THE BELL CURVE:A different Duke off the silver screen

John Wayne Week at the Newport Beach Film Festival, combined with the invitation from the Pilot’s editors to share Wayne remembrances, sent me to my files where very little digging turned up a mother lode of anecdotes accumulated in my research for a half a dozen profiles of him I wrote for national magazines during the 15 years Hollywood was my beat.

Although my many hours of Wayne interview tape are spaced out over those years, the one that comes first to mind is the last conversation we had. It took place over a chess board on his beloved yacht, Wild Goose, during the final year of his life.

I had spent a good deal of time with Duke on the set of “The Shootist,” his last film and a prophetic story about an aging gunfighter who was dying of cancer. I was in the midst of writing about it when he phoned me one Saturday morning with an invitation to join him, along with some high-rolling friends way out of my league — Kirk Kerkorian is the only one I remember — on a day-long cruise to Long Beach to satisfy an insurance test.

When we were underway, Wayne settled down on deck over a backgammon game with Kerkorian that reminded me of the perpetual game of chess against his personal photographer that Duke had going on his movie sets as a means of avoiding visitors he didn’t want to see.

The photographer never seemed to win any of these games, so while I was standing by idly watching the backgammon, I said to Duke, “Do you ever play chess against anybody you can’t beat?”

He gave me that long, slow, go-for-your-guns look and said, “Do you think you can beat me?”

I allowed as how I thought I could, and he swept the backgammon pieces off the table and growled, “Sit down.”

What followed were three of the fastest games in chess history. He played with the reins in his teeth.

He beat me two out of three and then turned to other sport, mollified, his honor restored.

I think of that chess game every time I visit friends in Dover Shores and drive past the place where his house used to be. He lived there the last 15 years of his life, and I could always tell when he was in residence because his station wagon, parked in the open garage door, was instantly recognizable by its bumper sticker that read, “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”

My most vivid memory of our conversations that took place in his house was the day Duke and I were browsing through his trophy room — where a fine collection of primitive art shared space with a lifetime of personal artifacts — when the doorbell rang. He peeked out through a crack in the curtains, motioned me to silence, and said, “It’s some friends of Pilar I don’ t want to talk to, so let’s just keep quiet until they go away,”

We did, and the irony of the image implanted that day of the intrepid lawman skulking behind a curtain in his own home has stuck with me.

Duke didn’t deal with irony much in our conversations, not even the irony of his role in “The Shootist” as a hired gun with terminal cancer. When I asked him if the role brought up uncomfortable memories of his first, near-fatal bout with cancer, he said vehemently: “That’s ridiculous. None of that movie has anything to do with me. I just thought it was a fine story with well-drawn and interesting people. That’s why I decided to make it. Hell, I licked cancer 13 years ago.”

He did, indeed, for almost 15 years before it finally caught up with him.

Dissembling was almost impossible — as well as unnecessary — for Duke, which made him both newsworthy and highly quotable. When the Harvard Lampoon dared him to come to its campus to defend his political and philosophical views “in the most radical, the most intellectual, in short the most hostile territory on earth,” he went — and wowed them. When I asked him why he took on the enemy on its own turf, he said: “They challenged me, and when I got there, they found out they don’t disagree with me. They disagree with some image that’s been built up of me.”

To the degree that this image portrayed only the reactionary frontiersman or the movie cowboy stamping out bureaucratic bad guys who would destroy our individuality, they missed Duke Wayne. His essence was more complex.

Below the surface of bombast was a strain of gentility and an unexpected sort of abstraction. To me, he never seemed to take himself or what he was saying as seriously as he might have liked us to think. He could be distracted from heated political rhetoric by a flock of geese flying overhead, or an old crony dropping by, or a pair of shapely female legs.

He caricatured his public image in some of his later films, particularly as Rooster Cogburn in the “True Grit” role that won him an Oscar. About the same time, his alma mater, USC, awarded him an honorary fine arts degree. And he made fun of that too, telling me: “Some wiseguy said I was probably the only man who ever received an honorary degree he couldn’t read. I guess the most important thing I learned at USC was that it would have been foolhardy to go out into the world with a name like Marion.”

The word he liked best to describe himself was “professional.” If he were still with us, that professionalism probably would have led him to put in an appearance at a film festival honoring him in his hometown. Especially if it were wrapped in some sort of a challenge.