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THE UNTOLD STORY

"I love Arizona," John Wayne told an Arizona Historical Society interviewer in 1970. Ever in character, his lean drawl unmistakable, the greatest big-screen cowboy in history wasn't just being polite. By then he'd starred in at least a dozen Westerns shot on location in Arizona, among them some classics; the state's backdrops had helped define his screen identity and had given him a boost at crucial moments. And here he was, back on the Old Tucson set to make Rio Lobo (his last Arizona film).

But film work only introduced Arizona to "Duke," as he liked to be called. His affection for the people and landscape here thrived more privately and was more real than any fictions on screen. He had close friends spread from Nogales to the Navajo Indian Reservation, was co-owner of one of the state's largest cotton-and-cattle operations, and came here often when he needed a dose of cherished apple pie à la mode or a getaway from the spotlights of Hollywood. In a sense, he relied on Arizona as his off-screen hideout, where it was easier for him to be a man instead of a looming celluloid image.

John Wayne was still trying to work himself out of hard times when he first showed up in Arizona. Rebellious as a boy in small-town Iowa and then on a rough homestead on California's Mojave Desert, he'd ridden boxcars running away from home. His family's desert farm had raised more rattlers than crops the stress had broken his parents' marriage and he'd put in two years at the University of Southern California only with the aid of a football scholarship (he got so desperate during football season that he sold his blood for spending money). He'd dropped out to toil as a propman and stuntman for movie studios. He relied on Arizona as his off-screen hideout, where it was easier for him to be a man instead of a looming celluloid image.

Then in 1929 he won a huge break, his first leading role, playing a buckskin-clad scout for a wagon train in the epic, The Big Trail. The film was shot where the landscapes were most Western: Wyoming's Tetons, Utah's Zion National Park, and the austere desert near Yuma, where Wayne lived in a tent and began his love affair with Arizona.

For the role, the six-foot-four novice actor learned to fake a fistfight, and he shed his given name, Marion Michael Morrison. (Marion, he said later, was "a very severe name to inflict on a boy.") Holding to a portion of his roots, he still preferred his nickname (the popular explanation: "Duke" commemorated an Airedale he'd had while growing up).

Moviemaking was wilder in those early days director Raoul Walsh lamented that the The Big Trail should've been retitled The Big Drunk. Weeks of imbibing by cast and crew climaxed the last night on the Yuma location: Indian extras in warpaint and costumes pulled an unscripted, well-lubricated raid, whooping and thundering around the set on horseback as they shot flaming arrows into the fake scenery and a train loaded with production gear.

Iron Eyes Cody, who became the most famous Hollywood Indian actor, worked on the film as a teenager and joined the raid, burning the baggage cars down to the axles and bombarding Anglo crew members with rubber arrows. "It was the wildest fun I think I've ever had in my life," he said.

Wayne was "a little too gone" and stayed in his tent drinking bootleg whiskey during the raid, according to Cody's autobiography, Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian. Years later Wayne told an interviewer that a jug passed around during a scripted campfire scene had been a little too realistic. His stomach queasy from a bad case of the turistas, he'd had to choke down "straight rotgut bootleg whiskey" while cameras rolled.

The fast-lane movie crowd molded young Wayne, or maybe he just fit in (he'd been into bootleg as far back as high school). As he went on to become the biggest box-office draw of all time, he indulged . . . well, John Wayne-size appetites: first and foremost for work, and then, after hours, for hard liquor by the quart, heaping platters of rich food (which his distinguished gut came to reflect), women (three wives and numerous affairs), tobacco (three to five packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day from the 1930s until his first bout with cancer in 1964), and for games and boyish pranks that hit like flaming arrows.

"He was a hell of a man," recalls Danko Gurovich, one of Wayne's oldest compadres in Arizona.

Though he lived within commuting distance of Hollywood, the actor kept coming to Arizona to make movies (see accompanyDuring story) and tend to his expanding business affairs and friendships here. Based on his bootprints in Arizona, it's easy to see why Wayne reflected once that he felt most comfortable portraying a man who had "only a little more good than bad in him."

