John Wayne Agonistes

We think we know John Wayne better than we do. The walk. The drawl. The more than sturdy conservatism. But did he really stride, as almost everyone says he did? He was a big man, but he had small feet, and took small graceful steps, like a hefty slow-motion Fred Astaire. Garry Wills says Wayne’s every movement is “a statement of individualism, a balletic Declaration of Independence,” which is pushing it a bit, but not as much as you might imagine. Watch Wayne cross the street in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, understanding that the woman in his life loves someone else. He pauses, lights a cigarette, moves slowly on, as if wading, as if the air had thickened into some eerily resistant medium. He’s just walking, and he’s on his own, but he looks like a procession. When I was a child we all tried to imitate this walk (well, the boys anyway), but we couldn’t do it. We rolled too much, we just looked like Robert Mitchum.

The voice was nasal, languid, on the edge of laziness. Quite often the drawl became a snarl, but it was a snarl of many colors, it only seemed to be monotonous. Listen to him calling James Stewart “pilgrim,” again in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The tone ranges from scorn to grudging respect to an incipient affection, and at one point includes something like a bullying, strangled hatred. What Wayne suggested in the movies was someone who rarely got what he wanted, but could experience disappointment only by denying it. He knew how to stay calm, or alternatively how to get angry, lash out, get drunk. This was not a weakness, but it was not exactly a strength either. Wills speaks of an “air of indomitable will” as Wayne’s trademark, but it is a will that is constantly foiled, impressive because of its loyalty to what it once aimed at. Wayne represents, again and again, and not only in westerns, bafflement as a form of integrity, a stubborn refusal to act on the knowledge that things have gone as badly as they have.

In a 1995 Harris poll, cited by Wills, Wayne was voted America’s favorite male star—he’d been dead for sixteen years then. This may say something about polling, and certainly says something about our notion of stars, but the comparative placings are interesting. Wayne came in ahead of Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Denzel Washington, and a long way ahead of Brad Pitt. It is true that Clark Gable was also on the list, and he had been dead even longer.

Wayne’s durability is astonishing,” Wills says, and he contrasts it to the eloquent but time-bound images of Astaire, Bogart, Brando, and others, who expressed only “fleeting moods in the nation.” “Wayne was saddled up to ride across the decades”—“Saddle up” is Wayne’s repeated order to his men as Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima. You might think there is a bit of special pleading here. Some of those fleeting moods went on for quite a while, and Bogart, for instance, was still haunting us well after what Wills calls “the romantic cynicism of the fifties” had turned into the romantic idealism of the Sixties and even into the unromantic bewilderment of the Seventies. You might also feel that Astaire will dance for centuries rather than decades and that you couldn’t even enter him in a competition that included Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Harris poll list mainly looks as if the question was not “who is your favorite star?” but “who is your favorite tough guy?” You might think too that the fact that most people now see films on video or television rather than in the cinema has completely changed the concept of “durability” in relation to dead-and-alive stars.

But there is no denying the force or interest of Wills’s subject, which is the appeal of the Wayne legend and why so many people have locked themselves into it. Wills himself is a little defensive on this score, and feels the need to fend off the notion that a mere movie star is not worthy of the man who has so brilliantly unraveled the nation’s complicity in the careers of two of its recent presidents

Why him? When I began this project three years ago, that was the question most often asked when anyone learned of it. I had received no such queries when I said I was writing about Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan.

Wills’s answer is that “it is a very narrow definition of politics that would deny John Wayne’s political importance… Wayne did not just have political opinions. He embodied a politics.” This is certainly true, but most of Wills’s book is not about Wayne’s politics in anything except the most distended sense of the word, and Wills’s subtitle thins the notion to near-meaninglessness. He had a better defense of his practice already in his Nixon book, which spoke of a dialogue “traced in air,” and of “a huge sunken body of historical aspirations which, now ill-formulated when we frame them at all, are nonetheless implicit in much of what we say and do.” Even his politicians are creatures of the collective imagination and in John Wayne’s America he cogently evokes the demands we make on such figures: “Wayne’s innate qualities are not enough to explain so large a social fact. He had to fill some need in his audience.” And again:

A myth does not take hold without expressing many truths—misleading truths, usually, but important ones: truth, for one thing, to the needs of those who elaborate and accept the myth; truth to the demand for some control over complex realities; truth to the recognition of shared values (however shakily grounded those values may be in themselves). Even the myths that simplify are not, in themselves, simple.

This could not be better put. The politics that Wayne embodied is a social fact and an intricate mythology, and Wills has written, as he says, the biography of the idea at its heart. This turns out not to be quite as different from a biography of the man as you might think, and takes the shape of a chronological tracing of Wayne’s movie career.

