I won’t read the NYT on a bet. My dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny links me to these two pieces, though, that brought the water involuntarily to my eyes

They constitute a two-part article written by Dick Cavett about his meeting with John Wayne.

The duke was… well, he was the duke. What else can you say? And while I always felt as if his private persona was as Cavett describes, the proof, so to speak, is in the pudding.

Who, today, can be John Wayne? Who is that big, onscreen and off? Look at the picture- Cavett looks like the Duke’s teenage son.

I’ll never meet the Duke this side of the soil. Maybe not on the other side, if Mark Twain is anything like correct. But Cavett did, and he has the chops to tell the story- clear and clean, without overt embellishment, in that self deprecating style of his, holding himself up as a scale to the Duke, and certainly not lacking in the grace department himself.

Thanks, Dick. Thanks, Jenny, for pointing this out.

“We should have started sooner.”

Indeed.