When Icons Collide

January 5, 2012

In the winter of our lives thoughts invariably turn to mortality. This happened to the author Glendon Swarthout who was shaving one night before a party and thinking of all his friends who were getting cancer and dying. He missed the party. While shaving he had a brainstorm that became The Shootist, the story of an aging gunfighter with terminal cancer who has one last hurrah. Of course, this ended up to be John Wayne's coda film.

In his last years, Wyatt Earp frequently visited Western movie sets around Hollywood in the 1920s. One story has it that the aging lawman met a young prop boy named Marion Morrison on one of these location shoots. Of course, the prop boy later took up the stage name of John Wayne.

Today Clint Eastwood is roughly the same age as Wyatt Earp when the latter icon visited the movie set where he met a future icon, John Wayne. If this isn't a perfect story and a capper to Clint's career, I don't know what is.

The Man With No Name Meets The Man With THE Name

"Suppose. . .suppose. . ."

—Wyatt Earp's last words