Slouching Towards Bethlehem (4 page)

The new house is empty now, the house on the street with the sign that says

PRIVATE ROAD

BELLA VISTA

DEAD END

The Millers never did get it landscaped, and weeds grow up around the fieldstone siding. The television aerial has toppled on the roof, and a trash can is stuffed with the debris of family life: a cheap suitcase, a child’s game called “Lie Detector.” There is a sign on what would have been the lawn, and the sign reads
“
estate sale
.
”
Edward Foley is trying to get Lucille Miller’s case appealed, but there have been delays. “A trial always comes down to a matter of sympathy,” Foley says wearily now.” I couldn’t create sympathy for her.” Everyone is a little weary now, weary and resigned, everyone except Sandy Slagle, whose bitterness is still raw. She lives in an apartment near the medical school in Loma Linda, and studies reports of the case in
True Police Cases
and
Official Detective Stories
.
“I’d much rather we not talk about the Hayton business too much,” she tells visitors, and she keeps a tape recorder running. “I’d rather talk about Lucille and what a wonderful person she is and how her rights were violated.” Harold Lance does not talk to visitors at all. “We don’t want to give away what we can sell,” he explains pleasantly; an attempt was made to sell Lucille Miller’s personal story to
Life
,
but
Life
did not want to buy it. In the district attorney’s offices they are prosecuting other murders now, and do not see why the Miller trial attracted so much attention. “It wasn’t a very interesting murder as murders go,” Don Turner says laconically. Elaine Hayton’s death is no longer under investigation. “We know everything we want to know,” Turner says.

Arthwell Hayton’s office is directly below Edward Foley’s. Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew. In any case, on October 17, 1965, Arthwell Hayton married again, married his children’s pretty governess, Wenche Berg, at a service in the Chapel of the Roses at a retirement village near Riverside. Later the newlyweds were feted at a reception for seventy-five in the dining room of Rose Garden Village. The bridegroom was in black tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole. The bride wore a long white
peau de soie
dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.

in the summer
of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like that: there was the day they brought in the first B-29, an event to remember but scarcely a vacation program. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called
War of the Wildcats
that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John Waynes world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. “Let’s ride,” he said, and “Saddle up.” “Forward
ho
”
and “A man’s gotta do what he’s got to do.” “Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.

“Hello, there.” Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream. Born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a druggist. Moved as a child to Lancaster, California, part of the migration to that promised land sometimes called “the west coast of Iowa.” Not that Lancaster was the promise fulfilled; Lancaster was a town on the Mojave where the dust blew through. But Lancaster was still California, and it was only a year from there to Glendale, where desolation had a different flavor: antimacassars among the orange groves, a middle-class prelude to Forest Lawn. Imagine Marion Morrison in Glendale. A Boy Scout, then a student at Glendale High. A tackle for U. S. C. , a Sigma Chi. Summer vacations, a job moving props on the old Fox lot. There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost. “Dammit,” said Raoul Walsh later, “the son of a bitch looked like a man.” And so after a while the boy from Glendale became a star. He did not become an actor, as he has always been careful to point out to interviewers (“How many times do I gotta tell you, I don’t act at all, I re-act”), but a star, and the star called John Wayne would spend most of the rest of his life with one or another of those directors, out on some forsaken location, in search of the dream.

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendships a little truer That
’
s where the West begins
.

Nothing very bad could happen in the dream, nothing a man could not face down. But something did. There it was, the rumor, and after a while the headlines. “I licked the Big C,” John Wayne announced, as John Wayne would, reducing those outlaw cells to the level of any other outlaws, but even so we all sensed that this would be the one unpredictable confrontation, the one shootout Wayne could lose. I have as much trouble as the next person with illusion and reality, and I did not much want to see John Wayne when he must be (or so I thought) having some trouble with it himself, but I did, and it was down in Mexico when he was making the picture his illness had so long delayed, down in the very country of the dream.

It was John Wayne’s 165 th picture. It was Henry Hathaway s 84th. It was number 34 for Dean Martin, who was working off an old contract to Hal Wallis, for whom it was independent production number 65. It was called
The Sons of Katie Elder
,
and it was a Western, and after the three-month delay they had finally shot the exteriors up in Durango, and now they were in the waning days of interior shooting at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City, and the sun was hot and the air was clear and it was lunch-time. Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at
huevos con queso
and Carta Blanca beer. Dean Martin, unshaven. Mack Gray, who goes where Martin goes. Bob Goodfried, who was in charge of Paramount publicity and who had flown down to arrange for a trailer and who had a delicate stomach. “Tea and toast,” he warned repeatedly. “That’s the ticket. You can’t trust the lettuce.” And Henry Hathaway, the director, who did not seem to be listening to Goodfried. And John Wayne, who did not seem to be listening to anyone.

