John Wayne's Arizona

John Wayne was a big man, 6-foot-4 and 225-plus pounds, big enough to fill a film frame and big enough to stand tall without shrinking to insignificance against the spires of Monument Valley, the red rocks of Sedona or the sky islands of southern Arizona. He cast a long shadow in other ways, too. John Wayne was still a young man when he emerged as an American legend, no less so now a hundred years after his birth on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa-than in his long film heyday. The landscapes and history of Arizona contributed much to both the man and the myth, and in Arizona he found pleasure and inspiration.

The movies first brought Wayne to Arizona at the dawn of his career. As the story goes, the famed director Raoul Walsh was looking for a male lead for the follow-up to his film In Old Arizona (1930), billed as the "first outdoor sound feature." On the 20th Century Fox studio lot, the director caught sight of a tall, slender young man named Marion Morrison working in the prop warehouse and doing bit parts and stunt work. Walsh recalled that he looked just right for the part. "To be a cowboy star, you've got to be 6-foot-3 or over," Walsh said. "You've got to have no hips and a face that looks right under a sombrero." The description fit Morrison perfectly, and the former University of Southern California football star got the lead in Walsh's movie The Big Trail. Walsh liked everything about the young man but his name, which, he protested, "sounds like a circuit preacher." Walsh and studio head Winfield Sheehan brainstormed, making lists of characters out of frontier history until Walsh hit on Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary War commander. "Not Mad Anthony," Walsh said in that eureka moment. "Just John. John Wayne."

Wayne soon found himself in the sand-dune country near Yuma, then, as now, a favorite spot for filmmakers seeking an authentic desert setting. He had done some early work on film crews there, but now, while waiting to take his place before the camera, he learned useful tricks such as knife-throwing. He took naturally to riding a horse, leading Walsh to conclude that he'd found a promising young star in Wayne. The movie flopped, and Wayne spent the next few years playing bit parts, including a boxer, an aviator, a railroad engineer, even the manager of a department store. Someone finally cast him as a cowboy, and he made 16 Westerns for Monogram Pictures as Singin' Sandy Saunders, the first singing cowboy in film history. Unfortunately, he couldn't carry a tune. He was eventually replaced by a fellow named Gene Autry, who knew his way around both a song and a horse.

It wasn't until the end of the decade that Wayne earned a 'I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a hand on.' -John Wayne in The Shootist

major role in a Western of any quality, one filmed in southeastern Arizona's Peloncillo Mountains, in Texas Canyon between Willcox and Benson, and-famously-in Monument Valley. Based on the story of a perilous passage between Lordsburg and Tucson in the wildest of the Wild West days, Stagecoach cemented Wayne's reputation as a strong but sensitive-and eminently sensible-cowboy. The 1939 film, directed by the tough-as-nails veteran filmmaker John Ford, was nominated for an Academy Award (it lost to Gone with the Wind); it would also be the first of many collaborations between Ford and Wayne, many filmed in Arizona.

Ford's interest in the history of the West helped make Wayne the personification of the frontiersman. "I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a hand on," he famously said, speaking in character as gunfighter J.B. Books in Don Siegel's great film The Shootist (1976). "I don't do these things to other people. I require the same from them." Those resonant words are of a piece with the ones he spoke in Ford's 1948 film Fort Apache, playing a composite figure out of Arizona history, the cavalry officer Capt. Kirby York. This first film in Ford's "cavalry trilogy" stars the haunting Monument Valley landscapes just as much as any human actor. In the end, Wayne made 84 Westerns, many of them set or filmed in Arizona. (As for the rest of his films, he said, "I play John Wayne in pretty much every film I do, and I've done pretty well so far, haven't I?") The landscape, he said, was part of the story, and the story was part of the folklore of America, a story that bore retelling again and again, even when it sometimes reflected badly on its protagonists.

Wayne loved acting in Westerns. "You don't have too many worries about what to wear in these things," he said, tongue in cheek. "You can wear a blue shirt, or, if you're down in Monument Valley, you can wear a yellow shirt."

Monument Valley was John Ford's trademark setting, but before he filmed Stagecoach there it had provided the backdrop to only one other film, George Seitz's silent drama The Vanishing American (1925). Ford found the place after Kayenta-based rancher and trader John Wetherill heard Hollywood location scouts were poking around Flagstaff. Wetherill reported this to his friend Harry Goulding, who had a trading post on the other end of Monument Valley. Goulding immediately assembled a portfolio of photographs by Josef Muench, a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways, and took these images to Los Angeles. There, he wangled an appointment with Ford and showed him Muench's images of Monument Valley. Ford was instantly smitten, and so it was that he and John Wayne found themselves in that most rugged and striking of settings. "I have been all over the world," Ford recalled, "but I consider this the most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on Earth."

Other directors brought Wayne to other parts of Arizona. Rio Bravo (1959), with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, El Dorado (1967), co-starring Robert Mitchum, and Rio Lobo (1970), all directed by the peerless Howard Hawks, were among the many films that Wayne would make at the Old Tucson Studios. Andrew V. McLaglen's McLintock! (1963) found Wayne filming on the outskirts of Nogales and Patagonia, while seg-

ments of Henry Hathaway's ensemble film How the West Was Won (1962) were shot in Tucson, Oatman, Superior and the Tonto National Forest. And James Edward Grant's 1947 film Angel and the Badman showed off Sedona to the advantage of both the movie and the place.

Wayne's Arizona films weren't always Westerns. He played, perhaps improbably, a Roman centurion in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), shot in part around Page as the newly formed Lake Powell filled with water. Action sequences for the World War II drama Flying Tigers (1942) were shot around Flagstaff, which also figures in Mervyn LeRoy's light comedy Without Reservations (1946), pairing Wayne with Claudette Colbert.

Wayne's films enabled him to explore every corner of the state and prompted him to buy property in Arizona, including 4,000 acres at Stanfield, near Casa Grande, where he grew cotton and built a feedlot to accommodate prize Hereford cattle.

From the late 1950s until his death in 1979, Wayne was a familiar presence in western Pinal County, often entertaining guests and locals alike at the Francisco Grande Hotel or at area ranches. At about the same time, Wayne entered into a partner-ship and bought the 26 Bar Ranch on the grassy high plains near Eagar, a place also known for top-quality Herefords.

Wayne often stayed at Flagstaff's Monte Vista Hotel, where it's said that he reported seeing ghosts on several occasions.

He spent much time in the company of another Arizona legend, Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential campaign he vigorously supported. Goldwater returned the favor by nominating Wayne for a Congressional Gold Medal after his death: The medal reads simply, "John Wayne, American," wording suggested by his frequent co-star Maureen O'Hara.

Wayne spent warm winter days riding in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains while staying at Tucson's Hacienda del Sol, a favorite Hollywood retreat in the 1940s. He vacationed at several ranches near Wickenburg and the famed Rancho de la Osa just outside Sasabe, where Tom Mix and Zane Grey also spent time. Reportedly, he even inscribed his name on a wall of the Hannagan Meadow Lodge, high in the White Mountains, before an elaborate hand-carved mantel was installed over it. No one alive today, it seems, can say for sureand so far, no one has undertaken the hard work of dismounting the piece to check.

"Whether Wayne is looking at the land that might make a great ranch, or turning in the doorway to survey his true home, the desert, every gesture was authentic and a prized disclosure," writes the noted film historian David Thomson. That's exactly right. John Wayne found a second home, close to his heart, in Arizona. And though he has been gone for more than a quarter of a century, it seems entirely reasonable to say that John Wayne, larger than life itself, lives here still. AH