John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2 page)

Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, and Gary Cooper were all much bigger stars when Wayne began his ascent, but they have largely receded into the past. Wayne became more than a movie star for his time; rather, he became indivisibly associated with America itself, even if it was an America that was dead by the time he was born, and he was personifying a folklore easier to locate in the nineteenth century than the twentieth.

Stagecoach
was a picture that could and in fact did fall apart several times before it finally got made, and it got made only because of the determination of John Ford, who believed in John Wayne more than John Wayne believed in himself. Ford was born John Martin Feeney in Maine in 1894, and by the time he met Duke Morrison in 1926, Ford—he took the screen name of his brother, the actor Francis Ford—had been directing movies for ten years and had already made his first great film:
The Iron Horse.

In the succeeding years, Ford was drawn by the young man’s inexhaustible energy, his willingness to do anything asked of him. For Duke Morrison enthusiastically adopted the perpetual challenge of a big man with ambition—to do everything better, harder, longer than anyone else.

“On every picture, there is at least one day when nothing seems to go right,” Ford said. “When things are going wrong, Duke is a mighty fine man to have around. He will run half the length of the valley to tell the second unit that we are planning to shoot another take. He rarely asks a man to do a job he can do himself.”

Other co-workers concurred, and valued Wayne for his willingness to extend himself far beyond the limited portfolio of an actor. “I’ve seen him put his shoulder to a location wagon that was stuck,” said the cameraman Bert Glennon, “or hold a pair of shears and a comb for a hairdresser when she had to make a hurried change on one of the characters.”

This never changed. Thirty-six years after
Stagecoach
, he made
The Shootist
, his last movie. The scene: a dying gunfighter named J. B. Books goes to a barbershop.

As Wayne settled himself into the barber chair for the scene, a prop man began to cut thin strands of fake hair and arrange them around the perimeter of the chair. Wayne and Alfred Dennis, the actor playing the barber, began to run their lines. Wayne stopped and watched what the prop man was doing.

“That won’t work,” said the star.

“Sir?”

“You’re not cutting off enough hair. The camera is ten feet away. It won’t read the little hairs that you’re cutting off. Give it to me.”

Wayne grabbed the prop hair and scissors and began chopping off giant hunks of hair, four and five inches long, throwing them around the barber chair. Rationally, these chunks would come from a man with shoulder-length hair, but Wayne knew that when it comes to movies, the eye is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what the lens sees.

The young prop man didn’t know that Wayne began his career as a prop man, and wasn’t about to lower his standards. In all the reviews and analyses of the picture then and later, the huge hunks of hair at the bottom of the barber chair always go unnoticed.

John Wayne always knew what the camera would see; he always knew what the audience would believe.

John Ford was profoundly Irish in every possible way, and his character was accompanied by an assortment of more or less symptomatic demons. He was defensive, in total control of his art, if not his life, and he was some sort of genius. “He was talented, and he was intolerable,” was the succinct opinion of Maureen O’Hara.

Andre de Toth, a director whom Ford promoted, said, “He was not a social person. He kept to his boat, to the studio, and to his Jack Daniel’s. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue in his life, and there wasn’t a lot of dialogue in his movies.

“He was making motion pictures
. He was sure of the art he wanted to make, but not much else. People put up with Jack Ford for one reason: he always told you what he thought was the truth. That’s what you see in a Ford film: honesty.”

In contrast to the largely impenetrable and essentially solitary Ford, Wayne had few obvious demons. He drank—but never allowed it to control his life or interfere with his work. He smoked incessantly, ate what he wanted, enjoyed the company of women, adored the company of men. He was like his mentor in one way only: he invariably said what he thought.

Ford had bought Ernest Haycox’s original story for
Stagecoach
in 1936 and circled the idea of making his former prop man the star of a western. After flirtations with a couple of other actors, he made up his mind: Duke would be the Ringo Kid.

“It isn’t enough for an actor to look the part and say his lines well,” said Ford. “Something else has to come across to audiences—something which no director can instill or create—the quality of being a real man.”

Wayne embodied one other quality Ford needed: “He was the only person I could think of at the time who could personify great strength and determination without talking much. That sounds easy, perhaps. But it’s not. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Like all excellent directors only more so, Ford was a manipulator, a man capable of thinking on three or four levels at once, and he enjoyed Wayne because the actor was completely different than he was. Wayne was a creature of spontaneity, with a bubbling enthusiasm for every new project and for life itself, and little interest in the contemplation of mistakes, of roads not taken. The most important movie of Wayne’s life was always the next one.

“Duke has always been able to enjoy life . . . to swallow and digest it in big, unchewed pieces. Depending upon the circumstances, he can be a roughneck, or a perfect gentleman. He’s my boy, always has been; always will be.”

Just before they began production on
Stagecoach
, John Ford took the young man aside and told him that he had a great future ahead of him.

He had no idea just how right he was.

