I just finished reading John Wayne: American, by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, an exhaustively researched and briskly written biography of a man who, for many, came to define traditional American values. The book reveals Wayne to have been a more complex and interesting figure than his on-screen persona might suggest. By the end I felt genuinely sorry for him as the book recounted his last, painful battle with stomach cancer.
But I also couldn't help thinking that the way he faced his death is the way most people face it these days -- as an issue they have never really confronted or even dared to think about, which takes them by surprise and knocks them for a loop.
Here are some excerpts from the book's last chapter:
Duke was up and walking around [in the hospital] on January 17, when the pathologists reported to Longmire that the gastric lymph nodes were full of microscopic tumor cells. Wayne displayed no outward reaction when Longmire gave him the news. It was almost as if he were not listening, or not hearing the feared fact that the disease was spreading....
He was relieved to get out of the hospital, but he lashed out at Pat Stacy when she asked him how soon the radiation treatments at Hoag would begin. Suddenly he denied ever hearing about radiation treatments from Longmire, claiming that the surgeon had told him that all of the tumor had been removed in the operation and that he was going to be just fine. Everyone else in the family, including Stacy, knew about the radiation, but he insisted emphatically and angrily that he had not been told, that he did not want any more surprises, that he was sick of hospitals and doctors and nurses and medicine and cancer.
He eventually agreed to undergo the treatments, although he insisted on absolute secrecy....
Everyone around him felt his wrath. Wayne's temper had always been somewhat unpredictable, but it was mitigated by his willingness to forgive and his omnipresent love for life. He hated pettiness, but with his body crumbling and his life slipping away, he found himself becoming just that -- angry, frustrated, irritable, and petty....
The weekend after the Oscar presentation [when he made his last public appearance], Wayne wanted to get out of the house and do something fun, maybe go out on the water for a weekend. He called Ralph and Marjorie Wingfield, his longtime friends from Nogales, Arizona, to fly out to Los Angeles and sail with him to Catalina Island on [his yacht] the Wild Goose. Marjorie was fighting her own battle against cancer. Still, he would not talk about his except to mention several times that he figured the doctors had gotten it all this time, just like they had back in 1964. They nodded their heads but knew better....
[Back in the hospital again, and suffering badly,] Duke asked his son Patrick to go home to Newport Beach and bring back the Smith & Wesson .38 he kept on the bedside table. When Patrick refused, he asked Pat Stacy to get it. "I want," he told her, "to blow my brains out." When she, too, refused, he exploded in frustration.... Wayne left Hoag a few days later and he had the Smith & Wesson at his disposal. But he couldn't do it. He was still hoping against hope for some kind of Hollywood miracle....
[He returned to the hospital and was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was inoperable.] Still, John Wayne expected more treatment; he wanted to live. He was not ready to accept reality. Nor were his doctors....
[T]hey asked him if he was interested in an experimental program designed to stimulate his own immunological system. At the time there was a good deal of optimism among cancer specialists about the possibilities of a drug named interferon.... Wayne agreed to become part of the program.... Nobody even whispered to him that he was dying or how long he had to live because he still could not talk about it....
Experimental medicine is just that -- experimental -- and Wayne's cancer was growing too fast for the interferon to have any chance.... The doctors at UCLA knew it, but they were human beings, too. They had a famous patient on their hands who was still denying his own imminent death, refusing to talk about it, and willing to try something -- anything -- to preserve his life. To keep his hopes up and to maintain their own images as healers and scientists, they went ahead with the treatments, and Wayne dutifully submitted to the needles, tests, and examinations....
[T]he only possible comfort now could be religious. There was no doubt among any of his friends that he believed in God.... But Wayne never developed a denominational loyalty.... God, for Duke, was simply the "Big Man Upstairs" to whom you turned for problems you could not solve yourself....
He was not more or less afraid [of dying] than any other normal person. He said that much in his interview with Barbara Walters, when she asked him if he feared death. Three months after the January 1979 interview, when he turned to the Catholic Church, he was not having any apparitions of the Virgin Mary or going through deathbed repentance or trying, with one foot in the grave, to get the other foot into heaven.... He was just getting ready to meet his maker, as a man should, and the Catholic Church -- the church of his family and of his closest friends -- was as good a way as he knew to do it....
[As the disease progressed] he was also throwing up bilious fluids from down in the small intestine every few minutes, and he could not sleep. Life was quickly boiling down to mere survival, just hanging on until it got even tougher....
Wayne refused to talk with anyone about his imminent death, but he symbolically acknowledged it by selling the Wild Goose early in June.... [H]e could never bring himself to do it, at least not until he was on his deathbed and realized he would never see the Goose again....
