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The late great Stanislavsky, who taught his pupils to "react" as everything from mad monks to coffee percolators, might have shuddered at such a theory of acting, but for Wayne, it works. "Sometimes they call it corn," he admits with a grin, "but I've always felt that if a scene is handled with simplicity—and I don't mean simple —it'll be good."
Success and the complications that go with it have robbed Wayne's own life of much of the simplicity he finds good. Before Stagecoach, he was a "serenely happy" husband, says Josephine Wayne. Five years later, after the birth of their fourth child, Josephine and Duke were divorced. Busy with his commitments at one studio after another, and conscientiously conferring over every step of every production, he found less & less time for the hearty outdoor pastimes—hunting, fishing, deep-water sailing—he likes best, and the long evenings of poker, bridge and horseplay he shared with his strapping friends Bond, Withers and John Ford.
Idylls & Ulcers. In 1946 Wayne married again, this time a velvet-eyed Mexican movie actress named Esperanza Baur, whom he calls Chata (Pugnose). Tall, graceful Chata is almost a female counterpart of Duke's men friends. She loves to ride and shoot, and she plays a skillful hand of gin rummy. But Wayne has found little time to enjoy these pastimes with her. "My husband," Chata explained recently, "is one of the few persons who is always interested in his business. He talks of it constantly. When he reads, it's scripts. Our dinner guests always talk business, and he spends all his time working, discussing work or planning work."
Soon after their marriage, Wayne became a producer at Republic (two Wayne productions: The Angel and the Badman, The Bullfighter and the Lady), and the work and the talk increased proportionately. Pacing the floor of his executive's office, amid the constant clangor of telephone bells and interoffice squawkers, his quick temper frequently boils over. After one of these outbursts, he broods for a while, then seeks out his victim in contrition. "I'm always apologizing to somebody," he says. He has acquired that final badge of executive success, a gastric ulcer. In 1950, after finishing Jet Pilot (still unreleased) for RKO, Duke decided to take Chata and himself on his first vacation in more than ten years. A trip through Central America in a reconditioned Navy PBY provided by Howard Hughes, the vacation turned out to be just a road-company version of life in Hollywood. A never-ending stream of autograph hunters and command appearances faced the famed movie star at every stop. The air waves hummed with unfinished business. John Ford, impatient to get going on Duke's new film in Ireland, peppered the wanderers with importunate messages. Tempers were constantly frayed, and the idyll ended with Duke having to fly off to Ireland to get back to work again. Chata regretfully packed her slacks and went back to Hollywood to watch and wait.