by Scott Eyman
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:
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Red River
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
The Shootist
Stagecoach
They Were Expendable
Fort Apache
Hondo
Sands of Iwo Jima
Rio Grande
The Quiet Man
Island in the Sky
Rio Bravo
True Grit
It can be seen that, while Wayne would make important films in many genres, it was the western that made him a star, and it was the western that kept him a star. As Charles Silver of the Museum of Modern Art wittily observed, “Wayne made westerns for twice as long as it took to fight the Indian wars. He made westerns for about as long as it actually took to settle the continent west of the Missouri.”
It was the western that defined John Wayne for audiences the world over, that made him the symbol of America to the world at large. In many ways, it still does.
Audiences traditionally assume that movie stars are just playing themselves, a gross oversimplification that ignores the massive adjustments that changed Duke Morrison from Winterset, Iowa, into John Wayne.
As the briefest glance at any of Wayne’s early B westerns shows, the easy, likable personality was there from the beginning, but so was a lumbering gaucheness not far removed from a high school play. The accoutrements that spelled John Wayne were added incrementally, painstakingly, intentionally. The John Wayne of 1932 has little to offer except his looks and personality; the Wayne of 1938 is a greatly improved actor of authority and concision. Duke Morrison built John Wayne the actor, John Wayne the businessman, John Wayne the icon, brick by brick. “He worked hard to be a graceful big man,” said Harry Carey Jr. “It didn’t just happen.”
As a man, Wayne could be demanding and impatient, as everybody from prop men to directors found out, but he had an innate gregariousness, an interest in other people, that was unexpected and charming. “What was different than the roles he played,” said his oldest son, Michael, “was that he would listen to people. He wanted to hear what they thought. He was a listener as well as a talker.”
His daughter Toni said, “He was an expert in western Indian tribes. He was a history buff who knew all about the Civil War. He knew what battle was where, and how many men died at this place. He knew an awful lot about Oriental art, about Native American art. He knew an awful lot about a lot of things.”
He was also a demon chess player. Although he wasn’t quite tournament caliber, he would make up for technical flaws with controlled aggression and by psyching ou
t opponents. “Is that the move you’re gonna make?” he would say with an air of deep regret. “You’re sure? Well, okay.” The opponent was soon convinced that he had blown the game. He did the same thing playing bridge.
But when it came to making movies, there was no guile involved. He relished the process. He almost never went off to his trailer during the lengthy period when shots were being set up, but hung around the set, preparing, playing chess, joshing with the crew. For Wayne, a movie set was home, and he loved being home.
Forged by years of working for little money and less acclaim, Wayne became the compleat professional. “I never saw him miss a word,” said Harry Carey Jr. “I never saw him late. I never saw him with a hangover. Oh, all right, I saw him with a hangover, but he was really a good man to work with.”
The years of laboring in thankless vineyards produced an actor who could effortlessly command a scene simply by entering it, who could communicate complex emotions without words. His own strength of character was easily lent to the men he played, but that strength often derived from an isolation that came at a terrible cost. Wayne’s power as an actor, and his greatest triumph, was that he never shied away from the ultimate implications of his screen image.
All this earned him his place as America’s idea of itself, a man big enough, expansive enough to serve as a metaphoric battlefield for America’s conflicting desires. He wasn’t born that way. As a boy he was insecure, bedeviled by poverty and nightmares. Until he accreted the security of a screen character, whose certainties he gradually made his own, he regularly berated himself for his clumsiness in the craft he pursued with such passion.
So the story of John Wayne is simultaneously the story of Duke Morrison—an awkward boy who transformed himself into the symbol of American self-confidence.
There have been several biographies of John Wayne over the years, mostly written by two disparate breeds: rapt fans, or scholars—alternating currents of hero worship and a quizzical wonder mixed with covert—or not so covert—disdain.
I knew Wayne slightly, but until I invested four years in research I couldn’t claim any special insights into the man other than witnessing his good humor, his courtesy, his surprising sensitivity.
“Had you read the O’Neill plays?” I bumptiously asked him once, regarding John Ford’s film of The Long Voyage Home.
He could have blown me right out of the water, and probably should have. Instead, he eyed me wearily, sighed, and quietly said, “I’d been to college; I’d read O’Neill.”
Point taken.
John Wayne’s story is about many things—it’s about the construction of an image, the forging of a monumental career that itself became a kind of monument. It’s about a terribly shy, tentative boy reinventing himself as a man with a command personality, of a man who loved family but who couldn’t sustain a marriage, and of a great friendship that resulted in great films.
And it’s also about a twentieth-century conservatism considered dangerously extreme that became mainstream in the twenty-first century.
It is, in short, a life that could only have been lived by one man.
* * *
1. One Winchester with a ring loop used by Wayne—he also did the move in Circus World and True Grit—does survive and the barrel has indeed been slightly sawed off. I’m grateful to Yakima Canutt for telling me about all this, to Jeff Morey and Joe Musso for explaining how it was done, and especially to Musso for showing me one of Wayne’s customized rifles.
PART ONE
* * *
1907–1939
“The son of a bitch looked like a man.”
