JOHN WAYNE: THE IRON DUKE

an article in The Saturday Evening Post, Spring 1971  by Paul Hendrickson

It looked like the end for Marshall Rooster Cogburn. Four varmints, their guns raised, their mounts ready, were waiting for the lawman at the edge of a birch grove.

"I mean to kill you or see you hanged at Fort Smith," rasps Cogburn.

"Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man," the outlaw leader shouts back

That does it. Clamping the reigns in his teeth so he can use both his long-barreled revolver and his Winchester, the federal marshal lets out a whoop and begins a headlong charge across the grove. At the end of the shootout, the four villains have bitten the dust. The hero himself lies pinned beneath his steed.

"Dammit, Bo," he says to the horse. "First time ya ever gave me reason to curse ya."

Somehow it always looks like the end for John Wayne, and somehow it never quite is. There was the 1964 cancer bout that left him with one lung, but still the winner of the fight, and also the owner of the now-famous line: "I licked the Big C." In 1969, when his portrayal of paunchy, hard-drinking and profane old Rooster Cogburn won him the Academy Award, critics spoke of True Grit as the actor’s valedictory. (The movie even ended with a farewell scene.) They were wrong. Today, the Duke continues to lope through new oaters with the bravado, if not the speed, of the young prop man at Fox films some forty years ago by the name of Marion Michael Morrison.

Even in his latest horse opera, The Cowboys, the stories persist the M. M. Morrison, alias John Wayne, is hanging up his gun. The film, which Warner Brothers chooses to call an epic, is about an old rancher who finds himself fathering and fuming over eleven boys on his last cattle drive across the West of the 1870's. It is a different kind of roll for Wayne and has prompted the film’s director, Mark Rydell, to say: "I think what attracted Wayne was the sense of passing on the mantle to a younger generation. I think he’s about ready."

The Duke himself would probably retort: "Nonsense." (Or words to that effect.) Old soldiers may fade away, but John Wayne just might ride on forever. Like Pearl Harbor or a Civil War battlefield, America’s biggest film money-maker has the power to stir men’s souls. People talk about John Wayne’s size-eighteen neck and his six-feet-four-inch, 225-pound frame. They say his hand is a boxing glove. But that part of the legend misses the point. The real legend of John Wayne is that he almost seems indestructible - or as nearly so as mortal man can be. Leathery is not the right metaphor. John Wayne is closer to iron.

Someone once said that John Wayne movies are as alike as buffalo nickels: only the date changes; even the Indian looks the same. If that is true of the plots - and there have been over 200 of those flickering frontiers and occasional battlefields over the years - it is also true of the characters the star has played. The error, however, is in the identification of the character on screen with the man at home. Inevitably almost, the viewer today sees the Iron Duke against a career spanning four decades in which (give or take a minor characteristic here and there, and changes of costumes) he has changed only by very slowly growing older. The pictures on the following pages do more than bear witness to the man’s aging. They represent the career of an actor who has been able to move easily from youthful swashbuckler to top-kick cowboy to archetypal hero of the Old West. In 1930 he played the role of hair-triggered son. In the forties he was the lean father figure, mustachioed and responsible, in movies like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. And by the sixties he had galloped into the roll of grand-paterfamilias. In True Grit, and ,most recently, in The Cowboys, his face has the look of cracked granite, yet the essential John Wayne is there - jutting jaw, sidelong glances, steely eyes.

Such mannerisms are too often the stuff of parody by comics on late-night talk shows and consequently, it becomes easy to forget that John Wayne is necessarily more subtle and complex a man than a ninety-minute roll of celluloid can reveal. Pigeonholers like to trace his might-is-right image back to his childhood when he supposedly found himself proving to every kid on the block that Marion was not a sissy’s name. Wayne’s detractors today charge that his politics, like his pictures, can be oversimplified, but a close look at the man indicates otherwise. He has been quoted as saying, for instance, that "There’s too much repression of young people today. So what if they want to tear loose once in a while? Kids today take more interest in our society than we did." Even with respect to his movies, Wayne admits how in the early days he went to work on the "John Wayne look." He adds with a grin that he purely dreamed up his much-imitated way of walking and that he had to practice saying ain’t.

Still, there is a simplicity to the script. Only John Wayne could look a pretty girl in the eye at the Alamo and say in that famous punched inflection: "Republic is a beautiful word." Audiences somehow don’t guffaw at those lines, and the reason must be because there is a brand of sincerity in John Wayne that we cannot readily find elsewhere. "I’m just the big tough boy on the side of right," he once said of himself. "Simple themes. Save me from the nuances. All I do is sell sincerity, and I’ve been selling the hell out of that ever since I started."

The start was slow. The boy born in Winterset, Iowa, moved with his family to the west coast, won a football scholarship to the University of Southern California, got into movies through the prop door, and then kicked around making bottom-of-the-bill cowboy pictures for nearly ten years. (For part of that time he tried to carry a tune as Singin’ Sandy, first melodious cowpoke of the talkies; Gene Autry eventually got the part.)

Finally, in 1939, the big break came when John Ford signed him to play the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. The part called for a brave, inarticulate frontiersman seeking vengeance for his father’s murder. The film has since become a classic of the Western genre, a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that almost elevated itself to the level of folk art. After Stagecoach, the reputation of both the star and the director was secure. The Duke went on to archetypal casting, becoming with each movie the pristine man of the nineteenth-century virtue-fearin’ God, but little else. Ford, of course, became the non-pareil sculptor of Western memories, to such an extent that critics finally concluded: "Well, if the real West wasn’t that way, it should have been."

Today, thirty-three years later, The Man is still up there on the screen. Those who know him say he could make as many as twenty more movies. And after that? He’ll probably spend his time going after marlin off Baja, California, or hunting deer in the Sierras. That is, when he’s not cruising on his 135-foot yacht (a converted World War II mine sweeper). His several dozen grandchildren, his seven children, and his Peruvian wife Pilar will no doubt be there with him, providing the spoonful of honey so that the medicine of "retirement" will go down a little more easily.

Warner Brothers, the producer or The Cowboys, allows no mistake to be made concerning John Wayne’s greatness. Because his films are pushing the 700-million mark in grosses, because he has starred in seventeen of the highest-earning films in motion-picture history, the Iron Duke, they say unabashedly, is the "undisputed box office champion in the universe."

Not bad for a man who has carried a big iron on his hip for forty years. Sorta gave a fella somethin’ to shoot at all that time.