In her final letter to John Wayne, Lauren Bacall said she needed to tell him something. It was something she couldn’t work up the nerve to tell The Duke when they last worked together.

The estate of John Wayne released that letter on Instagram recently. Bacall sent it to him only a few months before he died of stomach cancer in 1979.

“Duke and Lauren Bacall appeared in two films together. Today, we’re sharing a letter from Bacall to Duke towards the end of his battle with cancer from the #JohnWayneArchive,” the caption says.

Dear Duke,

This has been on its way to you for months. You have been so very much in my thoughts. I never have been able to tell you how much you’re standing up for me in ‘Blood Alley’ days meant to me. I wanted to say it on ‘The Shootist’ — never could somehow. — know how difficult that film was for you. You have the guts of a lion — I do admire you more than I can say. It was so great to see you Academy Award nite. I’m being inarticulate — I want you to know how terrific you are and how really glad I am to know you. You give more than [you] know — I send you much love — constant thoughts

Betty.

Letter from Lauren “Betty” Bacall to John Wayne in 1979

Lauren Bacall’s birth name is Betty Joan Perske.

The two made two films together — Blood Alley and John Wayne’s final film, The Shootist.

John Wayne Stands up For Lauren Bacall in Casting Choice

The 1955 production of Blood Alley was a troubled one. John Wayne, who was originally only set to produce the film, ended up having to step in as the star after he fired Robert Mitchum.

He knew he needed a strong female lead so he went with one of the most popular actresses of her era, Lauren Bacall. However, she wasn’t everyone’s first choice.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who had issued with Bacall over the years, was a co-producer on the picture. Hopper didn’t want Bacall in the movie. Wayne made it clear, her opinion was noted, but it was his movie.

“Don’t tell me how to cast my picture,” he supposedly told her. Bacall stayed in the film.

They remained friends for the rest of Wayne’s life. And when Bacall’s husband, Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with cancer, John Wayne was the first to send flowers. Even though he didn’t know Bogart well.

Bacall died in 2014. But in a 2007 interview, she joked that she didn’t think and Wayne would be friends. Bacall was a staunch liberal Democrat and Wayne was a well-known conservative Republican.

“Duke Wayne and I got along really well, considering that we didn’t agree about anything!” she said then. “It was quite amazing. He was great to work with. He really liked me, and I really liked him. We had great chemistry together.”

When John Wayne showed up on television, he was usually playing himself in a showbiz cameo, like his “I Love Lucy” guest appearance. As one of the century’s biggest movie stars, he didn’t exactly need exposure.

But Ward Bond, Wayne’s co-star in many of legendary director John Ford’s movies, struggled over whether or not he should make a move to television. When Ford discussed it with Bond, he got blunt. According to Joseph McBride’s book “Searching for John Ford,” the director called his friend a “dumb Irishman” and asked, “Don’t you act for a living?” Bond listened, and took a leading role in “Wagon Train,” a major TV western of the ’50s and ’60s. The show was once the highest-rated western on television, even beating out its regular competition, “Gunsmoke.” And Bond was far from the only movie star to appear in it.

The show began in 1958, and owed a great deal to John Ford’s vision of the American West. Every one of its many episodes focused on a unique character, either somebody in the wagon train or somebody the wagon train encountered, which made the show particularly supple ground for guest stars. When Ford directed an episode of the show, 1960’s “The Colter Craven Story,” the ostensible star was Carleton Young, another Ford stock actor, who played the part of Colter Craven. But dig into the credits and you’ll find another name: Michael Morris … who was actually John Wayne, perhaps the biggest star to appear on the program. And he did it in near secret.

Rise of the TV western

As televisions became more commercially available in the 1950’s, the TV western became one of its most ubiquitous genres, lovingly homaged in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” There were so many western TV shows that only a few are still widely remembered today, regardless of their contemporaneous popularity (shows like “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” remain cultural milestones even as others vanished). Like many film westerns, these shows took place a couple of years after the Civil War, using national scars and the rocky terrain of the country’s westward expansion as raw material.

“Wagon Train” was one of those shows. It didn’t just incorporate the communal warmth and actors of John Ford’s westerns — it borrowed story beats from his 1950 film “Wagon Master,” about 19th century Mormon pioneers. When Ford came on to direct his episode, he even used the movie’s location photography to give the episode a grandeur that differentiated it from the other westerns on television, according to Joseph McBride’s “Searching for John Ford.”

Where the initial movie was more concerned with the historic transport of pacifistic Mormons across the wilderness, the TV show became more secular by cutting out the Mormon element. The premise needed to carry the show through 284 hour-long episodes. All that mattered was that the wagon train kept moving.

The Colter Craven Story

In “Wagon Train,” Ward Bond plays wagon master Major Seth Adams, his typically irascible screen image softened for television. While he played the lead role for the show’s first four seasons (until his passing shortly after filming “The Colter Craven Story”), his character often takes a backseat to the main drama of the episode. Exceptions include the first season’s origin story two-parter “The Major Adams Story” and “Colter Craven.”