—RAOUL WALSH
CHAPTER ONE
The man the world would come to know as John Wayne was not born Marion Michael Morrison—as tradition would have it—nor was he born Marion Mitchell Morrison—as revisionist tradition would have it. His name at birth was actually Marion Robert Morrison. What is definitive is the date—May 26, 1907—and the place: a house the Morrisons were renting from Mr. M. E. Smith, a pharmacist who owned the Smith Drug Store. The house was and is at the corner of Second and South Streets in Winterset, Iowa, populated at the time by 2,956 people. The room was and is a small back corner that spans about eight feet by fifteen feet in a house of 860 square feet.
The birth announcement ran in the May 30, 1907, edition of the Winterset Madisonian complete with a typo: “A 13 pound son arrived at the home Mr. ank Mrs. Clyde Morrison, Monday morning.” Sometime after Marion became famous his birth certificate disappeared from the courthouse, although conspiracy theorists should know that an entry in the Madison County Record of Births (Book 2, page 329) attests to the town, name, date, and parents.
Gazing down at young Morrison, Dr. Jessie Smith undoubtedly realized that he was going to be a big boy. Dr. Smith was one of the rare turn-of-the-century women doctors, universally remembered as “a faithful physician and a steadfast friend,” according to Father Paul Barrus, who was born in Winterset five years before the town’s most famous citizen.
Winterset, Iowa, is thirty-five miles southwest of Des Moines, 350 miles west of Chicago. It’s a pleasant small town, the seat of Madison County, as in The Bridges of . . . In the hundred-odd years since, the population has incrementally increased to 4,800. Before the birth of Marion Morrison, Winterset’s only distinction was the residency of George Washington Carver in the 1880s.
This is the world Marion Morrison was born into:
At the Candy Kitchen on the east side of the public square, ice cream sodas cost 15 cents. If a housewife telephoned for groceries, they would be delivered within the hour. On Wednesday evenings, the Methodist church and the Baptist church would both call the faithful to worship in the evening by ringing their bells. The Methodist bell was light and silvery, the Baptist bell much deeper. The Catholic church would toll its bell on Sundays, or when a parishioner died. Every year in the Winterset High School, a Civil War veteran named Cooper would give an eyewitness account of Pickett’s Charge. In the event of an outbreak of diphtheria or smallpox, individual houses that were affected would have large QUARANTINE signs (yellow, with black letters) displayed in the front yards.
Winterset had two black citizens. One was Charlie Moore, and the other his son, Main, who graduated from Winterset High in 1896. There was also a man known only as “Nigger John,” who lived in a shack south of the southwest corner of the square, but he wasn’t counted in the official census. (There was a pre–Civil War stone house on Summit Street leading toward Council Bluffs that was said to have been a station on the Underground Railroad.)
Every year, a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin would play Winterset, and the actress who played Little Eva would drive her ponies in a parade around the square. Funerals took place at home, and sitting up with the dead the night before burial was a part of mourning. Every day at 4:40 P.M., people would attentively gather at the railroad station to see who came in from Des Moines.
In short, it was the sort of place that needed the presence of Professor Harold Hill to stir things up. There might have been trouble in River City, but there was never any trouble in Winterset.
Much has been made of the admittedly odd discrepancy of the birth name and the official name he carried until he entered show business, but there wasn’t really much to it. As Wayne would explain on his application for the OSS during World War II, “Name supposedly changed to Marion Michael Morrison when brother born and named Robert. There is no legal record of this change. Registered in school as Marion Mitchell Morrison, my grandfather’s name—never corrected same.”
All of this sloppy switching happened in Earlham, where the family moved in 1910, and where Marion’s younger brother, Robert, was born in December 1911. Using a child’s name as the pea in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t shell game was only the beginning of Marion’s ragged childhood.
What probably happened is that his mother, a formidably strong-willed—read borderline unpleasant—woman born Mary Brown in 1885 in Lincoln, Nebraska,
simply appropriated the older boy’s middle name for the preferred new arrival.
Both of Marion’s parents were born into the nervous middle class; Mary’s father had been a proofreader for a Des Moines newspaper, while Clyde Morrison’s father had been a real estate agent. Clyde was born in 1884 in Monmouth, Illinois, but grew up in Iowa and attended Simpson College on a football scholarship. He started in his freshman year, but was relegated to the second string midway through the season.
“Morrison did well [in an early game] but does not get into condition for proper work,” reported a local newspaper. In his second year, Clyde Morrison rode the bench. He left school before graduation and served an internship as a pharmacist in Waterloo, Iowa, where he met his future wife. Clyde Leonard Morrison and Mary Brown were married in Knoxville, Iowa, on September 29, 1905, and shortly afterward settled down to a war of marital attrition in which Clyde was always failing and Mary was always judging.
The Morrisons had moved to Winterset in 1906, where Clyde worked as a pharmacist’s clerk at Smith’s Drug Store on the town square. According to the memories of Father Barrus, Mrs. Morrison was considered “different” from other Winterset women, most of whom had grown up together. She was an outsider, and content with that status. Her best friend was Hazel Benge, who also kept a certain distance from most people. Alice Miller, a neighbor of the Morrisons, remembered seeing Mary, whom family and friends called “Molly,” pushing the carriage with her newborn boy around the town square and home again. Sometimes a neighbor would take over young Marion’s daily constitutional down South Second Street.