When John Wayne held two communists at gunpoint for an FBI sting: “The name’s Duke”
If there was one thing John Wayne hated more than anything else, it was a communist. The actor was an outspoken supporter of the witch hunt that ran rampant through Hollywood throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and if his friends are to be believed, his interests ran much deeper than that.
Wayne’s association with the so-called ‘threat’ was nothing if not interesting: he once found himself on the receiving end of an FBI investigation when J Edgar Hoover thought he was making a communist-leaning film, and he was alleged to have been targeted for assassination by Josef Stalin.
However, the most fascinating tale by far came from Yakima Canutt, the legendary stuntman and close friend of ‘The Duke’, who worked with him on almost 50 films in a personal and professional relationship spanning decades. The way he tells it, Wayne had a pair of commies utterly convinced he was going to shoot them in the back and leave them dead in the middle of nowhere.
To make things even stranger, the star was said to be accompanied by James Edward Grant, his most trusted screenwriter. As Canutt regaled Michael Munn in 1976, the foreign interlopers were made to kneel on a beach with their hands cuffed behind their backs, with Wayne and Grant standing behind them with their pistols raised, ready to send them back to Russia in a body bag.
After counting to three, they pulled the trigger… and nothing happened. At this point, Wayne turned to the two FBI agents who’d accompanied them and said, “You can have them now.” Glaring at the Russians who thought their days were numbered, ‘The Duke’ held up his prop gun and revealed his secret: “Blanks!”
To add even more intrigue to the increasingly implausible situation, Canutt maintained that Wayne never wanted to be credited for his secret role in national security. “You won’t forget our deal, will ya?” he called out to the feds. “I don’t care what you have to tell Hoover, but you’ll keep my name out of this.”
He’d only become involved after it was discovered the pair had been sent to kill him, setting plans in motion for the elaborate sting. “Like I told you, I got a wife, an ex-wife, and four kids, and I don’t want any of them knowing and having to worry for the rest of their lives,” he said. “These commies fucked it up this time. Maybe they’ll think twice before trying again.”
In response, one of the agents seemed apprehensive: “Maybe, Mr Wayne.” In a line that feels ripped straight from one of his films, the actor embraced his persona: “The name’s Duke.” It all sounds suspiciously far-fetched, especially when Canutt was adamant that Wayne never wanted his involvement in the sting to become public knowledge, but it also sounds so strange that it might well be true.
While ‘The Duke’ acknowledged on several occasions that he’d been marked for death by Stalin’s regime, he neither confirmed nor denied that he and a screenwriter had abducted two communist agents at gunpoint, driven them to a beach, and convinced them that they were about to be shot in cold blood before handing them over to the FBI, so who knows where the truth really lies?
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