‍Ward Bond with John Wayne discussing a script in California

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‍HOLLYWOOD legend John Wayne was a man’s man. He made no secret of it. The most famous cowboy in the world had a string of affairs and his love for Irish actress Maureen O’Hara is well known.

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‍But he had another love too, his close friend Ward Bond. They were so close from school to the grave, that the Press at one stage believed they were secret lovers like screen cowboy Randoph Scott and actor Cary Grant allegedly were.

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‍But nothing was further from the truth, even though their friendship was deep, according to lost letters found years after their deaths.

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‍Before he died in 1979, Hollywood icon John Wayne had requested an epitaph on his gravestone in Spanish: “Feo, fuerte y formal”. It translates to “Ugly, strong, and dignified”. But he never got it.

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‍Instead, after he died, his family picked a quote he once gave to Playboy magazine: “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

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‍For nearly 20 years his grave was left unmarked because his family feared it would just become a fans shrine … but in 1998 they finally erected a distinctive bronze plaque featuring him as a cowboy on horseback, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach, California.

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‍Searching for old newspaper stories about Wayne (The Duke), I was pleased to discover that American entertainment journalist Michael Goldman was given access to a treasure trove of personal letters and rare documents by Ethan Wayne, the iconic cowboy’s youngest son.

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‍It was all packed away in some old boxes that had been gathering dust for years. Correspondence included letters between the star and his legion of fans; U.S. Presidents; film director John Ford; Hollywood mega star Steve McQueen, and others along with his birth certificate, passports, drivers’ license, and marriage certificate.

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‍The icing on the cake was a manuscript on his life Wayne had started to write himself. We already knew much of the Wayne story after obits and biogs in our own national press following his death from cancer in 1979. But a lot of it was about his love for the fiery Maureen O’Hara, his co-star in The Quiet Man.

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‍What I was interested in was Wayne’s life-long relationships with actor Ward Bond and it was all there. Put together with what author Goldman, former editor of the Daily Variety in LA, already knew, it makes wonderful reading … and became the theme for his best-selling book on the star.

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‍None of John Wayne’s show-business friendships were as enduring as actor Ward Bond. Wayne, born Marion Morrison, and Bond were former teammates in the University of California football team.

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‍In 1929 film director Ford was making the film Salute, about the rivalry of an Army v. Navy football game and he hired football players, among them Wayne and Bond, for some of the parts.

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‍In his manuscript Wayne wrote: “Ford thought Bond had a discipline problem but found his unruly youthful nature to be pleasantly unpretentious and hired him anyway.

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‍Bond didn’t show up when the cast and crew were preparing to board a train for Los Angeles until the last minute. Wayne wrote: “The last player to arrive, an hour late, a dollar short, one pocket torn, and a gin bottle hanging out of the other, was Ward.”

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‍Ward drove Wayne ‘nuts’ on that trip, spending money irresponsibly, getting drunk, fighting and disobeying rules. Ford, however, realised that both of them had honest, self-effacing natures, so he paired them together, hung out with them, and the trio eventually became inseparable.

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‍Wayne went on to write: “Over corn whiskey and a few nocturnal escapades, Ward and I became even closer personal friends, and that friendship lasted until the day Ward died, over 30 years later. I loved him.”

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‍The two of them appeared together in 22 movies and two television shows. Bond was notable for his high-profile Conservative activism that from time to time, even had Wayne, a rock-solid Republican icon, playfully teasing him about “being on his Communist kick again!”

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‍But the friendship between the two men was deeper than a shared political belief. Some believed they were gay. But their brotherhood was built on genuine personal affection, some wild adventures, a humorous outlook on life, and genuine humanity if their letters are anything to go by.

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‍In one, Wayne joked that Bond had given up the sugar substitute saccharine because someone told him it was bad for his virility. In many of them were ongoing jests about Bond’s tatty appearance — jokes that had been making the rounds almost since the time the two men first met.

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‍Bond got the last laugh. In his will, he left Wayne his shotgun that Wayne, years earlier, had borrowed on a hunting trip and accidentally shot Bond ‘in his butt!’ He never let Wayne forget it, even after his passing.

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‍Wayne writes that he was heartsick when Bond died suddenly in a Dallas hotel room from a massive heart attack in 1960 just as he had rejuvenated his career as the star of the hit TV series, Wagon Train.

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‍He accompanied Bond’s body back from Dallas and took part in the ceremony-at-sea before blessing Bond’s ashes scattered over the ocean. In his eulogy, Wayne said: “We were the closest of friends, from school right on through. He was a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”

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‍When talking about Bond, Wayne admitted he never stopped thinking about him the rest of his life, even casting him in various screenplays he read.

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‍He said: “When you lose a friend that close after so many years together, you realize you’ve reached the time of life when the ghosts surrounding you are some of the most significant people in your life.”

