DUKE WAYNE AND REEL HEROES – Article in True Magazine, July 1971
Profile by Richard Schickel
He rides sort of lumpy in the saddle now, and since he lost a lung in his victory over “the big C” he finds he’s short of breath when he tries to do some of his more difficult stunts. He tore some ligaments in a fall when he was filming The Undefeated a couple of years back, leaving him without the full use of one shoulder and making him “look like an idiot” when he swings into the saddle. But he’s 64 and entitled to a few awkwardnesses.
In fact, such things rather enhance John Wayne’s appeal, for they are the visible evidence that, though rich and (mostly) revered, even he has not lived through this lousy century unscathed, that like the rest of us he has had sorrows and mishaps, but has endured and prevailed. We speak confidently of Duke Wayne as the last hero, and although he may not hold the title exclusively, we know he is entitled to a share of the crown.
We base that not merely on the screen character Wayne has honed and polished through more than four decades, but also on our sense that over 42 years his public and private selves has subtly fused, so that when we confront Wayne on the screen we know we are not reacting to a front, an exaggeration of one or two aspects of the man himself (which is the trick most movie stars perfect), but the whole man, all his basic instincts and intelligence and hard-won experience. Wayne doesn’t claim – even his most fervent admires, myself among them, don’t claim – that he gives us exquisite art. What we can say is that he has learned to give more of what he has, with more ease and more pleasure than anyone else on the screen today.
A decade ago, when I first tried to sort out my feelings about the man, I wrote that Wayne never seemed to be truly at ease with the western environment he had inhabited in so many movies. “It is for this reason,” I said, “that his best western roles have been as cavalry officers, men who live in the wilderness not through choice but because they have been ordered to do so. Wayne’s western knowledge thus seems to have been acquired under compulsion, rather than as a natural part of growing up. What is interesting is his very awkwardness.
Wayne doesn’t disagree. He likes to quote no less a critic than Douglas MacArthur, who once told him, “Young man, you represent the cavalry officer better than any man who ever wore the uniform,” and he has said he sees himself as “pretty rough, even cruel on occasions, but never mean, never small, never petty.”
All of which is a way of saying that he was simply using himself, as every actor does, to create a character for us. He was born in Winterset, Iowa, and although his parents soon moved to the San Fernando Valley, then in the process of becoming the fake movie West, the West was not his natural habitat. Nor, one imagines, did Wayne’s early manhood do much to enhance his ease before the cameras. He was a football player at USC and a prop boy at Fox on summer vacations – occupations that put a premium on roughhouse male companionship.
Wayne can’t remember exactly how many quickie westerns and serials he made for Mascot, Monogram and Republic, those long-gone purveyors of entertainment to the matinees of our childhood, but there were well over a hundred of them, and it seems fair to say that by the time director John Ford (who had been a friend since Wayne’s prop-boy days at Fox) gave him a role that began the making of a star, the role of The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Wayne was merely an experienced movie actor, not an educated one. And even though Wayne soon began to appear regularly on the annual list of the top ten box-office favorites, people whose memories stretched back to the stern, gaunt. silent William S. Hart found Wayne a discomfiting figure.
But to all of us who were growing up in the “40s, while Wayne was growing to his full stature as a screen hero, his break with classicism was an insignificant matter. For if the frontier had died 40 or 50 years earlier, those who had a vivid, living memory of it were beginning to die as well. What did we, as mere kids, know about all that? Wasn’t Wayne, with all his occasional awkwardness, loudness and gaucherie, a more accurate imaginative projection of how we might behave in that alien environment than those quiet, easy men were? Didn’t the real pioneers have to learn the skills and wiles of the frontiersman late in life and didn’t they come hard to them? Wasn’t it likely that they, like Duke Wayne, never entirely shook the feeling that they were strangers in a strange land? And, finally, wasn’t it likely that in this very masculine society that their pleasures were like his?
In any event, whatever one thought of Wayne’s style, no one tampered with the basic morality drama that lay very near the surface of all the greatest American westerns. The line between good and bad remained clearly drawn, and the former inevitably won in a conflict that, though dangerous and difficult, never carried overtones of sadism or any of the other perversions that crept into the westerns of the ‘60s, when their makers – excluding Wayne of course – lost faith in the form and it’s “relevance” to our morally confused period. Wayne’s films remained as clean and stark, as full of sudden beauties and perils, as the land they moved across. Above all, they insisted that everyone, hero and villain and bystander alike, was personally responsible for his acts. There was no attempt to lay off blame on society, on a subconscious flawed by mistakes in rearing, on mysterious fate. Wayne and the other lesser western heroes said through their behavior that there were indeed right and wrong, good and evil, and it was possible – no, necessary – for the individual to arrive at an understanding of them alone, unaided by anything but reason.
But despite the genuine affection in which many of us held Wayne’s flat voice or his inimitably rolling yet purposeful gait, his broad, calm, age-battered face, he didn’t achieve the heroic singularity he now possesses in our thoughts, he did not cross that shadow line between stardom and the legendary – perhaps even mythical – figure until the ‘60s. And no one would have guessed that he would do so.
He was, after all, 53 when the decade began – not exactly in the springtime of his life. And the western movie appeared to be heading into decline.
