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Nobody knew it then, but Rita Hayworth would suffer from Alzheimer’s, and some who had worked with Hayworth and later criticized her for her behavior have suggested that it is possible that she was in the early stages of that disease. Henry Hathaway, however, was convinced the troubles she caused—and suffered—

were of her own making. In 1981, he commented, “Rita didn’t have Alzheimer’s until recently. We’re talking about almost twenty years ago when we made that fucking circus picture. It’s sad to say, but Rita was a faded film star who drank too much and thought she was above everybody else.

“She got the part because Samuel Bronston’s people insisted she was still a major attraction for European audiences. She also looked just old enough and Duke young enough for the two of them to be lovers. It would have looked stupid to have someone like Angie Dickinson, who’s the better actress, to have played that part.

“I always said to Duke, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could get rid of this fucking awful so-called climactic scene where Rita and Claudia [Cardinale] twirl about on the ropes?’ It was a terrible scene and it needed an aging movie queen who still had the figure. I said to Duke, ‘Let’s find some unknown aging actress who’s going to fat and cast her in the part. Then we can have her save you from the fire, and we could have her eaten by the lions, and that would be an exciting ending to the film.’ Duke wasn’t sure if I meant it, or if it would have been a good idea, but he said, ‘What the hell, we’re stuck with Rita. Let’s just finish the goddamn picture.’ ”

It was a long production, with some final scenes shot at Pinewood in England in the autumn—“Something to do with the deal with Rank,” said Hathaway—but the weather was so cold and damp, it 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 253

LIFE IS A CIRCUS

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made Wayne’s cough even worse. Pilar begged him to see a doctor but he refused.

With the last scenes of Circus World in the can, Duke and Pilar flew from London to Acapulco to meet the Wild Goose. By then, Wayne was coughing up blood.

Henry Hathaway found himself with a problem when Samuel Bronston told him that he’d made a deal to have Circus World presented in Cinerama. Hathaway told me, “I could have strangled Bronston. I said, ‘If you’d decided even halfway through the production, I could have put some exciting stuff in.’ I knew what people expected from a Cinerama film. I’d shot most of How the West Was Won. They have to have exciting high points filmed from the audience’s point of view, so they’d feel like they were on a runaway wagon or whatever. We had nothing like that, except where the ship overturns, which was effective in Cinerama. We could have made it the best Cinerama film since How the West Was Won.

Instead, the public must have felt cheated.”

As a Cinerama road-show production, Circus World did not do particularly well in America. In Britain, Rank had the good sense to change the title to The Magnificent Showman, and it did good business at the London Coliseum. But when it went on general release worldwide in 1964, it found its audience. It was Wayne’s only release of 1964, and it was successful enough to keep Wayne in the top ten American box-office stars.

It was a period of his life Duke recalled with irony. “I did Pappy’s last film which went nowhere and I was all wrong for it; I played a Roman soldier, and I was all wrong for it; and I did the worst circus film ever made, and thinking back, I have to concede that my life was like a fucking circus. But I’ll tell you something. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

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23

Licking the Big C

In 1964, Paramount wanted another picture from Wayne before he made one of his own pictures. They had In Harm’s Way for him, a large-scale drama set against the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Otto Preminger was directing, and Wayne’s costars included Kirk Douglas, Tom Tryon, and Patricia Neal.

Following a compulsory health check (which all