Marion Morrison was born in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907. The family moved around Iowa for a bit before drifting to California. The boy went to school in Glendale, and then to the University of Southern California, where he played football, but didn’t keep his place on the team. He got a job moving equipment about at the Fox Studios, and was finally discovered by the director Raoul Walsh, who gave him a major part in The Big Trail (1929), which Wills describes as “a forgotten masterpiece.” Winfield Sheehan, chief of production at Fox, gave Morrison the name by which we now know him.

Wills’s illustrations include a promotion shot from this picture. Wayne is a rangy, amiable-looking fellow in buckskins, his hand on a sheathed knife. He is younger than you can really believe John Wayne ever was, just a kid. But he has the eyes of the older man, and a grin which could easily turn into a grimace of pain or disgust. Above all he looks at ease. You don’t think he has power or authority, or anything much of the features of the later myth. But you don’t think he’ll be shaken, and this is the effect Wayne carries through all his movies. Whatever he has done or has been done to him, he’ll stick it out.

In De Mille’s Reap the Wild Wind (1942), for example, Wayne is a captain who has deliberately scuttled his ship, because he feels he has lost his girl, and because the evil Raymond Massey has got to him. No one in the film denies this is a terrible crime, least of all Wayne himself, who loved the ship almost as much as he loved the girl. But standing trial, scarcely speaking, Wayne looks like an older version of the kid in the photograph. Of course I’m guilty, his face says, and this whole situation is very painful. But you can’t expect me to agonize about this, or go on feeling guilty. Being guilty is enough, and besides, you know as well as I do that I’m morally all right, whatever I’ve done. You couldn’t confuse me with Raymond Massey, even if I have colluded with him.

Relying strongly, as he says, on Randy Roberts and James S. Olson’s recent biography John Wayne, American,^* Wills proceeds to show that stardom didn’t come easily to Wayne, even after his auspicious start. He spent the 1930s racing about in B-westerns, and even John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), to which Wills devotes his most enthusiastically analytic pages, complete with diagrams, phrases like “rhythmed motion,” and the insistence on “dread knowledge” and the play of shadows in that film, didn’t really establish Wayne as a major Hollywood player. “The breakthrough year for John Wayne was 1948,” Wills says. This was the year of the release of Ford’s Fort Apache, and above all Howard Hawks’s Red River, actually made in 1946. Wayne came of age here, by playing an older, hard man, and in one sense he never played another role again. He repeated it almost instantly in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). He made a couple of cavalry movies for Ford (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949, Rio Grande, 1950), and the magnificent The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) for the same director.

Wills doesn’t think much of Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) but it seems essential for understanding the attraction of the Wayne myth, even if we can pick up the pieces of the myth itself from all his other movies. Wayne is an aging sheriff holding a prisoner in the town jail, waiting for the rescue attack which has to come, and does. He is awkward with Angie Dickinson as a dancehall girl, gruff with his ancient sidekick Walter Brennan, and brutally strict with the intermittently recovering alcoholic Dean Martin. But he holds these people together, and he does his job. You don’t doubt his humanity for an instant. You like him for his embarrassment about his feelings, which is the effect we are supposed to get (but don’t, in my view) in Red River and The Sands of Iwo Jima.

Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker, for example, in the second of those two movies, is a thug with an alibi. When he smashes a young soldier’s face, he’s doing it for the lad’s own good. I don’t doubt that this is part of the appeal of the movie for Marine instructors, and reportedly, for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but surely the movie is too transparent for almost everyone else. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” is what schoolmasters used to say in the old country when they took out the cane or the birch. You claim the voice of virtue because you can’t admit, even to yourself, the fun you’re having.

Wayne himself directed The Alamo (1960), and The Green Berets (1968), naive excursions into a jingoism which he took to be patriotism, and his acting career ended in a series of self-parodies, carried off with surprising dignity: True Grit (1969), Rio Lobo (1970), Big Jake (1971), Rooster Cogburn (1975), The Shootist (1976). Wills cites a wonderful response to a question from the editors of the Harvard Lampoon about the “phony toupee” Wayne was wearing. “It’s not phony,” he said. “It’s real hair. Of course, it’s not mine, but it’s real.” John Wayne died in 1979.

The anger of the Wayne character in The Searchers “outruns all rational cause,” Wills says. “Loss of every sort has poured into it.” This is absolutely right. The Comanche Indians, burning down his brother’s house, raping and killing his brother’s wife, and butchering the rest of the family, except the two girls they took off with them, are only the latest of Ethan Edwards’s triumphant opponents. He has already lost the Civil War, and who knows what else. He is a man of rage, and Wayne humanizes him not by justifying or explaining this rage, even in a gesture or a look, but by compressing all other possible passions into it. This rage is his life, we don’t have to like it or admire or defend it, only to see that he is nothing without it. Or almost nothing.

