Twenty-nine years ago today, we lost an American icon: John Wayne died of cancer at the age of seventy-two.



He had a name and a birthplace one would not expect from a man who became such an icon of western movies: he was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa. His parents took the somewhat eccentric step of changing his middle name from Robert to Michael when they decided to name their next son Robert. He acquired the nickname Duke from a family pet, and always preferred Duke to any other name, birth name or screen name.

He got his first work in movies in the waning days of the silent era through the influence of the great cowboy star Tom Mix. Once talkies came in, one studio he worked for tried to make him into a "Saturday cowboy" in the Gene Autry-Roy Rogers-Rex Allen mode; fortunately for the genre, Wayne could not sing, although he did have one of the most distinctive speaking voices of any actor living or dead.

His first major film was 1939's STAGECOACH, in which he worked under the direction of John Ford. All in all the pair would make over twenty pictures together, including the brilliant 1962 western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (still my favorite John Wayne film). He also made a number of war films, but I (and many others) still prefer his westerns.



In 1964, Wayne was stricken with cancer. There has been some speculation that the disease may have been linked to his 1958 film THE CONQUEROR. Not only was this an improbable role (he played the medieval Mongol tyrant Genghis Khan); more sinisterly, sand for the desert background of the film was trucked in from White Sands, site of nuclear testing. In the quarter century following the filming, ninety-one of the 220 people involved in the production were diagnosed with cancer. Wayne and fellow film legends Susan Hayward and Dick Powell eventually lost their lives to the disease.

Wayne fought off the cancer that time, and in 1969 played the role that brought him his first and only Oscar: the one-eyed US marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn in TRUE GRIT. (In his Oscar acceptance speech, Wayne said that if he'd known it would bring him this honor, he'd have put on the eyepatch thirty years ago.) He would reprise the role in 1975's ROOSTER COGBURN, in which his costar was Katharine Hepburn and the story was essentially a western version of her 1951 film THE AFRICAN QUEEN. Hepburn wrote glowingly of the experience in her autobiography.



Wayne made his last film in 1976. His cancer had come back by then, and ironically, in THE SHOOTIST, he played an aging gunfighter dying of cancer.

Wayne died on June 11, 1979.

He was in his later years a controversial figure, largely because of his politics (we'd call him a neocon now). But he was a man who stuck to his guns--pun intended--although the sort of unquestioning patriotism he practiced is not much in favor nowadays.

He wanted his tombstone to bear a Spanish phrase that translated, roughly, as "Strong, ugly and with dignity." It's actually adorned by something else entirely, but that phrase does have a great resonance, for no man ever dominated the screen with the laconic authority of John Wayne.

A better epitaph for him might have been the last line of the aforementioned THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE: "When a legend becomes a fact, print the legend."

Rest in peace, Duke.

And until next time, fair thee well.

After a two week wait, I finally got my results back from my mammogram. All's well. Thanks again to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Over at the messageboard my friend Laura, after watching UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN, has decided to do a virtual retreat in that lovely Italian wine country.

I slipped off to photobucket and found a dreamy place to contribute. Whaddya think?

One of Colorado's most haunted ghost towns, according to that humorous and indefatigable collector of the state's ghostlore, MaryJoy Martin, is Brown Gulch. Founded in the late 1860s by a group of silver miners--one of whom was, coincidentally, named William Brown--Brown Gulch has a whole chapter dedicated to its ethereal residents in Martin's 1985 book TWILIGHT DWELLERS: GHOSTS, GHOULS AND GOBLINS OF COLORADO. Possibly the most memorable phantoms of the Gulch are two mules, who fell from a crumbling rain-weakened road in 1879 and who still bray at the foot of the cliff where they died.

But I am both a lover of music and a hopeless romantic, and my favorite Brown Gulch ghost plays the fiddle over his lonesome grave.

Life in mining towns consisted of hard work, hard play, and occasional outbreaks of violence. There was law enforcement of a sort; some brawny citizen with a big gun--or once in a while, a US marshal--would be named sheriff and deputize a few miners. If things got too out of hand, justice would ride into town in the form of that itinerant gentleman Judge Lynch, accompanied by his bailiffs "Strong" Drink and Hempen Rope. Things would quieten down for awhile; and the cycle would begin again. Such women as came to town were either the wives of miners or the euphemistically named "dance hall girls." Once the silver seam--or gold seam--played out, the miners and hangers-on would pick up and move on, leaving silence and rotting buildings and collapsing mines behind.

Brown Gulch, however, was graced with the presence of a pale, sickly Englishman named Clifford Griffin. He arrived in the mid-1880s with nothing but the clothes on his back and a fiddle case, and in no time became one of the favorite residents of the Gulch. Clifford never told anyone the story of how an Englishman with a violin and the talent of an angel--especially when he played Mozart--ended up in a godforsaken silver camp, although gossip said he had left England to assuage his grief over a bride who died shortly after their wedding.

Clifford died on June 19th, 1887. Some say it was murder, some say it was suicide; I, mindful of his thin body and sickliness, would plop for that most heartless of nineteenth century killers, tuberculosis. He was buried on a cliff overlooking the creek that ran through the Gulch, a grave later marked with an obelisk tombstone.

Within a year of his death, Clifford Griffin was spotted near his gravesite, but more often he was heard; the rich sorrowful tones of his favorite Mozart pieces carried on the wind. Another mystery: Clifford was survived by a brother back in England who made arrangements to have flowers placed on Clifford's grave every year on the anniversary of his death, but the flowers continued to appear every year on June 19th, long after the brother passed. Some thought this ghostly; I'm inclined to think it was a music lover, paying tribute to his or her favorite fiddler.

Brown Gulch was finally abandoned in 1912, following two decades of mine collapses and landslides that finally made the town--dwindled to a population of less than one hundred too stubborn to leave--too dangerous to live in. The final landslide gave rise to another legend when someone claimed to have heard a piano playing in the old Lampshire Hotel as the building was bulldozed by mud and slush.

The story of the phantom pianist, however, hasn't resonated down the decades as has that of Clifford Griffin and his fiddle.

MaryJoy Martin tells the story much better than me, though. If you get the chance, read her book. It's a rollicking ride through Colorado history and ghost stories.

And with Mozart ringing in my ears, fair thee well.

I've become a sort of rambler through photobucket. I type in things for the heck of it; sometimes I get pictures and sometimes I don't. Tonight I typed in the words "ghost town" and these are some of the images I found:



As I searched through many, many pictures I was reminded of a song by C. W. McCall, the man from whom I copped my blog name:

the dance hall is silent and empty
the banjos don't play anymore
the music is only a memory
and the dancing is dust on the floor



The song is meditative, half-sung, half-spoken (McCall was never noted for his range), lamenting the life that went out of these little places:

once there was laughter
and once there was life
and once there was silver and gold. . .

as the mines played out and the living moved on to other ephemeral towns, leaving only tumbleweeds, the wind whistling through empty buildings, and the dead.

There are thousands of ghost stories from these little deserted places, and perhaps later I'll blog a few, but tonight I will just look at the pictures and dream.



the dance hall is silent and empty
the banjos don't play anymore. . .

Or do they?

And with a spectral "Oh, Susanna" ringing somewhere just out of the range of hearing, fair thee well.