In Ship Shape

John Wayne is best remembered as a symbol of the American West, but throughout his life, the world’s most famous cowboy had one abiding passion: the sea.

“John Wayne: On Board With the Duke” is a new documentary video that tells of his love affair with the ocean--from his Balboa visits in the 1920s to go bodysurfing as a teenager, to his final cruise to Santa Catalina Island on his beloved yacht in 1979, several months before his death at 72.

Clark Sharon, a freelance writer from Santa Ana, wrote, directed and produced the 68-minute videotape, drawn from several hundred candid photographs and 10 hours of Super 8 home movies. “On Board” shows Wayne in his unguarded, private moments: fishing, working out with a barbell, reading a book as he stretches out in the sun, cradling his youngest daughter, Marisa, and giving her a kiss.

It’s the legendary actor letting his hair down, literally, sans toupee. In private, old Duke seldom wore his rug, which he considered just another prop for the movies and an annoyance to be worn in public.

“The documentary is really about his off-screen life, which happened to take place aboard the yacht to a large extent,” says Sharon, 44. “That’s where he was most relaxed and enjoyed himself the most.”

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Sharon says some of his favorite scenes are of Wayne “goofing around in front of the camera--like anyone would do, but you don’t think of John Wayne doing that. He was playful and good natured.”

The documentary grew out of a book that Sharon wrote in 1993 with Bert Minshall, the last skipper of Wayne’s most prized possession, the Wild Goose, a 136-foot former Navy minesweeper Wayne bought in 1962.

The book, “On Board With the Duke: John Wayne and the Wild Goose,” told of Minshall’s 16 years on the boat, which Wayne kept berthed on a side channel in Newport Harbor not far from his Bayshore home. In the video, Minshall and other crew members remember a boss they say was quick to anger (Wayne blamed his “damned Irish temper”) but also quick to apologize, gracious to fans and loyal to friends. (There are no interviews with members of the Wayne family.)

Wayne bought the Wild Goose, which was built during World War II, when he was 54. He kept many of the original naval appointments, even when he remodeled the boat to add a master stateroom and to raise the ceiling several inches to accommodate his height of 6 feet, 4 inches. He used the Wild Goose to take his family and friends to Alaska, Mexico and many other ports-of-call over the years.

To help offset the high costs of operation and maintenance, Wayne began chartering the boat to such friends as Dean Martin and leasing it out as a floating prop for movies.

Sharon was a newspaper reporter when he met Wayne in 1975. After Wayne’s death, he served as a Wild Goose crew member on charter cruises.

He hatched the idea for the documentary at Planet Hollywood in Santa Ana on Dec. 31, 1993, over lunch with an old friend, computer specialist Bill Le Duc. Sharon had recently finished the book with Minshall and mentioned to Le Duc that he still had access to “all these great home movies” of Wayne. “It would be fun to do a movie,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

Le Duc asked Sharon what the budget would be. Sharon picked a figure out of the air, and Le Duc said he’d “kick in $30,000 to get it started. I about choked on my hamburger,” Sharon recalls. “It’s funny how quickly your mind will shift gears. I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe this is possible.’ ”

Le Duc’s $30,000 was seed money for the production, which cost more than $100,000.

“As I forged ahead on the project, I’d run out of money and have to raise more,” Sharon says. “I was surprised actually how people would jump in.”

He noted that all six of his backers lived in Orange County and were impressed that, for 14 years, Wayne had lived here too.

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In the process of making the documentary, Sharon made one foray to Los Angeles--to have the Super 8 movies transferred to broadcast-quality videotape. The rest of the work was done at Orange County locations.

Sharon, who attended Cal State Fullerton on a partial music scholarship, shares the musical direction credit for the video with an old high school band buddy, Jim Ishii,a musician, composer and arranger from Santa Ana.

According to the video, Wayne once said to his daughter Aissa: “When I die, I don’t want to miss the ocean. I want to stay here. I want to be cremated when I die. Then take me out and scatter me over the sea because that’s where my heart is.”

He didn’t get his wish. He is buried in an unmarked grave on a hill overlooking Newport Beach. But the Wild Goose, sold about a week before he died, is still berthed in Newport Harbor, where it is available to the public as a charter party boat.

* “John Wayne: On Board With the Duke” is available for $19.95, plus shipping and handling charges, by calling (800) 333-2042.