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NARRATOR:Interior inn on the park, London, night.
Howard Hughes.
The billionaire tycoon, aviator, and film producer
has become a recluse.
Locked in his penthouse suite, he refuses to bathe.
Sports a long white beard.
Fingernails that protrude like snakes,
where he sits for hours, naked,
except for a pink hotel napkin.
Another ritual would dominate his final years.
A motion picture that he would play continually
against a homemade projector screen.
The movie looks part western, part musical.
A would-be epic, a total farce.
To Howard Hughes,
this film called “The Conqueror”
was his final masterpiece.
I feel this tired woman is for me.
My blood says take her.
The Conqueror in many ways would be a--
a entirely forgettable picture today.
Howard Hughes had this idea.
He wanted to make the Genghis Khan story.
American and international audiences
loved these big wide-screen epics.
Howard Hughes was a megalomaniac.
He-- he certainly saw himself as a conqueror
of the movie business.
The aircraft business.
A conqueror of politics.
A conqueror of the whole world.
John Wayne,
and William Conrad,
and Ted de Corsia.
Uh, even Agnes Moorehead.
Playing Asiatics.
Just because it was accepted,
it doesn't necessarily mean that it was correct.
It was his creations.
It was the Howard Hughes presents this,
you know, iconic motion picture
that he believed was his masterpiece.
NARRATOR:For authenticity,
Hughes chose the perfect location
to recreate the world of Genghis Khan.
The Gobi Desert looks like the area around St. George.
Living in St. George in the ‘50s and ‘60s
was magical.
We heard all aboutThe Conqueror being here
and how the stars were here.
The Conquerorwas a $6 million disaster
that starred John Wayne as Genghis Khan,
the great Mongolian warrior,
who conquered most of Asia during the 12th century.
I wouldn't say it's one of the-- the best films I've seen
or one of my father's best films.
Of-- of all the Howard Hughes movies,
this is probably the toughest movie
to find anything admirable about.
The Conqueror has been called “one of the worst films
of the 1950s”, if not of all time.
If I could describeThe Conqueror in one word,
I would probably just call it “tragic”.
Ah, unfortunate.
Ridiculous.
Miscast.
I've heard that it's a terrible movie.
I don't know if I've seen it all the way through.
You know, I wouldn't watch it twice.
The Conqueror was to be Hughes' cinematic masterpiece.
Shot in breathtaking CinemaScope
and glorious Technicolor.
Why Mr. Hughes,
did you watch this film over and over,
as if searching for an answer?
Are you thinking about the people of St. George
as well as your cast and crew?
How they would be linked in a dark chapter
in American history?
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS NARRATOR:There was a time,
when the cinema was a place of spectacle and wonder.
When unforgettable films played on gigantic screens,
that overwhelmed the imagination.
Now, that time has come again.
Behold His mighty hands.
In the early ‘50s, studios were trying to create
these larger-than-life epics.
THE ROBE NARRATOR:Here is all the sweep and spectacle.
BEN HUR NARRATOR:The spectacle, the color, the excitement.
The human drama.
THE CRIMSON PIRATE NARRATOR:Yes, and a whole new world of entertainment wonders.
Well, in the ‘50s, television made the film industry
very nervous.
They were very, very conscious of having to counteract that--
that idea that they were competing
with little images in a little box
in black and white at home.
So, you had to have splashy color
and you had to have things that were big
and felt important.
SHANE NARRATOR:The motion picture unforgettable for its spectacle and scope.
And the other big factor at the time was this thing
called the “Cold War”.
And there was this communist agenda that was happening
that Americans were fighting against.
And there was this whole nuclear program
that was happening, and it was something that--
that became a very big topic in Hollywood as well.
THEM! NARRATOR:But born in that swirling inferno of radioactive dust
were things so horrible, so hideous,
there is no word to describe "Them!"
We may be witnesses
to a biblical prophecy come true.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It may be said that the Atomic Age is here to stay.
The question is, “Are we?”
The atomic bomb creates a temperature
at the center of the explosion
of a 100 million degrees Fahrenheit,
which is three and a half times
the temperature in the interior of the sun.
This heat creates great fires.
Secondly, it creates tremendous pressures
which push the air in front of them,
creating winds of 500 to a 1000 miles per hour,
10 times the velocity of a hurricane.
These winds knock everything down in their path.
Thirdly, it produces super radiations
equivalent to tons and tons of radium,
which would kill all life within an area
of 10 square miles.
These radioactive poisons would be carried
and dispersed through the winds.
The dust will settle gradually everywhere.
The Atomic Energy Commission emerged as a way
to create a separate government unit
to manage atomic energy outside of the military.
I graduated University of Utah in 1954
with a degree in ROTC for the air force
and business management.
I was to learn how to handle radiological projects
to protect uh, people.
The idea was that if we were to bomb targets in Russia,
the airplanes would be covered with radiological contamination.
General Curtis LeMay was head of the United States Air Force
at that time.
And we were
under the Strategic Air Command Commission.
The Soviet success with the atomic bomb in 1949
really created a sense of urgency
for locating a more practical continental test site.
Because the Pacific was expensive.
It was logistically complicated and they needed something
that could be used more efficiently
than the Pacific.
New Mexico where the Trinity bomb had been tested
was considered,
but ultimately they identified two vast areas of Nevada,
one to the north, Tonopah, Nevada,
and one about 70 miles north of Las Vegas.
NARRATOR:The US government chose the Nevada desert
north of Las Vegas
as the site for their atomic test program.
300 miles away,
another blast was being felt in Hollywood, California.
RKO, the king of B pictures,
but also prestigious films such as Scarface, King Kong,
and perhaps the greatest film of them all, Citizen Kane,
would be purchased by an aviation pioneer,
millionaire, and dreamer,
determined to shake up the film industry.
BRITISH MOVIETONE NARRATOR:The goal of aviators is now the nonstop flight
around the world.
And Howard Hughes has taken a big step towards attaining it.
Leaving Burbank, California,
the millionaire sportsman and film producer,
calls at New York on his way to Europe.
Even in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s,
Howard Hughes was a name surrounded by exoticism.
A mystery figure in one way,
a very famous highly public figure in another.
Howard Hughes was interested in really three things.
He was interested in aviation.
He was interested in women,
and he was interested in making movies.
Those three things do not necessarily make
a good head of a studio.
NARRATOR:Howard fired most of the RKO staff,
made fewer movies,
and upset the balance of Hollywood in the early 1950s.
But there was one subject matter
he was determined to bring to the big screen.
Howard Hughes had this idea.
He wanted to make the Genghis Khan story.
The-- the story of Genghis Khan--
Is a story of like a Caesar or you know, a Cleopatra.
This kind of blockbuster kind of idea.
The agent who was with him at the time said,
“I've got the perfect guy for you.
This Oscar Millard, he's an expert on Genghis Khan.”
OSCAR:I was in fact such an authority on Genghis Khan,
when I prudently looked him up in the Britannica
in the half hour I had before the meeting,
I had trouble finding him,
because I couldn't spell his name.
Dick Powell was a figure in Hollywood for a long time.
He was a guy who was very likeable.
Everyone liked him.
♪ Boy meets girl ♪
He'd come to Hollywood, uh, singer, dancer.
But um,
he started to see himself beyond being
in front of the screen
and started to think of himself behind the screen.
Hughes, he ended up getting to know Dick Powell
and somehow he managed to convince him
to let him direct this epic picture
called “The Conqueror”.
It's a huge project,
and I think he had the most uh,
important qualification for him getting that role,
was his ability to say yes a lot to Howard Hughes.
NARRATOR:Interior, bedroom.
Middle of the night, the phone rings.
A half waken man answers.
Interior, parking garage.
One hour later.
Powell is meeting with Hughes in the back of his limousine
to go over mundane production matters
regarding The Conqueror.
To Hughes,
everything must be discussed in utmost secrecy.
Over the shoulder medium shot,
as Powell watches the millionaire drive away
into the Los Angeles night.
The 3:00 a.m. meetings in secret back alley garages
and all of this was being run like a CIA operation.
Nothing was simple with this guy.
He was concerned that his conversations
would be overheard.
I know a lot of the backstory from my husband
having been a teenager working there
and the things he's told me.
He thinks his dad did it,
because it bought him a nice house
in Mandeville Canyon.
OSCAR:Powell said he would get Marlon Brando
on loan out from Fox to play the lead.
Brando was the new magic name
and I had just heard him deliver,
“Friends, Romans, countrymen”, as if newly minted.
Carried away,
I decided to write the screenplay
in stylized, slightly Archaic English.
Mindful of the fact
that my story was nothing more than a tarted up western,
I thought this would give it a certain cache.,
and I left no lily unpainted.
It was said that when Marlon Brando
was offered the-- the role as Temujin,
his biggest objection was the dialogue.
He couldn't handle it.
And so they started looking at who else they could get.
And um,
the one of the other names that they were looking at
was Yul Brynner.
Yul Brynner would've also been a--
quite an interesting character to kind of had done this movie.
This is business.