The star liked to overnight at Gurovich's Copper Hills Motel in Globe, where he'd abscond out the back door of the kitchen with cases of lobster and shrimp and do anything else he could to get the goat of his drinking buddy and partner. Gurovich, now retired in Scottsdale, beams and says, "We argued like hell for years."

JOHN WAYNE ARIZONA

with cases of lobster and shrimp and do anything else he could to get the goat of his drinking buddy and partner. Gurovich, now retired in Scottsdale, beams and says, "We argued like hell for years."

As Wayne's movie income rose, his impulsive investments around the world often went sour: he lost millions in oil wells, fanciful subdivisions, ice-cream plants, a fleet of Panamanian shrimp boats, and schemes to mine Nigeria and the Belgian Congo (now Zaire).

In 1958 he got stuck with a failing cotton farm, 4,000 acres of sun-beaten dirt near Stanfield, west of Casa Grande. "A couple of promoters got him in there," Gurovich says. "Duke was nearly broke."

The farm wasn't bringing in more than a bale and a third an acre, and banks were about to repossess the harvesting equipment. Wayne asked around, and discovered the guy farming the next place over, Louis Johnson, was an agricultural maestro bringing in four bales an acre. He looked up Johnson; 15 minutes and a handshake later, the two were in business together.

It began with Johnson managing Wayne's acreage, and to spice up the deal, they had a side bet: if any year's harvest reached the whopping four bales an acre, Wayne had to buy Johnson a new Cadillac. If the yield came in under four bales, turnabout: Johnson had to buy Wayne a new Pontiac. Over the next 10 years, Johnson drove a succession of seven Caddies.

Down to his laconic drawl and listing walk, "Duke was just the same, sitting or walking through this room, The real-life Red River empire had its highest profile among cattlemen.

as he was on screen," recalls Johnson, now retired and living in the farmhouse that was the hub of the Arizona empire he and Wayne fathered: 14,000 acres of cotton around Stanfield, 50,000 acres (leased and titled) of prime White Mountains rangeland, and the largest privately owned feedlot (capacity 80,000 head) in the country.

Wayne was onto a good thing. He provided infusions of capital and left the business decisions to Johnson. Like any screen cowboy, "Duke called me 'partner,'" Johnson says. "I was the boss. He never interfered."

The partners named their combined holdings the Red River Land Co., after Wayne's cattle-drive Western filmed 120 miles south of Stanfield in the environs of Elgin. The real-life Red River empire had its highest profile among cattlemen, beginning with a 1962 buy out of the legendary 26 Bar ranch near Springerville, with its herd of registered Herefords descended from the famous Milky Way herd owned by the candy-bar family. Under Red River's rein, the herd grew to 1,500 head and flourished in reputation; yearlings were trucked to the feedlot by Stanfield and sold in an annual auction staged at the barn behind Johnson's house.

The first auction, in 1967, drew 600 buyers from around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; 86 head that would be used to seed other herds around the world brought a total of $165,383, and the top bull went for $16,000. Four years later, a onequarter interest in the top bull at the auction fetched $50,000 the projected $200,000 total for a hundred-percent interest was the highest price ever put on thehe two orchestrated an elaborate scheme that had Wayne begging to invest in a supposedly champion racehorse they owned.

breed, the American Hereford Association said at the time. For a dozen years, the Red River auction ranked among the top five Hereford sales in the world; it also was a gala social event, fueled by the pit-barbecuing of three-quarters of a ton of the most succulent Hereford; and the drawing card was John Wayne.

