewed executive of good causes—frontier justice, battles against totalitarian forces, the defense of the weak—in human history. His memory keeps us cheerful.”