Almost all the cast of Katie Elder had gone home, that last week; only the principals were left, Wayne, and Martin, and Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson, Jr., and Martha Hyer. Martha Hyer was not around much, but every now and then someone referred to her, usually as “the girl.” They had all been together nine weeks, six of them in Durango. Mexico City was not quite Durango; wives like to come along to places like Mexico City, like to shop for handbags, go to parties at Merle Oberon Pagliai’s, like to look at her paintings. But Durango. The very name hallucinates. Man’s country. Out where the West begins. There had been ahuehuete trees in Durango; a waterfall, rattlesnakes. There had been weather, nights so cold that they had postponed one or two exteriors until they could shoot inside at Churubusco. “It was the girl,” they explained. “You couldn’t keep the girl out in cold like that.” Henry Hathaway had cooked in Durango, gazpacho and ribs and the steaks that Dean Martin had ordered flown down from the Sands; he had wanted to cook in Mexico City, but the management of the Hotel Bamer refused to let him set up a brick barbecue in his room. “You really missed something, Durango” they would say, sometimes joking and sometimes not, until it became a refrain, Eden lost.
But if Mexico City was not Durango, neither was it Beverly Hills. No one else was using Churubusco that week, and there inside the big sound stage that said los hijos de katie elder on the door, there with the pepper trees and the bright sun outside, they could still, for just so long as the picture lasted, maintain a world peculiar to men who like to make Westerns, a world of loyalties and fond raillery, of sentiment and shared cigars, of interminable desultory recollections; campfire talk, its only point to keep a human voice raised against the night, the wind, the rustlings in the brush.
“Stuntman got hit accidentally on a picture of mine once,” Hathaway would say between takes of an elaborately choreographed fight scene. “What was his name, married Estelle Taylor, met her down in Arizona.”
The circle would close around him, the cigars would be fingered. The delicate art of the staged fight was to be contemplated.
“I only hit one guy in my life,” Wayne would say. “Accidentally, I mean. That was Mike Mazurki.”
“Some guy. Hey, Duke says he only hit one guy in his life, Mike Mazurki.”
“Some choice.” Murmurings, assent.
“It wasn’t a choice, it was an accident.”
“I can believe it.”
“You bet.”
“Oh boy. Mike Mazurki.”
And so it would go. There was Web Overlander, Wayne’s makeup man for twenty years, hunched in a blue Windbreaker, passing out sticks of Juicy Fruit. “Insect spray,” he would say. “Don’t tell us about insect spray. We saw insect spray in Africa, all right. Remember Africa?” Or, “Steamer clams. Don’t tell us about steamer clams. We got our fill of steamer clams all right, on the Hatari! appearance tour. Remember Bookbinder’s?” There was RalphVolkie, Wayne’s trainer for eleven years, wearing a red baseball cap and carrying around a clipping from Hedda Hopper, a tribute to Wayne. “This Hopper’s some lady,” he would say again and again. “Not like some of these guys, all they write is sick, sick, sick, how can you call that guy sick, when he’s got pains, coughs, works all day, never complains. That guy’s got the best hook since Dempsey, not sick.”
And there was Wayne himself, fighting through number 165. There was Wayne, in his thirty-three-year-old spurs, his dusty neckerchief, his blue shirt. “You don’t have too many worries about what to wear in these things,” he said. “You can wear a blue shirt, or, if you’re down in Monument Valley, you can wear a yellow shirt.” There was Wayne, in a relatively new hat, a hat which made him look curiously like William S. Hart. “I had this old cavalry hat I loved, but I lent it to Sammy Davis. I got it back, it was unwearable. I think they all pushed it down on his head and said O. K., John Wayne—you know, a joke.”
There was Wayne, working too soon, finishing the picture with a bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set. And still nothing mattered but the Code. “That guy,” he muttered of a reporter who had incurred his displeasure. “I admit I’m balding. I admit I got a tire around my middle. What man fifty-seven doesn’t? Big news. Anyway, that guy.”
He paused, about to expose the heart of the matter, the root of the distaste, the fracture of the rules that bothered him more than the alleged misquotations, more than the intimation that he was no longer the Ringo Kid. “He comes down, uninvited, but I ask him over anyway. So we’re sitting around drinking mescal out of a water jug.”
He paused again and looked meaningfully at Hathaway, readying him for the unthinkable denouement. “He had to be assisted to his room.”
They argued about the virtues of various prizefighters, they argued about the price of J B in pesos. They argued about dialogue.
“As rough a guy as he is, Henry, I still don’t think he’d raffle off his mother’s Bible!”
“I like a shocker, Duke.”
They exchanged endless training-table jokes. “You know why they call this memory sauce?” Martin asked, holding up a bowl of chili.
“Why?”
“Because you remember it in the morning!”
“Hear that, Duke? Hear why they call this memory sauce?”
They delighted one another by blocking out minute variations in the free-for-all fight which is a set piece in Wayne pictures; motivated or totally gratuitous, the fight sequence has to be in the picture, because they so enjoy making it. “Listen — this’ll really be funny. Duke picks up the kid, see, and then it takes both Dino and Earl to throw him out the door—how’s that?”
They communicated by sharing old jokes; they sealed their camaraderie by making gende, old-fashioned fun of wives, those civilizers, those tamers. “So Senora Wayne takes it into her head to stay up and have one brandy. So for the rest of the night it’s ‘Yes, Pilar, you’re right, dear. I’m a bully, Pilar, you’re right, I’m impossible. ’”
“You hear that? Duke says Pilar threw a table at him.”
“Hey, Duke, here’s something funny. That finger you hurt today, get the Doc to bandage it up, go home tonight, show it to Pilar, tell her she did it when she threw the table. You know, make her think she was really cutting up.”
They treated the oldest among them respectfully; they treated the youngest fondly. “You see that kid?” they said of Michael Anderson, Jr. “What a kid.”
“He don’t act, it’s right from the heart,” said Hathaway, patting his heart.
“Hey kid,” Martin said. “You’re gonna be in my next picture. We’ll have the whole thing, no beards. The striped shirts, the girls, the hi-fi, the eye lights.”
They ordered Michael Anderson his own chair, with “big mike” tooled on the back. When it arrived on the set, Hathaway hugged him. “You see that?” Anderson asked Wayne, suddenly too shy to look him in the eye. Wayne gave him the smile, the nod, the final accolade. “I saw it, kid.”
On the morning of the day they were to finish Katie Elder, Web Overlander showed up not in his Windbreaker but in a blue blazer. “Home, Mama,” he said, passing out the last of his Juicy Fruit. “I got on my getaway clothes.” But he was subdued. At noon, Henry Hathaway’s wife dropped by the commissary to tell him that she might fly over to Acapulco. “Go ahead,” he told her. “I get through here, all I’m gonna do is take Seconal to a point just this side of suicide.” They were all subdued. After Mrs. Hathaway left, there were desultory attempts at reminiscing, but man’s country was receding fast; they were already halfway home, and all they could call up was the 1961 Bel Air fire, during which Henry Hathaway had ordered the Los Angeles Fire Department off his property and saved the place himself by, among other measures, throwing everything flammable into the swimming pool. “Those fire guys might’ve just given it up,” Wayne said. “Just let it burn.” In fact this was a good story, and one incorporating several of their favorite themes, but a Bel Air story was still not a Durango story.