The affair that drove John Wayne straight into a car accident
On-screen, John Wayne was always cool, calm, and collected. The Duke was the epitome of the leading man: an unflappable hero who always knew the right thing to say or do, a lady’s man who could just as easily sweep a woman off her feet as he could blow a man away with a blast from his six-shooter. However, this veneer didn’t always cover his personal life.
In his book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, author Michael Munn wrote about an incident on the set of an unspecified film. “During filming on location at Big Bear, Marlene Dietrich stayed at a hotel by the lake to be close to Duke,” he explained. He recalled a conversation he had with Henry Hathaway, who directed Wayne in a series of pictures, including True Grit. “I didn’t like having her around because her ardour sometimes made him late, which was unlike Duke,” Hathaway said of Dietrich. “One morning he came rushing in and hit a corner and turned over his station wagon.”
If you hadn’t already figured it out, Wayne and Dietrich were romantically involved. “Duke’s affair with Dietrich was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood,” Hathaway continued. “They would appear in public together at Hollywood nightspots, and she even went with him to football games and prizefights. And she took a great interest in his career and later took much of the credit for making him the star he became.”
Wayne was married three times in his life. His first wife was a Spanish-American woman named Josephine Saenz, whom he had met before he was famous. Their marriage lasted between 1933 and 1945 and it was likely that this was when Wayne was involved with Dietrich. His second wife, Esperanza Baur, was a fellow actor from Mexico.
The couple married in 1946 but divorced eight years later. Baur was constantly suspicious of Wayne’s cheating ways, and one night, when he came home late from a wrap party, she tried to shoot him. In 1954, Wayne married for a third and final time. His new wife, Pilar Pallete, was also an actress who hailed from Peru. She was 21 years younger than her husband, and the pair stayed married until his death in 1979. At the time of writing, Pallete is still alive, at the grand old age of 96.
The actor’s infidelity with his German-born co-star was discovered in the most unusual way. Due to her heritage, Dietrich was secretly monitored by the FBI as a potential Nazi sympathiser. In reality, she had turned down advances from the party to star in propaganda films, applying for US citizenship instead. According to Scott Eyman in his book, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, Dietrich’s affair with Wayne was discovered as a result of these investigations. She was also married at the time.
Dietrich wasn’t the only woman that Wayne messed around with. He allegedly had an affair with Maureen O’Hara, co-star of several of his films, including The Quiet Man and Rio Grande. Though their relationship has never been formally confirmed, O’Hara was severely affected by Wayne’s death, falling into a deep depression at the loss of her ‘good friend’.
Like many of his contemporaries, John Wayne let stardom go to his head and affect his personal life in dramatic fashion. His inability to stay true to one woman is just as big a part of his legacy as any of his movies, which explains the sheer volume of literature written about his wandering eyes.