They're trying thinking of-- of the box office.
Howard Hughes thought they're doing a story
about one of the great uh, figures in the world history.
This would be great to be sold around the world.
CAMEL CIGARETTES AD NARRATOR:Here's John Wayne.
America's number one dramatic movie star on location.
As you can see,
making a movie can be pretty tough going,
but free swinging He-Man parts
are what John Wayne loves to play
and what the audience loves to see him in.
Okay, cut.
You got The Beatles and-- and-- and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.
And John Wayne.
He epitomized the masculine American male for,
largely for 50 years.
He was the iconic representation of the American West.
That characteristic walk.
The slow draw.
Looks like you've got yourself around it.
The massive brow and physical stature,
embodied everything they thought the American West should be.
He's known,
and continues to be known as the big cowboy action star,
who at one time for a very long time
was probably the most famous person
in the world.
My father came from Iowa.
He came from the core values of middle America.
Uh he, appreciated this country for what it was.
If you were willing to work hard,
the opportunity was there to be a success.
When Oscar Millard found out John Wayne
was going to be starring in The Conqueror,
he realized that it was going to be a terrible mistake.
Because John Wayne was gonna butcher the dialogue.
OSCAR:I called Dick Powell.
He said, “Are you sitting down?
Fox suspended Brando.
So, we've got John Wayne.”
“When he starts mangling those lines,
he's going to be a big joke”, I said.
“He's promised to work on him with a coach
and tape recorder”, Powell said.
“He's very enthusiastic.
Swears he'll work his fanny off.”
At our first meeting for a run through,
Wayne was genial, complimentary, and drunk.
JOHN WAYNE:In the United States of America, that this can happen,
it's getting to be ri-goddamn-diculous.
OSCAR:He dozed off after the first few pages
and there was no more talk of his working on the dialogue.
The challenge with The Conqueror
was that it was a historical film
taking place in the 13th century,
and they needed to have these vast, wide open spaces.
Dick Powell had actually found this area of St. George, Utah,
um, and they felt
this would look fantastic on camera.
When the location scout said, “We need something, uh,
similar to the Gobi Desert, maybe about the 12th century.”
A man on the Chamber of Commerce,
he said, “Ah.
Uh, I was a pilot in World War II.
And I used to fly over the hump,
flying gasoline and supplies to China.
And you know the deserts that I--
I flew over there,
looked very much like the deserts we have here,
in a place called, ‘Snow Canyon’.”
Immediately, the knew,
Snow Canyon in the St. George area
was going to be the location for this film.
Living in St. George in the ‘50s and ‘60s was magical.
We grew up out on the little farm
south of Cedar City.
Small farm, enough to have a big garden.
Um, we had our chickens and a cow once in a while,
and a few pigs when we did our forage group.
Neighbors had sheep and it was a great place,
we played outside all day, and I had a great childhood.
My parents had a-- had a--
about a 250-acre farm right in the center of the valley,
at Beryl Junction.
And loved it.
Every second of it.
I learned how to work there.
I knew every adult in town, and every child,
and their dogs, and their horses.
Everybody knew where everybody lived,
and everybody knew where everybody worked.
And if we got into any kind of trouble,
everybody knew everybody,
and told their parents before we got home.
We went, um, fishing on the weekends.
Swam in ponds with our dog.
Uh, rode bikes, climbed trees.
When it snowed, we would gather up snow.
We'd put vanilla and sugar in it and pretend it was ice cream.
The place to go to when I was young,
and today is Judd's general store.
Everybody went there, everybody still goes there.
It's the place to hang out.
We were all called to get up about
2:00 in the morning.
We went to a bunker in Nevada.
We were put in trenches.
We were told to uh, close our eyes.
Three.
And then put our hands over our eyes.
Zero.
The light was so bright, I could see through
on the other side of my hands.
And I could see the guy's feet through the leather
standing next to me.
And we were told that this would be uh,
non-effective to our personal bodies
by the military.
That you don’t-- you don't have anything
to worry about.
We had drills all the time,
because we were told the Russians are coming.
I have just vivid memories of being in grade school
and having the drills,
where we had to jump under our desk
and cover our head.
♪ There was a turtle by the name of Bert ♪
♪ And Bert the turtle was very alert ♪
♪ When danger threatened him, he never got hurt ♪
♪ He knew just what to do ♪
♪ Please duck and cover ♪
♪ Duck and cover ♪
♪ He did what we all must learn to do ♪
♪ You ♪
♪ And you ♪
♪ Duck ♪
♪ And cover ♪
The spring and summer of 1953
were a critical turning point for atomic testing.
You have hundreds different experiments happening,
and there's a--
a real sense of Cold War urgency.
And that is not necessarily the best way to do science.
Uh, under these hasty emergency conditions,
and there are some consequences in 1953.
And most infamously, the-- the Harry shot
that is-- is bigger,
and raises a much bigger cloud of debris
than was anticipated.
And it also happens at a time
when the prevailing wind is heading directly
toward Bunkerville and St. George,
and Cedar City in Southern Utah.
These are the people who are on the front lines
of atomic warfare.
And the AEC wants to reassure them
and in the process reassure the American public
that this continental testing is so appropriate
and still safe.
When they were doing the above ground testing
at the Nevada test site.
When they would have an announced test,
families in the St. George area would come up here
to the highest bluff and bring their families
for the evening tests or the early morning.
And watch the tests that would be coming up over this bluff.
And bring food, a picnic,
whatever, they would spend hours.
The kids would play,
they'd communicate with their neighbors, have fun.
The test had come up as a big ball of flame
go up into the sky
and then it’d dissipate into a mushroom cloud,
depending on how the wind was blowing.
It would either go north, south or drift this way.
And typically, it would come this way,
because they'd wait
till the wind was blowing our direction.
AEC REPRESENTATIVE 1:Ladies and gentlemen,
we interrupt this program to bring you important news.
Due to a change in wind direction,
the residue from this morning's atomic detonation
is drifting in the direction of St. George.
To prevent unnecessary exposure to radiation,
it is better to take cover during this period.
Parents need not be alarmed about children at school.
No recesses outdoors will be permitted.
There is no danger.
This is simply routine safety procedure.
NEVADA ATOMIC TESTS NARRATOR:Yes, the very nature of testing weapons
for national defense
requires we accept the possibility
of some exposure to additional radiation.
There is some potential risk.
So a fallout quite simply is any particulate matter
that is generated by a nuclear explosion,
thrown into the atmosphere that then later falls down.
Some of it could fall straight down.
Some of it could go extremely high, 30-40,000 feet.
And get pulled into the atmosphere.
And circle the globe.
Uh, so, these could be particles of dirt.
They could be vaporized rock.
They could be the particles of the tower
and other parts of the military testing equipment.
And they could also be particles of radiation.
DEFENSE BRIEFING NARRATOR:Radioactive atoms produced in the explosion
join with the particles of earth and debris.
The mushroom shaped cloud forms and climbs higher.
It now contains billions of highly radioactive particles.
We call them, “fallout”.
The winds of the upper altitudes blow on the cloud,
sending it in one or more directions.
Some of the very light particles may remain suspended
in the atmosphere for years
and travel thousands of miles before landing.
But the heavy particles drop to the ground
within 24 hours.
These are the most hazardous,
because they emit the largest amount
of nuclear radiation.
A 100 miles from the explosion,
they are about the size of table salt
or fine sand.
When we would go to school, uh, in elementary,
men would come in big black suits
and check our thyroids, with Geiger counters.
And when we'd light it up, I remember lighting it up once
and asking what it meant,
and being told it meant that I'd had a dental X-ray.
Well, my mother was an RN and I knew what an X-ray was.
And I--
back then you didn't go to the dentist for everything.
And I knew I hadn't had a dental X-ray.
I remember it in fourth grade, fifth grade,
all the way through high school.
They would come, check our thyroids
with their fingers and say, “Take a sip.
Swallow.”
Give us a little sip of water
and we did that, we went back to class.
This is Atomic Test In Nevada.
It's a booklet the government put out,
one of their propaganda pieces in '57.
Uh, to kind of assuage peoples' fears.
So, it tells them they don't really have much
to worry about.
It's got pictures in it,
like you can see the little cowboys,
and it just makes it look like people here,
a bunch of Western yahoos.
“You people who live near Nevada test site
are in a very real sense active participants
in the nation's atomic test program.
You have been close observers of tests
which have contributed greatly in building the defenses
of our country and of the free world.
Nevada tests have helped us make general progress
in a few years and have been a vital factor
in maintaining the peace of the world.
Some of you may have been inconvenienced
by our test operations.”
That one always kills me.
♪ I am not scared ♪
♪ I am pretty prepared ♪
♪ I'll be spared ♪
♪ I've got a fallout shelter ♪
♪ It's nine by nine ♪
♪ A hi-fi set and a jug of wine ♪
♪ Let the missiles fly ♪
♪ From nation to nation ♪
♪ It's party time in all my radiation station ♪
♪ I'm not spared ♪
I, Temujin, chief of all Mongols...