"My favorite food is beef. My favorite beef is Hereford. My favorite people are Hereford breeders," Wayne drawled into the mike to kick off the 1978 auction, when reported sales topped $651,000. Plenty of cattle were "sold in private, not run through the ring," Johnson adds, so the actual sales total was more than double that. ("It'd run between $800,000 and a million a year.") Duded up in maroon cowboy boots, black jeans, and a bola tie cinched by a gold-crusted silver dollar, Wayne moseyed among what had become a horde. Actual cattle buyers were outnumbered, reported The Phoenix Gazette, by gapers and snowbirds who "crowded corral rails, climbed atop them, even improvised ladders" trying to glimpse the Duke. "As Wayne moved around the corral, he gave a friendly, soft jab to the shoulders of a couple of boys, paid close attention to a number of the bulls being groomed, and time after time spit on the ground just like a real cowboy."

Wayne made a point of attending every auction. He'd come to Stanfield for a week or so that included Thanksgiving dinner at Johnson's house (in the beginning, the auctions were held on the Saturday after the holiday; later they were moved to February). He'd stay in his unpretentious bedroom down a hallway at Johnson's a plain bed, an old oak rocker, windows looking out on pecan trees. When accompanied by large family groups (his third wife, Pilar, and his seven kids and grandkids also were Arizona regulars), he'd rent a slew of rooms at the Francisco Grande, the resort outside Casa Grande built by the San Francisco Giants for spring training.

The night before an auction, it was hard for him to hide in the throng at the cocktail party and banquet in the Francisco Grande ballroom. "The old widows here in town used to love to go out there and dance with John Wayne," says John Hindman, a docent at the Casa Grande Valley Historical Society.

Anybody would've gotten gray hair trying to pace Wayne when he hooked up with Johnson and Gurovich for, say, a weekend in Nogales. Sometimes he'd step off his private jet in Phoenix and into Gurovich's pickup truck (it had the necessary headroom) or drive here from California in one of his trademark bubble-top Pontiac station wagons (ditto on the headroom). The three modern-day middle-aged musketeers would race down to Nogales, Wayne at the wheel. “We’d fly, literally fly. He drove crazy,” says Gurovich, who’d climb into the backseat, providing one was available, when he felt most threatened.

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A legendary and unrepentant speeder, Wayne shrugged off a number of tickets in Arizona, and there was a flap in Casa Grande over one being dismissed apparently in deference to his celebrity status. Pulled over for speeding by a motorcycle cop another time, he wound up backing the officer by investing thousands in a South American sugar-sack factory; the anecdote, recounted in several of his biographies, isn’t pegged to a location, and may or may not have occurred in Arizona. At any rate, it was one investment that reportedly paid off.

South of the border in Nogales, Sonora, the typical weekend gained momentum. “We’d have a few Friday night, the next day, the next night,” Gurovich says. The threesome would hire mariachis to trail them on the sidewalk, serenading them into saloon after saloon. “A couple of drinks? No, a hundred drinks. We’d get pretty slacko.” For the main entertainment wherever they moseyed, they wagered and tried to swindle each other on everything. Money was just for keeping score. Wayne once lured Gurovich and Johnson into investing $2,500 each in a bogus cattle deal; the checks came back endorsed “John Wayne, heh heh, the Danko Cattle Company.” “Duke was smart,” Gurovich says. “He knew we’d get in his pockets [exact revenge for that and other swindles] however we could.” And they did.

The two victims orchestrated an elaborate scheme that had Wayne begging to invest in Snicker Bar Dan, a supposedly champion racehorse they owned. To set up Wayne, over aperiod of weeks, they paid off bet after bet he made on races Snicker Bar Dan supposedly won. "Duke told everybody it was the greatest racehorse that ever ran," says Johnson. Finally they let Wayne pay them more than $12,000 cash for a one-third interest in the horse (once the bets they'd paid off were deducted, about half that was profit).

THE DUKE'S ARIZONA FILMS JOHN WAYNE

Everything about John Wayne was large, including his turns of fate. In a career that spanned five decades, he starred in more than 200 movies with a total gross of more than $700 million figures unequaled by any other actor.

