Cinema: John Wayne as the Last Hero

At the edge of a birch grove, four mounted outlaws try to stare down the aging lawman.

“I mean to kill you or see you hanged at Fort Smith. . .” barks Marshal Rooster Cogburn.

“Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man,” the bandit leader sneers.

“Fill your hand, you sonuvabitch!”

Cogburn answers, clamping his reins in his teeth and letting loose with a two-handed fusillade from his Winchester and long-barreled revolver.

At the end of the battle, four villains —and one horse—lie punctured and defunct upon the ground. “Dammit, Bo,” says Cogburn to his mount as he lies pinned beneath it. “First time ya ever gave me reason to curse ya.”

SELF-PARODY is the price of style.

Hemingway verged on it in his later novels; Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower accomplished it in their later speeches. John Wayne charges into it in his latest movie, True Grit. Like all consummate stylists, he remains unharmed. Only the enemy is hurt.

The broader the parody, the bigger the self. Wayne has been honing and buffing that self in some 250 pictures —mostly westerns—for 40 years. He has become the essential American soul that D. H. Lawrence once characterized as “harsh, isolate, stoic and a killer.” Superficially his films have been as alike as buffalo nickels. Only the date changes; even the Indian looks the same. Yet through the decades there has been a perceptible alteration. The public, riding along in movie houses or taking the TV shortcut, has watched the celluloid Wayne pass through three stages of life. In the ’30s, he was the outspoken, hair-trigger-tempered son who would straighten out if he didn’t get shot first. By the late ’40s, he had graduated to fatherhood: topkick Marine to a platoon of shavetails or trail boss to a bunch of saddle tramps. In True Grit his belt disappears into his abdomen, his opinions are sclerotic and his face is beginning to crack like granite. Audiences now recognize him as a grandfather image, using booze for arterial Antifreeze, putting off winter for one more day. They also recognize Wayne as an actor of force and persuasion. And the frontier town of Hollywood—which has never granted Wayne a single Academy Award—has begun to realize that it might just be a little behind in its payments.

Romantic Backlash

On one side of the screen, Wayne has often appeared to be loping through his roles. But on the other side, it seems, there has always been an exacting competitive performer. In McLintock, recalls Actress Maureen O’Hara, “he didn’t like the way I was doing a scene, and he said angrily, ‘C’mon, Maureen, get going. This is your scene.’ I said I was trying to go fifty-fifty. ‘Fifty-fifty, hell,’ he said. ‘It’s your scene. Take it.’ Then he added under his breath, ‘If you can.’ ” The master of the western, Director John Ford, calls Wayne “a splendid actor who has had very little chance to act.” Agrees Director Andrew McLaglen: “All of a sudden they’re saying that he’s an actor. Well, he always was.”

Even such an anti-Establishmentarian as Steve McQueen is a Wayne buff. “Sometimes kids ask me what a pro is,” he says. “I just point to the Duke.”

No leading man retains prominence without a strong and basic sex appeal. Wayne’s has been uniquely conservative. “In a love scene, Clark Gable always forced the issue with a girl,” observed Director Howard Hawks (Red River). “Wayne is better when the girl is forcing the issue.” The romantic backlash has been operating for two generations on audiences—and on his female costars. Says Actress Vera Miles: “They used to say of the old West, ‘Men were men and the women were grateful.’ Well, that’s how he makes you feel as a woman.”

If Wayne stands to the right in sex, he is an unabashed reactionary in politics. A rapping Republican and flapping hawk, he has made the Viet Nam war his personal crusade. Yet his rigid, Old Guard style still wins salutes from the New Left.

Terry Robbins, a Chicago coordinator for the radical S.D.S., considers Wayne “terrific and total. He’s tough, down to earth, and he says and acts what he believes. He’s completely straight and really groovy. I mean, if they really want to make a movie about Che Guevara, they ought to have Wayne play him.”

