American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (50 page)

Rooster Cogburn is a washed-up U.S. marshal; his wife and child long gone, the only love he has left is for booze. When young Mattie Ross comes to him to catch the man who killed her father, she tells him he can do it because she knows he has “true grit.” He accepts the job and through it rediscovers his life and redeems his soul.

Wayne’s favorite scene in the film was the last, when he tells Mattie to “Come see a fat old man sometime” and then rides off on his horse and jumps a four-rail fence. Despite his missing lung, being grossly overweight, and sixty-one years old, he did the jump in one take with no stunt double. He meant to show the world that he was not just still alive but kicking, and Hollywood that he could still do the job.

Advance screenings went well, and word began to buzz through Hollywood that
True Grit
was a real winner. When it opened, June 12, 1969, the critics raved about it, and especially Wayne’s performance, and all was forgiven for
The Green Berets
. Charles Champlin, in the
Los Angeles Times,
wrote that “Rooster Cogburn sits like a crown atop [Wayne’s] forty years of playing John Wayne . . . until you’ve seen John Wayne with the reins in his teeth, you haven’t seen it all.”

Time
: “By growing old disgracefully as the fat, swaggering Rooster Cogburn, Wayne proves he can act—and solves his own senior citizen problem in one master stroke.”

The
New York Times
: “John Wayne has the best role of his career . . . the last scene in the movie . . . will probably become Wayne’s cinematic epitaph . . . This is only July but I suspect that
True Grit
will stand as one of the major entertainments of the year.”

And so it went, one critic after another heaping praise on Wayne. Soon enough there was talk of an Oscar for him, but Wayne brushed it off, not wanting to let the buildup get to him. The higher his expectations, he knew, the harder the fall would be when he lost, as he was sure he would.

ONLY A MONTH AFTER COMPLETING
True Grit
, Wayne made
The Undefeated,
directed by Andrew McLaglen, costarring Rock Hudson, one of the many heir apparents to Wayne’s throne. The only problem, as Wayne saw it, was Rock’s homosexuality, then unknown to the public. At first, he was reluctant to work with Hudson because of it, but as he got to know him, he was able to put his apprehensions aside and do some good work. He and Hudson played a lot of cards together between scenes and by the end of filming had forged the unlikeliest of friendships. It did a lot for Wayne to be able to cross this late-in-the-day divide. The film put a million dollars in his pocket, plus 10 percent of the profits after the film earned back its negative cost.

AFTER HIS ANNUAL CHECKUP, WHICH
showed no signs of his lung cancer having returned, Wayne and his assistant, Mary, flew to Durango to film
Chisum,
a Batjac production that brought him a million dollars from Warner Bros, $5,000 a week for expenses and 10 percent of the film’s profits.
Chisum
was originally commissioned by Twentieth Century–Fox, but after a series of big-picture failures (Robert Wise’s
Star
with Julie Andrews; Gene Kelly’s
Hello Dolly!
with Barbra Streisand), they put it into turnaround. Warner Bros immediately picked it up for distribution.

Filming ended in December 1969, just as Wayne got word he was going to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in
True Grit.

Chapter 26

Despite Wayne’s being at the top of his game, named the fourth-most-popular actor in Hollywood for the year 1969, the twenty-first time he’d made the list, the film he was working on,
Rio Lobo,
had an undeniably elegiac feel to it.
¹³⁴
When Wayne returned to the set after having won his Oscar for
True Grit,
everyone in the cast and crew wore an eye patch in honor of his first-ever Academy win.
Rio Lobo,
Wayne’s 161st feature film, and Hawks’s forty-sixth (that would be the last of his career), was essentially a remake of two of his earlier collaborations with Wayne,
Rio Bravo
and
El Dorado,
and the weakest of the trilogy. Produced and directed by Hawks and Batjac, and distributed by National General,
Rio Lobo
closed the door on big studio westerns. The film was released in December 1970 and barely made back its production costs; it competed with Arthur Hiller’s fabulously fatalistic college romance,
Love Story,
which earned the most money of any film at the box office that year; Robert Altman’s
MASH,
set in the Korean War but pointedly critical of the seemingly never-ending war in Vietnam; Michael Wadleigh’s documentary of the hippie-laden
Woodstock;
Bob Rafelson’s
Five Easy Pieces,
his postmodern look at the clash between existentialism and true love, starring Jack Nicholson; and Ted Post’s
Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
There were “war” pictures, too, but they looked like nothing that Wayne had ever made. The biggest, Franklin J. Schaffner’s
Patton,
reportedly Richard Nixon’s favorite film, was darker and more complex than most World War II films. And there was Brian G. Hutton’s
Kelly’s Heroes,
a heist movie disguised as a war film, with soldiers stealing gold from the Germans for their own use. While Wayne continued to promote the heroics of the Great American Western Hero, American films began to move in other directions, leaving him and his style behind. It was as if the Academy had said to him, Okay, here is your Oscar, now fade away.