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‍DROWNING IN A SEA OF WOKENESS

‍A CREW of British sailors were returning to their ship by steamboat in Bermuda, having been on shore leave in the capital, Hamilton. Sailors being sailors, there was a row that turned into a fight and one man went overboard.

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‍A British marine began to strip off to save him but was ordered immediately to stop by an officer who had spotted a boat with ladies on it nearby.

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‍“The ladies in the boat had every sympathy for the unfortunate man, struggling for his life, “ reported the Western Daily Press, “but were opposed to the idea of another man springing into the sea nearly naked unless duly and sufficiently covered up in acceptable garments of the day.”

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‍Time went on and the drowning man was tiring as he tried to keep afloat.

‍The officer finally asked for volunteers and five men fully clothed, at once leapt to the rescue, but too late. The sailor had drowned.

‍Western Daily Press, May 8, 1892.

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‍FLEET ST STANDARD HOLDS THE SECRET OF

‍LIVINGSTONE’S MISSING MASSACRE DIARY

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‍LEGENDARY explorer David Livingstone was desperate to record the bloody slave trading massacre he had just witnessed in his 1871 Field Diary, but he had run out of notepaper and ink deep in the African jungle.

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‍The violence of it affected him deeply and he needed to record how he felt and for England to know.

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‍Just one Fleet Street newspaper held the answer … an old copy of The Standard sent to him by a friend to let him know what was going on in his own country.

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‍Starving and crippled by pneumonia, cholera, skin ulcers and sand fly bites, Livingstone desperately squeezed the juice from a local berry to write over the top of the print in the 1869 edition.

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‍Abolitionist Livingstone despised the slave trade, and this was his chance to expose it. But for 150 years the pages he wrote using the juice faded to the point of near-invisibility, and the newspaper’s dark type further obscured efforts to decipher it. So, his secret horror remained firmly locked away on those sheets.

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‍But its scattered pages, were found tucked away in several forgotten boxes in the David Livingstone Centre just outside of Glasgow, by Digital Humanities scholar and English professor, Dr Adrian Wisnicki.

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‍The professor was known for applying scientific imaging to reveal hidden text in historical documents and he set to work.

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‍He and colleagues was able to crack the legibility puzzle by adding a false colour to the pages — light blue, turned out to be the best for printed newspaper text — so that the darker written text stood out.

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‍Wisnicki opened up his email one morning to find those pages before him: “It was like history was being made on the screen while I’m sitting there in my pyjamas,” he says.

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‍On March 23, 1871, Livingstone takes up his story. Forced to team up with the Arab slave traders due to his deteriorating health, he found — to his dismay — that he was actually beginning to like these men.

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‍“The Arabs are very kind to me, sending cooked food every day,” he wrote in April. He told them about the Bible, taught them how to make mosquito nets and drank fermented banana juice with them.

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‍They nursed him back to health, and they become friends, Wisnicki says. “It was a very complex relationship.”

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‍But Livingstone soon began to look down on and resent the local people he encountered. He generally had good experiences interacting with locals in the past, this time, he was lumped in with the traders and treated with distrust.

‍Dr Livingstone’s diary scribbled on the

‍ Evening Standard with berry juice

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‍So, he found it impossible to get the help and goods he needed to set out on a separate expedition to find the source of the Nile.

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‍“The Manyama are not trustworthy, and they bring evil on themselves often,” he complained of the local tribe.

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‍Days turned into weeks. By June, still lacking a canoe and having declared himself a victim of cheats, he followed the Arabs’ advice and used force to get his money back from a local chief for the canoe he was promised.

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‍He became even more desperate to travel and started to take on some of the methods the slave traders used to control the local population.

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‍He sent some men to the nearby village with the instructions to bind the chief and give him a flogging if he still did not cooperate.

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‍“It was not that significant,” said Wisnicki. “But the fact that Livingstone, a man of supposed peace, has taken a step down that path is a big deal.”

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‍On July 15, however, Livingstone wrote that he was abruptly woken from his stupor. The traders — his friends — went into a busy nearby market and began randomly firing guns into the crowd and burn down surrounding huts, killing at least 300 people, many of them women and children.

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‍He had never witnessed such an atrocity before, and he admitted to being “crushed, devastated and spiritually broken,” Some of his men were among the attackers.

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‍He wrote: “I was so ashamed of the bloody Moslem company in which I found myself that I was unable to look at the Manyama. This massacre was the most terrible scene I ever saw. It was a wakeup call. The explorer realized that he’d started to go the wrong way himself.”

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‍Livingstone immediately left the traders and decided to retrace his steps east, bringing him to a village called Ujiji. In the village, he heard rumours of an Englishman spotted nearby. The Standard piece of the diary ends there.

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‍The Englishman who had been spotted was of course reporter Henry Moreton Stanley and they finally met on October 21, 1871, in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The rest, as they say, is …

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍5 January 2026

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