The one actor who threatened John Wayne: “You big son of a bitch”
In the final decade of his life, John Wayne fought through losing his left lung to cancer and still managed to make some of the finest films of his storied career. 1969’s True Grit and 1976’s The Shootist are still viewed as Wayne classics, and 1972’s The Cowboys is one of the totemic star’s most underrated films. It casts the legendary tough guy as an ageing rancher who hires a group of young schoolboys to help him with a cattle drive after all his ranch hands abandon him to follow the gold rush. Along the way, they fall afoul of Bruce Dern’s villainous Asa Watts, known as “Long Hair”. Interestingly, while Wayne said making the film was one of the best experiences of his career, he did find himself in a confrontation with one of his co-stars, who even threatened to drop him on his ass.
When director Mark Rydell signed up for The Cowboys, he had never directed a western motion picture but had helmed ten episodes of CBS’s Gunsmoke. He knew after only 40 pages of William Dale Jennings’ source novel that he wanted to bring the story to the silver screen, though, and when he approached Warner Brothers, he already had an actor in mind for rancher Wil Andersen. He pitched George C Scott, who had just won – and summarily rejected – an Oscar for the iconic biographical World War II drama Patton.
The studio wanted Rydell to consider another option, though. It sent the reluctant director to meet Wayne on the set of 1971’s Big Jake in Mexico, but he wasn’t exactly enthused about the idea. Rydell told True West magazine, “He was very conservative politically, and I was a liberal Jewish kid from the Bronx. We couldn’t have been more polar opposites.” To his surprise, though, he found Wayne to be one of the nicest guys he’d ever met, and they agreed to make the picture together.
With his lead in place, Rydell cast Dern as the villain. At the time, Dern was shooting the sci-fi film Silent Running, but he was allowed two days off to film his role in The Cowboys. He told True West his agent made him an offer no actor could refuse: “You’ve got to have two days off next week because I have a role you must do. No one can know this. They’re doing a movie where John Wayne’s going to be killed, and you’re going to be the guy that does it.”
Rydell’s true masterstroke, though, came when he decided to cast half of the 11 schoolboys from the usual pool of child actors while the other half would be kids with rodeo experience. Stephen Hudis, one of the young stars, revealed that the boys with acting experience attended eight weeks of horse riding training while the rodeo boys were sent to acting classes. He smiled, “We would help them out with that, and they would help us with the horseback.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing for the boys, though. Dern revealed that one was almost cut from the film: Clay O’Brien, a nine-year-old rodeo expert raised on a California ranch. He was considerably shorter than the other kids, and Dern claimed Wayne even told the boy, “Well, you’re too small, son.” The reaction he got from the pint-sized cowboy was something nobody could have anticipated.
O’Brien supposedly stared the western icon down and, in his squeaky voice, told him, “I can drop you, you big son of a bitch.” He then twirled his rope three times before lassoing Wayne around his ankles. When he yanked as hard as he could, Wayne fell right on his ass in the dirt.
To everyone’s astonishment, the brave kid – who would grow up to become a Pro Rodeo Hall of Famer and a seven-time World Champion in Team Roping – simply grinned, “Who’s too small now?”
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