When author Scott Eyman was 21 years old, he spent 90 minutes with John Wayne in a dressing room at CBS. He asked him questions about Howard Hawks and John Ford and his early 1930s serial B-movies for Mascot Pictures Corporation. About 40 years later, Eyman had a hard time finding that man he met in 1972 in any of the books or biographies out in circulation. So he wrote his own.