“This week’s gone slow,” Dean Martin said, for the third time.

“How can you say that?” Mack Gray demanded.

“
This
...
week
’
s
...
gone
...
slow
,
that’s how I can say it.”

“You don’t mean you want it to end.”

“I’ll say it right out, Mack, I want it to
end
.
Tomorrow night I shave this beard, I head for the airport, I say
adios amigos
!
Bye-bye
muchachos
!
”

Henry Hathaway lit a cigar and patted Martin’s arm fondly. “Not tomorrow, Dino.”

“Henry, what are you planning to add? A World War?”

Hathaway patted Martin’s arm again and gazed into the middle distance. At the end of the table someone mentioned a man who, some years before, had tried unsuccessfully to blow up an airplane.

“He’s still in jail,” Hathaway said suddenly.

“Injail?”Martin was momentarily distracted from the question whether to send his golf clubs back with Bob Goodfried or consign them to Mack Gray. “What’s he in jail for if nobody got killed?”

“Attempted murder, Dino,” Hathaway said gently. “A felony.”

“You mean some guy just
tried
to kill me he’d end up in jail?”

Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table. “Some guy just tried to kill
me
he wouldn’t end up in jail. How about you, Duke?”

Very slowly, the object of Hathaway’s query wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes on 165 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. “Right,” John Wayne drawled. “I’d kill him.”

Almost all the cast of
Katie Elder
had
gone home, that last week; only the principals were left, Wayne, and Martin, and Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson, Jr. , and Martha Hyer. Martha Hyer was not around much, but every now and then someone referred to her, usually as “the girl.” They had all been together nine weeks, six of them in Durango. Mexico City was not quite Durango; wives like to come along to places like Mexico City, like to shop for handbags, go to parties at Merle Oberon Pagliai’s, like to look at her paintings. But Durango. The very name hallucinates. Man’s country. Out where the West begins. There had been ahuehuete trees in Durango; a waterfall, rattlesnakes. There had been weather, nights so cold that they had postponed one or two exteriors until they could shoot inside at Churubusco. “It was the girl,” they explained. “You couldn’t keep the girl out in cold like that.” Henry Hathaway had cooked in Durango,
gazpacho
and ribs and the steaks that Dean Martin had ordered flown down from the Sands; he had wanted to cook in Mexico City, but the management of the Hotel Bamer refused to let him set up a brick barbecue in his room. “You really missed something,
Durango
”
they would say, sometimes joking and sometimes not, until it became a refrain, Eden lost.

But if Mexico City was not Durango, neither was it Beverly Hills. No one else was using Churubusco that week, and there inside the big sound stage that said
los hijos de katie elder
on the door, there with the pepper trees and the bright sun outside, they could still, for just so long as the picture lasted, maintain a world peculiar to men who like to make Westerns, a world of loyalties and fond raillery, of sentiment and shared cigars, of interminable desultory recollections; campfire talk, its only point to keep a human voice raised against the night, the wind, the rustlings in the brush.

“Stuntman got hit accidentally on a picture of mine once,” Hathaway would say between takes of an elaborately choreographed fight scene. “What was his name, married Estelle Taylor, met her down in Arizona.”

The circle would close around him, the cigars would be fingered. The delicate art of the staged fight was to be contemplated.

“I only hit one guy in my life,” Wayne would say. “Accidentally, I mean. That was Mike Mazurki.”

“Some guy. Hey, Duke says he only hit one guy in his life, Mike Mazurki.”

“Some choice.” Murmurings, assent.

“It wasn’t a choice, it was an accident.”

“I can believe it.”

“You bet.”

“Oh boy. Mike Mazurki.”

And so it would go. There was Web Overlander, Wayne’s makeup man for twenty years, hunched in a blue Windbreaker, passing out sticks of Juicy Fruit.
“
Insect
spray,” he would say. “Don’t tell us about insect spray. We saw insect spray in Africa, all right. Remember Africa?” Or, “
Steamer
clams. Don’t tell us about steamer clams. We got our fill of steamer clams all right, on the
Hatari!
appearance tour. Remember Bookbinder’s?” There was RalphVolkie, Wayne’s trainer for eleven years, wearing a red baseball cap and carrying around a clipping from Hedda Hopper, a tribute to Wayne. “This Hopper’s some lady,” he would say again and again. “Not like some of these guys, all they write is sick, sick, sick, how can you call that guy
sick
,
when he’s got pains, coughs, works all day,
never complains
.
That guy’s got the best hook since Dempsey, not
sick
.
”

