In fact, there were so many A-list celebs running around Utah between the 1950s and the 1990s that Kanab became known as Little Hollywood. Like Moab, the town pulled out all the stops when it came to filmmaking.
It was a favourite of Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin, who incidentally paid to lengthen the local airport’s runway out of his own pocket because it wasn’t long enough to allow him to land his plane.
In 1979 John Wayne made his final ride into the sunset. It wasn’t a stray bullet or a tomahawk that got him in the end, but cancer. Not known for doing things in half measures, he was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking hombre.
His 100 cigarette-a-day habit cost him a lung and two ribs in 1964 and the disease came back with a vengeance in 1976. He managed to hang on for another three years, battling the ailment with ‘courage and unfaltering stoicism’ as his friend, fellow actor and future American president Ronald Reagan put it.
Of the more than 200 films John Wayne starred in, many in genres as far from the Old West as Hollywood could get, it is still that image of the Duke, with his almost patented amble, carrying a Winchester repeating rifle and talking in his unmistakable drawl splashed against those otherworldly buttes and mesas of Southern Utah that is the most enduring image of America’s Western heritage.
Find Out More
For more on travelling in Utah log on to www.utah.travel
More on Moab at
www.discovermoab.com
Monument Valley has a dedicated site at
www.utahscanyoncountry.com
Thank you for your article on the Old West and how John Wayne is remembered here. I am from Utah and grew up wishing I was the character that John Wayne was portraying. In fact, that is one of the reasons I wrote my book. I believe that America was made by people just like John Wayne portrayed. Men who stuck to the values they were taught. Even when someone tried to take their dream away. They were the quiet ones that got things done. Thank you. B L Strong, author strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheDreamTheMan