And here is the big dog. A real American hero. Marion Robert Morrison. John Wayne. Probably the most iconic American actor of all time. Hell, he represented the ol' red white and blue so well, that no good commie sonofabitch Joseph Stalin ordered his assassination. Luckily for the hundreds of assassins that were basically ordered to embark on their would be sent to certain doom, the order was rescinded by Nikita Khrushchev.
When he was born, astrologists and scientists studied him and determined that he would eventually grow to become the manliest man on earth, but the forces exerted by his pure masculinity could result in women being impregnated only by meeting his gaze. This would have had catastrophic consequences. So they had no choice but to limit him from ever reaching his full potential by giving him a girl's name, "Marion" And this is why John Wayne had the same given name as my grandmother.
He often appeared on screen with Ward Bond, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Lee Marvin, Ed Asner & Kirk Douglas. And he was such an undeniable bad ass that they had to play the pussies!
John Wayne stood anywhere between 6'4" and 9' tall, depending if he was slouching or if he'd accidentally doubled up his shoe lifts.
His fishing boat was a retired mine sweeper.
He fell out of favor during the hippie-dippy late 60's but didn't give a damn. He understood why people were pissed off, he just couldn't figure out why they had to be so damn annoying about it.
One time John Wayne was staying in a hotel room in Las Vegas directly below a room where Frank Sinatra was staying. Well Frankie was partying down pretty hard and John normally wouldn't have minded but he had just gone about two weeks on a drinking spree and was really tired. So he walked over to the room and kindly asked Frankie if he'd like to be dangled out the window Sug' Knight style. Then he punched out one of Sinatra's bodyguards and laid him out cold, because old boy was giving him some kind of "You can't talk like that to Mr. Sinatra" shit, and the Duke here was all like "WHAT-EV-ER! I'm gonna talk him how-ever I want! And your music is too loud in here too! So here's some sweet chin music!" and WAM! Right in the kisser! And Frankie was all like "I'm so sorry our loud partyin' has been disturbing your rest, Mr. Wayne. Please forgive me, I don't want to dance your insane tango of death tonight." And the Duke was appeased and went back to his room. True story more or less.
Death
He could only be killed by an Atom Bomb. Oh yeah, it's true. You know that the Duke was going through a whole carton of smokes a day when he filmed The Alamo. Huge flop. But the real killer was when he filmed his other great cinematic disaster, The Conqueror (1956).
The Conqueror was a poorly conceived (or was it contrived?) epic film produced by none other than Howard Hughes, that cast Wayne (a 6'4" white man) as Ghengis Khan (a possible dwarf of Asian decent). Exterior scenes were shot near St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site, Operation Upshot-Knothole, where extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred during the 1950s. After spending weeks on site, Hughes (famous for his keen rationality) later shipped 60 tons of dirt from the area back to Hollywood to finish the film on a sound stage. The film-makers knew about the nuclear tests—apparently there are pictures of Wayne holding a Geiger counter during production—but hey, this was the 50s and 7 out of 10 doctors recommended Lucky Strike cigarettes. Hell, Wayne was probably smoking in those goddamn pictures.
Director Dick Powell died of cancer in January 1963, only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died of cancer in the mid to late 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and committed suicide after he learned it was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as the wide use of tobacco—Wayne and Moorehead in particular were heavy smokers—and the notion that cancer resulting from radiation exposure does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer and 46 had died of the disease. Figures did not include several hundred local American Indians who served as extras on the set. Nor did it include relatives who had visited cast and crew members on the set, such as the Duke's son Michael Wayne. A People magazine article quoted the reaction of a scientist from the Pentagon's Defense Nuclear Agency to the news: "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne".
So there you have it. The Duke was killed by nuclear weapons.
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