WEST COAST STAGE DEBUTS : BROTHERS WAYNE TEAM UP IN COMEDY

It is only fitting that Patrick and Ethan Wayne, the sons of John Wayne, are making their West Coast stage debuts in Orange County.

The county, after all, has been known as “John Wayne country” for years. Newport Beach was Wayne’s home at the time of his death 5 1/2 years ago; the Orange County airport is now named after him, and the county is celebrated for a political conservatism that seemed to fit Wayne like a pair of handmade boots.

The Grand Dinner Theatre in Anaheim is hoping to cash in on this phenomenon with the casting of the Wayne fils --Patrick, 45, and Ethan, 22--in “Come Blow Your Horn,” now at the Grand and scheduled to run through March 17. “We realize that the Wayne name means a lot in Orange County, and we’re counting on this to be an important (box office) factor,” said Frank Wyka, who is producing this version of the Neil Simon comedy. (Directed by Mort Sertner, the other cast members are Sertner, Lisa Robinson, Julia Hannibal and Annabelle Weenick)

Although the Grand is publicizing the Patrick-Ethan appearance as “The Sons of John Wayne Together for the First Time,” the sibling duo actually made their debut in the Simon play last year at the Country Squire Theatre in Amarillo-- “Texas is another place that’s John Wayne country,” Patrick said.

As for working in the shadow of their father, the younger Waynes say they’ve learned to treat that issue philosophically. “Sure, being his sons has opened up doors in the industry. You can’t ignore that factor. But I feel I’ve accomplished a lot on my own, that I’m not just John Wayne’s son,” said Patrick, in a recent interview.

It was Patrick’s idea for the Wayne sibling pairing in “Come Blow Your Horn,” which is a playful saga about a bachelor about town who seeks to initiate his younger brother into the swinging life. (Patrick and Ethan, a movie stunt man-turned-actor, are half-brothers: Patrick’s mother was John Wayne’s first wife, Josephine; Ethan’s mother is Wayne’s third wife, Pilar, to whom he was married at the time of his death from cancer in 1979.)

For Patrick Wayne, who has had an active--if not a big-star--career in movies and television, acting began as a familial affair. As a child, he regularly visited his father on locations, even landing a cameo role in “Rio Grande,” John Ford’s 1950 cavalry movie that starred his father and Maureen O’Hara. Throughout the 1950s, Patrick was a juvenile member of director Ford’s so-called stock company--a boisterous, close-knit group of actors that also included Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen and Ben Johnson.

“It wasn’t a job to me. It was all great fun; they (actors and crew) were all family to me. I was a very privileged kid, in a sense, to have been around people like Ford in those days,” said Patrick, who eventually graduated to productions that didn’t involve Ford or his father, including major roles at the Disney and Columbia movie studios and in two network television series, “The Rounders” and “Shirley” (the latter a 1979 sitcom starring Shirley Jones).

Patrick, whose home is in Los Angeles, now spends much of his time working in Europe (he is in a made-in-Spain spoof film, “Rustlers’ Rhapsody,” and is involved in a projected Western series for Italian television) and on the U.S. dinner-theater circuit. After “Come Blow Your Horn,” he will be starring in “Arsenic and Old Lace” at the Burt Reynolds Theatre near West Palm Beach, Fla.

Like Patrick, Ethan Wayne made his screen debut in a frontier epic with his father. Ethan was 9 when he played the kidnaped grandson in the 1971 “Big Jake.” That production was quite a clan gathering: It also featured Patrick and was produced by John’s eldest son, Michael.

But Ethan--who was named after one of his father’s best-known screen characters, the enigmatic maverick in Ford’s “The Searchers”--became a motorcycling and flying enthusiast as a teen-ager and turned away from Hollywood for a time. When he did try his hand again at the movie business, he worked as a stunt man. After a time, “encouraged by Patrick and maybe too many (stunt work) injuries,” he said, he opted for acting: In 1983 he made “In Point,” a movie shot in Spain with Jimmy McNichol and Tim Van Patten, and he has also completed a movie with Ernest Borgnine.

Ethan, who lives in Newport Beach, admits he is still a fledgling actor. “I’m really serious about this (acting), and things are going just fine right now,” he said, adding with a laugh, “If I don’t make it, I can always get a job as Patrick’s gardener.”

Off-screen, Patrick and Ethan Wayne assume their roles as the dutiful sons of John Wayne--and the guardians of his legacy--with appropriate reverence. And they maintain the definitive story of John Wayne has yet to be realized.

Explained Patrick, who says he has not read any of the recently published biographies of his father, including a 1983 memoir, “Duke: A Love Story,” by his father’s secretary, Pat Stacy: “All I can say is that her (Stacy’s) account and the others are incomplete and in many ways inaccurate. The real account, the one written with our family’s involvement, has yet to be done.”

But when?

“I can’t say at this time, except that a book is in the works and somewhere down the road, and so is a film project, probably for television,” said Patrick. “I can say this--that these (biographies) will be a total and true portrait of my father, as the family knew him. They will be the authorized versions.”