The 40 people on that shore had never seen that look on Dean Martin’s face, and John Wayne was still under the water. Wait, because when Wayne saw what that young man had been carrying in his pocket all morning, his hand stopped shaking, and Dean Martin didn’t learn why until decades later. This is Durango, Mexico, January 1965.
The Sons of Katie Elder, elevation 8,500 [music] ft. The kind of air that makes a man with two healthy lungs aware of the altitude, and a man with one lung feel it like a hand closing slowly around the throat. The Cascada El Saltito is a triple waterfall, 3 mi east of the city on Route 45, and the river that feeds from it in January runs at 38°.
The crew knows this. The insurance company in Los Angeles knows this. The insurance company’s on-site representative knows it in a way that has kept him awake on several nights since the shoot began. John Wayne is 57 years old. Less than 4 months ago, surgeons removed his left lung and two of his ribs.
The scar runs down his back in a line that the costume department has spent 11 days carefully keeping from the camera. He breathes at altitude on one lung, and the one lung works with the discipline of an organ that has been told by its owner that stopping is not an option. The paperwork for what he is about to do in that water required three lawyers, a specialist pulmonologist, and 17 conditions, all of which Wayne read once and set aside.
He has not complained about any of it. Not to Henry Hathaway, who is directing this picture and who has been described by Wayne himself as the meanest man in the business. Not to Hal Wallis, the producer who spent 6 months persuading Paramount’s insurance division that a man with one lung could still carry a Western. Not to Dean.
Not to anyone. Notice what that means. Not fearlessness. Fear lives in the head and can be bargained with. What Wayne has is something older and quieter, a decision made before the morning he walked out of his Los Angeles hospital room and drove to the airport, that the work in front of him is the only thing that matters and everything else is weather to be walked through.
One lung, one decision, one airport in January. Dean Martin has been watching him make that decision for 11 days, not publicly watching. The other kind, the kind you do when you want to understand something and don’t want the other person to feel studied. Between setups, from a position that can pass for coincidence, Dean has watched Wayne put the oxygen mask to his face for exactly 4 minutes at the folding chair at the edge of every camera position, breathe from it with the efficiency of maintenance rather than struggle, stand
and walk back into frame as if the chair has nothing to do with him. He has watched the jaw set in the thin air when the altitude reasserts itself, the hands going white on the reins, the 5:00 in the morning solitude at the hotel dining table script open, coffee cooling, the stillness of a man rationing something he won’t acknowledge running low.
Dean hasn’t said anything about it. He knows the kind of man who doesn’t want it said. The river sequence is called for tomorrow morning. Wayne has read the call sheet. The insurance man has read it, too. What Dean doesn’t know, what nobody on this production knows except the kid himself, is the thing in the front pocket of the kid’s jacket.
The kid has been on the production 11 days. He is 19 years old, the youngest prop hand on the crew by 4 years, and he got this job through a borrowed connection and a willingness to accept wages that would not cover a week’s hotel in Los Angeles. His name, for the purposes of this story, is simply the kid because that is what everyone on the crew calls him and because the people who will piece this account together in later years never wrote his given name down.
He is from the San Fernando Valley. He drives a truck that starts on the third attempt. He sends half of every paycheck home. His father worked the stunt business for 14 years. Not the kind with screen credit and trailer space, but the working category below it. The stunt man who falls off buildings for $35 and does not expect a second take.
His father was good at this in the way working men are good at things nobody watches. Completely, quietly, without expectation of notice. 17 productions across 12 years. The guild card in the kid’s front pocket says so in the dry language of a document that knows nothing except facts. Name, membership number, years of service, specializations.
His father was known in the quiet economy of that world as the man you called when the shot had to work and the day’s budget wouldn’t support a mistake. In 1954, on an exterior shoot in the Arizona desert, a Paramount western directed by a man whose name was known and who has nothing directly to do with this story, a cable rig on a horse fall sequence failed at full extension.
His father hit the desert floor from a height that should have killed him. It didn’t kill [music] him. What it did was take the full use of his right hand, most of the hearing in his left ear, and the better part of 3 years of anything resembling normal life. The production’s insurer paid minimum.
The guild covered 6 weeks. After that, his father went home to the San Fernando Valley and learned to do things left-handed, which takes longer than anyone who hasn’t done it tells you and ends not in restoration, but in a different kind of capability. Functional, hard-won, and quiet. He never went back to the stunt business, but he kept the guild card.
And when his son left for Durango on a January morning in 1965, the card was what went into the front pocket. Not for luck, exactly, but for something harder to name than luck. The kind of thing a man carries when he wants to be in the same conversation with someone who isn’t in the room. And here is what neither of them knows yet.
