John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [184]
Oscar came to the Hollywood scene in 1928—so did I. We’re both a little weather-beaten, but we’re still here, and plan to be around a whole lot longer.”
He announced that the Best Picture of 1978 was The Deer Hunter, a film Wayne was not fond of, and made his way to the pressroom, to be greeted by many old friends, including Yul Brynner and Sammy Davis Jr.
Ava Gardner told me, “Sammy felt really bad because he’d given Duke a really tight hug, not knowing that Duke was in such terrible pain. I said to Sammy, ‘I’d bet Duke wouldn’t have missed that hug for anything.’ ”
John Wayne had just two more months to live. The details of his decline given to me by his friends are painful and emotional.
Maureen O’Hara recalled, “I spent three days with him at his house, and the whole time I never let him know how upset I was for him because I know he would have hated that. So I made him laugh 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 346
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as I told him stories, and we remembered some of our hair-raising adventures. But when I left . . . I knew I would never see him again.”
Claire Trevor said, “Milton and I arrived one Sunday and we were shocked to see how much more he had deteriorated since the Oscars ceremony. He could barely walk. It just killed me to see him like that.”
On 2 May 1979, Duke fell to the ground in agony. Ethan drove him straight to the UCLA Medical Center. There doctors discovered new cancer cells had spread, and they immediately operated to remove most of his colon. But it was all in vain, and within ten days his intestines were almost completely blocked. Duke was put on morphine intravenously and spent most of his remaining days unconscious with moments of semiconsciousness.
Barry Goldwater introduced a bill in Congress to authorize the minting of a special medal as a tribute to Duke. Since the Congressional Medal had been introduced in 1776, only eighty-seven people or groups had received it. On 23 May, Maureen O’Hara and Elizabeth Taylor flew to Washington to attend the hearings.
Many tributes were read out by Barry Goldwater; they had come from such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, and Katharine Hepburn, who wrote, “I understand that the United States Congress and our president are giving John Wayne a gold medal. Asked for a comment, I can only say with a heart full of love for all concerned, ‘About time.’ ”
The bill was passed unanimously, and it was decided that one side would bear a portrait of Duke as Davy Crockett, and on the other side would be a landscape of Monument Valley. Maureen O’Hara insisted that the inscription should read, “John Wayne, American.”
On 9 June, the archbishop of Panama arrived and Wayne was baptized into the Catholic Church. Michael declared that his father did it for his family because all his wives were Catholics, although Pilar had become a Christian Scientist.
The tension that had always existed between the two sets of Wayne children really began to show over the matter of their father’s bedside conversion to Catholicism. Aissa maintained her father was so opposed to organized religion that she couldn’t believe he would 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 347
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have gone through with the ceremony. She also said her father “was too drugged up to know a conversion was even being attempted.”
Claire Trevor said that it was a terrible time for the family. “Not only was their father dying, but rather than bringing his two sets of children together, it only served to widen the gap between them. I don’t know what was behind it all, but Michael, as the senior son and a fine man, liaised with the doctors, and he made all the decisions which I think the younger ones—Pilar’s children—took some exception to. Decisions were being made they didn’t agree with.
Guards were put outside his door and nobody but certain people—
approved by Michael, I suppose—were allowed to see him. I understand Pilar was not on that list.
“Neither