As the frontier receded from living memory, westerns drew less and less upon anyone’s personal experience and more upon other westerns for inspiration – and thus were operating several times removed from reality. And as the decade wore on, it became clear that the western had lost its hold on the creative imaginations of movie people. The biggest grosser of the period, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made it with audiences because it confirmed what they already knew or suspected: that the frontier was merely one more thing to be nostalgic about. This was the unlikely context in which Wayne transformed himself (and was transformed by us) from movie star to hero.
But there was more for Wayne to overcome than merely the spirit of the times. Besides being over the half-century mark, he found in 1960 that the result of bad business management, “I wasn’t in anywhere near the shape I thought I was – or ought to be after 25 years of hard work.” Worse, a lot of what he had – and all of his emotional capital – was tied up in The Alamo, a movie which may have suffered from unduly harsh criticism by Wayne’s political enemies on the left, but which suffered as much from it’s uninventive script, Wayne’s lumbering direction and excessive length.
Although the picture eventually paid a modest return, it was a heavy load to drag through the decade. So was the knowledge that opportunities for Wayne to appear at his best were bound to grow more elusive – even John Ford was thinking seriously of retiring.
And finally, there was politics to consider. Wayne had never hidden his allegiance to the right wing, and as everybody, right and left, became more outspoken in the ‘60s, so did Wayne. He made films for the campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and in interviews he spoke with increasing, sometimes heedless, bluntness about the war in Vietnam, about the racial issues and the generation gap. He often spoke in disconcertingly simplistic terms, venting a good deal of the frustration everyone now feels about the world, but doing so in a manner that should, logically, have alienated many of the paying customers.
One gains the sense that Wayne began to feel personally as well as ideologically isolated. He lives 35 miles off the beaten Hollywood track in Newport Beach, and lists for interviewers old friends like Ward Bond, who are gone, others like Fonda, Ford, Hawks, Bruce Cabot and Henry Hathaway (the most active of his old favorite directors) and says wistfully, “In the old days, when we all lived near each other, when your not working you’d all get together on a Sunday, but it’s just too far down here to keep up those associations.”
In short, it seems that everything – age, a serious illness, the decline of the screen genre in which he had done his best work, a shift in public taste, increasing intellectual and personal isolation – all should have conspired to drive Wayne at least into semi-retirement. Instead, one must somehow account for the fact that for thirteen consecutive years he has remained in the box-office top ten, that last year a Gallop poll placed him on a list of the ten most admired Americans and a recent Life poll of teen-agers picked him as one of the four men they most admired and though of as heroes – cheek by jowl with such unlikely running mates as Neil Armstrong and Bill Cosby. Obviously, Wayne’s career is some kind of miracle.
Or is it? I think not. For one thing, Wayne understands what a lot of younger stars don’t know or have chosen to ignore – that you have to work at it, and not just by turning up on the talk shows every now and then, either. You have to work at making pictures, keeping yourself before the public eye in a context suitable to you. Over the years, Wayne has averaged better than two movies per annum, and whether they were good, bad or indifferent as movies, they were always right for him.
But it takes more than good judgement to survive. It takes a skill that naturals like Wayne don’t talk easily about. You have to play each scene, find its meaning and still allow your personality to quietly, unhammily, dominate it all. At that – at getting himself into what he regards as the most interesting positions, the place where he can react instead of merely act – Wayne has gotten better and better as the years have gone by.
But technique and skillful self-management still do not suffice to explain Wayne’s status as the last great, universal movie hero. Wayne says that Rooster Cogburn in True Grit had, like all the other characters he has played, a powerful sense of justice, of fair play, which he enunciated without professing to be God. Wayne thinks there is still – despite the many well-publicized manifestations of a contrary spirit – a great unassuaged hunger for such people, even if it is clear that they are fantasy projections.
But there is still more to the matter than that. In a world increasingly ruled by faceless bureaucracies, in a world where no one seems to want to take responsibility for his own actions, let alone for the actions of subordinates and dependents, there is a desperate desire for figures – real or fictional – who accept responsibility.
That precisely is what Rooster – and the man who played him – have made a specialty of doing. That’s the reason why John Wayne can say wildly controversial things to interviewers , can offend huge segments of his audience with opinions on everything from long hair to religion, and yet keep them coming back for more.
It’s because he really doesn’t give a damn, because on screen and off, he is what he is and he’s willing to show it to all of us, the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad. He takes full responsibility for himself, and he has, through increasing skill as an actor, increasing frankness as a public figure and increasing moral courage as a man, forced us to accept him as he is. In a world of slicksters and sharpies and smooth talkers we are grateful to him, refreshed by him.
Which brings us to the big, final miracle he has achieved in our eyes. Which is simply that he has survived – survived the B pictures, survived the stupidities of the studio system, survived personal and financial disasters, survived the loss of the frontier as a living force in our sensibilities, survived even the passing of his contemporaries among his audience and fellow craftsmen. He has survived because he has never sold out to anyone.
We are a generation of survival artists, perhaps a nation of them, and as we look at The Duke we can’t help but admire him for making it seem so simple. And we wonder if perhaps, in this age of awful complexity, his way, the seemingly simple way, isn’t the only way. He makes a man stop and think. And remember. And feel a certain gratitude for the lessons he taught us as kids and now teaches our kids – lessons about honor, honesty, self-reliance and courage and just being one’s self, no matter what.