The Truth About John Wayne Revealed
According to critic Emmanuel Levy, John Wayne was a lot more awkward around women than you would imagine from his movies. Despite Wayne's supposed shyness, he was married three times. His first marriage to Josephine Saenz, with whom he had four children, was broken up by an affair with Marlene Dietrich after Wayne filmed Seven Sinners opposite her in 1940. After two more marriages and three more children, he lived with his secretary Pat Stacey during his last years.
Old age didn't slow down Wayne's career, and not just because he had already been wearing a hairpiece since the late '40s. The Duke, however, couldn't outride cancer, which he had first developed in 1964. The shocking truth behind his illness, however, was that it probably was caused by radiation exposure ten years earlier.
The set of The Conqueror, a film about Genghis Khan that Wayne made in 1954, was only 100 miles from an atomic bomb testing site. According to The Guardian, they filmed downwind from the Nevada site, leading 91 of the 220 cast and crew members to later develop cancer. John Wayne was among them, and he died of stomach cancer in 1979, leaving an astonishing life and career behind.
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