(Note: This is fourth in a series of articles following the career on John Wayne in Lone Pine)

Few things say the U.S.A. and our culture better than baseball and John Wayne. When John Wayne was working in Lone Pine on Tycoon in 1947, co-star Laraine Day's husband Leo Durocher brought westerns and major league baseball together in a remarkable way.

Leo Durocher was the controversial, yet winning coach of both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. He was very successful but also had a penchant for stirring up conflicts and trouble, with his actions and with his mouth. Durocher left us some great quotes. He once said, "Baseball is like church, many attend few understand." His most famous statement remains "nice guys finish last." And "Show me a good loser and I'll show you an idiot.".

Laraine Day had run off to Mexico and gotten a quickie divorce and then married Durocher. He was definitely a possessive and jealous husband. He never could relax when he was watching the Duke and his wife kiss. Roberts and Olson in their biography John Wayne: American wrote, "The press had a field day with baseball's bad boy and his new Mormon bride, who neither drank nor smoked. The the marriage did not hamper Tycoon, Durocher did. When shooting began in early February, before spring training, the manager became a frequent visitor on the set, and he never adjusted to seeing his wife in Duke's embrace. He just sat there day after day, Wayne recalled, watching him like a base runner who was preparing to steal home. Perhaps his presence, as much as anything else, was responsible for the decided lack of passion in the love scenes."

On March 24 of that year, at a meeting at the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, Durocher admitted to Commissioner Happy Chandler that he sometimes bet on card games with Kirby Higbe. It happened to be the same year that Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers and it fell to Durocher to quash a revolt among the white players of the team at Robinsons presence. On April 9th, Durocher was suspended for the entire season as manager of the Dodgers because of his association with known gamblers. With nothing to better to do, Durocher joined his young bride who was working on location Lone Pine on Tycoon. Undoubtedly he wanted to keep his eye of Mr. Wayne.

Bill Bauer, who at the time was superintendent of the high school district in Lone Pine, told this story before he died. Local old-timers still remember what a great storyteller and educator Bauer was; his accomplishments in Lone Pine were honored when the football field was renamed Bauer Field, the name it bears today.

Apparently Durocher was satisfied that the star was behaving himself, because soon HE began to miss baseball. He couldn't be involved in anyway with coaching officially, but when he met Bauer and found out besides Superintendent, he was also the baseball coach, he made an offer hard to turn down. Leo Durocher, suspended coach of the Brooklyn Dodgers, said he would assist Bauer in his coaching duties as long as he didn't tell anyone. A deal was struck and baseball coach Bill Bauer and the Lone Pine Eagles had some very professional assistance that year. What is lost to history is whether it made any difference to the boys won-lost record.

The plot of Tycoon, which one writer calls "overlong and dreary," involved Wayne's character building a railroad tunnel through part of the Andes, which the mountains above Lone Pine stood in for admirably. The actually set of the tunnel entrance was built at the west end of Ruiz Hill just west of Lone Pine. Remnants and marks of the set can be easily identified to this day. The bolts that were drilled into the rocks to help support the large set of wood, chicken wire and plaster are still easy identified today. On the north side of the set, an observer can easily pick out a piece of dripping plaster that runs down the face of another boulder, like white icing off a cake. On the ground small pieces of plaster that were never fully cleaned up when the set was struck are obvious.

On the location tours it is always fun to note that a famous still was shot just north of the Tycoon set featuring Wayne on a horse in a scene from Blue Steel nearly twelve years before. You cannot help wondering if Wayne would have pointed out to Durocher, Day or Anthony Quinn as they waited for the next take, that he had shot in almost the same place before.

James Agee, the film critic, wrote of the movie, "Several tons of dynamite are set off during the movie, none under the right person." However, the film was a modest box office set. Allen Eyles has written, "The only really interesting feature of the film is the way Wayne's role hints at the part he was soon to play in Red River. Both films were conceived and written by Borden Chase, who had given Wayne the "trait of obstinancy that alienates his friends and supporters until he learns the hard way he has been wrong."

Two years later, Wayne was to return to Inyo County, working extensively with John Ford on Three Godfathers (1949) in Death Valley and then coming to Lone Pine to film. It was here that a young Joy Anderson was to meet the famous director and his star John Wayne.

The stories left us about the shoot did nothing to improve John Ford's reputation as a nice guy, but he did create a marvelous and beautifully filmed movie that hasn't really aged much at all. In next months column we will take up the story of Three Godfathers, the shenanigans on the set and back at the Furnace Creek Inn and Ford's treatment of neophyte actor Harry Carey, Jr.