Wayne is searching throughout the movie for the girls stolen by the Indians. He finds the violated body of one, then discovers the other living as the wife of an Indian chief. This means she is no longer a white woman as far as Wayne is concerned, and his grim plan, right up to the end of the movie, is to kill her as soon as he gets a chance. For the girl’s sake as well as his own, of course. For the sake of the family. For the sake of whatever purity America has lost in the war, and keeps losing. At the last minute, with the chief dead and all possible obstacles out of his way, Wayne comes upon the girl, the same old whirling rage in his face. Then with an almost imperceptible change of expression, he picks her up, holds her high in the air as one would a little child, drops her into his cradling arms. He says, “Let’s go home.” It’s an amazing moment, not because the racist has repented, or had a good heart all along; but because a flicker of human affection, even in a burnt-out hating heart, turns out to be stronger than a whole program of revenge and cleansing. It didn’t have to turn out stronger, and on another occasion might not; but here it does, and we see it happen.

Wayne is defeated one way or another in most of his movies (he died in nine of them, by Wills’s count); a survivor, when he survives, in a world where even the truth is ruined. “I can live with it,” Wayne tells James Stewart when he informs him that he, Wayne, was actually the man who shot Liberty Valance, although Stewart thought he had done it. Living with it means living with homicide, however defensible, and Stewart, as a pacific crusader for statehood and democracy, is having a little trouble doing so. We have seen the shootout, with Stewart as the hapless easterner facing the lethal Lee Marvin as Valance. We don’t know how Stewart did it, because he was already wounded and using his left hand (he wasn’t much of a shot, even with his right), but we saw Marvin tumble into the street, manifestly hit, and very soon dead. Now we see Wayne’s version, as he tells it to Stewart. He came up a side street, and took out Marvin as he was about to finish Stewart off. Knowing he hasn’t killed anyone after all is what allows Stewart to go on with his quest and become a distinguished senator.

The paradox is elegantly posed: he can be (famous as) the man who shot Liberty Valance only because he was not the man who shot Liberty Valance. But living with it, for Wayne, also means not regretting having saved the life of the man who will take his girl from him (he does the same thing in Reap the Wild Wind—the rival there is Ray Milland), and even more important, forgiving himself for shooting a man who couldn’t see him, in a situation where self-defense was not even a question. Wayne has embraced dishonor for the sake of another man’s life—or perhaps for the sake of the woman they both love. Can he live with it? Only pretty miserably, it seems, and the movie centers on his upcoming funeral, so that Wayne not only portrays these feelings, he brings them out in others. His death, as Wills says, focuses the “unstated disappointments” in the lives of those who survive him. “We all live with lies, with lost passions, friends left behind, potential selves that lie buried in what we become. Our own life is a burial place for our youth.”

At the end of Fort Apache, Wayne endorses, for the sake of the reputation of a cavalry regiment, a lie which makes nonsense of everything he stands for. A foolish massacre becomes a heroic legend, and we have to imagine how he lives with that. He is anticipating, as Peter Bogdanovich said long ago, the moment in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance when James Stewart has unfolded the true story of who did and didn’t do what, only to have a newspaper editor snap his notebook shut and say he certainly is not going to use this retrospective scoop. “This is the West, sir,” he says to Stewart, now famous for the deed he didn’t do. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The line is quoted everywhere, although the implicit definition of the West is not always noted, and the assumption is that Ford was being either ironic about the truth or gung-ho about its suppression. He can’t really have been entirely one or the other. Since he spends so much time showing us the fact that the legend denies, and of course shows us the denial itself, he can hardly have missed the irony. But equally you couldn’t defend the principle of the legend, as Ford did (“We’ve a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to”), without acknowledging the inconvenience of the fact.

In The Sands of Iwo Jima, what Wayne has to live with is estrangement from wife and child, and he does this by brutalizing the men under his command, getting paralytically drunk whenever he is away from base, making awkward, failed attempts at the paternal touch with a young soldier, and dying on Iwo Jima, an unsent letter to his son in his pocket. You could argue, incontrovertibly, that this is all in the plot of the movies, and that these are old and frequently told stories. But the point is not what happens, or how it happens, or even, exactly, how Wayne plays it. It’s who he is while it’s happening, what the situation makes of him and what he makes of it. The important thing in these recurring defeats is not the bluster that sometimes accompanies them, but the unappeased longing that provokes the defeats and survives them.