And my dad playing Genghis Khan?
Are you serious?
Come on.
I wish you well, Temujin Khan.
Yes, it is odd.
Was it unusual for the time?
No.
Who got the job was who was the big box office guy?
There's no question that John Wayne had his fans
and followers, who would come to a movie
even where he's wearing a ridiculous painted on,
Fu Manchu moustache.
I do think the general assumption
is that-- that Wayne may have read the script,
but not when he was sober.
OSCAR:I doubt if he looked at the script again
until the day before the cameras were to roll.
When he called me at home, “Oscar”, he said,
“You got to do something about these effing lines.
I can't read 'em.”
“Duke”, I replied,
“I'd have to rewrite the entire script for you.
Why didn't you speak up sooner?”
He muttered an expletive and hung up.
She's a woman, Jamuga.
Much woman.
Should her perfidy be less than that of other women?
It's the dialogue.
I take her with me.
That people loved repeating.
On those rare occasions, thank God they're rare,
when my wife will be annoyed with me about something.
I like to say...
You're beautiful in your wrath.
And then again, the line delivery.
Eternal skies,
Yessugai, my father, hear me.
John Wayne's performance did not draw--
A great deal of critical praise.
At the time, St. George, I believe had
under 30 motels.
So, they not only had to rent all of the hotels,
but a lot of locals rented out their homes.
Susan Hayward rented a home from a local
and the enthusiasm, especially the young people
was such that they had to limit autographing sessions
to two and a half hours.
My mother was my mother.
Uh, and that other person,
she had a job and that job was acting.
Susan Hayward was uh, in many ways
one of the quintessential stars of the 1950s.
She was beautiful, she was talented.
She was smart.
She would come to Hollywood around 1937.
Um, along with a whole lot of other Hollywood starlets
who were being uh,
tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara
in Gone with the Wind.
Scarlett.
What is it?
I love you.
Um, she didn't get the part, but she did stay around.
She was always fighting for-- for the good movies.
Um, but um,
RKO had-- had contracted with Fox to get her on loan
to do The Conqueror.
It was an absurdity.
Really off the wall.
That-- I think that was-- that was evident to everybody
who was connected with it.
She knew with this was not gonna be great casting.
It would be an odd choice,
but Howard Hughes didn't really care.
Hughes had personally wanted to work with her,
because he wanted to--
he wanted to get Susan Hayward into bed
is what it was.
Susan Hayward decided,
made a conscious decision not to change her appearance
for The Conqueror.
And that says a lot about her.
She's not gonna changer her look at all,
to be a Mongolian!
Come on now!
She's not gonna do this.
She's gonna be the Hollywood actress,
Susan Hayward.
You could tell that this was a smart woman.
She wasn't afraid.
Whether it be for vanity.
Maybe she didn't wanna see herself--
In that sort of makeup.
But she-- she took a stance.
I know she said at the time, she said,
“I play a red-haired Tartar princess,
as if some wild Irishman got lost
on the way to the road to old Cathay,
which is pretty clever comment.
The one thing that Howard Hughes and Dick Powell did
when they castThe Conqueror was,
they did have a really re--
resounding supporting cast of people.
Pedro Armendariz was a very successful actor in Hollywood,
but also he had done a lot of uh,
Mexico's version of Hollywood
in Mexico's golden age of films.
He was uh, a very ethnic-looking actor.
He could fit in to a lot of really interesting roles.
Whether he was playing a-- a Mexican or an Asian,
or a Turk or whatever the role was.
I know that John Wayne fought for Pedro getting roles
and getting the credit uh, that he deserved.
And there are a lot of scenes that are Jamuga,
Pedro Armendariz interacting with Temujin, John Wayne.
Tempting.
Tempting, but unwise, my brother.
Listen to me.
There are moments for wisdom, Jamuga.
Then I listen to you.
There are moments for action, then I listen to my blood.
And Pedro Armendariz actually--
and it is a sign of a very good actor,
he seems, uh, a little bit more comfortable
with this ridiculously stilted script.
Speak then.
- Deny it! - I will not.
To deny it would give substance to your thought.
This shame might spare you.
Curb that silver tongue.
Speak straight!
But there's Spanish accent there.
And that's a-- a little bit in--
incongruous.
A fair prize, my son, if my eyes see well.
Fairer than you, my mother.
Agnes Moorehead was cast as John Wayne's mother.
Even though she was only seven years older
than he was.
And then Agnes Moorehead, how did she get there?
Spawn of evil.
Let your slaves have their sport with her.
I will not have her within our tents.
We have Agnes Moorehead in this.
Lee Van Cleef is in it.
And uh-- and Conrad and-- and--
and all these white actors are in this film,
which was common.
Unfortunately, it was deemed acceptable
to have yellowface played in Hollywood at the time.
White men ran studios,
and the culture at the time was anything other than Anglo
is less than white.
Racism was horribly prevalent at that time.
John Wayne felt that he could play Genghis Khan, an Asian.
It shows a lot of ego, and lack of self awareness,
and lack of empathy towards the Asian race.
The thing about the cultural appropriation
in this movie, is there were Asian American actors
who actually worked in Hollywood.
I mean, why not?
At least-- at least for some of the minor roles.
What think of you that, Shaman?
So grave a question demands a shorter answer.
Let a sheep be slaughtered,
and the shoulder blade brought hither.
There's not a chance in the world
they could make a film anything like this today.
Can you imagine?
The only director who could have handled this uh, film,
I think successfully making it delightful
would have been Mel Brooks.
That summer, we would go to the local swimming hall,
where all the other kids went.
And we went to uh,
we went to the morning church on uh, on Sundays.
The casting crew of The Conqueror
largely had set up houses in-- in St. George's.
They'd rented homes in a-- on a block,
and they all lived next to each other,
across the street from each other.
So, they all were sort of surrounding each other.
And it was a-- a bit of a family atmosphere.
My father never came up to St. George.
And I don't recall us going back to Los Angeles
to spend time with him.
Yeah, they were going through a divorce.
And it-- it was uh, it wasn't a real pleasant time.
It wasn't a pleasant for I--
I think for anybody in the family.
But I remember John Wayne,
because he lived across the street.
He was a very personal guy.
I had a-- a scar under this eye.
So, John Wayne saw it and he asked me what it was.
And I told him I got hit with a rock
underneath my eye.
And I remember him--
him laughing and him saying,
“Put beef steak on it.”
Susan Hayward um,
always had this affection for John Wayne.
She always thought he was one of her favorite leading men
and she was attracted to him.
And so, she-- she did make moves on Wayne.
They said at one time she had a love scene on the set
and she kissed him, and he said,
she stuck her tongue in his mouth.
One of the things that my brother
and I liked to do
was we liked to camp out on the front yard.
And all I'm gonna say is this, that uh,
one morning about 3:00 in the morning,
we saw this figure.
We were both up come running across the lawn uh,
to the house across the street where John Wayne was living.
And it was my mother.
And I don't think uh,
she was running over there, you know,
to get a-- to get a bagel.
When we moved to St. George,
we heard all about The Conqueror being here,
and how the stars were here.
They were hanging out at the Big Hand Cafe.
And there were a lot of pictures at the time
before the Big Hand Cafe was torn down.
A lot of pictures of John Wayne and Dick Powell.
And those guys,
and their pictures were plastered all over the walls.
They were pretty proud of that.
Dick's Cafe,
a renowned restaurant in St. George,
was not only the chief uh, dining spot,
but Dick Hammer catered on location.
A lot of the locals were used as security guards,
As greensmen.
As extras.
Just about everyone was needed to be in the film.
We were a movie set town and we got to be extras.
It was a big deal.
NARRATOR:The cast and crew took part in a charity softball game
against the local Elks Club of St. George.
Wayne signed autographs.
Dick Powell entertained the crowd,
and Susan Hayward kicked off her high heels
to run around the bases.
A local family, the Smoots,
presented Susan Hayward with a giant cake
for her birthday.
The whole town
as well as Powell and Wayne were there,
as Tim Barker recalls.
It was on the set,
and there were pictures of that with Dick Powell
and John Wayne, and uh, some of the other principals.
Uh, John Wayne cut the cake with his Mongol sword.
They had 20 stuntmen.
These stunts were very seriously dangerous.
We're talking horse stunts,
which the horses are tripping, falling.
The men are falling into the sands.
And there were lots of accidents.
What I found fascinating about this
and I don't know how they did it
or whether they did it deliberately,
is all the horses falling down.
And maybe once they-- they had trip wires.
But where was the SPCA?
There was actually a-- a joke on the set at one point
where there was gonna be a big action sequence
and Dick Powell said,
“This is where we separate the men from the boys,
in this scene.”
And John Wayne,
you know, joked back to him and said,
“Well, let's just hope we don't separate the men
from the horses.”
Sadly, a short time later, there was a-- a big action scene
and Pedro Armendariz had been thrown from his horse,
and his horse at the time, um, fell,
and actually landed on top of him.
