photo #9470315

Between takes in the Utah desert, John Wayne and his teenage sons tried out a Geiger counter on the rocks.137 miles upwind, America had been setting off atomic bombs.The film was The Conqueror. Howard Hughes spent $6 million on it, and he cast the most American man in Hollywood as Genghis Khan. Time magazine said he played the conqueror like a "square-shootin' sheriff."They shot near St. George, Utah, in the summer of 1954, much of it in Snow Canyon. The year before, the government had set off 11 atomic tests at the Nevada site. St. George sat right in the path of the fallout.People on the set knew about the tests. That's why a Geiger counter was out there at all. The story goes that it clicked so loudly Wayne thought it was broken.After 13 weeks in the dust, Hughes had 60 tons of that same soil trucked to Hollywood so the studio shots would match.The film was a flop. Then the crew began to get sick. Director Dick Powell died of cancer in 1963. That same year Pedro Armendáriz, who played Wayne's blood brother, learned his cancer was terminal and shot himself. Agnes Moorehead died in 1974. Susan Hayward died in 1975. Wayne lost a lung in 1964 and died of stomach cancer in 1979.When People magazine counted around 1980, 91 of the 220 cast and crew had developed cancer, and 46 had died of it.Nobody has ever proved the fallout did it. Skeptics point out how many of them smoked, Wayne most of all, and he blamed his cigarettes himself.But that count left out the hundreds of Native American extras who rode through the same dust. Nobody ever found out what happened to them.