Yet he had steep ups and downs. The Big Trail, his first Arizona film and his first starring role, was hailed by critics when it was released in 1930, but staggered and died at the box office. Demoted to roles in B-Westerns that were cranked out on California locations, Wayne was absent from Arizona for most of the next decade, except for starring in The Three Musketeers, a 12-episode serial made in 1932, for which the old territorial prison at Yuma was face-lifted to remotely resemble a French Foreign Legion fort. It took what is arguably Arizona's most dramatic landscape to trigger Wayne's rise to fame. In the summer of 1938, a bare-essential movie crew struggled north from Flagstaff in cars and trucks, 150 miles on wagon trails to the haunting buttes of Monument Valley. The primitive conditions and stark, spectacular terrain seemed to inspire Wayne, director John Ford, and the rest of the Stagecoach crew. Stagecoach garnered three Academy Awards and established the character Wayne was to portray pretty much fromthen on in major features: the strong-willed, competent, stoic action hero whose toughest conflict was with his own imperfections (which could read as a description of Wayne himself). Wayne and Ford continued to draw off the power of Monument Valley, shooting Fort Apache (summer of 1947), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (summer 1948) and The Searchers (1956). Harry Carey, Jr., who also appeared in Yellow Ribbon, remembers Wayne relishing the frontier aspects: "Duke was a superstar, a top draw by then. He had his own dirt-floor cabin [it might've been concrete], and showered under a cold bucket. He didn't mind at all. He took it in stride, like everything else." By the end of his fling with the valley, the star and landscape were irrevocably partnered in the public eye, a unified - if somewhat mythical symbol of the Wild West. It was probably inevitable that disagreements arose about just who had "discovered" the valley for film. Ford claimed posterity had him to thank, while the Gouldings (who ran the trading post in Monument Valley) said they journeyed to Hollywood with the stunning black-and-white photos of the valley taken by Josef Muench that caught Ford's eye to begin with. Wayne insisted the idea to film there was originally his. The question is somewhat moot since the valley had been on screen earlier. John La Due, an Arizona film historian, says Vanishing American, a silent Western starring Richard Dix, was shot in and around the valley in 1923, and before that, travelogues were made there. You get a feel for the man in the memories lingering from other Arizona films that honed Wayne's screen identity: Tall in the Saddle, shot in Flagstaff and on the outskirts of Tucson, 1944; Angel and the Badman, on location in Sedona and, briefly, Monument Valley, in the spring of 1946; then perhaps his finest film and his personal favorite, Red River, shot in the fall of 1946 in and around Rain Valley and Elgin, a pinch of settlement on the rolling grassland 60 miles southeast of Tucson. Local cowboys hired for Red River as extras and doubles, to tend stock and put on stampedes, say Wayne was as comfortable around them, maybe more so, as he was around the acting-school versions. On location for Angel, Wayne (who also produced the film) stayed in a little cabin at the Sedona Lodge, ate in the big mess then on in major features: the strong-willed, competent, stoic action hero whose toughest conflict was with his own imperfections (which could read as a description of Wayne himself). Wayne and Ford continued to draw off the power of Monument Valley, shooting Fort Apache (summer of 1947), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (summer 1948) and The Searchers (1956). Harry Carey, Jr., who also appeared in Yellow Ribbon, remembers Wayne relishing the frontier aspects: "Duke was a superstar, a top draw by then. He had his own dirt-floor cabin [it might've been concrete], and showered under a cold bucket. He didn't mind at all. He took it in stride, like everything else." By the end of his fling with the valley, the star and landscape were irrevocably partnered in the public eye, a unified - if somewhat mythical symbol of the Wild West. It was probably inevitable that disagreements arose about just who had "discovered" the valley for film. Ford claimed posterity had him to thank, while the Gouldings (who ran the trading post in Monument Valley) said they journeyed to Hollywood with the stunning black-and-white photos of the valley taken by Josef Muench that caught Ford's eye to begin with. Wayne insisted the idea to film there was originally his. The question is somewhat moot since the valley had been on screen earlier. John La Due, an Arizona film historian, says Vanishing American, a silent Western starring Richard Dix, was shot in and around the valley in 1923, and before that, travelogues were made there. You get a feel for the man in the memories lingering from other Arizona films that honed Wayne's screen identity: Tall in the Saddle, shot in Flagstaff and on the outskirts of Tucson, 1944; Angel and the Badman, on location in Sedona and, briefly, Monument Valley, in the spring of 1946; then perhaps his finest film and his personal favorite, Red River, shot in the fall of 1946 in and around Rain Valley and Elgin, a pinch of settlement on the rolling grassland 60 miles southeast of Tucson. Local cowboys hired for Red River as extras and doubles, to tend stock and put on stampedes, say Wayne was as comfortable around them, maybe more so, as he was around the acting-school versions. On location for Angel, Wayne (who also produced the film) stayed in a little cabin at the Sedona Lodge, ate in the big mess

