John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [136]
“How the hell could they have said he was healthy? Why didn’t they find the lung cancer he had?”
Duke arrived in Honolulu with Pilar and the children and checked into the Ilikai Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Apparently, Wayne did not look as healthy as Scripps had declared him. Tom Tryon told me later, “You know, Duke really wasn’t well. He looked ill. I was told that he’d been making one film after another for the past four years, and there was talk that his wife was getting concerned about him.
When I saw him, I could understand her concern. He was coughing badly. I mean, really awful. It was painful to see and hear, so God knows what it was like for him. He’d begin coughing and he wouldn’t stop, and it sounded just horrendous. He’d begin coughing 254
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in the middle of a scene and Preminger would have to stop filming.
If it was anyone else, Preminger would have yelled some kind of abuse at him, but he never yelled at Duke.”
Preminger had the reputation of being a bully, earning him the nickname “Otto the Ogre.” But he was not able to bully every actor.
Over two interviews with Kirk Douglas, the first in 1975 and the second in 1988, he talked about Wayne and the films they made together. “Otto Preminger was in private and on a social level a charming man. But when he was working, he was a bully. I always thought he looked and behaved like the sadistic Nazi commandant he played in Stalag 17. He never treated me badly on the set, and he didn’t treat Wayne badly, but he was cruel to Tom Tryon. Just unendingly cruel. He would come right up to Tom and scream until he was spitting saliva.”
In Harm’s Way was the first of three films Douglas made with Wayne. Said Kirk, “I like John Wayne. We don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but I’ve got tremendous respect for him. To me, Wayne is a real professional. He’s a much better actor than he’s often given credit for.
“Wayne has very prescribed concepts about what parts he should play, whereas I feel an actor should play anything. He didn’t like it when I played van Gogh in Lust for Life because he would have preferred me to be more like one of the boys, so to speak. He saw the picture at a special screening, and after it, he said to me, ‘Kirk, how in the hell could you play such a weak character like that?’
“I said, ‘What do you mean, John?’
“He said, ‘Fellers like us are the tough guys of movies. We’re in a certain class.’
“I said, ‘But John, I’m an actor. I try to play all different kinds of parts.’ ”
After Wayne’s death, Douglas told me, “He was the kind of star that really doesn’t exist anymore. He had an image and I think he believed in that image. He developed that character he played on screen and he sincerely believed in it.”
Tryon said, “I admired Duke for his determination and I liked him as a human being.”
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The last time Wayne had worked with Patricia Neal, they had not really warmed to each other. “When we made In Harm’s Way, it was the first time I’d seen Duke since we made Operation Pacific and I was surprised to find him a lot warmer, a lot more relaxed, and a lot more generous,” she said. “We had both been through a lot in our respective lives since then and perhaps that’s why we got along on our second picture. My husband [Roald Dahl] and I spent a lot of time with Duke and Pilar in Hawaii.”
When In Harm’s Way finished in August 1964, Pilar finally persuaded Duke to have another checkup at Scripps. He drove to the clinic alone, and when he later called to tell Pilar that he would be there for a few days for observation, she became understandably alarmed.
In fact, he was kept there for five days. He returned home and told Pilar, “I’ve got a little problem. I’ve got a spot on my lung. I’ve got lung cancer.”
Wayne was due to start filming The Sons of Katie Elder for Henry Hathaway.