The decade of B westerns had been Wayne’s movie prep school, the learning equivalent of years in repertory theater. In 1939, Wayne was relatively unknown only to the critics in the big cities. As far as they were concerned, he had the stink of dozens of disposable B movies about him.

But as far as the audience was concerned, Wayne had paid his dues. They had watched the big man for nearly ten years; they had seen him mature as a man and as an actor. They had always liked him, and they had grown to respect him as well. Wayne may not have been a star in New York, but he was assuredly a star in Waco and Rockville and Atlanta.

Wayne hadn’t played a variety of parts, but he had carefully observed actors who did. He had seen how even a bad movie was impossible without teamwork on the part of the cast and crew.

“Doing those B westerns he learned how to be resilient,” said the actor William Bakewell, who did time with him in some of these films. “He learned what to lean on and how to bring his best foot forward. You had to get up on your lines. You had to be a quick study because they didn’t want to waste any time or film. . . . Doing those quickie westerns, he learned how to be John Wayne.”

Aesthetically, Wayne walked right into an American archetype. The part of the Ringo Kid—the way Ford presented the actor, the way the actor played the part—served as the template for about half of his career: dignity, intent, competence, and, if necessary, skill in combat, all added to a foundation of innate likability.

Wayne had spent ten years in limbo after
The Big Trail
, working for some of the worst directors in the business. Now, after a single turn working for one of the best, his life would never be the same again, but he never seemed entirely convinced that there was anything inevitable about it, or even that he had done it on his own recognizance.

“The reason Ford made a star of me,” he grumbled to John Ford’s grandson late in his life, “was that I played cards with him.”

In his early years, Wayne’s acting was tinged with a tentative self-consciousness; it was acting that didn’t seem to be acting, that had a way of intimately involving his audience rather than keeping them at an admiring distance.

Soon enough, he would play the tired, benevolent Nathan Brittles in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, the fierce, my-way-or-die Tom Dunson in
Red River
, the hesitant retired boxer Sean Thornton in
The Quiet Man
, the lonely isolate Ethan Edwards in
The Searchers
, as well as ten other varied characterizations fully deserving the overused adjective “great.”

The watchful, shy young actor of the 1930s became a man burdened by responsibility and pain too terrible to fully share, gradually segueing into a feisty old guy who could still uncork a jug . . . or twirl a Winchester. Alone among the great movie stars, Wayne dared to show us the most perilous as well as the most moving of the seven ages of man.

As Randy Roberts and James Olson pointed out, “He was
so
American,
so
like his country—big, bold, confident, powerful, loud, violent and occasionally overbearing, but simultaneously forgiving, gentle, innocent, and naive. . . . John Wayne was his country’s alter ego.”

I first met John Wayne in August 1972. He was not merely big, he was huge, with hands that could span home plate—the largest hands I have ever seen on a human being. It was not so much his height—six feet three and three quarters inches, as he attested in a military application during World War II—it was his bulk: very broad shoulders and a large chest that, in his youth, spiraled down to a slim waist. By the time I met him, a good-sized man could stand behind him and never be seen.

At the same time, there was an unexpected delicacy about him. He had small feet for a man his size—size 10 or so, as opposed to the 14 or 16 that might be expected. This accounted for his carefully balanced walk, the arms slightly bent at the elbows for balance.

And there was also a surprising graciousness of manner and a quiet way of speaking. He was shooting a TV show at CBS at the time, and regarded himself impassively in the makeup mirror in between sips of a scotch and water. Every once in a while, he would contentedly puff on a slim cigar, even though he had lost a lung to cancer eight years earlier. He answered my questions calmly, getting enthusiastic mainly when talking about directors.

My hair was undoubtedly longer than he liked, but he didn’t seem to mind. I loved John Ford and so did he. At the end of a long day on the set, he walked over, shook my hand, and said, “I hope you got what you wanted. I’m not such a terrible right-wing monster, am I?”

His general attitude, on that day and on several days thereafter, was a perceptible relief that he could have a conversation about something besides cancer or politics.

Most actors are disappointing when you meet them—often smaller than life, they need writers and cameramen to give them their aura of command. Not John Wayne. He liked to talk about chess, Indian lore, and western art, but above all he liked to talk about movies. It was the movies that had converted the son of a reliably unsuccessful drugstore clerk, a young man who managed to win a football scholarship to USC only to lose it, into a rich man with a kind of immortality. In no other actor was the apparent line between the private man and the public image so narrow.

In the movies, he played searchers, warriors, men who settled the West or fought for democracy in the Pacific. His characters’ taste for the fulfillment of an American imperative was usually based on patriotic conviction, rarely for economic opportunity. He came to embody a sort of race memory of Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth century as it should have been.

For decades, his image was in fashion and then it went out of fashion. His strength was seen as authoritarian, his overwhelming sense of the past held up as proof of his archaic nature. A man of complex ideals was nudged aside in a time of expedient desires.

But eventually, the wheel comes around again.

These are the movies of John Wayne. Not all of them—by actual count there are 169, give or take, depending on whether you allow guest appearances or not—just the best, in no particular order: