In 1965, Joan Didion went to visit John Wayne and the cast of The Sons of Katie Elder while they were shooting down in Mexico City. Later that year, "John Wayne: A Love Song," was published in the Saturday Evening Post:
...there with the pepper trees and the bright sun outside, they could still, for just so long as the picture lasted, maintain a world peculiar to men who like to make Westerns, a world of loyalties and fond raillery, of sentiment and shared cigars, of interminable desultory recollections; campfire talk, its only point to keep a human voice raised against the night, the wind, the rustlings in the brush.