So, he was injured and they--
at the time, they feared that he may have
even broken his back
and they actually had to, um, take him to the hospital.
He was ended up not being hurt as badly as they'd feared,
but it was one of those kind of serious mishaps.
NARRATOR:After finishing shooting an action scene,
Powell turned to Wayne and said,
“There were no injuries.
Do you think the stuntmen are getting better?”
Wayne replied,
“No, the horses are getting smarter.”
The nature of The Conqueror taking place
in 12th century, Mongolia,
you have to hire hundreds of extras,
who can be made up to look as close as possible
to those who would be living in that area of Asia.
The nearest and most practical people
to hire were 300 members
of the Shivwits Indian reservation,
not far distant from St. George.
Yes, a 130 degrees.
They're wearing these Mongolian costumes.
These kind of armor
and these heavy winter animal skin,
thick, kind of heavy costumes.
These people were very hot.
And hundreds of extras on horses and things,
they would be out there for hours in this--
this grueling heat.
Environment of the American West is harsh.
Aridity and weather conditions
that can be extreme ranging from heat to cold.
And the desert is windy.
It's one of the windiest parts of the United States.
And the winds can be ferocious and unpredictable.
So, there would be these vast scenes of blowing,
you know, dirt and dust swirling around.
And not only was it-- was it bad enough with the--
the natural winds that were happening.
It was the fact that they were--
they were creating their own dust
by having these massive fight scenes
and these horses were running around
and they were having this--
kicking up all this dust and debris,
that was literally covering the actors.
And so they-- they ended up coi-- calling it
like “Utah chili powder”, because it was on everything.
So, they would sit down to eat
and it would be covering the food they were eating.
NARRATOR:After two months in Utah,
the cast and crew of The Conqueror,
returned to Los Angeles,
for interior shooting on the RKO sound stages.
Let there be music and a feast befitting Temujin,
chief of the Mongols.
I was a harem girl lounging somewhere.
You know, there's a lot of lounging
when you're in a harem thing.
And I--
I was looking around and I looked at Wayne, too,
you know, and I thought, “This is really bad.”
Genghis Khan, he's not.
Between takes, I'd be there and he'd be there.
He is sitting up on his throne and just hanging out.
We knew he'd been drinking in the daytime.
We all felt that he was drinking his way through that picture.
The costume designer, Michael Woulfe,
he wanted it to look as if I were naked.
The censor,
the haze office would decide that well,
this scene is too racy, and they'd edit a film
before they would open it in the city.
My dance number was cut out of the film,
in Baltimore, in Boston.
I don't know where else.
Woman of Samarkand, I recognize her by the uh...
There are no finer dancers under the heavens.
And without compare in the arts of love.
After them all other women are like
the second pressing of the grape.
I didn't--
I thought it was, um, not good.
There's so many strange things about this movie.
And about Howard Hughes' participation.
But one of the things that apparently he insisted upon,
was they moved tons,
literally tons of desert sand and-- and brought it
onto a sound stage.
In fact, Howard Hughes and the crew
carried 60 tonnes of this stuff back to the studio,
so that this deep, rich red sand
could be spread on the floors of the sound stage.
When they rebuilt parts of the village
in Culver City at RKO.
They have a campfire scene.
They would actually shoot that in the stage.
They'd bring all the sage brush, the sand, the rocks.
So, when they shot these scenes with these close-ups
of John Wayne, and Susan Hayward,
and Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendariz,
it would fit with the film,
so there wouldn't be a jarring difference.
So, they ended up bringing back
all this radioactive soil back for a sound stage filming.
They would leave it there for all of the weeks
that were necessary to film the interiors.
They were exposed to it
in these hermetically-sealed sound stages
day after day, after day.
JOHN:The Conqueror was released in 1956.
And there was a big push for it.
It-- it got a lot of promotion, a lot of publicity.
Hughes had invested $2 million or something
in promoting this film.
The critics were not kind.
A John Wayne fan all the way through childhood
and adult life.
The Conqueror, I cannot say that I ever saw it.
And from what I've heard, we didn't miss anything.
It was not quite my John Wayne uh, movie.
It--
It was an incredibly cheesy movie that you know,
even being young, we laughed at it.
THE CONQUEROR NARRATOR:For a hundred years,
the children of their loins ruled half the world.
That's one of the things that's remarkable
about the film is, it does feel like an epic.
But it's only a-- a 111 minutes long.
And it's has that-- a great virtue
of feeling much longer than it is.
As bad as they sayThe Conqueror was,
it was not unsuccessful.
The movie cost $6 million to make,
but the movie made $12 million.
$12 million in 1956
would equate to about $130 to $135 million today.
So, it-- it was a successful movie.
NARRATOR:The cost to promote and market the film
erased any profit for Hughes.
NEVADA ATOMIC TESTS NARRATOR:That great flash in the western sky.
An atomic bomb at the Nevada test site,
140 miles to the west.
But it's old stuff to St. George.
Routine.
They've seen a lot of them, ever since 1951.
Nothing to get excited about anymore.
I mean, they did 928 tests in that desert.
That's 928 bombs.
More powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
that were dropped on our own country
by our government.
It was a common experience.
When I'd feel that concussion, I knew exactly where to look.
We'd be working out there in the field,
and you know,
you could see the mushroom cloud come up.
My mom would come out to um, the field,
and she would take us back home.
And make us stay in the house
when that cloud floated over the valley.
This one time,
I went and opened up the door.
And looked at that cloud
as it was drifting over the valley.
And it had an eerie orangish red tint to it.
You know, so you knew, that the cloud was hot.
Starting in '53,
there were sheep ranchers who were noticing
disease effect on sheep.
Sheep that were dead, sheep that had lesions.
Things that they claimed they'd never seen before,
and that were happening in numbers
that were unprecedented.
During lambing season,
our neighbors had piles of dead lambs.
They were deformed lambs.
And I always thought that that was normal
to have piles of dead deformed lambs
during lambing season.
I remember the Bulloch family losing a lot of sheep
and not-- they weren't just dead,
they lost their livelihood.
They lost their way to make a living.
It was determined that the sheep had died from starvation
and being cold.
Well, we knew those sheepherders.
We knew them personally.
They weren't starving their sheep.
Their sheep weren't freezing.
So, it was a low blow.
Those people lost their livelihoods
and that’d been generation after generation of farmers.
The Conqueror was the last film Howard Hughes produced.
Before the film's release,
Hughes sold RKO to General Teleradio
for $25 million.
By 1967, he was the richest man in America
valued at $1.37 billion.
The fact he bought back the rights
to his last two pictures,
Jet Pilot and The Conquerorfor $12 million,
led one observer to comment,
“It was the show business coup of the century for Teleradio.
What were you thinking Howard?”
Hughes got his wish
when he began an affair with Susan Hayward.
My mother dated Howard Hughes for a short period of time.
And Howard Hughes was a very weird man.
He was really trying to make an impression
on my mother,
and he came to the house one time,
and he met my brother and I.
He gave each of us a silver dollar.
And you know, my mother said, “Give me the silver dollars.”
She gave them back to him.
She didn't approve of the fact of-- of him,
giving stuff to children that he really didn't know.
NARRATOR:When Hayward discovered that
the wandering eyes of Hughes hadn't abated,
she terminated the short-lived romance.
My mother had this uncanny knack.
I understand it now,
but the men she had in her life were just totally inappropriate.
My mother repetitiously got involved with men
who you know, same guy, different face,
that kind of thing.
And uh,
a lot of her relationships didn't really last that long.
My father had a dairy.
Uh, it was called the “St. George Ice Company”.
They were the only ones that pasteurized milk,
uh, probably south of Provo.
My uncle, Grant Whitehead was a milkman,
that everybody knew and he was recruited to be
in the Atomic Energy Commission movie,
that told everybody this sleepy town.
NEVADA ATOMIC TESTS NARRATOR:Pretty deserted at this hour.
Everything is closed down.
Everyone's asleep.
Everyone that is, except a milkman.
Been delivering over the same route for 12 years.
Never missed a day.
They filmed The Conqueror here when I was a teenager.
So, I was often,
I uh, asked to go out and deliver milk to uh--
to the onsite filming, but mostly up in Snow's Canyon,
not-- not far from here.
The cows ate the crops.
The kids drank the milk from the cow,
and adults did.
If radiation gets into the ground,
and then grass grows on that ground,
and cows eats that grass,
then the milk can have strontium, uh,
or other radioactive elements in it.
And that was a fact that was well known.
Growing up
many of my childhood friends were getting sick.
I had little Tammy Packer down the street,
who was probably 8 when I was 7.
And she came to school one day with her head shaved.
Because she had had a brain tumor
and had surgery.
Um, she ended up dying,
and you're not used to your little friends dying.
Four weeks later,
her 4-year-old brother died of testicular cancer.
Darwin Hoyt was in fifth grade.
And Bruce Stone was in sixth grade,
when he got sick.
And he died when we were in eighth grade.
He had his leg amputated,
and he actually lived till he was in eighth grade.
Darwin died, I believe, when he was in sixth grade.
