Culture | American cinema

A man in full

How John Wayne stayed America’s favourite film star for so long

John Wayne: The Life and Legend. By Scott Eyman. Simon and Schuster; 512 pages; $32.50 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

SOON after his 57th birthday, John Wayne learned that he had a big cancerous tumour on his left lung. “I sat there,” he later wisecracked, “trying to be John Wayne.” Who was that imaginary figure: Western hero? Shy giant? Rightist bigot? American myth? Scott Eyman knows the questions but leaves it mostly to others to say what Wayne’s outsize screen personage meant. He concentrates instead on what Wayne, the actor, did.

In comprehensive detail, this new biography chronicles a great star at work. Light on Hollywood gush and sleaze, it tracks the ups and downs of a long career. Its patient record of Wayne’s triple hold on audiences, critics and moneymen goes some way to explaining an astonishing fact about a man who was born in 1907, not long after the birth of film itself: that even today, Wayne remains one of the top-ten favourite stars in America, a fixed point in an otherwise changeable field of actors and actresses young enough to be his great-grandchildren.

From the late 1920s, when Wayne started in Hollywood shifting props and turning stunts, until just before his death in 1979, he appeared in around 200 films. He came up slowly in silent quickies and then in hack parts for minor studios. He made friends with Yakima Canutt, dean of the stuntmen. The long apprenticeship taught Wayne to use gesture more than words. The director John Ford spotted Wayne’s simple, natural-seeming style and cast him in “Stagecoach” (1939), Wayne’s breakthrough Western. “He’ll be the biggest star ever,” Ford predicted. “He’s the perfect Everyman.”

Wayne on camera was not dwarfed by the desert. He seemed to get bigger as he went up. Almost six foot four (1.93 metres) in boots, he had a broad chest, long body, shortish legs and small feet. He worked hard to become a graceful big man. The swaying stride he developed—like a fairy to some, “I-own-the-world” to others—made him recognisable by gait alone.

He was gorgeous when young, with lidded, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and a lopsided smile. His face was strong, not rugged, and with no trace of cruelty or guile. Nightloads of tequila and cigarettes, dawn shoots, three marriages and countless affairs, including one with Marlene Dietrich, aged the face without changing the expression. The neck thickened, the stomach grew and drooping lids narrowed the eyes. Wayne’s steady, appraising gaze still said, “I won’t start anything, but if you do…”

Wayne was lucky in his directors, as they were in him. Several of Ford’s Westerns with Wayne became classics, notably “The Searchers” (1956, pictured) and “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), as did an earlier film, “Red River” (1948), directed by Howard Hawks. In a popular genre, such films pointed to the moral harms of frontier conquest. They replayed with 20th-century means the old tale of wilderness versus civilisation. He did war pics, adventure films and comedies too, but the American West was his truest stage. How hard it was, Ford and Hawks once agreed, to shoot a Western without Wayne.

He was born Marion Morrison into a struggling Scots-Irish family in Iowa, nicknamed Duke as a boy after his Airedale terrier and renamed John Wayne on screen. His father’s luck—a failed farm, a job in a drugstore—was no better on moving to California. When he was 14, Wayne’s parents split up. The navy turned him down and young Wayne was too poor to stay in college. Hard graft, wariness of high-ups and sympathy for working stiffs became his compass points.

After the studio system weakened in the late 1940s, big stars and independent producers came into their own. Wayne was among the first actors to win a percentage of a film’s earnings. By then his name alone could bankroll a film. He started his own production company and tried directing, with mixed success. Though few critics applauded, audiences did. “The Green Berets” (1968), Wayne’s hymn of praise to the Vietnam war, made big money. Wayne himself grew rich, though not super-rich. Trusting and open by nature, he was routinely outfoxed by Hollywood’s second-most-creative industry, accounting.

Politically, Wayne emerges here less as a conservative zealot than as an innocent easily used. In the second world war, when other stars enlisted, Wayne’s studio asked for repeated deferments and he demurred. He was no more heroic in the post-war red scares that led to Hollywood’s blacklisting of left-wing writers and directors, although on this possibly lenient account, Wayne was more figurehead of an ignoble cause than active witchhunter.

Like a cinematographer, Mr Eyman offers readers Wayne from many angles, in his own words and the words of those who worked with him. He offers few stereotypes, makes no final judgments. After Wayne, Westerns grew gruesome. Screen heroes became superheroes, and then cartoons. No longer number one, Wayne will slip further down the rankings. His outsize image will blur and fade. In the meantime Mr Eyman has left an engrossing record of how the Duke stayed top dog for so long.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A man in full"

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