When he died the U.S. Congress approved a commemorative John Wayne gold medal that portrays him riding at full gallop through Monument Valley.

The moment of revelation came at the annual cattle auction. Gurovich showed up wearing a Tshirt with OFFICIAL TRAINER, SNICKER BAR DAN imprinted on the back. "I told all the cattle people from 30 states what we'd done, and they thought it was great to put something over on Duke," Johnson says. Wayne didn't get wind that he'd been taken until he was on the podium, making his customary "American-flag speech," Gurovich says. "He was furious. I got off that podium and left in a hurry. . . . He had a hot temper, but he didn't hold a grudge. He forgave me the next morning. He actually cried, and said it wasn't the money, it was embarrassing him in front of all the cattlemen. He thought cattlemen were the finest Americans . . . But we kept the $12,000. Over the years, I think we all just about broke even gypping each other out."

Many of Wayne's pleasures were simple. Once he persuaded Gurovich and Johnson to drive with him all the way from Tucson to Nogales just to have a slice of hot apple pie à la mode at Zula's Cafe, one of his hangouts. The homemade pie went down fine. Then they drove back.

There were other quiet times, too. Five or six times a year, Wayne showed up at Johnson's for a visit and an update on Red River operations. He'd get up at dawn, down a cup of coffee, and he and his compadre would jump in the pickup and roar off, touring their holdings around Stanfield, often covering a couple hundred miles. "He loved to watch things grow," Johnson says. "He loved to meet people. He never did meet a stranger." Wayne would jump out of the pickup to jaw with anybody from the farm manager to an irrigator standing on a ditch bank. "He'd remember their names, too," Johnson says. Once when a new irrigation well came in, Wayne arrived out of the blue with a bottle of champagne to celebrate in the middle of a cotton field. Toward sunset Wayne would join Louis and Alice Johnson in their living room, relaxing over drinks and watching the sunset color Table Top Mountain. In the evenings, Wayne would instigate a game of chess, backgammon, gin, or bridge. "He liked to play bridge with me because he could beat me," Louis Johnson says.

came in, Wayne arrived out of the blue with a bottle of champagne to celebrate in the middle of a cotton field. Toward sunset Wayne would join Louis and Alice Johnson in their living room, relaxing over drinks and watching the sunset color Table Top Mountain. In the evenings, Wayne would instigate a game of chess, backgammon, gin, or bridge. "He liked to play bridge with me because he could beat me," Louis Johnson says.