I knew that Coleen may had cancer.
I knew that Mark Bradshaw's mother,
Welwyn, was going to died because she had cancer.
At my age, it wasn't until later on
that I started to really get a grasp
of what had happened.
Because so many of them were happening around me,
I grew up thinking it was just normal for people
to get cancer,
and for people to lose their dads,
and for the little kids to die.
Irma Thomas' daughter, Michelle, was a good friend of mine
and I spent a lot of time at their house.
And Irma had a hand-drawn map of St. George.
And she started marking X's on the houses of people
that had cancer.
And it became very apparent that like,
wait, there's a lot of people dying of cancer.
And it was because of Irma Thomas
that we really started to think,
“Wow, something's going on here.”
When Michelle Thomas contracted cancer,
I thought,
“And here's her mom trying to prove
that that government gave us all cancer
and then her own daughter gets cancer.”
When the exposure is to a young person,
the cancer may come then at any point in their life
in the future,
and many times the latency period for cancer
is on the order of 10, 20, 30, 40,
even 50 years later.
There were the questions.
But there was so much propaganda
that we were safe.
GREGORY:There has been some exaggeration
says the Atomic Energy Commission.
The tests do not produce dangerous fallout.
They said we were fine.
And they wouldn't do anything to harm us.
NARRATOR:Dick Powell would direct three more films,
and executive produced,
as well as hosted popular television shows.
ZANE GREY THEATER NARRATOR:Tonight's star, Dick Powell.
Most important of all the professional men
who moved to the frontier was the doctor.
NARRATOR:While directing a television program in 1962,
Powell's neck and face began to swell.
And he was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph glands.
Doctors told Powell's wife,
movie star June Allyson to prepare for the worst.
Dick Powell was one of the first to kind of succumb to cancer.
Dick Powell was the guy who was--
he was there through the entire thing.
He was there probably longer and in more,
um, danger than anybody.
Because he was sitting in the director's chair
in this huge boom, sitting there,
just being hit with this dust in his face for hours.
My dad uh, frequently wore a-- a mask.
Then when he was talking to the actors, he--
he-- he took it off.
Some of the actors were only in portions of the film
who could kind of come and go.
Dick Powell was there all the time.
NARRATOR:Allyson learned that the nuclear tests
done near the set of The Conqueror,
after Powell's death.
She was later heard to remark,
“Had I stayed longer on location with Richard,
I might not be alive today nor the children.”
On the set of the second James Bond feature,
From Russia with Love,
Armendariz was fighting a losing battle.
He took the part of Kerim Bey, the Bond ally,
in order to provide for his family.
Take a look, you should remember him.
This man kills for pleasure.
Pedro kept the fact he was dying from lymph cancer
that had spread to his hips making walking difficult.
He kept working with regular doses of morphine.
When From Russia with Love went into the editing phase,
Armendariz was admitted to the UCLA Medical Center.
He asked his wife, Carmen,
to get a ham sandwich for him to eat.
She leaves.
Pedro goes into the drawer in the stand next to him
and pulls out a gun.
When Carmen returns,
she finds him dead from a gunshot wound
through the heart.
He was 51.
Someone had gotten him a gun and he-- he took his own life.
I mean, it was terrible.
Everybody was in a state of shock.
I mean, he had-- obviously had terminal cancer,
and he didn't wanna deal with it.
I can understand that completely.
He didn't want to--
He didn't want to exist, you know,
unless the quality of life is good.
You know, what is the point?
NARRATOR:When learning of his friend's death,
Wayne stated, “I don't blame Pete.
I'd do the same thing.”
♪ My friends all tell me, go to him, run to him ♪
♪ Say sweet, lovely things to him ♪
♪ Tell him, he's the one ♪
♪ Deep in my heart ♪
♪ I know it, but it’s so hard to show it ♪
♪ ‘Cause it's easier ♪
♪ Easier said than done ♪
♪ My buddies tell me ♪
♪ Fly to him, sigh to him ♪
♪ Tell him I would die for him ♪
♪ Tell him he's the one ♪
♪ Although, he gives me a feeling ♪
♪ That sets my heart a-reeling ♪
♪ Yeah, it's easier ♪
♪ Easier said than done ♪
♪ Well, I know ♪
♪ I know ♪
♪ That I love him so ♪
♪ But I'm afraid that he'll never know ♪
JOHN F. KENNEDY:Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers
will increasingly contaminate the air
that all of us must breathe.
The loss of even one human life
or the malformation of even one baby,
who may be born long after all of us have gone,
should be of concern to us all.
♪ Easier said than done ♪
They banned atmospheric testing and uh,
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
was one of the big achievements of the Kennedy administration.
Tragically, it came too late for Pedro Armendariz,
and John Wayne, and Susan Hayward,
and Dick Powell, and um, so many other people.
A fast ship going in harm's way.
Lousy situation, Commander Eddington
John Wayne's first direct encounter
with the scourge of cancer occurred in 1964.
Uh, he had just completed filming In Harm's Way
in Hawaii.
He was coughing like crazy.
His wife, uh, Pilar asked him to go get checked out.
They discovered a rather large-sized tumor
on one of his lungs,
and diagnosed him with lung cancer,
and in very short order,
the lung was removed in its entirety,
along with two ribs.
He had a procedure where they broke his sternum open
like this.
They took out a lobe of his lung and sewed him back up.
He was-- he was in the hospital for six weeks
after the procedure in convalescence.
He was so swollen up, he looked like Jabba the Hutt.
I was absolutely just scared to death.
I just thought that was gonna be the end of it.
Somehow, he made it through this experience.
I was just finishing my 199th picture.
Never felt better in my life
And I said to myself,
“When this is finished, I'm going out on my boat.”
And then I got nagged into going for a medical checkup.
They found a spot on the X-rays.
It was lung cancer.
If I'd waited a few more weeks, I wouldn't be here now.
The whole anti smoking movement was kind of,
just being born in that era.
Smoke now, pay later.
He would get uh, requests to be a spokesperson.
And ironically, and interestingly,
he always said no.
And the reason he gave for saying no,
was that no one had proven to his satisfaction,
that his cancer was caused by cigarette smoking.
So, why don't all of you do yourselves a favor?
Get a checkup.
NARRATOR:It was also during the summer of 1963,
that Agnes Moorehead's career began to rise.
Though not in the recognition factor,
as Wayne or Hayward.
She worked constantly,
and won acclaim in the comedy television series,
Bewitched.
The Conquerorwas the last thing on her mind.
During a routine checkup at the Mayo Clinic,
Moorehead was diagnosed with uterine cancer,
that was spreading.
Alas, there is no peace even for him
who seeks only to enjoy his hard-won riches.
And then there were a bunch of other people
that were on the cast and crew that were not known,
not named actors who would have cancer
that were-- would die.
This was just happened
to be one of the movies they made.
Of course, it was the multiple sicknesses
and the ultimate multiple deaths of similar cause.
That's when people started to talk about
the likelihood of them being exposed up on location.
Those of us who had worked on the picture, the dancers,
started realizing something really horrible
had likely taken place.
And were we the luckiest people in the world
not to have been there?
Lucky you didn't go on location,
because these people are dying that did.
That was the word around town.
My sister and I, uh, were there the whole time.
You know, I was digging in that dirt.
She was riding horses.
Uh, and uh, my sister and I had been uh,
cancer-free all-- all of these years.
Yes.
And I consider us both very, very lucky.
Of the 220 people who were constantly on location
shooting in Utah, 90 or 91 came down with cancer.
NARRATOR:Agnes Moorehead confided to close friend
and confidante, Debbie Reynolds,
“I should never have taken that part.”
I think she told Debbie Reynolds,
who was a friend of hers,
that she had never should have gone there,
and made The Conqueror.
My father was a delightful person.
His name was Orville Wardle,
and he worked on road construction.
He had been healthy his whole life.
Suddenly, he got very sore muscles.
He went to the doctor.
He was sent up to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.
And the doctor said, “We opened up your dad
and he's completely full of cancer.
All over lungs, all over his pancreas,
everything.
There's absolutely nothing we can do.
We are sewing him back together right now.”
In 1997, dad was diagnosed with leukemia.
They basically gave dad two weeks to live.
Uh, which was a little bit of a shock.
Uncle Stan was asking dad what his uh, symptoms were.
And dad started telling his symptoms to him.
And Uncle Stan looked at him, and said,
“Those are exactly the same symptoms
as Grandma Holt.”
And Grandma passed away in about 1967.
At the time, they had no idea what caused the--
my grandma's death.
But uh, dad and Uncle Stan felt very, very positive
that it was uh, leukemia.
Very similar to what dad had.
In the summer before my 29th birthday,
I found a lump on my neck,
and it was like the size of a piece of corn.
And I kept moving it up and down.
It didn't hurt. I didn't think anything of it.
Then I got bronchitis and I got pretty sick.
I went to the doctor for the bronchitis
and she's feeling my throat.
And she says, “Oh, you have a lump here.
Hmm.
Well, we should probably check it.”
