American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (2 page)

He had been nominated twice before, once as an actor in 1949 for Best Actor in Allan Dwan’s no-frills war movie
Sands of Iwo Jima,
when he lost to Broderick Crawford in Robert Rossen’s neopolitical
All the King’s Men
(a role Wayne turned down because he disliked the film’s political message), and once as producer (Best Picture/Batjac, his own production company) in 1960, for his post-Disney “adult” version of the classic story of
The Alamo,
which he also directed. Wayne lost that time to producer/director Billy Wilder for
The Apartment
.

Why was Wayne perennially passed over? For one thing, he made enemies in the industry where many never forgave him for his politics, and because of it, some of his greatest performances, like Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s
The Searchers,
were famously ignored by the voters of the Academy
.
Made during the height of the blacklist,
The Searchers
provides not just the best performance in any Hollywood film of 1956, but one of the greatest performances in any film anytime, anyplace, anywhere. Five years earlier, Stanley Kramer’s monumental
High Noon,
a western written and coproduced by blacklisted Carl Foreman, was nominated for eight Oscars and won four, including Best Actor for Wayne’s friendly rival for most of their careers, Gary Cooper. Why? Perhaps part of the reason is that Wayne was the former president of the radical-right Motion Picture Alliance, begun by Walt Disney, Sam Wood, and others in the early ’40s, the tea-party-style posse of a politically divided Hollywood that helped ruin the careers of some of its best talent (and biggest moneymakers), including Foreman. In 1971, an unrepentant Wayne told
Playboy
magazine, “I’ll never regret having helped run Foreman out of this country.” It was not hard to tell which side the Academy was on.

But it wasn’t only politics. As larger than life as he was for audiences, to the Hollywood studios that employed him and the voting Academy members, Wayne was, almost to the end of his career, considered a glorified “B” movie actor, his films never considered “quality” or “art,” certainly not worthy of Oscar. The studio book on Wayne was that he was just another Hollywood cowboy, that he didn’t have the emotional range of a Jimmy Stewart, the gritty elegance of a Spencer Tracy, the spitting toughness of a Humphrey Bogart, the street smarts of a Jimmy Cagney, the beautiful pain of a Marlon Brando, the urban cynicism of a William Holden, or the inherent populism of a Henry Fonda, all Oscar winners. He was just
there,
Hollywood’s unanointed Duke, as dependable as oats. Yet, as film critic and historian Andrew Sarris, promulgator of American auteurism, rightly acknowledged on the occasion of Wayne’s
True Grit
nomination, his “forty years of movie acting and thirty years of damn good movie acting . . . Wayne’s performances for John Ford alone are worth all the Oscars passed out to the likes of George Arliss, Warner Baxter, Lionel Barrymore, Paul Lukas, Broderick Crawford, Jose Ferrer, Ernest Borgnine, Yul Brynner and David Niven . . . ironically, Wayne has become a legend by not being legendary.”

And after Wayne’s Oscar win, Sarris explained his special appeal: “I remember responding to him in a relatively uncomplicated way though he seldom functioned as a conventional hero. He could be accursed or obsessed . . . And on many other occasions the characters he played faced a twilight existence of loneliness and dependency . . . Wayne’s most enduring image, however, is that of the displaced loner vaguely uncomfortable with the very civilization he is helping to establish and preserve . . . At his first appearance we usually sense a very private person with some wound, loss, or grievance from the past.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OSCARS,
Wayne was on location in Old Tucson, Arizona, shooting
Rio Lobo,
the third and weakest film of a trilogy of late-career westerns for Wayne directed by Howard Hawks. When his day’s filming was finished, Wayne flew in his private plane to LAX, where he was met by a limo and driven directly to the Beverly Hills Hotel. His third wife, Peruvian-born Pilar Pallete, and their three children, Aissa, fourteen, John Ethan, eight, and Marisa, three, were already there, waiting for him.
¹
They had arrived earlier in the day and checked into two of the hotel’s exclusive private bungalows, one for Wayne and Pilar and one for the kids. A bungalow over was an already sloshed Richard Burton and his wife, the equally inebriated Elizabeth Taylor.

