In what was now a familiar pattern, Clint and Dad participated, too: Clint as one of my goober buddies hanging out in the back seat of my stolen wheels, Dad as one of the sheriff’s incompetent goober deputies. Chuck cast them of his own volition—I never pushed him. There were also a bunch of great character guys in the movie: Dave Madden, better known as Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family; the wiry Warren Kemmerling, so good in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and countless westerns; and Peter Isacksen, a gawky comic actor who played Seaman Pruitt in Don Rickles’s navy sitcom CPO Sharkey.
Making the movie damn near killed me, not because it was unpleasant to do but because, miracle of miracles, a prestige acting role came my way right after I reached my agreement with Roger. I was cast as John Wayne’s young protégé in The Shootist, his final film, directed by Don Siegel. So, for a short period, I shot Eat My Dust!, The Shootist, and Happy Days at the same time. The production side of Happy Days was, as ever, gracious—they kindly accommodated me so that I only had to show up to Paramount two days a week, rehearsing on Thursdays and filming on Fridays. Corman crammed my Eat My Dust! workload into just eleven days of the four-week shoot, which took place near Lake Piru, an hour northwest of L.A. For the rest of my time, I was in Carson City, Nevada, where The Shootist was filming on location.
I don’t know how I shouldered this workload except that I was twenty-one and had the physical stamina not to collapse in exhaustion—barely. The Shootist was a trip, because it starred not only Wayne but also Jimmy Stewart and Lauren Bacall. The Duke was dying of cancer and the old gang was rallying around him for one last adventure.
That’s what he preferred to be called, Duke. When I first arrived in Carson City, Don Siegel met me downstairs in the hotel where we were all staying and suggested that we go straight up to Wayne’s suite to meet the great man. On the way to the elevator, we passed the gift shop, and there was the latest TV Guide magazine with Henry and me on the cover. Siegel laughed and bought a copy. “Duke will love this,” he said. I wasn’t so sure.
When we knocked on the door, we were greeted by an instantly familiar figure: tall, imposing, rugged, and . . . bald? “I hope you don’t mind, I didn’t bother to put on my wig,” said the sixty-nine-year-old Wayne. He reached out to shake my hand, which disappeared into his like a ten-year-old’s. Siegel held up the issue of TV Guide for Wayne to examine. He looked down at it, looked up at me, looked down at it once more, and then said in a pointedly drawn-out John Wayne drawl, “Ah! Big shot, huh?”
Thanks a lot, Don, I thought.
But Duke and I got along well from that moment onward. He admired my professionalism. Sometimes, I noticed, he struggled with his lines. While Ms. Bacall kept to herself and most of the other people on the set were too much in awe to comfortably engage with Wayne, I asked him if he wanted to run his lines with me; that’s what I always did between takes. To my delight, he welcomed the suggestion. I went to school on this opportunity—me, rehearsing one-on-one with the most iconic western star of them all!
Working on The Shootist was an eye-opener for me because, as legendary and decorated as Wayne, Bacall, and Stewart were, they worked harder than anyone else on set, putting in the hours and doing as many takes as necessary to nail a scene. I had observed this same trait in Henry Fonda, even on a project as half-hearted as The Smith Family. I would see it again when, in the years to come, I would direct Bette Davis and Don Ameche. It wasn’t the studio system or their distinctive looks that had made these actors the giants of Hollywood’s golden age. It was—surprise, surprise!—their common work ethic and commitment to quality. They simply outhustled everyone else.
Still, The Shootist afforded us a fair amount of hang time. I pumped Duke for John Ford stories, and he happily obliged. “Jack Ford always taught me to keep things moving,” he said, “and to only give the audience a maximum of 80 percent of your emotion, even for the most dramatic scenes. It’s more powerful for the audience to complete the feeling themselves.” Another Ford-ism he imparted: “If you give ’em all you can on a picture and the audience doesn’t go for it, then hell—give ’em their nickel back and git on to the next one!”