John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [172]
“If you come to our good country, you’ll come and visit,” he said.
“Consider that an open invitation.”
“I will. Good-bye Duke,” I said.
“So long, Michael,” he said with gentle sincerity. “I’ll always be your friend.”
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It sounds unsettlingly sentimental, I know. But that was John Wayne.
When he’d arrived earlier in the year, I’d managed to get a signed photo—a priceless tangible memento. But the invitation to visit him and his declaration of friendship are two intangible gifts that I prize more highly than the signed photo.
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The Last Ride
Sometime in 1977 my path crossed with Douglas Hickox when he was in preproduction on Zulu Dawn. He asked me, “Did you know there was something going on between Wayne and his secretary Pat?”
I told him that John Sturges had said Wayne was having a fling with his secretary.
“That was no fling,” said Hickox.
I remembered Pat Stacy from the Brannigan set, although I never actually conversed with her. She wasn’t a great beauty by Hollywood standards, but she had a pleasant face, and seemed a nice lady. She was thirty-two in 1974, less than half Wayne’s age. At the time, it seemed to me, being a mere lad of twenty-one, something of a scandal. I was to learn that Pat brought great comfort to Wayne’s last years. But when their love affair first began, there was a great deal of heartbreak all round.
Hickox told me, “When we were filming Brannigan nobody asked Duke about Pat. But there were rumors. You’ve got to figure something’s happening when two people disappear to Paris on their own. That’s what Duke and Pat did in the middle of filming when we didn’t need Duke for a couple of days. Then Pilar and the children 323
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arrived and I don’t know what went on, but it made Duke pretty bad tempered for a while.”
I was still unable to believe that John Wayne had fallen for his secretary. As a young fan, I didn’t like to think of Wayne as someone with human needs and frailties. I was prepared to accept John Sturges’s theory of a simple “fling.”
“Anyway,” I told Hickox, “Pilar was the one who left Duke. He told me she had.”
Hickox said, “Duke told me he still loved Pilar. He never talked to me much about his private life.”
Many years later I would experience the trauma of divorce and the devastating effect it has on the children, which I mention only because I think it helps me to understand why Wayne’s problems, which were much bigger than mine, would have caused so much grief, and why smoke screens would have been set up.
What I was to discover, through the books by those involved and from speaking to people who knew Wayne well, was that all those people who had an emotional investment in John Wayne all came from different angles.
Pat Stacy wrote Duke: A Love Story, an account of her love affair with Wayne which impressed, among others, Wayne’s friend James Stewart, who called Stacy’s book “a warm, appealing story. It brings out in a very vivid way the warm, dedicated, generous, courageous aspects of Duke’s character. It pays honest and loving tribute to John Wayne.”
Even Maureen O’Hara said, “Pat has written of those years sensitively, with class and dignity and warmth.”
But Aissa, in her memoir John Wayne, My Father, thought Stacy had exaggerated her relationship with Wayne and virtually dismissed it. Pilar, in her book John Wayne: My Life with the Duke, wrote that when she arrived in London during production on Brannigan, Duke made it clear he wanted to start over again with her. When she asked him if he was in love with Stacy, he denied it, and when she offered him a divorce, he said he didn’t want one.
When she told him she was taking the children back to America, he treated her with “distant politeness.” Finally, he told her, “We both have to face it. Our marriage is over.”
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It isn’t difficult to understand why there were conflicting stories.
Wayne tried