"After he'd win $200 or $250, he'd quit. Then a few hours later, he'd talk me into another game. He really enjoyed that." Alice Johnson recouped some of the losses when Wayne made another deal: he'd pay her $100 a pound for any weight she helped him lose. An inveterate steakand-potatoes man, Wayne periodically tried to slim down his 240pound-plus bulk. For three weeks, his hostess had him on a diet of spinach, asparagus, buttermilk, and similar ilk. "He'd sneak into the kitchen at night to get an extra piece of of the losses when Wayne made another deal: he'd pay her $100 a pound for any weight she helped him lose. An inveterate steakand-potatoes man, Wayne periodically tried to slim down his 240pound-plus bulk. For three weeks, his hostess had him on a diet of spinach, asparagus, buttermilk, and similar ilk. "He'd sneak into the kitchen at night to get an extra piece of fruit," Alice says. One night there was a loud crash; in full sneak, he'd slammed into a surprise: a hallway door that had been

JOHN WAYNE ARIZONA

Among Wayne's Arizona hideouts, the most Western in spirit was the Guevavi Ranch, 50,000 acres of creased desert grassland and mission country along the lazy Santa Cruz River northeast of Nogales. He met owner Ralph Wingfield in 1946 during the filmActing of Red River. Wingfield supplied 300 head for the cattle-drive scenes. The two were drawn together by Wayne's respect for cattlementlemen. (In a 1976 essay in The New York Times, Wayne wrote of his rural upbringing and association with ranching families he admired for being hardy and trustworthy: "Mis races estan aqui! My roots are buried here!") "He started staying at my place in 1950 or '51. He was one of

the greatest guys I was ever around,” Wingfield says. “He was liked by most everybody.” In the ranch headquarters, a rambling maze of courtyards and porches and adobe walls decorated with snarling mountain-lion pelts, the bedroom reserved for Wayne was almost stark with its painted doors and ceiling beams, nothing grand and no curlicues except the broad ones on the carved Mexican headboard.

Wayne holed up there regularly through the 1970s. He liked to sit under the mesquite tree outside his room, on the little brick patio overlooking the duck pond. The scene hasn't changed much today, and the tranquility lingers. “He liked it out here,” Wingfield says. “It was quiet. Sometimes he just wanted to get away from the public.” It was while staying at the Guevavi that Wayne got on good terms with the homemade pies at Zula's, the adobe-and-rockwalled cafe on a hilltop curve of the old Tucson-Nogales highway, just north of the border. When not sampling a slice of apple pie (or dieting under Alice Johnson's regime), Wayne went for the pecan pie à la mode.

He dressed like a wrangler, looking authentic in his big 26 Bar silver belt buckle, and got noticed anyway, but he was rarely mobbed out in public in Nogales or elsewhere in Arizona. “He was very relaxed about that [mixing with the locals],” says Bob Shelton, founder and vice president of the Old Tucson movie production company and theme park. “He'd come to Tucson, to southern Arizona, four or five times a year, go to parties, football games, Mexican-food places.” Mostly, Arizonans just took John Wayne in stride in this land of extremes, and he must have appreciated the respite. Those fans who did seek him out, he obliged with typical good humor. Squirreled away in scrapbooks all over the state today are who knows how many of the cards he handed out, emblazoned: JOHN WAYNE (surely the most awe-inspiring business card ever) with his signature and “Good Luck” scrawled on the back. He never turned down one autograph hound, Louis Johnson says. “We'd be eating, and here'd come a gang. He'd scoot his chair back and say, 'My pleasure.' Sometimes we'd be through eating, and he'd still be signing. He didn't dodge any of them. He said, 'Louis, thank God they still ask.” You get the sense that nothing was faked. Sure, the cowboy star shied away from riding horses for recreation on the Guevavi and Red River spreads, but he'd had enough of that during his younger years of stunt riding for nearly a hundred B-Westerns. No, the John Wayne you saw, forking pie like any mortal at Zula's, was genuine. “One time, I asked him how it felt to be John Wayne,” Danko Gurovich says. “And he answered, “The greatest feeling in the world. I love being John Wayne.” The actor mellowed, slowed down some after losing a section of lung to cancer in 1964, but, as he put it, he thought he'd “licked the big C.” He climbed on a horse once again to ride at the head of the parade from Eagar two miles to Springerville for the big John Wayne Day celebration in August, 1968. Afterward he invited everyone out to the 26 Bar for barbecue and a demonstration by cow-herding border collies. Like the ranch barbecues for local kids he'd hosted the previous two summers, it was a chore done out of kindness and not for glory, since he'd had trouble breathing at the high altitude (about 7,000 feet) and had pared back his visits to the 26 Bar. “He was friendly and talked with all the kids,” remembers Bryant Whiting, who rode a sorrel just behind Wayne. “We had it was a chore done out of kindness and not for glory, since he'd had trouble breathing at the high altitude (about 7,000 feet) and had pared back his visits to the 26 Bar. “He was friendly and talked with all the kids,” remembers Bryant Whiting, who rode a sorrel just behind Wayne. “We had a bigger crowd at that parade than we've ever had in Springerville before or since.” In Tucson Wayne put in appearances to benefit a cancer Fund, the local rodeo, schoolkids, and sick kids, when he wasn't dropping in on Old Tucson's Shelton to play bridge or gin rummy. "He'd rather win $75 from you in gin rummy than get a big movie contract," remembers Shelton.