Wayne and Pilar spent a quiet night together, and the next morning he was driven alone downtown to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to rehearse for that evening’s big event. His arrival drew the biggest reaction so far from the fans already filling in the bleachers on either side of the red carpet, some arriving at daybreak to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars. They didn’t stop screaming, mostly positively, for Wayne from the time he emerged from the limo until he passed through the private entranceway of the Pavilion. Someone in the bleachers held up a sign that read
JOHN
WAYNE
IS
A
RACIST
. If he saw it, he showed no visible reaction.

After being made up in his dressing room and running through his paces—where to go, where to stand, what hand to use to accept the statuette if he won, which side of the stage to exit—there were still a couple of hours to go before showtime. He lingered backstage, an informal schmooze space for nominees and friends, to see who else had arrived. Fueled now with drink, he told all the stars there who were interested, and the few who weren’t, that he didn’t think he had any chance in the world of winning. For one thing, he went on, he was too old, that the Academy preferred younger winners to keep bringing new audiences to the movies. For another, in a Hollywood that was making
Easy Rider
and
Midnight Cowboy,
his films had gone out of fashion.

He hated both of those pictures. Their drug-taking, antiestablishment themes, and, to him, glorification of homosexuality were all the proof he needed that he and his MPA gang had won the political battle against Hollywood’s “Commies” but had lost the moral war.
Easy Rider
was “perverted” and
Midnight Cowboy
“a love story about two fags . . .” And what did
Midnight Cowboy
have to do with anything about cowboys anyway? Always polite, when Wayne ran into Dustin Hoffman backstage he graciously told him that he enjoyed his performance in the film.

As for his own in
True Grit,
it was, as far as he was concerned, essentially the same character he’d played since John Ford’s 1939
Stagecoach
some thirty years earlier, the only difference being that he was older. They hadn’t given him an Oscar for that one, and he figured they wouldn’t give it to him now.

There were two more rehearsals, for lights, cameras, and sound. By 2:00 in the afternoon, as the dancers, techies, camera operators, lighting focusers, and stage managers with earphones and clipboards crisscrossed the stage, Wayne found himself alone in the crowd. His mood brightened at six when Pilar arrived. She had left the kids with a sitter at the hotel thoughtfully provided by the Academy, which frowned upon children backstage during the big night. He saw her and smiled, the familiar grin that buried his eyes inside a squint and spread out and flattened his thin-lipped face. He swooped Pilar up in his arms the way he once famously had Maureen O’Hara in John Ford’s 1952
The Quiet Man,
and the young Natalie Wood in Ford’s 1956
The Searchers,
and carried her that way back to his private dressing room. He poured them each a drink as they patiently waited for the stage manager to knock on his door, open it halfway without looking in, call “places,” and shut it behind him.

The telecast began promptly at 7:00 Eastern Standard Time. The live TV show opened with a filmed montage of Hollywood’s greatest all-time stars, after which Gregory Peck marched onstage, his eyes ringed with glasses, and in his stentorian voice introduced each of that night’s nominees, as they walked out and took a bow.

Wayne received the loudest ovation.

The last to take the stage was the show’s honorary host, Bob Hope (there was no single official host that year), wearing a patch over one eye to spoof Wayne’s performance as Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit
. The audience roared. It was the best indication yet that Wayne might at last win his longed-for and long overdue Oscar.

Wayne took Pilar to their seats on the aisle down front. Like all the major category nominees and their spouses or dates, they were placed close to the stage, the lesser ones put farther back. As the ceremonies rambled on, Glen Campbell, one of Wayne’s costars in
True Grit
, came out to sing the film’s theme, “True Grit,” one of the evening’s five songs nominated as “Best.” Campbell finished to a smattering of applause that sounded louder on TV than it did live, Wayne’s cue to quietly slip backstage and prepare for his entrance as a presenter for Best Cinematography.

