John Wayne: godfather of the western. The most aggressively American movie
star, the epitome of rugged individualism, is synonymous with the most
classically American movie genre. It is appropriate that westerns were
marginalised in US culture at around the time of Wayne’s passing. The last
great old-style classic western was his swan-song The Shootist (1976),
a heartbreakingly self-referential portrait of a frontier legend dying of
cancer. The star and the genre grew up, grew old and died together.
There are public monuments to John Wayne in the US, but the fact that the
western has not really outlived him is perhaps the greatest one of all.
Westerns were displaced by cop thrillers, “road movies” and sci-fi epics
such as Star Wars. Sagas celebrating mature white males conquering
the West find little favour in modern America, most of whose cinemagoers are
aged between 12 and 24. A few big-screen westerns have appeared in recent
years ( Open Range, The Missing, a new Alamo) — but
these have been expensive, superfluous stragglers in pursuit of a parade
already long vanished.
Yet on television and DVD westerns are still hugely popular, and the
biggest-selling personality on DVD is the man who bestrode the list of top
ten movie stars for a generation. Even this year he was ranked third in a
Harris poll on America’s favourite movie star, behind Denzel Washington and
Tom Hanks. Not bad for a star who died 28 years ago.
Later this month, on May 26, it will be the 100th anniversary of John Wayne’s
birth. Paramount Home Entertainment, in conjunction with Wayne’s own
production company, Batjac, will mark the occasion by releasing special
collector’s-edition DVDs of four classic Wayne movies long out of
circulation and much sought by devotees of the Duke: Island in the Sky
(1953), Hondo (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954) and McLintock!
(1963).
The release of these four movies is timely and commercially shrewd, but it
isn’t all about dollars and cents. This is the culmination of a labour of
love. Michael Wayne, the star’s eldest son, was the president of Batjac from
1961 until his death, at the age of 68, in 2003. Gretchen Wayne, Michael’s
wife of 45 years, assumed the presidency and devoted her energies to, in the
finest Wayne fashion, “finishing the job”. Now Gretchen has fulfilled her
late husband’s dream of restoring the films, which she will release with a
wealth of special features from the Batjac archives. And she will appear at
Cannes in May to present a digitally restored print of Hondo in 3-D.
I visited Gretchen Wayne in her home in Hollywood and at the Batjac offices in
Beverly Hills. She is a dynamic, charismatic lady, elegant in appearance,
warm, open and friendly in her personality. Even before she met Michael
Wayne, on a blind date when he was 15 and she was just 14, she says she had
already long been conscious of John Wayne. She grew up in Hollywood. Her
father ran a tyre dealership and belonged to a golf club where Wayne was a
member. “My father loved to go to westerns,” she says, “so he would take my
sister and myself. I saw all the early John Wayne westerns.” (Her sister,
Kathryn, is married to Frankie Avalon, who played Wayne’s young sidekick
Smitty in The Alamo.) But what were her early impressions of the man?
“He wasn’t a person who ever came into the room in a loud way. He was a very
proper man — very respectful. I had an extraordinary mother-in-law
[Josephine Saenz, Wayne’s first wife; they divorced in 1945]. To the credit
of both of them, they kept whatever their problems were between them. She
never spoke a disparaging word about the father to the children. He was
always a very warm person and loved family.”
Once married into the Wayne family, Gretchen’s only problem with her
father-in-law was what to call him. She wouldn’t call him “Dad”, because her
own father was still alive. When he invited her to call him “Duke”, as the
world did, “I agonised over this because he was ‘Mr Wayne’. That’s how I’d
known him for ten years. Fortunately, when we had a baby he said, ‘I would
love it if the grandchildren called me Grandaddy’ — so that’s what I called
him until the day he died.”
Besides devotion to his family, Gretchen stresses another virtue that Wayne
embraced with equal fervour both onscreen and off: “He had incredible
loyalty to his friends. If you were his friend, you were his friend for
ever. My husband had the same trait, and that’s a noble quality in a human
being. He was also very generous, and he didn’t do it in a public manner.
True generosity is giving of yourself or your time without any accolades. My
husband did exactly the same thing.”
Wayne instilled strong values in his children, and the children absorbed them
and adopted them as their own. Michael Wayne learnt the ropes of movie
production before assuming control of Batjac, just as Duke Morrison had
started out as a prop man before his gradual and hard-won rise to stardom.
“Grandaddy trusted Michael. He was the ‘go-to’ person for him. If he got in
trouble financially, Michael would figure a way out, and Michael’s dad
deferred to that judgment. Hence the fact that Michael ran and owned the
company.”
Wayne was enormously proud of all his seven children, particularly of his
eldest son. Yet, occasionally, the shrewd producer had to learn to keep pace
with the old pro.
“On one picture,” Gretchen recalls, “as Michael told the story, the call was
for 8am. They take a car out to work, and there’s this lone figure standing
on the set, in his western attire. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ [he
says]. ‘It’s 8am. We’ve lost an hour of shooting because the sun is up.’
First one on the set. Last one to leave. Michael said, ‘I learnt my lesson.
I was up and there before he was from then on.’ ” In 1964, Wayne had
famously “licked the big C”. Shortly before he succumbed to a fresh cancer
in 1979, Michael convinced him of the need to protect his name and likeness
legally from exploitation. Now anyone in the US (at least) who wishes to
market a John Wayne product requires a licence from the family-owned Wayne
Enterprises. “It was Michael’s idea,” says Gretchen, “that funds raised,
with his father’s approval, would go to support cancer research; and
Michael’s dad said, ‘I don’t want you to get fat on this.’ Michael gave
millions to the cancer institute.”
