Customer Reviews

JOHN WAYNE'S AMERICA: THE POLITICS OF CELEBRITY CASSETTE

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An immensely engaging analysis of the actor who for many years was the #1 most popular film star in the world, even many years after his death. The author diagnostically and exhaustingly detailed perspective of Wayne the actor vs. Wayne the man is what sets it apart as a landmark bio. You will not be displeased. In one chapter the author discusses the fact that, after having seen "High Noon" he was so upset with the scene wherein Coop throws his marshall's badge into the dusty road that he was instrumental in seeing to it that the script writer was investigated and later forced out of the country after being suspected of pro-communist leanings during the McCarhty witchtrials. Wayne is ultimately admired as an artist yet condemned for his staunchly conservative political views

I'll try to make this comment short, although John Wayne was a complex man and Gary Wills' book is 380 pages long. The subject of this discursive biography (1907 - 1979) was born in Iowa, moved to California at an early age, worked his way into low-budget Westerns, and during the 1940s had risen into box-office stardom. He more or less stayed there during the 50s, 60s, and much of the 70s. Wayne was an American icon. There are monumental statues of him larger than life, a major airport bears his name, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.

Yet, what he did was act in the movies. Gary Wills does a perceptive and erudite number on Wayne, separating the man from the myth. That's as it should be in a factual document. If it were a hagiography, instead of "John Wayne's America" it would have to be called "John Wayne, America."

Actually, it's not nearly the mean-spirited analysis some might expect. It's by no means a tabloid expose. John Wayne emerges as a genuine human being, at least as virtuous as most of the rest of us. He could make fun of his own image, walking through brick walls on "Laugh In." And the "politics" of the subtitle has more to do with social relations within a community than with Wayne's sometimes fierce nationalism and anti-communism. Wills also seems to have done his routinely thorough job of research his subject and has interviewed just about everyone left alive with an opinion on Wayne and his career.

When it comes to stripping the myth away from the man, unwrapping the package, so to speak, Wills pay considerably more attention to people who had a hand in shaping the legend of John Wayne, particularly director John Ford, with whom Wayne had a prickly friendship but whose talent helped make Wayne into the myth he became. In later years, it was Wayne's star presence that helped keep aging auteurs like Ford and Hawks afloat. Wayne's personal life -- marriages and so forth -- are hardly mentioned. Ford was far more brutal towards Wayne for not enlisting during World War II than Wills ever is. The author gives us a reasonable understanding of Wayne's awkward and arguable position. With Ford, you were either in or out.

Mostly, time and space are given over to an analysis of Wayne's best movies such as "Stagecoach", "Red River," and "The Searchers," and including a couple of examples that I, for one, wouldn't ordinarily think of as among Wayne's better efforts: "The Shepherd of the Hills" and "Big Jake." Full credit is given to Wayne for his subtle but sometimes superb performances.

But it's not the directors alone that made Wayne the icon, nor was it just his talent. It was the embodiment of certain exceptionally American sentiments in his Westerns. More simply put, it was the city versus the freedom of the countryside. Everybody hates the city, even those who love it. That's why everybody moves to New Jersey and Florida and Oxnard. It's as close as they can get to Monument Valley and still have Starbuck's. In the country, especially as it was two hundred years ago, people could be free of federalist constraints and make their own rules. It was the appeal of Thomas Jefferson over Alexander Hamilton. The city caused people of different kinds to mix with each other, sometimes uncomfortably, and it brought anonymity and corruption. All real Americans are eager to cut off financial aid to the cities while giving tax breaks to the farmers, even if the farmer's name is Tenneco, Incorporated. The city is libraries. The frontier is experience. City people deserve to suffer while those on the frontier need to be rewarded for the risks they've taken.

I'm exaggerating here to make a point, but it's Wills' point and it makes sense in terms not only of our own history but our own current affairs.

I wouldn't avoid reading this because I expected it to be a hatchet job. And I wouldn't avoid reading it because I thought it would substitute the figure of John Wayne for that of Uncle Sam. I'd invite anyone to read it, though I disagree with some of Will's meditations, because we'd all be better off looking at the essence instead of the accident. Fooling ourselves can be fun. We all need fantasies from time to time. They provide us with guidelines for actions. But, when their values are adopted as axioms, in the long run they don't lead us anywhere except into trouble.

Wills, author of many other works, including the amazing Lincoln at Gettysburg, sets an examination of Wayne's films squarely in the American zeitgeist - given them added heft and importance.

Wills will appear at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral on October 15, 2007, for a conversation with Dean Alan Jones. It will also be webcast live and archived for later listening. More information is available at: http://www.gracecathedral.org/calendar/detail.php?eid=1053.

Any perusal of this book would, in my opinion, show the reader that author Garry Wills, however eminent and Nobel Prize-winning he may be, has done a hatchet job on an American idol whose lifestyle and political views he finds abhorrent and indefensible.

Wills is dismissive and condescending toward John Wayne -- originally Robert, later Marion, Morrison -- in a thousand ways, some subtle, some obvious. His father, who an earlier, more definitive biography depicted as a well-meaning man and loving father, but rather deficient as a provider, is described in Wills' book as a failure, plain and simple. His mother, who blatantly favored Wayne's younger brother all her life and never evinced much real love for her elder son, is given a pass. Duke Morrison's football career as recalled by himself and others is dismissed as being mostly a fabrication and himself as being a mostly third-rate player.

Wayne's recollection that he got his start in the movie business as a "grip" through 1920s cowboy star Tom Mix, is brushed off as "unlikely." Director John Ford is described as a Svengali who molded a passive John Wayne in such a way as to suit himself. A fight that almost occurred between John Wayne and a black actor during the filming of one movie is stopped before it starts, according to Wills, because Ford shouts to the black actor, "Don't hurt him! We need him!" The assumption is that, naturally, the African American actor would have beaten Wayne to a pulp if given half a chance. Wayne's failure to serve in World War II is depicted as solely out of self-interest (and possibly cowardice). Roy Rogers didn't serve, either; does that also make him a self-serving coward, Mr. Wills?

Wills ridicules the general tenor of Wayne's many Western movies, and appears to have a superior, looking-down-his-nose attitude toward the millions of Americans who loved both them and their star. Wayne's conservative political views come in for a special blistering by Wills, who indulges in the usual liberal denouncing of the so-called "Red Scare" of the late 1940s, and of Wayne's gradually dawning political consciousness of those days.

The book does have its good points. Wills does excellent analyses of several of the Duke's later, more serious movies, although the conclusions he arrives at are usually not the ones I would have reached.

But taken all in all, it's obvious to me that Garry Wills did not hold John Wayne in high regard (nor his fans), and therefore wrote this biography in an attempt to "take him down a peg." In my opinion, all he really did was display his own prejudices for all of us to see.