John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [155]
“When I called it a wrap, I knew I had a picture among all those reels of film.”
While Hathaway went to work on the editing and postproduction, Wayne took a month off and enjoyed Christmas 1969 at home with his family. Claire Trevor recalled, “When Christmas came around, the biggest kid in the house was Duke. He’d get upset if anyone else tried putting up the trimmings and the tree. He just loved to do all that. And he always made sure he had presents for everyone. In fact, everyone had more presents than they needed.
They say Christmas is for children. I always thought Christmas was just for Duke Wayne.”
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It was a particularly special Christmas that year, according to Duke: “I felt I’d finished a film that was my best in years, and that makes you feel pretty damn good. Just after Christmas I got a call from Hal Wallis to come and look at some of the footage [from True Grit] they’d assembled, and, wow! Hal was talking about Academy Awards and telling me this was the one. That was enough to send me off to Durango for my next picture [ The Undefeated], which I’d not really been looking forward to. The only problem I had was that I had to lose all the weight I’d gained to play Rooster, and that’s not easy for me over Christmas. But I did it because, I guess, I felt good about myself.
“I think on that one I just enjoyed the whole experience. Andy
[McLaglen] was directing and we had a lot of old friends in the cast like John Agar, Ben Johnson, Paul Fix, and Dobe [Harry] Carey.
And we had Rock Hudson, one of the most professional guys I ever worked with.”
For most members of the public, the revelation that Rock Hudson was gay only broke when he was dying from AIDS in 1985. But it wasn’t news to most in the business. Wayne obviously felt a need, in 1974, to quickly establish how much I knew before he spoke out of turn, asking me, “You know about Rock?”
I replied, “He’s a homosexual? Yes, I know!”
That opened up a whole side of Wayne I would never have expected to see. “Who the hell cares if he’s a queer? The man plays great chess. We had many a game up there in Durango. And what a good-looking man. I admit, I couldn’t understand how a guy with those looks and that build and the . . . manly way he had about him could have been a homosexual, but it never bothered me. Life’s too short. It wasn’t like some of his type who go around saying, ‘Poor me, I’m discriminated against.’ He just got on with his life in private, and I never cared to know about it. All I cared about was he was on the set on time every day, and at the end of the day he’d say,
‘Care for a little chess, Duke?’ and I’d say, ‘You wanna get beat again?’ ”
When I interviewed Rock Hudson in 1980, he told me, “I was grateful to Duke Wayne because my career was going down the toilet at that time. Then I get a call from Andy McLaglen, saying, ‘Me and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 291
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Duke Wayne want you to make a movie in Durango. Think you’re up to making a Western?’ I wanted to fall to the ground and give praise, but I didn’t want to appear desperate. I told them I’d be happy to join them in Durango and said I’d better get some practice getting on and off a horse. I was more used to getting on and off Doris Day. That sounds terrible, and you know what I meant. I said I did, and we got on well.” He went on to tell me, “What crap the film was, but what a great time I had doing it. It came out just after True Grit, and that made a lot of people go to see it. John Wayne was then the Hollywood legend, and I was on screen with him. The guy is an angel. He saved my life back then when no other filmmaker wanted to know me.”
The film was a typical 1960s John Wayne picture, with Duke as a former Union officer rounding up horses to sell to the army but ends up with his herd of horses in Mexico. There he crosses trails with Hudson as a Confederate colonel, who leads a party of around a hundred men, women, and children from the conquered South into Mexico. Making an unusual alliance, Wayne