As if striving to be a regular guy, Wayne joined the Shriners in Tucson in 1970. He memorized the catechism and became one of the "brothers," attending meetings and dinners from time to time.

He'd sit in the stands to root for the University of Arizona football Wildcats. Tucson Citizen columnist Jeff Smith, who sat with Wayne during one game, chronicled: "Along about the third quarter some drunk a couple rows behind us stood up to cheer, stumbled, fell, and poured his whole hip flask down the back of Wayne's overcoat. Wayne turned around, got up, and unfolded himself to full length, staring down at this wimpy little lush sprawled beneath the bleachers. who stared up into the same steely gaze that has terrified a thousand two-bit gunslingers, and fainted dead away."

Only John Wayne could've escaped the irony when he was invited by the Apache tribe to a traditional lunch at Alchesay Hall in Whiteriver, the capital of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, in July, 1970. The man who'd made his living killing makebelieve Apache on screen found himself surrounded by real Apache. He toured the old fort and a tribal sawmill, and fans, many of them kids, surrounded him everywhere, calling out hon dah, "welcome" in the Apache language. Gurovich, who was awed by the cross-cultural swarm, says, "He must've written 500, 600 autographs that day."

Eo, Fuerte y Formal - "Ugly, Strong, and with Dignity" - was the epitaph John Wayne always said he wanted. When he died in 1979, a few months after his last swing through Arizona (his killer was his old nemesis, the big C), headlines from Tokyo to Tehran mourned. Unanimously, the U.S. Congress approved a commemorative John Wayne gold medal that for all time portrays him riding at full gallop through Monument Valley.

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson editorialized: "Nations need symbols. They bind, uniting people, instilling a sense of common purpose Through it all, John Wayne symbolized. strength, virtue, and individualism. His enormous popularity would have ruined lesser men, but for him it was simple, wholly natural. He will be mourned and missed like no other American."

But in Hollywood (well, Beverly Hills), they put up a 21-foothigh bronze statue of Wayne astride a horse, six-shooter, Winchester and all, on Wilshire Boulevard. Today you can fly into John Wayne Airport in Orange County, where there's another bronze of him bigger than life in full cowboy regalia. You can drop in on the hamlet of Winterset, Iowa, and cruise down John Wayne Drive, and stop in at the John Wayne birthplace memorial,

JOHN WAYNE ARIZONA

the restored four-room house he was born in.

Surprisingly, there aren't many traces of John Wayne in Arizona today. Memories of the actor are slipping away as his contemporaries age and pass on. His Red River holdings, the 26 Bar, were sold after his death for a reported $45 million (split with Louis Johnson). His hideout rooms at the Guevavi Ranch and at the former Red River farmhouse are preserved more or less as they were when he used them, but they aren't accessible to the public. The rock sign for the 26 Bar, on a hillside along State Route 260 west of Springerville, makes no mention of the ranch's former owner.

Some memorabilia from his Monument Valley films is displayed at Goulding's trading post (technically, just over the Utah line), and the Old Tucson set has some props and studio stills from his films shot there; and someday there may be a John Wayne room in an international war museum planned for one corner of his former Red River spread.

