The closest Clint Eastwood and John Wayne came to working together: “I sent that to him, and he didn’t like it”
Ask a thousand people to name the first two actors that come to mind when they think of the western genre, and almost all of them will respond with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Not necessarily in that exact order, but those two icons became synonymous with the wide-open plains and a trusty six-shooter.
‘The Duke’ spent decades as the medium’s biggest and most bankable star, but he couldn’t maintain that stranglehold forever. Then again, Hollywood wasn’t providing him with much competition, at least until Sergio Leone cast a TV guy best known for Rawhide as the mysterious protagonist of his Dollars trilogy.
Just like that, a new heir had been appointed. Eastwood didn’t want to be permanently typecast, but he still made plenty of westerns throughout the 1960s and 1970s. At last, there was a fresh face on the scene who could ride into a dusty town and rid the place of its problems, which left Wayne scrambling to keep up.
Whereas Eastwood embraced the industry’s shift towards a darker, more realistic, and less performative approach to storytelling, ‘The Duke’ couldn’t stand it. He wanted everything to remain exactly the way it was and had been for most of his career, and he grew increasingly jealous of the young pretender everyone had anointed as his successor.
It would have been a team-up for the ages had they crossed paths on the silver screen, but it wasn’t to be. Eastwood recalled that tentative plans had been made as soon as they locked eyes: “The first time I ever met him, he said, ‘We ought to do a movie, kid,'” he told Paul Nelson. “I said, ‘Yeah, it would be great.'”
While Eastwood was briefly considered for a part in True Grit, he didn’t feel it was worth taking. Undeterred, though, a pitch landed on the actor and filmmaker’s desk that he thought would make the ideal vehicle to give audiences the one thing they’d been dreaming of since he burst onto the scene: a two-hander between the western’s undisputed focal points.
“I gave Wayne a story I’d read once, which wasn’t complete,” Eastwood explained. “It was a far-out western idea. I sent that to him, and he didn’t like it. He went on and on about how it didn’t represent the men and women who settled in the West. He got into some area where I didn’t understand what he was talking about.”
To be fair, he blamed himself: “I was looking at it as something as a potential vehicle if developed, and somehow I wasn’t very good at explaining myself when I sent him the covering notes,” Eastwood admitted. “We never went anywhere with that. After that, he became ill.”
‘The Duke’ even tried to play his new rival at his own game and failed miserably, with Wayne starring in the dismal McQ after Eastwood turned it down. The latter did try to make it happen, but knowing how stubborn his opposite number was in defending the ideals of Americana and refusing to venture too far outside of his wheelhouse, it felt like it was doomed from the start.
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