Mary St. John visited with him three days before he died.... He was searching for peace and asked Mary what she thought of death. She quoted a passage from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
Wayne looked at her quizzically and asked her to repeat the passage, which Mary did. He quietly remarked: "You know, I never thought of it that way."...
He took his last gasping breath at 5:23 p.m. on June 11, 1979.
Another excellent biography is Teller of Tales, by Daniel Stashower, a fascinating study of Arthur Conan Doyle, which treats his researches into spiritualism with evenhandedness and respect. Doyle was 71 years old -- just one year younger than John Wayne -- when he passed away. Like Wayne, he had been a vigorous public figure for decades, extroverted, sure of himself, ready and eager to jump into any debate. But unlike Wayne, he had spent years pondering the mystery of mortality and collecting evidence that convinced him, beyond doubt, of life after death.
Here's how he met his end, as Stashower tells it:
Two months after the fire [that destroyed his home], Conan Doyle embarked on another round of travels. "I am off next week to do Holland, Denmark, Stockholm and Oslo," he told Harry Price. "My ambition is to speak in each European non-Catholic capital before I pass." Although the schedule was lighter and the reception more cordial than it had been in Africa, his health buckled under the strain. In Copenhagen, he suffered a bout of agonizing chest pains, but refused to curtail his speaking schedule. In near constant pain, he carried on with his slate of lectures, often clinging to the podium for balance. Returning to England on the Channel ferry in November, he had to be carried ashore.
Doctors were summoned to confirm what Conan Doyle already knew. "I write this in bed," he told a friend in America, "as I have broken down badly and have developed Angina Pectoris. So there is just a chance that I may talk it all over with [the deceased] Houdini himself before very long. I view the prospect with perfect equanimity. That is one thing that psychic knowledge does. It removes all fear of the future."
Against his doctors' orders, he struggled up to London to honor a speaking commitment at an Armistice Day spiritualist assembly. Riding to the Albert Hall in a cab, he suffered another attack. He leaned heavily on his sons as he staggered into the hall, and delivered his speech in a halting, weakened voice. Refusing to admit to his infirmity, he gave a second speech later in the day.
His doctors now ordered complete bed rest. A sickroom was established on the ground floor at Windlesham, as Conan Doyle now had difficulty climbing the stairs....
Through the early months of 1930, he showed brief periods of improved health. He took advantage of his renewed energy to revise his autobiography, adding a chapter entitled "Up to Date," and to write a modest paragraph of introduction for The Edge of the Unknown, a collection of spiritualist essays.
On July 1, he went to the battlements for the last time. For some months he had been lobbying against an ancient piece of legislation called the Witchcraft Act, dating to the reign of James I, which had been revived as a means of prosecuting mediums. A steady flow of letters brought about a meeting with the home Secretary, Mr. J.R. Clynes. Jean accompanied him to the Home Office and watched anxiously, clutching a vial of smelling salts, as her husband rose unsteadily to plead his case.... His voice faltering, Conan Doyle went ahead with his prepared statement, drumming his fingers against his chest as though to keep his heart beating.
He returned home badly weakened.... One cold spring morning, his son later recalled, he rose from his sickroom and stole out into the garden, unseen by anyone in the house. A few moments later, the butler heard a crash in the hallway. He found Conan Doyle lying on the floor, gasping for breath....
He told his family that he did not wish to die in bed. As the crisis neared, they helped him to a chair where he could look out at the Sussex countryside. He died there, surrounded by his family, on the morning of Monday, July 7, 1930. He was seventy-one years old. His last words were addressed to his wife. "You are wonderful," he said.
"The reader will judge that I have had many adventures," he had written a few days earlier. "The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now."
In comparing these two deaths, I don't mean to disparage Wayne or to suggest that Doyle's spiritualism was the only factor in his more positive attitude. One difference, of course, is that the successes of modern medicine have led people to expect and demand miraculous cures, while in older times people took a more fatalistic approach. But the major difference, I think, is that Doyle had thought long and hard about his own death, had researched the subject to the best of his ability, had come to certain conclusions that he found both logical and comforting, and was therefore ready to meet his earthly end without bitterness, rancor, denial, or fear.
Wayne, on the other hand, like most people today, simply refused to think about the subject at all, putting it out of his mind and distracting himself with work and travel and recreation and socializing, never pondering the deeper issues that mortality raises. At the end, he was unprepared to face this final challenge, because nothing in his previous life had allowed him to prepare for it. Instead of yielding gracefully to the inevitable, he put up an increasingly painful and pointless fight, denying the facts as long as possible, then belatedly seeking comfort wherever he could find it.
Cicero, as quoted by Montaigne, said, "To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die." We moderns have forgotten this ancient wisdom. We ought to remember.
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