The Man Behind the Cowboy: 23 Little-Known Facts About John Wayne

Ladies’ Man

John Wayne’s on-screen persona opposite his cinematic love interests was often shy, bordering on awkward. But when the cameras stopped rolling, Wayne was actually a brazen womanizer. He was married three times and had a total of seven children, but none of his marriages went particularly well. He was consistently and flagrantly unfaithful to all three wives, having long and public affairs with some of the most famous women in Hollywood, most notably Marlene Dietrich and Joanne Woodward.

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“Daddy, Get Me That”

Iconic German actress Marlene Dietrich was famous for her beauty, intelligence, and skill in knowing – and getting – exactly what she wanted. When she saw John Wayne for the first time at the Universal commissary, she is said to have nudged her agent and said, “Daddy, get me that.” She was at the height of her popularity when it came time to cast for Seven Sinners, and she demanded that John Wayne play the leading man, setting off their famous three-year affair.

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More Than Just Romance

Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne would go on to star in two more movies together, The Spoilers and Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, their affair carried on and intensified, as John fell head over heels for the fascinating actress. More than just a romantic affair, the two became the best of friends, bonding over their shared love of making films and enjoying many of the same hobbies together. They also appeared in public often as co-stars, but this was enough to get people talking and the affair became public.

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The Toxic Film Set

In 1956, Howard Hughes made a movie called The Conquerer, starring Wayne as Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan. This was a case in which the filming location might have ended up being more treacherous than a real battlefield. The film was shot in Utah, right near a nuclear weapon test site, exposing the cast and crew to fallout. In 1981, People magazine noted that out of the film’s 220 cast and crew members, 91 had developed cancer and 46 of them had passed away, including John Wayne himself.

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“He Had The Magic”

Through his many years of tumultuous romantic affairs, Wayne made no secret of his long love affair with film star, Maureen O’Hara. The two first met at a dinner party at the home of director John Ford in 1941, and O’Hara recalls being instantly taken with the actor. “Wayne would have to sing for his supper which caused great merriment because he couldn’t sing,” Maureen recalled. Despite the humiliation, she claims, “He had credibility. He had manliness. He had the magic.”

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Tough Enough For Wayne

It wasn’t only Wayne who found an admirer in O’Hara – the feeling was clearly mutual. The pair’s chemistry read well on the screen, as the pair made five movies together including the classic The Quiet Man. The fiery O’Hara proved a worthy foil to John Wayne’s forceful presence. “I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne,” she wrote in her memoir. “Duke’s presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal…fire, it was exciting and thrilling.”

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His First Wife Tried To Shoot Him

Of John Wayne’s three divorces, his most dramatic was probably from Esperanza Baur, a former Mexican actress. She suspected Wayne of having an affair with his co-star from Angel and the Badman, Gail Russell, a claim which both actors denied. The night the film wrapped, Wayne came home very late from the usual wrap party. By the time he reached home, Esperanza was in an intoxicated rage and attempted to shoot him as he walked through the door.

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A Controversial Interview

Recently, an interview of Wayne that was published in a 1971 Playboy magazine that cast him in a pretty unflattering light has resurfaced, sparking a huge controversy around the star’s legacy. Specifically, Wayne was quoted as saying that he “believed in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility”. Regarding Native Americans, Wayne thought that America did no wrong in “taking this country away from them,” and that they were “selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

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He Never Fought In The War

While Wayne appeared in countless World War II movies portraying fearless heroes, he actually never served in the real war himself. While fellow actors of the era like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda went off to serve their country, John Wayne deferred his deployment at first so he could get a leg up in Hollywood. But the temporary deferment dragged on as his star-power rose, and by the last couple years of the war, he was so entangled with Marlene Dietrich that he just never ended up serving at all.

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The Original Duke

John Wayne was born as Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa in 1907. As a child, he had a best friend – the family dog, an Airedale terrier named Duke. The two were so inseparable that people started calling the young Marion “little Duke.” As he wasn’t exactly a fan of his own name, he began to adopt the name “Duke” as his own, and by the time he was an adult, he practically refused to be called by his given name.

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He Stayed Down-To-Earth

The actor known as John Wayne kept his feet on the ground throughout his career, remaining down-to-earth despite his stardom. His secret? He kept his “real self” and his “actor self” divided into two different personas. “The guy you see on the screen isn’t really me. I’m Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. I’m one of his closest students. I have to be. I made a living out of him,” he once explained.

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It Wasn’t His, But It Was Real

John Wayne might have been the paragon of manliness, but his image took a hit when his hair began to thin in his 30s. He began to wear a hairpiece – a fact that didn’t go unnoticed. In fact, during a visit to Harvard in 1974, one student rudely asked him, “Where did you get that phony toupee?” His response was as calm, cool, and collected as John Wayne could ever be. He backfired, “It’s not phony, it’s real hair. Of course, it’s not mine, but it’s real.”