That card connects two men across 11 years in a cable rig in Arizona. One of them is about to find out. Hold this detail because it is the one that makes everything else mean something different from what it appears to mean. The card is in the pocket on the morning of the river sequence. The river sequence is the thing that puts Dean Martin off the bank before anyone else moves.
And what follows, the coordinator, the confrontation, the quiet on the hotel path at 5:00 only makes full sense when you know the card exists and what is written on its back. But first, the water and the 11 seconds. The sequence for day 11 requires Wayne to be pulled upstream and dragged beneath the surface at a marked depth before his character surfaces.
He is too large for the rubber insulation suit the smaller cast members use. The accommodation for this is a shorter window of exposure, a heated tent 12 ft from the bank, and the on-site physician standing at the camera position with a bag that has been opened and closed so often in 11 days that the clasp shows wear.
Hathaway calls action at 22 minutes past 7:00 in the morning. Wayne goes in clean. The stunt doubles take him under at the mark. The river closes over the cavalry hat. The cameras keep rolling. 8 seconds. 9, 10. The insurance man takes one step forward. At 11 seconds, Wayne surfaces. His face has the color of something from which the blood has been pressed out.
He gets a hand on the bank. The arm fails and he goes down on one knee in the shallows with his head forward, breathing in the specific careful way of a man who has just located the edge of what his body can sustain and is taking inventory before proceeding. Nobody moves. This is the strange truth of a film set at the moment of a real emergency.
The first response is always stillness. 38 trained professionals, and for two full seconds not one of them takes a step because nobody’s cue has come. Dean Martin is off the bank before the 2 seconds are finished. He is in the water to his knee, has Wayne’s arm, and is saying something in the register that carries between two people and no further.
I’ve got you, Duke. Don’t move yet. Not are you all right? Not should we stop? The right thing, which costs Wayne nothing to receive. Wayne’s hand finds Dean’s arm. He steadies. He nods once. And that is when Birch crosses the bank. Stop for a moment and understand the geometry here because the next 60 seconds require it.
Wayne is in the shallows, 30 ft from the crew position, Dean beside him, both men facing the water. The kid is at the upstream edge of the camera line behind the main position sorting gear in his canvas prop bag, close to the bank, watching. The way he has positioned himself every morning for 11 days to watch John Wayne work.
Birch, production coordinator, 7 years with Hal Wallis Productions, has been keeping a ledger on the kid since day three when a misplaced prop crate delayed a setup by 8 minutes. On this morning with the first unit’s attention fully on the river, he has decided to settle the account. He says it at a volume that reaches the 12 nearest people.
The kid’s position is terminated effective this morning. Transportation to the highway has been arranged. Personal effects from the bunkhouse should be gathered before lunch. The kid says nothing. He picks up the canvas bag, takes one step toward the path. Dean Martin turns around. He straightens up from the shallows.
He looks at Birch across 30 ft of bank and says in a voice that carries without trying to carry, “Hold on.” Two words, no drama in them at all. And yet they stop a man mid-stride and make 12 people go still in the space of a single second. Birch turns. He sees Dean, wet to the knee, Western costume, face without readable expression, walking toward him from the direction of the river, and behind Dean just finding his footing on the stones is John Wayne.
Picture this whole, Dean in front, Wayne a step behind and to his left, still breathing with the care of a man managing altitude and cold and one lung simultaneously. Water running from the brim of his cavalry hat and darkening the front of his leather vest. The kid between them and Birch, bag over his shoulder, waiting.
40 people on the bank, completely silent. The river making its noise. The cypress trees along the Cascada El Saltito shifting in the cold January air. One look at all of it tells you everything you need to know about what is about to happen and nothing about why. Birch says, “Mr. Martin, this is a production matter.” Dean [clears throat] says, “I know what it is.
” He stops 2 ft from Birch, not a threatening distance, the distance that makes the space between two people mean something deliberate. He is not a large man. He has never needed to be. What is in his face at this moment is something the people standing on that bank would spend years trying to describe, and the best available account reads simply, “He looked like a man who had already decided exactly how far he was prepared to go and was waiting, without impatience, to find out whether any of it would be required.
” “The kid stays,” Dean says. Birch opens his mouth. Day 11 of a 46-day shoot, and Wayne puts his hand on Birch’s shoulder. Not a grip, a placement. The careful placement of one large hand on a man’s shoulder, accompanied by nothing else. No words, no change of expression, no increase in pressure. The weight of the hand, the eyes above it, the particular quality of John Wayne’s silence, which is a different thing from other men’s silence in the way that a river is a different thing from standing water.