When he walked back out, he received a standing ovation and waited for the audience to quiet down before he spoke. “I’m an American actor,” he said. “I work with my clothes on.” A few giggles, a bit of applause. No one was quite sure in this era when it had become fashionable for actresses to “go nude” in mainstream films where he was going with that. His comic timing was, as always, less than perfect. “I have to. Horses are rough on your legs and your elsewheres.”
Ah.
Laughter sprinkled throughout the house. He then opened the envelope and announced the winner, Conrad Hall, for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. Soon after he presented the golden statuette to Hall, the two left together, stage right. During a commercial break in the action, Wayne was escorted back to his seat.

Almost at the end of the four-hour-plus marathon, it was after eleven in New York, well beyond prime time, the Best Actor award was finally presented. The winner of the previous year’s Best Actress Oscar, Barbra Streisand, handed it out. Streisand, sparkling in pink, after smiling and flitting around the stage in a grand star sweep, read the names of the nominees. Only three were actually present, and each had a TV camera trained on him. Jon Voight was standing in the wings, Richard Burton was in his seat looking supremely uninterested. Wayne, seated not far away from Burton, squeezed Pilar’s hand. Babs teased the audience by opening the envelope as slowly as possible, looking at the name, and then saying, “I’m not going to tell you!” A light rumble of impatience rippled through the audience before she belted out in show-stopping ballad mode “
JOHN WAYNE IN ‘TRUE GRIT’!”

He bolted out of his seat, propelled as much by shock as glee. He unbuttoned his jacket as he walked briskly to the stage, no sign of his famous, oft-parodied pigeon-toed small-step gait. Standing at the microphone, he looked a bit heavy, his unnaturally brown toupee sitting on his head like a muskrat, giving Wayne’s face an oddly unnatural box shape. He kissed Streisand lightly on the cheek without looking at her as she handed him his award, and then let out a breath-filled “Wow” filled with a lifetime of hopes, dreams, frustrations, and accomplishments. He lightly wiped a line of sweat from below his right eye with the knuckle of a bent forefinger and said, “If I’d known that, I would have put that patch on thirty-five years earlier.” He waited for the genuine laughter to die down, then continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m no stranger to this podium. I’ve come up here and picked up these beautiful gold men before, but always for friends. One night I picked up two—one for Admiral John Ford and one for our beloved Gary Cooper. I was very clever and witty that night, the envy even of Bob Hope, but tonight I don’t feel very clever, very witty. I feel very grateful and very humble, and owe thanks to many many people. I want to thank the members of the Academy; to all you people who are watching on television, thank you for taking such a warm interest in our glorious industry. Good night.”

That was it. Short and sweet, no long and meaningless list of people to thank that nobody knew or cared about. As he stepped away from the mike, the music came up and Streisand, who had been standing behind and to the left, took him by the arm, and led him off stage right, to a career’s worth of resounding applause.

After, Wayne spent two hours patiently answering questions for the press and posing for the paparazzi, with and without Pilar. Then they were off to the traditional Governor’s Ball, the most prestigious party of the night. They didn’t get back to the Beverly Hills until nearly one
A
.
M
.

Burton, meanwhile, empty-handed, had left immediately after the ceremonies with Taylor, and the two went straight back to the hotel, skipping all the parties, preferring to be alone, where they could drink, piss, bitch at, and moan to each other.

A little after one o’clock in the morning a pounding came on the Burtons’ door. When neither one opened it, fear washing over them in this era of Charles Manson paranoia, Wayne, alone now and completely wasted, kicked it in as easily as if it were a stage prop. A stunned and frightened Burton and Taylor clutched at each other as they stared at him in silent disbelief. A grim-looking Wayne walked over to Burton, held out his Oscar stiff-armed like he was ready to tackle someone with it, and said, slowly, in that each-word-is-a-sentence style of his, “You should have this, not me.”

After that, the mood changed. All three stayed up the rest of the night, drinking until dawn, schmoozing and laughing and telling stories, along the way Burton confessing he was certain he would never win an Oscar, Wayne assuring him his day would come (it never did).

The next morning Wayne and Pilar and the children got up early and were driven to the airport for the flight back to Old Tucson. Playtime was over and for Wayne there were still a few more miles of film to shoot before he slept.