John Wayne: the imagination that made Marion

SCOTT Eyman’s excellent John Wayne: The Life and Legend will deepen the writer’s reputation as an authority on American film.

John Wayne in 1968 film The Green Berets, which was a financial success but a critical debacle.

AT the back of a motel carpark, overlooking Monument Valley, Utah, is a rough, small stone hut. A sign is affixed that reads: ‘‘Captain Nathan Brittles. US Cavalry.’’

Myth holds that this is where John Wayne stayed during the making of John Ford’s classic 1949 western She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. It is emblematic of the blurring of the cinematic lines between reality and legend, which the Navajo, who manage the Valley, understand clearly.

Standing in the carpark itself, looking beyond the original trading post, which is now a museum, Old Glory flaps in the breeze. Looking up the Valley with its magnificent buttes and mesas is like standing on the set of Fort Apache. Of course, you are doing precisely that.

Monument Valley, for millions of filmgoers, constitutes the American west at the time of Manifest Destiny. Ford, director of superb films from Stagecoach to The Searchers ­achieved this by returning time and again to incorporate its landscape in his films. In Scott Eyman’s excellent John Wayne: The Life and Legend, the actor is said to have claimed credit for introducing Ford to the Valley. Like so many episodes in the Duke’s life, this claim on the truth is open to challenge.

Let’s start with Wayne’s name. He was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa on May 26, 1907. His overbearing mother Mary later took part of his name for his younger brother Robert and hence the name of the future Duke (taken from the name of the family dog) became Marion Michael Morrison and occasionally Marion Mitchell Morrison. For Hollywood, John Wayne was much easier.

And Eyman is an authority on the Hollywood of this time. He has written biographies of Cecil B. DeMille and Louis B. Mayer, as well as one of the irascible Ford, the most influential figure in Wayne’s life and arguably the greatest American film director of the 20th century. Eyman’s credibility on the movie industry is persuasive. This new biography will deepen his authority as a writer on American film.

Wayne’s early life was not easy. His father Clyde, a pharmacist, failed in business and eventually the family moved out to California. A football injury saw the young Wayne taking a job as a prop man in the movie studios. But Wayne always claimed he wasn’t interested in acting. Like much of the persona he created, this was simply untrue and his first big break was in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 epic The Big Trail. The movie failed and Wayne’s career nearly ended.

Then, for nearly a decade, as he drank and played cards with Ford, pleading for parts, Wayne made low-budget, low-paying westerns at Republic Pictures, the films churned out on a weekly basis. But when Ford decided to make Stagecoach, he knew Wayne was now the actor to play Ringo. Incidentally, contrary to Wayne’s assertion, Ford had been attracted to Monument Valley by the owners of the trading post, Harry and Leone ‘‘Mike’’ Goulding, who had shown the director a portfolio of photographs of the location. Ford was enchanted and Monument Valley was to become the American frontier on the screen.

Pearl Harbor cast Wayne in a different light. He tried unsuccessfully to enlist in Bill Donovan’s OSS (forerunner of the CIA) and then begged to join Ford’s combat films unit. But he never served in uniform. Eyman notes insightfully: “For the rest of his life, Wayne would compensate by being as much of a red, white, and blue patriot as the most ardent Marine, slaughtering freedom’s enemies on the screen.’’

Perhaps also as a consequence, the staunchly Republican Duke threw himself enthusiastically into the anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American ­Ideals, which generated Hollywood’s infamous blacklist.

Wayne’s role, along with his close friend, the spiteful Ward Bond, was dishonourable.

No better analysis of Wayne’s culpability in the McCarthy purges in Hollywood was ever provided than that of Carl Foreman, screenwriter of High Noon, among other classics, in an article for Punch magazine: ‘‘Ask him what he thinks of Joe McCarthy, and he will tell you that, as near as he can remember, the senator was a much vilified, much misunderstood, great, great American.’’

Wayne always boasted of his success in driving Foreman from Hollywood. So it’s then a short walk to The Green Berets.

Eyman writes that 1968 film was a financial success but a critical debacle. He’s right, but he makes a better point. Jack Valenti, who was a senior adviser to president Lyndon Johnson, ­realised that Wayne making The Green Berets would result in a much more popular defence of American policy in Vietnam than anything that LBJ could say.

It was Valenti behind the scenes in Washington who produced the extraordinary US military support, out of Fort Benning, Georgia, that saw the film reach the box office.

Eyman has written an exceptional book. He is always fair to Wayne and his balance is a consequence of talking to the Duke’s family (buffeted by three failed marriages and numerous mistresses, including Marlene Dietrich) and to close working buddies, such as Harry Carey Jr. He repeatedly makes the point that while Wayne was militantly anti-communist, he was courteous to a fault in terms of his personal relationships with people on the set, who may have disagreed with him politically, and he was always proud of his union membership.

Wayne created his own legend and maintained it ruthlessly. Making True Grit, his only Oscar-winning performance, he threw a photographer off the set for taking shots of him sitting on a car saddle on which the famous close ups of Rooster Cogburn charging at Lucky Ned Pepper’s gang were filmed. The legend had to be preserved.

John Wayne today resembles Mount Rushmore: impressive and permanent but (as Michael Parkinson discovered in interview) best seen from a distance. He remains as much a part of American folklore as the four presidential profiles on the mountain in South Dakota.

Stephen Loosley is a former ALP senator.

John Wayne: The Life and Legend

By Scott Eyman

Simon & Schuster, 672pp, $39.99 (HB)