I thought, “Hm, okay.”
So, she sent me to an endocrinologist
and he took a biopsy and I was getting ready to go
with my then-husband to a concert he was playing
when the phone rang.
It was the doctor and he said, “Um, you've got cancer.”
My doctor said I had uh, the beginning of uh,
prostrate cancer.
In 1955, they excised the prostrate.
It was just the most painful time of our lives.
We took my dad home and laid him on the couch,
and we watched him die little by little.
And he was in terrible pain.
After he was diagnosed with cancer,
dad lived two and a half years.
About 2006, 2005,
my mom was diagnosed with lymphoma.
Mom lived for about six to eight months after that.
My sister, three years ago,
passed away with pancreatic cancer.
So, my sister and my parents
have all passed away with cancer.
But life is life.
You take the challenges and go with it.
And I do have to say that
I wouldn't want to wish cancer on anyone.
I had surgery right away.
They removed my thyroid and then they had
to remover lymph nodes around it.
And when my mother started crying
as they wheeled me into the operating room,
I thought maybe this is worse than I think.
Maybe this isn't so good.
So, because they removed my thyroid,
I had no thyroid hormone,
which meant that I had to be on thyroid medicine
for the rest of my life.
And I-- I did ask ‘em,
I said, “What would have happen if I just never
took this again?”
They go, “Well, you-- you die.”
And it did make me think,
“I've just gotta always be sure to have extra.”
NARRATOR:Interior, Desert Princess Hotel, Las Vegas, day.
Medium shot.
Howard Hughes is now a recluse in his Las Vegas hotel,
rarely venturing from his top floor suite.
He has become consumed by irrational fears
of germs and diseases.
He would only communicate through edicts and memos
to select employees.
Hughes by the 1970s had become an enigma,
surrounded in mystery.
Hughes read with horror
about the continued atomic testing
near his desert paradise,
and decided to do whatever it took
to stop the testing.
He sent his top aide, Robert Maheu,
to meet President Lyndon Johnson
and offer him $1 million after he left office
if he would stop the testing.
NARRATOR:The tests went off as planned.
Why was Hughes concerned about atomic testing
in the area 135 miles
from where he produced The Conqueror?
Before production began on The Conqueror,
RKO would have made some effort
to make sure that the area was safe.
So, RKO, Dick Powell,
would have had conversations with the government
about the nuclear testing program.
They knew of all this, because the location departments,
but they also had a weather department.
They had other departments relating to--
to permitting from the United States government
for shooting on national parks.
So, when they were thinking of shooting in these areas
near where the Yucca Flats is.
Of course, they were told.
They all knew that the 1953 tests,
11 tests were done in Yucca Flats there.
The AEC consistently indicated that the conditions were safe.
They talked less about the fact that they had done studies
that indicated that the series in the spring
and summer of '53 had generated downwind levels of radiation
that exceeded their own existing standards
for what would be an appropriate level, uh,
of radiation exposure.
The government told people what they knew
they wanted to hear,
and what they wanted to tell them,
but they really didn't know for sure
what the long-term impacts were of these things.
NEVADA ATOMIC TESTS NARRATOR:There is no danger.
JAMES:The Conqueror was the last movie that Hughes produced.
And he ended up buying up all the prints
that were in circulation at the time
to the biggest movie he had ever made.
Why?
Some people question as to whether Howard Hughes
did that out of some feeling of guilt.
That he had somehow brought these people together in--
in Utah to film The Conqueror,
and that he was somehow responsible for their deaths.
No one saw the movie for-- for 25 years.
He removed it from distribution.
And the fact that he was addicted
to watching The Conqueror again and again,
it was as if only he himself had the right to feast his eyes
on the splendor of its wild magnificence.
♪ Well, you say you got the blues ♪
♪ You got holes in both holes of your shoes ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ You’re feelin' alone and confused ♪
♪ You got to keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Just keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Yeah, you're... ♪
♪ You're about to go insane ♪
♪ ‘Cause your woman’s playing games, ♪
♪ And she says that you're to blame ♪
♪ You got to keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Just keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Keep on smilin' through the rain ♪
♪ Laughin' at the pain ♪
♪ Just rolling with the changes ♪
♪ Till the sun comes out again ♪
♪ Keep on smiling through the rain ♪
♪ Laughin' at the pain ♪
♪ Just rolling with the changes ♪
♪ And we’re singin' this refrain ♪
NARRATOR:On the night of January, the 22nd, 1971,
Susan Hayward awoke to a fire and a smoke-filled apartment.
She had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand
and a vodka bottle nearby.
She barely escaped with her life.
Now absent from the big and small screen
for several years,
she underwent a hysterectomy to remove tumors
from her uterus.
And then more tumors were discovered
in her vocal cords and brain.
Too frail and ill to work,
Susan Hayward bravely made her last public appearance
at the 1974 Academy Awards.
Those nominated for the best performance by an actress.
I watched it and I found out later
that after she had made the presentation, uh,
she had a seizure backstage and had immediately had--
had to go to the hospital.
I got a call from her accountant
and he had talked to my brother,
and then he called me and he said,
“Tim, uh, your mom's got a problem.
She's got about $60,000 worth of unpaid bills
sitting on her desk and she can't--
She's no longer capable of-- of opening up her checkbook
and-- and writing checks.”
I said, “What is going on?”
And he said,
“Your mother's in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital,
and they're giving her two weeks to live.”
She had, uh, adenocarcinoma,
uh, metastatic brain cancer with multiple tumors.
They were all over the place in-- in her brain.
I mean, that-- that just got dropped on me like a bombshell.
And uh, you know the next thing I know,
I'm-- I’m with my brother, uh, walking in--
into this hospital room and my mother's in this bed
and she doesn't recognize either one of us.
She had an aneurysm of the aorta and it just blew up.
And her death was almost instantaneous.
I think this is probably the first time
I've ever really discussed at any--
at any length and depth
about what my mother experienced.
I mean, her brain cancer was horrific.
It was absolutely horrific.
Mr. Shatner--
Ranchers testified they have lost thousands of sheep in Utah
to radioactive fallout.
But they charged the Atomic Energy Commission
refused to admit it.
He said,
“Jack, the easiest thing we could do
would be to pay for these sheep.
But if we paid for 'em, every woman that got pregnant
and every woman that didn't would sue us.”
NARRATOR:Newly declassified documents and minutes
from the Atomic Energy Commission meetings
during the 1950s
warranted congressional hearings in 1979,
due to pressures from the citizens
of Southern Utah.
Chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy,
the hearing exposed a government
that was indifferent and callous
towards its own citizens.
Documents show that the US government
covered up the known dangers of fallout path of atomic bombs.
If you read the minutes of The Atomic Energy Commission,
from the very beginning, they knew it wasn't safe.
And they would have arguments.
I mean those minutes read like high drama.
There would be a commissioner who said, “Sheep are dying,
people are starting to get sick”,
and there was one commissioner, who just shouted at him.
“People have got to live with the facts of life.”
And parts of the facts of life are fallout.
Commissioner Murray,
we must not let anything interfere
with this series of tests.
- Nothing. - “Nothing.”
I thought she was dead.
Not hardly.
NARRATOR:For his final film The Shootist,
Wayne portrayed a man dying of cancer.
He comes home to settle scores.
Shooting took place in Carson City, Nevada,
which was at the opposite end of the testing site
where the wind blew towards St. George, Utah.
And where he filmed The Conqueror
20 years earlier.
The story is about an aging gunman
who's trying to hole up
and die quietly from a particularly vicious cancer.
You have a cancer.
Advanced.
How much time do I have?
Two months.
Six weeks.
There's no way to tell.
The character, in trying to do the right thing,
decided if he gets killed, it's not such a bad thing.
Going out in a blaze of glory
is better than going out with cancer.
And I'm-- I’m pretty darn sure that that's correct.
That that is the way
John Wayne would have enjoyed going out.
I would not die at death like I just described.
Not if I had your courage.
It's the finest performance he ever gave as an actor.
He's a human being.
He's not a cardboard cutout.
Uh, it was a hard film for me to look at for a long time,
because it was so close to reality,
but um, he does a great job.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John Wayne.
That was rough, yeah.
He had um, lost a lot of weight
and was in pretty bad shape.
He had a tuxedo, but he had another suit,
one of his other suits underneath the tuxedo,
so that-- so it wouldn't hang on him.
He actually wore a complete other suit of clothes
underneath it.
Pretty-- pretty remarkable.
I was in uh, Westwood.
It was the same day
that he had to go into the hospital,
UCLA Medical Center.
I saw him on the street.
And I walked up to him and I introduced myself.
And I said,
“That you won't-- probably won't remember this,
but you gave me a picture of yourself
and signed it, you know, ‘Put beef steak on your eye.’”
And he goes,
“You're-- you’re one of Susan's boys, aren't you?”
I said, “Yeah.”
And so we-- we chatted,
you know, for a while on the street.
And he said,
“I've gotta go into the hospital today.”
This was after my mother had passed away.
