I am Mayuri and Westerns were never something I planned to take seriously. My uncle had them on every Sunday afternoon and John Wayne was always there on screen, hat low, voice lower. At some point I stopped watching the films and started wondering about the man behind them. Where did someone like that actually live? The answer surprised me. It wasn’t one place. It was three completely different worlds.
The Newport Beach House
Fourteen years. Same address on Bayshore Drive, Newport Beach.
Wayne moved in during 1965 and never left until cancer took him in 1979. The house was single storey and sat on the water. You would walk past it and not think twice about who owned it.
The den is what people who visited remembered. A massive wooden desk sat dead centre. Old firearms. Kachina dolls. A painting here, something he grabbed off a trip there. The shelves just kept filling up over the years and at some point it stopped being decorating and started being just, his life, arranged on surfaces. No interior designer signed off on any of it. Wayne made every choice himself and said he didn’t give a damn whether other people liked it.
That’s the house. No drama. Just a man with a very specific idea of how he wanted to live.
The Wild Goose
The boat is part of the story too…
After the war, a 136-foot minesweeper was sitting around doing nothing. Wayne bought it, stripped it back, and turned it into something liveable. He called it the Wild Goose. Nobody told him to. It just seemed like the right kind of vessel for him.
Dean Martin came aboard. Maureen O’Hara visited. Dean Martin came. They played cards, fished, and sat around. It felt like the Newport den except the floor moved.
And this part I genuinely did not expect to find – the Wild Goose came out of the same shipyard as Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso. Same place, overlapping years. Same place, same years. Cousteau was mapping the ocean floor. Wayne was playing chess on the deck. Two men, one shipyard, had completely different plans for the water.
His son Ethan later mentioned that the boat was large enough to block the views of nearby neighbors. Wayne’s response to that situation was apparently to jump overboard and swim to shore when docked in Mexico rather than deal with any fuss.
The Wild Goose is still in Newport Beach today. You can book a cruise on it.
The 26 Bar Ranch in Arizona
Wayne didn’t just own a ranch. He ran one.
The 26 Bar in Arizona raised purebred Herefords and Wayne was an active part of the operation, not a name on a deed. The most interesting decision he made there was hiring Temple Grandin, the animal behaviorist, to design a cattle chute system. This was well before Grandin became widely known. Wayne saw the practical value and brought her in.
That hire tells you something about how he thought. He wasn’t interested in how things had always been done.
The Iowa House He Started In
None of this started with California money.
Before any of this, there was a four-room house in Winterset, Iowa. 1907. His father Clyde ran a pharmacy.
The family never stayed anywhere long. Earlham came and went — the pharmacy there went bankrupt by 1911. Then Des Moines, then Keokuk, then a place called Brooklyn where a pot-bellied stove threw sparks while they were mid-pack and nearly burned everything down. Then California.
The Winterset house is still standing. Inside it sits a 70mm Mitchell camera from his first leading role. Most people walk past that room without stopping. I would have stopped.
Also Read: