John Wayne: A Giant Shadow

by C McGivern

  Duke recalled the days at Republic, after he began to establish himself, through rose-tinted glasses, “The atmosphere on the lot was down-home Texas… lots of cowboys. We put the Western and Republic on the map. The studio might have been small and unsophisticated but we had adequate equipment… not color at first, and of course we shot fast, but we had some of the best technicians and some of the very best action directors… no peers on that. Thinking back I had one hell of a time. I was out there doing things that keep a man fit. I was always in prime condition, even with my drinking, because I was out there in the open. Yeah, it sure was a hell of a good life then.”

  He hardly gave a thought anymore to Josephine and his marital problems, things were less difficult when he ignored them. He stayed away, casting off his worries off like an old shoe. Later he couldn’t think back to that time with anything less than the most excruciating feelings of guilt about what he had done. He had made choices, but had been tortured for the rest of his life for making them. Over the years he had never stopped trying to make it up to Josie and their four children. He became a man of great power but was never, despite the years of effort, able to do what he knew he should have done, had he been a “real man.” Back then learning his trade had seemed more important, and he had willingly sacrificed everything to his craft. The more he learned, the more he enjoyed working, and the more he drifted away. He couldn’t remember the day he decided to leave home; his departure just crept up on them all.

  He spent his days perfecting a variety of difficult skills, the hardest of which was, he said, was the art of delivering long and boring speeches, “All actors should try to deliver the boring speeches I had to make. Anyone can act hysterical, or angry, but it was really difficult being boring!” He developed his unusual patterns of speech then to accommodate those speeches, “Nobody can be natural. You have to find your own way. I have found that if you put your ah, ah, ah’s in the middle of a sentence, if you say, “I think I’ll… ah… ” the audience is with you, now they’re looking at you, and you can stand there for twenty minutes before you say, “go to town.” If you say, “I think I’ll go to town, ah... pause” they’ve left you. The other way they’re waiting for you. That’s where these bastards try to imitate me… they don’t know what I’ve actually done, where I can take all the time I want. I know what I’m doing. I was in so many pictures that weren’t exactly things of joy, but I watched them, to see if I got away with certain things. I got away with talking like that, so I used it. People listened to me when I paused mid-sentence.”

  Later he dealt with the problem of long speeches by an even simpler measure; whenever he could get away with it he cut his dialogue out altogether. As his power in the industry increased he began choosing his own scripts and had others altered to suit. He deliberately slowed his speech down which, together with the breaks and pauses, gave it an unusual melodic quality. Everything he did was meticulously worked out as he searched for a style of acting that suited his strengths, and the developments he made eventually powered him out of the B-movie and on to superstardom. He worked tirelessly to create a character that could be transferred from one role to the next and then for the next fifty years labored just as hard to protect the image so painstakingly constructed.

  For millions of Americans in the South, Southwest and the West his was becoming a powerful message, increasingly well delivered. Every Saturday night large numbers gathered at the cinema to watch, cheering as he restored order to a disordered world. They watched through the lens of the Depression, where there was no order at all, only immense hardship. The John Wayne they identified with was always the outsider, riding alone into trouble, to put things right. He created dozens of brilliant images in a thousand unsentimental, throw-away comments, to illustrate the qualities they so admired. There are many images of the lone warrior riding through a stark, desolate, dangerous landscape… isolation a thing he embraced, it was not a trial for the bold, confident hero. He attacked all comers and all problems head on, his gun and his power resolutely pitted against evil and guile. He didn’t always work within the law, but he was always on the side of justice and there was always a clear difference between right and wrong. The sparing use of words reflected his hardness and his stoicism was to be seen in the codes he lived by. “And a killer… ” He was, of course, but as he continued to develop the characterization, he inflicted surprisingly few fatal wounds on his enemies. His purpose was only to right wrong, not kill those who stood in his way. His stubborn pursuit of justice was much more likely to see him wounded or killed, and he tended to outlast his opponents rather than outshoot them, his power of endurance always greater than theirs. Still his adversaries knew, without any doubt that he was prepared, and above all, able to kill without a flicker of the steel blue, snake-like eyes.

  In contrast there was also something soft and sweet about his performances too. Ultimately, he was attractively vulnerable. He might stubbornly refuse to show his tender side but no one could ever doubt it was there. From his earliest films a delicate gesture, a shrug of the shoulders, a turning away of the head, a body movement peculiar to him reflected it. His understated gestures added a power to his work not shared by any other Hollywood star. He had no slickness about him and his feelings and thoughts were obvious without words ever having to pass through his tightly clasped lips. His were the gestures that reflected loneliness and frailty. It was acting of a most subtle kind, learned first on Poverty Row, but which, over the years had an immense cumulative power. Peter Bogdanovitch commented, “He brings to each new movie he makes a resonance of the past, his and ours, he fills them with reverberations above and beyond his own quality, he is a measure of the movie star. Today’s audience is denied the kind of contact he made… ”

  The sheer number of films he cranked out ensured his audience felt they knew him, he was like an old friend, always there when they needed him most. A warm familiarity grew and they trusted implicitly, that he would not fail them. When they paid their money to see a Wayne movie, they sat back, confident their expectations would be met.

  But so convincing was he as the man separated from all others, defined as he was by a strict personal moral code, that his own identity began to be inevitably bound up in it. It became harder to separate the real Duke from the characters he played. He tried his best to produce the required goods on screen, but he also tried to be the man his fans wanted him to be, sacrificing himself at his own altar.

  He was once asked if he had always just been playing John Wayne, he felt irritated by the implication that he couldn’t act, “I am happy when people say that. I like the idea of being popular with a great number of people and having identification with them. Now if they identify me as a rich, conceited actor over in some corner place, and they’re saying, “Hell, Jesus, he’s good in his racket but he’s a mean son of a bitch” that would start to limit their attitude toward me. They would start looking at me instead of being with me, in order to identify with the cowboy, the Western man, I always try to be something they can easily identify with, therefore I have tried never to let my ego enter into my performance to the point where it makes a many-colored male bird that may attract attention for a while. I like a steady character, and the more they say, “now Jesus, that’s just the way he is” why the better it is for me in the business.”

  The interviewer persisted, “But that isn’t the way you are, doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No, it doesn’t bother me. The intellectual, left-wing types belittle me, scoff at me. I don’t care, I really don’t care.” Of course he had not always been John Wayne and he had to learn to forgive himself for his weaknesses and his mistakes, he had to understand he was John Wayne, flaws and all. Living up to the reputation hadn’t been easy but he never stopped trying, “I may fail. But I can’t quit.”

  He made the most enormous effort to appear natural before the cameras. He still hated much of what he saw in his own performance, and particularly disliked his walk. He attempte
d to modify it but it was a walk, all his own, that became as famous as the drawled speech. People said he copied it from one person or another but school friends argued he always walked the same way, stood the same way, and Duke himself once told writer George Plimpton, as if imparting a secret from the depths of his soul, with a straight face, but tongue firmly in cheek, the story of how the walk had been developed, “It was my Dad who worked it out. He held my hand and told me to put one foot in front of the other, and that was walking. Do ‘er the other way round, and that’s walking backwards!” He hadn’t copied it perhaps, but he did later deliberately develop it to suit himself. Katharine Hepburn said, “Nobody walks like John Wayne… he is a man with great legs and tight buttocks, and small sensitive feet, he carries his frame lightly and his walk is fine and light.” Whenever anyone mentioned that his walk was sexy he simmered with anger, “God, I get hot when they say I wiggled my rear and all that stuff.” But he also confessed, “Well, at one time I guess sexuality was part of my appeal… I don’t know whether I still convey that… all that crap came from the way I walked... there’s evidently a virility in it, otherwise why keep mentioning it?” He had always been quick to say he wasn’t conscious of his walk, but smiled when he agreed, “I must walk different from other people, but I never went to school to learn how.”

  He developed the walk and accentuated elements of it in exactly the same way he perfected the other mannerisms, which were more studied than anyone could ever have guessed. The slightly raised eyebrow, the sudden stillness that came over him when he was threatened, the shrug of shoulders, were inimitable because he had spent long hours studying and perfecting each movement. Critics assumed he was John Wayne playing himself; that he was not acting at all. In fact, he was simply very good at acting naturally. Duke often said the only difference between him and all the other struggling actors in Hollywood was John Ford, but his stock mannerisms were all in place long before Ford came along with Stagecoach. Appearing to be natural was an act of artifice on his part, and he knew, even early in his career, that he could act very well, “There’s no way of being natural on screen, you lose your tempo. You just have to keep going and hope your personality gets you through.”

  He had spent many hours working with Yak and noticed that he was a terrible actor, making grimacing faces and shouting when called on to speak, “But I noticed that when he was confronted with real danger he behaved exactly the opposite, when Yak was in real trouble he would get a humorous glint in his eye and talk very straight and direct to his opponent- gave the impression of a steel spring waiting to be released… I tried to explain that his real attitude looked better than his acting did. He never reacted to this, but I did.” He added his own glint to the straight and direct look and way of talking. The character he was developing came straight from the western novels he had loved to read as a lonely boy, where the cowboy was lean, tough, a loner who disliked small-talk, a man who was willing to impart rough justice and protect the weak. And then he added the physical characteristics that he either copied, developed, or were natural gifts.

  And cinema goers everywhere liked what they saw as he grew from boy to man, almost imperceptibly, before their eyes, creeping steadily into their imagination. People had started asking him for his autograph when he was spotted out drinking, and he loved to talk to them about films. Just a few short years before he had done everything he could to hide his skinny, six foot four frame, now he took pleasure in the fact that his fans couldn’t miss him. He grew to be comfortable talking with ordinary people and came to love the admirers who made it so obvious they enjoyed his films. Recognition became his life blood, a transfusion, replacing the love he had needed earlier in his life. He couldn’t get enough of it; not because he had the ego of a star, but because he appreciated the sensation of being cared about. Apart from anything else the fans proved to him that his work was acceptable, they made him want to continue doing more and better films. He always remained conscious of their demands and expectations, and chose his films with care, not wanting to disappoint them.

  Whilst the public appreciated his effort, Josie made it clear she didn’t. His sense of guilt and his inability to find any peace at home led him to suffer continued bouts of deep depression. He worried constantly about his value as a man, and Josie always managed to make him feel like a failure. In private he agreed and although he was doing well financially, he believed he was a useless husband and father. He had everything he had ever wanted, regular, steady work, his beautiful wife, and a family of his own to love and cherish as he hadn’t been, yet he remained unfulfilled.

  Both he and Josie put their hearts into making the marriage work, but it just didn’t. They wanted different things and lived different lives. He found it unbearable that he couldn’t make his marriage work. He was tormented by thoughts of his parent’s failure and by the unhappiness they had caused him. He dreaded putting his own children through that experience. In every film he worked on then he played a man of honor, and in his own life he had a deep sense of what was right, what was wrong, and yet here he was, doing what he knew to be wrong; it wasn’t honorable to walk away from his wife and children. But he had changed, he thought the years of courting before they married had been too long for them both, and he at least, had come to want very different things during that period. She had turned to religion and become heavily involved in the social and charitable scenes, she was a leading personality in the local Catholic enclave. He didn’t have the slightest interest in religion. Josephine had moved in aristocratic society all her life. He, of course had not, but now found that on several evenings a week he was expected to attend the formal dinner parties and soirees that he hated.

  Josie expected him to curb his drinking at such functions, as if dressing up wasn’t bad enough, and he was only allowed one cocktail, a few glasses of wine with his meal and a brandy later in the evening! He felt like a fish out of water thrashing around gasping for oxygen. He considered himself a second rate actor from Poverty Row and to get through such evenings at all he needed a few drinks inside him. Josie, disliking his slurred, sloppy speech, and his blurred eyes when he had been drinking, forbade the concession. He dreaded arriving home. He was scared he would be hustled straight into a suit, refused his glass, and worse, be expected to smile and make small talk with a nun! He just could not function at that level. If anyone loved the sound of laughter ringing in his ears it was Duke, he appreciated a joke more than most and found humor and laughter everywhere he went… except in his own home where it mattered most, and where a sense of pervading misery seeped through everything he touched and did. Josie couldn’t give him what he needed and he was hurt by her coldness. He felt inadequate; if anything was designed to destroy him it was that. During their divorce hearing when her frosty attitude was brought up, she pointed out that they had four children. He commented, “Yeah, yeah… four times in ten years.” He knew he was not being fair, after all he loved her, and he regretted saying it as soon as he opened his mouth. He felt ashamed he had been overheard and reported, knowing how badly he had hurt her.

  He didn’t understand what had gone wrong, what he had done wrong. He knew it must have been his fault, because everything was always his fault, what upset him was that he could do nothing to make it right. His intentions had been good; still the marriage had turned into a nightmare for both them and their children.

  He had been right. It had been the long delay between his falling in love and finally marrying her that led to such frustration in him, and he already resented her by the time they married. He had never stopped wanting her, but his urgent need had made him angry. He had fallen in love too soon in their relationship and she had made him wait too long. Her constant postponement of their marriage led to a deep mistrust, he had always been afraid that he was about to lose her, so that by the time she did give him her love it was already too late for him, he no longer trusted it, didn’t believe in it and was always fearful she was about to snatch it back, just as
his Mother had always done. Marriage was not what he had expected at all but for many years he did nothing about it. He accepted things, was miserable, but was too afraid of failure to move out. Much later, once he accepted the idea that it was OK to fail, to accept defeat with grace, he became adept at turning failure into ultimate success, “I may fail, but I can’t quit !”

  Gradually he became less considerate of Josie’s feelings and more concerned with his own. He couldn’t remember if he withdrew because he found her frigid and boring, or if she had become cold toward him because he gave everything he had to his work. Whatever the reasons, it was Poverty Row that won his heart and soul as Josephine never could. He had seldom indulged in affairs, as was the accepted solution to such difficulties in Hollywood at the time. Always a “one woman at a time man,” he was not a chaser. But he did need a woman to complete his life, and he felt empty, lost and alone without one at his side. He didn’t want any woman. It had to be someone special, someone he could love. John Wayne was a very unusual movie star for the generation he belonged to. He was surrounded on all sides by beautiful women eager for his attention, desperate for him, but he showed little interest in them just because they were available. A press agent once said he had never seen Duke make a pass at anyone! So for the time being he remained lost, frustrated and bored.