And uh, I said,
“You know, best of luck to you, Mr. Wayne.”
And then that was it.
Cancer returned unfortunately to John Wayne's life in 1979
and he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
By the time they figured out what he had,
it was really pretty far gone.
And he was in the hospital for six weeks.
And he was slowly dying.
He was dying,
but you would never know that from this man.
He had bedsores the size of my palm
that just ate right through his skin,
separating flesh.
You couldn't-- couldn't heal it.
He was just in total pain.
And never complained about any of this stuff.
But he keep-- keep going on, you know.
And my brothers and sisters and I thought,
“You know, this guy is uh, bulletproof.”
He just willed himself to wake up
and say goodbye to his kids.
And then-- and then he um, he left.
He went.
♪ Flied away ♪
I was assigned by People Magazine
to photograph Irma Thomas,
because of the leukemia rate in St. George, Utah.
Irma was extremely committed to her vision
and to explain to the world what this--
what had happened in St. George.
Because no one was listening to her,
and then in the middle of that,
she told me this great story about how John Wayne had--
had made this movie called “The Conqueror”
in St. George.
I had a very good friend, Michael Wayne,
John Wayne's oldest son.
And I thought,
“This is something I should talk to Michael about.”
And so I called Michael, and I said,
“Did you make a movie called‘The Conqueror’,
Howard Hughes' movie?”
He said, “Yeah.
In fact, I got sick on the set and Patrick was there.”
And I went, “This is an amazing story.”
He really at that point was very excited about it.
Didn't think much of the movie.
He couldn't quite figure out
why did dad was playing a Mongolian.
Michael gave me all the daily notes
that you have on the show and the crew list.
And so we started investigating that crew list.
We systematically went down from the director of photography
to the different departments
and we went one by one, you know,
to see who had contracted cancer at this point.
And it basically hit me like a ton of bricks.
We had to really get more information
and that's why we went to Washington,
you know, to see what we could get.
And the Atomic Energy Commission didn't wanna talk to us.
They just slammed the door in our face.
It was a cover-up and we had hit a brick wall.
My partner on-- on the story was Karen Jackovich
and we decided that,
we should go to the Freedom of Information Act
and they cooperated a little bit,
so we figured we had enough information
to go to bed with it.
NARRATOR:A few months after Wayne's death,
a People Magazine article linked the deaths of the cast
and crew of The Conqueror
to the atomic tests and the radiation
that envelops St. George.
There was a general awareness by everyone,
that it may have been more than just, you know uh,
coincidence that uh,
all of our uh, parents, our relatives,
uh, had come down with cancer.
I mean the numbers are-- are pretty high.
What were the implications of this fallout?
A reasonable-thinking person would have
to assume that it had some effect on what happens
to these people's lives.
Including your father?
Well, yeah, my father was there, sure.
The People Magazine article that came out was huge.
And I always loved the line in there,
the official who said,
“Oh my God, I hope we didn't John Wayne.”
You know, they didn't care about all the other people
who had been killed all those years before,
but they didn't want it to have been John Wayne.
It was the first time I'd ever heard that our cancer
and John Wayne's cancer might be tied together.
I remember we were in this pitch Cold War,
so uranium was at a-- a premium, you know,
and everybody was you know, “We're gonna get rich.”
And we had Geiger counters on the set
and we turned these Geiger counters on,
and they would rattle like,
we're standing on a uranium deposit.
And we were so excited.
We thought we're gonna find the richest uranium
or whatever it be.
We come to find out later
that that was fallout from tests that were going on up north.
And the wind would blow all of this, uh,
radioactive fallout down here.
I was glad that they--
and grateful that they had tied that together.
Because that catapulted us
into more of a national spotlight.
The story seemed to hit a nerve
within the media that, you know,
“Did America kill John Wayne?”
If it took John Wayne to get things rolling
and noticed, then I'll be it.
We'd all flown up to um, Utah to uh,
scout a location for the film.
And nobody ever told anybody that,
there was any radiation up there.
Or that anything had been tested.
And so, um, they-- we spent months in that area,
and there were dust storms.
Horrible dust storms and we had to wear masks
a good lot of the time.
Yeah.
And a lot of the crew, as you said,
- have died of cancer. -Mm-hmm.
And a lot of the stars in the film.
You’re expectation’s a lot people?
Yes.
Now, this is just horrifying.
Well, did John Wayne really die,
because of the excessive exposure
to radioactive fallout while on location?
When he was uh, very well known
even at that time to be a very heavy smoker,
as were some of the other cast and crew members.
How does one determine that?
NARRATOR:Five years before he died, John Wayne gave an interview
to biographer, Michael Munn,
where he discussed the connection
between The Conquerorand cancer.
True to his patriotic roots, he denied a connection.
“All I can tell you is that I smoked,
so did Dick Powell,
so did Susan Hayward,
so did Pedro.
And I guess you can say that in those days,
at least 50% of the population smoked.
As for developing nuclear weapons,
we had to.
Russia had developed its own atom bomb
and when Stalin was alive,
he was mad enough to threaten the world.
As for The Conqueror,
the lesson of that film is don't make an ass of yourself
trying to play a part that you aren't suited for.”
In recent years,
there has been growing concern that cases of cancer occurring
in the state of Utah,
may be related to the nuclear tests
in the neighboring state of Nevada in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Today, a major scientific attempt
to study the possible cause and effect relationship
is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study finds that the leukemia rate for children
living in areas which received heavy fallout
was two in one half times
the rate for children not exposed.
Dr. Lyon, you are 80% convinced based on your study,
that there is a link between leukemia
and the children, and the atomic test.
Is that correct, sir?
I'd say that's a correct statement.
What keeps you from being 100% sure?
The nature of epidemiologic research
which makes it hard for us,
particularly in a case like this,
where we would--
did not have precise follow-up of all the individuals
in the study, uh, to know whether this--
this occurred,
because of the radiation or was some other chance factor.
Did not study any possible link involving adults?
Is that correct?
That's correct.
And we didn't do that,
because we simply don't have a group of people,
uh, of adults in the state of Utah, who are not exposed.
A lot of times we forget
that every girl is born with every egg
she's ever gonna have.
A radiation exposure to a woman who is pregnant
has the potential to impact the woman
who is pregnant,
her fetus or embryo,
and if it's a fetus with fully-formed ovaries
then the ova that will become that woman's grandchildren.
Our youngest child, Bethany, was just
a beautiful, delightful child.
The minute she was born,
I just couldn't get enough of this child.
I loved everything about her.
Bethany started to complain that her legs hurt
and she didn't wanna play.
She was lethargic and the doctor said to me,
“I can promise you nothing's wrong with this child.
She's just constipated.”
And so, I just--
My mom and I just packed her up in the middle of the night,
and took her to the ER,
and they started to do some tests.
And I was down in the library
and they called me back to her room.
And when I hit the end of the floor,
I could see these doctors lined up outside of her room
and it was just like I was being sucked down a hollow.
There were just lined up to talk to me.
And I just up curled up on-- on her bed,
‘cause she wasn't back yet, and put a pillow over my head,
and I just said, “I don't-- I-- I can't.
I don't wanna hear it, I don't wanna hear it.”
She had neuroblastoma stage four.
I was devastated,
‘cause I knew it meant that she would die.
She had a tumor the size of an orange
in her little tiny tummy and a nine-hour surgery,
and seven hours of radiation, and was off-treatment
making medical history.
And she was gonna get to go back to school.
And then she got sick again.
We went to Salt Lake
and found out she had acute monoblastic leukemia.
But at the same time, my sister was really sick.
She had melanoma that had spread everywhere.
And so Bethany and I went to the hospital
and said goodbye to Cathy, and we went to Salt Lake
and they wanted to start chemo.
And I said,
“Well, we need to go home first and then we'll come back.”
Got home about 2:00 in the morning,
and the hospital called about five minutes
after I got home and said, Cathy was in a coma.
So, I went to the hospital
and I just crawled on the bed with Cathy,
and I just said,
“Right, you're just gonna have to come
and take Bethany with you,
because I just can't let her go by herself.
You're gonna have to be there with her.”
Cathy died.
Without ever even making a move.
Bethany spent a month on chemotherapy
and she died a month later.
She was 6.
The night before she died, she said to me,
“Oh mom, there's Aunt Cathy dancing on the table.”
So, I knew Cathy had come to take her.
I was secretary to Mayor James G. Larkin.
In 1978,
the Atomic Energy Commission invited the mayor of St. George
to bring a bus full of people to the Nevada test site.
I had the opportunity to go out there.
An arts magazine I was freelancing for
called me and said,
“There's a photojournalist coming to town
who's been photographing
and taking histories of downwinders.
And we want you to do a piece.”
So, I spent time with her and she would tell--
She started telling me about all the diseases
that were caused by fallout exposure.
And she ticked them off and she got to thyroid cancer.
And I just stopped and said, “Oh, I had thyroid cancer.”
Redbook Magazine had-- had done an article
while Bethany was um, on treatment.
And I was invited
to the first radiation victims conference in New York.