And there was Wayne himself, fighting through number 165. There was Wayne, in his thirty-three-year-old spurs, his dusty neckerchief, his blue shirt. “You don’t have too many worries about what to wear in these things,” he said. “You can wear a blue shirt, or, if you’re down in Monument Valley, you can wear a yellow shirt.” There was Wayne, in a relatively new hat, a hat which made him look curiously like William S. Hart. “I had this old cavalry hat I loved, but I lent it to Sammy Davis. I got it back, it was unwearable. I think they all pushed it down on his head and said
O
.
K
. ,
John Wayne
—you know, a joke.”

There was Wayne, working too soon, finishing the picture with a bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set. And still nothing mattered but the Code. “That guy,” he muttered of a reporter who had incurred his displeasure. “I admit I’m balding. I admit I got a tire around my middle. What man fifty-seven doesn’t? Big news. Anyway, that guy.”

He paused, about to expose the heart of the matter, the root of the distaste, the fracture of the rules that bothered him more than the alleged misquotations, more than the intimation that he was no longer the Ringo Kid. “He comes down, uninvited, but I ask him over anyway. So we’re sitting around drinking mescal out of a water jug.”

He paused again and looked meaningfully at Hathaway, readying him for the unthinkable denouement. “He had to be
assisted
to his room.”

They argued about the virtues of various prizefighters, they argued about the price of J B in pesos. They argued about dialogue.

“As rough a guy as he is, Henry, I still don’t think he’d raffle off his mother’s
Bible
!
”

“I like a shocker, Duke.”

They exchanged endless training-table jokes. “You know why they call this memory sauce?” Martin asked, holding up a bowl of chili.

“Why?”

“Because you
remember it in the morning
!”

“Hear that, Duke? Hear why they call this memory sauce?”

They delighted one another by blocking out minute variations in the free-for-all fight which is a set piece in Wayne pictures; motivated or totally gratuitous, the fight sequence has to be in the picture, because they so enjoy making it. “Listen—this’ll really be funny. Duke picks up the kid, see, and then it takes both Dino and Earl to throw him out the door—
how
’
s that?
”

They communicated by sharing old jokes; they sealed their camaraderie by making gende, old-fashioned fun of wives, those civilizers, those tamers. “So Senora Wayne takes it into her head to stay up and have one brandy. So for the rest of the night it’s ‘Yes, Pilar, you’re right, dear. I’m a bully, Pilar, you’re right, I’m impossible. ’”

“You hear that? Duke says Pilar threw a table at him.”

“Hey, Duke, here’s something funny. That finger you hurt today, get the Doc to bandage it up, go home tonight, show it to Pilar, tell her she did it when she threw the table. You know, make her think she was really cutting up.”

They treated the oldest among them respectfully; they treated the youngest fondly. “You see that kid?” they said of Michael Anderson, Jr. “What a kid.”

“He don’t act, it’s right from the heart,” said Hathaway, patting his heart.

“Hey kid,” Martin said. “You’re gonna be in my next picture. We’ll have the whole thing, no beards. The striped shirts, the girls, the hi-fi, the eye lights.”

They ordered Michael Anderson his own chair, with
“
big mike
”
tooled on the back. When it arrived on the set, Hathaway hugged him. “You see that?” Anderson asked Wayne, suddenly too shy to look him in the eye. Wayne gave him the smile, the nod, the final accolade. “I saw it, kid.”

On the morning of the day they were to finish
Katie Elder
,
Web
Overlander showed up not in his Windbreaker but in a blue blazer. “Home, Mama,” he said, passing out the last of his Juicy Fruit. “I got on my getaway clothes.” But he was subdued. At noon, Henry Hathaway’s wife dropped by the commissary to tell him that she might fly over to Acapulco. “Go ahead,” he told her. “I get through here, all I’m gonna do is take Seconal to a point just this side of suicide.” They were all subdued. After Mrs. Hathaway left, there were desultory attempts at reminiscing, but man’s country was receding fast; they were already halfway home, and all they could call up was the 1961 Bel Air fire, during which Henry Hathaway had ordered the Los Angeles Fire Department off his property and saved the place himself by, among other measures, throwing everything flammable into the swimming pool. “Those fire guys might’ve just given it up,” Wayne said. “Just let it burn.” In fact this was a good story, and one incorporating several of their favorite themes, but a Bel Air story was still not a Durango story.

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.”