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A Little Dumb. Both Wayne and Ford hope and believe that their newest collaboration, soon to be released as The Quiet Man, will be their best yet. If so, it can only add to the complexities that already beset Wayne's crowded life. An unassuming, worrying man who, in the words of one of his best friends, still thinks of himself as "a stagehand who got lucky," Duke is in many respects like a high-school football captain drafted willy-nilly as president of the student council and editor of the school paper. John Ford still treats him as a clumsy sophomore and bawls him out unmercifully when they work together. Wayne takes it like a scolded schoolboy and murmurs, "Sorry, Coach," with abject hero-worship. But in other quarters Duke himself is the worshiped hero. Sometimes he finds the situation confusing.
When Hollywood began to worry about the Communists and fellow travelers in its midst, John Wayne was drafted to head an organization known as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. "Hell," says one friend, "Duke didn't know anything about the menace of Communism. All he knew was that some of his friends were against them."
To please his friends, Duke did his best to face the problem as, say, the Ringo Kid might face it. The effort was not altogether successful. When Actor Larry Parks confessed to having once been a party member, newsmen raced to John Wayne for a statement. Caught without a script, Duke fingered his chin, said it was too bad that Larry had been a Communist, but damn courageous of him to admit it. He hoped, he added, that the confession wouldn't hurt Larry's career. At a mass meeting soon afterward, M.P.A. Vice President Hedda Hopper put the record straight. John Wayne to the contrary notwithstanding, she told the meeting and its abashed president, Larry Parks would most certainly not be forgiven. "Well, you certainly gave it to me," Duke told her with a grin. "You certainly deserved it," said Hedda. Later she confided to a friend: "Duke is a little dumb about these things."
Well-Ordered World. John Wayne's dogged loyalty has always been both a trial and a solace to his friends, depending on the direction it takes. Grant Withers, a self-admitted has-been who was a star earning $2,250 a week when Duke was only a prop man, admits that Wayne has kept him in the business for years by getting him parts. "One of the best things you can say about Duke," says Withers, "is that he was a swell guy when he was making 50 bucks a week and he's an even better guy now that he's making half a million a year."
That estimate of Duke's earnings is probably conservative. Outside of his film interests, his holdings now include sizable chunks of California real estate, several oil wells, a share of Cartoonist Al Capp's comic-book publishing company, a piece of a Broadway hit show. With unfulfilled contracts still calling for pictures at Warners, RKO and Republic, and an unwritten agreement with Ford to make any picture Ford wants, Wayne last week was busy negotiating the last details of his own producing company.