John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [174]
“Then when he got involved with Pat, I think his children by Pilar had trouble accepting it. And it’s understandable that they had trouble accepting that their mom and dad were no longer together, without having to come to terms with the fact that their father had a new woman in his life.
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“What I can say for certainty about Duke is that he had a great capacity to love. He loved his friends and if you were a friend of his, you could do no wrong and he’d do anything for you. He loved all his children, and to him they were everything. And then there were the women in his life. I don’t think he ever stopped loving Josephine, although it had more to do with respect and admiration. In most men—in most people—that would have been enough for an ex-spouse. But with Duke it was a kind of love.
Pilar he never stopped loving. Of that I’m sure. But they had reached the point where they couldn’t get on, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Then along came Pat and she made him feel young and vibrant again. She loved him, not because he was John Wayne, but because he was a man called Duke, and she loved him for all his virtues and in spite of his vices. I believe he loved her because she loved him for himself. But I don’t think it would have lasted had he not died as soon as he did. And it wouldn’t have been either Pat’s fault or Duke’s fault. It would have been because she was his secretary, and you cannot have a lasting relationship between a man and his secretary. But for the time he had left, she was great for him.
“For a while Duke was torn between his feelings for Pilar and his feelings for Pat. He later told me he was in turmoil because he was prepared to make the effort to try for a reconciliation with Pilar, but he had also fallen in love with Pat and didn’t want to lose her. He told me that when he went back to Newport [after Brannigan] he and Pilar discussed reconciliation. But they were just beating their heads against a wall.”
According to Pilar’s book, this last attempt took place over dinner in a restaurant. When Pilar offered Duke a divorce, he told her, “I don’t want a divorce. What the hell gave you an idea like that?”
She asked him bluntly if he was in love with Pat and, according to her account, he answered, “Of course not. She’s my secretary—
that’s all.”
“Then why did you take her to Paris?” Pilar challenged him.
He responded with, “Why the hell did you leave London ahead of schedule?”
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As Claire Trevor said, they were beating their heads against a brick wall until, finally, as reported by Pilar, Wayne said, “We have to face it. Our marriage is over.”
What had begun as a “fling” during McQ had become a real love affair during Brannigan.
McQ, released in February 1974, did not do particularly well, taking just $4.1 million domestically. I am sure that had Wayne known that his attempt to emulate Dirty Harry would fail, he wouldn’t have done Brannigan, because, although it was a better picture than McQ, it did even worse at the box office, making less than $4 million. Henry Hathaway recalled, “I thought that was the end of his career. There was no way Wayne was going to become a character actor, but there seemed nothing for him at his age. And he really was gradually becoming unwell.
“Westerns had literally bitten the dust—at least, the kind Duke and me used to make. We’d both struggled in recent years. That’s what happens in life and especially in movies. Clint Eastwood had come along and he was the only one making good Westerns, and he could also play a cop like Dirty Harry, but Duke couldn’t compete.
“So I thought Duke had had it. Then I got a call from Hal Wallis in 1972, saying he wanted to do a sequel to True Grit. Duke was all for it, and Wallis had got Katharine Hepburn to be in it too.