John Wayne: The Life and Legend (110 page)

“Westerns didn’t die,” said Andrew Fenady, “they were murdered. By Altman, by Peckinpah, by the revisionists. Around the time of Vietnam, suddenly there couldn’t be heroes. The righteous revisionists took great delight in demeaning and defiling and perverting anybody that ever wore a badge, a uniform, or moved west.

“And something else happened: the western got absorbed.
Star Wars
was like a Borden Chase western, with two uneasy friends, except with rockets and spaceships instead of horses and wagons. Setting it in space worked. And today, kids don’t know from westerns.”

For years, the debate about Wayne centered around the ridiculous question of whether or not he could act, with liberals generally taking the negative position. But, as James Baldwin—a much better movie critic than most movie critics—pointed out, movie stars are primarily escape personalities for the audience: “No one, for example, will ever really know whether Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable—or John Wayne—can, or could, really act, or not . . . acting is not what they are required to do. Their acting ability, so far from being what attracts their audience, can often be what drives their audience away. One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them
be
.”

But the truth is that Wayne could act, could take on any color demanded. For John Ford, he was a lonely romantic; for Raoul Walsh he was a brawler; for Howard Hawks, he could be either one mean SOB, eyes fixed firmly on the prize, or a quietly secure man, determined and unruffled.

“Wayne [could] be tough or tender . . . sociable or cantankerous,” wrote Jeanine Basinger, before wittily describing the ultimate non-movie lover: “The person who walks out of
Red River
talking about Montgomery Clift.”

Whatever he played, the power of Wayne’s personality shone through—clarity triumphant. Wayne played the kind of man he needed to believe in, the kind of man the audience needed to believe in, until “John Wayne” became a statement as much as a name. The actor became his own genre. Once he was asked what he thought he brought to American movies. His answer was simple: “vitality.”

Politeness mattered to him; so did something that might be called gallantry. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly,” wrote a critic who knew him, “but he did suffer them occasionally, when he knew that his indifference would hurt like a slap to the face.”

Movie stars often hide their true selves from their public, which can result in inadvertent and humiliating exposures. But Wayne never obscured his flaws, and often went far out of his way to expose them, because pretending otherwise would have been a breach in the binding contract he had with his audience: to tell the truth as he saw it. Unfortunately, his unified field theory of American society caused many to ignore the questioning, complicated humanity of his best performances.

As an actor, he could extract nuances of behavioral beauty out of primal emotion. Often, he embodied self-reliance, but he also embodied generosity of soul and spirit—not common qualities in the latter part of the twentieth century, let alone today.

His fellow conservatives appropriated convenient snapshots of Wayne’s career that emphasized his rugged individualism as a means of promoting their own philosophy, without ever seeming to notice that the self-sufficient men he played had a way of ending up hopelessly isolated or dead.

You pay your money and you take your choice—a heroic frontiersman embodying Manifest Destiny, or a displaced loner uncomfortable with the civilization he’s helping to forge.

Or both—a human jigsaw encompassing the warring halves of American masculinity.

In one sense, time ultimately worked against Wayne, as it works against everybody. Nothing could have been more foreign to him than the Method technique of dredging up emotional memories to animate the inner life of his characters—the grinding difficulty and persistent financial humiliation of his childhood and young manhood was something he always sought to escape and relived only grudgingly.

Instead, he cultivated what Andrew Sarris referred to as “a . . . Jungian process” of developing an entirely new persona that gradually enveloped him like a suit of clothes. He consciously went outside of himself, personifying a myth of the past that helped define the present. First he invented the personality, then he projected it. In the process, Wayne became a populist movie star, someone to whom the critics came only late, and then, for the most part, reluctantly—a midwesterner who became a Man of the West.

When he died, the editorialists said that the last simple American hero was gone, but that indicated both that they hadn’t seen a lot of John Wayne movies and that they thought times had changed. Neither his movies nor his politics went away. Certainly, the political and social landscape of America of the early twenty-first century is one that Wayne would immediately recognize, because America is a perennial circular conversation—generally a loud one—between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles, and John Wayne incarnated the extremes of socialization and isolation more comprehensively than any leading man before or since.

Tracy had Hepburn, Wayne had O’Hara—the woman who understood him and could more than hold her own. In her memoirs she wrote, “He was smart but not shrewd, and was cheated out of a fortune more than once. . . . He loved ladies and liked women, but . . . was terribly unlucky in marriage and never understood why. . . . Duke was one of the most decent men I have ever known. . . . He felt forever a slave to his image.”

In conversation, O’Hara elaborated on her beloved friend: “He came to work. He knew his lines. He worked like a dog. He tried to make each movie the best he possibly could. He wanted to satisfy the fans who were coming to his films.”

And about John Ford, that great tortured—and torturing—genius, she gave vent to a profound monologue of rage and regret at the gaping holes that time leaves in our lives, as well as the debt we owe to the people who define our dreams. Wayne and O’Hara took what Ford dished out because

we respected his ability as a director. He was the best, by God. And Duke had made so many little westerns and each time he worked with Ford, he was thrilled to be making a great picture, with a great director.

