John Wayne: The Life and Legend (90 page)

An ancillary reason for the show’s existence was revealed in the credits: the copyright for the show was held by John Wayne.

As with many politically committed people, seeing the nation move in the opposite direction from his own orientation had a residual impact on Wayne. Although he talked about how much he hated politics and politicians—his preferred phrase was “fucking politicians”—he obsessively returned to the subject of the deadly path America was on. At the same time, he was at pains to refute the prevailing image of himself as an intellectual troglodyte. “I came into this business from the University of Southern California, where I was taking a pre-law course. I had gone to Glendale High School, from which I graduated with a 94 average. I could say, ‘isn’t’ as well as ‘ain’t.’ ”

On college professors: “It takes 15 years of kissing somebody’s backside for a professor to get a chair somewhere and then he’s a big shot in a little world, passing his point of view on to a lot of impressionable kids. He’s never really had to tough it out in this world of ours, so he has a completely theoretical view of how it should be run and what we should do for our fellow man.”

On Vietnam: “I would think somebody like Jane Fonda and her idiot husband would be terribly ashamed and saddened that they were a part of causing us to stop helping the South Vietnamese. Now look what’s happening. They’re getting killed by the millions. Murdered by the millions. How the hell can she and her husband sleep at night?”

On government: “I don’t want any handouts from a benevolent government. I think government is naturally the enemy of the individual, but it’s a necessary evil, like, say motion picture agents are. I do not want the government . . . to insure me anything more than normal security.”

On Manifest Destiny: “When we came to America, there were a few thousand Indians over millions of miles, and I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from these people, taking their happy hunting ground away. We were progressive, and we were doing something that was good for everyone.”

On identity politics: “The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that’s what we have to put up with. I think that any person that’s in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from.”

On the women’s movement: “I have always felt that women should get exactly the same salary for the same work that a man would. And I assume and presume that is gradually coming to pass. Mainly because women have been individual enough to step out and become lawyers and do these different things.

“But I think it’s ridiculous for the studio to have a woman be a grip on a set. There are certain standards of hard work that are expected of a grip that a woman can’t cut. That doesn’t mean that she couldn’t direct the picture if she had the talent to do it. But I mean, there’s a lot of men that couldn’t go in and be a grip, because they’re not capable of the physical effort required to perform that job.”

On Richard Nixon: “The Cronkites and the Sevareids and the rest of you guys are out to get him just because a bunch of jerk underlings acted stupidly. The President is too great a man to be mixed up in anything like Watergate.”

On the dark night of the soul: “There’s that hour when you go to bed at night, before you sleep, when you’re alone. That’s when you have time to think over your past and that helps you shape up your attitudes toward people, toward situations. If you lose your self-respect, you’ve lost everything.”

The simmering irritation that some of the public felt about Wayne’s social and political opinions came to a boil when Wayne sat down for an interview with
Playboy
that was published in May 1971: “With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”

That was just for starters. Carl Foreman and Robert Rossen had done things “that were detrimental to our way of life” by making
High Noon
(“the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life”) and
All the King’s Men
respectively, and he would never regret “having helped run Foreman out of the country.” The men that gave him faith in his country were men like Spiro Agnew. Douglas MacArthur “would have handled the Vietnam situation with dispatch.”

Some of the
Playboy
interview was funny—after comparing modern producers to whores, he said, “Why doesn’t that son of a bitch Darryl Zanuck get himself a striped silk shirt and learn how to play the piano? Then he could work in any room in the house.” But the truculence overwhelmed the humor.

Wayne had voiced many, if not all, of these opinions in print before, but not in the pages of
Playboy
at the height of its influence. The year before, he had told
Reader’s Digest
that “the way to stop [Vietnam] is to call Russia’s Kosygin and say that the next time a Russian-made gun is turned against us, we’ll drop a bomb right on him. They tell me everything isn’t black and white. Well, I say why the hell not?”

Wayne loosed his most breathtaking blast of imperialist rhetoric in the not exactly obscure pages of
Life
a few months after the
Playboy
article: “Your generation’s frontier should have been Tanganyika. It’s a land with eight million blacks and it could hold 60 million people. We could feed India with the food we produced in Tanganyika. It could have been a new frontier for any American or English or French kid with a little gumption. Another Israel! But the do-gooders had to give it back to the Indians.”

The
Playboy
interview inflamed the bruises left by
The Green Berets
, although it was both an amplification and a distortion of Wayne’s feelings. While Wayne didn’t care for the 1964 Civil Rights Act—he felt it violated the rights of property owners—he blamed white supremacists for the civil rights movement. The Fifteenth Amendment, he believed, clearly gave everybody the right to vote. “If blacks had been allowed to vote all along,” he told Mary St. John, “we wouldn’t have all this horseshit going on. George Wallace is part of the goddamn problem, not the solution.”