Gretchen’s role in presiding over Batjac is clearly as much about continuing
Michael Wayne’s work as that of his legendary father. But what’s next for
Batjac? The holy grail for John Wayne fans would be the director’s cut of The
Alamo (briefly available in the UK on VHS in 1993). The rights, however,
are with United Artists (now MGM/UA), and beyond Gretchen’s control, though
she says she would be happy to give them material for DVD special features.
The Alamo(1960), produced and directed by Wayne as his grand patriotic
statement about American liberty, had its premiere at the dawn of the most
politically contentious decade in recent US history. It was also the era in
which John Wayne skyrocketed from film star to right-wing polemicist to
beloved national institution. Wayne had already won his political spurs as a
dedicated antiCommunist during the 1940s and 1950s, but his hawkish stance
on the Vietnam War was heartfelt, controversial — and the impetus behind his
second directorial effort, The Green Berets (1968), which drew almost
unprecedented critical flak.
“He made that picture because he made a promise,” Gretchen explains. “He went
over to visit these young soldiers at his own expense, and there was a lot
of risk involved. He said, ‘I promised them I would tell their story.’ And
that’s why that film got made. He was a conservative, but he thought
he was a liberal in the real sense of the word: open-minded, studied the
classics, listened to all ideas, then made his judgment. But he was probably
fiscally conservative, socially liberal.”
The following year, the Oscar he won as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit
(1969) demonstrated the depth of affection for him, and reinforced his image
as Movie America’s champion of traditional values and Manichaean certitudes.
But why, even now, is John Wayne such an enduring icon?
“They refer to that generation of men during the Forties as ‘the finest
generation’,” says Gretchen. “They put everything on the line. They married
their sweethearts, went off to war, kept us safe from the enemy, and we
still revere them, thank God. We haven’t done the same for our other
fighting men. But we revere that generation, and they were the moral compass
for a lot of us today. They were the ones who set the standard. And who was
emblematic of that standard? John Wayne.”
Yet that wasn’t how Wayne saw himself. “He always said to Michael, ‘People say
I’m a hero. I must be a good actor! I’m not a hero.’ People identified with
him. He had an honesty about him that people could connect with. He was
sophisticated, but he didn’t wear sophistication on his sleeve. He had a
humble quality. Women saw him as the manly man – the epitome of what manhood
should be. He was respectful of women, except in The Quiet Man, but
that’s the humour of it. And men — I think of the guy that went to work,
doing his best to support his family, eking out his living, being honest,
loving his wife, caring for his children, supporting his country: he felt he
could identify with John Wayne. Because in John Wayne he saw a guy that was
true to his ideals in life.
“He represents a time when we gave our word, and meant our word, on a
handshake. Honesty, a certain amount of gentility, respect and obligation.
He felt all of those things, and he represented that in characters he
played. People look up to that. Maybe he’ll remind us of a time when people
were responsible human beings, and I think we’ve lost that.”
That sentiment could have come from John Wayne himself. To millions of fans
around the world, he’s Superman in a Stetson, and the fifth face on
Rushmore. Does she think Wayne’s star might ever fade?
“Not in my lifetime. He lives with people in their hearts. But,” she points
out, “I don’t know what my great-grandchildren would think. How many know
Tom Mix? He was a big star.”
There are lots of stars, and they come and go. But as a lifelong fan, I can
only respond: there’s only one John Wayne.
Michael Coyne is author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity
in the Hollywood Western (I. B. Tauris) and American Political Films
(Reaktion Books). Special editions of Island in the Sky, Hondo, The High and
the Mighty and McLintock!, will be available on DVD from May 14
A boy called Marion
May 26, 1907: born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. In 1914
moves to California. Nicknamed “Duke” after his pet Airedale.
1926: on football scholarship at University of Southern California,
finds work as props man at Fox.
1930: the director Raoul Walsh casts him in The Big Trail and
advises a name change to John Wayne. The film is not a hit and he languishes
in B-films.
1939: John Ford casts Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach,
launching a new star, the golden age of the western, and an enduring
director-star team.
1942-45: Wayne becomes the all-American war hero — on screen — in Flying
Tigers, The Fighting Seabees, Back to Bataan and They Were Expendable.
1948-50: Howard Hawks’s Red River catapults him to
superstardom, prompting Ford to say: “Never knew that big son-of-a-bitch
could act.” He stars in Ford’s Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon and Rio Grande, the first of five films with Maureen
O’Hara. Oscar-nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima.
1948-51: identified with antiCommunist crusade in Hollywood, joining
the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
1956: plays racist Ethan Edwards in Ford’s The Searchers,
now seen as his greatest role.
1959: stars in Rio Bravo as a riposte to High Noon
(1952), which he thought “unAmerican”.
1960: directs and stars in his dream project, The Alamo,
investing heavily in the $12 million epic. Critics pan it.
1962: stars in Ford’s late-career masterpiece The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance.
1964: has surgery for lung cancer.
1968: directs The Green Berets in support of America’s role in
Vietnam. Despite pickets and hostile reviews, it is a hit.
1969: plays fat, boozy, one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in Henry Hathaway’s True
Grit — and wins the Best Actor Oscar.
1976: in his 152nd and final film, The Shootist, he portrays a
gunfighter dying of cancer.
May 1979: awarded Congressional Medal of Honour, inscribed simply:
“John Wayne, American”.
June 11, 1979: dies of cancer. Buried in unmarked grave overlooking the
Pacific Ocean.
