“Duke, you ruined my career!”: John Wayne may have betrayed his protégé, but they got the last laugh
Being stabbed in the back by a friend and mentor is never ideal, but when John Wayne sold his protégé out for a role he didn’t want to play himself, they ended up getting the most lucrative revenge imaginable.
Even though he fielded plenty of offers during his time, ‘The Duke’ wouldn’t be caught dead starring in a TV series. He did make cameo appearances in a couple of shows, but the one thing that united them was the presence of either John Ford or Ward Bond, two friends he could never say no to.
He was a big-screen actor, and since audiences were still turning up to catch his latest adventures at their local cinema, he felt comfortable enough to never lower himself to episodic fare. He didn’t feel the same way about an aspiring star he’d taken under his wing, though, and basically sold them up the river.
Having co-starred alongside Wayne in Big Jim McLain, Hondo, Island in the Sky, and The Sea Chase, as well as taking top billing in the Batjac-produced Gun the Man Down, James Arness had clearly been hand-picked by ‘The Duke’ as a rising star, and perhaps even an heir to his throne one day.
However, when CBS approached the icon and gauged his interest in playing the leading role in Gunsmoke, he baulked. He didn’t do TV, but what he could do was sell the talent contract he had Arness under to the network, even though he wasn’t initially enthused at the prospect of committing to an ongoing series.
“I always knew Gunsmoke was a good thing,” Wayne told TV Guide. “Almost did it myself. Offered me the world. But I was busy, so I gave ’em a young fellow I had under contract named Jim Arness. Know what he said to me when I sold his contract to CBS? ‘Duke, you ruined my career!'”
He might have felt that way initially, but a gigantic pile of money has a way of soothing most wounds. Arness spent 20 seasons and over 600 episodes as Matt Dillon, but more than that, two of his self-founded companies were involved in the production of Gunsmoke, which gave him a bigger piece of the pie, with the actor estimating that he’d earned somewhere in the region of $30 million from it.
In fact, he told Burt Reynolds, who spent 50 episodes as Gunsmoke‘s Quint Asper in the 1960s, that from one role alone, Arness had “made more money than Duke has in his entire motion picture career.” Due to a combination of The Alamo and financial mismanagement, Wayne was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy in the ’60s, all while the guy he’d effectively sold to CBS was raking in millions on an annual basis.
Arness may have been concerned that TV would be the death of him, but it kept him gainfully employed for two decades, and even left him rolling in the cash when his mentor was almost declared penniless, which may well have been the icing on the cake.
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