Free Cat's Pajamas by James Morrow

box-office star of all time, John Wayne—a performance that was never committed to celluloid but that leaves his Oscar-winning Rooster Cogburn gagging in the dust.
    It would be inaccurate to say that Duke and I hated each other. Yes, I detested the man—detested everything he stood for—but my loathing was incompletely requited, for at some perverse level Duke clearly relished my companionship. Our irreconcilable philosophies first emerged when we appeared together in the 1953 survival melodrama, Island in the Sky, and ever since then our political clashes, too uncivilized to be called conversations or even debates, provided Duke with a caliber of stimulation he could obtain from no other liberal of his acquaintance. Throughout his career he routinely convinced the front office to offer me a marginal role in whatever John Wayne vehicle was on the drawing board, thereby guaranteeing that the two of us would briefly share the same soundstage or location set, and he could spend his lunch hours and coffee breaks reveling in the pleasurable rush he got from our battles over what had gone wrong with America.
    As I write these words, it occurs to me that any self-respecting actress would have spurned this peculiar arrangement—a kind of love affair animated by neither affection nor physical desire but rather by the male partner’s passion for polemic. No public adulation or peer recognition could possibly accrue to the parts Duke picked for me. There is no Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress Portraying a Cipher. But while I am normally self-respecting, I have rarely achieved solvency, and thus over a span of nearly twenty years I periodically found myself abandoning my faltering Broadway career, flying to Hollywood, and accepting good money for reciting bad dialogue.
    In 1954 I played a fading opera diva trapped aboard a crippled airliner in The High and the Mighty, which Bill Wellman directed with great flair. Next came my portrayal of Hunlun, mother of Genghis Khan, née Temujin, in The Conqueror, probably the least watchable of the films produced by that eccentric American aviator and storm trooper, Howard Hughes. Subsequent to The Conqueror I essayed a middle-aged Comanche squaw in The Searchers, the picture on which Duke started referring to me, unaffectionately, as “Egghead.” Then came my blind wife of a noble Texan in The Alamo, my over-the-hill snake charmer in Circus World, and my pacifist Navy nurse in The Green Berets. Finally, in Chisum of 1970, I was once again cast as Duke’s mother, although my entire performance ended up in the trim bin.
    It was Stuart who first connected the dots linking John Wayne, myself and nearly a hundred other cancer victims in a fantastic matrix of Sophoclean terror and Kierkegaardian trembling. Six weeks after Dr. Pryce had labeled me cancer-free, Stuart was scanning the New York Times for March 15, 1975, when he happened upon two ostensibly unrelated facts: the Atomic Energy Commission was about to open its old nuclear-weapons proving ground in Nevada to the general public, and former screen goddess Susan Hayward had died the previous day from brain cancer. She was only fifty-six. Something started Stuart’s mind working on all cylinders, and within twenty-four hours he’d made a Sherlock Holmesian deduction.
    â€œThe Conqueror,” he said. We were having morning tea in our breakfast nook, which is also our lunch nook and our dinner nook. “The Conqueror —that’s it! You shot the thing in Yucca Flat, Nevada, right?”
    â€œAn experience I’d rather forget,” I said.
    â€œBut you shot it in Yucca Flat, right?”
    â€œNo, we shot it in southwest Utah, the Escalante Desert and environs-Bryce Canyon, Snow Canyon, Zion National Park…”
    â€œSouthwest Utah, close enough,” said Stuart, shifting into lecture mode. “The Conqueror, 1956, Cinemascope, Technicolor, the second of Dick Powell’s