John Wayne

John Wayne: The Walk, the Voice, the Argument

He lost his football scholarship to the University of Southern California in a bodysurfing accident, breaking his collarbone in the Pacific rather than on the field, and was too frightened of his coach's reaction ever to explain what had happened. That coach, Howard Jones, then did him the favour that made the career: he pointed the tall pre-law student toward a film set, where a director named John Ford put him to work as a prop boy. Marion Robert Morrison would appear in more than 170 pictures and spend twenty-five years on the exhibitors' list of top ten money-making stars — more than any performer before or since.

Marion Morrison of Winterset

He was born in Winterset, Iowa, on 26 May 1907, the son of Clyde Morrison, a pharmacist, and Mary Alberta Brown. The family moved to California — Palmdale, then Glendale in 1916. A local fireman took to calling the boy "Little Duke," because he was never seen without his Airedale terrier of that name, and the boy preferred it to Marion. The nickname outlasted everything else about that childhood.

At Glendale Union High School he played on a championship football team, presided over the Latin Society and wrote sports copy for the school paper. At USC he stood six feet four and a half inches and read pre-law until the sea intervened.

Eighty Horse Operas

Raoul Walsh gave him his first starring role, in *The Big Trail* (1930), a widescreen epic shot simultaneously in 35mm and the new 70mm Grandeur process. Audiences who saw the Grandeur prints stood and cheered; almost no theatre could project them, and the picture failed. Walsh had also given him the name: he proposed "Anthony Wayne," after the Revolutionary general, the Fox chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as "too Italian," and Walsh offered "John Wayne" instead. Wayne was not in the room for the conversation.

There followed roughly eighty low-budget Westerns across the 1930s, most at Monogram and Mascot. The decade was not wasted: working with the stuntman Yakima Canutt, Wayne helped develop screen-fighting technique still in use — his own claim was that he introduced the idea of the hero fighting dirty, with chairs and lamps, rather than clean.

Stagecoach and the Ford Years

Ford had to fight for the money to cast him in *Stagecoach* (1939); the B-picture reputation was against him, Claire Trevor took top billing, and Walter Wanger financed it independently. It made Wayne a star. His co-star Louise Platt recalled Ford predicting the young actor would become the biggest star ever, because of his appeal as the archetypal everyman.

The partnership ran fourteen films: *She Wore a Yellow Ribbon* (1949), *The Quiet Man* (1952) opposite Maureen O'Hara, *The Searchers* (1956), *The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance* (1962). With Howard Hawks he made *Red River* (1948), *Rio Bravo* (1959) and its two near-remakes. He directed *The Alamo* (1960), playing Davy Crockett, and was nominated as its producer for Best Picture. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor as the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in *True Grit* (1969). His last film, *The Shootist* (1976), cast him as an ageing gunfighter dying of cancer.

The Searchers

Ethan Edwards is the performance the case for Wayne stands or falls on. Roger Ebert called him "one of the most compelling characters Ford and Wayne ever created" and the role one of Wayne's best. It is also a portrait of a racist: Ethan intends to murder his own kidnapped niece because she has become, in his phrase, the leavings of a Comanche. Ebert argued the film consciously examines that hatred rather than unconsciously endorsing it, and that Ford and Wayne both understood how vile Ethan's attitudes were — which, he wrote, took courage. The film went on to shape *Taxi Driver* and *Star Wars*.

The War He Did Not Fight

Wayne was thirty-four at Pearl Harbor, classified 3-A, and Republic's Herbert Yates threatened to sue if he broke his contract to enlist. He wrote repeatedly to Ford asking permission to go, and National Archives records show he applied unsuccessfully to the Office of Strategic Services. He toured South Pacific bases and hospitals for three months with the USO in 1943–44, carrying an OSS assignment to report on whether MacArthur's staff was obstructing the agency. His widow believed the failure to serve was the most painful fact of his life, and that he became "a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."

Politics, and the 1971 Interview

He co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944 and was elected its president in 1949, supported the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy, acted as an enforcer of the Hollywood blacklist, and turned down *High Noon* because he read it as an allegory against blacklisting. He co-directed and starred in *The Green Berets* (1968), the only major American film made during the Vietnam War in support of it.

The 1971 *Playboy* interview is the document that will not go away. In it he said he believed "in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility," and that he did not "feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians." Nothing in the record softens those sentences. He was not consistently doctrinaire — he broke with the right to back the Panama Canal Treaty and quit the John Birch Society over its fluoridation conspiracy — but the interview is what it is.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The claim for Wayne is a claim about craft and physical presence, not intellect, and it should be made in those terms or not at all. What he possessed was an unusual command of stillness and reaction on camera. He described the method himself, and the description is more precise than it first sounds: "I read dramatic lines undramatically and react to situations normally. This is not as simple as it sounds." Raoul Walsh put the same point from outside: "Wayne underacts, and it's mighty effective, not because he tries to underact — it's a hard thing to do if you try — but because he can't overact." Lee Strasberg, whose Method Wayne openly disdained, grouped him with Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper as actors who "try not to act but be themselves." Howard Hawks noticed that after the removal of a lung in 1964 Wayne paused in strange places for want of breath, and that the defect became a device: "you wait for him to finish." Andrew Sarris wrote that at his best Wayne came close to "a tragic vision of life," projecting "the kind of mystery associated with great acting."

The counter-case is straightforward. Wayne played essentially one man across 142 starring roles; his range was narrow by design, and he said so, arguing that a star must "bring along some of your own personality" — the opposite of transformation. Marlon Brando attacked the persona directly, arguing that the America Wayne embodied "just simply doesn't apply." Jean-Luc Godard framed the paradox and did not resolve it: how could he hate Wayne the Goldwater man and still love him when he takes Natalie Wood in his arms in the last reel of *The Searchers*? That is where the question sits.

Legacy

Wayne was a chain smoker; he lost his left lung and two ribs to cancer in 1964, went public with the diagnosis against advice, urged preventive screening, and is credited with coining "the Big C." He died of stomach cancer at the UCLA Medical Center on 11 June 1979, aged seventy-two. He received the Congressional Gold Medal on his last birthday, with testimony from Maureen O'Hara, Katharine Hepburn and Frank Sinatra, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously from Jimmy Carter in 1980. Joan Didion, who first saw him in 1943, wrote that "when John Wayne rode through my childhood... he determined forever the shapes of certain of our dreams." Both halves of that sentence are still being argued over.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Congressional Gold Medal
• California Hall of Fame