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More Sailor Than Cowboy

Although he was known as America’s favorite film cowboy, the real John Wayne didn’t really enjoy horseback riding at all, refusing to get on a horse unless it was absolutely required for a scene and never riding in his leisure time. Instead, Wayne preferred sailing on his yacht, The Wild Goose, and was overall much more drawn to the sea than the range. He had even surfed as a young man, after his parents moved the family from Iowa to southern California.

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Cameo Man

As one of the biggest film stars in America for decades, John Wayne was invited to do quite a few cameos on popular TV shows. One of his most memorable appearances was an episode of I Love Lucy in which he plays himself, where Lucy sneaks into the famous actor’s trailer, gets caught red-handed by Wayne, and pretends to be his masseuse in order to avoid getting into trouble. For an appearance on Beverly Hillbillies, he asked to be paid with a bottle of his favorite beverage.

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He Was In Star Wars

Not many people know that John Wayne had actually turned up in the original Star Wars movie. But he didn’t ride horseback into town as a space cowboy. In fact, it was only his voice that made an appearance, used for the voice of imperial spy Garindan. However, the audio was so processed and manipulated that by hearing it, one would never have been able to tell it was Wayne. In fact, the voice barely sounds human at all.

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The Everyman’s Hero

Late into his career, Duke Morrison revealed the secret behind what gave John Wayne the everyman appeal that had made him such a success. The character was created to fill a void in Hollywood: “I’ve found a character the average man wants himself, his brother, his kid to be,” he said. “It’s the same type of guy the average wife wants for her husband. Always walk with your head held high. Look everybody straight in the eye. Never double-cross a pal.”

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The Injury That Made Him A Star

If it weren’t for one fateful accident, John Wayne would have never come to be. While studying at the University of Southern California on a football scholarship, Morrison sustained a serious shoulder injury while bodysurfing, losing him his place on the team. When college got to be too expensive, he was forced to leave and start working odd jobs on movie sets, which is where he was discovered. It just goes to show that what seems like the worst thing that could happen often brings unexpected positive turns in life.

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Hands-On Dad

Ethan Wayne, John’s youngest child, revealed in his memoir that despite his father being a famous actor, the ailing John was aware that he had limited time with his son and so was determined to spend as much time with him as possible. “He took with me on location. I’d be homeschooled down on location in Mexico because he knew he wasn’t going to be around for me when I was older… So he took me with him when I was little.”

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Health Troubles

In the ’60s, Wayne’s years of smoking five packs a day finally began to catch up with him. He began to develop a hacking cough and became out of breath easily. His attitude of, “maybe it’s six months off the end of my life but they’re not going to kill me,” ended up backfiring horrifically. While filming In Harm’s Way with Otto Preminger in 1964, he began to have brutal coughing fits and people began to realize something was seriously wrong.

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The Big C

Sadly yet unsurprisingly, John Wayne developed lung cancer. John Wayne was the first person to refer to cancer as “The Big C.” He came up with the idiom to make his struggle with the illness less “scary” to studio executives in the early 60s. In his first battle with cancer, Wayne lost a rib and half of one lung, and yet he still managed to hold a press conference in his own living room shortly after in order maintain his strong public image.

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He Was Almost Killed By The KGB

Joseph Stalin might have been a John Wayne fan, but he was not a fan of Wayne’s vocally anti-communist views. His solution was to send two KGB assassins after him who were thankfully foiled by the FBI. But the story didn’t end there. When Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, visited the US in 1959, he made just two requests – to visit Disneyland, and to meet John Wayne. When they met, he apologized on Stalin’s behalf, reassuring John, “I rescinded the order.”

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No Filming After Noon

At the height of his career, John Wayne was treated like royalty on the set, and he was such a big name by the ’60s that he called the shots on set. One of his unusual rules (which doubtless made filming with him incredibly difficult) was that none of his scenes were filmed after 12 noon. Why? Well, Wayne had what would be defined today as a drinking problem, and as soon as noon rolled around, he would hit the bottle. His drinking and smoking habits ultimately caused his fatal health problems.

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Words To Be Remembered By

Originally, John Wayne asked that his tombstone be engraved with the words, “Feo, Fuerte y Formal,” – “ugly, strong, and dignified.” But when he finally succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of 72, a quote from his controversial Playboy interview was engraved on his tombstone instead: “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

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The Story of Sophia Loren, A Hollywood Star Who Only Loved One Man For 50 Years

Sophia Loren was known to many as an amazing actress, but only known as a soulmate by one – Carlo Ponti. Sophia’s dark, exotic eyes and long, bronzed limbs gave her an unparalleled beauty that stole the hearts of men the world over…

Illegitimate Child

Born in poverty, Sophia was an illegitimate baby of a single mother in Naples. Sofia Villani Scicolone would go on to live a fairytale, and she transformed into one of the most loved stars of cinema. But her early life was not so glamorous…

Illegitimate Child

She Escaped To The Theatre

Her last name came from her father, Riccardo Scicolone, who refused to marry her mother, Romilda Villani, and would not allow her younger sister to take his name. According to Loren, she was taunted as a child for being illegitimate. Even as a young girl, Sophia found herself drawn to the theatre, making many trips to see her favorite Hollywood stars on the screen. She would sometimes watch four shows in a single day. And even at the age of 11, she knew her future would lay in films.

