John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [185]
Ava Gardner told me, “Francis was on the so-called approved list, and he went—with Barbara, I think—and he told me that when he saw Duke lying in bed with tubes running through him and looking nothing like the man he’d once squared up to, he just cried. He kept saying, ‘I had no idea. I had no idea.’ ”
On Friday, 11 June 1979, the doctors told Duke’s children that the end was very near. Michael couldn’t be there, having to deal with lawyers. But all the other children were around his bed. Aissa took hold of her father’s emaciated hand. He stopped breathing. Patrick said, “Good-bye, Dad.” The time was 5:23 P.M.
Paul Fix told me, “A lot of his friends would have liked to have attended the funeral to say good-bye. But we weren’t invited. A lot of us were puzzled because Duke never made a secret of his final wish—that he be cremated and have his ashes scattered over the ocean. He said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t bury me in a box and put me in the ground for the worms. Let me become a part of the ocean.’
“He also wanted something engraved somewhere that said, ‘ Feo, fuerte, y formel,’ which was Spanish for ‘ugly, strong, and with dignity.’ He wanted that as his epitaph. But he never got it.”
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Duke was buried on 15 June 1979, in an unmarked grave on a hilltop in Pacific View Memorial Park, overlooking the ocean. Only his family know where their father’s remains lie because, understandably, they didn’t want his grave to be desecrated. But the fact that he was buried instead of cremated further increased the tension between the two sets of children.
Michael said that his father had died a Catholic, and had received a Catholic funeral. Aissa said her father’s wishes to be cremated were ignored.
I have no doubt that both sets of children had the best interests of their father at heart. I never met Aissa or Pilar, but their respective memoirs seemed to expose the delights and the despair of being daughter and wife of John Wayne. Michael and Patrick I did meet, and despite Duke’s lifelong belief that none of his children by Josephine had ever forgiven him for leaving them and their mother, all I saw and heard convinced me that Michael and Patrick loved their father, respected him, and never had a bad word to say about him. In fact, I would say that their father was their role model, and each of them had certain of their father’s attributes. Michael is the tough man, making tough decisions. Firm, but gentle. Patrick has the humor of his father. He is the actor rather than the businessman.
He developed a certain kind of grace in his movements, a trait he learned from his father. Somehow, combined, Michael and Patrick are the two sides of their father.
But there is no other John Wayne.
Among the many tributes I was able to acquire was one from a star who never worked with Wayne, who barely knew him, and had no anecdotes to offer, only his heartfelt personal tribute. Charlton Heston told me, “He created a permanent niche for himself as the American film actor. Beyond any question, beyond any doubt, John Wayne is the absolute all-time movie star.”
John Wayne was a legend long before he died in 1979 at the age of seventy-two. In a career spanning more than fifty years he made almost two hundred films. Most of those films, even by his own admission, were lousy. His more successful films were often little more than moderately good. The number of outstanding films he 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 349
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made can be counted on two hands. Some might argue they could only be counted on one hand. And yet he became a living legend.
There were many critics who said he couldn’t act. Yet he has somehow managed to top poll after poll of the all-time top movie stars. He came to be looked upon