Who killed the Duke?
It remains one of the most intriguing of the many Howard Hughes mysteries:
What was he thinking when he filmed a John Wayne movie on an abandoned nuclear test site?
"His memos definitely indicated he knew it was dangerous (from radioactivity)," said Richard Hack, author of "Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters."
In his book, Hack mentions in passing the radioactivity connection to the deaths of Wayne and others involved in the film "The Conqueror." But during a telephone interview Tuesday, he said Hughes' memos shed damning evidence that Hughes knew the cast was at risk.
Hack said almost 80 percent of the cast and crew died of cancer, including Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendariz, as well as director Dick Powell.
Wayne played Genghis Khan, the Mongol invader whose conquests included Afghanistan. Most of the film was shot in 1955 near St. George, Utah, about 100 miles downwind of the Nevada Test Site.
The high number of cancer-related deaths "could be just a very huge coincidence but an extraordinary coincidence," said Hack. There is no evidence that Hughes informed those on location of the possible danger.
Furthermore, Hack said there is documentation that Hughes had 60 tons of radioactive sand hauled to the RKO sound stage in Los Angeles in order to match the set for close-ups.
lvrj.com
Of the 220 persons who worked on The Conqueror on location in Utah in 1955, 91 had contracted cancer as of the early 1980s and 46 died of it, including stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead and director Dick Powell. Experts say under ordinary circumstances only 30 people out of a group of that size should have gotten cancer....
Many people involved in the production knew about the radiation (there's a picture of Wayne himself operating a Geiger counter during the filming), but no one took the threat seriously at the time. Thirty years later, however, half the residents of St. George had contracted cancer, and veterans of the production began to realize they were in trouble. Actor Pedro Armendariz developed cancer of the kidney only four years after the movie was completed, and later shot himself when he learned his condition was terminal.
Howard Hughes was said to have felt "guilty as hell" about the whole affair, although as far as I can tell it never occurred to anyone to sue him.
straightdope.com
An estimated 80,000 people who lived in or were born in the United States between the years 1951 and 2000 will contract cancer as a result of the fallout caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, according to an analysis of government studies by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Well over 15,000 of these cases would be fatal.
ieer.org |
