John Wayne’s movie career is filled with dozens of classic films from 1939 to 1976. John Wayne is of course famous for the great American Western. There’s one movie from his very long career, The Conqueror, that’s believed to be the cause of his death from cancer. At the height of the Cold War in 1956, The Conqueror was filmed at St. George in southwestern Utah. It was just over 100 miles downwind from the Nevada Test Site where 11 atomic bombs were exploded the previous year. The cast and crew were unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout during their 3 months of shooting. How could this have happened?
The U.S. military detonated approximately 100 nuclear bombs above ground at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1963. In 1953 alone, they carried out 11 atmospheric nuclear tests as a part of Operation Upshot-Knothole. The mushroom clouds were tens of thousands of feet high, and desert winds carried radioactive fallout across the Nevada and Utah desert. St. George is just 137 miles (220 km) from the Nevada Test Site. Western Shoshone lands and deep canyons around St. George were covered with layers of deadly nuclear dust. In the summer of 1954, filming began there on The Conqueror.
The tests had deceptively innocent names like “Nancy, Dixie, and Encore.” Two of Upshot–Knothole’s tests were particularly dangerous to the people of Utah and deposited long-lasting radiation downwind. The first was “Simon,” a massive 43 kiloton bomb exploded in April 1953. The second was “Harry,” a 32 kiloton blast that went off a month later in May 1953. By comparison, the famous first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was only 13 kilotons.
“Harry” was 20 kilotons greater than the advisable yield determined by the Atomic Energy Commission’s Chief Medical Officer. Following “Harry’s” detonation, unexpected strong, early-morning winds carried radiation directly east towards populated areas. On Western Shoshone “Indian” land, they were used to the bright flashes and loud rumbles of atomic testing.
Native Americans were never warned in advance by the government.
In St. George, Geiger counters measured 350 milliroentgens that year. In some cases, they went off the scale of handheld counters. As the cloud of radioactive fallout blew over the city, school children were at morning recess and mothers hung laundry out to dry. The people were advised by a radio broadcast to stay indoors for an hour.
Radioactivity would also concentrate in “hot spots” like canyons due to wind patterns. In the weeks following “Simon” and “Harry,” the press began to express concerns. So the Atomic Energy Commission created a publicity film to convince the public that they were safe, all was good. The AEC never advised those living downwind to avoid consuming vegetables and milk. Both absorbed the radioactive isotopes strontium 90 and cesium 137. Those isotopes would not have diminished much a year later, when filming began.
THE CONQUEROR
In one of the worst casting decisions ever made, American John Wayne was cast as the Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan. He starred opposite Susan Hayward, who played Bortia, a captive princess and love interest for Genghis. Dick Powell directed the film. Not only was the casting a bad idea, the Hollywood Studio, RKO, also decided that the movie should be filmed in remote St. George, Utah because its rustic scenery was thought to resemble Mongolia.
By the 1950s, it was well known that nuclear explosions produced massive amounts of highly radioactive and potentially lethal fallout. Still, the producers of the film decided to shoot the film near the test site in the remote Utah desert. From June through August 1954, famous movie producer and aviator Howard Hughes assembled John Wayne, the rest of the cast and crew for his latest “epic” film.
Much of The Conqueror was filmed in nearby Snow Canyon.
At the time filming took place, AEC authorities labeled the film site as perfectly safe from the harmful effects of radioactive fallout. This was even though abnormal levels of radiation were detected when the area was examined following “Harry.” So the cast and crew poured into the small desert town, filling every motel and hotel for 3 months. They even cast local Shoshone Native Americans as Mongol warrior extras. They had no idea that Snow Canyon had become a radioactive hot spot.
At the end of the shoot, Hughes and Powell even had 60 tons of the radioactive Snow Canyon dirt shipped back to their studio in Culver City, California. This was to make reshoots look realistic with the same color and consistency of dirt. Unbeknownst to RKO, radioactive desert sand sat on their back lot for decades, and is now an industrial complex.
The Conqueror depicted a turbulent love affair between the Mongol warrior chief and the beautiful daughter of his worst enemy. Despite its high-profile cast, the film was a critical and box office bomb – no pun intended. No one bought cowboy John Wayne as a barbarian warlord, nor Hayward as his exotic lover. The film has been listed as one of the 50 worst movies of all time.
