John Wayne: The Life and Legend (89 page)

Structurally, it’s a mess—the film’s first half hour has almost no relation to the rest of the film—and even William Clothier’s camerawork is perfunctory. The only charming moment passes almost unnoticed—a wanted poster for one Hondo Lane brightens up a sheriff’s office.

“
Rio Lobo
doesn’t look like a Hawks film,” wrote critic John C. Mahoney. “It hasn’t the relationships of a Hawks film. It hasn’t the sound of a Hawks film, the wit, mocking, contrapuntal and over-lapping dialogue. . . . Nor does it have the cast and performances, having an even poorer ensemble of actors than those corralled for
Red Line 7000
.”

The film’s only attributes were a good opening sequence of a runaway boxcar, and Wayne, who knew the picture was terrible. “
Rio Lobo
is bad,” he admitted to one writer off the record. “Hawks made the mistake of doing too much of the writing.” He went on to remark on Hawks’s habit of playing off writers against each other. “Both Ford and Hawks could direct . . . but Hawks couldn’t write. He never should have tried. That was pretty obvious by
Rio Lobo
. He’d become sort of aloof and I guess there have been too many showings in Paris of his films. He’s feeling that he’s a cult now.”

Rio Lobo
brought in $4.25 million in domestic rentals against a cost of $5 million—in twentieth place for movies that year. “Anybody else would have made it, [it] wouldn’t even have been released in LA,” said Tom Kane. “It would be Rod Cameron [and it would play] somewhere down in Sweetwater, Texas.”

John Ford was now retired. Every once in a while, he’d make an appearance at one of the colleges around town, as with a January 1970 turn at USC. The future screenwriter John Sacret Young was there, and he remembered that Ford “looked like a big man who had lost his bigness. Age and ill health had eaten it away.”

Ford called the camera “this wonderful looking monster,” and told the kids to “forget about it. Get a good cameraman and work with the people. Shoot their eyes. You can express more with the eyes than with anything else.” Someone asked him about French cinema, and he grumbled, “All they do is get in and out of cars.” He said that Dudley Nichols and he had the same idea about scripts—that there should be a “paucity of dialogue.”

“In just his choice of words there is the flavor he imbued,” wrote Young in his notes. “This self-created image, now deeply ingrained, of a big, slouching roughneck of an Irish New Englander slipping in the word ‘paucity.’ It is funny and more.”

Five months later, Young attended the annual Memorial Day service at the Field Photo Chapel, which had been moved to the grounds of the Motion Picture Home. It is a small white building with four pillars in front and an antique pulpit. There are nine rows of benches and a sign that says, “Here dead lie we/Because we did not choose/To live and shame the land/From which we sprung,” followed by the names of the men of the Field Photo Service who had died in the war.

Ford was in uniform, with seven and a half rows of bars. He was smoking a Tiparillo, but put it aside as Ray Kellogg helped him put on his sword. “Every year the same sword,” Ford muttered.

Mike was making deals. Wayne was continuing to spread himself very thin and was enjoying every minute of it. But when he was with his family, he was totally there.

“Because he worked so much, and he worked with my dad, it was different than with kids whose grandparents grew up around the corner,” said Michael Wayne’s daughter Alicia McFarlane. “It was like he was out of town a lot of the time. We would see him if he was in town, or around the holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas. Occasionally he would surprise us; our house was in Toluca Lake, and he would drop by with the biggest box of candy I’ve ever seen.”

McFarlane remembered him as “a wonderful grandfather, a grab-you-and-throw-you-up-in-the-sky grandfather. It’s a credit to my parents that we didn’t have a big concept of who he was, or his impact. To us, he was our grandfather. We went a few times to visit him on the set, and we figured out what business he was in, but we were kids—we weren’t watching old movies.

“I have a great photo of the two of us sharing an Oreo cookie—he’s handing me the part with the icing on it. He was a doting grandfather, and he didn’t mind having kids around the house—he already had dogs.”

Alicia loved to sneak into her grandfather’s office when nobody was around and look at his collection of kachina dolls, then browse through the hundreds of books that were neatly lined up on the shelves. Wayne’s library was unfocused, but with an emphasis on his business. He had first editions of
The Searchers
and
True Grit
, novels by Zane Grey, stories by Bret Harte, coffee-table books of Frederic Remington and Tom Phillips.

There were conservative-oriented books on politics, pop fiction (
Jaws, Centennial 
) and some very un-pop literary fiction: Nabokov’s
Lolita
. There were books on Hollywood westerns, a signed copy of Darryl Zanuck’s biography, unsigned copies of books about Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe, as well as compatriots such as Raoul Walsh and Edward Dmytryk. He had a surprising taste for Tolkien, with hardcovers of all the
Lord of the Rings
novels. His musical tastes centered around Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Doris Day.

Mike and Gretchen’s son Chris was born prematurely in 1967 and had to have open heart surgery when he was five. He would occasionally mention to his grandfather that he wished he was bigger, so he could play football. “You’re healthy,” Wayne would say. “That’s the main thing.”

“The house in Newport was a neat place to be,” said Alicia, “and it was a pure delight to go there. Pilar would say, ‘We’re all going to the toy store!’ Looking back as an adult, it must have been a pain in the neck, but Pilar was great; she spoiled us.”

If the grandchildren were at the house, the evening’s entertainment would consist of a double feature—the first picture was for the kids, the last for the adults. Alicia felt she’d finally come of age when she was allowed to watch the second feature:
Le Mans,
with Steve McQueen.

