The Assassination of Big Jim McLain

I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying that Reuters is reporting it:

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged by the anti-communistic attitude of film star John Wayne that he tried to have him assassinated.

A new biography of the American icon—'John Wayne—The Man Behind the Myth' by British writer and actor Michael Munn—says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to movie audiences worldwide as "The Duke"….

The book says the Soviet plots were cancelled after Stalin's death in 1953 by his successor Nikita Krushchev who was a fan of the larger-than-life star of more than 100 films.

"That was a decision of Stalin during his last five mad years. When Stalin died I rescinded that order," the book quotes Krushchev as telling Wayne during a private meeting in 1958.

Wayne was also targeted, Munn claims, by Mao Zedong. His source for all this is Orson Welles, and indeed, it sounds like the sort of mad yarn that Welles would try to palm off on a gullible writer. Think of it as his final, posthumous gift to his fans.