She was not yet a star, but she had already earned herself a flattering reputation. In 1965, at just 30 years of age, Joan Didion was about to leave Vogue magazine, where she had spent seven years. She had joined the magazine as a proofreader, before rising through the ranks to become one of the editorial staff. Two years earlier, she had published her first novel, Run, River. She soon became one of the most astute observers of life in Hollywood, but also, and above all, of the emergence of the counterculture, notably for Esquire and Life.
But for now, she accepted an offer from The Saturday Evening Post: to meet a legend, in the form of John Wayne, on the set of his new western, The Four Sons of Katie Elder. This was Wayne's 141st film, the 59th directed by Henry Hathaway and, incidentally, Dean Martin's 44th screen appearance. After a three-month delay, the crew was finally able to shoot in Durango, Mexico, and settled in for the final days of filming at Estudios Churubusco, a studio near Mexico City. This would make it easier for Wayne to find time to meet a journalist.
Offers from the Saturday Evening Post were the sort you did not turn down. The title paid its contributors very well. The journalist had just returned to her native California and settled in Los Angeles with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, a Time journalist who would soon become a prominent novelist and screenwriter. The couple, who lived large, needed money. They drove sports cars, like the Corvette in front of which Didion posed in 1968 in a long knit dress for a series of images that would later become famous. They enjoyed good restaurants and wished to leave the Los Feliz neighborhood for Malibu, home to the Hollywood stars and producers whose every move they wanted to chronicle. But Didion did not accept the magazine's offer just to pay the bills: Wayne was her childhood idol.
She was just a little girl when, accompanied by her little brother, she saw him for the first time at the movies. It was 1943, at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, where her parents worked. There was not much to do in the military camp, except to admire the first B-29 – remembered as the plane that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and go to the movies.
An authentic hero
When, in Albert S. Rogell's The Bloody Rush, she heard Wayne promise his partner that he would build her a house "at the bend of the river, where the cottonwoods grow," she became convinced that she would expect the same from any man from then on: a house where the cottonwoods grew. Wayne, already nicknamed "The Duke," was to be the young girl's idol from that day forward. Now a journalist, she wrote in the introduction of her interview entitled "John Wayne: A Love Song" that "He determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams."
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