“Searching for John Ford” notes that by the end of the 1950’s, Ford’s five-decade filmmaking career had stalled somewhat, which saw him visiting the sets of his old friends’ projects. When he wasn’t bullying John Wayne on the set of Wayne’s directorial debut, “The Alamo,” he would hang around Ward Bond’s TV show. Ford’s passion for American history and its complicated players made him pitch Bond an episode dealing with U.S. president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. Bond acquiesced.

Because of Ford’s interest in Grant, the saga of Colter Craven (Carleton Young) is just one piece of the episode. Craven, a surgeon whose experience in the Civil War has traumatized him to the point of alcoholism, joins the wagon train with his wife. When Major Adams (Bond) needs Craven to perform a C-section, he explains his own past with the Civil War, talking about his time in Shiloh, where he reunited with an old friend named Sam (Paul Birch). Hidden in this flashback is the appearance of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who is played by actor Michael Morris. Who is actually John Wayne.

Wayne in the open

“Sam” is Ulysses S. Grant, and Ford portrays him first as a hapless drunk who sparks the ire of townspeople. His Civil War moment comes later, in Shiloh. Adams and Sam reunite, they share a haunting conversation, interrupted by the arrival of Sherman.

In a show with major roles for actors like the Oscar-winning Bette Davis, Agnes Moorehead, and Lou Costello, it feels almost perverse to shoot its sole John Wayne appearance like Ford does. Sherman is kept at a distance, in wide shot, with only one line. Wayne’s familiar posture and voice are the only clue that this mysterious figure is a famous movie star. It was a favor from Wayne to his buddies Ford and Bond — they remained tight even after Wayne almost walked away from his role in “The Searchers.”

As for John Wayne’s credited name for “Wagon Train,” Michael Morris? That’s closer to his actual name: Marion Robert Morrison.

While Ford’s choice to barely show Wayne was almost certainly a typical bit of rebellious behavior (according to “Searching for John Ford,” the director also got in trouble for giving Grant a cigar in a show sponsored by cigarettes), it suits the show well, keeping the focus on Adams and Grant. In 1962, Ford would get the chance to show the aftermath of Shiloh again in the anthology film “How the West Was Won,” depicting Grant (Harry Morgan) and Sherman (John Wayne again, now fully credited) in conversation. You get to see his face that time.

Despite his decades-long career, Rooster Cogburn was the only time John Wayne appeared in a sequel. Wayne made his screen debut with an uncredited appearance in 1926’s Brown Of Harvard and ended his acting career 50 years later with Don Siegel’s The Shootist. Wayne appeared in many different kinds of genres during his long career, from bizarre romantic drama The Barbarian And The Geisha – where Wayne fought his director – to war movies like Sands of Iwo Jima.

Despite his success with other genres, Wayne is forever tied to Westerns. 1939’s Stagecoach was the film that made him a star, while he went on to appear in many classics of the genre, including The Searchers, Rio Bravo and 1969’s True Grit. While the success of Westerns waned during the late ’60s and ’70s, Wayne continued to headline in movies like Cahill U.S. Marshal and The Cowboys. His second last movie was 1975’s Rooster Cogburn, which saw him reprise the title character from True Grit.

Wayne won his only Oscar for playing Cogburn in True Grit, an aging, cantankerous U.S. Marshall hired by a teenage girl to track the man who killed her father. Rooster Cogburn arrived six years later and saw Wayne – who turned down a Clint Eastwood Western – titular’s character having been stripped of his badge for misconduct. He’s given a chance to redeem himself by chasing after a gang of bank robbers, and during the story, he’s joined by Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn as a spinster who – just like True Grit’s Mattie Ross – wants to find her father’s killers. Rooster Cogburn is also notable for being the only time in Wayne’s career he made a sequel or reprised a character, with the team-up between him and Hepburn being the highlight of the movie.

Sadly, Rooster Cogburn is utterly inferior to True Grit despite its leads, and while it’s not Wayne’s worst Western, it’s far from his best either. Reviews for the sequel weren’t kind either, with critics feeling both Wayne – whose grandson Brendan is also an actor – and Hepburn were much too old to convincingly portray their characters. During this era in Hollywood, sequels and franchises were still more of the exception than the rule, and while many of Wayne’s Westerns were essentially variations on the same stories or characters, he may have wished to avoid direct follow-ups for the stigma attached to them at the time.

He had appeared in thematic trilogies like John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy or thinly veiled remakes like Rio Bravo riff Rio Lobo, but Rooster Cogburn was his only direct sequel. It appears there were plans for a franchise had the movie being a success, with a third movie called Someday being developed. Rooster Cogburn proved to be a box-office disappointment, however, though a TV movie titled True Grit: A Further Adventure aired in 1978 with Warren Oates playing Cogburn.