A man with one lung, soaked through, still finding his breath at 8,500 ft, placing his hand on a coordinator’s shoulder and requiring nothing at all. Birch steps back. The hand comes off his shoulder. The kid can finish the shoot, Birch says. He walks back toward the camera position, and the morning has changed in a way that nobody on that bank can yet account for.
A cable moves through a pulley somewhere up the bank. The sound of it sharp and clean in the mountain air, metal against metal, a crew returning to its ordinary function. The cypress trees hold their positions along the far bank. The light remains what it is, flat early morning mountain light. The kind that shows everything exactly as it is and softens nothing.
Dean watches Birch go. Then he turns to the kid who has not moved, canvas bag still on his shoulder, face held very carefully still. Put the bag down for a minute, Dean says. Look, this is the moment easiest to hurry past because the drama of the morning appears to be over. The coordinator walked away. The shoot will resume in 20 minutes.
15 days remain on the schedule. But the confrontation is not the story. The story is what happens on the path back to the hotel at 5:00 in the afternoon, and what gets made of it in a hotel room before sunrise. And to understand either of those things, you need to know that the kid has been reaching into his front jacket pocket every 30 minutes since the river sequence ended, touching the card, withdrawing his hand.
The afternoon is continuity work. The mechanical progress of a crew moving toward a production’s final third. The kid does his job without fuss, without needing to be told twice. Wayne at the edge of the afternoon setup watches the kid for 60 seconds from a distance that could pass for something else. He appears to reach no visible conclusion.
He goes back to work, but the hotel path is less than 8 hours away, and the card is still in the front pocket. At 5:00, with the mountain light going flat and the crew beginning to break down the river position, Wayne finds himself on the path back to the hotel at the same walking pace as the kid.
Not arranged, two people leaving the same location at the same natural speed, which is how the conversations that matter tend to begin. “You’re from the Valley,” Wayne says. “Yes, sir. San Fernando.” A few steps. “Your father in the business?” “He was.” A pause. “He had an accident. He can’t work anymore. He told me to come out here and make something of myself.
” Remember what that sentence costs a 19-year-old to say to John Wayne on a mountain path in Durango. The kid’s hand goes to his front pocket. He takes out the guild card and holds it out. Not with ceremony, just the way you offer something you’ve been carrying when you want the person next to you to know it exists. Wayne takes it.
He reads the front, turns it to the back, reads down the list of productions until he finds the Arizona exterior, 1954. The notation in pencil in his father’s handwriting, “Cable fail, horse fall.” Wayne stops walking. He stands on the path in the early evening air of Durango with the card in his hand, and he is quiet for a moment in the way a man is quiet when he is sitting with something and deciding what weight to give it.
“One card, one year, one cable rig in Arizona. I wasn’t on this picture,” he says finally, “but I knew the director, I knew the company.” He turns the card once more. “I heard what happened.” The cypress trees move along the path. The river is still audible below them. “How is he?” Wayne says. “He manages. >> [music] >> He learned to do most things left-handed.
He doesn’t talk about the accident much.” “He send you out here?” “He told me to go make something of myself,” the kid says again, and this time it sounds like what it is, a sentence said at a kitchen table in the San Fernando Valley carrying more weight than its words. Wayne hands the card back. He says nothing else for the rest of the path to the hotel, but the kid notices in the days that follow a different quality of attention in the way Wayne looks at him on set, not visible to anyone else.
The private kind, the kind a man pays to something he has decided means something. There are 17 days left in the Durango shoot. The kid counts them quietly, glad to be somewhere unaware that something at home is pulling at him. 17, 14, 11. On the eighth day, a letter arrives from the San Fernando Valley. His mother’s handwriting. The week has been hard.
His father’s hand has been troubling him. There are things at home that need attending to. The letter does not ask directly. It doesn’t need to. The kid reads it twice and puts it in his back pocket and says nothing to anyone. Six days remaining. Then five. On the 14th evening before the end of the shoot, the kid comes to Dean Martin’s hotel room door at 9:00 and says, without preamble, that he is going home in the morning.
His father has had a hard week. He is the oldest son. Dean opens the door wider. He sits the kid down. He listens to the whole of it without interrupting, which is something Dean Martin does better than most people who have never been in a room with him would guess. When the kid finishes, Dean says, “You sure?” The kid says, “Yes, sir.
” Dean looks at him for a moment with the expression of a man who has considerably more to say and has decided not to say any of it. “All right,” he says. He shakes the kid’s hand. The hotel corridor at 9:00 is quiet in the particular way of places used for transition. A single lamp at the far end, closed doors, the sense of something having just ended.
The kid walks back toward his room. Wayne is in the chair outside his own door when the kid comes down the hall. He has been there 20 minutes, glass of water, the mountains just visible through the end window, the stillness of a man who knew something was coming and was waiting for it without impatience.