DURING THE MAKING OF
RIO
Lobo,
Wayne had a tendency, as he had during
True Grit,
to show the younger actors in the picture how to act.
Rio Lobo
had originally been written for Wayne and Robert Mitchum, but the budget couldn’t afford both of them. The producers felt Wayne could carry the picture by himself, and hired Mitchum’s son, Christopher, for a much lower fee. Watching him try to pick up a pistol drove Wayne crazy. Finally he grabbed it from his hand and said, “If you’re gonna pick up that handgun, Chris, for Christ’s sake, don’t do it
that
way.” He then looked at Hawks and said, “Isn’t that right, Mr. Hawks?” “That’s right, Duke.” Wayne was always mindful of his directors, and never wanted to show them up on set.

While filming, Wayne received news that his brother had died of cancer. He had always taken care of Robert, who had lived off the Wayne name all his life. Wayne disappeared for a day before resuming work on the film.

Wayne’s next film was
Big Jake,
made by Batjac for Warner Bros, and directed by George Sherman. It starred Ethan in his first major role, as Wayne’s grandson. Michael Wayne produced, and Patrick Wayne had a featured role. The film also featured Christopher Mitchum again and reunited Wayne with Maureen O’Hara, although much of her role was left on the cutting-room floor. The film went nowhere at the box office, confirming Wayne’s fears that his days as an important filmmaker had ended with
True Grit
.

ALSO THAT YEAR, WAYNE’S MOTHER,
Mary, passed away after a long bout with lung cancer. She had moved to Long Beach after she and Clyde divorced, remarried, and lived there for the rest of her life with her second husband and Robert.

IN 1971, WAYNE GAVE AN
interview to
Playboy
magazine, of all places, a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred Q and A. Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s flamboyant and extremely liberal publisher, couldn’t have asked for a better subject. It was as if now that Wayne had his Oscar behind him, he could say what he really wanted to but couldn’t. Besides his harsh condemnation of
High Noon
and his unabashed pride in running Carl Foreman out of the country, the most shocking part of the entire interview was Wayne’s putting the blame on the U.S. military for the failure to end the war in Vietnam: “If Douglas MacArthur were alive, he would have handled the Vietnam situation [
sic
]. He was a proven administrator, certain a proven leader. And MacArthur understood what Americans were and what American stood for.” He also praised President Truman for his “great guts” in taking on the North Koreans. He blamed the State Department for holding Truman back from widening the war. He explained the reason he never wanted to run for office was that America was too much of a system of checks and balances. He claimed he was offered an opportunity to run as George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate on the 1968 American Independent ticket and turned it down for two reasons, the first being he was busy producing
True Grit
and, second, he was a solid, loyal Nixon man. He also blamed his politics as the reason for the critical failure of
The Green Berets
and referred to the
New York Times
critic Renata Adler as an “irrational liberal.” This water-cooler interview got the entire country talking about John Wayne again.