The novelist P. F. Kluge, who wrote the cover story for
Life
that contained the inflammatory quotes about Africa, found something other than his expectations, something other than an imperialist dinosaur. “My strategy for the story was whether or not the end of the west meant the end of his career,” Kluge remembered. “And I found a level of articulation that I had not expected. The description he gave me about Monument Valley rose to the level of elegy, which I wasn’t sure he had in him. There were depths of memory in him that surprised me. All of those stars of that generation had been interviewed to death and pawed over and worn smooth. His ability to articulate and come up with something fresh surprised me.”

The interview was done on a transcontinental flight from New York to Los Angeles, with another day at Wayne’s house in Newport Beach. Kluge was delighted to find that the local Budweister distributor had supplied Wayne with a tap, and the two men started drinking, which is when Wayne sailed into politics.

“He was really invested in his politics. I had to acknowledge that this was not bullshit, this was from the heart. And he had a need to talk about it; it wasn’t a potted right-wing speech that he had given before. He was generating feeling when he spoke to me.

“I liked him. Kind of. Yeah. But there was a considerable gap of disagreement there. And you didn’t know how far you could go before you pissed him off.”

The hangover from the
Playboy
interview lasted for decades. A year after it was published, Wayne was made the grand marshal of the Rose Bowl Parade. The USC
Daily Trojan
opined that the selection of Wayne was “a gross insult to Blacks, to American Indians and to Americans of any race who believe in equality. John Wayne is a blatant racist.”

The pot was kept bubbling when a reporter for
The Advocate
asked Wayne about gay rights. He clearly hadn’t been expecting the question, because he paused to think. “I think gay people . . . personally . . .” he began. “You know, I’m an older man, and I’ve been thrown in a lot of experiences, and I have a feeling that it’s abnormal and it’s certainly not the natural way we were put on earth. So I see no reason to jump with joy because somebody is gay, and I don’t see any reason for waving a flag for all the wonderful things gays have done for the world . . . any more than you’d say, ‘Oh, boy, hooray for the tuberculosis victim!’ It’s abnormal to me.

“Now, as far as having them live their own life, I feel that a man has a right to live his life the way he wishes—as long as he doesn’t interfere with me having my rights. So I have nothing against them, but I certainly see no reason to jump with joy about it.”

It hardly needs to be pointed out that Wayne was a man of his time, embodying the attributes of a small-town Edwardian boyhood and a good many of the prejudices as well. Once, in a discursive conversation, he expounded on his sense of fair play. “I didn’t know about Jews, niggers or Japs as minority groups until I went to college. At Glendale High we had ’em all—and on the football team if any guy called the Japanese fella a Jap we took him off the field, but not until the bunch of us took our turns at ’em. We all shared the fact that we were poor and struggling and there wasn’t time to show prejudice. We only felt together.”

In his own mind, Wayne was a true democrat, if not a Democrat, but at the same time he was oblivious to matters of terminology and tone. “His language reflected his background and his class,” said P. F. Kluge. “But that wasn’t him. I know a lot of people like that. I’m from New Jersey, and people from New Jersey speak roughly about other races. But they’re all in the same neighborhood and rubbing against each other and giving each other a ration of shit and having a beer. Wayne would give a fair shake to people he encountered.”

Increasingly journalists baited Wayne with questions that were predominantly social in nature, and he couldn’t resist responding. The vast majority of the interviews he faced now focused on politics and sociology, at which Wayne had presumably developed an expertise through his portrayal of frontier values. The interviews set Wayne’s public image as a reactionary in amber.

What seemed at the time to be paleoconservatism has since become Republican orthodoxy, as with Wayne’s essential mistrust of government, expressed when he wrote, “Government has no wealth, and when a politician promises to give you something for nothing, he must first confiscate that wealth from you—either by direct taxes, or by the cruelly indirect tax of inflation.”

Wayne’s politics made it easier for those who didn’t share his beliefs to refuse to engage with the truths he told as an actor. If Wayne was an ignoramus, if he was a war-mongering hypocrite who never served in the military, if he was an actor in a dying genre like westerns, then he didn’t have to be taken seriously as a craftsman, let alone an artist.

Many New York critics went to town. Pauline Kael wrote, “The world has changed since audiences first responded to John Wayne as a simple cowboy  . . . now, when he does the same things and represents the same simple values, he’s so archaic it’s funny. We used to be frightened of a reactionary becoming ‘a man on horseback’; now that seems the best place for him.”

But there was a corresponding undercurrent of respect and love from literary writers like Joan Didion: “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. . . . When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more.”

In many respects, these dueling dialogues about Wayne’s value and meaning continue in another century, with the subject long dead.