Slouching Towards Bethlehem Read online

  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.”

  Since that summer of 1943 I had thought of John Wayne in a number of ways. I had thought of him driving cattle up from Texas, and bringing airplanes in on a single engine, thought of him telling the girl at the Alamo that “Republic is a beautiful word.” I had never thought of him having dinner with his family and with me and my husband in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park, but time brings odd mutations, and there we were, one night that last week in Mexico. For a while it was o
nly a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.

  And then something happened. Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the dream, and I could not think why. Three men appeared out of nowhere, playing guitars. Pilar Wayne leaned slightly forward, and John Wayne lifted his glass almost imperceptibly toward her. “We’ll need some Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table,” he said, “and some red Bordeaux for the Duke.” We all smiled, and drank the Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table and the red Bordeaux for the Duke, and all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: “The Red River Valley” and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.

  1965

  Where The Kissing Never Stops

  OUTSIDE THE MONTEREY county courthouse in Salinas, California, the Downtown Merchants’ Christmas decorations glittered in the thin sunlight that makes the winter lettuce grow. Inside, the crowd blinked uneasily in the blinding television lights. The occasion was a meeting of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, and the issue, on this warm afternoon before Christmas 1965, was whether or not a small school in the Carmel Valley, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, owned by Miss Joan Baez, was in violation of Section 32-C of the Monterey County Zoning Code, which prohibits land use “detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County.” Mrs. Gerald Petkuss, who lived across the road from the school, had put the problem another way. “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this,” she asked quite early in the controversy. “Why they aren’t out working and making money.”

  Mrs. Petkuss was a plump young matron with an air of bewildered determination, and she came to the rostrum in a strawberry-pink knit dress to say that she had been plagued “by people associated with Miss Baez’s school coming up to ask where it was although they knew perfectly well where it was— one gentleman I remember had a beard.”

  “Well I don’t care” Mrs. Petkuss cried when someone in the front row giggled.”I have three small children, that’s a big responsibility, and I don’t like to have to worry about...” Mrs. Petkuss paused delicately. “About who’s around.”

  The hearing lasted from two until 7:15 p. m. , five hours and fifteen minutes of participatory democracy during which it was suggested, on the one hand, that the Monterey County Board of Supervisors was turning our country into Nazi Germany, and, on the other, that the presence of Miss Baez and her fifteen students in the Carmel Valley would lead to “Berkeley-type” demonstrations, demoralize trainees at Fort Ord, paralyze Army convoys using the Carmel Valley road, and send property values plummeting throughout the county. “Frankly, I can’t conceive of anyone buying property near such an operation,” declared Mrs. Petkuss s husband, who is a veterinarian. Both Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss, the latter near tears, said that they were particularly offended by Miss Baez’s presence on her property during weekends. It seemed that she did not always stay inside. She sat out under trees, and walked around the property.

  “We don’t start until one,” someone from the school objected. “Even if we did make noise, which we don’t, the Petkusses could sleep until one, I don’t see what the problem is.”

  The Petkusses’ lawyer jumped up. “The problem is that the Petkusses happen to have a very beautiful swimming pool, they’d like to have guests out on weekends, like to use the pool.”

  “They’d have to stand up on a table to see the school.”

  “They will, too,” shouted a young woman who had already indicated her approval of Miss Baez by reading aloud to the supervisors a passage from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “They’ll be out with spyglasses.”

  “That is not true,” Mrs. Petkuss keened. “We see the school out of three bedroom windows, out of one living-room window, it’s the only direction we can look”

  Miss Baez sat very still in the front row. She was wearing a long-sleeved navy-blue dress with an Irish lace collar and cuffs, and she kept her hands folded in her lap. She is extraordinary looking, far more so than her photographs suggest, since the camera seems to emphasize an Indian cast to her features and fails to record either the startling fineness and clarity of her bones and eyes or, her most striking characteristic, her absolute directness, her absence of guile. She has a great natural style, and she is what used to be called a lady. “Scum,” hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as “a veteran of two wars” and who is a regular at such meetings.”Spaniel” He seemed to be referring to the length of Miss Baez’s hair, and was trying to get her attention by tapping with his walking stick, but her eyes did not flicker from the rostrum. After a while she got up, and stood until the room was completely quiet. Her opponents sat tensed, ready to spring up and counter whatever defense she was planning to make of her politics, of her school, of beards, of “Berkeley-type” demonstrations and disorder in general.

  “Everybody’s talking about their forty- and fifty-thousand-dollar houses and their property values going down,” she drawled finally, keeping her clear voice low and gazing levelly at the supervisors. “I’d just like to say one thing. I have more than one hundred thousand dollars invested in the Carmel Valley, and I’m interested in protecting my property too.” The property owner smiled disingenuously at Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss then, and took her seat amid complete silence.

  She is an interesting girl, a girl who might have interested Henry James, at about the time he did Verena Tarrant, in The Bostonians. Joan Baez grew up in the more evangelistic thickets of the middle class, the daughter of a Quaker physics teacher, the granddaughter of two Protestant ministers, an English-Scottish Episcopalian on her mother’s side, a Mexican Methodist on her father’s. She was born on Staten Island, but raised on the edges of the academic community all over the country; until she found Carmel, she did not really come from anywhere. When it was time to go to high school, her father was teaching at Stanford, and so she went to Palo Alto High School, where she taught herself “House of the Rising Sun” on a Sears, Roebuck guitar, tried to achieve a vibrato by tapping her throat with her finger, and made headlines by refusing to leave the school during a bomb drill. When it was time to go to college, her father was at M. I. T. and Harvard, and so she went a month to Boston University, dropped out, and for a long while sang in coffee bars around Harvard Square. She did not much like the Harvard Square life (“They just lie in their pads, smoke pot, and do stupid things like that,” said the ministers’ granddaughter of her acquaintances there), but she did not yet know another.

  In the summer of 1959, a friend took her to the first Newport Folk Festival. She arrived in Newport in a Cadillac hearse with “JOAN BAEZ” painted on the side, sang a few songs to 13, 000 people, and there it was, the new life. Her first album sold more copies than the work of any other female folksinger in record history. By the end of 1961 Vanguard had released her second album, and her total sales were behind those of only Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, and the Weavers. She had finished her first long tour, had given a concert at Carnegie Hall which was sold out two months in advance, and had turned down $100, 000 worth of concert dates because she would work only a few months a year.

  She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads (“What’s Joanie still doing with this Mary Hamilton?” Bob Dylan would fret later), never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything “sad.” But she rode in with the folk wave just as it was cresting. She could reach an audience in a way that neither the purists nor the more commercial folksingers seemed to be able to do. If her interest was never in the money, neither was it really in the music: she was interested instead in something that went on between her and the aud
ience. “The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,” she said. “The hardest is with one.”

  She did not want, then or ever, to entertain; she wanted to move people, to establish with them some communion of emotion. By the end of 1963 she had found, in the protest movement, something upon which she could focus the emotion. She went into the South. She sang at Negro colleges, and she was always there where the barricade was, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham. She sang at the Lincoln Memorial after the March on Washington. She told the Internal Revenue Service that she did not intend to pay the sixty percent of her income tax that she calculated went to the defense establishment. She became the voice that meant protest, although she would always maintain a curious distance from the movement’s more ambiguous moments. (“I got pretty sick of those Southern marches after a while,” she could say later. “All these big entertainers renting little planes and flying down, always about 35, 000 people in town”) She had recorded only a handful of albums, but she had seen her face on the cover of Time. She was just twenty-two.