She Escaped To The Theatre

Miss Eleganza

It was 1950, and a young Sophia appeared as a contestant in the Miss Eleganza beauty contest in Rome. As though a ploy by Cupid, Carlo — a renowned Italian film producer — was one of the competition judges, and from the moment she stepped on the stage, he could not take his eyes off of her. “I immediately knew that she was someone exceptional. Something played off her that gave her a kind of illumination,” Carlo Ponti said of the first time he saw her.

Miss Eleganza

When They First Met

Sophia met the love of her life, Carlo Ponti, when she was just 17 years old. At first, he was just a director for her and Carlo took an interest in training her: he taught her manners, got rid her of accent, made her read books about art, and he insisted she learn English. He became a mentor to her, he protected her, and soon a strong feeling prevailed. It was their love that helped them overcome the many obstacles to happiness.

When They First Met

He Was Her Mentor

Despite there being immediate chemistry between them, Ponti was previously married, and despite being separated from his wife, the circumstances put a halt to their romance. “To Sophia it was just unthinkable to be the ‘other’ woman in his life, especially after her strict and conservative upbringing that she had grown up about the sanctity of a marriage.” Carlo Ponti nevertheless took her under his wing, becoming her talent agent, and changing her name from Sofia Scicolone [the name of the father who was never there for her] to Sophia Loren.

He Was Her Mentor

They Grew Closer

With the help of Carlo, Sophia appeared in an astounding thirty films, and it was during this period that the pair grew closer and closer, becoming inseparable. Sophia only had eyes for one man, despite their 22-year age difference. After four years of companionship, Carlo finally bought the now 20-year-old Sophia a diamond ring. They were secretly engaged for three years. Madly in love with one another, the pair would not believe critics who said their marriage would not work, and on September 17, 1957, in a simple and secret ceremony, they finally wed.

They Grew Closer

Then Came Cary

Sophia Loren and Cary Grant shared amazing chemistry in the movie Houseboat. They first met when they both played in The Pride and the Passion back in 1957. Loren was about to marry Carlo Ponti and faced a choice that was to determine both her personal life and her career. Grant asked Sophia to marry him while they were filming, but he belonged to another world in America. Sophia was scared to change her life completely without knowing if their relationship was real.

Then Came Cary

A Difficult Choice

“They were very different men. It was difficult. It was my first American-language film, and my English was so very terrible. I was upset. I needed help on many occasions with the language, and Cary would help me.” When their filming of Houseboat finished, they exchanged numbers, and he said he would call. In fact, he did come to visit her on the set of an Italian film, Two Women, and then when she was acting in a film in New York, he came to the house.

A Difficult Choice

Carlo Was Jealous

On the day Houseboat concluded, he sent her a giant bunch of yellow roses. She was leaving on the plane and boasted to Ponti about the yellow roses. “Yes, it wasn’t a nice thing to do. I think I wanted to test him, to test how he felt. I was very young and thought if he got angry and jealous, it meant he loved me.” In fact, Ponti was so jealous; he became angry and hit her. Jealousy doesn’t equate to love, but for Sophia, it meant he cared.

Carlo Was Jealous

Ciao

She was together with Carlo at this time and they already had a son. Loren said, “One day, Cary called me when I was in New York for another film. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why are you calling?’ And he replied, ‘Because I wanted to say ciao.’ That was it. He died. He must have known he was dying.” She also said, “I felt that I could never fit in there. I never felt like I have a future there because of my nationality.”

Ciao

Sophia’s Mother

Even though she had a father, he never married her mother, Romilda Villani, and was absent from her life. Her mother was also beautifully regal. When she was 17, Romilda won a contest held in Italy by MGM Studios to find a new star – and the prize was to go to Hollywood. It was her dream to be an actress, but her parents both said she was too young and didn’t permit her to go. Romilda, according to her daughter, “oozed allure.”

Sophia’s Mother

They Couldn’t Get Married

By this time they couldn’t get married because Ponti couldn’t get a divorce – the laws in Italy at that time were extremely strict and dictated by Catholic rules. Adding to this vulnerable point in time came the gently seductive, impossibly charming Grant, who courted her while on the Pride and the Passion set. They had many intimate dinners. Why didn’t she take Cary Grant? Loren explained, “You know, I had to make a choice, Carlo was Italian; I know it was the right thing to do for me.”