But so far, the war museum is more real on paper than on the ground, and even if completed, the displays there and at Goulding's and Old Tucson Studios will continue to focus on his films and their fictions not John Wayne the man, who was so vividly and especially real in Arizona. Perhaps most telling, at Zula's (under new ownership) in Nogales, the only movie star honored recently was Kirk Douglas: a newspaper clipping by the front door reported his visiting the area and lunching at the cafe.

In John Wayne's words, his given name, Marion, was 'a very severe name to inflict on a boy.'

JOHN-WAYNE ARIZONA

At the old Red River house near Stanfield, the Johnsons sometimes find themselves under siege from fans who can't let go. "On Sunday afternoons, we still have people coming here to take pictures," says Alice Johnson. "They come from out of state, to see [what they think was] John Wayne's house. You'd think it'd taper off, but it hasn't." And things are pretty much the same out at the 26 Bar. "We get quite a few people asking, 'Is this the place where John Wayne was?'" says Dave Hartman, now manager of the spread. "They take pictures of the ranch house and show barn."

Twelve years after his death, new biographies and studies of John Wayne's films are coming out. "There's quite an interest in him now," says Priscilla Steenhoek, curator of the memorial in Iowa. She wouldn't be surprised to learn that Arizona's attorney general, Grant Woods, and at least one state senator, Matt Salmon of Mesa, both have full-size, very Western cardboard John Waynes striding through their offices, shooting don't-mess-with-me gazes. ("I like what he stood for," says Salmon.) Thirty-five thousand fans visited Wayne's out-of-the-way Iowa birthplace last year. "This place has become a shrine," Steenhoek says. "People come to show their affection People are just beginning to realize he's dead, and there will be no more John Wayne movies Different places like ours are becoming memorials, inadvertently."

Arizona, which does have a Tom Mix memorial and a Rex Allen museum not to mention the annual Rex Allen Days celebration held in Willcox could heed the scolding of international tourism pro Rene Lecler (editor of Harpers & Queen magazine in Great Britain), who stopped in Tucson in 1983 and advised that more be done here to market John Wayne. Millions of people around the world became familiar with Arizona through Wayne's films, and many have a hankering to follow his trail. As the Tucson Citizen reported, "Britons reared on America's Westerns have a strong affinity for Tucson and the Southwest." With a stampede of promotion, Lecler said, "You could have a tourist boom just on the fans of John Wayne."

The best commemorations may be those done more person-ally, such as the one orchestrated in the fall of 1985 by Bruce Babbitt, then the governor of Arizona, who invited some of Wayne's old Arizona pals and some of his kids to rendezvous near the buttes of Monument Valley.

A rainstorm graced the desert and drew its cloud kerchiefs around the buttes then let up so the group (which included Danko Gurovich and Louis Johnson) could grill steaks at a Navajo tribal picnic area. As sunset stretched and the camp-fire snapped, a TV-and-VCR rig was set up, and everybody leaned back to watch one of the classic John Wayne movies that had been shot right there decades earlier. "It was The Searchers or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," says Babbitt, reaching back for the memory. "We watched it as sunset faded across the valley, sitting around a fire in Monument Valley It was life imitating art."

It's not too late to officially honor John Wayne in Arizona with something more lasting than fading memories and cardboard silhou-ettes; say, name a horse trail, or a scenic country drive, or a Western festival, or an ugly but strong rock formation after him. Something that would've made him smile, or perhaps more appropriately gotten his goat. Something to mark forever that the big man was here, and honestly loved it.

Ray Ring is primarily a novelist (his most recent book is Arizona Kiss, published by Little, Brown and Co., Inc.), but he jumped at the chance to write about John Wayne. The actor shaped generations of American boys, Ring says, including himself. It's not too late to honor John Wayne in Arizona with something more lasting than fading memories and cardboard silhouettes.