The Soviets in Mexico
After surviving the first attempt, Wayne then refused to allow the FBI to protect him and didn’t tell his family about the plot to kill him. Instead, he moved into a house with a large wall surrounding it. Thereafter, he relied on his cabal of loyal stuntmen who went to communist meetings in the United States to find out more about future attempts on Wayne’s life. These men attended the meetings and started huge fights. This was when Wayne believed Canutt had ‘saved his life.’
Munn continued his tale by suggesting that the USSR made another assassination attempt in 1953 when the movie star was in Mexico shooting Hondo. Apparently, local police got in touch with Wayne and informed him that strangers were asking a lot of questions about him. Then the police asked him if he wanted them to dispose of these characters permanently. Wayne told them to lock the threats up for a while then force them to leave the country.
Stalin was already dead at this stage, so Wayne assumed that Khrushchev was behind the latest attempt. However, in a private meeting with Khrushchev in 1958, the Soviet leader said the assassin order was: “a decision of Stalin during his last five mad years. When Stalin died, I rescinded that order.” Therefore, the agents trying to kill Wayne were doing so of their own volition.
The Battle of Burbank
Even though the cruel dictator was dead, American communists were seemingly intent on killing Wayne and made another attempt in 1955. On this occasion, a group of communists in Burbank launched an attack on the Duke’s home. Once again, the alleged incident sounds like it comes straight from a Hollywood script. The latest assassins were motivated by the fact that Blood Alley was yet another John Wayne anti-communist movie.
Once again, Wayne knew of the plot and just like his screen character; he refused to back down. He was supposedly the ‘real deal’ and was just as tough in real life as he was in the movies. He threatened to “blow them all to kingdom come” if they dared show their faces. When the armed communists showed up at Burbank, Wayne and his loyal group of stuntmen fought back, capturing and beating up the group. They pleaded for their lives and Canutt gave them tickets to Russia.
Real or Fiction?
The balance of probability suggests that Munn’s tales are fictitious. They simply sound too ‘heroic’ although they could potentially make a decent movie. We don’t know whether Stalin wanted Wayne dead; perhaps it was more anti-communist propaganda: The evil commies coming to the United States to murder one of its biggest icons? Munn’s tales are very much in the ‘he said, she said” category, and while the stories are compelling, it is likely they are highly exaggerated at best and utterly false at worst.