They Couldn’t Get Married

Father Figure

The older, respected father figure is something that she was always searching for, which is perhaps why she loved Carlo Ponti, who was 22 years older. He was her emotional substitute for a father. The first problem was that Carlo Ponti was already married and had two children. Back then, one had to obtain permission to divorce from the Vatican, but he couldn’t get permission, and so the lovers had to do it in another country. They eloped to Mexico in 1957, where Ponti got his official divorce and married Loren.

Father Figure

The Marriage Was Illegal

But after returning home, the spouses were faced with new problems. In Italy, their marriage wasn’t accepted. So Ponti was accused of bigamy and Lauren of illegal cohabitation. They didn’t even have the right to appear together in public, they were in love and didn’t want to go along with the rules of society and end their relationship, so they decided to leave Italy and lived in exile for many years while they sought a solution.

The Marriage Was Illegal

They Had To Move To France

Attempts to resolve their issue proved unsuccessful, and in the end, the couple acquired French citizenship and moved there. Ponti’s ex-wife also had to acquire French citizenship in order to file for divorce. Finally, Sophia and Carlo got married again in 1966. This time their marriage was official. A seemingly unlikely pair, as time passed, their love only continued to deepen and flourish, just as they would have continuing successes in their careers in film & television.

They Had To Move To France

Starting A Family

Loren didn’t want to just be a married woman; she dreamed of being a mother and desperately wanted to start her own family. Unfortunately, this wasn’t that simple as the actress had already had two miscarriages. After some tests she soon discovered that her hormones were imbalanced and that was the cause of her miscarriages. So she underwent hormonal treatment and after being prescribed estrogen shots and undergoing fertility treatments, Loren finally had a successful pregnancy.

Starting A Family

Reclusive Lifestyle

When Sophia finally became pregnant she was 34 years old, but doctors had her on bed rest as a precaution. She was cautious and followed their advice and led a reclusive lifestyle from a hotel room in Geneva for months. It was on the 29th of December in 1968 that she gave birth to their first son Carlo Ponti Jr. Four years later on the 6th of January 1973, she gave birth to their second son Edoardo Ponti.

Reclusive Lifestyle

Charged

She may love Italian food, but the country’s religiosity, rules, and regulations certainly didn’t please her. Indeed, her husband was convicted in Italy for income tax evasion, misuse of government subsidies, and illegal export of Italian assets and artwork, resulting in a four-year prison sentence. Loren was charged for complicity in the crimes but was later acquitted. The paintings Loren was accused of smuggling included works by Picasso, Braque, de Chirico, and Canaletto, which were valued at around $6.7 million.

Charged

I Was Innocent

“It was painful because I was innocent all that time. It was bad management, but they went on with the trial. They gave me one month in jail and released me after 17 days.” “No, it took 40 years. Forty years later, I won the trial. I had paid every penny. I made a lot of films outside of Italy, and it was convenient, so we moved.” Despite having to move, they were happy; they were in love and stayed together for half a century.

I Was Innocent

He Watched Over Her

Once she cut her hair to look like an actress who was very successful at the time, Lucia Bosé, and Carlo said to her, “You should always wear your hair short.” “Each time I did something that he had a liking to, he would always say, ‘You should always do that.’ And yes, this gave me confidence. He watched over me and he … took my insecurities away. It seemed like he would take care of me, which no other man had done,” Sophia said.

He Watched Over Her

Prison Sentence

She says that the first time she met Ponti, she immediately felt at home. She noticed after she saw him, she felt calm. Carlo Ponti made her into what she is, and together they steadfastly withstood all the blows of fate. After her and Ponti’s run-in with the Italian law regarding marriage, they were essentially exiled from the country. Loren missed Italy so much that Ponti would drive her to the top of St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland so she could just glimpse her homeland.

Prison Sentence

Why Did She Feel Like This?

“I would think to myself, ‘Why do I feel like this?’ Because I trusted him. I was terribly young. I just turned 17 when we first met, and it wasn’t until a long time later that we got together.” she said of her husband. He gave her confidence and one day he bought her an outfit, and he said, “You should always wear suits because it looks very good on you.” He always made a point of focusing on what was positive…

Why Did She Feel Like This?

Carlo’s Passing

The couple eventually moved again, this time from France to Geneva, Switzerland, where they lived quietly and happily. It was the New Year of 2007, and Carlo, having trouble breathing, was rushed to the hospital. He was now 94 years old, and Sophia & Carlo’s relationship had spanned an amazing 50 years. Carlo remained in the hospital for ten days, fighting, but eventually passed away on the 10th of January 2007. Sophia had not left his side for the entire ten days.

Carlo’s Passing