Says Abbie Hoffman, leader of the yippies: “I like Wayne’s wholeness, his style. As for his politics, well—I suppose even cavemen felt a little admiration for the dinosaurs that were trying to gobble them up.”

Even Paul Krassner, editor of the black-comic book the Realist, makes his broadside sound like a grudging salute: “Wayne is one of the floats from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

Stereophonic Superman

Krassner has a point. John Wayne has become one of the pop-artifacts of contemporary life. He carries with him the unmistakable aura of camp and comic strip, as if his conversation came in balloons. As if when he slugged the opposition there would issue forth a thunderous THWACK! and SOCKO! In person, the seamed, leathery face seems an extension of his saddle. A handshake lets the visitor know how a baseball feels when it is swallowed by Frank Howard’s glove. True, the unwigged forehead goes clear back to his crown, but the size-18 neck defies collars, and at 6 ft. 4 in. and 244 Ibs., Wayne remains gristly underneath the adipose. Even so, Wayne is a bit like Clark Kent waiting to change into Superman. The real man seems to be the one onscreen. Up there, equipped with a rug and a role, 60 feet tall and stereophonic, he assumes his rightful proportions.

At his bay-side house in Newport Beach, Calif., Wayne, in Clark Kent disguise, recalled his spiral career in a series of flashbacks to TIME Reporter Jay Cocks. Iowa-born kid turned U.S.C. football star,, the former Marion Morrison began in films as a part-time prop man. He fell into bottom-of-the-bill cowboy pictures and made a few better-forgotten films in civilian clothes. “They had a college picture about girls playing basketball,” he recalls. “The man in charge was a little dance director. Everything he did was by the count—one, two, three, four—and then your line. I was completely embarrassed, and that’s when I walked down the street talking to myself. Will Rogers went by and he says, ‘Hey, Duke, what’s the matter?’ And I started to tell him and he says, ‘You’re working aren’t ya? Keep it up.’ ”

An admirable philosophy, one the actor still clings to, along with an advisory from his druggist father. Though it was made in this century, it has the terse ring of orders from Davy Crockett: 1) always keep your word; 2) a gentleman never insults anybody intentionally; 3) don’t go around looking for trouble. But if you ever get in a fight, make sure you win it.

Part 3 became the cornerstone of the Wayne tradition. “When I came in,” he claims, “the western man never lost his white hat and always rode the white horse and waited for the man to get up again in the fight. Following my Dad’s advice, if a guy hit me with a vase, I’d hit him with a chair. That’s the way we played it. I changed the saintly Boy Scout of the original cowboy hero into a more normal kind of fella.”

Contained Violence

In the distinctive Wayne drawl there is the implication that somehow it would be effeminate to pronounce the ow in fellow or the / in of. In a field where male stars are constantly rumored to be epicene, Wayne’s masculinity is incontestable. As a boy he owned a dog named Duke. The child became Big Duke, and the sobriquet stuck. By 30, Big Duke was a looming figure of contained violence waiting for a place to let loose. “I was in a saloon once where a guy shot all the way down a bar,” he once complained to a director during a western fight scene. “And I wanna tell you, those extras aren’t moving fast enough.” The trick was to release the violence in neighborhood theaters. But somehow the oversized part continued to elude the outsized Wayne. The first picture he made for Monogram literally took place in a one-horse town; the budget did not allow for any more livestock.

In the 80 or so features that followed, Wayne earned his head-’em-off-at-the-passport, but his salary and his reputation remained minuscule. In one he suffered the ultimate indignity as Singin’ Sandy, the screen’s first melodious cowpoke. The hoarse opera was swiftly dubbed, and Wayne returned to the role of Speakin’ Star. The movies soon found an acceptable substitute: fella named Gene Autry.