I had no clue that these things were going on.
We stayed one night.
They put us up at a very nice hotel
and that night they fed us steak and lobster.
Then I thought,
“Well, why would they feed us that?
They could have given us hot dogs and hamburgers
and we would've been fine.”
That's when she started questioning me.
She's like, “Well, when?”
And I told her. “Well, where'd you grow up?”
I said, “Salt Lake.”
“Did you drink milk?”
I said, “Oh yeah,
and sometimes we'd go to my grandfather's
and we'd drink it straight from the cow.”
And she just kind of stopped.
And she said, “I wanna interview you.
You got thyroid cancer from testing.”
When we got out to the test site,
it was barren desert.
But there were many, many huge craters.
Way bigger than I had ever imagined.
But the whole time, they were convincing us
about how important the work was out there,
how safe it was, how good it was.
And I look back at it now and it was just a PR program,
where just they tried to shut us up.
“No, no, no, no.
I grew up in Salt Lake, not Southern Utah.”
And she said, “You people are so naive.
You think it stopped at borders of counties
and states.”
And that's when she showed me the map by Richard Miller
of everywhere that fallout had gone.
And it was like being punched in the gut.
And I thought, “Oh my God.
I'm-- I'm one of them.
I'm a downwinder.”
One of our congressman, Jim Hansen,
when I sat down and talked to him,
he had the audacity to say to me,
“Sometimes small sacrifices have to be made.”
And he knew the minute he'd said it what he'd said.
And I'm going, “The sac--
the small sacrifice you're asking is my daughter.
And it wasn't your sacrifice to make.”
All of the people in St. George that were leaders,
they all knew that we were gonna go out there
and be wined and dined,
and fed a bunch of garbage to try to get us to be quiet.
And it did the opposite.
I am going to shout it from the rooftops.
I'm not going to be silent anymore.
Then we got organized.
You and your family must take cover.
Mr. Udall, what is the basis of the claims
your clients are making?
Uh, their claims are based on the fact that they were
US citizens.
Who were not warned
about what the government was doing.
And that it was dangerous to them
and this was inflicted upon them.
The sub committee says
Congress should pass a special law.
Warren Hatch finally came to me and said,
“So what's your wishlist?”
I said, “Very good.
It's about time.”
NARRATOR:In 1991, the US Congress finally passed
the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act,
also known as RECA.
Today, the House of Representatives
restores our nation's honor
by holding the American government
responsible for Cold War abuses,
which stained our collective consciences
by causing death and injury to its own people.
♪ Looking for the black gas ♪
♪ Switch up your seal ♪
NARRATOR:The bill would provide tiered compensation
for individuals affected by nuclear testing
from onsite workers
to those living in downwind communities.
The areas covered by the bill are limited
to just 22 counties.
Also listed are the diseases
that would qualify a candidate for payment.
The compensation is capped at $50,000.
No children or grandchildren are eligible.
The downwinder community are lobbying Congress
to expand the bill,
both geographically and generationally.
And they don't recognize any second generation cancers.
I would like to amend the bill.
People got $50,000.
So, is that what a human life's worth?
$50,000.
It doesn't cover your chemo.
I filed seven times for my dad's compensation
for my mother to get that.
They said you can't prove that your dad lived
in Southern Utah.
I went through the downwinder questioning period
and so forth, and ended up collecting $50,000.
Yes, it was a good amount, but I would much rather have--
have my parents, you know, still have them.
I am personally flabbergasted at the fact
that anybody would think
that handing my mother a check for $50,000
replaces my dad.
But what it does do is it admits guilt.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act
was a-- a step.
It was an important step.
It never went far enough.
NARRATOR:A group that did not initially benefit from RECA
was the Shivwit tribe.
We had a lot of native Americans
but a lot of the people that lived here
didn't have any records.
Didn't keep records.
Couldn't really prove where they were.
And so the compensation was difficult to get.
I believe that a lot of them got sick, uh,
after the movie.
It was difficult to find out what happened to them.
We weren't able, I don't think, to go to their tribe
and get the information that we needed.
NARRATOR:The Harry test deposited more radioactive fallout
over areas of the United States than any other test.
With the largest accumulation
having fallen in the vicinity of St. George, Utah.
The issue of fallout is--
is relevant today, uh, as it's ever been.
Radiation can last for tens of thousands of years.
The Trinity test, the world's first atomic test
generated radiation that circled the globe.
There was radiation detected in milk in Chicago.
So, from the very beginning of the nuclear age,
everyone involved was aware that radiation moves.
NARRATOR:The National Cancer Institution has determined
that the entire population of the US in the 1950s
received on average a dose of thyroid radiation
around 20 times greater than normal background radiation.
Their report also states
that this radiation could result in an added 10,000
to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer.
The vast majority of downwinders will never know they were.
They'll never know.
Um, but there were a lot more of ‘em
than anybody ever thought.
NARRATOR:In 1992,
the United States ended a nuclear test moratorium.
The US Congress apologized to the downwinders
on behalf of the nation.
Beth, your tree needs some water.
Bethany, I miss you everyday.
Every single day.
The whole cemetery is full of people
that have lost their lives from what our own government
did to us.
There's a lot of sorrow and suffering that were--
was unnecessary right here that didn't need to happen.
And we're not so naïve as to think people don't get sick,
but not in the numbers.
And now the second generations and the third generations
is not normal.
If something's wrong,
you don't just walk by and let it happen.
You fix it.
We're losing the history of what happened
at the test site.
We're losing the stories, because people are dying.
We have to tell our stories.
If we don't tell our stories, nobody's gonna care.
We have to talk about what happened to us,
because to me,
story is like the most powerful tool we have.
You can have all the facts you want
and give them facts,
but it's the story that's gonna get to them.
NARRATOR:Howard Hughes did not live to see the downwinders’ fight
for justice prevail.
The great aviator died in a flight back
to the United States for medical treatment.
That he died while on an airplane,
where he was perhaps the happiest,
seems like a fitting end
to one of America's most enigmatic figures.
HUNLUN:My son, a miracle has been wrought!
You live!
BORTAI:I know the nature of this man.
No torture will persuade him like a woman's gentleness.
JAMUGA:Will bring sorrow between me and him,
and disaster upon his people.
TEMUJIN:There are moments for action then I listen to my blood.
NARRATOR:Several years after Howard Hughes' death
and over 25 years after it was filmed,
The Conqueror would finally be re released.
Most would agree it was not worth the wait.
I take you for a wife.
I think the legacy of The Conqueror,
if anything is, as bad as a movie it was,
if it did anything, it helped create a movement.
It certainly did raise the profile
that something was going on in St. George
and in the surrounding community.
The fact that it was filmed in Utah,
downwind of where this nuclear fallout came
from this nuclear testing,
that makes the movie relevant and interesting,
and that backstory to that is probably more fascinating
than the movie itself.
Coming to terms with The Conqueror
and the nuclear tests,
might remind us that some of the nuclear dangers
that we were being terrified about as little kids
have not entirely disappeared.
NARRATOR:Whatever happened to the 60 tonnes of sand,
that were shipped from Snow Canyon
to Studio 15 on the RKO lot?
Opinions differ.
I remember a few years back, we went over to RKO Studios
and there was still a big pile of this dirt on the backlot
at RKO, and we went there
and it was still radioactive from, you know,
two decades before.
So, it was kind of spooky and scary.
Michael Wayne went with me.
It was the middle of the night when we went to the back lot
and it was still hot.
I believe,
as the guy that went in there with a Geiger counter,
that--
That um, it's still there.
Later I was told and read that,
all this was removed and brought to the Baldwin Hills
right over the La Ballona Creek in Culver City
where it is now.
Where is it there?
We--
Nobody knows what the sand is there.
Not only was it taken to Culver City,
it was dumped out in Simi Valley, where my uh--
my youngest daughter lives.
Where do you get rid of it?
I mean, where are you gonna put it?
My dad's idea was how about when those big caves
where you dug out the arraign?
How about putting the stuff back in there?
Makes sense to me.
♪ Well, you say you got the blues ♪
♪ You got holes in both of your shoes ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ You're feelin' alone and confused ♪
♪ You got to keep on smilin', just keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Yeah, you're about to go insane ♪
♪ ‘Cause your woman's playing games ♪
♪ And she said that you're to blame, ♪
♪ You got to keep smilin', just keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Keep on smiling through the rain ♪
Laughin' at the pain ♪
♪ Just rollin' with the changes till the sun comes out again ♪
♪ Keep on smilin' through the rain ♪
♪ Laughin' at the pain ♪
♪ Just rollin' with the changes and singin' this refrain ♪
♪ Singin' in a honky tonk cafe ♪
♪ Nobody's hearin' what you play ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ They're too busy drinkin' anyway ♪
♪ You got to keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Brother, keep on smilin' ♪
♪ You say you found a piece of land ♪
♪ Gonna change from city boy to country man ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Try to build your life with your hands ♪
♪ And just keep on smilin' ♪
♪ Keep on smilin' ♪