AFTER
BIG JAKE,
HE MADE
The Cowboys,
his only 1972 release (January), directed by Mark Rydell, at Universal, for which Wayne was paid $1 million and 15 percent of the net profits. The film was a hit, grossing over $7 million, and gave Wayne audiences everything they wanted from his movies—lots of action and a tough but understanding hero. In this film, he hires eleven young boys to help him drive his cattle four hundred miles from his ranch to the railroad. There are obvious echoes of
Red River
in the story, with Wayne helping these young boys grow to manhood, experiencing prostitutes, fights, thieves, and rustlers. The villain in the film is played by Bruce Dern, who shoots and kills Wayne’s character. When they were making that scene, Wayne turned to Dern, whom he didn’t particularly like, seeing him as part of the new wave of long-haired actors who had no respect for “old” Hollywood, and said, “Ooh, they’re going to hate you for this,” to which Dern said, “Maybe, but in Berkeley I’ll be a fucking hero.”

It was one of those shoots where Wayne didn’t bring his children along, perhaps because he was “killed” in the film and he didn’t want them to see that. When his young son Ethan asked when him he’d be back, Wayne answered using one of his favorite expressions, “In about three months, God willing and the river don’t rise.”

In some ways,
The Cowboys
is the best of Wayne’s post–
True Grit
films, suffering only from his advancing age that kept him from being more physical. As Rex Reed crudely put it in his review of the film for the
New York Daily News
: “Old Dusty Britches can still act!”

In the winter of 1972, Wayne made
The Train Robbers,
a Batjac production in association with Warner Bros, produced by Michael and written and directed by Burt Kennedy. Bill Clothier was the cinematographer. Shot in Durango, the film costarred Ann-Margret as a beautiful widow who enlists Wayne to recover a half million in gold stolen by her late husband, from the train that is now carrying it. To help him, he hires Ben Johnson and Rod Taylor. Bobby Vinton was added to the cast to attract younger audiences. The film climaxes in a grand shoot-out. After Wayne and company return the gold to Ann-Margret, she is promptly arrested by a Pinkerton man from Wells Fargo. She has made up the whole story to get Wayne and his boys to rob the train for her. The film came in at a negative cost of $3.5 million and was one of Wayne’s few post–
True Grit
failures.

He stayed in Durango to shoot his next film,
Cahill, U.S. Marshal,
without bothering to return home.

WAYNE AND PILAR FORMALLY SEPARATED
that same year, after having lived in separate bedrooms for the past three; Pilar had told the children it was because of Wayne’s snoring, but of course that wasn’t the reason. Wayne had been slowly drifting away from his family, even more so after his Oscar win. He was cranking out films and spending more and more time on the road, always leaving Pilar behind, he said, to run the household.

Fully recovered from her addictions, she soon developed interests of her own to try to create an identity separate and apart from her husband’s. Pilar did give him one final chance to save their marriage with an ultimatum, either go to marriage counseling with her or give her a divorce. He agreed to the counseling but quit after two sessions. To a friend, he said, “Hell, it’s over with Pilar.”

And there was something else. Wayne had a new woman in his life.

The story of his May-December seven-year involvement with Pat Stacy, an attractive, petite, thirty-year-old brown-haired divorcée from Indiana he had chosen to replace the retiring Mary St. John as his personal assistant, is a complicated one and difficult to parse. She was a graduate of Northeastern University, had moved to Los Angeles in 1968, and landed a job at Arthur Andersen & Co., Wayne’s new tax accountants. There she was handpicked by Mary St. John to be her eventual replacement. When Mary ran her choice by Wayne, he enthusiastically agreed. He liked what he’d heard and even more what he saw.

There is no question Pat Stacy was enamored of Wayne as well, and soon after became his constant traveling companion while Pilar remained at home. In 1973, he took
The
Wild Goose
up the coast to Seattle, to film
McQ,
a contemporary detective thriller directed by John Sturges along the lines of Steve McQueen’s 1968
Bullitt
. It was now easier for the sixty-six-year-old Wayne to get in and out of cars than on and off horses. Pat accompanied him on the trip. It was during the making of this film that she and Wayne became lovers. Stacy: “We finished shooting one day, and we all went to our staterooms. I was headed for mine when Duke put his arm around me and led me to his. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. I went with him. We had a great admiration and affection for each other, but I don’t think we said we loved each other.”