Wayne never did jump from the treadmill. He was lifted off by John Ford, who had become a poker-playing buddy. “I had been friendly with Ford for ten years,” recalls Wayne, “and I wanted to get outa these quickie westerns, but I was damned if I was gonna climb on a friend to do it. He came to me with the script of Stagecoach and said, ‘Who the hell can play the Ringo Kid?’ ” It was a part that called for a strong, inarticulate frontiersman vengefully seeking his father’s killers. “I said there’s only one guy: Lloyd Nolan, and Ford said, ‘Oh, Jesus, can’t you play it?’ ”

Yes, he could and yes, he did. The film became a classic of the genre, and Wayne changed to archetype casting. Following the wheel marks of Stagecoach, he became the essential western man, fearin’ God but no one else. Tough to men and kind to wimmin, slow to anger but duck behind the bar when he got mad, for he had a gun and a word that never failed.

The films of the westerner have seldom been sullied with fact. As Historian Joseph Rosa showed in The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? (TIME, May 16), “the so-called ‘Western Code’ never really existed. Men bent on killing did so in the most efficient and expeditious way they knew how. Jesse James was shot in the back. Billy the Kid died as he entered a darkened room. Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind while he was playing poker. In each case the victim had no chance to defend himself.”

No matter. In the province of the Old West, truth is a dude. The good and bad men who belong are necessary fantasies of the national mind. The public pays to see the Wayne western as a native morality play. The greatest good vanquishes the deepest evil and walks into the gaudiest sunset. The difference between Wayne and his audience is that they leave the illusion behind when they exit from the theater. The Duke has always taken it home with him.

Soldier-Cowpolce

During World War II, the western dwindled in popularity, but the hero could pull more than one trigger. Wayne switched from Colt to M-l and became a screen soldier. He was a bit unsteady out of the saddle, but there was conviction behind his “Let’s get the Nips!” rallying cry. Part of it came from his disappointment at missing the action. He was too young for World War I. As father of four, he was draft-exempt during the second. Still, he treasured a notion of himself in officer’s garb. “But I would have had to go in as a private,” Wayne says. “I took a dim view of that.” Nobody took a dim view of Wayne for staying out. In the ’50s, General Douglas MacArthur told him, “Young man, you represent the cavalry officer better than any man who wears a uniform.”

But by 1948, the rawboned soldier-cowpoke was no longer raw or bony. The eyes had begun to puff, the flesh was settling. The walk away from the camera was a little too distinctive. From the back, the Wayne Levi’s sometimes resembled two small boys fighting in a tent. His eleven-year marriage to Texas-born Josephine Saenz had quietly clopped off into the sunset; she got custody of their four children. After a stretch of popularity, Wayne looked less a Duke than a commoner. He was No. 33 on the list of box-office stars.

This time Wayne was rescued by Screenwriter Borden Chase, who created a role that Wayne could play, he predicted, “for the next 20 years.” The movie was Red River, a western version of Mutiny on the Bounty with the range as the ocean and John Wayne as a pistoled and Stetsoned Captain Bligh. Wayne was at last allowed to play his age (41). Like a man loosening his belt and taking off his tie after a day in the office, the Duke was relaxed, secure and solid. The kid had gone respectable and become a father. Red River was a critical and popular smash. In 1950 the Duke was on top as No. 1 .

Off-screen he had almost as much clout. It is axiomatic that in order to be a conservative, the individual has to have something to conserve. Wayne had made more money on horseback than Eddie Arcaro. He had property, a big rep and a new wife, Mexican-born Actress Esperanza Baur. He was Hollywood’s super-American, whose unswerving motto was “Go West and turn right.”

Blow for Liberty “There’s a lot of yella bastards in the country who would like to call pa triotism old-fashioned,” grouses Wayne today. As he sees it, yesterday was even worse. “With all that leftist activity, I was quite obviously on the other side,” he recalls. “I was invited at first to a coupla cell meetings, and I played the lamb to listen to ’em for a while. The only guy that ever fooled me was the di rector Edward Dmytryk. I made a pic ture with him called Back to Bataan.