“Modern intellectuals are puzzled by the popularity of John Wayne,” Wills says. Are they? Is anyone? You can wonder what this popularity means without thinking it’s hard to explain. You don’t have to be an anti-intellectual to admire the style with which Wayne both acknowledges and refuses, in movie after movie, the complications of the world. And of course you don’t have to be an intellectual to dislike him, just a member of any of the numerous constituencies who find everything he stood for simply boring and boorish.

Wills seems to need to set up a monolithic, error-prone elite so that he can present himself, as J. L. Austin once said of A.J. Ayer, in the improbable guise of the plain man; and he boldly tackles critics in the same spirit, momentarily forgetting his fancy readings of Stagecoach and The Searchers—as in “It is a silent but very telling paraklausithyron (the classical genre of a locked-out lover’s plaint).” “Critics love to oppose popular verdicts and find unsuspected depths in unlikely movies.” They do. Like Robin Wood, for example, who “prefers Rio Bravo to Red River.” You might wonder why this is not just a matter of taste, especially when you learn a page or so later that the popular verdict on Rio Bravo was the same as Robin Wood’s. Wills, quick on the draw but ecumenical about his targets, now changes his ground and himself becomes the elitist critic, rising above mere money: Rio Bravo “was a lucrative artistic failure,” “good enough to bring in the trade.”

There are similar swerves all over the book. Just after the splendid passage I’ve already quoted about the truth of myth, Wills suddenly turns stern and moral about Wayne’s success. “He finally became what he had projected on the screen—a hollow triumph, for what was that but the figment of other people’s imaginations?” If Wills celebrates the icon on one page (“Monument Valley itself could not overpower him. It seemed to breathe a cognate spirit”), he falls on the man elsewhere (“Wayne nimbly maneuvered to avoid volunteering or being drafted” during World War II, and even more fiercely, on the subject of Wayne’s anti-communism, “The same careerism that kept him from wearing a uniform kept him from taking a stand. His role, finally, was to emerge after the battle and shoot the wounded”). Similarly with John Ford, who is billed as an artist in one chapter title and as a sadist in another. The great director is “deeply, ludicrously sentimental,” and torments his older brother “with an almost fiendish ingenuity.” It’s not that great artists can’t be cruel or sentimental, or that icons can’t have clay feet. On the contrary, these conditions are so frequent that it’s Wills’s outraged language that seems odd.

What’s happening, I think, is that Wills, in spite of his understanding of the indirections of myth, wants a direct political or moral payoff for the Wayne story; he tries for drama, finds only blunt judgments, and ends up with a bundle of rather weary paradoxes: the lost but unforgettable frontier, the wilderness which is society’s favorite dream. “The great urge of the American imagination is to light out for the territory.” Maybe only of certain (colonial) kinds of American imagination; but even if the myth is still alive, don’t we need to do more than repeat it in its most blinkered form?

Is Wayne the most dangerous man of Eric Bentley, or the American Adam of Melville? He is both. He is the former because he is the latter. He reflects our society back upon itself, which is the source of his appeal, and of his danger. It is a mixed and terrifying image, full of the unresolved contradictions in our own ideal country.

Sure, but this is where we came in. And “danger” and “terrifying” blur the whole question by being too loud.

Wills’s misreading of a crucial scene in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a kind of backhanded invitation to further comment, because I think the plot here, and Wayne’s role in it, allows us to get closer to an unresolved and enduring contradiction among the visions and revisions of American history. The man who endorsed the legend in Fort Apache has become the fact itself in this film. According to Wills, Wayne urges James Stewart “to take credit for killing Valance,” but the point is almost precisely the opposite. Stewart is morally crippled by the thought that he has killed Valance; and he is then able to return to the modern political world because he learns that he hasn’t. He has left the convention hall in shame, accused (by an extravagantly rhetorical John Carradine, as the lawyer for the bad guys) of killing a man, of indulging in the very lawlessness he came West to oppose.

The charge is disingenuous, but nonetheless true, as far as Stewart knows. If he has killed Liberty Valance he is, in his own eyes, no better than Liberty Valance. He believes in votes rather than guns, as he says, even if he now knows that you may not stay alive to vote if you don’t have the help of a good gun.

But he hasn’t killed Valance. The film allows America, in this mythical formulation, to combine Stewart’s private innocence with Wayne’s private guilt, and to turn them both into a single, imaginary, public, violent man of peace: the legend, the man who shot Liberty Valance. This is complicated, but it’s not terrifying. It’s not a hollow triumph either. It is an example of mythological thought. Westerns often wonder, as Joan Didion says, “at just what pass the trail had been lost,” but this one doesn’t wonder, it knows. It says that the law needs violence, yet we must also choose between law and violence, and keep choosing. As Claude Levi-Strauss suggested some forty years ago, “the object of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” But then he added that this is “an unrealizable task when the contradiction is real.”