The kid tells him. Wayne nods. He doesn’t ask the kid to reconsider, doesn’t explain about the remaining credit or the finished paycheck or the practical mathematics of staying. He [music] listens. Then he puts his hand out and the kid takes it. One thing, Wayne says, “Leave me the card. Just for tonight. I’ll have it outside your door before you leave.
” The kid reaches into the front pocket. He gives him the card. Listen, because this is the part that takes 20 years to surface. Somewhere between 9:00 in the evening and 5:00 in the morning on a January night in that Durango hotel, John Wayne, one lung, 17 days remaining in the shoot, made a telephone call to Los Angeles.
He never mentioned making it. Not to Dean, not to the producer, not to anyone. In the morning, [music] a canvas envelope sits on the floor outside the kid’s bunkhouse door. Inside, the guild card and a folded piece of hotel stationery. On the stationery, in Wayne’s handwriting, one name and one phone number. Below them, a single line. He’s expecting your call.
The name belongs to a stunt coordinator at Paramount Pictures, a man who had worked adjacent to Wayne’s productions for years and who was at that particular moment in early 1965 in a position to hire for technical consulting on rigging and cable systems. Work that requires knowing what 14 years in the stunt business teaches a man.
Work that does not require a right hand that closes fully. The kid is gone by 6:00. The production log for day 32 reads, “Prop hand departed. Personal. [music] No name.” The shoot continues. The mountains outside Durango do not keep accounts. The call happens 3 days after the kid gets home to the San Fernando Valley. The conversation leads to work.
Not stunt work, that chapter closed in 1954, but technical consulting on rigging and cable systems on terms his body can meet. It is not a rescue. It is a door open that was locked. The kid does not find out who arranged it for a long time. His father does not find out for longer still. Dean Martin finds out through second-hand accounts years later assembled in pieces gradually in conversation, long after the shoot has dissolved into a film that opened to good reviews in the summer of 1965, his response, recorded in an interview
from the mid-70s when someone asks him about working with Wayne, has become the line that people who know this story come back to. “Duke did things and then acted like they’d done themselves. I never quite figured out if that was modesty or just how he was built.” It is how he was built. One cannot be separated from the other.
It is a Sunday afternoon, many years later, when the kid finally puts the whole story in front of his father. Not a planned moment, the kind that arrives when the conditions are simply right. His father’s hands are steadier than they have been in years. The right one is still shaped the way a hand is shaped when the grip has been rebuilt through will alone, but it holds a coffee cup without difficulty, and on Sunday mornings it holds a knife over a piece of basswood the way it used to before the cable failed in Arizona in 1954. The light comes through the
kitchen window. The aspens outside make the sound they make. The kid tells the whole story. The river. Dean’s voice crossing 30 ft of rocky bank, hold on, and everything stopping. Wayne coming out of the water. The hand placed on the shoulder and the silence. The path to the hotel. The card taken from the front pocket and the expression that crossed Wayne’s face when he read what was written on the back.
The corridor at 9:00 in the evening. The card given over for one night. The envelope on the bunkhouse floor in the early morning dark. His father listens to every word without speaking. When the kid finishes, the father is quiet for a while, working something through the way he works things through, carefully, without rushing.
Then he says, “He didn’t know me. He knew the picture,” the kid says. “He knew what happened on it.” The father picks up the knife from the table, the old one, the one his own father left him, the one that went into to drawer in 1954 and came out again years later and he turns it once in the light from the kitchen window.
One clean cut. The grain of the wood goes where it wants to go and the knife follows. Good man, he says, that is all. Notice what it took to get there. Not a speech, not a confrontation anyone was watching for. One card kept for one night, one call made before sunrise, one envelope on a floor and never a word about any of it.
There is a version of this story with a speech, a confrontation that plays out fully in front of the crew with something said loud enough for the record, with a resolution that has clean edges and a satisfying sound. That version is easy to tell and not entirely wrong, but the actual shape of what happened in Durango in January of 1965 is quieter than that and less resolved and more true.
One man, one breath, one choice. A man with one lung put his hand on another man’s shoulder and said nothing. A man who had no connection to any of it made a telephone call in the middle of the night that he would never acknowledge. The kid went home, his father went back to work and somewhere in the prop inventory log of a Paramount Western that played to strong reviews in the summer of 1965, on a page that no one will look at twice, a line reads, prop hand departed, personal.
The river outside Durango is still the temperature of 38° in January. The cypress trees along the cascada el saltito are still standing. The mountains have never kept records of what happens at their feet and they are not about to start now. If you enjoyed spending this time here, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing.
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