People loved him precisely because he was himself, because he spoke his mind, because he lived by a code of honor, and, partly as a result of all that, because he was so much fun. “He made people comfortable with his unbelievable gimlet-eyed wit,” says Marie. “It’s a gift because it says, ‘You and I are equal and we can laugh at the folly of humanity.’”
He had mastered the art of being fun over many decades, through many changes of fashion and fortune. Being a bore was, to him, a kind of moral offense. It meant you took yourself too seriously, rated yourself too highly, and spread sorrow instead of joy. Wayne was born a Lutheran but became a faithful Roman Catholic, with the fervor typical of a convert. The God he worshipped was a God of charity, justice, and fun.
We’re talking about a specific form of fun, admittedly. There were no feats of athleticism involved, unless you consider busting a gut laughing to be exercise. And maybe you should, since that, mixing cocktails, and walking around Manhattan are the only forms of physical activity I ever saw him engage in, and he lived almost as long as Queen Elizabeth.
Krista remembers squiring Wayne around the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in LA one night in the mid-’90s. They had just met a dazzlingly handsome young actor, whom Krista confided was not very smart. Wayne said, “Darling, who wants to fuck Kafka?”
A powerful life force coursed through Wayne, right up until the very end. It carried him on an altogether unlikely journey from rural, remote Ripon, Wisconsin—where he later described himself as “this gazelle that no one knew what to do with”—to Princeton, which he attended with the help of a scholarship. After graduating in 1954, he spent two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then sailed to postwar Paris on a French government scholarship. He returned to Princeton for a PhD in English, then suddenly quit. The action was happening in New York City.
