AMERICA 250: Cancer kills film legend John Wayne

Those who knew the actor well said Wayne was careful to maintain the continuity of that screen image, not only because it was financially successful, but because the characters he portrayed struck a truthful chord in the man himself.

As a child, Wayne was fond of telling interviewers, his father had imparted to him the following life-philosophy, summed up in three rules: “Always keep your word. A gentleman never insults anyone intentionally. Don’t look for trouble, but if you get into a fight, make sure you win it.”

The actor once said he had tried to live by those rules, with the possible exception of the second which, he admitted — usually with a satisfied, devilish glint in his eye — he had amended to: “A gentleman never insults anyone unintentionally.”

But it was not merely the roles he played as an actor that created the enduring love affair with his fans.

It was as if, over the years, the actor and the man seemed to merge together — both in the minds of many Americans, and within Wayne himself — to form one, indistinguishable symbol of courage, endurance and indestructabillty.

The culmination of that metamorphosis — of what might be called the blending of the man and the myth — became complete in 1964 when Wayne, then 57, successfully, and publicly, defeated cancer.

Two months after leaving Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, Wayne — against the advice of his own public relations advisers — called a press conference at his home to advise the world he had undergone surgery for lung cancer.

A startled nation learned that, by virtue of early detection, the Duke had “licked the Big C.“ It was, at the time, cancer’s most public defeat. Almost immediately, doctors reported getting requests from patients for “the kind of operation John Wayne had.”

As if to underscore the totality of his recovery — less than four months after he’d first entered Good Samaritan — Wayne, with only, one lung, headed to Durango, Mexico, to film, in high altitude, the physically demanding “Sons of Katie Elder.”

Later, Wayne would disclose that diagnosis of the presence of a cancer the size of a golf ball in his left lung had made him feel as if “someone hit me across the gut with a ball bat.”

Born Marion Robert Morrison, May 26, 1907, in his family’s home in Winterset, Iowa, Wayne grew up on stories spun by oldtimers of the days when Jessie James robbed banks and trains in the area and tall tales about wagon trains, Indians, and the hardships endured, seemingly without complaint, by his pioneer ancestors.