In the early afternoon they began the last scene, and although they spent as much time as possible setting it up, the moment finally came when there was nothing to do but shoot it. “Second team out, first team in, doors closed’’ the assistant director shouted one last time. The stand-ins walked off the set, John Wayne and Martha Hyer walked on. “All right, boys, silencio, this is a picture.” They took it twice. Twice the girl offered John Wayne the tattered Bible. Twice John Wayne told her that “there’s a lot of places I go where that wouldn’t fit in.” Everyone was very still. And at 2:30 that Friday afternoon Henry Hathaway turned away from the camera, and in the hush that followed he ground out his cigar in a sand bucket. “O. K.,” he said. “That’s it.”
Since that summer of 1943 I had thought of John Wayne in a number of ways. I had thought of him driving cattle up from Texas, and bringing airplanes in on a single engine, thought of him telling the girl at the Alamo that “Republic is a beautiful word.” I had never thought of him having dinner with his family and with me and my husband in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park, but time brings odd mutations, and there we were, one night that last week in Mexico. For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.
And then something happened. Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the dream, and I could not think why. Three men appeared out of nowhere, playing guitars. Pilar Wayne leaned slightly forward, and John Wayne lifted his glass almost imperceptibly toward her. “We’ll need some Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table,” he said, “and some red Bordeaux for the Duke.” We all smiled, and drank the Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table and the red Bordeaux for the Duke, and all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: “The Red River Valley” and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.
1965
Where The Kissing Never Stops
outside the monterey county courthouse in Salinas, California, the Downtown Merchants’ Christmas decorations glittered in the thin sunlight that makes the winter lettuce grow. Inside, the crowd blinked uneasily in the blinding television lights. The occasion was a meeting of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, and the issue, on this warm afternoon before Christmas 1965, was whether or not a small school in the Carmel Valley, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, owned by Miss Joan Baez, was in violation of Section 32-C of the Monterey County Zoning Code, which prohibits land use “detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County.” Mrs. Gerald Petkuss, who lived across the road from the school, had put the problem another way. “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this,” she asked quite early in the controversy. “Why they aren’t out working and making money.”
Mrs. Petkuss was a plump young matron with an air of bewildered determination, and she came to the rostrum in a strawberry-pink knit dress to say that she had been plagued “by people associated with Miss Baez’s school coming up to ask where it was although they knew perfectly well where it was— one gentleman I remember had a beard.”
“Well I don’t care” Mrs. Petkuss cried when someone in the front row giggled.”I have three small children, that’s a big responsibility, and I don’t like to have to worry about…” Mrs. Petkuss paused delicately. “About who’s around.”
The hearing lasted from two until 7:15 p. m., five hours and fifteen minutes of participatory democracy during which it was suggested, on the one hand, that the Monterey County Board of Supervisors was turning our country into Nazi Germany, and, on the other, that the presence of Miss Baez and her fifteen students in the Carmel Valley would lead to “Berkeley-type” demonstrations, demoralize trainees at Fort Ord, paralyze Army convoys using the Carmel Valley road, and send property values plummeting throughout the county. “Frankly, I can’t conceive of anyone buying property near such an operation,” declared Mrs. Petkuss s husband, who is a veterinarian. Both Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss, the latter near tears, said that they were particularly offended by Miss Baez’s presence on her property during weekends. It seemed that she did not always stay inside. She sat out under trees, and walked around the property.
“We don’t start until one,” someone from the school objected. “Even if we did make noise, which we don’t, the Petkusses could sleep until one, I don’t see what the problem is.”
The Petkusses’ lawyer jumped up. “The problem is that the Petkusses happen to have a very beautiful swimming pool, they’d like to have guests out on weekends, like to use the pool.”
“They’d have to stand up on a table to see the school.”
“They will, too,” shouted a young woman who had already indicated her approval of Miss Baez by reading aloud to the supervisors a passage from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “They’ll be out with spyglasses.”
“That is not true,” Mrs. Petkuss keened. “We see the school out of three bedroom windows, out of one living-room window, it’s the only direction we can look”
Miss Baez sat very still in the front row. She was wearing a long-sleeved navy-blue dress with an Irish lace collar and cuffs, and she kept her hands folded in her lap. She is extraordinary looking, far more so than her photographs suggest, since the camera seems to emphasize an Indian cast to her features and fails to record either the startling fineness and clarity of her bones and eyes or, her most striking characteristic, her absolute directness, her absence of guile. She has a great natural style, and she is what used to be called a lady. “Scum,” hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as “a veteran of two wars” and who is a regular at such meetings.”Spaniel” He seemed to be referring to the length of Miss Baez’s hair, and was trying to get her attention by tapping with his walking stick, but her eyes did not flicker from the rostrum. After a while she got up, and stood until the room was completely quiet. Her opponents sat tensed, ready to spring up and counter whatever defense she was planning to make of her politics, of her school, of beards, of “Berkeley-type” demonstrations and disorder in general.
“Everybody’s talking about their forty- and fifty-thousand-dollar houses and their property values going down,” she drawled finally, keeping her clear voice low and gazing levelly at the supervisors. “I’d just like to say one thing. I have more than one hundred thousand dollars invested in the Carmel Valley, and I’m interested in protecting my property too.” The property owner smiled disingenuously at Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss then, and took her seat amid complete silence.