The man they called the Duke—the most bankable movie star in Hollywood for three straight decades—was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, on May 26, 1907. Long before the myth of the taciturn cowboy took hold, he was a bright, athletic boy who earned a football scholarship to the University of Southern California, served as class president, and belonged to the debating team and the Latin Society. The nickname Duke came not from bravado but from an Airedale terrier he walked to school each day; a firefighter began calling the boy Little Duke after the dog, and the name stuck for life. A body-surfing accident ended his athletic career and his scholarship when he was too embarrassed to tell his coach the truth.
He stayed on at Fox Film Corporation, where he had already found summer work moving props in exchange for football tickets, and began picking up bit parts. Director John Ford noticed him. In 1929, Raoul Walsh cast him in The Big Trail and gave him a new name: John Wayne, a reference to Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne. The film was a commercial disappointment, and Wayne spent the 1930s grinding through dozens of B Westerns, learning his craft in the least prestigious way possible.
During those years, he was also trying to marry Josephine Saenz, the daughter of the Consul General of Panama, a devout Catholic family deeply skeptical of the young Protestant from a modest Glendale home. The courtship stretched across seven years. She waited while his career stalled and his prospects remained uncertain. They finally married on June 24, 1933, at the home of actress Loretta Young, and had four children: Michael, Toni, Patrick, and Melinda.
For a while, the marriage was genuinely good. Josephine gave him the stability he needed while he waited for a breakthrough that finally came in 1939 with John Ford’s Stagecoach. The film turned the Duke into a star almost overnight, and the career that followed—Fort Apache, Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Sands of Iwo Jima—cemented his place in American cinema. But stardom brought with it everything that stardom brings.
Affairs began in the early 1940s, most notably with Marlene Dietrich, his co-star in Seven Sinners. Josephine discovered the involvement, sought counsel through her Catholic faith, and tried to hold the marriage together, but the trust was broken. Wayne moved out in 1942. The divorce was finalized on Christmas Day, 1945.
Josephine retained custody of the children, stepped away from public life, and devoted herself to her family and faith. She died in 2003 at age 95, outliving the Duke by nearly a quarter century. By then, Wayne had already met his second wife. In the fall of 1941, while still married to Josephine, he traveled to Mexico City and was introduced by actor Ray Milland to Esperanza Baur Diaz, a 21-year-old Mexican actress.
He described himself as entranced. He set her up in a penthouse on Sunset Boulevard, and after his divorce was final, they married on January 17, 1946. He was 38; she was 25. Wayne himself compared the marriage to shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar.
Chata, as she was known, was jealous from nearly the beginning—jealous of his children, jealous of his work, jealous of the women he worked with. The couple had no children of their own. Her mother moved into the house, becoming a permanent ally in arguments and a companion in heavy drinking. The household was perpetually on the edge of something going wrong.
The most dramatic eruption came in 1947 while Wayne was filming Angel and the Bad Man with Gail Russell, a fragile young actress struggling with severe stage fright and her own drinking. Wayne spent considerable time in her dressing room, saying he felt protective of her. Both he and Russell firmly denied any romance, a denial Wayne maintained at the divorce trial and Russell maintained for the rest of her life. Chata was not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on fidelity, given that she had become his girlfriend while he was still married to someone else.
On the night the film wrapped, Wayne arrived home late to find himself locked out. He broke a window and let himself in. Chata came down the dark hallway with a . 45 caliber handgun.
In Wayne’s version, she and her mother both came charging out, fighting over the weapon. Chata claimed mistaken identity—she heard breaking glass and pointed the gun at a figure she didn’t recognize. Whatever the sequence, the gun discharged. The bullet passed close enough to his head that the margin between the divorce trial and a funeral was measured in inches.
He was not hit. Chata begged forgiveness, swearing she would change. Wayne agreed to stay. The cycle that followed—sobriety, relapse, fighting, fragile reconciliation—repeated through the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.
Wayne had her mother sent back to Mexico. It helped, but only for a time. By May 1952, Wayne alleged in divorce proceedings that Chata had been involved with hotel heir Nicky Hilton Jr. while Hilton was a guest in the Wayne home.
The separation came that month. The divorce trial was three days of public spectacle, with charges flying in both directions: unfaithfulness, emotional cruelty, drunken violence. Gail Russell was subpoenaed to testify, and the publicity accelerated the unraveling of her own marriage and career. Her contract with Paramount was dropped within two years, and she died in 1961 at age 36, found alone in her West Hollywood apartment.
The cause was attributed to the effects of long-term alcohol consumption. Wayne was ordered to pay Chata $150,000 in a lump sum plus $50,000 a year for six years. The divorce was finalized on November 1, 1954. He later told gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, with dark humor, that they had had a pretty good time together when she wasn’t trying to kill him.
Chata returned to Mexico, largely in seclusion, living on the alimony payments that were her primary income. She died on March 10, 1961, in a hotel room in Mexico City, at age 40, of a heart attack. Empty alcohol bottles were found in the room. Her alimony had ended not long before she died.
On the very day the divorce was finalized, Wayne married his third wife. He had met Pilar Pallete in Tingo Maria, Peru, in 1952 while scouting locations for The Alamo. She was 23, the daughter of a Peruvian senator, an actress recently signed to Wayne’s own production company. The age gap was 21 years.
She was educated, poised, and calm—different in character from either of his previous marriages. The wedding took place in a small garden ceremony in Hawaii. She took on four stepchildren without the tensions that had defined his marriage to Chata, gave up her own film career without bitterness, and bore him three more children: Aissa in 1956, John Ethan in 1962, and Marisa in 1966, by which point Wayne was nearly 60. The following decades were remarkable professionally.
He won the Academy Award for True Grit in 1969, playing Rooster Cogburn, a morally complex marshal as far from the simple heroic archetype as he had ever gone. But the marriage, beneath the surface of apparent stability, had been quietly coming apart. Wayne’s absences grew longer, not just during shooting but between films. He spent long stretches on his boat, the Wild Goose, away from the domestic world in ways Pilar increasingly experienced as emotional withdrawal.
Wayne’s own explanation was characteristically blunt: they had lost interest in each other. In November 1973, after 19 years of marriage, a formal separation was announced. Pilar maintained to the end of her days that they never legally divorced and that the bond between them persisted until his death. Wayne’s companion in his final years was his personal secretary, Pat Stacy.
Wayne had been fighting cancer since the early 1960s and had lost his left lung in 1964. Stomach cancer arrived in his final years. He did not perform his dying for the public. He died at UCLA Medical Center on June 11, 1979, at age 72.
His daughter Aissa was with him in his final hours, holding his hand. When she asked if he knew who she was, he told her, of course, he did. The three marriages produced seven children. Pilar was not written into his will; she had been written out after the separation.
The document included Pat Stacy and also Josephine, his first wife, who outlived him by 24 years and received an acknowledgment in his estate that his third wife did not. Pilar, still alive in her 90s and living in California, has said she never could love anyone the way she loved him. The subjects of her paintings are often John Wayne.