He started talking about the masses, and as soon as he started using that word — which is from their book, not ours — I knew he was a Commie.”*

Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were uncovering more leftists back East, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt, and Wayne decided that it was time to help out. “An actor is part of a bigger world than Hollywood,” he announced. Together with Scenarist Chase and such rigid stalwarts as Actors Adolphe Menjou and Ward Bond, Wayne helped to form the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Wayne may have seen himself as a patriot. But next to some of his red-white-and-blue-blooded colleagues he looked a little pink. “We had a split in the group,” Chase later reported, “the once-a-Communist-always-a-Communist group and the group that thought it was ridiculous to destroy some of those who, say, joined the party in the ’30s in Nazi Germany. Duke and I were in the latter group.” A risky place to be; when Wayne praised Larry Parks for admitting his Old Left indiscretions, Hedda Hopper bawled out the Duke publicly. He got the message. “I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia,” he now declares. “They’d have been taken care of over there, and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first ones they’d take care of —after me.” Still, even when he became president of the alliance, Wayne viewed politics as a necessary evil. “My main object in making a motion picture is entertainment,” he confesses. “If at the same time I can strike a blow for liberty, then I’ll stick one in.”

Grinding out his two or three epics a year, Wayne feinted a jab with Big Jim McLain, the story of a ham-fisted HUAC investigator. It failed because Wayne was as uneasy in mufti as he was playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. In that film, Mongolia became westernized when Wayne announced to Tartar Woman Susan

Hayward, “Yer beoodiful in yer wrath.”

In the troubled ’60s, Wayne the political theorist and Wayne the film maker formed a merger. After mulling over the drama for 14 years, Wayne produced, directed and starred in The Alamo — as Davy Crockett. The picture was about the Texans v. the troops of Santa Anna, but it was also, he said, “to remind people not only in America but everywhere that there were once men and women who had the guts to stand up for the things they believed.”

As Wayne saw it, the Alamo was a metaphor for America. There was Mexicans and there was Us, there was black and there was white. “They tell me every thing isn’t black and white,” complains Wayne. I the hell not?”

Fundamentalist Character In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter once defined the fundamentalist mind as “essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities.” Wayne’s fundamentalist character was not against the American grain; it was in it.

Aging and raging, he began to take on all enemies in the same spirit: Commies, Injuns, wrongos, Mexicans — and his wife Esperanza. “Our marriage was like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar,” he said. She recalled the night he dragged her around by her hair. He countered with a claim that when he was on location she had a house guest named Nicky Hilton. During the divorce proceedings, Wayne uttered an aside that could have come from one of his early oaters: “I deeply regret that I’ll hafta sling mud.”

Though in the divorce his name had been linked with such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Gail Russell, Wayne had a different altar ego. His new wife —like the others—was of Latin extraction: a Peruvian exactress named Pilar Palette. “Just happenstance,” he claims. “Whenever I’ve had free time I’ve been in Latin America.”

In 1964, for the first time in his life, Chain-Smoker Wayne began to feel kinda poorly. Pilar persuaded him to consult a doctor. He dropped out of sight for a few months, then surfaced after a successful operation at Good Samaritan Hospital to utter his most quoted line: “I licked the big C.” He was minus one lung, but his energy had not diminished one erg.

Obviously, a man who can vanquish cancer is indestructible. Still, even if he was immortal, he wasn’t getting any younger. There was catching up to do. At a time when other men start to think about bifocals and social security, Wayne began to learn his lines for The Sons of Katie Elder, a typically nuance-free Wayne western about four lusty, brawling brothers. But that was just for loot. Now that he was back on his feet, some things were griping him. The moral backslide, for one. He stumped for his friends Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. “I said there was a tall, lanky kid that led 150 airplanes across Berlin. He was an actor, but that day, I said, he was a colonel. Colonel Jimmy Stewart. So I said, what is all this crap about Reagan being an actor?”

Another thing that bothered Wayne was the war. He was for it. When ordinary men feel that way, they sound off at home or in saloons. Wayne did it in a picture. The Green Berets was probably the only prowar movie made in the ’60s. It was so pro that New York Congressman Benjamin S. Rosenthal accused Wayne and the Army of conspiracy. The movie, claimed Rosenthal, “became a useful and skilled device employed by the Pentagon to present a view of the war which was disputed in 1967 and is largely repudiated today.”

