The night before I was scheduled to interview John Wayne, yes THE John Wayne, I couldn't sleep. My eyes got puffier with each tick of the clock. By three a.m. I thought about putting cucumber slices on my baby blues so they wouldn't look like Florida oranges the next day.
"You're to meet America's Legendary Hero in Newport Beach in a few hours," my brain screamed. "You look like Mr. Magoo with a hangover. Cucumbers! Now!"
By ten o'clock the next morning, I stood at John Wayne's front door, puffy eyes and all, so nervous that it took both of my hands just to ring the doorbell.
I expected a servant to answer, a butler or his housekeeper. That didn't happen. The Duke himself opened the door and smiled down at me. Down, because he was really, really tall. I felt like a Munchkin.
Tucked under his left arm, he held a bug-eyed Chihuahua, an early version of Taco Bell Dog. It glared at me with lips curled back to show his tiny razorblade teeth. He was obviously not glad to see me. I looked at the big guy cradling a minuscule, snarling pup and I thought to myself, Annie Leibovitz would kill to take this photo.
"Hi," he said. "I'm John. Come on in." I had an overwhelming urge to respond, "Well, howdy there, Pilgrim." Thank the lord I resisted.
After following him to his living room, a comfortably large area as unpretentious as the man himself, I declined his offer of coffee. My hands were shaking as if I'd had a sudden onset of the D.T.s. God forbid I should spill java all over his antique oriental rug – definitely not the professional image I hoped to project.
Previously, John Wayne had agreed to deliver the keynote address at the National Conference of Student Union Directors and Programmers to be held in Washington, DC. As convention and workshop coordinator, I told him about the piece I planned to write in order for him to know that it would be published in the association's literary magazine. I also said that we planned to present him with the Actor of the Century Award. He was mighty happy about that.
"I want to write some personal stuff about you that can't be found in your official bio." I prayed that he wouldn't ask me to be more specific. Unfortunately for me, God must have been brunching it that day with Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer because he didn't get the memo.
"What sort of personal stuff," he asked a nano-second after the words had left my lips.
"Uh, well, like, um, how did "The Duke" become your nickname?" I could not have asked a question more lame than that. Duh. He laughed as if he'd expected the question. Apparently, it was the one he was always asked, and I felt like kicking myself for not being more creative.
"Well, Little Lady, there have been a bunch of stories told about that. One was that I played the role of a duke in a school play, which I never did. Another report said I was descended from royalty! That was all a lot of rubbish. Hell, the truth is that I was named after a dog!"
While researching, I had read about his dog, but I hung onto his every word he spoke as if being named for a dog was news to me. I wouldn't have stopped him from telling this story if a tsunami was bearing down on us.
"When I was a kid, I had an Airedale dog named Duke," he said. "That dog followed me everywhere. I delivered newspapers on my bike and when the Glendale firemen would spot us they'd say, ‘Here comes Big Duke and Little Duke.' The rest is history."
I sat back to peek at my notes in hopes of finding a sensible question to ask so the man wouldn't think I was a total idiot.
He seemed to pick up on my state of mind and it made him grin. Clearing his throat, he said, "Hey, I've been thinking about this keynote thing I agreed to do, and to tell you the truth it's a bit of a concern. It's tough getting through to a bunch of hotheaded college kids. The Duke wouldn't want to get booed off the podium."
This is a good place to interject that, throughout the interview, John Wayne almost always referred to himself in third person. The Duke this, The Duke that, The Duke whatever. I halfway expected his clone to pop out of the woodwork.
It surprised me that John Wayne, beloved icon, would ever think an audience might not like him, so I asked him about it. He thought for a minute and then began to tell me about an experience he'd had while speaking to a group of students from USC, his alma mater.
"It was just after my movie The Green Berets was released and well, kids at that time were protesting the Vietnam War and the government, too. The Duke delivered his speech and then skedaddled off the stage before they could start throwing rotten tomatoes."
"Seriously?" I imagined a full-scale anti-war demonstration complete with the National Guard, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox fighting each other for an exclusive. In my mind's eye I saw helicopters swooping down and landing on the rooftop of Bovard Auditorium in order to spirit him away. I "saw" him brush off bits of tomato from the brown tweed blazer with leather patches on both elbows the very one he was wearing that day for our interview.
He noticed my expression and laughed. "Turned out, I was worried for nothing. Those kids applauded for such a long time after I left the stage that The Duke had to get on back out there and talk for another 15 minutes." He nodded. "They were good kids."
I assured him that the students he would interact with in Washington would be thrilled to hear him speak and that I was certain he would charm them even more than he had done at USC.
Quite suddenly, he got up from the sofa. "You'll have to excuse me for a minute. There are some fans on that sightseeing boat coming up the waterway. They'll expect The Duke to come out there and wave." He started for the sliding glass doors that led to a large terrace, then stopped. "Almost forgot to put on the ol' rug. The fans don't want to see a baldheaded Duke."
He put a wide grin on his face, slapped on his toupee and casually strolled out to greet his admirers. I watched him smile and wave, looking more like the Duke of Windsor than the Duke of Newport Beach. When the boat hovered in front of his house, his fans waved back, cheered and snapped photos, then it floated on down the waterway to gawk at another celebrity home.
"The Duke never likes to disappoint his fans," he remarked when he returned.
He led me through his enormous trophy room and talked about the various awards he had been given, including the Best Actor Academy Award, won for his performance in True Grit. After we had circled the room and I had oohed and aahed way too much, I found myself looking at what appeared to be a jar filled with black shoe polish.
"Hey, Duke! What's this jar of shoe polish doing here?" By that time, I felt so comfortable around him that calling him Duke seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
"Well, I'll tell you, Little Lady." He picked up the jar. "What you see right here is a little bit of black gold from The Duke's first oil well."
When I looked at it more closely, it still looked like black shoe polish.
After another hour or so of Q & A, he walked me out to my car and hugged me. Yowzer! John Wayne gave me a hug. I had gathered enough personal info that day to write what I hoped would be a good piece. Dog. Wig. Fans. Oscar. Jar of black gold. I thanked him for the interview and told him how much I enjoyed our visit and that I looked forward to seeing him again in DC.
With a grin lighting up his face, he threw me a rephrased Rooster Cogburn line of dialogue that gave me a grin even bigger than the one he wore: "Well, come on back and see a fat old man some time!"
While driving back to Los Angeles that day, I began to memorize the John Wayne I had seen holding a Chihuahua under his arm; the John Wayne who referred to himself in third person, and the John Wayne who took the time each day to greet boatloads of admirers with a big smile on his face and a wave of his hand.
Those images are the ones I will hold onto until the day I meet up with The Duke at that Big Fan Roundup in the Sky.