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to Josephine, with whom he had three children, he had a series of affairs with various actresses he met on the sets of his films, while his wife and children were at home. Wayne divorced Josephine in order to marry his then-mistress, Esperanza Baur. His marriage to Esperanza occurred literally weeks after his divorce from Josephine was finalized.
    But Wayne’s second marriage fared no better than his first. Plagued by reports of chronic adultery, Wayne divorced Esperanza after seven years of childless marriage. Once again, Wayne did not wait long to take on his next wife, this time marrying Pilar—a Peruvian woman he met while filming a movie in her homeland— on the very day his second divorce was finalized.
    The marriage with Pilar also did not last. Although he never formally divorced Pilar, with whom he had four more children, they separated in 1973 so that Wayne could live with his new mistress—his secretary, Pat Stacy, with whom he remained, while still married to Pilar, until his death in 1979.
    The numerous broken families Wayne created could not have been any more antithetical to the traditional moral values he endlessly claimed to espouse. His confirmed adulterous relationships are too numerous to chronicle, including a lengthy affair with Marlene Dietrich during his first marriage. His multiple divorces and split-ups were anything but amicable. As entertainment journalist Emanuel Levy reported concerning Wayne’s breakup with his second wife,
     
There were indeed charges and counter-charges of unfaithfulness, drunken violence, emotional cruelty, and “clobbering.” Wayne described his wife as a “drunken partygoer who would fall down and then accuse him of pushing her.” He deplored the publicity his divorce proceedings received in the press, though they did not hurt his career or popularity.
     
    The 1969 Time profile gives a small glimpse into the enormous disparity between the Moral Crusader Wayne and the reality of how he lived his life:
     
Aging and raging, he began to take on all enemies in the same spirit: Commies, Injuns, wrongos, Mexicans—and his wife Esperanza. “Our marriage was like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar,” he said. She recalled the night he dragged her around by her hair. He countered with a claim that when he was on location she had a house guest named Nicky Hilton. During the divorce proceedings, Wayne uttered an aside that could have come from one of his early oaters: “I deeply regret that I’ll hafta sling mud.”
     
    The moral mess in Wayne’s private life was not confined to draft dodging and serial broken marriages. And in that regard, his life was an almost exact precursor of one of the current leaders of our nation’s Values Voters movement—superpatriot and war lover Rush Limbaugh. Like draft evader Limbaugh, the law-and-order moralizer Wayne, in the midst of his serial marriages and divorces, developed a rather nasty addiction to drugs.
    Throughout the 1960s, Wayne regularly took amphetamines during the day in order to work and barbiturates at night in order to sleep. On one occasion, Wayne actually confused his habits. During a taping of a guest appearance on The Dean Martin Show in 1969, Wayne accidentally took a downer rather than the speed he used in order to work, and arrived announcing: “I can’t do our skit. I’m too doped up. Goddamn, I look half smashed.”
    In the midst of the initiation of the now-infamous Republican “Southern strategy” led by Richard Nixon, whereby the Republican Party would seek to exploit racial tensions in order to recruit white Southerners to the GOP, John Wayne gave a 1971 interview to Playboy magazine filled with one reprehensible comment after the next. The most enduring one was his explicit embrace of “white supremacy” as his governing ideology:
     
We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are