Wayne and Hayward weren’t worried much by the harsh criticism. They were both popular actors and simply continued making movies. Unfortunately, with the dangerous filming location of The Conqueror, their health would never be the same. John Wayne went on to star in famous Westerns like Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Cowboys and his last film, The Shootist.
He played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, for which he won his only Academy Award for Best Actor.
However, within a few years of filming The Conqueror, unusual medical ailments started appearing in the cast and crew. In 1960, costar Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer. After learning of his condition, he killed himself in 1963. That same year, the film’s director Dick Powell died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 53.
For Susan Hayward, her career abruptly ended 15 years later when she was diagnosed skin, breast and uterine cancer, before ultimately dying of brain cancer. She died in 1975 at the age of only 56. That same year, costar Agnes Moorehead died of uterine cancer at the age of 74, likely from exposure to high levels of radiation during The Conqueror shoot. Costar Lee Van Cleef died of throat cancer in 1989.
Howard Hughes reportedly felt “guilty as hell” that his production company subjected all those innocent people to the toxic fallout in Utah. He spent $12 million purchasing every copy of The Conqueror so it would never be seen again. He supposedly watched it repeatedly in his final days before dying in 1976.
In addition to those working on the film itself, family members who came to visit also had cancer scares. Michael and Patrick Wayne visited their famous father on set. Both would later have skin cancer and benign tumors removed. Susan Hayward’s son had a benign tumor removed from his mouth. These could of course have come cigarette smoking which was still very common in the 1950s and 60s.
JOHN WAYNE
So what killed John Wayne? Wayne spent years fighting lung cancer, first diagnosed in 1964. He appeared to beat it when the diseased lung and two of his ribs were surgically removed. Many of his friends tried to convince him that his condition resulted from exposure to fallout radiation during The Conqueror. Wayne’s two sons visited the set in 1954 and played with Geiger counters around contaminated rocks. He however thought it was due to his two packs-a-day cigarette smoking habit.
But cancer returned 14 years later when he went in for supposedly routine gall bladder surgery and learned he actually had Stage 4 stomach cancer. Wayne passed away at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles in June 1979 at the age of 72. “THE DUKE” was actually born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. We’ll perhaps never know for sure if filming The Conqueror resulted in the cancers that killed John Wayne and so many others. But we do know that filming downwind of a nuclear testing site was certainly a questionable decision.
Testing has shown that the soil in some St. George canyons likely remained dangerously contaminated until 2007. During the 1970s, leukemia rates in the Western Shoshone Indians and residents of the St. George area were 5 times higher than the rest of the state. Those affected with cancers came to be known as “Downwinders.” In an attempt to compensate them, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy sponsored a bill, The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1979.
However, the bill was never voted on in the U.S. Senate.
By 1990, it was determined that approximately 110 of the 220 people who had worked on The Conqueror had developed some form of cancer, and 49 had died. Given all this evidence, it still cannot be definitively proven that the cancers that killed the cast and crew of The Conqueror were linked to the radioactive fallout at the shooting location.
Doctors from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City believe the majority of the cancer deaths were directly tied to their radiation exposure. However, the connection between radiation and cancer has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. In a group to 220, doctors would expect only 30 cancers to develop. With half afflicted, the connection to The Conqueror was now highly suspicious rather than merely coincidental.
In 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed RECA into law. The act provided compensation in amounts between $50,000 and $100,000 to those suffering from leukemia, thyroid cancer, bone cancer, and any other cancer determined by the National Cancer Institute to develop after exposure to low-level radiation. The government expected only a few hundred would apply. Instead, as of 2018, 34,372 claims had been approved, totaling $2,243,205,380. The amount paid out could have been much higher, since many Downwinders had already died.
In all, the U.S. military conducted 928 nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992. One hundred of them were atmospheric tests, before they switched to underground testing. It is estimated that almost 150 million curies of radioactive fallout was released by the time atmospheric testing ending in 1963. This equates to about 20 times the amount of radiation released during the infamous Chernobyl, Ukraine nuclear explosion and meltdown.
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