“Nonsense,” says Wayne, or words to that effect. “The Green Berets made $7,000,000 in the first three months of its release. This so-called intellectual group aren’t in touch with the American people, regardless of Fulbright’s blatting, and Eugene McCarthy and Mc-Govern and Kennedy. In spite of them the American people do not feel that way. Instead of taking a census, they ought to count the tickets that were sold to that picture.”

Nonetheless, Berets was an expensive production. Warner Brothers, which distributed it, will end up with some profits. Batjac, the Wayne-owned company that produced it, will just about break even. The old Hollywood axiom still holds: “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” In the territory of True Grit he can safely espouse the hard line without having a Congressman on his back. “In spite of the fact that Rooster Cogburn would shoot a fella between the eyes,” theorizes the law-and-order man, “he’d judge that fella before he did it. He was merely tryin’ to make the area in which he was marshal livable for the most number of people.”

Down at Newport Beach, Wayne also makes it livable for the most number of people. Out in Newport Bay bobs his boat, Wild Goose II. Lesser men would have a yacht; Wayne’s craft is a converted minesweeper. His house overflows with memorabilia and sentimental tributes from institutions as far apart as Good Housekeeping and the U.S. Marines. His collection of Hopi Indian kachina dolls is probably second only to Barry Goldwater’s. Though the family car appears to be a standard Pontiac station wagon, it was custom built. “I wrote to the head man at G.M.,” he beams, “and said, Tm gonna have to desert you if you don’t stop makin’ cars for women.’ ” They fixed him up with a model deep enough to accommodate him, Stetson and all. Three of his seven children live with him: Aissa, 13, John Ethan, 7, and Marisa, 3. Two older sons, Pat and Michael, run Wavne’s Batjac film-production outfit. And 16 grandchildren frequently wander around the spacious house. No one has counted all the people on the payroll; there are the folks at Batjac, the moviemaking cronies who travel with Wayne from picture to picture, the employees on his cotton and cattle ranches, one of which covers 60 square miles. Plus assorted domestic servants.

Well-Deserved Epitaph

At home, playing grandpaterfamilias to the world, he watches his country in motion, hoping it will move into the sunlight where the contrasts are clear. He will never fill up another ashtray, but he still manages to empty a few bottles. “Getting out with my comrades,” he says, “and talking revolution, jeez, I’ll hit it pretty good.” Forever the superpatriot, he once refused to let a bandleader play his favorite tune because “everybody would’ve had to stand up.” Yet beyond the self-parody, beyond the fifth-face-at-Mount-Rushmore pose, there is a heroic essence that Wayne manages to convey. Today, like “war,” the word “hero” is usually preceded by a disinfectant: “anti.” Not to the Duke. Conflict is made to be won; heroes are created to be the uncommon man sans imperfection. “I stay away from nuances,” he says. “From psychoanalyst-couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing only.” As Wayne sees film heroism, “Paul Newman would have been a much more important star if he hadn’t always tried to be an antihero, to show the human feeta clay.” No one will ever see Wayne’s feeta clay—and no one wants to. His politics seem to date from the Jurassic period, and from other men they might appear dangerous. But as expressed by the Duke they are the privately held opinions of a public man and they have the quality of valid antiques.

Robert Frost summed up old age:

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Nor keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

The boughten friendship goes on at the box office; Wayne will continue to provide, provide at the rate of two pictures a year. And at the final fadeout? “I would like to be remembered—well, the Mexicans have a phrase, ‘Feo, fuerte y formal.’ Which means: he was ugly, was strong and had dignity.”

It is a well-deserved epitaph for a great gunfighter. Sorta gives a man something to shoot for.

* Dmytryk later admitted that he was a Communist for a year, in 1944-45, before undergoing “a complete change of heart.”