5 Things You Didn’t Know About John Wayne’s ‘True Grit’
After three Academy Award nominations — each spaced about a decade apart — John Wayne finally got an Oscar statuette in 1970, for the Western film True Grit, which premiered on June 11, 1969. The film, directed by Henry Hathaway, starred Wayne as U.S. Marshall Rooster Coburn and country singer Glen Campbell as Texas Ranger La Boeuf, while Kim Darby played Mattie Ross, the young girl who enlists them to find her father’s killer.
True Grit was a commercial and critical win for Wayne, but its production was bumpier than an Arkansas country road. Read more about the making of the film and its legacy below.
1 John Wayne offered the role of Mattie to his daughter Aissa … when it wasn’t his to give
During pre-production, Wayne had it in his mind to cast his daughter Aissa Wayne as Mattie.
“I made the mistake of telling her the part was hers,” the actor later recalled, according to an excerpt of the biography John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth shared by Showbiz CheatSheet. “Then when I told Hathaway what I’d done, he said, ‘You stupid bastard, Duke. This isn’t your movie. We got the part cast. So you can go and break your daughter’s heart and tell her she can’t do it.’ And that’s what I did. I hated myself for it.”
2 Wayne wanted Elvis Presley to play La Boeuf
Everett Collection
The Rhinestone Cowboy himself Glen Campbell portrayed La Boeuf in the film, but producer Hal Wallis sought another music star for the part: He wanted Elvis Presley, True West Magazine reports. However, Colonel Tom Parker, the singer’s talent manager, demanded that his client get top billing over Wayne, so Wallis’ idea was a nonstarter.
On the Memphis Mafia Kid podcast (per the Daily Express), Billy Smith, a cousin of Presley’s, said Wayne also wanted the King of Rock and Roll for to play La Boeuf.
“In fact, he asked him a couple of times,” Smith added. “Of course, it was always carried through Colonel, and at that time when he was asking, Elvis was such a big star. Colonel didn’t want him to play second [to] anybody else, so that ruled that out.”
3 Henry Hathaway didn’t get along with some of his actors
Everett Collection
Darby told the Los Angeles Times in 2011 that Hathaway yelled at her on the first day of shooting True Grit, and it took a dressing-room tête-à-tête to resolve their tension. “I said, ‘Henry, I’ll do anything you want, just don’t yell at me again,’” Darby remembered.
Campbell told the paper, meanwhile, that Hathaway yelled at him, too. “[I said] ‘You know, I can get on a horse and get out of here and get in my car and go back to L.A.,’” Campbell recounted. “He kind of looked at me and said, ‘Well, I have been tough on you.’ That was Henry Hathaway.”
As for costar Robert Duvall, he once said he and Hathaway “didn’t get along” but acknowledged that, as an actor, he “didn’t get along with a lot of directors,” per the Daily Express.
4 You can thank movie magic for Rooster’s eye patch … and the hanging scene
Everett Collection
Wardrober Luster Bayless revealed that Wayne insisted on the use of both eyes while filming True Grit, even though Rooster wears an eyepatch. So Bayless used window-screen mesh and gauze to make a patch the actor could see through. But then Wayne “wanted a fresh patch every day, because they got dirty,” Bayless said, per True West.
Though Mattie is often seen on horseback in True Grit, Darby was “really afraid” of horses and can only actually be seen riding one for about five minutes of the film, she told the Times. In her place, a stunt double took the reins. “She was about 65,” Darby recalled. “They made a mask of my face out of clay, and she would wear that, and it would match my profile.”
And for the hanging scene at Fort Smith, Gary Combs said he and the other stunt performers wore “leggings with cables that went under your instep, and up to a harness on your hip, so when you drop, you hit on your insteps, not your neck.”
5 The film inspired two sequels before the 2010 remake
Everett Collection
Wayne reprised his True Grit role for the 1975 film Rooster Cogburn, teaming up on screen with Katharine Hepburn. Wallis once again served as producer, while his wife, Some Came Running actor Martha Hyer, wrote the script under a pen name. The plot is strikingly similar to True Grit’s story: Rooster Cogburn has Wayne’s character helping Hepburn’s Eula Goodnight track down her father’s murderers.
And in 1978, ABC aired the TV movie True Grit: A Further Adventure — a pilot for a prospective TV show — with The Wild Bunch actor Warren Oates taking over the role of Rooster and theater actor Lisa Pelikan playing Mattie. In that movie, Rooster and Mattie uncover corruption in a frontier town while coming to the aid of a hard-scrabble widow played by Lee Meriwether.
Then, of course, came the Coen Brothers’ True Grit remake in 2010, a film starring Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld — who both got Oscar nominations for their performances — plus Matt Damonand Josh Brolin.
Remind