“My grandfather made this movie called
Trouble Along the Way
, where he had a little singsong in his voice when he talked to the little girl. That’s the way I remember him talking to me when I was little. When I got bigger, it was ‘How are you doing in school? How are your grades?’ I was a very average Joe in school, so I didn’t look forward to those questions. He very definitely wanted to know what was going on in our lives.”

Alicia’s favorite memory of her grandfather involved a huge trampoline Wayne installed in his yard. “All of us were out there, and he came out and got on the trampoline and started jumping high into the sky! He was so much bigger than the rest of us, so he went higher than we could. All of his kids and grandkids were there, popping up into the sky, and he was right in the middle of them, going higher than anybody else.”

About this time, Wayne began to combat what he saw as his younger children’s lack of interest in the family. He decreed that dinner would be at 5 P.M. every day, with mandatory attendance. But the kids were teenagers, didn’t want to be there, and even Pilar seemed to resent the command performance. “Asking about our lives, he’d allow us to answer, then he’d wind up issuing lectures,” remembered Aissa. He was harder on Ethan than the girls, and hit him once or twice for lying, when all the girls would get was a lecture.

But Ethan was a boy, and a chance for Wayne to make up for the mistakes he’d made with Mike and Pat, as well as a chance to mitigate the mortality he felt gaining on him. “He’s mine and I want to be with him,” he said of Ethan. “He’ll be 14 before I know it and something happens [then]. They start to drift away and they don’t come back until their thirties. At 30 they realize what fatherhood is. My oldest boys are in their 30s now and they’ve come back. But with Ethan I won’t be here when he’s 30, so I’ve got to love him now.”

The girls tended to get a pass. For Christmas 1972, nine months after Aissa turned sixteen, Wayne gave her a yellow Porsche 914. She lent the car to a boyfriend, who wrecked it. She returned home at dawn to find Wayne in his pajamas, pacing in the driveway, furious because he thought she’d be home by 2 A.M. Wayne gave her the silent treatment for a day, then came into her bedroom. “If I gave you what you deserved,” he said, “I’d have to ground you forever. So let’s just forget it.”

Wayne’s TV appearances began increasing in the 1970s. In June 1971, he went to Monument Valley to shoot a CBS special called
The American West of John Ford
. He wasn’t happy about the fact that he was only paid scale, but he did it because Ford’s grandson, Dan, was producing the show and Ford asked him to appear. It was Ford’s last trip to the location he defined in the world’s consciousness. As the two men reminisced about Ward Bond, Ford said, “Oh God, rest his soul. The only bad thing about this trip is that I miss him.”

Bob Shelton was putting together a promotional film for Old Tucson when he heard Wayne was in Monument Valley shooting the documentary. Shelton got a small crew together and flew over. Shelton and his film crew handed over some prepared questions they wanted Wayne to respond to. He took a look at them, then threw them over his shoulder.

“Where’s the camera?” Wayne asked. And then he rattled off five minutes of footage, extolling the benefits and history and pleasures of Old Tucson and all the great pictures he had been lucky enough to make there.

“We got in the plane and flew home,” said Shelton. “I would have to say that John Wayne was what every young boy wants to be like, and what every old man wishes he had been.”

Among Wayne’s appearances were spots on the popular
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,
also done for scale—$210. He liked Paul Keyes, the head writer, who also wrote for Dean Martin’s TV show. (For one
Laugh-In
appearance he dressed up as the Easter Bunny; another involved him holding up a red, white, and blue daisy and reciting, “The sky is blue, the grass is green, get off your butt and be a Marine.”)

In late November 1970, Wayne hosted
Swing Out, Sweet Land
, written and produced by Keyes and executive-produced by Bill Harbach, whom Wayne had first met while shooting
They Were Expendable
.

The show ran ninety minutes, cost Anheuser-Busch $1.4 million, and serves as a time capsule of a special kind of show business hell. Lorne Greene plays George Washington, Rowan and Martin are the Wright Brothers, Lucille Ball is the Statue of Liberty, Dan Blocker is an Indian who sells Manhattan to Michael Landon’s Peter Minuit, and Bob Hope and Ann-Margret entertain the troops at Valley Forge.

Dean Martin plays Eli Whitney—cotton
gin
—get it? The Doodletown Pipers sing a choral version of the Declaration of Independence, there are laugh tracks for the comedy bits, and Wayne played himself as an
Our Town–
style narrator who framed the show and introduced the scenes.

NBC handed the show to Harbach and his partner Nick Vanoff, who were already producing the highly successful
Hollywood Palace
series. “It was the biggest show we ever did,” remembered Harbach. “We shot for two weeks, and there were hardly any problems. We told [Wayne] our ideas for the show and he said ‘That sounds fine.’

“Wayne was a pro. He’d ask, ‘What time tomorrow, Boss?’ and I’d tell him and he’d be there fifteen minutes early. He was very outgoing, and had this deep enthusiasm under the skin. Anything you needed him to do, he did. Of course, he was to the right of Charlemagne.”

The trade papers found the show mawkish—“a star-studded, often awkward, seldom amusing extravaganza . . . a massive name-dropping mélange [with] a few bright spots,” wrote the critic for
Variety
. But the ratings were huge; NBC estimated that about 77 million people watched the show, once again proving Wayne’s command of his audience, as well as his knack for seamlessly spreading his brand.