If John Ford walked in the door right now, and said “Let’s go,” I would say “Yes, sir.” I’d jump and I’d be there. In spite of everything.

If you watched him direct, if you had a chair at the back of the set and kept quiet, if you just watched him work, you would be astounded. He told the cameraman what he wanted, but he didn’t tell an actor how to do it—he just told us what he wanted. The rest was up to you. And then you’d do it, and he’d say, “Cut, print, next shot.”

He didn’t do too much talking. He hired you because he liked the way you worked. He liked what he knew he could get out of you. He didn’t go into deep detail about the movement of your little finger. If an accident happened and you stopped and said, “I’m sorry,” he’d say, “Just a minute. I am the director. I tell you when to stop. I am the only person that says ‘Cut.’ If you make a mistake, keep going and make it up.” And we all knew that and we all would keep going and make it up. That was the freedom that was so wonderful, the freedom that he gave you, and the belief in you that he gave you.

And every night you went home saying, “By God, I did a good day’s work today.” You knew it was work you were going to be proud of.

Duke Morrison began as an awkward, insecure boy tormented by terror dreams, and became the emphatic representation of American masculinity. “I found myself in some of these parts,” he would say, “found the things I want to believe in and I think other people have made similar discoveries for themselves. Ford never shot the story, he shot the myth. I sometimes think the myth is what makes belief possible.”

Take him or leave him, he made the myth seem more authentic than it had been before, more authentic than it has been since. Wayne’s characters had an obstinate bravery that derived from his own innate stubbornness. Stuck in a bad place, they would succeed simply because they refused to fail. As one writer noted, Wayne’s spirit runs deep in the American grain—the spirit that makes firemen rush into a burning building, makes a bystander dive into a river to rescue a drowning stranger, makes a lawyer pound away for a decade over a wrongfully convicted man nobody else cares about. Just because it’s the right thing to do.

Wayne’s films with Ford and Hawks remain touchstones of film culture, and in the climax of
The Searchers
he performs what Molly Haskell correctly calls “one of the most beautiful scenes of Christian reconciliation in art.” Ford’s films manage something John Sacret Young calls “double visions of events. There’s a vital immediacy, and also a sense of memory image—how we remember things on the horizon of our own and our country’s history.” In the foreground of the best of them was Wayne’s ability to emphasize pain and endurance, out of which emerged bravery, which can be roughly defined as fear that has said its prayers.

Because of Ford, because of Hawks, because of his own driving intent, John Wayne has maintained his place as an American icon—
the
American icon. Thirty thousand people yearly make the pilgrimage to his birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, the heartland he escaped from geographically but belonged to emotionally. “People consider our site a shrine,” says Brian Downes, the director of the birthplace museum. “A few actually cry.”

“Do I miss him?” echoed Maureen O’Hara. “Oh, God, yes. There are so many times I’d like to call Duke, or the old boy [Ford] to ask their advice, ask them what they think. But I had a wonderful life with them. Sometimes I wondered what they liked about me, and then I realized I was the only female man left in their lives.”

For Wayne, talking about the old days with Ford always stirred the spirit of reverie, as well as a sadness about the old days being dead and gone—at least until the movies were shown once again. Wayne could talk about his life with a rare sense of objectivity, as well as wonder and gratitude.

“Lucky career,” he would say. “The type of pictures I’ve been in so many people can identify with, all around the world. They can immediately accept me into their social feelings. Old Duke, he was all right, they might say, and I’m not sure they’d say it to Olivier or about him, wonderful as he is.

“People say John Wayne isn’t an actor. OK, I’m a personality. But what it is, for cryin’ out loud, is that I don’t want the butcher or the baker or the candlestick maker to
think
I’m an actor. I want them to know I’m one of them, and getting by.”

So Duke Morrison transformed himself into John Wayne, a merging of great virtues and great flaws, all of which he acknowledged, all of which he played. There was a fair amount of overlap between Wayne’s personality and his screen character—the humor, the gusto, the irascibility, the sheer emotional and physical size—but there was also a childlike quality far more apparent offscreen than on.

And there was also a knowledge of the world and the theater that verged on sophistication, although he would have avoided the word. Once, gazing at the Heisman trophies in a USC trophy case, probably with no small amount of envy, he began reciting Shakespeare. “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” He stopped, enjoying the incongruity. “Hamlet, act two, scene two. I could tell you the whole play right down to ‘Goodnight, Sweet Prince.’ ”

Take him as an innocent man in primary colors, the incarnation of our remembered—or imagined—spirit: bold, defiant, ambitious, heedless of consequences, occasionally mistaken, primarily alone, implicitly nostalgic. At his best he was an American amalgam of Prince Hal
and
Falstaff, for our time, for all time—larger than life, transcending death.

Words written by Borden Chase about Tom Dunson stand well for the man who played him: “Everybody said, ‘You can’t make it. You’ll never get there.’ He was the only one believed he could. He had to believe it. So he started thinking one way, his way. He told men what to do and made ’em do it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. . . .

“All he knew was, he had to get there.”